Who Am I?

"Abba Poeman said to Abba Joseph: Tell me how can I become a monk. And he replied: If you want to find rest here or hereafter, say in every occasion, who am I? and do not judge anyone."

-- Greggory Mayers --
("Listen to the Desert," p. 9.)

One of the most insightful observations in the Bible is found in the Book of James, where it is plainly stated (at James 1:8) that, "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."  

In one pithy sentence, this profound observation diagnoses the basic human dilemma - the duality of the ego and 'who' we actually are - as well as the symptoms of our dilemma, i.e., the instability of our egoically-inspired thoughts, words and actions. A person identified with the ego is, of course, apt to think, say or do just about anything in any circumstance. Thus, Abba Joseph's sage advice is to ask oneself repeatedly, and in whatever circumstances one may find him or herself in, the question, "Who am I?" Are our thoughts, words and actions driven by the all-too-human separate "self" of the ego, or do they emanate from the authentic "Self," i.e., in strictly Christian terms, from "the Kingdom of God within" us? (See Luke 17:21.)

Almost as an afterthought, Abba Joseph also adds the advice: "and do not judge anyone," for he must have known that each of us is liable to find him or herself at any time within the throes and under the dictates of of our smaller "self." This is the heart of Jesus' admonishment: "Judge not, lest ye be judged." And, of course, it is the ego, itself, that renders the harshest judgment, and is metaphorically willing to serve as prosecutor, judge, jailer and executioner. Our greatest challenge is, thus, quite literally, to get over our "selves."

"Only he who has renounced the impassioned thoughts of his inner self, which is the intellect" observed St. Hesychios, "is a true monk. It is easy to be a monk in one's outer self if one wants to be," notes the father of' centering prayer, "but no struggle is required to be a monk in one's inner self."

[Palmer, et. al, "The Philokalia," Vol. 1, pp. 174-175.]

Religion, Spirituality and the Mystic Experience

Religion and spirituality, in common parlance, may be seen as separate but related concepts. Religious practices and spiritual practices are a mixed bag. They overlap. Religious experience and spiritual experience, on the other hand, are in essence the same phenomena, the dilation or expansion of ordinary egoic consciousness. They are the experience of a new and rarefied state of consciousness and being that saints, sages and the mystic have reported in all cultures, in all ages and on all continents.

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," wrote William James, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

"This enchantment," James observes, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 47-48.]

Writing of this universal experience in an introduction to Swami Prabhavananda's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita ("Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God"), the polymath philosopher, Aldous Huxley, observed that the experience of a higher, unitive consciousness lies at the heart of all the world's great religious and spiritual traditions. Calling it 'the Perennial Philosophy' (a title he would later use for a book examining the religious and spiritual phenomena underlying the world's great faiths), Huxley observed that there are the following four core principals at the heart of all religions and spirituality:

"First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the attached four-part discussion, representatives of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths - a Benedictine monk, a Naqshbandi Sufi teacher, and a Jewish rabbi -  explore the mystical traditions that are their common heritage, and the similarities that the mystical experiences of these faiths have with the same experiences reported in other traditions.

A Universal Religion?

Swami Vivikenanda, the principle follower of the Self-realized sage, Sri Ramakrishna (see "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna") was one of the first teachers to bring the knowledge of Hinduism and the Advaita Vedanta to the West. Making his unheralded debut at the Parliament of the World's Religions at Chicago in 1893, his message (like Ramakrishna's) was the underlying non-dualistic unity of all religions.

"Unity in variety is the plan of the universe," Vivekananda observed. "As a man you are separate from an animal, but as living beings man, woman, animal, and plant are all one; and as existence you are the whole universe. That universal existence is God, the ultimate Unity in the universe. In him we are all one. At the same time, in manifestation these differences must always remain."

"What then," he asks, "do I mean by the ideal of a universal religion? I do not mean any one universal philosophy, or any one universal mythology, or any one universal ritual, held alike by all; for I know that this world must go on working, wheel within wheel, this intricate mass of machinery, most complex, most wonderful. What can we do then? We can make it run smoothly, we can lessen the friction, we can grease the wheels as it were. How? By recognizing the natural necessity of variation. Just as we have recognized unity by our very nature, so we must also recognize variation. We must learn that truth may be expressed in a hundred thousand ways, and that each of these ways is true so far as it goes. We must learn that the same thing can be viewed from a hundred different standpoints and yet be the same thing."

