"Cosmic Self-Portrait" by Tim Hjersted (cc 4.0)
A cosmic identity begins with the understanding that humanity is a single species — sharing not only a common biology and evolutionary history, but a shared capacity for consciousness, suffering, and ethical responsibility. It invites us to situate ourselves not as members of narrowly defined tribes or artificial nations, but as participants in a shared and temporary existence on a miraculous but endangered planet. This is not a poetic flourish. It is a rational inference from the facts of evolution, history, and our current technological capacity for self-destruction.
From the standpoint of biology, the differences that dominate our politics and media — race, nationality, ethnicity — are practically meaningless. Genetically, we are remarkably homogeneous, a single species with a common ancestry.
The imagined divisions used to justify exploitation or exclusion are precisely that: imagined. Constructed for political purposes, sustained by ideology, and useful to those who profit from fragmentation and fear.
From the standpoint of history, the concept of cosmic identity is not new. It appears in early strands of humanist philosophy and in the Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism — the view that every human being belongs to a single moral community, that our primary loyalty is not to a nation or tribe but to humanity as a whole. Cosmopolitanism challenged the parochialism of its time by insisting that ethical concern should extend outward, without borders or hierarchies, toward all people.
A similar insight lives in many indigenous worldviews, which understand identity through relationship and interdependence rather than separation. The Hopi speak of living in balance within a sacred web of life; the Māori concept of whanaungatanga emphasizes kinship extending not only across families and communities but across the natural world itself. These traditions frame belonging at the scale of a living planet rather than a political boundary.
This perspective reemerges in modern science as well — captured most famously by Carl Sagan, who reminded us through the “Pale Blue Dot” that every conflict, empire, ideology, and imagined division has unfolded on a borderless, swirling, living sphere, rich in life, suspended in darkness. His work reframes planetary identity not as an abstraction but as an observable fact, visible to anyone willing to look clearly at our place in the cosmos.
It is a perspective accessible to anyone willing to look beyond the conditioned limits of nationalism and chauvinism. And yet, for all its simplicity, this identity is profoundly subversive.
It undermines the legitimacy of systems built on domination — systems that depend on convincing people that their neighbors are enemies, that their suffering is deserved, or that solidarity is naive.
It calls into question the moral standing of states that preach democracy while exporting violence, or corporations that preach innovation while accelerating ecological collapse.
The obstacles to embracing such an identity are not intellectual. They are institutional. They lie in the media systems that train us to see others as threats. In educational systems that celebrate conquest and obedience. In economic systems that reduce people to consumers and the planet to raw material.
These systems do not merely distract us from a sense of cosmic unity — they are structured to prevent it. But the possibility remains.
We are at a moment in history where the threats we face — climate breakdown, nuclear proliferation, militarized artificial intelligence — cannot be contained by borders or resolved by competition. They require cooperation on a scale that only a planetary identity can support.
The choice before us is not between left and right, or East and West. It is between an identity of common kinship and an identity that's so narrowly defined it could lead to our self destruction.
To adopt a cosmic identity is to affirm the moral equality of all people. To reject the logic of empire. To see war, poverty, and ecological destruction not as inevitabilities, but as symptoms of a failure to recognize who we are to one another. And, perhaps most importantly, to act accordingly — not in abstraction, but in solidarity, and with urgency.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” ― Henry Beston
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein
"Interbeing is the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else. We are all interconnected. By taking care of another person, you take care of yourself." ― Thich Nhat Hanh
"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." ― Chief Seattle
Māori proverb: "Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au" (I am the river, and the river is me). Identity flows inseparably from land, water, and ancestors, nourishing body and spirit.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people and movements creating a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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