IWC INAUGURAL ADDRESS ~ Prof. Raghavan N. Iyer

Transcript ~ IWC INAUGURAL ADDRESS

The Declaration of Interdependence

All that any society can do—and that's the best it can do—is to assist wherever wisdom may be found, to assist individuals to make it available to all, and to maximize the diffusion and the spread of wisdom.

Prof. Raghavan N. Iyer

A Talk by Raghavan N. Iyer

Crosbie Hall, Santa Barbara ~  July 4, 1976

Friends, under the auspices of the Brotherhood of Bodhisattvas, who guide and guard the destiny of humanity, a great event took place on August 11th, 1945, some time before the war ended, on the birthday of the great Magus teacher on August 11th. Shri B.P. Wadia, the founder of the trade union movement in India and a lifelong theosophist, worked ahead of his time to sow a seed for a plant that would survive through the decades after the dismantling of the world at the end of the most horrendous holocaust of the Second World War. That Institute of World Culture, founded in a beautiful town, Bangalore—very much like Santa Barbara—has maintained itself with a characteristic gift of continuity that belongs at its best to Indian culture over millennia, and it has come through intact.

When in 1974 I had the privilege of returning after 14 years to visit that institute, and when I lectured there about the undertaking in Santa Barbara and the plans for the future, the response was profound and overwhelming. The war ended at a time of universal rejoicing but also determination that that would be the war to end all wars. The fighter spirit in the history of America enunciated a principle of universal responsibility for peace which, alas, was qualified and moderated by the principle going back to the concept of Europe, to the old world; and therefore we had the United Nations, but with a universal charter vitiated by the power given to the Security Council.

Nonetheless, at the time of the ending of the war, more books appeared in the United States, in England, in France, even in Germany, and certainly in Japan, in all parts of the world, providing great plans, dreams, and hopes for the future. This involved all the great religions of the world. Humanists of every stripe, even skeptics and cynics, deeply shaken by the terrible wounds of the war, felt that something more fundamental, something more lasting, had to be established and that the lessons of history must be learned—though in fact, the one lesson that history teaches, according to Hegel, is that men learn almost nothing from it. It was a great moment.

It was a great moment everywhere. And that moment was also the moment which B.P. Wadia chose, on that very day when the news came of the ending of the war, to do what he called initiating an event of great omen. Very soon after that event, he pointed out to those around him that the idea of the spiritual and cultural unity of humanity would have to be sustained through a period when the idea would become replaced and substituted by various organizational, experiential, and ceremonial activities. The idea would be at the very core—because it was an indestructible idea—of a new type in the affairs of humanity, but at the same time, it would be submerged; and not only submerged, in fact, it came to be inverted.

During these thirty years since 1945, the world witnessed a very rapid acceleration in the name of the Cold War. In the early years after the war, in the name of securing certain special privileges for the leading economic powers in international economic organizations, they paid lip service at one level to decolonization, but refused to accept the logic of the democratization of humanity. There was a rearguard action supported, no doubt, by small groups constituting a very minute proportion of the world's population. But this minute proportion of the world's population was able to do what was pointed out before the First World War by Julien Benda: the new clerks, the intellectuals, inflamed the baser passions of humanity, aggregated them, homogenized them, rationalized them, and dignified them—all those passions that are invoked on behalf of the small against the great, on behalf of the part against the whole.

Therefore, it was hardly surprising that only a few years ago, it seemed as if whatever was beautiful and noble in the heart of humanity that asserted itself in 1945 had been completely drowned. Cynicism became the order of the day in international relations. Meanwhile, beginning with 1963, the great climatic year for the century and crucial in the United States of America, it was possible coolly to plan out and initiate a plan of activities extending to the end of the century, involving showing courage to the young to negate the falsity of the pseudo-culture that had emerged in the name of the American dream, supported by the American system.

And this has worked—worked with an intensity and also sometimes a poignancy that has reached throughout the world. Therefore, it is not surprising that, moving from 1945 in Bangalore to 1976 in Santa Barbara, we should think of the inability of our fellow country in the United States of America to really know how to honor the founding fathers. There is a great confusion. There is immense sincerity. There is gratitude. There is also pride on having come through Vietnam and Watergate.