[Vidyatamananda and Isherwood, "What Religion Is," pp. 30-31.]

The non-dualistic universality of Swami Vivikenanda's message is an eternal theme of the great visionaries and mystics of all traditions. In the attached video, this theme is reiterated in the words of the great thirteenth-century Sufi poet, Jalalludin Rumi.

The Gospel of Fearlessness

Unlike many Christian ministers who preach the gospel of a salvation aimed at an idyllic rather than a horrific and tortuous afterlife, the Rev. Theodore (Ted) Nottingham, of Indianapolis' Northwood Church, preaches the power of a fierce present-moment spirituality that addresses at a deep psychological level the existential problems that all individuals face in this life. In the attached video, Nottingham addresses the principal psychological problem that we all suffer from, namely the self-centered fear that establishes and maintains the human ego.

"Every one of us has fears," Nottingham observes. "Fears of what people think of us, fears of what is going to happen tomorrow, fears of illness and unemployment. . . . What is this fear that is behind all of our distress, he asks, "this fear that keeps us from living in freedom and joy?"

"When you begin to realize that to live in those fears and anxieties that have tortured us for a lifetime is to live turned towards one's 'self.' You might," he observes, "call fear an exaggerated self-interest."

"There is power available in any situation," Nottingham notes. "We just have to get our head out of that which keeps us in the basement of our 'selves,' in our negativity, in our imaginations. Imagination," he notes, is just thoughts . . .  thoughts of what could happen if . . . of what that person is thinking right now about you."

"How many of you," he asks, "have had a whole scenario go through your head about what is going to happen at this meeting, and it was totally different and everything was fine? In the meantime, you have lost so much time, so much energy, so much forgetfulness of God. Learn the discipline of directing your thoughts," he urges, "of choosing not to go with the emotion of fear. Remember what you know, and not just what you feel."

"Remember," he says, "that negative thinking always lies, because it only gives you a little piece of the picture, not the whole picture, (but) just a little edge of it. Some of us," he notes, "get addicted to that . . . (and) enjoy our negative emotions."

"We are not our fear," says Nottingham, "and we have to learn from the Master who walks the way for us. Be willing sometimes to do it (while) afraid," he advises. "You are not your fears!"

On Yoga, Religion and the Ground of Being

The word for religion in the East is "yoga." It refers not just to the outward form of hatha yoga that we are all familiar with from the proliferation of yoga studios here in the West - which is just one of the "six limbs" of yoga - but, more fundamentally, it refers to the inner, esoteric path of religion. Derived from the same Sanskrit word as the English "yoke," it means to "tie" or "unite." In this instance, to unite one's being (the atman) with the Ground of Being (Brahman, or God).

Similarly, the word "religion" has an inner, esoteric aspect as well as an outer, exoteric one; albeit, when we talk of religion in the West, we refer almost exclusively to this latter meaning, denoting the various creeds, rites, rituals and observances that characterize the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In practice, and common usage, the word "religion" has lost the "inner" aspect of its meaning.

The word "religion" - like "yoga" - also means to "tie" or "unite" (or, more accurately, to "retie" or reunite"). It is derived from the Latin root ligare, which means to tie, just as a 'ligature' is a stitch that ties up a wound, or 'ligament' is the tissue that ties the muscle to a bone. Thus, the inner meaning of "religion" is also to "retie" or "reunite" one's inner being (the soul, or spirit) with the Ground of Being (God). Unfortunately, the concept of "religion" no longer seems to refer to this inner, esoteric process of reunification, and is almost exclusively used to denote outer, exoteric forms.

In the West, at least, as Aldous Huxley points out in his classic work "The Perennial Philosophy," this loss of meaning demeans religious practice and obscures the inner path to spiritual awakening.

"Nobody," writes Huxley, "has yet invented a Spiritual Calculus in terms of which we may talk coherently about the Divine Ground and of the world conceived of its manifestation. For the present, therefore, we must be patient with the linguistic eccentricities of those who are compelled to describe one order of experience in therms of a symbol-system, who relevance is to the facts of another and quite different order."

[Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," Perennial Classics: 2004, p. 35.]

One of the most respected modern theologians, Paul Tillich, in his memorable sermon "The Depths of Existence," notes that a true spiritual seeker may be prejudiced by what he knows of "God" and may, in fact, have to forget all that he knows about that term in order to find the Ground of Being within him or herself.

