Custodians of the Cosmic Gift of Freedom Glen T. Martin A self-aware being does not need to be an egoistic-ethnocentric being. Our minds are full of images. These images inform and swirl around an incessant inner chatter that is organized according to its innumerable illusions, obsessions, and fantasies. Our minds overflow with ceaseless images, mythological images, including obsessive verbal repetitions, defining our robot-like existence as we continue blindly on the path of endless misery and eventual self-annihilation. We have constructed our identities, full of emotion, through such repetitions and compulsive images. In consequence, the world around us manifests itself in a giant chaos of conflicting, incommensurable fantasies, giving us a world disorder that approximates, literally and figuratively, a war of all against all. One of the strongest and most potent images around which we impulsively construct our identities is the so-called “sovereign nation-state.” We are slaves to this knee-jerk compulsive loyalty to these lethal geo-political fictions. Our geo-political world is entirely organized around these ideological fantasies that today possess weapons of unimaginable destructive power. At the egocentric-ethnocentric level of cognitive-moral maturity, people interpret the world in terms of the illusory images they have constructed around themselves as the center of existence. A Russian looks at the world as a Russian, a USA American looks at the world as an American, a Chinese looks at the world from that illusory center and so on—all countries looking at the world from their equally illusory self-centeredness. Culture, news media, social media, education, and law in these societies all reinforce the illusion and create the monstrous world of perpetual conflict within which we appear to be trapped. Freedom becomes a sham. It becomes a matter of using technology, organization, energy, and material to dramatically oppose, marginalize or assimilate those who embrace different collective illusions. The entire system is a war-system. It need not be this way. As we grow toward cognitive-moral maturity our freedom becomes ever more liberated from compulsive images and identities. Compassion, justice, and a deep transpersonal objectivity begin to emerge. We are capable of an intellectual-moral maturity that critically discerns the childish madness of egoistic-ethnocentric nationalism and, in the very process of doing so, becomes self-aware of the inner dynamics of image-making that generate our egocentric-ethnocentric identities. Here, objective critical analysis and insight begins to understand its own process of subjective image-making and its wrong-headed drive to grapple with the extraordinary freedom and “imagelessness” of self-aware consciousness. As my recent book Human Dignity and World Order (2024) elaborates, human freedom is “freedom” precisely because it involves a dimension of infinity that informs the life of each self-aware being. This also constitutes our inviolable dignity affirmed by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We are frightened by the apparent “emptiness” of the infinity that permeates our lives in the form of freedom and attempt to tether it down with our egocentric-ethnocentric illusions. We compulsively coalesce our identities around something that appears to provide security within this boundless and borderless freedom. As philosopher Hans Jonas so well-articulated, freedom has emerged in us from the depths of a 13.7-billion-year evolutionary process. We are custodians and bearers of this precious gift of the cosmos. Our dignity is either truly cosmic or it is a meaningless slogan. But this gift appears too much for us to bear. As Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor declares to Jesus who has returned to Earth in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov: human beings long for bread, miracles, and a system of domination organized as if it were freedom. As George Orwell declared in his book 1984, humanity longs to be organized under the “truths” that “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.” Our egoistic-ethnocentric illusions form a primary manifestation of this longing. We enslave ourselves with our illusory images, and call this “freedom.” The totalitarian society of 1984 does not need to be imposed on us from the outside. We impose it on ourselves through a childish clinging to our illusions. The 16th and 17th century wars of religion in Europe were about this conflict of illusions, a conflict of religious mythologies still going on today for much of the world. Nevertheless, the 20th and 21st centuries became much more “secular.” The dogmas of religion have receded somewhat. They have replaced the illusory gods of the religious wars with the illusory mythologies of sovereign militarized nation-states. Today, without a new awakening or a new Enlightenment, human beings face the very real possibility of wiping themselves out in thermonuclear holocaust and/or environmental collapse. Indeed, many who have embraced some apocalyptic religious mythology even welcome the prospect. Instead of celebrating the infinity and openness of our divine gift of freedom, they use their egoistic-ethnocentrically distorted perversions of freedom to wish for Armageddon. In others, the process of