Introduction to The Superman: Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Vision of the Religion of Humanity, by Santi Nath Chattopadhyay. Gyan Publishing House, New Delhi, 2917, pp. 13-31.
Glen T. Martin
Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga and theory of the spiritual evolution of humanity provides a substantial contribution to the on-going paradigm shift emerging out of 20th century scientific thought and culminating in the new planetary civilization of the 21st century. Aurobindo’s life and thought have yet to deeply penetrate the developing philosophy and spirituality of our contemporary world. I am hoping that this book on the thought of Aurobindo contributes toward that end. In this Foreword, I will sketch out the framework of paradigm transformation characterizing the past century and try to show Aurobindo’s extraordinary contribution to this process.
- The Axial Roots of Our Higher Human Potential
A number of scholars have investigated the great significance of the Axial Period in the history of human civilization, the period roughly from the 8th century to the 2nd century BCE. This period was a period of transformation in the evolutionary development of human consciousness. German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1953) named this age the Axial Period (Achsenzeit). Great philosophical, ethical, and religious teachers arose whose influence resulted in the great religious orientations that continue to dominate the world of today.
During the Axial Period, Lao Tzu, Chaung Tzu, and Confucius flourished in China. The Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita were created in India. Gautama Buddha founded Buddhism in northern India, and Zoroaster taught in Persia. A number of great Hebrew prophets taught in Israel. In Greek lands, the Pre-Socratic philosophers established western philosophy and were followed by the great philosophical visions of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism.
A common human consciousness was emerging worldwide that for the first time was able to distinguish human subjectivity from the objective natural world, as well as able to envision the world as a whole in conjunction with an ultimate principle existing behind and above the multiplicity of phenomena. For Lao Tzu and Chaung Tzu, this principle is the Tao. For Confucius, it is the principle of order to which the master of Humanness (jen) conforms his life. For the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, behind the phenomenal play of existence is the eternal Brahman.
In the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism, the eternal Buddha nature exists as dharmakaya, the unsayable absolute. Zoroaster saw the world as created by Ahura Mazda, the uncreated God. The Hebrew Prophets proclaimed Yahweh as the creator of heaven and earth and redeemer of the people of God. The philosophers of Greece described an unchanging eternal principle that transcended the world and provided the goal and aspiration for human endeavor. Plato termed this the Form of the Good; Aristotle called it the Unmoved Mover; the Stoics referred to it as the cosmic whole or God.
In his classic study An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (2004), philosopher of religion John Hick understands the emergent consciousness of the Axial Age as projecting human life into an evolutionary mode. A personal subjectivity has now been developed that finds human life to be lacking, infected by sin or ignorance, and feeling the inner demand for salvation or awakening. The missing or lacking element, as understood by all these Axial Period religious teachers and texts, can only be satisfied through a process of conversion from ego-centered consciousness to a consciousness centered on ultimate reality, the ground of being, or God. In all these traditions the great teachers and saints have been the ones whose lives have manifested this conversion from ego-centered existence to Reality-centered existence.
One important implication of this interpretation of religion and its emergence within the Axial Period is that the course of individual life as the conversion of consciousness from ego-centeredness to Reality-centeredness is mirrored in the conversion of human consciousness in general from ego-centricity to supramental consciousness of Reality or God. On the scale of human existence (about two million years), the Axial Period was just yesterday. Since that time, many teachers and mystics have lived who contributed toward humanity’s growth. Sri Aurobindo’s work provides a crucial 20th century understanding of this process. However, whereas Hick largely limits the process of God-realization to our subjective and moral growth in individual human life, Aurobindo sees the conversion from ego-centrisim to God-realization as integral to both individual human life and to cosmic evolution.
In The Human Cycle Aurobindo develops a theory of human evolution that begins with an analysis of the Pre-Axial Vedic age, which we no longer understand, he says, for we “have lost that mentality” (1970: 3). He traces human development through several stages (symbolic, typal, and conventional) to the individualistic and rationalist revolt against conventionalism that finds its realization in the past several centuries, first in the West, and then in a worldwide influence that “has awakened the slumbering East” (19). The results of this transformation involve the rise of science and, in social theory, the ideals of democracy, human rights, and the right of every person to live a life not predetermined by his or her social role.
