Good morning, everyone, good afternoon to people in other time zones, those of you in Europe and on other continents. Welcome to the Living in Oneness Summit. I’m Steve Farrell with Humanity’s Team, and I’m one of your hosts during the Summit. Today is Day 2 of the Living in Oneness Summit. We are broadcasting live each day with at least two programs, two hour-long programs, and we’re talking about how we can become fully alive as part of the divine.

I want to invite you to get comfortable and relax. We have a terrific program today. I think you are really going to enjoy this program and the one just after this one from 10 to 11 Pacific Time with Dr. Deborah Rosman, the President and Co-CEO of HeartMap. Now I’d like to introduce you to our special guest for the hour. If you were listening, you heard me share, he is a wealth of knowledge and also I’m not sure Bill would say this about himself, but I want to say it about him.

I think he’s a model for living in oneness. I’ve had the pleasure to get to know him. He lives here in Boulder, Colorado, and you are so going to enjoy him. William Ury co-founded Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow on the Harvard Negotiation Project. He is the co-author with Roger Fisher of Getting to Yes, a 10 million copy bestseller translated into over 35 languages, and the author of the award-winning Getting Past No, The Power of a Positive No, and The Third Side.

He is the author of the forthcoming Getting to Yes with Yourself. He is also the founder of the Abraham Path Initiative that has charted the path that Abraham and his family walked over 4,000 years ago. Welcome to the program, Bill. It’s great to have you with us.

It’s a real pleasure, Steve.

As I was sharing, if you heard us chit-chatting here as we were getting going, we have so much ground to cover that we’re just going to jump right into it. Let’s start with negotiation, because if you all read the New York Times, you’ll see that Bill is one of the key leaders in negotiation worldwide and is often called on by respected media, such as the New York Times, to give advice when sticky situations arrive, such as these impasses that have happened between President Obama and House Republicans in Congress here in the United States. He’s also consulted by sovereign governments when sticky situations come up. We’ll talk about some of those things. I thought we could begin with just this special gift, talent, that you have in this area of negotiation, and then we can kind of step into oneness, because as you’ve shared with me, it’s all kind of related.

How did you come to be such an incredible leader in negotiation worldwide, Bill? Well, I don’t know exactly how I did. I know that when I was a child, I had the occasion to go to school in Switzerland when I was a child in a school with children from many different cultures, maybe 30 or 40 different nationalities and cultures. Anyway, I’ve always had that question of how can we human beings get along with each other and deal with our differences and really appreciate our differences, but also be able to reach agreements. I became an anthropologist, actually, to study that question, but I always wanted to apply anthropology to something concrete, which is this question of how do we find better ways to deal with our differences than feuding with each other or killing each other.

That’s my passion, really. My passion is helping people get to yes. Yes. Some of these, with Colombia, there are several countries that you’re involved with, Syria, right? Right.

I think maybe Colombia, where these incredibly challenging situations surface, sovereign governments are actually reaching out to you to get your thoughts about how negotiation can come in. I know you’ve created even a special gift item, a bonus item for us that talks about negotiation. Maybe we can also, at this point, bring in the application of oneness. You haven’t said this yourself, but just talking to you, the thing that occurs to me is it seems like negotiation is such an incredible application of oneness, a real tangible example of what oneness is. Am I onto something?

You’re absolutely right. First of all, in the broad sense of the term, we’re negotiating all the time. Negotiation is simply a fancy word for back-and-forth communication. You’re trying to reach agreement with the other side, and you have some interests which may be our intention, like you’d like a little more money and they would like to give you a little less, or you want to go someplace for the family vacation, someone else in the family wants to go somewhere else, and you’re trying to reach agreement. In that sense, we’re negotiating with our kids, with our partners, our spouses, we go to the office with our colleagues, our clients, our bosses, our employees.

When I ask people how much time they negotiate, in the broad sense of the term, people often say it’s 50% of my time or more. In that broad sense, what are we doing? As you say, Steve, we’re trying to take differences and come into a single agreement. It’s a practical way of getting to yes is getting to one. We’re trying to take disharmony and turn it into harmony.

