From Inner Peace to Public Order: A New Experiential Method for Holistic Legal Education in Times of Psycho-Emotional-Social Crises

Abstract

Inner peace is the actual source of stable external public order. Inner peace provides detached observation and clarity about one’s goal and the method for accomplishing it. The Indian Constitution and legal systems worldwide are struggling to maintain public order. Several attempts made so far are either social, economic, or political, viewed through the lens of law. They do not last for long, nor are they fully sufficient or able to produce a harmonious balance of equality, liberty, fraternity, dignity, unity and integrity. The Author demonstrates in this article that law is a product of life, and that life is a product of our inner spirit, where peace resides. Modern psychology and applied spirituality are coming together to guide human development and education, helping society realise the visions the human spirit seeks in these times of psycho-emotional, social, and mental health crises. In this article, the author explains how inner peace can be achieved through various stages and techniques, and that this must begin with legal education, as the disciplines of law, academia, and research are all about human well-being and harmonious collective development. It helps law students understand their important role and contribution to themselves, their careers, their families, their nations, human unity, and universal humanity.

Keywords: Inner peace, public order, legal education, law students, methods, psychology, applied spirituality

Law and society in Transition

Peace is experienced and explained in many ways. It is a state of a subjective, objective, and conscious environment in which either external peace, inner peace, or both come. They govern one or more kinds of relations without disorder or chaos. Externalpeace is when one has freedom from all outward interferences to one’s own self and belongings. Threat, conflict and violence willhave no place in external peace. Instead, it is filled with goodwill, mutual respect, harmony, knowledge, and power.Inner peace is an experience of psychologicalattentiveness when one has freedom from all kinds of internal disturbances from one’s own being and one’s relations in the world. Agitation, insecurity and hatred will have no place in inner peace.Instead, it is filled with silence, mindfulness, compassion and quiet happiness. Peace is generally considered to be external and outer in social existence. Inner peace is considered a matter of individual choice for personal attainment, away from social relations and life. Public values, social and legal educational institutions, at present, largely recognise and attempt to protect only external peace. Inner peace is yet to become a common and central theme in social and legal educational institutions. Only people from spiritual, religious, and interfaith communities, counselling psychologists, and healing therapists believe inner peace is a true solution for public order.

Modern developments worldwide are increasinglyhighlighting the need for inner peace as a solution to psycho-emotional-social crises that threaten public order. It is increasingly felt that inner peace will pave the way for lasting order in one’s self and one’s outer life. Unfortunately, proponents of inner peace neither play nor are invited to play any dynamic role in shaping current policies, systems, and legal education to address crises. The vision statements for world peace and actions for social public order disappointingly stop at token, preachy motivational activities for the public, without enabling psychological experimentation with inner-peace practices. This experiential peace can ignite real change for law and society in transition. Current legal educators, academics, and researchers in the discipline of law must come forward to articulate these psycho-emotional-social values of peace, from conceptual discussions to research, from publications to practical, time-slotted campus practices, to nourish the growth of academic establishmentsfor law students, enriching their academic experience and meaning of life. These peace academics and experiential peace practices can help addressthe emotional, physical, and mental health issues that threaten our stability, harmony, and social unity.

Need for Inner Peace

The author emphasises that the experience of inner peace can be a powerful tool within mainstream academic value systems, towards building a robust sense of well-being and a deep sense of justice for all in society through legal education and institutional systems that shape our individual and collective lives. With lop-sided globalisation taking place across the world, resulting in imbalanced growth, the true sense of equality and justice has no space amid the degeneration of the values of apeaceful life. An experience of inner peace can give life a satisfying meaning in both individual and social life, and this cannot be avoided by starting with education, curricula, and the campus. Our legal systems under Indian Constitutional Law that concern human rights, Constitutional guarantees, the aspirations of the international community, the legal order, the United Nations Organisation, international conventions, etc., need this inward experiential view to impact the world outside. Our world, with diverse cultures, is moving towards a planetary spirit and age that require this foundational experience of inner peace to safely journey through turbulent times of violence and social disorder, as a lack of inner peace reflects negatively in outer peace. Law students, who are the vitality of social and political thought and life in every society around the world, must experience inner peace to understand the significant contributions they will need to make to our shared and beautiful future. Youthful law students can render this service only when they understand the futility of external tokenism toward these serious values, done either exhibition ally or intellectually. In addition to all these, the inner peace experience becomes indispensable for cutting through sectarian views and dogmatic values arising from the bygone past, which relied on relics of partial understanding, outer control, and conquest. Such bearings have a chance to reframe the emotional intensities of guilt or anger stemming from their inability to cope with emerging socio-political-legal crises in public life. Legal education must start with this experiential discovery of inner peace in its curricula, as it addresses systems that shape individual lives and regulate socio-psychological community life.