However, today we have reached the limits of critical and analytic reason, for these powers cannot illuminate the deeper soul in human beings or the world, and the rationalistic ideal must begin to “subject itself to the ideal of intuitional knowledge and a deeper self-awareness” (24). This new stage in the evolution of human consciousness must end in “the ultimate discovery that man is inwardly a soul and a conscious power of the Divine.” The discovery of this, and living according to its truth, must ultimately “end by revolutionizing his social and collective self-expression” (28)
Two insights emerge from the development of this new “subjectivism.” First, that the ego is not the self but rather the soul is a portion of universal Divinity (39) and, second, that the individual is in solidarity with all humankind, that “we are in our life and being not only ourselves but all others” (40). “It is the practical recognition of this truth,” Aurobindo writes, “it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfill itself in the life of the race” (1970: 547).
Human evolution can move to a manifestation of the true Self, which is greater even than mind. The ideal becomes a progressive transformation of our lives and social existence into embodiments of the transcendent and universal spirit (55). Human evolution is understood by Sri Aurobindo to be a function of the cosmic self-unfolding of the universal Being:
The law for humanity is to pursue its upward evolution towards the finding and expression of the Divine in the type of mankind, taking full advantage of the free development and gains of all individuals and nations and groupings of men, to work towards the day when mankind may be really and not only ideally one divine family, but even then, when it has succeeded in unifying itself, to respect, aid and be aided by the free growth and activity of its individuals and constituent aggregates. (64)
The evolution of human life toward this goal will take planetary civilization from its present mental age to a spiritual age will mean that there will be a conscious focus on the “essential aim of subjective religions, a new birth, a new consciousness, and upward evolution of the human being” (248). Spiritual evolution will be recognized as our “destiny” and our greatest need. This evolution will be led by people who have become vehicles of the spiritual in every aspect of their being: aesthetic, ethical, mental, and physical. The unity of human life will progressively assimilate the supramental unity of the cosmos and the Divine unity behind all phenomena. “Obscurely,” Aurobindo says, “we are now beginning to see something of this behind all our science and philosophy and all our other activities” (230).
- Holism, Mind, and Evolution in 20th Century Science
The amazing growth of science since the 17th century, therefore, provides an important aspect of the background necessary for appreciating the work of Sri Aurobindo. The early-modern scientific paradigm that was synthesized by Sir Isaac Newton with the publication of Principia Mathematica in 1687 did not yet give us the holism to which Aurbindo refers. Rather, it promoted the competitive individualism and fragmentation that Aurobindo insisted must be superseded by a realization of holism and unity. Both the system of militarized sovereign nation-states and the system of competitive corporate capitalism function as impediments to the further integration and spiritualization of humanity. For, “the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close” is “another kind of barbarism” (1970: 72).
Classical physics, in particular, failed to discover any place for mind within the universe. For physics understood the cosmos on the model of a machine, constructed from parts (bodies in motion) having only external relations with one another. Mind had no comprehensible place within this paradigm. As contemporary physicist and interpreter of science Henry Stapp puts this: “Classical physics not only fails to demand the mental, it fails to even provide a rational place for the mental. And if the mental is introduced ad hoc, then it must remain totally ineffectual, in absolute contradiction to our deepest experience” (in Kafatos and Nadeau 1990: 173).