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth," Tillich notes.  "It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth." 

"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being," he continues, "is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "Shaking The Foundations," Scribners, New York: 1948, pp. 56-57.]

 This misunderstanding of what the words "religion" and "yoga" originally referred to is illustrated by the misunderstanding I initially had about one of the most famous passages in the New Testament. (Although I am not Christian, per se, the only fully enlightened man I have ever met, once urged me to study all religions until I could see "the sameness" in them all.)

In Matthew 11:28-30, we read:

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest upon your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light."

 Originally, this passage invoked in me an image of Jesus shouldering the cross, much like Atlas struggling with the whole world upon his shoulders. I assumed that the burden Jesus was talking about was in actuality, a literal burden. When I re-examined this passage, however, having learned that the "yoke" he talks about is his esoteric, inner religious teachings (i.e., his "yoga"), I got a wholly new meaning.

Here he first says he is "meek" meaning he is free of the small, egoic "self" which is the common burden of duality that virtually all men and women labour under. Then he notes that he is "lowly in heart," also signifying he is free of the ego and exists wholly within the Ground of Being alone.

Next, he notes that his "yoke" is easy, meaning that the process of his religion (his yoga) is simple and consists of the prayer and meditation that will free one from the bondage of the egoic "self" and its duality. Then, he describes what the fruit of his esoteric religious practice is - i.e. what the essence of his teaching consists of - and that is "light." And, of course, light - the clear light of Being - is what all inner religious practices refer to, in one form or another, as the source of our Being.

Indeed, perhaps one of the most famous passage from the Holy Quran, is the "Light Sura" Chapter 24, Verse 35 which reads:

"Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men: and Allah doth know all things."

Thus, when one begins to look to the inner, esoteric core of all Eastern and Western religions - to the yoking of one's depth of being with the the ultimate depth which is the Ground of Being - one begins to find the lightness of being free from the ego and the small sense of "self." This realization, it seems, is at the heart of all yogas and all religions.

Thomas Merton: An Encounter with Buddhism

According to the Lotus Sutra, one of the most revered of the Buddha's teachings, "If there are living beings who hear the Law, believe and accept it, and put forth diligent effort, seeking wisdom that comes of itself, taking solitary delight in goodness and tranquility, and profoundly understanding the causes and conditions of all  phenomena, they shall be called pratyekabuddhas," or the independently enlightened.

Thomas Merton
at Abbey of Gesthemani
circa 1968

In 1968, the Trappist monk and prolific writer, Thomas Merton would journey to Asia, furthering his comparative study of Bhuddist, Jain and Hindu teachings. In the end, it was a short trip, as Merton was accidentally electrocuted in his Bangkok hotel room. Before his death, however, he would meet with a host of ardent spiritual seekers and contemplatives like himself, the most famous of these being the Dalai Lama.

Yet, the most influential contact he made was with the Buddhist teacher, Chatral Rinpoche, a monk who had spent more than thirty years in the solitary contemplation that was Merton's only real home in this world. It was Chatral Rinpoche who identified Merton as a pratyekabhudda, and with whom Merton would take a variant of the Boddhisatva's vows, in which he dedicated himself to do all he could to reach enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, in this lifetime or the next.

Merton was already far along that path, as the following entry written in his journal several months before he set out to Asia demonstrates:

"I am the utter poverty of God," he wrote. "I am His emptiness, littleness, nothingness, lostness. When this is understood, my life in His freedom, the self-emptying God of me, is the fullness of grace. Love for all, hatred of none, is the fruit and manifestation of love of God, peace and satisfaction."

The following little-viewed videos tell the story of Merton's journey to South Asia, his meeting with Chatral Rinpoche, and Chatral Rinpoche's identification of Merton as an independently enlightened being. In doing so, they highlight the Buddhist acceptance of ultimate teachings, irrespective of what religious or spiritual tradition in which they arise.

The Buddha consistently said that his path was not the only path to enlightenment, and that every being must find his own path. His teachings, he noted, were meant only to be guides, and he encouraged all to investigate for him or herself the truth of what he said, rather than merely taking his word for it.