In this article, the author focuses on showing how inner peace augments the attainment of external peace for public order through experiments that must begin in campus educational curricula. Academic institutions and curricula need to take this seriously, given the social, political, economic, cultural, and legal contexts that the subjects and disciplines of study address through regular teaching, learning, and assessment. This enables systematic engagement in students’ growth. The author emphasises that if students in campuses are introduced to inner peace as personal experience, and as subjective evidence of psychological feelingof heightened self-awarenessfrom within during their growing stages in legal education, it will help them recognise their positive role in the making of a world of new order,new harmony and new beauty that will become the new definition for true law for collective harmony and true justice for peace and well-being. This experience of inner peace can endow law students with central personality traits that foster holistic strengths. Some of them are: the clarity of intelligence to search for true values and seek wisdom, a strength of attentiveness to gain more focus and concentration of energies, a compassionate empathy by developing higher kindness of love through beauty and harmony and finally daily life-actions based on thesepersonality traits, which from inner peace can easily develop. This will be a new life to studies and work in addition to the regular curricula of the Bar Council of India. Youthful law students will become envoys ofpositive peace and work dynamically across every field of legal practice, impacting all aspects of daily life, both in the individual and public senses. In addition to this important contribution, thehuman and social qualities that develop from this experience of inner peacecan help youthful students resist temptations to all kinds of harmful, impulsive or extreme adventurism that can leadto unhealthiness, impulsivity, lack of restraints and blind adherence to adverse attractions that spoil the not-yet fully matured psychological, social, emotional and mental health being. Modern campuses have to address this, as education has become a fundamental foundation for shaping lives and contributing to the world through various careers. Peace experience can easily give studentsthe capacity to discern and identify what is healthy to develop first and to retain subsequently, with a shining awareness of being self-positive, self-progressive,and self-dynamic in life.This can be a great step towards healthy behaviour and constructive development for one’s own self and the social self. This can be a miracle moment of self-discovery and the realisation of the authentic self for every student.

What is Inner Peace? Three Ingredients

One wonders what this experience of inner peace is all about. This must first be understood conceptually to foster interest in subsequent subjective experiences. It can have three basic elements among many others. In simple terms, experiencing inner peace gives one the following.

An understanding and recognition of the source of thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations and body movements,
An observation of the cause and effect relationships between two actions, and
A conscious detachment that can help one to see through the inter-dependent play between inner and outer life leading to harmony among diverse challenges of life.

Accordingly, all these help one understand the consequences of actions, both within oneself and outside oneself. For example, when one can observe the source of anger or hatred, one can better control it, as observing itself is a step of mindfulness outside of anger or hatred. Similarly, when one sees through the cause-and-effect relationships, one can observe the vicious cycle of energy, such as violence or hatred, which can lead only to another movement of energy, ending again in violence or hatred. When one sees through the inevitable interdependence between the inner and the outer, between the individual and the collective, one can appreciate how inner peace connects to social peace, resulting in public order. The inner cause of peace leads to an outer effect of public order. This is a key role of the experiential method for holistic legal education that can resolve the psycho-emotional-social crises that campuses everywhere struggle to address in the form of mental health and holistic well-being issues. In fact, learning at all levels of education requires this undisturbed psychological state that arises from the mutual, interdependent play of inner and outer vibrations. This experiential psychological state is the only meaningful way for public order. This inner peace is the only way to deal with issues ranging from physical to emotional and mental health issues. This practice is the only way to create a new world and human unity. This understanding ought to become a chapter of practical study and practice, with scheduled time slots for all, supported by experienced coaches who can handhold students in educational institutions.