Two discoveries of 20th century science going on during Aurobindo’s lifetime are especially significant here. The first is the discovery of the holism of the universe and all the phenomena within it. The second is the overcoming of the mind/body separation of early modern science and the emerging recognition that mind is integral to the holism of scientifically observable reality. In their book The Conscious Universe: Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory (1990), Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau make the case, using the latest results of science, that the universe is fundamentally conscious. They write:
Yet in discovering a new limit to our ability to fully comprehend physical reality, we are presented with a view of nature in which consciousness, or mind, can be properly defined as a phase in the process of the evolution of the cosmos implied in presupposing all other stages. If it manifests or emerges in the later stages, and has been progressively unfolding from the beginning stages, then it would follow that the universe is in some sense conscious. (177)
These thinkers argue that the theoretical paradigms by which we organize our thought impact our “practical reason,” that is, our specific ways of organizing and acting in human life. They contrast the emerging understanding of holism in the universe (and the senses in which mind appears inseparable from that holism) with the early-modern scientific paradigm that was both materialistic and atomistic:
And yet it is also demonstrably true that theoretical reason does over time refashion the terms of construction of human reality within particular linguistic and cultural contexts, and thereby alters the dynamics of practical reason. As many scholars have exhaustively demonstrated, the classical paradigm in physics has greatly influenced and conditioned our understanding and management of human systems of economic and political reality. Virtually all models of this reality treat human systems as if they consisted of atomized units which interact with one another in terms of laws for forces external to the units. These laws or forces are also assumed to act upon the isolated or isolatable units to form hierarchical organizations which are themselves isolated or isolatable from other such organizations. (181)
The brutal realities of capitalism and political systems resting on militarism, power, and domination exist as outmoded artifacts of an early-modern science now superseded by holism— insight into the oneness of humanity and the integral role of mind in the evolutionary process. The paradigm shift that occurred in the 20th century in biology, social theory, quantum physics and cosmology lays the groundwork for a transformation of human existence, in John Hick’s terms, from a fragmented system of militarized nation-states (premised on ego-centered existence) to a holism of unity in diversity (premised on Reality-centered existence).
Darwin’s theory of evolution as it was expressed in his book On the Origin of Species (1859) drew upon this early-modern paradigm to the extent that it repudiated teleological explanations of evolution in favor of a causal account of random mutations resulting in species variations that were selected out in the struggle for survival among members of various species. However, the discovery of holism in 20th century science set the stage for an understanding of evolution as emergent evolution. Rather than a mechanistic process pushed from behind by random mutations and natural selection evolution began to be understood as the emergence of higher dimensions within the universe through the power of the holism integral to self-organizing systems and integrated energy fields. As physicist and interpreter of science Fritjof Capra puts it in his book The Tao of Physics – An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism:
The organizing activity of living, self-organizing systems, finally, is cognition, or mental activity. This implies a radically new concept of mind, which was first proposed by Gregory Bateson. Mental process is defined as the organizing activity of life. This means that all interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive, or become inseparably connected. Mind, or more accurately, mental process is seen as being immanent in matter at all levels of life. (1975: 151)
Mind is no longer seen as an accidental epiphenomenon of the evolutionary process but is now understood to be an integral aspect of the holistic fields within fields discovered by a variety of 20th century sciences. Human life, as Sri Aurobindo had understood all along, is no longer a secondary and contingent aspect of the evolutionary process. Humans can now be understood in an entirely different light. Scientist and Roman Catholic thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin declares that “the time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe – even a positivist one – remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.” Man can now be understood “as the axis and leading shoot of evolution” (1959: 35-36).
Sri Aurobindo’s understanding of the integral relation between human mind and spirituality and the cosmic process appear amazingly prophetic in the light of scientific syntheses that took place after his death in 1950. Henry Stapp describes recent breakthroughs of quantum physics in the following way:
The scientific task of explicating this general quantum-mechanical ontology is just beginning. But even the general features of the quantum ontology involve a conception of man and nature profoundly different from the picture provided by classical physics. For man appears no longer as an isolated automaton. He appears rather as an integral part of the highly nonlocal creative activity of the universe. The revision of the conception of a person, and of his perceived relation to the rest of nature, cannot help but have an immense impact on what is perceived as valuable. It must inevitably lead us away from the egocentric bias that was the rational product of the ontology of classical physics, to the values inherent in the image of self, not as a local isolated automaton but rather as a nonlocalizable integrated aspect of the creative impulse of the universe. (1988: 57)
If the human self and the human mind can be thought of, in the light of contemporary scientific breakthroughs, as an “integrated aspect of the creative impulse of the universe,” then we are poised once again to consider the thought of Sri Aurobindo. The human mind and human subjectivity become central factors in the gigantic process of cosmic evolution and not merely epiphenomena incidental to a blind materialistic process. Science has revealed a universe in which human beings are an integral part, within which there functions an “anthropic principle” (Harris 1991) and in which humans are not merely a cosmic accident lost within the vast stellar spaces. Without this understanding, Aurobindo writes, human beings “would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects…amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe” (1973: 47).