But how can people in general understand the immensity, the dignity, and the majesty of the American dream? Because have they really learned in school and college, at home, in town, and through the politicians, the true meaning, the great idea behind America, the great dream that was there from the first? It is therefore not surprising, in a metaphorical sense which Whittier perhaps foresaw a long time ago when he spoke of the second founding, perhaps in Santa Barbara of another kind of America, that the opportunity should be taken in the name of the great Mahatmas, who work only for the whole and only for the long future, to inaugurate the Institute of World Culture on a small but authentic basis, so that a nucleus of human beings who understand and are willing to dedicate themselves to its great purposes may emerge. In time, it will not, of course, be difficult to draw the global picture for the work of such an institute, marking a series of steps in the direction of the civilization of tomorrow.

So this is indeed a sacred and happy occasion for all of us. On this occasion, it is not only important to recognize the sacred principle of continuity enshrined in the civilization of India, but also to recognize the significance of the great American experiment. In the late 18th century, it was Count Claude Saint-Martin who enunciated the great motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. It was a great affirmation on behalf of the whole of the human race. It was a time when the French philosophes, like Condorcet, thought in terms of a moral vision pertaining to the whole of humanity—humanity seen as a single, indivisible, and emerging moral community conforming to laws of progress that affect the whole and also, as Condorcet said, characterized increasingly by more and more equality between and among nations, classes, and individuals. It was a great vision.

It was a vision that went with an awakening—an awakening in regard to the dignity of man, the rights of the individual, but also the importance of making a fundamental break with the patterns of the past, patterns sanctified by worn-out custom, by decrepit usage, by rationalizations of every kind that were in the name of the weaknesses rather than the strengths of human beings. Benjamin Franklin, among the makers of the Constitution and the sharers and shapers of the framing of the Declaration of Independence, was very much in touch with the Enlightenment in France. Intuitive from his early years, Benjamin Franklin spoke explicitly again and again of the family of mankind. He had a vision of the whole, in terms of which he also spoke of the significance of the American experiment.

But it was later a French visitor to this country, de Tocqueville, who actually coined the phrase "the Great Experiment". And that was what the United States of America was meant to be: a great experiment in service of a great idea, just as the Enlightenment understood that the idea of humanity was even more fundamental than mere external forms—because these were men who had come to see through the forms of external religion—they recognized the nobility of an idea which could unite the aspirations and the wills of human beings, even though many of them, unlike their hidden, invisible helpers, may have underestimated the enormity of the task.

So too in the United States of America, the idea of a great experiment was in the name of principle, so that for the first time a country emerged with a constitution and a declaration that was in the name of abstract principles. It was a nation or a community in service of a proposition. The constitution would be an educational experiment so that waves upon waves of immigrants and masses of human beings calling themselves Americans would progressively learn what it means to affirm the great principles of the Declaration of Independence.

But in the learning, of course, there is also unlearning—unlearning similar ideas that in fact are only similar apparently but are incompatible with the logic of universalization, the logic of democratization. Also, it means not only unlearning such ideas which are incompatible with the American dream; it means having the courage and the capacity to examine the basis of one's own individual and collective failures in the great experiment.

So by now, in 200 years, as people readily recognize all over the world, but especially in the neighboring country of Canada, the United States of America is a teacher of humanity—but a teacher both in terms of failures as well as successes. The American experiment has failed, and in its failure, much is to be learned by humanity. At the same time, at the core of the American experiment, overbrooded by wise forefathers and great adepts, there is an indestructible truth which is part of the unwritten constitution, the unspoken consensus, and the basis of the unfinished experiment of America.

This involves getting to the very depth of the root of the American idea. It involves rethinking and reaffirming that the American is a man or a woman who defines himself or herself; no one can do it for another. It is to understand that the American, as a self-defining individual, is an inheritor of the whole of the human heritage—no less and no more. America, while it represents a new direction over 200 years in world history, also is a part of world history, a part of the whole of nature, and the whole world.

This means self-conscious selection by each individual who has the courage to individuate, but in the most universal context possible. The whole world lies before one. It is up to the individual to choose and make real and authentic whatever he wants from the world's religions, the world's literature, the world's art and music, and all the great creations of the human spirit in recorded history, going way beyond into the very myths and mists of antiquity.

