Human and Cosmic Freedom
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 22 Sep 2025
Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
Activating Cosmic Consciousness and Our Utopian Horizon
20 Sep 2025 – Freedom appears as one of the most elusive ideas in our philosophical and practical vocabularies. The idea of freedom applies to individual persons, organizations, ethnic identities, and to nations. It is a key term in relations of authority and social ordering. The employer tells the employee at the end of the work period, “You are free to go now.” The police officer tells the detained person, “You are free to go.” Animals are “set free” into the wild. Forces of nature “flow freely.”
People speak of economic freedom, social freedom, cultural freedom, and personal freedom. They speak of a “free society” versus an “unfree society.” Children are taught that freedom does not mean impulsive behavior, but that we must grow toward “responsible freedom.” Responsible freedom does not mean random acts of self-indulgence. It requires self-control and self-development in order to attain our goals in life and/or to live as a responsible citizen.
In this essay, I want to introduce an idea of human freedom emerging from the “Postmodern Paradigm” that has been derived from cutting edge science for the last century and a quarter. As a background for the discussion, let us also recall that the great religions have always been concerned with freedom. Without going into details concerning the complex notion of freedom in each of these religions, I simply want to set the stage for our discussion through some very broad observations.
In the ministry of Jesus, Jesus tells his disciples, “Then you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). For much of Christianity, a saving knowledge can free us from the bondage of sin, evil, and confusion. In Judaism, the paradigmatic historic liberation of the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt is celebrated annually as a model for the freedom of self-determination everywhere. This translates into an ethic of personal growth and self-responsibility in which we grow in freedom through obedience to God’s laws. Here, there is a striking similarity with freedom in Islam, in which obedience to God’s will and His laws gifted to humanity provides true freedom for both the community (Sharia) and individual persons.
In Buddhism, freedom results from transcending ego-attachments and desires to discover a “nirvana” in which we are able to live freely within the samsaric world of bondage, suffering, and death without being drawn into its endless cycles of karmic attachments and unfreedoms passed on from generation to generation. For the Hindu family of religions, there is a similar pattern that associates freedom with liberation from the realm of bondage in karmic rebirths through transcending attachments and ultimately experiencing union with the inner Atman which is at the same time Brahman (the divine). In Taoism, inner freedom emerges from alignment of one’s life with the Tao (or the fundamental principle within all things) resulting in effortless action (wu-wei) that does not generate conflicts and difficulties because it is performed in harmony with the One at the heart of these “ten-thousand things.”
Historically these great religious traditions have all associated human freedom with a harmonic relationship with the divine principle behind or within the cosmos, whether this be named as God, Allah, Buddha-nature, Brahman, or Tao. By contrast, the modern idea of a free, democratic society, did not arise until the Renaissance in the West and was elaborated during the 17th and 18th centuries resulting in the French and American revolutions establishing constitutional democracies as a paradigm or ideal for human societies. The idea of an abstract personal freedom within a framework separating church from state (and therefore including freedom of worship) appears as a very late comer in the history of the thought of freedom, the ancient Greek experiments with democracy not withstanding.
These 18th century Enlightenment ideas of personal freedom with guaranteed civil liberties did not associate freedom with any particular path or avenue by which to achieve spiritual freedom and well-being, as did the traditional religions. Freedom under the early-modern paradigm specifically included the capitalists “right” of free enterprise, the right to own and accumulate property, and to dispose of one’s property as one sees fit. This view of freedom was reinforced by the radical separation of mind from matter that had been powerfully articulated by Descartes in the 17th century. Nature (matter) was no longer a sacred embodiment of the divine cosmic principle but became simply dead material available for “free” appropriation and exploitation. As Max Weber declared in the early 20th century, the world had become “disenchanted.”
But these materialistic and secular conceptions of freedom were relatively short lived. By the 19th and early 20th centuries thinkers were pointing out the spiritual wasteland produced by this radical separation of mind and matter with the assumption of economic freedom that could manipulate the natural world solely for human purposes of development and enrichment. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called this situation “nihilism,” the loss of truth, values, and all hope. Max Weber declared that the result under “late capitalism” was the “loss of freedom” and the “loss of meaning.”
Nevertheless, a new paradigm or worldview has emerged from the physical sciences beginning with Max Planck in 1900 and Albert Einstein in 1905, a paradigm since becoming elaborated in both directions (the super-small dimension of the cosmos investigated by quantum mechanics and the super-large dimension investigate by relativity theory). Both of these emerging scientific enquiries pointed to something entirely new to the materialist tradition, namely evolution. In the early 19th century, G.W.F. Hegel had first pointed to it in a prescientific way. Charles Darwin had argued for it with regard to life on Earth in On the Origin of Species in 1859. But it took these ongoing scientific revolutions at the quantum level and the space-time level to confirm an unparalleled paradigm shift from static materialism to cosmic evolutionism, the evolution of the entire universe. The Cosmos as a whole is an evolutionary process, encompassing literally everything, including all energy, all life, and all human life.