Human thought and spirituality may now facilitate the process of descent of the divine principle into human life. We are an integral part of an immense cosmic process and our action, or karma yoga, must be to facilitate this process:
Life is the first step in the release of consciousness; mind is the second. But the evolution does not finish with mind; it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be toward the development of Supermind and spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved divinity in things release itself entirely and become possible for life to manifest perfection. (1973: 29)
We must take conscious steps to integrate humanity both administratively and spiritually. Sri Aurobindo points out that vast conversions will need to take place in global social, political, and economic organization if we are to continue the trajectory of our evolutionary destiny. His vision of human evolution was not merely theoretical, but required practical steps to facilitate the process. He considers these necessary, practical changes in some detail within The Ideal of Human Unity.
- World Union as a Prelude to Spiritual Evolution
We have seen that the proper development of a human being as seen by the great religions involves the overcoming of egoism through the focusing of life on ultimate Reality, according to theologian John Hick. For Sri Aurobindo, this includes collective egoisms, for example, the overcoming of “huge State egoism” which he characterizes as “brutal, rapacious, cunning, oppressive, intolerant of free action, free speech and opinion, even of freedom of conscience in religion, it preyed upon individuals and classes within as upon weaker nations outside” (1970: 281). The real business of a state at the present evolutionary stage of human development is not to act out of collective egoism but to facilitate cooperative action, prevent harmful waste and friction, and remove avoidable injustices (283). But the state apparatus must become universal, a worldwide “parliament of man” (388), encompassing all humanity. We must ascend to “world-union” and become a “federated unity” for all humankind. This is not the spiritual goal, as we have seen, which is the realization of the Divine within human life. But it has an important function as the next step, laying the groundwork for human spiritual evolution:
Such an external or administrative unity may be intended in the near future of mankind in order to accustom the race to the idea of a common life, it its habit, to its possibility; but it cannot be really healthy, durable or beneficial over all the true line of human destiny unless something be developed, more profound, internal and real. (284)
Like his great contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi, Aurobindo calls this functional world-union “a federation of free nations” (329). In 1942, Gandhi introduced a resolution into the Indian National Congress that read “the future peace, security, and ordered progress of the world demand a world federation of free nations, and on no other basis can the problems of the modern world be solved” (1986: 14). In The Ideal of Human Unity, written long before Gandhi’s statement (and published in the journal Arya between 1915 and 1918), Sri Aurobindo analyses the possibilities, dangers, and features of developing such a federation at great length. But once begun, he says, whatever difficulties and setbacks were encountered, “it will be impossible for mankind to draw back” and whatever trials had to be endured “would be bound to help in the end rather than hinder the final and inevitable result” (365).
The fundamental principle of the federation of free nations will be neither a totalitarian uniformity nor an anarchic diversity but the principle of unity in diversity:
But freedom is as necessary to life as law and regime; diversity is as necessary as unity to our true completeness…. At the same time, while diversity is essential for power and fruitfulness of life, unity is necessary for its order, arrangement and stability. Unity we must create, but not necessarily uniformity. If man could realize a perfect spiritual unity, no sort of uniformity would be necessary; for the utmost play of diversity would be securely possible on that foundation. (401)
We need, he says, “a world-union founded upon the principle of liberty and variation in a free and intelligent unity” (442). “The unity of the human race to be entirely sound and in consonance with the deepest laws of life must be founded on free groupings, and the groupings again must be the natural association of free individuals” (490-91).
Sri Aurobindo died in 1950, leaving his spiritual partner the Mother (Mira Richard) in charge of the continued development of his vision and the movement that had developed around his powerful teachings. He wrote that he had no doubt about the depth of realization of the Mother and her capacity to further bring the Divine realization to earth:
There is one divine force which acts in the universe and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe. The Mother stands for all these, but she is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world so as to transform life here—it is so that you should regard her as the divine Shakti working here for that purpose. She is that in the body, but in her whole consciousness she is also identified with all the other aspects of the Divine (1973, 20-21)
In 1958 World Union was created under the direction of the Mother as an international organization working for the global unification described in The Ideal of Human Unity. That same year, the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) was founded in the United States by Philip Isely and others with the purpose of writing a Constitution for the Federation of Earth (Martin 2010).There was immediate mutual recognition between the two organizations.