This then is up to the individual. Where the individual has to initiate his own path of choice and his own path of universalization, instead of being helped by the whole of the past, it is now very clear that he is hindered by it. He is not hindered by what, at the very depth, animates millions upon millions of human beings upon this great land, but he is hindered again by a microscopic minority who have rewritten the history of this country in terms of original sin, in terms of self-interest, in terms of cynicism, and in terms of human weakness. They have tried to annex it to some kind of succession theory going back to the Roman Empire, affixing it to the Judeo-Christian tradition understood in narrow terms. They have gone away from the great breadth and universality of the original vision that is still in the Great Pyramid and the eye over that pyramid, which is the eye of universal wisdom.

It was Tom Paine who recognized that no human being and no society has any monopoly over wisdom or any clues as to how wisdom is distributed among human beings. All that any society can do—and that's the best it can do—is to assist wherever wisdom may be found, to assist individuals to make it available to all, and to maximize the diffusion and the spread of wisdom—the wisdom that is innate in human souls and which cannot be understood by any empirical or external criteria. In other words, a man like Tom Paine understood that America was a vindication of a faith in, through, and behind the unfinished experiment: a faith in the future of humanity. Here, in this great melting pot of many peoples, many ideas, and many influences, there could arise the possibility that every human being may in time become unafraid, become an individual, and become, if possible, even a king—a king with a kingly grace in his relations with others, a kingly dignity in his capacity to choose for himself what are those seeds of universal wisdom and the inheritance of humanity that he can make live seeds in the soil given to him to cultivate.

That was a great insight into a fundamental principle which is more intact today than people know, which is perhaps even stronger at the level of intuitive affirmation in the America of today, certainly than in 1963. In these 13 years, all the barriers have been powerfully assaulted which forced people to define themselves in narrow terms; at the same time, of course, the task is vast because it involves nothing less for any man or woman in any part of the world than the task of raising one's level of consciousness. Therefore, one might say that if on a day such as this we are to insert all that was valid and good in the past 200 years enshrined in the Declaration of Independence under the umbrella of a larger spirit enshrined in a Declaration of Interdependence, there would be a crucial correction to something going wrong over the last 30 years, but indeed over the last 200, and also a crucial opening to the future. This could make not only sporadically individual Americans recognized as friends of the human race, but make America itself change its own perception of itself, become self-conscious in a richer and larger sense which was, of course, understood by the very greatest American poets, seers, and philosophers—beautifully expressed by Walt Whitman in the 19th century and by Thomas Wolfe in our own time.

How appropriate that B.P. Wadia should have ended his great inaugural address to the Institute of Culture in Bangalore in 1945 with these words of wisdom, which spoke with a ringing sound to all present because they felt this was the highest contribution that came out of America to the humanity of the future: "That we all labour together, transmitting the same charge and succession. We few equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times, we enclosers of all continents of castes, allowers of all theologies, compassionators, perceivers, rapport of men, we walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers nor anything that is assertive. We hear the bawling and din; we are reached at by divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side. They close frantically upon us to surround us, my comrade, yet we walk upheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and down till we make our irreplaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras, till we saturate time and eras that the men and women of races and ages to come may prove brethren and lovers as we are."

A great, glorious, boundless, joyous vision—that was a vision of wisdom. It is only appropriate that in our own time, the same vision should be expressed in the accents of pain and agony, because that is more appropriate to the America of today. It is a sadder but wiser nation. That does not mean to say that it becomes irrelevant to have the lofty thoughts and feelings of awakening, but it also becomes more honest to recognize one's kinship with all the world's misery, because there is so much misery here, so much known to every person within his or her own heart. Therefore, it is appropriate to read words of both: "And how, where, why it came we cannot say, but we feel pity now for all men who have ever lived upon the earth. And it is night now—night, and the great stars are flashing in the lilac dark. The great stars are flashing on a hundred million men across America, and it is night now, night, and we are living, hoping, fearing, loving, dying—dying in the darkness while the great stars shine upon us as they have shone on all men dead and living on this earth, on all men yet unborn and yet to live who will come after us."

The recognition that humanity precedes any generation and that humanity belongs also to the unborn—this is a great and crucial insight. This is not an abstract truism; this is a living principle in terms of which human beings could reorient themselves. It was Burke who said that a nation that does not honor its ancestors does not deserve well of its posterity. It is true of individual human beings in all parts of the world that if they cancel, if they blind themselves, let alone if they deny in gaze and gratitude the great debt they owe to all those who went before them, they will have been unworthy of the descendants to come after them. How then to rethink the whole concept of living—living in the present with an awareness of the whole past, known and unknown, and the future mostly unknown, but which always is immediately before our very eyes in every newborn baby, in every child? This is a great question. It is a question that has to be addressed to the human heart. It is a question which must be raised with such an intensity of feeling that the answers that one finds are answers in terms of actual patterns of life, not answers at the level of mere verbal affirmation, not answers at the level of symbolic demonstration, not answers at the level of true belief, but answers in terms of decisions, in terms of actions, but in terms also of thoughts in relation to those invisible and unseen and those unborn, those yet to come.

