The Spiritual Quest of Humanity and the Earth Constitution
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 4 May 2026
Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
16 Apr 2026 – Ours is a time when the bestiality in man has risen to the surface of global governing. The captains of wealth, the institutions of economic exploitation and accumulation, the continuous revolution in the technology of war, and the use of Artificial Intelligence for both war and human domination—all conspire to make our time resonate with irrational apocalyptic traditions worldwide. Some Zionists think that committing genocide on their neighbors is a necessary component of God’s revelation. Some Christians think that nuclear holocaust will enable the second coming of Christ.
Truth, honesty, integrity, justice, and love are spat upon with nihilistic distain. The MAGA movement in the USA abjures truth, fairness, and human dignity in favor of a valueless drive to power and perversion. We see madness, lust, perversion, and disgrace everywhere in the dominant trends of today’s civilization. We see a planetary anti-civilization destroying the ecological foundations of human life to enable their perversions in the present at the sacrifice of a future for our entire species.
Much of the pathology that dominates our world system derives from an early modern misunderstanding of the development of science and its philosophical implications. In the 17th century Descartes divided the conscious subject (the mind) from the external object (the world). This split appeared to be confirmed by the tremendous successes of a developing science that was unlocking nature’s secrets and placing in human hands, as Francis Bacon put it soon after, the power to dominate nature for human ends. The view began to emerge that “reality” constituted an “objective” world external to human awareness, a world that was mechanical, atomistic, manipulable, and value-free.
Values, which at one time were thought to derive from God as a “natural law” written on the human heart (as St. Paul put it in Romans 2:14) were, after Descartes, not merely a subjective reaction of the “external” world. Values had zero ontological reality. They were “merely subjective” reactions to affairs and events. Universal truths and categorical imperatives disappeared into the utter relativism of nominalism—there are no universals, only particulars. With the dissolution of moral universals came the view that all values are merely subjective and relative. There are only opinions and no independent truths. In the 18th century David Hume concluded that “reason is but the slave of the passions.” In the 19th century Frederich Nietzsche undertook to deconstruct, not only values, but reason, truth, and the entire foundations of civilization.
Today, we reap the whirlwind of the early-modern reduction of subjectivity in favor of an utterly amoral, unfeeling, and thoughtless external world seen as atomistic, mechanistic, and value-free. Institutions (that we still cope with today) were developed premised on these assumptions: capitalism involved the exploitation of nature and people in the service of unlimited value-free accumulation of wealth, and sovereign nation-states included a world divided into absolute, militarized nation-state entities whose relation to one another was reducible to non-moral, value-free military and economic power. Today, we reap the whirlwind of these false assumptions. Without values, all that is left to human beings are power (within the objective world of wars and political struggles) and perversion (within the subjective world of thought, feeling, and consciousness).
Power and perversion are what we find all around us today. In spite of conceptual revolutions from both scientists and cosmological thinkers transformative of the entire early-modern paradigm, the reductionist view has not been abandoned or superseded by either our institutions or by popular thought. We have discovered today that the early-modern view was dead wrong. We have discovered that the cosmos manifests an evolutionary upsurge in which we human beings are a key element, a central element within Cosmic life. With the help of thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo in India, Alfred North Whitehead in the USA, and Teilhard de Chardin in Europe, it now becomes clear that, as Teilhard expresses it, human beings are understood to be “the axis and leading shoot of evolution.”
This should not be thought of as a return to the ancient religious cosmologies of either the East nor the West. A dominant view in the East was that human life was about escaping the samsaric world of endless rebirth and suffering through a direct union with Being itself, a moksha or release from the world of becoming, suffering, and death. A dominant view in the West was that human life was a journey of suffering and travail within a fallen world of sin and death toward an other-worldly salvation in eternal life with God. The postmodern evolutionary cosmology transcends both of these orientations while embracing on a higher level what may have been of value in them.