During the three decades following 1970, Samar Basu and A. B. Patel, both major leaders in World Union, also served as leaders within the World Constitution and Parliament Association. A. B. Patel was General Secretary and Treasurer of World Union International Center, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. Like Basu, he participated in the first three Constituent Assemblies in 1968, 1977 and 1979 during which world citizens from many countries worked together to envision, write, and promote the Earth Constitution to all the governments of Earth. Patel presided over the signing of the initial version of the Earth Constitution at the Second Constituent Assembly in Innsbruck, Austria in 1977 and was its very first signatory. From this time until his death, he was Co-President of WCPA with Dr. Reinhart Ruge of Mexico. He was also elected as Parliamentary Speaker for the first session of the Provisional World Parliament held under the authority of the Constitution that took place in Brighton, England in 1982.
Samar Basu was a noted Bengali author who first visited Pondicherry in 1967, joining World Union in 1973. He soon became Editor of World Union Journal and lectured widely on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. Basu was also a signatory to the Earth Constitution during the Second Constituent Assembly. His book The UNO, The World Government and the Ideal of World Union as Envisioned by Sri Aurobindo chronicles many of these events. Dr. Terence Amerasinghe of Sri Lanka, as Co-President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association after Patel’s death, wrote the Preface for this 1999 book in which Amerasinghe quotes from the Mother’s Message to the Peoples of the World at the Birth Centenary of Sri Aurobindo in 1972: “A new world based on Truth and refusing the old slavery of falsehood, wants to take birth. In all countries there are people who know it, at least feel it. To them we call, will you collaborate?” (iv-v). Basu saw the connection between World Union and WCPA in an almost mystical light. In this book, he writes:
…The World Union as an international organization was set up in 1958 under the direct guidance of the Mother (of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), to work for Human Unity and World Peace and harmony on spiritual foundation as envisioned by Sri Aurobindo, and that WCPA was also founded in 1958 as an international organization to achieve the same goal in its own way. The formation of these two organizations in the same year has a deep occult significance which has yet to be realized. (58-59)
For many years Amerasinghe was Co-president of the World Constitution and Parliament Association with Dr. Reinhart Ruge from Mexico. Both were regular visitors to Pondicherry and Auroville and collaborators with World Union in the work for democratic world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Amerasinghe and Ruge recognized the significance of the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and made the evident connections between the Earth Constitution and Aurobindo’s great vision of the evolution of human life toward “Supermind,” toward ever-greater unification and spiritual realization.
Ruge and Patel had met in Delhi in 1975. Patel immediately invited Ruge to Pondicherry, after which time they became good friends. Ruge retired in 2003 to become WCPA Honorary President for Life and Amerasinghe continued as WCPA President until his death at age 90 in 2007. Both Ruge and Amerasinghe understood human life through the model of the emergence of a higher level of human existence, one major step for which would be the ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Each of them understood that “the ascent to the Divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable sacrifice. This alone is man’s real business in the world and the justification of his existence…. (1973: 46-47). Perhaps this is why these leaders spent so much time in India. India is not only a center of the great insight into the human ascent to the Divine, but its multiple wisdom traditions lend themselves to an understanding of the need for the dynamic unity in diversity envisioned by the Preamble to the Earth Constitution: “the principle of unity in diversity is the basis for a new age when war shall be outlawed and peace prevail; when the earth’s total resources shall be equitably used for human welfare; and when basic human rights and responsibilities shall be shared by all without discrimination” (Martin 2010: 28). In the profound words of Aurobindo, “the universe and the individual are necessary to each other in their ascent” (1973: 49).
The praxis of these activists on behalf of the Earth Constitution recalls the Karma yoga of Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo writes: “The soul in us develops itself by life and works, and, indeed not so much as the action itself but the way of our soul’s inner force of working determines its inner relations to Spirit. This is, indeed, the justification of Karma yoga as a justification of the soul’s higher self-realization” (117). The praxis of organization on behalf of World Union must necessarily be complemented by the praxis of Integral Yoga as developed by Sri Aurobindo.