So clearly then, nothing less is needed than a tremendous effort by individuals to rise to a new level of a larger self-consciousness. But in this, they could have the comfort, whatever the difficulties, that what the Buddha said in relation to love is also true of all the Buddhas, of all the greatest human beings who ever lived in relation to consciousness. Buddha said that the greater love can lift the lesser love—what a beautiful thought. Which of us has not experienced something of this at some point in life? So too with consciousness: the greater is our own range of consciousness, our own perspective upon the human scene and upon the human inheritance, the more we can also be elevated by the perspectives and perceptions of those still further beyond us, who see far more than we can even on the little hillocks of our own contemplation.

This then requires nothing less than a great reaffirmation of what it means to talk of the living unity of humanity and the indivisibility of the heritage of the human race. Humanity may be seen at many levels; this goes back to the earliest times and it is true among all cultures. Humanity may be seen as by mapmakers, going as far back as Anaximander, merely as an aggregate of human beings defined by locale and territory—totally justifiable to make maps, but extremely misleading if that is your only perception of the human race. But what was displaced in the mentality of mapmakers has now become, for progress, enshrined in the name of statistics, so that every time you look at even well-meaning writers in journals like The Futurist or The Humanist, or you listen to all kinds of so-called experts, they can only talk statistically about the human race; and they can't do it with the precision, with the joy of discovery of the early cartographers.

Humanity is, of course, at one level an aggregate of human beings, but it is more than that. Humanity was also seen as a unity within a larger unity, a unity represented by human reason as a share in divine reason. This was the great concept of the Stoics; it was also the concept of Heraclitus that the logos is involved in the entirety of the human race. The logos has an eternal unity which is ontologically prior to every kind of logoic utterance by individual human beings at all times, so it is not merely a unity in the diversity of utterance in space and time by particular voices; it is a unity in that source of all voices which is the universal voice, the great logos, the great central source of human thought, human speech, and human inspiration.

This, of course, is an exalted concept. It is also extremely difficult typically for people to see humanity as a Stoic state, as a single community—a community which is united by metaphysical and moral laws, though it may be very difficult for that community to become a polis, to become a unity in territorial or political terms. In other words, the human inheritance pertains to an invisible, metaphorical, and metaphysical cosmos, which is the very soul of any of the many forms and experiments yet to emerge in the future on the plane of political unification or on the plane of external organization.

So here then, we have many different concepts of humanity. There was also from early times the concept of humanity which is simple to understand: humanity as a multilingual, multicultural family. It goes back to Antisthenes that there are many tongues, many ways in which the single story of human culture is spelled out in all places by vast varieties of peoples. All of these are great conceptions, far superior to any concept of humanity that we can derive today from those individuals who have at last become incapable, because of miseducation and because of lack of self-education, incapable of understanding, let alone of meditating upon or committing themselves to, humanity as an indivisible family. There will always be individuals everywhere who can do this. All the problems of our time have not prevented Buckminster Fuller from talking always consistently of the 100% welfare of the human race; that is the voice of simplicity, the lost simplicity of the individual untrammeled by all the false dichotomies and surface complexities of our time.

To reaffirm, however, the unity of the human inheritance at the level of consciousness requires a positive preparation by individuals over a period of years where they think, feel, act, and speak in terms of humanity. Because they know that this is very difficult, they take active and concrete steps in their lives not only to correct their initial limitations, to prevent them from becoming permanent and constant limitations, but also to constantly enrich each other out of mutual effort in the sheer enjoyment, the acceptance, and the deepening of awareness of the whole of the human race.