We’re trying to move into alignment, into agreement, into working relationships that work for people. We’re trying to take war and turn it into peace. It’s all about going to oneness. You said, as we’ve talked before, you’ve said the best way to get to yes is to come from this place. That intuitively strikes me as true, and it also seems a little mysterious.

Can you… Yeah, let me just say a word about that. The interesting thing is I started off working on how to help people get to yes in a very practical way. How do you reach agreement? What I’ve found is that it’s not always easy for people to get to yes.

People say, well, yeah, it’s easy to get to yes with some people, but not with others. There are these difficult people. After working on getting to yes, I wrote a book called Getting Past No, about how do you negotiate with difficult people in difficult situations. Over the years, over the decades of working from family feuds to labor strikes to boardroom battles to wars, what’s really dawned on me is that the single biggest obstacle to us being successful in getting to yes, getting what we really want, is not what we usually think it is. It’s not just that difficult person on the other side.

It’s not just the difficult teenager. However difficult they could be, the most difficult, the greatest obstacle to us getting what we want is right here. It’s ourselves. It’s our own human tendency to react, in other words, act without thinking. It’s to get in our own way.

As the old saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. What I’ve realized is that actually there’s a prerequisite to actually getting to yes with others, which is to get to yes with yourself. It’s to come from an inner yes, a yes to life, a yes to yourself. That’s the key. That’s really what I’m working on right now, is I realize there’s a prerequisite course to getting to yes, which is getting to yes with yourself.

Boy, what something to really write down. When angry, you’ll give the best speech that you will ever regret. Of course, that’s so true, isn’t it? It just comes back to this aspect of when we’re closed down and triggered, the oneness is not … We’re not connected. We’re basically in a state of disconnection.

More than that, we’re just emotionally triggered. We’re just off in a place of almost … I’ll call it insanity. That’s not the time that we want to give a speech to somebody, is it? That’s absolutely right. It’s very natural, very understandable to react.

This is why the foundation to me of successful negotiation is the ability to, I call it, to go to the balcony. It’s almost as if you imagine that you’re talking with that person, you’re negotiating with them on a stage. Part of you, your mind goes to a mental and emotional, maybe even a spiritual balcony, a place of calm, of perspective, of self-control, self-mastery, where you can really keep your eyes and ask yourself, what’s most important here? What’s most important in this argument with my teenager? Is it the laundry or is it the long-term relationship?

You can really focus on what’s most important so that you can then try to achieve what is really important to you. The key is that we don’t have a hope of a chance of being able to influence the other side before we’re able to influence ourselves. That’s the key to going to the balcony. It’s to take a moment, just stop for a second, count to 10, take a few deep breaths, take a break, whatever going to the balcony, whatever your favorite technique is, but stop for a moment and focus on what you really want before you get into that chain of action and reaction and back and forth that goes nowhere. Boy, that strikes me too.

We’re, of course, talking about negotiation, but we could substitute the word life for negotiation and just say, we’re in any situation, interacting with our partner, our daughter, our coworker, our neighbor, whatever, just exactly what you said. What is most important here? You used the example of laundry or our long-term relationship, but we’ve got these different circumstances that would be the laundry, some short-term issue that maybe we’re concerned about or our long-term relationship. What strikes me is oneness, where we’re coming from that place of real deep consideration and not just so tactically in our head with this checklist of, you used the situation of our daughter. Hey, your room wasn’t cleaned up today.

You didn’t pull your blinds up. The lights were on. Get upstairs and get on it. Well, that’s one way to have an interaction with your daughter in the morning. That said, from the balcony, one of the great powers in negotiation, and you’re absolutely right when I use the word negotiation, it’s life.

Life is negotiation. Negotiation is life we’re talking about. It’s not just some rare activity. It’s something that we’re engaged in all the time in interacting with others. The two most basic words of the language are yes and no.