In their discourse on Education, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother affirm that collective reorganization for humanity is just as fundamental as individual self-realization: “In this effort, however, to improve human conditions there have always been two tendencies, which although apparently contrary to each other should rather be complementary and together work of the progress. One seeks a collective reorganization, something that would lead toward an effective unity of mankind: the other declares that all progress is made first by the individual who should be given the conditions in which he can progress freely. Both are equally true and necessary, and our effort should be directed along both lines. Collective progress and individual progress are interdependent.” (227)
The history of WCPA remains linked to Sri Aurobindo and World Union. Despite the appearances today of seemingly insurmountable obstacles to the unification of humankind, WCPA chapters around the world continue to actively promote the Earth Constitution with ever-growing recognition. We share a common understanding that the next step for human beings can and must be political and constitutional union under the Earth Constitution. It alone will make possible the further descent of the Divine into human life.
Sri Aurobindo practiced spiritual discipline for many years, from his first realization upon reading the Gita as a young man in the Alipore prison (1973: 7-8) to his development of the “Integral Yoga” system of his mature years as “his program for historical transformation gained a universal expression essential for contemporary religious thought” (9). He realized that the transformation of consciousness and the descent of the Divine within himself was nothing unique but simply an actualization of a universal spiritual capacity belonging to all human beings. And he understood that his own spiritual realization pointed to a process that was fundamental to history and humanity.
He showed in his life and work that, through Divine grace, humans could undertake a conscious evolution that would elevate human life beyond man to Superman, beyond egoistic existence to the Life Divine. He understood his own realization of higher consciousness “not as a coincidence or fortuitous accident, but as a sanction and seal of the Divine Power” (1973: 11). At the age of seventy-five, he wrote of the meaning of India’s role in world affairs and of his own life’s work as the articulation of “a new step in the evolution which, by uplifting the consciousness to a higher level, would begin the solution of many problems of existence which have perplexed and vexed humanity, since men began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society” (11). Here lies Sri Aurobindo’s profound contribution to the transformations of the 21st century.
The breakthroughs in contemporary science, the process of ratifying the Earth Constitution, and the immense contributions of Sri Aurobindo, together lay the groundwork for the profound paradigm shift characterizing our present century. Science has discovered the key role of human beings in cosmic evolution, and the movement for human unity understands that we must convert our lives from ego-centric existence to fullness of Reality, which Sri Aurobindo spiritually experienced as an ever-fuller immanence of the Divine within our lives. I am quite sure that this impressive volume on Sri Aurobindo will make a significant contribution to this process of inspiring a deep paradigm shift. With Aurobindo, we understand that a great evolutionary movement is in progress, one that can fundamentally transform human life at any time: “if earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation” (57).
Works Cited
Aurobindo, Sri (1970). The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Aurobindo, Sri (1972). Collected Writings in Twenty-two Volumes. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Aurobindo, Sri (1973). The Essential Aurobindo. Robert McDermott, ed. New York: Schocken Books.
Basu, Samar (1999). The UNO, the World Government and the Ideal of World Union. Pondicherry: World Union Publisher.
Capra, Fritjof (1975). The Tao of Physics – An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Berkeley: Shambhala.
Gandhi, Mahatma (1986). Quoted in Tom A. Hudgens, Let’s Abolish War. Denver: BILR Corporation.
Harris, Errol E. (1991). Cosmos and Anthropos. A Philosophical Interpretation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. London: Humanities Press International.
Hick, John (2004). An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jaspers, Karl (1953). The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kafatos, Menas and Nadeau, Robert (1990). The Conscious Universe: Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Martin, Glen T. (2010). Constitution for the Federation of Earth. With Historical Introduction, Commentary and Conclusion. Pamplin, VA: Institute for Economic Democracy Press.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1959). The Phenomenon of Man. Bernard Wall, trans. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Stapp, Henry (1988). “Quantum Theory and the Physicist’s Conception of Nature: Philosophical Implications of Bell’s Theorem.” In Richard F. Kitchener, ed. The World View of Contemporary Physics: Does it Need a New Metaphysics? Albany: State University of New York Press.
one world renaissance 