Non-Duality in Western Civilization

The West has always been influenced by the East. Even the West's principal religious tradition, Christianity, arose in Palestine, and has as its at root a fundamental non-dualistic perspective. See, for example, the following biblical passages: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD thy God is One." (Deut. 6:4); "I am in the Father, and the Father in me." (John 14:11); "I and the Father are one." (John 4:24).

This non-duality is no mere coincidence of wording, says philosopher and best-selling author, Peter Kingsley. The sense of 'One-ness' was already there at the birth of pre-Christian Western civilization and was then merged into the arising Eastern Christian tradition.

"Its fine what's going on in terms of coming together, and bringing different traditions, together, and this idea of a new global 'One-ness' (or) global harmony. But to me it's very important actually to be able to say, "Well that's been there since the beginning, and we here are looking towards bringing a greater reality or sense of 'One-ness' into these tatters of Western civilization."

"To me,"" Kingsley notes, it is very very important to say, "Yes, but that sense of 'One-ness,' not only did it happen to be there when Western civilization was born, but that it was out of that sense of 'One-ness' that Western civilization was very deliberately created."

While strains of the non-duality from the East permeates both the Old and New Testament, and indeed all of Greek thought, perhaps the great neo-Platonist Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, put it best in the second book of his famous "Meditations," when he observed:

"This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part."

John Shelby Spong: A Rejection of Fundamentalism

Bishop John Shelby Spong (Retired),
Episcopal Church Diocese of Newark, NJ

"We've reached a point in our society," remarks retired Episcopalian Bishop, John Shelby Spong, "where the message that comes out of the church doesn't make contact with the world where people are living. So religion, Christianity in its traditional form, is more and more a relic of yesterday. And I don't think you can revivify a corpse."

In the attached video, Spong, a very 'controversial' figure of what might be called "the religious left" in America, brings his wide and ecumenical knowledge of biblical history and interpretation to bear not only on the story of Jesus as recounted in the Gospels, but more so on the dominant refrains of fundamentalist Christianity that are emanating from America's "religious right," alienating whole generations in America and abroad who rarely, if ever, attend church services - even for weddings and funerals.

Born into a fundamentalist evangelical culture, Spong (who was raised and schooled in North Carolina) rejects the literalist interpretation of the Bible which seems, today, to be the dominant feature of Christian life in America, going so far as to say that traditional theism itself may have to be rejected.

"The two movements that I see - at least in America, today - in religion," Spong says, "are a rush back to a fundamentalistic, pre-modern mentality that reminds me of simply an hysterical response to the death of religion. . . . And the other response, which is even bigger but doesn't make the press, is the response of those who say 'if that's what religion is, this fundamentalistic, pre-modern thing, I don't want anything to do with it.'"

Spong criticizes both "the Church" in America for promoting a form of pre-modern theism which focuses primarily on sexual matters that it knows little about, as well as the political right in America which has embraced a fundamentalist and militaristic tradition that panders to the population which embraces such fundamentalist religious views.

"God is a mystery into which we walk," Spong observes, "and the more deeply you walk the more that mystery just surrounds you."

"I consider myself today a God-intoxicated person," Spong says, "almost a mystic; but, I have no idea of what human words I would use to articulate 'who' God is, or 'what' God is; I can articulate (however) what my experience of God is."

Spong's informed but inevitably controversial views should perhaps be "required viewing" for the spiritual but not religious who are sick of the debate between fundamentalists and scientific rationalists and are still in search of spiritual teachings which are relevant to their modern, post-rationalist lives.

Esoteric Spirituality: The "Inner Teaching" of Christianity

In his masterwork, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” the pioneering American psychologist, William James made a fundamental distinction between what he termed ‘outer religion,’ the dogmas, doctrines, steeples, altars and incense of religious worship, and the ‘inner religion’ of spiritual experience and psychological transformation, a distinguishment which seems fundamental to the seeker of spiritual awakening or enlightenment in this modern Information Age.

In another spiritual masterpiece, “Discover the Power Within You,” the great Unity Church minister and theologian, Eric Butterworth sets out to find the religion of Jesus, rather than the religion about Jesus, noting that there has always been a paradox in the way humanity has reacted to the spiritual truths they have found on the spiritual quest, elevating the teacher while ignoring the teachings of universal spiritual truths:

“The history of man on the eternal quest,” he writes, “has been a strange odyssey. In his search for the ‘holy grail' man has looked everywhere and in vain, but he has failed to look within himself. Occasionally, a prophet came, telling of the world within. But instead of following him into the deeper experience, men invariably made a god of the prophet – worshiped and built monuments to him. They then trapped themselves in a religious practice that had no within.”

