In my article in Meer Magazine on September 12, 2026, I presented an analysis of US and Israeli aggression from the point of view of authentic Jewish religious wisdom. The article received lengthy feedback from two friends of mine—one in Australia and one in Switzerland—who raised fundamental questions about the idea of “Infinity” and the extent to which I could apply this to my advocacy of world union under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

In this article, I try to clarify this issue, not in the light of some theories about “infinity,” but because who and what we are as human beings is vital to the whole question of war and peace. It is vital to whether we can expect to go down into the oblivion of self-extinction through nuclear war or climate destruction, or whether we can experience a new renaissance of human flourishing and futurity.

The first friend who responded, from Australia, is himself a prolific author and a long-time practitioner of Soka Gakkai Buddhism. At the 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament that took place in Pondicherry, India, in December 2025, he was an advocate for creating a Commission for the Study of Human Consciousness, and the Parliament voted successfully to create this Commission.

Why would a movement for a democratic Federation of Earth create such a commission? Because if we humans want to survive much longer on this planet, we need to change our thinking radically—from fragmentation, war, hatred, fear, and violence to peace, love, trust, and a nonviolent world system. The study of the evolution and growth of consciousness is therefore essential.

This is not sheer idealism, but the most concrete realism. If we want a future on this planet, we must begin thinking like mature human beings, very differently from the way many of today’s so-called world leaders are thinking. We need solutions to climate collapse, to vast extremes of wealth and poverty, and to the endless invention and deployment of ever more destructive weapons systems. However, thinking differently is not a simple matter. It involves the nature of law and government, the question of levels of consciousness and maturity, and a theory of how human beings should and can change the way we think and operate.

My article quoted French Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas, who states that “Infinity is reflected in the human face.” We contain, he observes, “more than is possible to contain.” There is nothing particularly astounding in this observation since, in Western thought, human dignity, human rights, and our transcendent self-awareness were often understood to reveal that we have been made in the image of God.

My article went on to draw on the prohibition of idolatry with which the Decalogue begins, interpreting this to mean that we must not worship any finite thing—whether nation-states or religious texts—but only that which transcends finite things. In the Western traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this means God: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Many in the US and Israel worship the nation-state as well as literal interpretations of finite religious documents. I argued that such idolatry leads to violence, wars, and genocides.

I also asserted that the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, since it unites humanity (transcending nations, cultures, and all religious divisions), allows humanity to overcome such idolatries under the principle of unity in diversity, making possible for the first time a world of peace, justice, and ecological sustainability. In his long public letter, my friend in Australia wrote: “It is difficult to see how a global parliament, however well-intentioned, could awaken humanity simply through a cartography of rules, regulations, and institutional processes. Such an approach remains fundamentally top-down. What is required is almost the reverse: an awakening that begins with the individual and develops from the bottom up.”

He recommended that we need to create the conditions by which people—from the bottom up—can realize the common spiritual reality that underlies all the world’s great religions. However, what would such conditions look like? Would the realization of the goals of the Earth Constitution help give us such conditions? Among its six fundamental goals are ending war and disarming nations, protecting universal human rights, and restoring our planetary ecological system to a sustainable “home for humanity.”

Such goals are relatively simple compared to awakening humanity to the spiritual dimension underlying the world’s religions. They are obtained through the rule of enforceable laws legislated by the World Parliament. Would a world of peace, human rights protection, and sustainability create conditions for spiritual awakening? To me, this seems self-evident.

My other friend, who responded to the September 12 article from Switzerland, stated that we were both right: that emergent evolutionary developments, to which I appealed, do give us ever greater holisms in the history of living forms on Earth, yet all the while the great spiritual dimension (emphasized by my Australian friend) was a reality that needed to be discovered by humanity. He proposed his own project of creating “cradles of peace” groups throughout the world as a compromise between the idea of creating the conditions for spiritual awakening first (before Earth Federation) and my ideal of promoting the Federation as a necessary condition for spiritual awakening.

I believe that there is a fundamental question at issue here regarding the relationship between the One of spirituality, the oneness of humanity, the rule of law, and our potential for a transformed future. Much of the Buddhist tradition emphasizes the One, so much so that “the many” are often given a dismissive status under the headings of impermanence (anicca), interrelational interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda), and non-self (anattā). As Nāgārjuna expresses this in the second century CE, there is no substantial nature of anything anywhere—no selfhood, simply impermanent, fleeting manifestations of emptiness (śūnyatā). Where in this is the dignity and significance of human reason, creativity, and civilizational evolution? There appears to be something missing.

