Of all the professions, it is perhaps nursing that is most decisively leading the way toward a reorientation of values and behaviors that promote wellness and the continuity of humanity on Earth. This is a fitting development because “nurse” is derived from the Latin nutrire, meaning “nourish,” and it is nurses whose empathy, compassion, caring, and wisdom have nourished countless humans in their journeys from birth to death. Now nurses and their leaders are nourishing the human species in a worldwide effort.

Dr. Jean Watson, one of the most distinguished and widely honored nurses in the world, has been awarded 15 honorary doctorates, 12 of which are international. She is distinguished professor and Dean Emerita, University of Colorado-Denver, College of Nursing, where she held the nation’s first endowed chair in Caring Science for 16 years. She is the founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and the founder and director of Watson Caring Science Institute, a nonprofit foundation. The Caring Science philosophy and clinical practice model that Watson has pioneered include but transcend the needs of individuals. They also promote health in the largest sense—the health of the Earth itself. Caring Science philosophy and practice have been embraced by nursing organizations worldwide.

Through the courage and wisdom of Dr. Watson and her colleagues represented in this volume, we see the dawning of a concept that is powerful enough to catalyze a solution not only to health-related issues but also to the challenges that affect humanity’s very survival. The origin of the problems we face can be expressed succinctly: We have tried as a species to secede from nature, and we have failed. In so doing, we have misconstrued our relationship to one another and to all sentient life. “The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be,” said André Malraux (1901–1976), France’s former Minister of Cultural Affairs (Dennis, 2017, p. 41). Malraux’s observation dates to the second half of the 20th century, and it appears more accurate now than ever before. As the planetary dilemma Malraux predicted plays out, it is no longer possible to be a passive bystander. As global citizens, if we are passive toward the problems we now face, we contribute to them. In our era, neutrality is not an honorable option. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, “To believe something and not live it is dishonest” (Dewal, 2015, p. 29).

We confront threats to our existence our forebears never imagined. The evidence for our global predicament is based in abundant science, not on some sidewalk lunatic wearing a sandwich board yelling, “The end is near!” Our challenges include climate change and global warming; polluted air and water; exploding populations; habitat and species loss; water scarcity; deforestation; desertification; murderous ideologies; resource depletion; grinding poverty; endless wars of choice; ethnic and religious hatreds; lack of decency, love, and kindness toward others; on and on, all abetted by the materialistic “I’ve got mine/every man for himself” philosophy with which our society is currently septic. This is a hell from which, experts say, beyond a certain point there may be no escape. As author John Graves wrote in his elegy Goodbye to a River, “That long and bedrock certainty of thoughtful men that regardless of the race’s disasters the natural world would go on and on is no longer a certainty” (Graves, 1974).

What do these dismal facts have to do with Watson’s Human Caring Science? The answer is, everything.

There is an ancient belief that during times of crisis, the Earth produces or raises up a solution. It may be in the form of a great heroine or hero, or it may be a new belief or concept that is powerful enough to steer things back on course. What is our current crisis? As the mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote toward the end of the past millennium, “The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as one harmonious being?” (Campbell, 2002, p. xix). Nowadays we hunger for a culture that transcends the suffocating narrowness and intellectual strangulation resulting from the prejudice, bigotry, greed, and crass materialism that threaten our future. We are vision starved and myth hungry. As cultural historian Morris Berman writes, we long for a future culture that “will have a greater tolerance for the strange, the nonhuman, for diversity of all sorts, both within the personality and without” (Berman, 1981, p. 275). Also, Kingsley L. Dennis, the British sociologist, observes, “We will reconnect with the sacred or we will stagnate” (2017, p. 49). Many believe we have turned the corner in the right direction. As Dennis writes, “The magical, mysterious sacred revival is already underway, it just isn’t paraded by the mainstream yet. But the spores are seeding all over the holy ground of this blessed planet. It will come to pass—it has already been born” (2017, p. 49). We contend that the Human Caring Science that Jean Watson has midwifed is part of this process of rebirth. It is part of “the knowing, accepting, and the seeking out the sacred aspects of life that bring the revitalizing energies surging and coursing through our spirit veins” (Dennis, 2017, p. 51).

Our online dictionary suggests that “care” is related to the assurance of health; welfare; maintenance; and protection of a person or thing (Online Dictionary, 2011). We in the healing professions usually translate this into our professional roles, responsibilities, and skills toward sick and suffering individuals, but the “health, welfare, maintenance, and protection” of the “something” apply also to Earth itself. For if our environment is degraded beyond reclaim, it will not matter much what our blood pressure or cholesterol levels are. Human health is impossible if the Earth cannot sustain us. Only by sensing at the deepest emotional, psychological, and spiritual levels our connections with one another and the Earth itself can we summon the courage necessary to make the tough choices that are required to survive. This is Human Caring Science writ large.

But the connections implicit in Human Caring Science are not human- or Earth-limited; they are infinite. As French philosopher René Guénon put it, “The human order and the cosmic order are not in reality separated, as they are nowadays all too readily imagined to be; they are on the contrary closely bound together, in such a way that each continuously reacts on the other so that there is always correspondence between their respective states” (Guénon, 1953, p. 140). This view is ancient. As the Greek philosopher Parmenides famously asserted in the 5th century BCE, “No mind, no world” (Singh, 2014).

