We’re familiar with the idea that the human being has a soul but nations also have souls. If you think of the United Nations as a forum for the souls of the world’s people, in the embodiment of nations, then it becomes a very spiritual place.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is the United Nations and our opening thought is by Alice Bailey, the founder of the Lucis Trust organization who sponsors this show: “Spirituality is essentially the establishing of right human relations, the promotion of goodwill and finally the establishing of a true peace on Earth, as the result of these two expressions of divinity.” I’ve always wondered about goodwill. To me at this point, after reading some of the works of Alice Bailey, I think it has a lot to do with wishing every creature to be free of pain and suffering and to experience the joy of existence and to wish that to every living creature—maybe even inanimate things as well. Can you give your thoughts on this opening statement by Alice Bailey?
Sarah: Well, in that opening statement, she really sums up the essence of the United Nations, whose anniversary is observed on October 24th, which is why we have timed this program for now. Perhaps people don’t think of the United Nations as being a spiritual achievement, but it is when you consider this statement that spirituality is essentially the establishing of right human relations. That’s the whole raison d’être of the United Nations: to bring about right human relations among the nations of the world. In fact, it’s said in the Ageless Wisdom that the keynote for our present cycle in our planet’s and solar system’s evolution is right human relations. This is the crux of the problem to be solved on Earth at the present cycle of evolution. The achievement of right human relations depends upon goodwill and the establishing of a true peace. There are a lot of people that pray for peace, that march for peace, that appeal for peace, but I often wonder if they really understand what exactly they are hoping will come with an era of peace. So many people think peace is the opposite of war—we put down our guns, and then we have peace—but in fact, peace is the outcome, the effect of right human relations. You can have a ceasefire and not have a true peace. You just have a temporary cessation of gunfire, of war, but it isn’t a real peace. Peace is the effect of right human relations, and that’s what the United Nations works for. We’re familiar with the idea that the human being has a soul. But the writings of Alice Bailey also point out that nations have souls. If you think of the United Nations as a forum for the souls of the world’s people, in the embodiment of nations, then it becomes a very spiritual place.
Dale: Yes, I think the miracle that the United Nations was founded at all lies in the fact that human consciousness was finally ready to establish this great forum. It was ready after the great crisis of World War I and II. Finally, we were jolted out of our lethargy and had come to the realization that we needed to find a new way to avert the scourge of war as a way of settling disputes. So, the United Nations came out of that time of crisis.
Sarah: In fact, the Charter of the United Nations expresses the state of mind and the hope of the United Nations beautifully. It says in the opening lines, “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…” Those are the opening goals of the United Nations Charter, which was drafted in 1945 in San Francisco, and which is one of the great spiritual documents of the world. People might think, well, it’s just a piece of paper, but when a nation joins the United Nations, it gives its consent to abiding by the conditions laid out in the Charter and it’s a moral commitment that I think is a lot more than just lip service. One of the things that really gets me is people who say that the United Nations or any similar global gathering is a place just for talk. I heard somebody say that last night in a television discussion program: “Oh, it’s just talk, talk, talk. We don’t have any more time for talk.” Well, what’s the alternative? Gunfire? Setting off a bomb? I’d prefer to talk, thank you. Let’s keep talking. Keep the lines open. It’s true that the UN does sometimes seem in danger of collapsing under a mass of paperwork and agreements and discussions and words. But, all the talk has led to a great deal of progress for humanity, not only through the General Assembly— which is where the governments of nations meet every fall, and that’s going on now—but the special agencies of the United Nations, which are less well known and that do so much good work for humanity. I was recently somewhere in a public place, in an elevator where I heard someone talking about a UN conference he had just attended where they were gathered to work out consensus on geographical names, and somebody said, “Why is that important?,” and he said, “Well, it’s really important that all of the people of the world agree on what to call the various mountains and rivers and regions of the world so we all know what we’re talking about. For example, for charting flight paths, we have to be sure we’re all talking about the same spot in northwestern Siberia. That’s an aspect of the UN’s work—this global convening of minds to reach consensus—which people don’t know much about.
Dale: Think what the world would be like if we hadn’t founded the United Nations. We probably would have gone through World War III by now. It has stopped a lot of conflict from erupting, so I think all that talk has a place.
Sarah: People often accuse the UN of being ineffective. It’s only as effective as the member nations allow it to be. I always wonder why people think the UN should be different than or better than or something other than the member nations that compose it. If you think about it, it’s a reflection, a mirror image of the state of the world’s people, and in fact, it’s a very flattering image, in my opinion. It gives a better expression of the potential within humanity than the individual nations do, if you examine them one by one. The collective UN body, I think, gives a very positive depiction of the state of human consciousness today, for all its foibles and weaknesses as a system. When you think about it, how could it be much better than it is, where you have something like a hundred and ninety nations from all different parts of the world, different cultures, different traditions, different languages, different types of government. You’ve brought them all together and you expect them all to agree; that’s amazing! In fact, they do reach agreement time and again on various treaties and initiatives, the Law of the Sea being one, the Rights of the Child being another. It’s quite astonishing that there’s any kind of agreement at all. People accuse the UN system of being slow to accomplish much, but they are committed to the principle of consensus, as I understand it, which means people have to reach an agreement before an initiative is passed. That’s a lot more difficult than taking a vote and having the majority win and the minority lose; too bad for you. Consensus requires that everybody come around to a point of view that is acceptable. That takes great effort and some sacrifice and a lot of patience, but that’s how the UN works.
Dale: Sometimes if they don’t agree, if the representative of a nation doesn’t agree with either side, then they can simply abstain, and that is not a negative vote, that’s simply an abstention which allows for a consensus to come about. You don’t have to take a stand necessarily.