In the emergent evolutionary view, we now see that comprehension of our situation does not come through reducing what is complex (human life) to simpler parts (understood through physics, chemistry, and biology). Instead, we now comprehend the lower dimensions in terms of the higher that the universe has clearly produced (the human self-aware mind and its capacities). Human beings are no longer considered a contingent and epiphenomenal accident within the vast reaches of an impersonal Cosmos. Instead, there is an entelechy in the Cosmos that has evolved us, and that same entelechy exists within us. We are understood as microcosms of the macrocosm. We can therefore go inward to discern our transpersonal entelechy for developing our body-mind reality to enhance and contribute to the process of Cosmic evolution. As contemporary cosmological thinker Raimon Panikkar expresses this:
The experience of contemporary Man finding himself, and moreover believing himself, not master of the universe, but in a certain sense its builder, its responsible partner, is a fundamental religious experience. Man has suddenly felt himself bound to the earth, joined with it in a communal destiny, playing his part in a cosmic whole of which he is the awareness. Human religiousness cannot henceforward dissociate itself from the earth, this earth of Men, and every effort toward salvation now calls for a genuine integration with all universe. (Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural Studies,1979, p. 452.)
This “fundamental religious experience” is not one of clinging to traditional religious cosmologies, whether Eastern or Western. We are “bound to the earth,” that is, we are evolved as mind-body realities who manifest “the cosmic whole of which [we are] the awareness.” We are now understood as the “responsible partner” of the Cosmic nisus or entelechy toward ever greater unity, wholeness, integration, and harmony. The fate of the Cosmos and the fate of human beings are now intertwined. The Cosmos has become aware of itself in us. We became “the axis and leading shoot of evolution.”
The process of discovery of this principle that the Cosmos has become aware of itself in us was, of course, fore-figured by some of the great spiritual teachers and mystics in traditional religious orientations East and West. But in the modern world, a key moment in the overcoming of the Cartesian spit between mind and body came with Immanuel Kant’s identification of the trans-temporal unity of consciousness (which he called the “Transcendental Unity of Apperception,” or TUA). In his Critique of Pure Reason (1783), Kant pointed out that the unity of consciousness was a presupposition of the very possibility of both self-awareness and knowledge of the universe. As such it was not (nor could be) part of the flux of time. It provided our intuition of an enduring selfhood persisting through time throughout life, without which we could not be a knowing, learning, growing human person capable of knowledge, understanding, and recognition of universal moral principles.
Since then, this insight and its implications was developed in related ways by philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Husserl, but was perhaps made most explicit by contemporary thinker Errol E. Harris in his book The Reality of Time (1988). The TUA must be recognized as eternity already present in our lives: the fundamental nisus of the Cosmos manifests itself in the human mind: we are microcosms of the macrocosm. Harris writes: “By an activity of self-organization, this sentience is articulated and brings itself to consciousness, and in our minds becomes self-reflective—so that the whole process becomes aware of itself…. Ego and world are thus but two aspects of one experience, inseparable and in principle identically the same. Not only is the experience mine, but it is an experienced world; not only is it a subjective experience, but it is the sublated development of the entire objective world process” (p. 104).
Self and world, body and mind, are no longer seen in terms of Descartes’ spit. They are one reality and one process, which means that the world arises simultaneously in and as both poles. World and self appear together and belong together. Our role as “the leading shoot of evolution” is to develop our mind-body spirituality, thereby participating in and contributing to a Cosmic evolution of ever greater coherence, integration, and harmony.
In his book, Sacred Science (1998), John Heron further spells out our role: “There is no separation, no gap, between perceiver, perceiving and perceived, that they are interfused distinctions within a local unitive field and that has infinite horizons and interiority….I regard the phenomenal world as an innovative process of divine becoming, within which we humans are co-creators of global transformation, a planetary civilization. On this view, my moral life has two interdependent aspects primary and secondary. The secondary and supportive aspect is that it works to foster and facilitate, with others, the inner transformation of human consciousness, so that we may celebrate the multi-dimensional fullness of creation…. The primary aspect is that it works to release the life-potential of persons-in-relation, to facilitate social empowerment and social justice in every sphere of human activity. [The goal is] for persons to become full creators of a planetary civilization” (pp. 99-100).