This needs to become a new theme for educational conferences, seminars, immersive workshops, and publications, where the importance of inner peace is discussed, and methodologies for systematising it are deliberated for the welfare of students, teachers, and campuses. Educational administrators must allow a designated week for peace-studies and peace-experiences to allow and soak everyone inside campuses with ideas of peace and insightful experiences of peace to gradually allow for a natural taste for peace in the day-to-day activities of campus life such as, while listening in halls of academic learning, reading in libraries, resting in residences, doing homework, eating in the dining spaces and even while playing in sports fields. This helps students understand that inner peace can be maintained no matter the situation, where one is placed, or how one is positioned. It goes without saying that this peace helps foster the power of knowledge in academia. Peace is the foundation in the mind of learners for reflection of the light of knowledge.

Development of Inner Peace: Four Stages

How do we develop the experience of inner peace? There are four major stages, among others, demonstrated below. They are conceptually explained to outline how practical experience of peace can take place. They are as follows.

The conceptual stage of knowledge and understanding of inner peace,
The practical stage of exercises meant as experiments for the experience of peace,
A stage in which a live and lived experience of peace is observed for evidence and, finally,
The stage at which a dynamic application of peace is introduced and undertaken in one’s legal work and its space.

All four stages, when followed, can create and integrate inner peace, resulting in social life that promotes public order. Of course, it goes without saying that these practical experiences become truly psychological and socially real only when these practices are undertaken on a day-to-day basis, making the experience live and lived. This presupposes an observant, introverted eye for feeling the experience of peace, for catching its loss, for identifying missteps and rectifying them as the experiment is put into practice. This helps tackle the biggest practical challenge to peace that arises when peace moves from the individual to the collective phase. It must also be understood that though peace is a subjective experience from others’ point of view, it is fully objective to the one concerned in practice who experiences it. This is well understood when we read spiritual scriptures across religious traditions and the latest psychological evidence, which highlight the value of peace. When every individual commits to this practice, it becomes a major contributory factor to collective peace, leading to external public order. Owing to the long-drawn-out linear method of the educational system where development of an analytical mind is emphasised more, the experience of inner peace becomes highly challenging for a mind that enjoys dissection of ideas and thus, in the end, is found to be incapable of observing the vibratory feelings of peace that hold a deep resonance at a somatic level with affective frequencies of peace. This psychosomatic fact is yet to enter mainstream legal education.However, humanity has reached a new stage of learning to practice and experience inner peace, leading to external order. Students, teachers, and campuses need deep peace to fulfil their respective roles. The legal systems, social psychology, and political processes, along with the guarantees of the Constitution of India, International Laws, and various other Statutes, are struggling to find a way to bring peace and public order for our individual and collective good. The only lasting solution lies in the inward-out method that must come from ideas and ideals shaped by legal education curricula, with an emphasis on peace and its experiential evidence. This helps the law and society in transition move to the next phase of development without disharmony or chaos. In fact, peace education can precede, or even substitute for, moral and ethical education from certain angles. Let us study all four stages one by one.

Stage 1: Concept and Understanding of Peace

This can be implemented by incorporating inner peace education into legal academic curricula, either every semester or as determined by the administration, depending on feasibility. This curriculum consists of basic knowledge and conceptualisation of what inner peace entails in terms of thinking. Inner peace can be explained through various elements that comprise it. They are the awareness of any one or more of the following to begin with. They are: the stillness, calm, quiet, silence, tranquillity, serenity, etc., that come to one’s observation, and their gradual effect and impact in the surroundings, from oneself to the outside. Out of this initial awareness of these, one can get a kind of detachment, a form of rest from activity, a gentle repose and self-composure, a happy immobility, voluntary disinterest, ease, relaxation, relief, contentment, comfort, etc. All these are like spokes in the wheel of peace. This awareness of any one or more of these brings an overall sensitivity, followed by receptivity to oneself and to the surroundings in which one exists, continuously contacting and interrelating with the things around. This must be nurtured. These elements of inner peace can be trained by making students conscious of voluntary, willed thinking, feeling, emotion, and action, flowing from these, in any environment in which one is placed. Experts from outside or teachers within educational institutions who are trained in this peace exercise can be brought in to undertake and handhold the peace exercises. Peace knowledge, when incorporated into assessments through studies and research, can also be a powerful incentive for students to study first and then experience peace. The whole idea of this exercise is to bring responsiveness, receptivity, mindfulness and vigilance to one’s thought, one’s feeling and one’s conduct,which then can augment oralterthe structure of the environment in which one is present and related to the outside. The concept and understanding of peace are the first foundational bases for the peace experience, which can then safely lead to practical exercises when pursued with regular care, restraint, and guidance.