This then is a very great task. It is a task that involves individuation as well as larger and larger levels of universal consciousness. It is also an effort which involves tapping and drawing from classical cultures and the renaissances of history in every part of the world, as well as what is valid and crucial in the modern experiment of the last 200 years. It involves new modes of exemplification of perfectibility, and that involves trying to understand but also trying to imagine what was the meaning and significance of the great portraits of perfect types of human beings given in all cultures—whether they be sages or shamans, hierophants, king-initiates, or men of every kind, but great examples of what human beings could become. To give these at a time when human beings are starved in their imagination for anything that is authentic and inspiring—this is a great undertaking. It requires immense work, a lot of preparation of individuals, preparation of materials, and diffusion of the influences of individuals and materials. How can we take the concept of perfectibility and make it relevant in the coming decades, not only to people in the United States of America but to peoples everywhere in the world? This is a great and challenging task, but no less a task than all the other great tasks in relation to the universal enlightenment of humanity of which philosophers like Kant spoke and to which great prophets like the Buddha devoted all they had, and it is an unending activity. But to insert oneself into that activity self-consciously, intelligently, and cooperatively—this is to give one's life a new meaning.

This might require, therefore, not only understanding and rethinking perfectibility in all its classical forms, but also trying to really reflect upon creativity. What was the creativity released in the Renaissance—not only the much-written-about Renaissance of Florentine Italy, but all the great Renaissances in the histories of all the cultures of humanity, because there have been many? The term Renaissance simply means—first used by a Frenchman in the 18th century—the grafting upon any dying culture of that which is living but disembodied, transmitted by a past culture. It was the deliberate grafting of the living parts, though disembodied, of classical Greece into the dying medieval structure of Italy at a time of great instability and great activity that released the Renaissance. Something like this was true again and again in different parts of the world, but it was also incorporated into the very philosophy of nature that the Chinese had, into the very philosophy of man that the Indians had: a philosophy of continuous destruction and regeneration, self-regeneration. So in accordance with the great cycles of renewal in nature, but also in human life, there is a basis for a deeper and more intensive kind of self-regeneration by individuals.

But we not only have to ponder upon perfectibility and creativity; we also have to understand the whole modern concern of happiness, which in America uniquely among nations was regarded as a constitutional right. But what is happiness? What is fulfillment? It was possible for Adams to say that happiness for him—and there is something very poignant about this from the time of Adams up to the present—was retiring one day with 40 acres upon land that he could call his own. How sad; to this day, everyone would really like to do something like this—to have no cares, no work in relation to a society that, however much you try to serve, you still cannot fully give yourself to. The desire to go into the country, have a few acres of land tilled, and to read and to think there—there is something beautifully poignant about this form of expression, and it was very simple among the early Americans like Adams of what they meant by happiness. Jefferson thought that happiness involved experiencing the sheer delight of the mind in search of all possible knowledge. This was born in life—life with Franklin, with the great Enlightenment conception of the unification of human knowledge. But it was Emerson who thought that happiness had to do with something more: it had to do with losing yourself in the over-soul, being roused by some incredible ego that drives you to experience and enjoy your identity with nature and humanity; without that, there could never really be fulfillment.

The very term fulfillment requires completing oneself, and as Bellamy understood, every human being is incomplete and he can never complete himself except by a self-conscious commitment to self-transcendence, as opposed—to Bellamy—merely to a very episodic and inevitable inconclusive form of self-transcendence in the form of physical eros. What is this larger conception of fulfillment and happiness that has always turned modern man once he became aware of his rights? What is the duty that any man owes to universal culture, much stressed by UNESCO—the universal right of every human being to the whole of human culture, but also the universal duty of every single human being to the culture, the culture of humanity and the culture of tomorrow? Clearly, all of this needs at the least not only more time, one might say leisure, but a reseeking of the very concept of work and of leisure. The finest definition of leisure given is that leisure is silence. This was understood by those who enjoy the fruits of leisure creating the fruits of solitude.

Whether in the country or in the city, Emerson said if you do it in the country you must come back to the city, because otherwise you will not really be able to make the fruits of your contemplation and solitude available to others. Emerson also felt that in deepening your own powers of self-reliance, you must show your concern for the city of man. The city of God is causal; it ever exists—Emerson detached it altogether from any medieval concept of the city of God—but the city of man has to be ceaselessly created. In one place he said it arises wherever a group of human beings develop and refine, enjoy and exemplify a beautiful concept and ideal of friendship—but friendship not in any small sense, friendship in the name of the whole of humanity. Just imagine that the Institute of World Culture could result in the emergence of a new ideal, a new concept, and new exemplars of true friendship. What an incredible relief it would be for individuals. So great is the ignorance of the individual in relation to world history, in relation to the universal cultures and civilizations of humanity, even though each one can do a great deal in the task of self-education. But how enjoyable it is to make one's limitations work in favor of oneself, to perfect the part of saying, "I do not know, but I wish to know," and reach out to others thereby. Through an immense sharing verbally, through the written word, but also by exemplification and also in silent communion, there can be the bringing together of the best possible resources available at any given time, so that there could be an expansion of cultural awareness and a deepening of cultural appreciation.

