I have figured out why man is the most fortunate of all creatures and as a result worthy of the highest admiration and earning his rank on the chain of being, a rank to be envied not merely by the beasts but by the stars themselves and by the spiritual natures beyond and above this world.

The words are from Pico della Mirandola, the great Renaissance humanist. In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man”, written in 1486, Pico goes on to  explain that the Creator has given  humans a gift that sets them apart from the rest of creation. This extraordinary gift is the power of self-definition. According to how we humans define ourselves through our actions, we rise or fall in the orders of creation.  Here’s the key passage:

The Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature. He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him “Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine”…

Imagine! To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to be!

These splendid words pierce our everyday complacence and our compromises. If we are truly, each one of us, at the center of the universe, with the power to make of ourselves what we will, then how will we exercise that power now, in this moment?