The Earth Constitution gives us universal, enforceable laws for the whole of planet Earth. I do not think that either of my friends fully understands the nature of law—its meaning, its capacity to establish each person as a legal personality (citizenship), and its power to unite. It should be clear, nevertheless, that the present broken world system, which divides the world into some 194 territorial and legal fragments, undermines these potentials of the law and leads to competition, struggles, secrecy, trashing of human rights, and the corruptions of war. I presented a history of Western philosophy of law in my 2008 book Ascent to Freedom: Practical and Philosophical Foundations of Democratic World Law that attempted to reveal the deeper meaning of law. Here is some of what that book discussed.

In the Western tradition, the law was typically associated with what was termed “Natural Law”—that is, the moral framework of human life provided by the Cosmos or God. Human beings feel the weight of moral obligation that we did not create ourselves and generally have felt that the societal laws we do create should conform to the natural moral law that encompasses human life. In the first century BCE, Cicero wrote: “The most stupid thing of all, moreover, is to consider all things just which have been ratified by a people’s institutions or laws… There is only one justice, which constitutes the bond among humans, and which was established by one law, which is right reason in commands and prohibitions. The person who does not know it is unjust, whether the law has been written anywhere or not.”

Human beings are free and hence exist as moral beings who must conform their written laws to that moral framework. A society that has unjust laws imposed on it by a king, a dictator, or a ruling class (such as Karl Marx described) is an unlawful society, in violation of nature, reason, and the moral foundations of human life. In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas confirmed this tradition by stating that: “The force of the law depends on the extent of its justice. Now in human affairs a thing is said to be just, from being right, according to the rule of reason… Consequently, every human law has just so much of the nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature. But if at any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law.”

In the modern world that began with the Renaissance and flowered in the 17th century, we find Immanuel Kant during the 18th-century Enlightenment presenting the fundamental formal principle of the moral law: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”

The form of a morally legitimate act is universal law. A free being “legislates” for himself or herself the possible conformity of the maxim of his or her action to a universal legislation encompassing what any person anywhere should do in these circumstances. When people come together in a “civil state,” Kant observes, they form a “community” defined by the universal laws of their legislative body, with laws that must conform to the fundamental form of all morality.

Hence, a legitimate state means the liberty and equality of everyone before the universal law. To unite in such a state is, he states, “an end that everyone ought to have,” for the civil state under the rule of universal laws makes possible the growth and development of respect for the moral law among citizens.

So far, so good. Kant appears in the same Western tradition as Cicero and Aquinas. Human persons are moral beings under the Categorical Imperative to “do what is right regardless of their inclinations,” and what is right is what can be universalized to all rational beings.

However, Kant (perhaps for the first time in history) recognizes that moral living in a legitimate civil community is impossible under the system of sovereign nation-states, for these sovereign states recognize no binding law above themselves. Hence, they violate the universality of morality and law that must also be embodied in their legislation. For the moral law says that a morally legitimate act conforms with universal law—law applying to all rational beings, not to this or that national territory.

The system of sovereign nation-states is immoral, according to several of Kant’s late essays, because it is inherently a “war-system,” and all war is self-evidently immoral for it violates that form of the Categorical Imperative that says: “Always treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means.” To kill an enemy in war is hardly to treat them as an end in themselves. War is immoral, and the fragmented sovereign nation-state system itself violates our obligation to join in a “social contract” whose legislation makes citizen morality possible.

The only legitimate human legal community must involve a federation of free states, bringing binding universal laws to all humanity, thereby empowering the moral capacity of citizens everywhere on Earth and leading humanity, Kant declares, toward a universal “Kingdom of Ends” in which every person treats every other person as an end in themselves, and never merely as a means.

The 20th and 21st centuries have led to a transformation in our understanding of our human place in the universe. Natural law is still there in the sense that free beings are morally obligated to universalize their proposed actions (thereby necessarily involving all of humanity as the background of each moral decision and action). What has changed is that we now understand the Cosmos as a whole to be evolving and that human beings are an expression of that evolution. As Teilhard de Chardin put it, we are “the leading shoot of evolution” because the evolutionary process “has become conscious of itself in us.”

For philosopher Errol E. Harris, the nisus (or emergent evolutionary telos) of the Cosmos has become conscious of itself in us through our rational capacity for recognizing moral and natural laws. Hence, the natural-law framework of the Western tradition is now understood as immanent within human consciousness as the leading shoot of evolutionary upsurge toward ever greater coherence and holism.

Psychologist Erich Fromm wrote that “it follows that man will obtain his full capacity for objectivity and reason only when a society of man is established above all particular divisions of the human race, when loyalty to the human race and to its ideals is considered the prime loyalty that exists.”