This then is an all-absorbing task. It is a task that involves every kind of new experiment. It involves the utopians—those who want to withdraw at some level from the prevailing standards of society in the name of some ideal vision of an ideal brotherhood or mystical commune—but it also involves cosmopolitans in every sense, those who wish to mix and mingle and travel and learn and enlarge their very perception of the world in which we live to prepare for the world of the year 2000. Indeed, the tasks that the institute can confront itself with are infinite. The objects are so broad and deliberately stated in so broad a manner that if the whole of humanity were fully occupied in serving all these objects for the next hundred years they could not be achieved; but if even a few human beings could be united in thought, in heart, and will in the continuous service of these objects in their lives, they could become living seeds of future possibilities. They could prepare themselves to greet others like them elsewhere, and therefore one could truly say that without a deep reflection upon the very meaning of interdependence, each of the objects cannot be understood, let alone can any one of these objects at any level be honestly dear to us.

The second object involves a recognition of the interdependence of all free men and women. At the simplest level, there must be a reason why even the highly mythified Western cowboy speaks to the whole of humanity. In fact, sometimes he speaks more to people in other parts of the world—in Japan, in Italy, in India, in Russia—than he sometimes speaks in America, because, of course, naturally, of the immense fatigue resulting from the overuse of the myth. But this is only a simple illustration of how, at the highest level, no human being who is truly free—free from every kind of prejudice—will fail to recognize and greet in fellowship another human being who is also similarly free. There are more of these partly free human beings all over the world today than will ever be known, because they can only be known individually; they cannot be known statistically. By their very nature, they will not be reported in the mass media. Many people have written about this new kind of person; Carl Rogers has even called him "the person of tomorrow." But there is an interdependence to all free men and women, and if they cannot affirm interdependence, they are not yet fully free. Their index of freedom is the joyous affirmation of interdependence with all others like them elsewhere—today, yesterday, and tomorrow.

The third object, very crucial and very fundamental to our future programs, involves the interdependence of human greatness. No great human being has ever emerged in a single culture without drawing roots from the soil—the soil tilled by millions of human beings. You cannot separate greatness in one from the latent greatness in many. This was understood in the ancient world. It was understood in the epics—the Indian epics, the Greek epics. This was understood in Roman times. It was understood even in this century by a poet like Drinkwater. Greatness is the product of that which is universal, and therefore, where there is no authentic basis for greeting the greatness in many, there will not emerge truly great human beings who can point in the direction of great possibilities in the future.

The fourth object affirms the interdependence of all artistic endeavors. The more you study the different art forms of any period, of any people, the more you find incredible resonances in music and in sculpture, in literature, and in the very zeitgeist—the thought forms of the age. There is an incredible but elusive interdependence to all artistic endeavors. While that is true, of course, within cultures, it is also true across cultures. This was crucial to the very concept of artistic creativity in the Renaissance in Florentine Italy.

The fifth object involves, as is today pretty widely accepted at all levels, the interdependence of all seekers. All the seekers who have ever lived, all the seekers today, they are interdependent. But what people often lack is a doctrine of universal salvation, because the interdependence of all spiritual seekers will never become a reality in human lives unless the whole concept—appropriate perhaps in part to the Piscean Age—of individual salvation is rooted out totally from consciousness and replaced by a natural and spontaneous acceptance of universal salvation: the inserting of one's own progress, success, growth, and salvation into the whole. One is concerned with one's own only to the extent to which one wants to perfect one's sense of responsibility. It is only for the purpose of responsibility that one really needs to think of oneself. But that thinking about oneself could be constructive and fruitful if it arises out of thought in terms of the whole—the salvation of all. That was known to the great prophets, and that always was a great divide between the prophets and the priests—between the very greatest human beings and those who came after them and spoke in their name, but narrowed and thereby falsified and inverted the original message.