Those are the basic words of negotiation. One of the great powers we have in trying to get to yes with others is the ability to reframe, to see the picture in a different way. When you’re talking about oneness, Steve, it reminds me, I mean, we have this choice about we could either see the picture, there’s kind of a small picture of life where we’re these kind of individual separate little units in a hostile universe at odds with each other struggling for our survival, and you’re going to get one kind of behavior out of that small picture of life. It’s going to be very much win-lose, and you’re going to try to win, and you’re going to get into a fight, and so on. Or we can choose to reframe and see the larger picture of life, which is actually a truer picture both scientifically and spiritually of interconnectedness, of seeing that in fact we’re not just separate.

We’re not just this little isolated little body separate from the rest, but we’re part of this larger whole. And if we can see it from that larger picture, then we can deal with people with respect and find ways to reach agreement that work for all sides, to reach win-win agreements, as it were. Boy, and shortly we’re going to go segue over to this Abraham Path Initiative that I was talking about earlier that Bill founded, which really is a beautiful story of how this initiative came to being, what it is, and how it’s really all about oneness. But before we go there, I wanted to mention this synchronicity, Bill, that I’ve mentioned to you. It’s just huge.

I, you know, of course was an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the 90s. I was kind of in the right place at the right time, and I started a digital communications company with a partner. We grew it over 10 years, and it just grew like crazy. We sold it to NEC, the Japanese company, in 1999. But in the early years, we had these huge challenges because my partner and I did start it with our own money, and we were just in our early 30s, which is to say we didn’t have any money.

So it was quite challenging growing this company that was growing so rapidly just on our own bank accounts, basically. There was a point in time there in those first several years where my partner wanted to sell and have me just take the company and grow it because the challenges were so severe, which is not unusual, especially when you’re going to grow a company together and not bring in venture capital. But it got so challenging that I looked through bookstores for a resource and found this book called Getting to Yes, which is this big bestseller that Bill wrote. I told him when we met here in Boulder and talked about the things he was doing, the things the humanities team was doing, that his book, I think, in some ways, maybe saved my relationship with my partner at that time because it was so challenging. He ended up not selling to me, and we ended up together growing the company for about ten years.

And we grew it quite large, and the sale was quite large, so it ended up working out well for my partner. But this tool, this book called Getting to Yes, was a huge resource for me, and I’m very grateful that you wrote that book, Bill. Well, that’s really profoundly satisfying because writing a book takes a lot of time, and you’re always hoping that it’s going to actually help someone out there. So those kinds of stories touch an author’s heart. Well, it’s terrific.

Getting to Yes is this book if anybody is interested in negotiation, and really it’s about oneness. It’s about seeing that the other person is a part of ourself. Just like Bill said, negotiation is about really coming from the place of this other part of yourself that has these other interests and really understanding them and then coming to some kind of win-win that’s based on what their interest is and your interest. It’s an interconnected world, so it’s not a separate body over there. It’s a part of ourself that we’re negotiating with.

Let’s go ahead and segue over to the Abraham Path Initiative. This is such a cool initiative, Bill, and you’ve told me so much about it. Bill, if those of you that were here earlier know, he actually just got back from the Middle East several days ago, and we walked through three countries over in the Middle East. But can we start with just a little bit about what the Abraham Path Initiative is? Who’s Abraham, and what’s this thing about, Bill?

Well, this all came about post-9-11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I was just sensing this wave of fear and separation in humanity, really, between the West and the East, and so I was having dinner outside here one summer here in Boulder with some friends of mine who had just gotten back from the Middle East, leading a kind of a pilgrimage to Syria, and we were talking about what could be done, if anything, and the idea emerged for me of, well, what about reenacting the ancient journey that Abraham and his family took 4,000 years ago, which is a story that gave birth to many great traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It’s kind of the origin story. You know, as an anthropologist, working in the Middle East, one of the things is so much of those conflicts, and so many of the conflicts in the world are really about story, they’re about identity, they’re about who we are. And what the story of Abraham reminds us is that no matter what may divide us as human beings, what unites us is far, far greater. And the essential message of Abraham, his essential insight, is what we today would call oneness.