Evolution become the fundamental thought of the 20th and 21st century sciences and, with this paradigm-shift, everything began to look different. Materialism had excluded value from the cosmos and relegated value to mere “subjective reactions” of persons to objective circumstances. Materialism had relegated the divine dimension to either no God or an absentee God who started the cosmic machine going and then withdrew from participation in the resultant process.
In his Lowell Lectures of 1925 (published as Science in the Modern World) philosopher Alfred North Whitehead provided a comprehensive overview of the paradigm shift from mechanism to evolutionism. Whitehead declared that “a thoroughgoing evolutionary philosophy is inconsistent with materialism.” And he shows that an evolutionary philosophy necessarily brings values, both human and divine, back into both science and philosophy.
This initial synthesis has been followed by hundreds of volumes of top thinkers (from physicists and biologists to philosophers and theologians) who have documented, elaborated, and refined the evolutionary paradigm. This has included volumes such as The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (1988), edited by David Ray Griffin and repeated elaboration of such themes down to the present in volumes such as You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why it Matters (2017) by Chopra and Kafatos.
Under the evolutionary paradigm, the materialism, atomism, and determinism of the materialist Newtonian paradigm have been abandoned. Instead of materialism, we have a broad recognition that there is no such thing as “dead” matter, but that “mind” is fundamental throughout, down to the tiniest subatomic particles. Instead of atomism (everything reducible to tiny building-blocks), we have a cosmic holism: the whole is reflected in every part and changes in every part operate in “internal relationships” with encompassing “fields,” from the subatomic to the level of the whole. Instead of determinism, creativity is now intertwined with dimensions of lawfulness and randomness, giving direction and a telos to the cosmic evolutionary process.
This dimension of creativity is a dimension of freedom, and freedom in some senses of the word, as Whitehead insisted, informs the whole from the subatomic level up. The creativity of the cosmos is teleological. Christian scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes, “under the combined pressure of science and philosophy, we are being forced, experientially and intellectually, to accept the world as a coordinated system of activity which is gradually rising up toward freedom and consciousness” (1971).
In his discussion of the role of democratic government, philosopher Errol E. Harris writes that the purpose of all legitimate government is “the development of the physical, mental, intellectual, and moral capabilities of every individual” which are “the presumed conditions of freedom.” This freedom is not the egoistic “self-determination” of capitalism, he argues. For the Cosmic “nisus” in us tends towards “order, rationality…and the realization of harmony.” Harris maintains that “the unifying principle of the ultimate whole” has come to awareness in us and that “genuine rational love, therefore, must extend to the entire human race” (1988).
With Harris, I maintain that these 20th century insights into our evolving human condition go back to Immanual Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared in 1783. Kant points out that the “transcendental unity of apperception” or “transcendental ego” provides the absolute presupposition for the existence of both human knowledge and freedom. This transcendental unity of consciousness makes knowledge, including all scientific knowledge, possible. It is a unity that persists in all normal people from day to day, making possible remembering and learning from what took place yesterday, last year, and throughout all history. Similarly, this transcendental unity of consciousness presupposes the unity and intelligibility of the world as ONE world, thereby, again, making knowledge of the world possible.
It not only makes knowledge possible through self-awareness but practical moral action as well. I could not be a responsible moral person unless I felt that I was the same person from day to day and year to year. Hence, it is the source of human freedom. Without the unity of self-aware mind, there can be no freedom but only instinctual reactions like those of the animals. “The perfect match between human beings and the universe is about a meeting of minds,” write Chopra and Kafatos. “The human mind matches the cosmic mind” (149). “We allowed the universe to be aware of itself in the dimension of time and space” (186).
Here is the key point that I want to emphasize: this transcendental unity is not my “empirical self.” It is not the self that happens to like ice-cream or baseball or making money. It is the transcendental unity of consciousness that makes these contingent affairs of the empirical self possible. In the words of physicist Henry P. Stapp, humans now appear “as an integral part of the highly nonlocal creative activity of the universe.” Self-aware mind, itself beyond time, space, and knowledge, is the creative activity of the cosmos manifest in us.
In his 1922 book known as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called this transcendental unity the “metaphysical self,” which is “a contentless point, at the limit of the world and not part of it.” And in his 1929 “Lecture on Ethics,” Wittgenstein identified one of his experiences of “absolute ethical value” as “feeling absolutely safe,” feeling that “nothing can injure me no matter what happens.” I maintain that this “freedom from the world” experienced by Wittgenstein derives from his identification with this transcendental self. It is this contentless point of sheer self-aware mind, which is beyond space, time, and change (and making each of these things possible) that also makes the empirical self possible.
Several of the Hindu Upanishads declare that “consciousness is the knower, not the known.” Consciousness cannot be known because it would then become the known, not the knower. There is nothing to discern behind consciousness. Reductionists today claim a brain, entirely missing the point. Metaphysicians may claim it is a divine “reality” like Brahman, Allah, or Tao. But the Budda knew better. Absolute apophatic mysteries are not to be reified, but lived: live from the unsayable mystery—become one with it. Let it live through you. (It already does.)