Stage 2: Practical Exercises for Peace Experience

The second important stage that comes to mind is to ensure a practical experience of inner peace. There are four important techniques to follow for this. They are as follows.

The first is a conscious will that can be self-induced through imagination or a sense of intuitive feeling and inspiration, leading to the experience of inner peace itself, which exists in its own zone of peace. Mind, by will-power, imagination, inspiration, and wanting, allows a contact with that zone of peace. The various elements of awareness of inner peace as shown above in the first stage (such as stillness, calm, quiet, silence, tranquility, serenity, detachment, a form of rest from activity, a gentle repose and self-composure, a happy immobility, voluntary disinterest, an ease, relaxation, relief, contentment, comfort etc.), can form an initial thinking-link leading to a feeling-link to connect with the zone of peace. The conceptual meanings we arrive at regarding these various elements of peace gradually bring an initial reflective contact with the truth itself, which lights the experience. It must be remembered that for a critical thinking mind, this zone of peace is as much a reality as the zone we witness in the reality of stones, plants, animals and homo-sapiens. These physical realities that the analytical mind knows can also be known and felt through life's psychological realities. As the reality of a body in time and space is clothed in the mind as thought, feeling, emotion, and sensation within our nervous systems, so also the reality of experience can give a doubting mind a preliminary perception of peace on its adventurous journey. When doubt is consciously and willingly kept aside, experience takes shape and convinces the mind without the need for any reasoning. The beauty of this experiment is that the mind is better positioned to analyse peace after the experience. Doubt, when it goes excessively critiquing, can block the entry of new experience that forms new knowledge but which is doubted without experience of the same. When we trust the whole process of self-inspiration, imagination, intuitive feeling, and motivation with our own freedom and liberty, the psychological realities reveal themselves through their own experiential phenomena as we become even a little conscious, aware, mindful, and attentive to the experiences coming our way. This is the first and crucial technique to begin with.
Then, the second technique is about switching the mind from the zone of action when engaged in movements like studying, playing, or daily campus chores, to another zone where intentional stilling, focus, or concentration is adopted by gradually slowing down from constant outward activity. This stillness allows quiet to enter the mind, the body, and the realms of thought, feeling, emotion, and sensation. This switching helps one change the direction of energy from outgoing to ingoing, with a conscious withdrawal as energies are interiorised. This puts energies back into their storehouse, into a dynamic stillness, a quiet calm within, while invisibly releasing an effect on the outward nature. This second technique stabilises the benefits of the first technique.
Now comes the much-needed state of self-absorption of all these peace elements within oneself, individually and slowly, in interrelations with near and dear, with whomever we relate with, in the work we do, and in interactions with people, objects, and things. This third technique is a precursor to the final dynamic application of peace to result in public order. In this state of self-absorption, one must remain in concentration specifically for absorption of those peace energies to let them flow consequently. This forms the next link and loop to another layer of experience, where peace takes on a dynamic power that can influence inter-relations, office work, and space. In this third technique, one consciously, mindfully, with awareness and attention, sees and feels the peace energies with all their elements, which reside and are ready to act and respond to a given situation. Finally, with peace found to be factual and unaffected, the possibility of being kind, compassionate, good-willed, and sincere becomes easier to put into practice. Behind kindness, compassion, goodwill and sincerity, it is the ingathering as well as the outgoing of peace energies with all their elements that come along. In fact, it is peace that moves into kindness, compassion, goodwill and sincerity. Peace is a state of unaffectedness or non-disturbed energy, which, when we relate to it without violence, becomes kindness, compassion, goodwill, and sincerity. Kindness, compassion, goodwill, and sincerity then become our methods, through which our energies and vibrations of peace are transferred. This forms the crucial, golden, mutually complementary link. When a positive cheer and progressive enthusiasm are added to this, they spread by contagion wherever we are, for collective action or public order. This final technique results in peace within the individual, which then impacts the environment and the world around it. This then becomes peace-energy and peace-vibration in a space where kindness, compassion, goodwill, and sincerity serve merely as vehicles to convey the good and service of peace. The practical importance of this fourth and final technique is that peace becomes life-oriented, world-embracing, and problem-solving. When these four techniques are introduced to students in youth, particularly in legal education, they get their first taste of peace in both individual and collective contexts. The time and energy spent on this peace exercise and experience must be specifically encouraged by the teaching community and the management of educational institutions, which help students, in their careers and future, serve themselves, their families, society, the nation, and humanity as a whole.

