During my visit to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, I came across this beautiful exhibit called The Tree of Life. It explains how all life on Earth evolved from common ancestors, tracing the branches of life from their shared origins to the extraordinary diversity we see today like bacteria, fungi, plants, molluscs, other animals, and human beings. Standing in front of it, I was thinking about what Acharya ji mentioned about it multiple times. We humans often behave as though we are separate from nature, as though nature is something outside us that exists for our use. We divide the world into human and non-human, superior and inferior, useful and useless. But this tree tells a different story. We are not visitors standing outside the tree, looking at the other branches. We are one of its branches. The same evolutionary history connects us to every other living beings, even though not every living species is our direct ancestor. When we begin to imagine ourselves as separate, superior beings, we may start treating the rest of life as mere resources for us to consume . If we truly understood that we are part of this living world, would our relationship with animals, forests and the planet remain the same?
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