secularization has led them to transfer their fanatical loyalty from false mythological gods to obsession with one form or another of false, mythological nation-state identifications or to the obsession with an unrelenting accumulation of private wealth. The beauty of our civilization’s diverse cultures and historical traditions turns ugly through the egocentric-ethnocentric identification with one or another of these cultures, traditions, or nations. True freedom in us is actualized as a transpersonal, image-free divine gift. The enormity and preciousness of this gift has not yet dawned upon us. We misuse and prostitute our freedom by grubbing for the unlimited accumulation of private wealth or the obsessive drive to enslave our lives to nation-state power and prestige. The entire world becomes a monstrous cauldron of power struggles, of greed, wars, evil, and the corruption of our precious gift of freedom. Our cosmically inspired obligation involves becoming proper custodians of this precious gift of freedom. Freedom, like dignity, arises in humanity as a whole and cannot be divided into incommensurable parts struggling to manifest a “self-determination” independently of one another. To attempt the self-determination of parts independently from the whole is to destroy freedom. A country investing its wealth and treasure into a military in order to “defend freedom” is an enslaved country, dominated and destroyed by its own internal mythological illusions. Human freedom as a species-phenomenon arises in the process of growth from childhood into ever greater cognitive and moral maturity. To deal with the gift of freedom wisely and maturely we must see through the egocentric-ethnocentric image-making compulsions within ourselves. We must organize our geopolitical and cultural diversities around the holism of free humanity. Only together, truly together, can we deal with the climate crisis or establish planetary peace as well as designing a global system of justice and compassion. Freeing consciousness from the tether of egoistic-ethnocentric bondage liberates thought and creativity for its true purposes of truly experiencing the fullness of life, on the one hand, and for perpetual transcendence, on the other. Liberated from egocentric-ethnocentric concerns, the present moment of this utterly miraculous and astonishing thing called “life” arises into a beautiful fullness and completeness beyond anything that these immature levels can experience. Endless striving motivated by greed, power, hate, and fear, diminishes toward zero in the face of the intrinsic delight of living fully. Beyond egoism and ethnocentrism, perpetual transcendence is also empowered. Our utopian imaginations are liberated from subjectivistic tethers to envision the genuine fullness of peace, justice, equality, and sustainability within the embrace of the traditional “transcendental” ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness. Humanity experiences a new synergy, an energy uniting us to solve our most fundamental problems. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth is about protecting and empowering the freedom of humanity as a whole and the integrity of each national and cultural part and each individual person. As I wrote in the 2010 Introduction to the “pocket” edition of the Constitution, it provides a “freedom-system” for humanity. By moving the paradigm from an illusory “atomistic” independence presupposed by the sovereign-state system to the “inter-in-dependence” of a holistic unity-in-diversity system, the Constitution makes possible growth beyond egoism and ethnocentrism while truly protecting and enhancing universal human rights. The Constitution embraces all the rights of the UN Declaration within the larger, holistic and planetary rights to peace and to a protected environment. Freedom must be cherished, cultivated, intuited, and invited as a living inspiration within our common human endeavors. This is defeated by the current broken world system, and it is enhanced by the Earth Constitution, which systemically and consciously builds a world-system premised not on power and wealth but on freedom and dignity. By creating a World Parliament involving the participation of all humanity in the selection of the World Parliament, the Earth Constitution gives humanity (for the first time at the proper planetary scale), the means by which authentic dialogue and discussion of our common freedom and its meaning can take place. Once we end the wars and the tragic conflict of the fragments over their illusory egoistic-ethnocentric identities, we can then become open to our common human self-understanding of the gift of freedom. This very gift obligates the democratic world system to maximize the freedom of each of its parts within the framework of the freedom and common good of the whole. But more than this. The Earth Constitution provides the vehicle for humanity to realize its true destiny as the custodian, protector, and sacred enhancer of this cosmic gift of presently inconceivable dimensions and possibilities. As many profound thinkers have declared: “Utopia” then becomes a very real possibility of human existence. Peace, justice and freedom become no longer empty “ideals” but concrete prospects. The Constitution forms the necessary vehicle for a flourishing and fulfilled human destiny. 5