Stage 3: The Live and Lived Experience of Peace

This third stage is an automatic result of the first two stages as explained above. How can this be demonstrated? It can be done by building an informal, free, and voluntary community that practices inner peace daily and gradually allowing it to developinto a proactive body of peace energisers and peace commissioners. There are two ways to do it, explained below.

First, a positive involvement in the process of peace experience and
Second, a peace-reintegration process.

In the positive involvement, it is a process already involved in the four techniques outlined above, such as conscious willing, inspiration, imagination and intuitive feeling; switching the mind from action to stillness, remaining in the state of self-absorption, and the voluntary practice of kindness, compassion, goodwill and sincerity with positive cheer and progressive enthusiasm.

In the reintegration process, it is constant support from the inner background, with sustained levels of lived experience of peace, brought, introduced, and injected wherever peace is absent and wanting.This reintegration process serves as a constant means of growth in one’s experience of peace and also as a model for newcomers to see, observe, understand, feel, and follow. This is a critical process for expanding peace energy from a single zone to multiple zones, with a rippling effect on a wider audience and larger groups. It is a community-building exercise. This peace reintegration helps institutional and cross-cultural assimilation where diversity and pluralismin that a campus struggles before the ideals of unity, equality, liberty, fraternity and dignity, integrity that Indian Constitutional law envisages for nation building and which the new National Education Policy (NEP 2020) has directed all educational institutions to look into for building newer pathways of holistic life and resolve psycho-social-emotional crises coming as mental health issues of all kinds we witness helplessly. This can be a new model of student community engagement, collective involvement, and peace activism that is self-healing and socially healing when our transition through developmental phases becomes difficult, thereby halting real social change and transformation. Finally, this adds beauty to youth, harmony to public order, stability to relationships, and skills to build capacities to face and enjoy the world and career. This can be an overall nourishing goodness to heal all psychological, emotional, social and mental health issues that come on campus, such as anxiety, fear, guilt, worry, tension and depressive moods. This peace experience rebounds with necessary energy, renews enthusiasm, and breathes optimism, cancelling all the negative baggage of a regressive past or even trauma. In fact, it also complements the psychological counselling students undergo amid their hectic, stressful schedules. It is the duty of management, teachers, and staff to help students on this journey, as they form part of our collective future. The possibility of students and teachers finding their educational campuses as gardens of peace, beauty, harmony, joy, and the silent work of energies can be a great promise and hope for all involved in education, research, youth, and collective growth.

Stage 4: Dynamic Application of Peace

How do we practically apply peace in our career and nature of work? How can we align peace practices with our institutional goals, employment terms, and clientele satisfaction? All of our office work deliverables are determined by clients and customers outside our management or institutional systems, which then direct employees to work on them. This dynamic application can become easier when graduating students are well-versed in the three stages: conceptual knowledge of peace, peace practices experimented with, and the memory of lived peace experiences. Here are three more essential processes to follow.

First, an avid interest and stimulating inspiration to work for peace in the form of goal-setting, goal-persuasion, and goal-actions.
Second, a methodical and day-to-day approach to function, to act, to respond and to react to every aspect and element of work with peace, through peace and for peace.
Third, to identify legal work where the respective laws involve peace as a subject, whether it is external peace or inner peace.

The dynamic application of these three is highly challenging, even though there were practical experiments with them in their memories from when they were students on campus. When students graduate and step into the world, social situations and career pressure can create a stressful atmosphere, disturbing the peace and pleasant memories of those experiences. It is here that goal-setting becomes easy for goal-persuasion, leading to goal-actions. These goal elements cannot be diluted or forgotten, no matter how stressful the situation is. These goal elements act as a vision board, directing the energies of thought, feeling, emotion, and sensation to make the body act for peace, respect peace, respond to peace, react positively to disturbances of peace, and observe that which is not peace. This creates a situation in which the individual concerned remains unaffected and undisturbed while pursuing a career in the collective work space outside. When the first two essential processes are attained, the third process of a dynamism of peace completes all efforts to build this peace-dream and peace-reality.

