Towards a unified vision

Welcoming and opening address to the 
2009 Selfknowledge and Responsibility Symposium,

by Peter Yiangou

To listen to this talk, please go to the Sound Recording Section of the website.

Good morning everyone – and welcome to Chisholme House, home of the Beshara School. I trust that everyone is refreshed and rested.

By now you will have seen details of the programme for the next few days. 'Towards a unified vision – self-knowledge and global responsibility.' When I first saw the proposed title for the symposium earlier in the year, I felt a real sense of excitement, and look forward to seeing how this theme opens up over the next few days. And how relevant to link these two aspects – self-knowledge, and global responsibility – also, how inseparable they are, when you look at the implications. When we start to know our own nature, we find our connection to all of Nature – which includes the universe, the natural world and humankind. Conversely, when we mingle with Nature, we find ourselves and our connection to all things. The two natures contain each other, two sides of the same coin. Perhaps through this understanding we will begin to see that there is no spiritual/secular divide, no inside and outside, just the river of Life which carries all in it.

The fact that our lives are inseparably linked to our environment is the starting point of our understanding of the global crisis facing us. What we hope will be able to emerge in the coming days is that these ideas are not romantic idealism but a practical necessity and offer us a way of looking at the difficulties that face us and our world today.

This symposium is set against the backdrop of a global crisis on virtually every front of human endeavour – population explosion, water scarcity, species extinctions, environmental degradation, over-fishing, climate change, poverty, erosion of civil rights – not to mention the sense of dislocation felt by so many. Clearly events like this symposium will not on their own change the world overnight – but perhaps they can be a marker of something much bigger emerging in human consciousness, like an iceberg where only very little is seen above the surface, but the immensity lies hidden beneath.

On the surface of it, we have been drawn here by a commonality of interest, in the shape of a Symposium. But that which 'lies beneath' and moves us to action is the passionate spirit at the heart of human nature for the best of possible outcomes whatever the difficulties. This enduring spirit, common to all of humankind, is the immensity that lies beneath and unites us all. It is the unlimited source of creative intelligence we have always drawn on in our search for new directions, evident since the earliest emergence of humankind.

In it we find our common root, free of any ideology – and let us be clear that we can no longer afford ideology under any guise. However noble a cause might seem, if it divides humanity into 'us' and 'them', it is unlikely we will we be able to find the level of integration necessary to deal with the problems facing us. In the emerging global situation our common interest requires that it includes all of humanity. Nobody can be consigned to being 'other'.

The notion of an unlimited, inclusive, underlying reality, which is the source of and informs all diversity, is central to the education offered at the Beshara School. It is the other background against which this Symposium is set, and its inspiration. It is our hope that the environment provided here over the next few days will enable us not only to be enlightened by the perspectives brought by the different speakers and events, but also through listening and conversation, to explore how these perspectives might converge at a deeper and more profound level of understanding.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the people who are alive on the planet at any one time also stand at the leading edge of history. This might seem self-evident and hardly worth mentioning, except for the fact that we live in unprecedented times - because living at the leading edge of history also means that we are the ones responsible for what happens in our time. There isn't anybody else. Behind us, stand a thousand generations of humanity with all its diversity. In a very real sense, we are the product of all that has gone before. The fabric of our time is woven from these billions of living threads with their aspirations, hopes, knowledges, memories – not to mention their DNA. We carry history in us – in our bones, as much as in our minds.

And in front of us wait the future generations, silently looking to us over their shoulders, a question in their eyes – in what state will we pass on this beautiful unique world with all its life and diversity? What will we leave at the end of our watch?

Our responsibility now is so huge it is difficult to comprehend, and arguably quite different from anything that has gone before, because ours is the era during which the ground-breaking choices need to be enacted. If our descendants are to continue the human odyssey towards unimaginable outcomes, what is our responsibility – will we leave the conditions for these outcomes to be unimaginably difficult or unimaginably beneficent? We have heard much about the unimaginably difficult, but let's draw now on the unimaginable beneficence that could follow this period of crisis if we are prepared to rise to the occasion. Are we collectively and individually prepared to stand for an unimaginably beneficent outcome?

It would be naïve to assume that we are in for an easy ride in the years ahead. But if we can face the issues in the manner suggested, with confidence and optimism, not only will we be fortified by a real sense of purpose, but the prospects for a beneficial outcome also become commensurately greater. Perhaps events like this one can be the prototypes and forerunners for showing that collective effort which draws on the unified and unlimited depths of our humanity is alive and well and available for immediate service.

Peter Yiangou

6 September 2009