The ideals of humanity are articulated in part through the natural law tradition that recognizes the need for civil law to mirror the natural (Cosmic) law that gifts us with freedom and morality. Such universality of moral purpose and understanding is impossible under the system of sovereign states, for they pass legislation not to conform with universal principles, but to protect their separation, to privilege their ruling classes, to ensure their security, and to make possible their going to war.

Philosopher Harold Bidmead writes: “The enemies of a peaceful international order are the worshippers of the false god of national sovereignty, the idol with feet of clay… The world needs to be governed by constitutional law, not by war.”

Law establishes each person as a legal personality—that is, as a “citizen.” Our world today is awash in human tragedies and perpetual conflicts because each nation-state recognizes certain persons as citizens subject to and empowered by its laws, while treating the rest of humanity as non-citizens for whom its laws are largely indifferent. The chaos and misery of this system is a reflection of our human moral and spiritual poverty. Under the Earth Constitution, there are no “illegal” persons—a concept that is utterly absurd.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it in the 18th century: “The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, by uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and remain as free as before.” This is the true function of government under which people are obligated to unite.

With the Earth Constitution, every human being becomes a legal citizen under universal law for the first time in history. Therefore, every person is embraced within the moral universality by which natural law encompasses our common humanity. Christian philosopher David Ray Griffin correctly says of an Earth Federation that “it is simply a vision of a world order in terms of moral principles.”

To be a citizen is to be protected and empowered by the force of the whole. The emergent evolutionary holism of the Cosmos produces wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Wholes and parts necessarily belong together. There is nothing top-down about the Earth Constitution.

Every person becomes a citizen protected, empowered, and lifted to a new level of wholeness. The parts become oriented to the common good of the whole, and the whole becomes present in each part, lifting it into true community. The universal force of morality and political integrity become united.

Here the real meaning of universal law begins to emerge: one humanity embraced by one legislation and one binding moral obligation to universalize our proposed actions to conform to what every rational person could and should do. Here we have the necessity of establishing constitutional world law, binding equally on all persons and empowering them to live good lives in harmony with the common good of humanity. This is what makes possible the next steps in the progress of human consciousness to higher levels of discernment and harmony with the depths of the Cosmos and our own deeper Selfhood.

Zen Buddhist philosopher Masao Abe asserts that “sovereignty now belongs to mankind.” We need to go beyond individual and national egoisms, for “the state is now developing a demonic character as it destroys the balance of moral restraint and controlling power which should be the rationale of the state.” The egoistic level on which the world continues to live “alienates the individual from mankind and does not truly enliven either the individual or mankind.”

Let us recall that my friend from Australia wrote that “it is difficult to see how a global parliament, however well-intentioned, could awaken humanity simply through a cartography of rules, regulations, and institutional processes. Such an approach remains fundamentally top-down. What is required is almost the reverse: an awakening that begins with the individual and develops from the bottom up.”

But we now see that a world parliament is not simply a matter of rules, regulations, and institutional processes. Like the universality of the moral law, it unites humanity beyond individual and national egoisms. By basing government on moral principles of the common good of humanity (such as human dignity, ending war, and protecting the global environment), the Earth Constitution raises us to a new level of Cosmic existence. It is not top-down, but holistic unification within a common good that embraces both universality and individuality.

Masao Abe writes: “From what position is it possible to grasp mankind as a single, living, self-aware entity? I believe that the foundation for this position is for each of us to awaken to his or her true Self—that is, each individual must break through his or her ego structure, thereby realizing original Self.” The realization of the oneness of humankind, the development of a collective consciousness for humanity, is a necessary step in the Cosmic emergent evolutionary process for each to awaken to his or her true Self.

My friend in Switzerland believes that we need a transitional movement in which people come together in “cradles of peace” to practice awakening and to prepare the assent to ratification of the Earth Constitution. However, if the founding of universal citizenship itself brings people beyond personal and national egoisms toward the universal Self, then why delay the process with an intermediate stage?

World law helps bring the natural law that arises from our common human freedom into conformity with our brothers and sisters worldwide. It gives us a holarchy in which the force of the whole protects and embraces the parts. This conformity alone gives us legitimate government, and legitimate government empowers persons to live from the universality of their Selfhood, and not from the divisive ego.

The Earth Constitution does not give us a top-down system. It allows us to unite with all others under the banner of our common humanity and with a protected legal personality for every person. As Rousseau declares, “by uniting himself with all, each may still obey himself alone and remain as free as before.” Here we begin to discern the real meaning of “law.”

Law arises from our common human rationality with its universal moral forms. It unites us all within a binding framework that recognizes both the uniqueness of each (human rights) and the oneness of all (the binding common good). The Earth Constitution lays out both dimensions brilliantly and thereby serves as a necessary step in transcending egoism and fostering an ever-deeper awakening of our Cosmic spirituality and Selfhood.