The main step in the third process is to identify the legal work in which peace, as a subject, is involved, as defined by the relevant law, whether external or internal peace. This law or legal work can be in litigation, law firms, the judiciary, in-house corporate, PSUs, Government services, public policy, para-legal work, ADR, legal research, etc. One can start with the primary roles of the Constitution of India and the United Nations Charter, and with all legal provisions and sub-provisions within the national and international charters, where the element of peace is mentioned as a goal of a municipal nation-state and as addressed to the peace of the international community. This must be an exhaustive study of where peace is mentioned, how it is mentioned, and who the authorities responsible for maintaining peace are, etc. This study must have already come from the legal education campuses, where students were made to study, research, and write examinations on these for knowledge and assessment. Let us examine a few instances of peace from various legal enactments. This can serve as a model to think about and work in the respective areas of legal work, whatever be the workspace, like courtroom litigation, law-firm counsel, judicial work and office, in-house corporate lawyering, PSUs legal departments, Government services, public policy drafting, para-legal work, ADR, legal research, etc. All these have external peace as the basis, as every legal work is the work of bringing peace to the parties who have come as a result of a lack of peace from within.

The Preamble of the Indian Constitution has peace as the foundation, purpose and outcome. Peace has come through equality, liberty, fraternity, dignity, unity and integrity. Various other Articles in the Constitution indicate peace in 12 legal provisions, either directly or indirectly.
The United Nations Charter, in its Preamble, Articles 1 and 2, and other provisions, explains peace 47 times.
The whole of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, which is an international judicial body that settles disputes between States in the international community towards the international legal order, is a subject of peace throughout.
The Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace (1984), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), various Human Rights Conventions, etc., point to peace in human life and in community life.
All the enacted Statutes of any municipal state jurisdiction through the rule of law indicate peace as the goal and peace as the method.
All enacted Statutes that address dispute settlement mechanisms state peace as the objective and the process.
All enacted statutes, governance methods, policies, and judicial interpretations that use rationality and logic to resolve disputes indicate the use of the psychoanalytic method of peace as a settlement for the disputes.

From the abovementioned findings, we can now understand how peace is ingrained in our human seeking. When we go through suffering and searching yet are unable to grasp what peace is or materialise it in life, we forget that peace is within and must be reflected outward. We need to hold peace as a flame of experience to guide our actions, direct our thoughts, enhance our feelings, enrich our emotions, and empower our senses. Peace becomes intra-personal to oneself and inter-personal in our relations and through our legal work. Peace is thus not only the foundation, purpose, and outcome as mentioned above, but also the beginning of every solution to the challenges in law, legal order, legal systems, and society for human unity and universal humanity.

Conclusion

When we read the aforementioned legal requirements for peace, with their importance explained, we can clearly see how peace has become an external social and global issue. Everything the author explains and expresses in this article points to the conclusion that what must be achieved externally must first be achieved from within.In other words, what social collectivity, world over, needs to accomplish must first be accomplished in the individual. What legal systems aim to achieve for society must be achieved by individuals in their psychological systems. We all know that even a preliminary intellectual understanding of inner peace for youth, as explained above, is enough to spark interest and create space to experience peace at a later stage. In practical terms, we need to trust the process even before reaching the goal, that is, to trust that this peace exercise in academic curricula does not go in vain. We only need to believe, as transpersonal psychology or applied spirituality, as an experience of subjective evidence, tells us, that the significance of these mindfully altered or consciously shifted states of awareness can truly alter the mental, psychological, and behavioural nature of the human being, the structure of society, and carry the world from the zone of ignorance to public order. In short, peace brings happiness, liberation, and the strength to resist all kinds of disorderly and ugly movements of human energy. The secret lies in understanding this fact and, on a day-to-day basis, acting on these practical inspirations by starting with the experience of peace through experiments, as suggested above. Legal education must include peace studies and peace experiments alongside legal knowledge and research. Peace is the basis for human unity and universal humanity. A quote by Sri Aurobindo about the Ideal of Human Unity is inspiring.

“A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Humankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be no universal religious system, one in mental creed and vital form. The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development. A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one; that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth; and that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us, oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation, but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality, and a common life. There must be the realisation by the individual that only in the life of his fellow-men is his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race. To go into all that this implies would be too large a subject to be entered upon here; it is enough to point out that in this direction lies the eventual road. No doubt, if this is just another idea, it will go the way of all ideas. But if it is at all a truth of our being, then it must be the truth to which all is moving and in it must be found the means of a fundamental, an inner, a complete, a real human unity which would be the one secure base of a unification of human life. A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.