The fact of our oneness and connectedness suggests that we revise the Golden Rule from the customary “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” to “Be kind to others because in some sense they are you” (Dossey, 2013a, p. xxviii). As novelist Alice Walker said, “Anything we love can be saved” (Walker, 1998)—including the Earth and its creatures, our children, and generations yet unborn. Also, as poet W. H. Auden bluntly said in the 1930s, as if peering into the present, “We must love one another or die” (Auden & Mendelsson, 1977, p. 246). Love is a natural accompaniment of our inherent unity, connectedness, and oneness. Love helps us resacralize our world. Love helps us survive.

Extending Human Caring Science to all our interactions in the world is a way of recalibrating our collective response to all the problems we face, a move that permits a cascade of solutions to fall into place. As Watson has consistently emphasized, this approach requires a shift in our consciousness. It entails reorienting our ethical and moral compass toward the Earth and one another. It is about changing channels, redialing our basic concepts of who we are and how we are related to one another and to the terrestrial crucible that sustains us.

When caring includes all of life, it becomes a vision powerful enough to make a difference in how we approach all the challenges we face—not as a mere intellectual concept, but as something we feel in the deepest way possible. As Herman Hesse said in the prologue to Demian, “I have been and still am a seeker, but I no longer seek in stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me” (Hesse, 1919, p. ii).

Jean Watson sees that caring and science must be wedded, thereby producing a force greater than either factor can achieve in isolation. Her vision is affirmed by developments in the physical sciences that portend a revolution in how we conceive our relationships with one another.

It is now clear that, owing to advances in modern physics and the biological sciences, we live in a nonlocal world in which apparently separate elements are intrinsically connected or entangled (Dossey, 2013b, p. 30; Radin, 2006). These intimate connections defy separation in space and time. They operate at both an invisible subatomic level and, we have recently learned, in the everyday, macroscopic biological domain as well (Vedral, 2011). Our existence is based not in separation, competition, and rugged individuality, but in unity, connectedness, and cooperation. The sheer fact of caring arises naturally from these intrinsic relationships.

It is beginning to dawn on our society that the implications of nonlocality are enormous. As renowned historian of religions Huston Smith expressed the relevance of this development, “[If] nonlocality holds for the material world, what about the world of the human mind? If both mind and matter are nonlocal, we are on our way to regaining what was lost in Newton’s time—a complete, whole world in which we can live complete, whole lives, in the awareness that we are far more interrelated than we had thought” (Jauregui, 2007, p. xiv).

But we do not require modern physics to inform us of our unity. This wisdom is ancient. We merely detoured from this knowledge in the modern era in our attempted withdrawal from nature and one another. The thread of oneness runs through human history, from ancient times through the present. The pedigree of this concept is extensive. As Plato wrote, “[H]uman nature was originally One and we were a whole” (Wilber, 1983, p. 234). Hippocrates stated, “There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy” (Watson, 1992, p. 27). Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance philosopher, believed that the world is governed by a “unity whereby one creature is united with the others and all parts of the world constitute one world” (Watson, 1992, p. 27). In the 19th century, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel called distant mental exchanges between humans “the magic tie.” He believed that “the intuitive spirit oversteps the confines of time and space; it beholds things remote; things long past, and things to come” (Inglis, 1992, p. 158). Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th century German philosopher, suggested that a single event could figure in two or more different chains of circumstance, linking the fates of different individuals in profound ways. He believed in a form of communication that took place between humans during dreams (Watson, 1992, p. 27). Walt Whitman, America’s 19th century bard, proclaimed, “All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and link’d together…. Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more” (Whitman, 1917). His contemporary, philosopher-essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, “There is one mind common to all individual men … [a] universal mind….” Emerson called this universal mind the “Over-soul” which, he said, is “that unity … within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other…. [W]ithin man is the soul of the whole … the eternal ONE” (Emerson, 1987). Among the poets in Emerson’s camp was William Butler Yeats: “[T]he borders of our minds are ever shifting, and … many minds can flow into one another … and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy…. [T]he borders of our memories are … shifting, and … our memories are part of one great memory” (Pierce, 2000, p. 62). Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and the collective conscious paralleled the views of Emerson and Yeats (Jung, 1968). These various observers are saying that everything is connected, including minds.

Caring awareness is spreading. We have allies. For example, Vaclav Havel, the playwright, poet, and first president of the Czech Republic, said: “I have been given to understand how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love” (Havel, 1995). In other words, a little more caring.

Caring is not something we have to invent. It is our nature to care. Caring must merely be rekindled. That is what Jean Watson has done. She reminds us of who we are and of what we are capable. In her perspective, reality is interconnected, multidimensional, mindful, relational, and loving (Radin, 2013, p. 310).

It is appropriate that Watson launched her Human Caring Science nursing, for all the human professions it is nursing that provides the soil and the soul that can best nurture the wisdom on which our future likely depends. In so doing, Watson stands in the tradition of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), a towering genius of both intellect and spirit who streaked like a fiery comet across the sky of 19th-century England, transforming nursing in world culture with her philosophical “art and science” nursing legacy (Dossey, 2010). In Nightingale’s tradition, Dr. Jean Watson has herself streaked across the 20th- and 21st-century skies with an equally precious gift—her Human Caring Science that is now an emerging paradigm. Her vision calls us to ethically informed caring and love—praxis in action. It is difficult to imagine a greater contribution.