Robert: Well, hopefully one day man will evolve to a point where violence will not be an option to settling disputes, but we’re not there yet. I agree, if there’s any one organization that can be a catalyst to getting us to that point of consciousness, it’s the UN. Does the United States need the UN or does the United Nations mainly look after the smaller nations?
Sarah: Yes to both. Yes, the United States needs the United Nations and yes, the UN mainly, I think, protects, fosters the needs and the well-being of the smaller nations within the General Assembly. Every member nation has one vote; all the votes are equal. This upsets some people that a nation the size of the United States with some two hundred and sixty million people has one vote equal to some Caribbean island like St. Lucia with maybe under a hundred thousand people. These nations have their platform within the UN system, no matter how small they are, no matter how poor they are. They have a voice, they have a place, they have a forum for airing their views and for being heard. This is tremendously important for the smaller nations, but for the United States, it needs the United Nations just as much, I believe, because regardless of your size or your power, every living thing today is being required to integrate itself into the larger whole. This is the spiritual law of the present time. It’s the law of synthesis which we have discussed on past programs. Everything on Earth is governed by this great law, and it’s what’s driving all of these amalgamations. It’s the spiritual influence behind globalization, which is initially working out in some ways that are very harmful and threatening, but behind it is this great energy of synthesis that’s bringing about the conglomerates, the amalgamations, the global treaties. The United States needs to incorporate itself within the larger world, just like every nation does. That’s the forum the UN provides.
Dale: That’s the same pattern of incorporation into the larger whole that the United States has already gone through, if you think about it. In our early history, some of the individual states were not really ready to join together and become a United States that needed a federal government.
Sarah: The European Union is another example.
Dale: Exactly, and this same pattern is what is really moving the nations of the world together. I think extending that pattern from the nation to the global whole is the reason why we have to take part in the United Nations forum and the network.
Robert: In a time of global tension, what role can the United Nations play?
Sarah: I think the United Nations role is even more critical today than it was when it was founded in the last days of the World War. The world is a lot more complicated. The weapons have reached a stage of development that endangers all of us. Those of us who remember something like Chernobyl a few years ago know that all too well. We will all survive together, or we’ll potentially go down together because the potential for destruction is on such a massive level. It was just a couple months ago that the conflict between Pakistan and India was so heated that we were worried that they might use their nuclear technology, which both countries apparently have. That kind of issue has to be brought before the global family of nations. The UN provides the forum in which these nations can air their views and where they can be told by other nations what they are doing and how it is affecting the other nations. It’s interesting that no country can rightfully chart a course that might endanger other nations. I think that is understood by most people of goodwill today and I think they face crises because they realize that you have to have, if not a general consensus, you have to have a fairly broad support for initiatives. This is a way to defuse tension, to bring stability, to create a kind of equilibrium when there is conflict.
Dale: Absolutely. And that’s referring to that point that no man is an island and no state and no nation can be an island in the world of nations, and it’s back to what was said earlier about synthesis, too. Human consciousness is moving in the direction of this. We see this and, as I said earlier, the fact that we even formed the United Nations—which in fact was kind of the second incarnation of the old League of Nations that was started back in the 1920s. That didn’t happen; it fell apart because this cooperative consciousness wasn’t present until the crisis of World War II. It was realized finally that something new, something better, had to be produced—a forum that would help us resolve these questions in a more synthetic way. That’s why human consciousness was ready and it instinctively picked up on this drive towards synthesis.
Sarah: It’s interesting that the United Nations is an organization that was formed out of a two-phased war. The Alice Bailey writings view the World Wars I and II as essentially one war and you mentioned the fact that the first phase of that war, which we call World War I, didn’t bring about the forming of a successful League of Nations and so World War II followed. It suggests the karmic pattern that was underway in the last century that led to the founding of the United Nations, where gradually through untold suffering and the loss of millions and millions of lives, people realized there has to be a better way to solve our differences. And so, as troubled and as sometimes inept and difficult as the UN system is, it’s all we’ve got on a global level for dealing with these world problems. Today we’re at a stage where problems really are very seldom confined to one nation; they extend almost automatically. They spill over the borders in a way that they never used to. We need a global forum for resolving these problems, and the UN is a system that’s in place. Instead of criticizing it, why don’t we work with it and help to make it better?
Robert: I always think of the United Nations as a spiritual organization because it’s spending as much time attempting to unite mankind as scientists did in trying to divide the atom that blows up and destroys mankind. Does the United Nations have a spiritual destiny?
Sarah: Absolutely. And I think this was understood in the very beginning. The writings of Alice Bailey give the account of how the UN was founded at the conference in San Francisco in April 1945, at a time of tremendous spiritual significance in the Ageless Wisdom teaching. The book The Externalization of the Hierarchy by Alice Bailey goes into this enormous spiritual tide of energy that brought World War II to an end and humanity to the point where it was ready for a global initiative.
Dale: Also in the Bailey books, we read a lot about the Great Beings behind the scenes that are really working at the founding of the United Nations, and in fact it started back with the League of Nations. There was a great spiritual idea at that time put forth that finally worked its way out into the world through the efforts of President Wilson, and this was a great spiritual event at that time. It’s an idea that just wouldn’t go away and had to develop. So, there is behind the scenes in the Spiritual Hierarchy a great push and an effort to sustain this organization.
Sarah: If you don’t believe it, go and visit the United Nations. You can take a tour of the UN and you can be in the atmosphere of the place and see people from all corners of the world working together. You realize then, I think, what an opportunity it is for humanity to find a new way to resolve differences.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You have been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with the world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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