If the Cosmic nisus has emerged in human persons in the course of the Cosmic evolutionary process, then each of us becomes a self-aware node in that developmental process. Spirituality is no longer a top-down instruction of persons by an all knowing church as the custodian of both salvation and right cosmology. Neither is spirituality any longer a process where an all-knowing teacher representing a spiritual lineage guides students toward a supreme enlightenment beyond a world of maya and illusion. Spiritualty involves both body and mind and is practiced in everyday life by each engaged person and their spiritual communities. It is a participatory learning process in which persons engage in their personal development in multiple ways, including ritual, meditation, imagination, abstract thought, celebration, attentiveness, recollection (or remembrance), and social action.
These actions can today be engaged in by many, but they are also denied to many others because of the above-mentioned global institutions of extractive capitalism and militarized sovereign nations. Most people of Earth are missing out on their opportunities to engage in, and enhance, the process of Cosmic evolution because they are struggling day to day for survival. As Heron declares, our goal is clearly a planetary civilization in which our divinely gifted capacity for spiritual growth can be afforded to all persons and preserved in our institutions as a heritage for future generations.
A necessary step in the actualizing of this goal will be ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The Preamble to the Constitution affirms that “Humanity is One.” We are one in the fact that we understand ourselves to be microcosms of the macrocosm. We all share the same infinite dignity. We are emergent nodes of a Cosmic nisus moving toward ever greater harmony, integration, and fulfillment. The Preamble continues: “the principle of unity in diversity is the basis for a new age when war shall be outlawed and peace prevail.” An absolute necessity for a planetary civilization is precisely the outlawing of war and establishing a world peace system to replace the current sovereign-state world war system. Unity in diversity abolishes the war-system. And this Preamble states that the new age will be realized “when the earth’s total resources shall be shared by all without discrimination.”
It is precisely these three requirements for a new planetary civilization that are institutionalized within the Earth Constitution: (1) institutional recognition that “Humanity is One,” (2) ending war and establishing a world peace system, and (3) the equitable sharing of the earth’s total resources for the good of all. The governance system outlined within the 19 articles of the Earth Constitution actualizes these three principles through the “six broad functions” of the Earth Federation: to establish peace and disarm the nations, to protect universal human rights, to create reasonable economic and social equality for the citizens of Earth, to monitor and regulate world resources for the good of all and future generations, to protect the environment and ecological fabric of the Earth, and to address all other problems beyond the scope of nation-states.
The Constitution is designed as an integrated whole with its main agencies revolving around an Integrative Complex of seven administrations that provide knowledge, expertise, certifications, and regulations for the whole. Thus, the Judiciary (fostering justice), the Enforcement System (peace keeping and crime prevention), the Ombudsmus (human rights), the Executive (worldwide implementation of the laws passed by Parliament), and the World Parliament itself will function with entirely different principles than today’s struggles for wealth, power, and propaganda that characterize contemporary modes of governing. The Earth Constitution provides the goals outlined above that unite the institutions of governing under very different principles from the wealth, power, and propaganda of the current systems.
The World Parliament consists in three houses: the House of Peoples, the House of Counsellors, and the House of Nations. Even though the diversity of its agencies and the diversity of the three houses of Parliament provide classical “checks and balances” on the operations of the Earth Federation government, the three houses will be united under the same universal principles reviewed above. The foundations of government, even within the House of Nations, are no longer wealth, power, and propaganda. They will now be peace, universal human rights, and ecological restoration and protection. The House of Nations and the whole of the World Parliament will, therefore, operate with and for civilizational unity. The goal of spirituality, characterized by John Heron as a “planetary civilization” dedicated to spiritual exploration and growth along with peace, social and ecological justice, and respect for universal human rights, will have been significantly achieved.
Spirituality, today, emerges from a reborn cosmological vision in which the process of Cosmic evolution concentrates, like a laser-beam, in each and every person. Our goal is to establish a planetary civilization in which planetary peace and social justice have advanced to the degree that our common human vocation becomes manifest and possible for all. The Earth Constitution serves that end beautifully. The spiritual quest of humanity runs through the very center of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.
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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: Anti Zionism, Arms Industry, Arms Trade, Artificial Intelligence AI, Democratic World Federalists-DWF, Earth Constitution, Genocide, Homo Barbaricus, Israel, Military Capitalism, Predatory Capitalism, Profits, Spirituality, United Nations, War Economy, World Order, World Parliament
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 4 May 2026.
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