As Harris shows at length in several of his works (including The Reality of Time, 1988), the evolutionary nisus (and unifying principle) of the cosmos has come to consciousness of itself in us as precisely this transcendental unity of consciousness. The empirical ego uses the freedom provided to indulge its fantasies, cravings, hopes, and fears. The transcendental self brings freedom into human life to foster cosmic evolution toward ever greater harmony, love, and holism. As Indian sage Sri Aurobindo expressed this, “spirituality is not only for a few gifted and rare individuals. It is for all of humanity. It involves cooperating with the goal and task inherent within our human situation to realize the One in and through the many—to move from our present ego-centered human consciousness to a cosmic-centered consciousness that constitutes our true self” (1970, 554).
Our true self is the cosmic transcendental unity of self-aware mind that makes possible all knowledge, ethical action, and wholeness. It is the cosmic “logos” come to awareness of itself in us, as philosopher-theologian Raimon Panikkar declares. Here is our hope for true freedom from war, hatred, nationalistic and personalistic egoisms. Here is our hope for uniting humanity, for example, under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. We have misunderstood freedom as a kind of isolated sovereignty of individuals or nations apart from the whole of humanity, our planetary ecosystem, and the cosmos that lives in and through us. Our freedom, arising from the unity of self-aware mind, places the evolutionary nisus in our hands, as our responsibility, at least on this planet.
Our subjectivity arises from the unity of consciousness, a unity that encounters the entire world as its object. Subject and object are thus united, and we come to understand what it means to have “rational love” for all persons, the natural world, and our awesome, mysterious Cosmos. Human and cosmic freedom become one, with a harmony of vision and mission. We begin to understand the telos that brought us to self-awareness out of nature, and to understand why we have an inviolable dignity that transcends the lesser dignity of the other creatures on Earth. As Rabindranath Tagore put it, “it is the mission of civilization to bring unity among people and establish peace and harmony.”
The unity of consciousness makes possible our human temporality in which we appropriate a past within a dynamic present and project ourselves toward an imagined future. The future we are all capable of imagining has a “utopian horizon,” that is, we can imagine a world of peace, harmony, justice, and shared dignity. The utopian horizon, therefore, functions as a cosmic gift that can serve as a guide to how we organize ourselves on our precious planet Earth. How do we establish a common good for humanity of freedom, peace and justice? The answer cannot be “sovereign” militarized nation-states, for these cannot absolutely unite us as one humanity within one universal common good and one global mind.
It becomes clear why we need to ratify an Earth Constitution and to participate in sessions of the Provisional World Parliament like the one coming up in Pondicherry, India (and online) December 7-10, 2025. All normal human beings share this transcendental unity of consciousness. We are one human reality, and we need one government to actualize a common good for all of us, beginning with salvaging the global environment and eliminating all weapons of mass destruction.
Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1969) speaks of discerning “infinity in the human face.” This infinity (self-aware mind reflected in the human face and eyes) in which each of us participates, provides the absolute ethical imperative to treat one another (all of us) equally as inviolable ends and not as means. Are the fundamental goals of the great world religions now emerging through this transformed Postmodern Paradigm? Is what was once called “religion” now becoming a “sacred secularity”?
It is the cosmic self, “at the limit of the world and not part of it” that brings freedom, and the longing for freedom (and the utopian horizon imagining ever-greater freedom) to humanity. It is high time we acted on this gift before it is too late. Our freedom needs to accept the gifts of our utopian imagination and take practical steps to make both our harmony with the planetary ecosystem and the oneness of humanity a living reality. Ratifying an Earth Constitution must become our first major step in that direction.
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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu
Tags: Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Cosmos, Earth Constitution, Freedom, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality, Tao Te Ching, Taoism, Utopia
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 22 Sep 2025.
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MY Comments in Response to: Human and Cosmic Freedom
The UN International Happiness Day was founded on June 28, 2012 by United Nations adviser Jayme Illien, who was an orphan rescued from the streets of Calcutta in India by Mother Teresa’s International Mission of Hope Charities. Jayme Illien was later adopted by single American woman named Anna Belle Illien. UN Happiness Day was celebrated throughout the world on the 20th of March. Jayme Illien is a great hope for others who are victims of a variety of slavery to be free to be happy.
Freedom is the precondition for happiness because “there is no Happiness in slavery even in dreams.” – Said Tulsidasa. Science and religion both can jointly lead to every man and woman to be free and happy. Albert Einstein rightly observed, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Einstein’s observation on science and religion can be explained by citing a story that there was severe fire in a village. All the inhabitants of the village, except two handicapped – a lame and a blind, moved to the safe place to save their lives from the fire. But the left lame and blind also succeeded to move to the safe place through helping each other by way of sitting by the lame (the science) on the shoulder of blind (the religion). For more details, one may refer to my article and our book cited below with their website link and reference:
Science and Religion for Freedom and Happiness
SCIENCE – SPIRITUALITY, 11 Sep 2017
Surya Nath Prasad, Ph. D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/09/science-and-religion-for-freedom-and-happiness/
Science, Religion and Peace
Edited by Surya Nath Prasad & Dr. Suman Shukla
Foreword by Prof. Johan Galtung, Pioneer of Peace studies
Published by IAEWP – A UN Peace Messenger, in 2003