We need a map of the world's integrity.

Somehow, amid the practical concerns of everyday life, many of us forget the map of our world in its wholeness. Its scale seems far too small for our daily practical needs. Many people, even when they do think about it, sincerely believe that such a map is needed only by children at school. And that is a very, very big mistake!

It is such a serious mistake that we humans often begin polluting rivers upstream from the very places where we draw our drinking water. We forget where “upstream” is and where “downstream” is, and amid our immediate tasks and concerns, we fail to understand where the rivers from which we take our water actually come from and where they flow.

We simply need a holistic worldview, like such a map of the world. We are suffocating without a practical philosophy of Life.

The demands of the moment leave us no time for questions. We have no time to reflect. And now, instead of even a large-scale map — which, however imperfect, still gives us some sense of the whole — we are increasingly reduced to nothing more than a dot on the screen of a GPS navigator. An electronic system guides us. And sometimes we ourselves do not even realize where it is taking us.

In a complex world, we cannot pull teeth, cook borscht, and pilot supersonic airliners all at once. This is simple and obvious: we need specialization. And the more complex our world becomes, the more specialized each of us becomes. It all seems obvious, doesn’t it? What is less obvious is the other side of the coin: the more narrowly specialized we become in our fields of activity, the more important the overall picture of the world becomes.

We may call it whatever we like. Religion, philosophy, worldview — but the essence is the same: it is a certain mental map of the World. Our generalized ideas and perceptions come together to form an image of the world as a whole. In its wholeness. In its unity. A world in which we can see the boundaries of what is known to us. The boundaries of the world we have explored. And where we draw for ourselves a map of this world in all its fullness.