The Significance of This 16th Session of the Provisional World Parliament

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 22 Dec 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Alternative Presidential Address

7 Dec 2025 – Dear Brothers and Sisters, Dignitaries, Friends, and Comrades,

We are at the point of a culmination of history in which the oneness of humanity moves, on this auspicious occasion, to fulfill itself in a singular diversified order of law and justice. We are at a moment of great transition in which the nihilism of the present world disorder takes important steps toward a great affirmation. This culmination point might be termed the actualization of the Brahmanic fullness of our being, our vaisudhaiva kutumbakam that has flowed forth in such diverse forms as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.

In this event of the Provisional World Parliament, we may also be at a point of origination, a birthing, an initialization of something that goes deeply into the very foundations of the mystery of existence itself. This point of origination might be symbolically linked to the creation ex nihilo of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a creatio continua that has never since ceased. It might be linked to a Lord of History working toward an incarnation of our common divine-human destiny.

The parliament is expressive of our “ever-present origin” as articulated by Swiss thinker, Jean Gebser. Whether culmination or origin, we are moving beyond what Gebser called “ego-consciousness,” the dualistic consciousness of egoism, nationalism, of all forms of dogmatism and bigotry, to “integral consciousness,” the immediate atemporal consciousness of the whole. Like the cosmos, as a microcosm of the cosmos, humankind is a whole. The world is one family.

The culminating timeless fulfillment and the originating event beyond time and history flow from one and the same Absolute Mystery of Existence manifest in its two most fundamental paths—the path of fulfillment moving toward the primordial One, and the path of origination moving toward a culmination. These paths coincide today as one and the same drive to actualization found everywhere and nowhere in opposition to our beleaguered, fallen, and omnicidal human condition.  The immense multi-billion-year process of Cosmic Evolution has brought forth a creature whose finitude intersects infinity, whose self-awareness brings to consciousness the utter mysteries of fulfillment and origination, a creature that has moved out of and beyond an immersion in ontological wholeness and into the self-aware moral and ethical dimension, who has moved “beyond being” as Plato declared, and into responsibility.

A free being develops as a creature that can transcend his or her own ego to grow into union with the eternal Oneness of all Reality as well as a creature that can see within itself the infinity of self-transcendence linking us to the evolutionary upsurge of Existence.  We transition from nihilistic and omnicidal freedom (of weapons, wars, and climate destruction) to an affirmation of our role in the self-actualization of the cosmic nisus toward transcendence. We are bringing transcendent unity in diversity out of fragmentation and fratricide, peace and harmony out of war and ecocide.

We gather at this Parliament in our quest for knowledge (jnâna), which is the effort of our intellect at self-transcendence toward unity and fulfillment. We also gather here out of love (bkakti) through our heart’s passion for the truth of the whole. And we gather as our collective deed (karma) through a creativity that aims at something truly new, a divinely inspired imperative, the consequences of which we leave in the hands of Krishna. What we accomplish in this Parliament is not found in some utility that we may have achieved in merely laying the groundwork for a better world.

The very being of the Parliament goes beyond utility to the birth and/or rebirth of what is most fundamental, what is most crying out for fulfillment, what is most demanding of a new point of origination. Human beings today face self-generated extinction due to unrestrained climate destruction and the out-of-control madness of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass murder. Insight into the possibilities of fulfillment and evolutionary transcendence is not lacking.  But humanity remains mired in both the structures and the ideologies of nationalism, war, competition, economic determinism, identity politics, runaway technology, and collective egoisms.

In modern India, the chronicle of fulfillment has been narrated by many great visionaries such as Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sri Aurobindo. In modern western culture the chronicle of origination and evolutionary transcendence has been narrated by such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Emmanuel Levinas. On both fronts, our common divine/human gift of a utopian imagination has generated self-transcendence, universal vision, and transformative action.

Yet today, humanity refuses to awaken to the truly new, to the transformative energies that permeate our human situation and offer profound hope. Time is rapidly running out, and tipping points of no return continue to slip past.  Here at the 16^th session of the Provisional World Parliament, these energies are electrifying delegates and observers alike.  Along with the simple and pragmatic founding of Provisional World Government, the Parliament gives birth to both the deep dimension of fulfilment and the transformative energies of the truly new.

In today’s global struggles, the flawed image of a so-called multipolar world continues to attract the leaders of the majority of nation-states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  The anachronistic image of a unipolar world under neocolonial economic and military domination continues to dominate thinking in Europe and North America. Neither vision will open for humanity a future beyond ecological and military self-destruction.

