Principle 5

No individual person is more important than any other. Each must contribute what they have to offer, and receive what they need to be well.

We are most well when we are sustained by the mauri, the web of connections that makes us who we are.

The history of the world is much about people dominating people, people who consider themselves to be better than others, and more entitled to take what they want for themselves, even if others must go without.

In the past that competition for power and resources has resulted in wars and famines which prevented the world’s human population from outgrowing the resources the planet was able to provide.

Those days seemed to have ended at the end of World War 2. The balance of power that resulted from the conflict and the realisation that mankind had developed weapons capable of destroying all life on Earth, ushered in a period of relative peace.

But the forces that have maintained that balance are fast losing their hold. Doing nothing about creating a new way of maintaining that balance, it will inevitably fail; it will lead to an intensity of competition for resources that will be impossible to restrain. Inevitably it will result in war more catastrophic than any that have ever come before.

We need to urgently put in place a new order, one in which we, the human race, need to accept our place as part of the web of life, not apart from it and as masters. We must start with ourselves, and set aside the mindless competiveness which has caused, and still causes, so much hurt and death.

 Nobody is entitled to more than they reasonably need to be well while others have less than what they need to survive. That does not just involve other people. All living creatures have the right to life, and maintaining the full diversity of life is necessary for all to survive. We must care for the Mauri.

That means we can no longer grant ourselves the right to consider ourselves above others, more entitled and more privileged. Those are luxuries we can no longer allow, or afford. We need to remember that by having less and sharing more we will in fact find health and wellness, and a real sense of belonging. That is something that wealth, no matter how great and how insulated from reality, can ever hope to deliver.

We need to look carefully at the reasons given to justify the inequalities that are increasingly common in our modern society. At the end of the day everything we have comes from the Earth, the Whenua. We are born from the Earth and we will go back to the Earth. We have our religions and our philosophies and all sorts of esoteric lore that has evolved in the thousands of years of human existence. Over the millennia there have been many great teachers, some known, many unknown. They have led their followers along different paths of enlightenment and opened to them worlds so profound that no words can describe. But at the end of the day we must accept that we are children of the Earth, and we will return to the Earth.

So how can we justify the pedestals that we sometimes like to build for ourselves, on which we stand and see ourselves as above those who haven’t walked the journey that we have followed? We, the enlightened ones, the holy ones, the ones closer to God (???), and therefore more entitled to a bigger share of what the earth has to offer. The great mystics have been the most humble of people; they had the vision to see how little they were in a world bigger and more profound than the human mind could ever imagine. Even the great thinkers of the modern age, Stephen Hawking for one, have shared with us a vision of a universe much bigger than our imagination could ever comprehend, and had been humbled by it.

We pride ourselves in our creativity but maybe we have only created a world of fiction and stupidity that increasingly is beyond comprehension. The great developments that have been underway since the beginning of the industrial revolution have resulted in fewer and fewer people owning more and more, and an increasing proportion of the world’s population living in poverty. Technology is paraded as a way of setting the people free from poverty; in fact it has been a pathway for the rich to take even more, leaving more and more people locked in a prison of poverty from which they could never escape. The great spiritualities of the ages that have enabled people to grasp a perspective which made sense of their realities have been replaced with a dream of a material heaven. “You could have all these riches if you subscribe to our philosophies and learn how to make money; we will show you how”. We have created a giant pyramid scheme which is consuming the whole world, and too many people keep subscribing to it, because they hope they might win.

All the richest people of previous centuries have one thing in common.....they are all dead. So much for their visions of grandeur and power!

We live in a world of madness, lead by mad people who are so consumed by their own addiction to wealth and power that they may never be able to see how silly they are.

We need to rediscover that world of connections that makes us who we are. The Tiwaiwaka principles are not an obstacle to our ambitions; rather they are a pathway towards finding who we are and what we are, and in finding that, finding peace. We are one with the gift of life that empowers life. We are connected to the mauri, sustained by it, fulfilled by it.

- Pa Ropata / Rob McGowan 2020