“How many times has this happened?,” Butterworth asks rhetorically. “How many religions are there in the world ?”

In a trio of videos from the prodigious author, broadcaster and ordained minister, the Reverend Theodore (Ted) Nottingham goes "within" and examines the "esoteric teachings" of Christianity, the "inner teachings" of Jesus, and the process of "theosis," or "God-realization," the experiential process which lies at the heart of the Christian's spiritual quest, but which is little known or used in the West today.

In this subjective selection from Nottingham's wide body of work, it is hoped that the spiritual aspirant's eyes may be opened to the inner potential not only of Christianity, but of all the world's great wisdom traditions, and that any "scales of prejudice" may be removed to make his or her "inner" sight all the clearer.

As Jesus made clear in his ministry, it is not the outer form that is of consequence; quite the opposite. To the Pharisees who were persecuting him for what they saw as his outer practice, he plainly said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21).


"Esotericism and Christianity"





"The Inner Teaching"





"Theosis: The Path of God-Realization"




Author and translator of a dozen books, Ted Nottingham is an ordained minister and currently the pastor of Northwood Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a student and teacher of practical spiritual development for over thirty years, his books reflect aspects of the spiritual journey for readers of all traditions.

His Youtube videos and PodOmatic podcasts are available here and here.

Christianity's Teachings of 'Higher Consciousness' Largely Lost in the West

"Through our awakened presence, or higher consciousness, the universe becomes conscious of itself."

When was the last time that you heard a message like this at your church, temple, synagogue or mosque? Have you ever heard anything like this from a televangelist, from a "Christian fundamentalist"? 

Traditionalists, who may be skeptical of what sounds like a New Age mantra, may be surprised that this basic truth of all of the world's wisdom traditions comes from a mainstream Protestant minister, based in the mid-west heartland of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Ted Nottingham, an author, publisher, television and video producer, and the Disciples of Christ pastor at Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church, may be one of the most unheralded, yet most progressive theologians of our day. His message of the pressing need for each of us to awaken consciously to the Divine at the core of our being, and the Divinity which pervades and underlies the entirety of the universe, is based not on the surge of interest in higher states of consciousness and the synthesis of physics and spirituality, but on a deep and profound understanding of scripture and early (particularly, Orthodox) Christianity.

The above quote, from Nottingham's YouTube video on "Theosis" - or, the process of' God-realization that was at the heart of the early Church's teaching, and which remains at the heart of Orthodox traditions - is, in fact, a message which is ubiquitous across the world's great wisdom traditions; a point acknowledged by Nottingham.

With an extensive knowledge of varied spiritual traditions - from ancient Judaism, to the Desert Fathers, to G.I. Gurdjieff - Nottingham proposes an engaged, deeply personal and transformative practice of Christianity, one designed to tap the transcendental potential of each of us in a world where spiritual realities are too often overlooked or absent.

Theodore (Ted) Nottingham on YouTube

One of his most recent videos, "Rediscovering Christianity," is a well-reasoned and persuasive appeal to re-examine the basic tenets and message of the world's largest religion; to look at how and where its essential tenets have been lost or obscured; to go beyond the historical "baggage," "bloodshed," and "modern misrepresentations" of Christianity, and to look at it anew for its relevance in the 21st century.

Nottingham's basic message throughout his writings, sermons and videos is that there is "a new quality of consciousness" available to each of us, a message that has been lost in most instances. (Other must-see videos by Nottingham on Christianity, include "The Inner Teaching," and "The Watch of the Heart," an essential Eastern Orthodox methodology and discipline  for overcoming the ego.

"We have made impotent that which is the very source of our life, within us and around us, Nottingham says. "We've lost sight of the invisible within the visible."

He urges the viewer to get over the Darwinism versus Creationism debate, and the modern controversies over science versus faith, to move beyond the "absurd levels" of Christian fundamentalism, in order to rediscover the potentiality of Christianity's "holistic dimension" that has been largely lost in the Western Christian tradition.

Nottingham's voice and message is one that is needed in the public discussions on faith, higher consciousness, and human potential. He is, at once, a welcome antidote to both the narrow fundamentalism and the evangelical atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins et. al., as well a passionate advocate of humankind's potentiality.