The sixth object points to the interdependence of all innovations, of all discoveries. There is plenty of evidence of this. Certainly, the interdependence of all human beings in relation to physical health is known, but what about psychic health, mental health, and spiritual health? The spiritual, mental, moral, and psychic health of no individual human being in the present or the future could be detached from the health of all others. This requires, of course, a revolution—a revolution in one's very thinking about the therapeutics of self-transformation or the use that one can make of the best in science, but also the interdependence of all the many cooperative experiments of the past and the present so that they can enrich each other instead of becoming aborted through a false sense of uniqueness or through extreme isolation.

The seventh object, of course, asserts what is most challenging in America but is more and more taken for granted by all non-Americans today—this is where America has to catch up with humanity: the interdependence of all resources of the world and human welfare. You can no more see the resources of the world except in global terms. America imports rubber from Malaya; it imports copper from Rhodesia, oil from the Arab world, and indeed the list is extremely long of all that it imports from any country. America also has so much to give to the world in food, but also in many other materials. When the full significance of this economic fact is translated into a learning and gain of ideas—not learning them colonially, not learning them in desperation, not learning them by imperfect imitation, but learning in the most adult and generous sense—there would be, of course, an incredible revolution in the relations between this country and the whole world. But this is a problem that faces the whole of the human race; it is one that can only be met by global action. It is one to which many bodies are now devoted, including the Club of Rome.

The eighth object involves an interdependence of the invisible architects of cosmopolitanism. This is mysterious, like the invisible building of Solomon's Temple in the Old Testament—that which is built by no visible hands. That must be part of an institute which works under the inspiration of the Brotherhood of Bodhisattvas.

The ninth object stresses the interdependence of all creative pioneers. All those who pioneer in the direction of the future need the support, the company, the criticism, the help, the inspiration, and the example of all other such individuals all over the world. It is not mere goodwill, but getting together with purposes that draw out the latent resources of creativity in human beings, because it has already been found that when human beings from very different parts of the world innovate together, far more is possible than when they innovate separately or only with people who are already familiar to them in groups to which they already belong.

Lastly, of course—and this is, we all know, the easiest at one level of acceptance, yet the most difficult at the level of total consciousness—is the constant recognition of the interdependence of all human beings, indeed all beings who have lived in the past, who now are alive, and who will live in the future: the interdependence of all human beings at all times and in all places. If a person really grasps the full significance of this, he will gain a strength and a vision that will make the whole of his life truly a blessing. Very few, of course, come to this point where they thrill at all times merely with the thought of the human race, and beat to the heartbeat of the cosmos, and beat to the great pulse of the Brotherhood of Bodhisattvas. But the Institute gives no less an ideal to those who feel that they would be able to prepare themselves to incarnate this ideal at whatever level, to make a difference to their lives, but even more to the lives of others.

So interdependence is in and through every one of these objects, and therefore it would be profoundly appropriate on this occasion, at the conclusion of this inaugural address, to affirm aloud each of the objects so that this Declaration of Interdependence is taken on this day on behalf of all, on the 4th of July, 1976, in Santa Barbara.

Declaration of Interdependence

First, to explore the classical and Renaissance traditions of East and West and their continuing relevance to emerging modes and patterns of living.

Second, to renew the universal vision behind the American dream through authentic affirmations of freedom, excellence, and self-transcendence in an ever-evolving republic of conscience.

Third, to honor through appropriate observance the contributions of men and women of all ages to world culture.

Fourth, to enhance the enjoyment of the creative artistry and craftsmanship of all cultures.

Fifth, to deepen awareness of the universality of man's spiritual strength and its rich variety of expression in the religions, philosophies, and literatures of humanity.

Sixth, to promote forums for fearless inquiry and constructive dialogue concerning the frontiers of science, the therapeutics of self-transformation, and the societies of the future.

Seventh, to investigate the imaginative use of the spiritual, mental, and material resources of the globe in the service of universal welfare.

Eighth, to examine changing social structures in terms of the principle that a world culture is greater than the sum of its parts, and to envision the conditions, prospects, and possibilities of the world civilization of the future.

Ninth, to assist in the emergence of men and women of universal culture capable of continuous growth in non-violence of mind, generosity of heart, and harmony of soul.

Tenth, to promote universal brotherhood and to foster human fellowship among all races, nations, and cultures.

May those who guide and guard the welfare of humanity bless the land lit this day for the great sounding of the Declaration of Interdependence in the United States on the 4th of July, 1976, but on behalf of the humanity of the present and the future.

Raghavan Iyer