A multipolar world is not a world of unity in diversity empowering all through the embrace of the whole.  A multipolar world clings to an incoherent and outdated concept of national sovereignty within which the true unity in diversity of humanity is forever excluded in favor of a war-system that exists across our planet regardless of whether any actual fighting is taking place. As the climate collapses all around us, each so-called “sovereign nation” will hunker down on its own survival at the expense of the rest of humanity. National sovereignty is exclusionary, fragmenting, and violent—truly a war-system and a self-extinction system.

The Earth Constitution replaces the world’s war-system with a true peace-system. It replaces the world’s utterly unsustainable economic system predicated on endless growth with economic sustainability founded on the principle of the cooperative well-being of the whole rather than the success or failure of arbitrarily defined national and corporate fragments of humanity, as arbitrary as they are violent, as contingent and ephemeral as they are foolish and corrupt. Sovereignty belongs to the people of Earth, who alone are empowered to generate fair and equitable laws for the harmonious governance of the parts embraced within the whole.

Under the Earth Constitution, we are not, however, engendering a “totality,” a mere adding together of the nations and people of Earth to form a collective unity of the whole of humanity. This is not the “New World Order” of the old global system. Nor is it a “rules-based” global order promoted by some powerful governments. It is absolutely not the proto-fascist chaos that we often see around the world today. Nor is it the multipolar nationalistic worlds of competing world powers. If the system of militarized sovereign nation-states is intrinsically a war system, and if the system of organized economic greed and growth feeds into and exacerbates that war system, then moving to a totality of these systems would give us neither peace, nor freedom.

The Earth Constitution, on the contrary, actualizes the ethical dimension of human dignity, the dimension of infinite value and inviolable integrity within each person, the dimension underlined by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948 which declared that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”  Sovereign nation-states structurally cannot recognize this dignity fully, or else it would make both their fragmentation and all war impossible. The Earth Constitution is founded in all its articles precisely on this dignity, and that is why it alone can serve as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

At the same time, the dignity of each, associated with human rights and the collective West, is complemented in the Constitution by the awareness of karmic interdependence and interrelation, associated with the holism of the East. Unity in diversity means neither the dominance of diversity nor a monism of unity. It means a new human reality in which the mysterious cosmos from which we are born and into which we die actualizes a humanity in which freedom and service, love and sacrifice, dialogue and mutual respect, intersect in a creature destined to live within a civilization of peaceful and caring transhistorical fulfillment on our precious planetary home.

The Constitution for the Federation of Earth is both legitimate and absolutely necessary because it founds an integrated whole of unity in diversity, not by the adding up of incommensurable parts but on recognition of the infinite depth within each.  The Earth Constitution transforms entities based on national self-interest and institutionalized economic greed (inevitably a war system and domination system), to their proper mode of being as diverse expressions of human dignity and the integrity of the human person (that is, to a peace system, justice system, and freedom system).

Here is where the nonviolent transformation of the present world system away from an intrinsic war-system takes a major step toward the great religious traditions envisioning the fulfillment of the intrinsic cosmic mystery and the originating desire of that equally mysterious upsurge that we call the human phenomenon.  At the heart of both originary intuitions of the traditional religions of humanity lives the awareness of infinity that permeates our human situation and calls us to ethical action. The Earth Constitution embodies a major fulfillment of that ethical action directed to placing human relationships on the foundation of our gigantic human dignity—dignity that is at the same time individual and collective—thereby transforming history and bringing a fundamental dimension of our humanity to relative fruition and a new beginning.

Out of the vast cosmic evolutionary process, the universe has evolved a creature transcending the natural world precisely because it has a special dignity, the dignity of infinite depth, freedom, and responsibility. This gift of freedom and responsibility reveals that we are not a finished creature, bearers of some predetermined “human nature.” Rather, we are called to evolve, to grow morally, spiritually, and institutionally. We are called to join all of humanity in the conscious endeavor to actualize our vast potential for peace, justice, mutual respect, and freedom. I will briefly quote six thinkers, four from the East and two from the West, who point to this inviolable dignity that in turn necessitates the oneness of humanity and the need for an Earth Constitution.

As we know, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother founded World Union, a movement that worked closely with the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) in those early decades from the 1950s to the 1980s, to write the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Sri Aurobindo declared that, “Our humanity is the conscious meeting-place of the finite and the infinite and to grow more and more towards that infinite even in this physical birth is our privilege…. To exceed constantly our present limited self till it opens fully to transcendence in which the universal lives and to base upon it all our becoming.”

For Sri Aurobindo, the transitional process from egoistic and nationalist selfhood to the universal self involves world union in the form of the Earth Constitution in which the infinity that is inseparable from our dignity becomes the premise of a conscious evolution toward ever greater peace, harmony, and freedom.

