Animals align themselves to the magnetic poles of the earth
 http://www.physorg.com/news138902073.html 
 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061021115811.htm 
They have a built in compass/GPS function, courtesy of nature to keep them aligned and tuned to nature. The human situation is more pathetic than that of the animals. We need to work at developing some of these skills, an obvious disadvantage in exchange of freewill and choice. It took us long to develop the compass to navigate the world. The technology has become very sophisticated and our maps of the planet and immediate neighborhoods are near perfect. We can cover much more in a day than our previous generations, can even go for a deep dive into outer space and come back with pin point precision.
Though mobility has improved rapidly vast majority of us still do not move out of our places of birth. But there is a different kind of a journey which all humans undertake, the one of personal and community growth and development. How well equipped are we for this journey which is many times more complex than a journey over space?
Let us run a reality check
1. What is THE first requisite for a journey over space? We should make certain of our current position. Ask any number of people, you are not likely to get this answer. First things first- goes the saying but seldom does this happen. Let us ask the same question about the other journey that we discuss here, where are we now? What is our current position? Any error in estimating the position takes us on the wrong course.
2. What makes us, the Human, uniquely different from the Animals, as a class? Ask yourself and arrive at the answer. Ask the same to another 100 people you come across. We play this game in our stretch workshops. We seldom get the right answer even with groups of people known for their brilliance. Quiz them on anything else under the sun you would get an answer though one can as well get these answers through a web search. It takes much more time to get the group to agree that our uniqueness as a class which makes us distinct from the animals is our ability to IMPROVE ourselves, the environment and community around us. If we don’t improve and improve continually can we claim ourselves to be human, that we learn and evolve? We cannot - we would be sub animal. The human is the most threatened of all species. S/he is a threat to he/r/self to the environment and other life forms. But for us the animals and plants would be much better off. Animals do not kill within the same species without any reason but we do. They don’t have cancer wards, asylums and old age homes. If we are to learn about community it is much better that we look at them than at us. So what has gone wrong with us? Is humanness / community improving or on the decline?
3. Are we civilized? If the emperor says he is the emperor we have reasons to disbelieve what we hear. Same holds true of claims of being civilized and developed. As a child I remember that most of the adults in my village used to carry a dagger with them, not to fight any wild animals but to protect themselves from others. Hardly a week would pass without some news of a murder on some silly reason. Today they don’t but in some ‘more civilized, developed parts of the world’ nearly every other man owns a gun. Who is more civilized / developed?
4. Who performs and what are the criteria for measurement? The southern coastal state of Kerala in India, unlike many other parts of the country, has more or less the same quality of life similar to a developed country like Sweden. The major difference is that it has a much lower per capita income. Should we measure development by eco illiteracy or eco literacy? Who leaves a bigger ecological footprint, the rich or the poor? Do we recognize performance? Farmers commit suicide in some parts of India. Fishermen of south India are probably the best of primary producers but even poorer than the farmers. Drinking water has become costlier than milk. Farmers and fishermen are poor not because they are not productive but because the markets and the policy makers respect and listen to those with muscle and not the unorganized. No wonder that we have a crisis of food security in the making.
5. Are we better off than the animals in terms of community?
6. Are we mature? Adults? Hitler is not dead. He still lives in us. Listen carefully to the new age messiahs, gurus, change agents and leaders. Adults need only data, information. They can lead themselves. Compare the salary structure of CEOs in Japan vs. USA in comparison to the shop floor worker. What does it show? We are willing to entrust our fate to the commander in chief, rest all our hopes of humanity on a small number of men and women. We have very little faith in the wisdom of community. We still would like to have leaders and followers, than self-manage. The result is Hitlers in camouflage
7. Do we learn? If we had been learning there should have been improvements across multiple facets which ultimately will lead to oneness, better community, environment and the assurance of a secure future.
8. What is progress? If in 2500 years we could not go beyond Buddha and Christ, can we say that we have progressed? In the last more than 3000 years if we could not improve upon the wisdom of the Upanishads how can we claim that we have progressed? 2200 years back we had the Kama sutra, a treatise on sex and sexuality, which is widely translated into other languages. What have we understood about sex and sexuality over this long period if we are to learn from such antiquity?
WANTED - A new language of Improvement
“Change is the only constant”. We have more change masters than masters of improvement. Change can be good or bad, superficial or substantial. Look at the semantics. If one observes the language one can see the positions which give rise to such views from which the language originates. From such positions improvements cannot happen. To cross over the semantic swamp we need a new language, a LANGUAGE of improvement and PERFORMANCE which we might call Inglish. Inglish is more than Indian English, which, thanks to the British, is spoken by more people than in Britain and USA combined. When one learns a language other than one’s mother tongue, every word is vey new whereas for the native speaker the very same words have lost their depths of meaning. Familiarity takes away the depth and might even breed contempt. Inglish is a requirement because we have used up the communication potential – most of it has been used up as advertising bylines to promote shadows and substitutes (Brand X makes you a complete man and brand Y makes the complete woman) - of languages to connect people across the planet as a community. So we communicate yet do not enhance true community. Such communication is only noise, the major barrier to connect, building bridges. We need a common language to connect the world as a single community. We could make machines talk to each other across multiple platforms. Next step is to do the same with the human so that man and the machine are aligned. The graphic user interface took the computer to the masses, transcending the barriers of language. The visual has more bandwidth than any other stimuli and the next gen views rather than read. Inglish has to be a visual language.
This is just to trigger and continue the dialogue. The post is not meant to be full-fledged and self contained arguments. These are some very random thoughts on why we need a compass/ GPS to fix our position and direction for the journey - to show us the TRUE NONORTH, one for each one of us since we can not use somebody else's
http://firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blog/2008/7/the_first_discipline_framework_abstract_to_concrete

LIMITS TO GROWTH OR LIMITS TO LEARNING ? Nishtha has said it- what I wanted to say
http://imprintingspirit.gaia.com/blog/2008/8/your_mission_should_you_choose_to_accept_it_is_this