Rabindranath Tagore declares that the system of warring nation-states gives us a “negative freedom” (that he calls “the freedom of self-will”). The self-will of nationalism forever deprives us of the “positive freedom” of human unity.  The true course of freedom, he declares, is the movement toward goodness and love, “for goodness and love are infinite, and only in the infinite is the perfect realization of freedom possible.” Of the world’s war-system, Tagore declares: “From one end of the world to the other the poisonous fumes of hatred darken the atmosphere. The spirit of violence which perhaps lay dormant in the psychology of the West, has at last roused itself and desecrates the spirit of Man…. It is the mission of civilization to bring unity among people and to establish peace and harmony.”

This session of the Provisional World Parliament precisely embodies the “mission of civilization to bring unity among people and to establish peace and harmony.”  The violence and “desecration” of the system of militarized nation-states darkens the atmosphere of Earth with their poisonous fumes.  The Provisional World Parliament transcends the dogma of national sovereignty and founds its vision of the future on the oneness and infinite dignity of humanity. The sovereign right to make law arises from the people of Earth, from their freedom and dignity, not from fractured minorities who today happen to hold a monopoly on both wealth and power.

Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar Masao Abe declares that “All of mankind on this planet has entered into an age when it must realize that is now based on the clear realization of itself as ‘mankind’ … as a community with a single destiny—one living self-aware entity.” It is this common “humanity,” he affirms, that now has sovereignty. Each of us must break through our “ego-structure,” whether this be personal egoism or a collective national egoism, to realize the qualitative oneness of humankind. Only then, Abe affirms, when we base our lives on wisdom and compassion, and “will a single government, having all mankind as its basis be possible.”  “The age of the nation-state must end,” he asserts, and “the age of mankind must begin.” This Provisional World Parliament puts forward an Earth Constitution based precisely on this principle of the sovereignty and the oneness of humanity.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1942 that: “The better mind of the world desires today not absolutely independent States warring one against another but a federation of friendly inter-dependent States … I see nothing grand or impossible about our expressing our readiness for universal inter-dependence rather than independence….”   In affirming this truth, Gandhi was expressing a long tradition called “world federalism” substantially initiated in the West by Immanuel Kant. East and West agree on this ascent to world unity and universal human dignity.

Kant made absolutely clear that a planetary civil constitution lives as a moral imperative for every human being.  In 1784, Kant declared: “The greatest problem for the human species, whose solution nature compels it to seek, is to achieve a universal civil society administered in accord with the right…. It is only in such a society that nature’s highest objective, namely, the highest attainable development of mankind’s capacities, can be achieved…. Thus there must be a society in which one will find the highest possible degree of freedom under external laws combined with irresistible power, i.e., a perfectly rightful civil constitution, whose attainment is the supreme task nature has set for the human species; for only by solving and completing it can nature fulfill her other objectives with our species.”

Just as Sri Aurobindo saw an effective World Union as a necessary means for the conscious evolution of humanity toward higher forms of consciousness and harmony, so Kant perceived that a global civil constitution was a necessary step in the conscious evolution toward an actualized “Kingdom of Ends,” that is, a fully moral planetary civilization in which war has been abolished and in which peace, justice, freedom, and mutual respect have replaced our present broken world disorder.

Like Sri Aurobindo, and like Kant, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a 20^th century scientist and French-Catholic Jesuit Priest, saw in the cosmic evolutionary process the realization of the universal principle of upsurge toward love and harmonization. He declared, “the movement of our soul expresses and measures the very stages of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.”  We now “hold it in our hands,” he says, “responsible for its past to its future.”  I submit to you, my friends, that all these thinkers affirmed, in one way or another, that our human task has now become “conscious evolution.”   The Earth Constitution is designed for conscious evolution. It alone accelerates the unification of humankind toward one cosmopolitan community of unity in diversity living in peace, justice, and freedom upon the Earth.

Brothers and sisters, dignitaries, friends, and comrades: What are we doing here in Pondicherry, a place deeply symbolic of human vision and unity?   Is not our presence in this august location symbolic of a truly new beginning?   Are we not taking a new step forward in the conscious evolution of humanity, not only beyond our present crisis of climate collapse and proliferating nuclear weapons, but rather toward a truly positive freedom, as articulated by Tagore, characterized by unity, harmony, and love?  Kant calls this humanity’s “greatest problem.”  Together, we delegates at PWP 16 are addressing humanity’s “greatest problem.”

Let us work together in the coming days of this auspicious parliamentary meeting to perpetuate what we do here into the future, to secure a permanent home for the Provisional World Parliament that can help accelerate humankind’s growth beyond individual and national egoisms toward a truly higher dimension of consciousness, toward genuine “positive freedom” and the advent of a world system grounded in human dignity. Our message must sing out worldwide, in joy, hope, and planetary vision. The very survival of humanity depends on this.  The future of the cosmic evolutionary process is truly in our hands.  May the Sacred Depths of Existence, confer blessings upon this Parliament.

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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

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 22 Dec 2025.

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