Basically, he saw that the whole universe was interconnected, that there was only one divinity. That’s what gave birth to what’s called monotheism today. But his basic insight is that there’s only one, and therefore, the way we need to treat others is with hospitality and open hearts. And so he’s known for, you know, he wandered, basically. He left Mesopotamia, his home, then.

You know, he followed kind of the inner call from the divine, which said, you know, go find yourself. And so he left with his family, and he went on a great journey to, you know, what we now call the Promised Land. But actually, the message was, go find yourself. So in some sense, the Promised Land is inside you. Of course, it’s that inner experience.

And so I thought, you know, with today, in today’s world, how do we bring people together? Maybe the story can bring people together. And what better way to revive the story than to enable people to walk in the footsteps of Abraham and actually make the same kind of journey he did, to walk and meet people. Walk, meet, you know, people, very simple people, and, you know, come into connection and dissolve the fear and the separation that afflicts humanity. So that was the origin of the Abraham Path.

And of course, a lot of people said, that’s the craziest idea. No one’s going to go walk in the Middle East. Are you crazy? And so we studied the idea for a few years and looked at, you know, the impact of long distance walking paths, like the celebrated Santiago de Compostela Path in Europe, or the Appalachian Trail in the United States, and saw all the benefits that they can bring in terms of ecotourism and, you know, economic benefits, social benefits, all kinds of benefits for people. And we decided to test it out.

And that was 10 years ago, that vision. And we studied it for a few years at Harvard, and we tested it out. And I’m pleased to say I’ve just come back from walking parts of the path in three countries, in Palestine, in the West Bank, in Israel, and in Jordan. And the path is – thanks to our host committees in the region and so on, the path is alive in four countries, going on five. And there’s, you know, about 300 miles of path that’s mapped out.

You can go to our website, which is called www.AbrahamPath.org, and it’s alive and well. And the spirit of Abraham is alive in the villagers, because you might go there expecting hostility, but what you receive instead is the most amazing hospitality, as my colleagues and I found when we were walking and staying in people’s homes just now in the Middle East. MR. HOGAN Awesome. We’re going to talk more about this.

A quick item for listeners. You can go to the livinginone.com site, livinginone.com, and then at the bottom, on the third over, you’ll see the program and replay page. Click on that, and then over on the right margin, you’ll see the dates, May 8, William Urey. Click on that, and then if you have inspirations or comments you’d like to share, go ahead and put them in the window there. And we might even see if we can get to one or two here during the hour.

This story about Abraham, I want to just come back to it. You’ve educated me, Bill, in Abraham, and of course, I’d heard of Abraham, the Abraham of the Bible. As you mentioned, three religions came out of this Abraham, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So if people will recall, this is the Abraham that was the father, the physical father of these prophets that went on to start these three major monotheistic religions, Abraham. And I didn’t know much about him, and I still know very little, but you’ve educated me some and shared that Abraham really was about oneness, and even said, you know, we are all one in his own words.

Can you tell us a little bit more about him, Bill?

Sure.

Well, you know, we know a little bit about him from the scriptures, from the Bible, from the Quran, but we know a lot about him from, you know, kind of cultural memory, oral history, little things that I find along the path. But the one thing that everyone agrees upon is that he’s associated with the spirit of hospitality and kindness, loving kindness towards others. He believed in receiving strangers into his tent.

There’s a story I’ll just tell you, one of the many stories that I heard in Turkey from an imam a few years ago about Abraham sitting in his tent, and an old man comes by, and he’s around 70, looking for a meal, and Abraham welcomes him into the tent. But then, I don’t know, for some reason he asks him, you know, do you believe in the one God? And as it turns out, the man maybe is a fire worshiper or something, and he doesn’t quite share Abraham’s beliefs, so he doesn’t quite feel entirely welcome, so he kind of leaves the tent. And Abraham’s sitting there in the tent, and he hears the voice of God saying to him, you know, Abraham, I’ve known about that fellow’s religious beliefs for 70 years, and I’ve been giving him three meals a day. You can’t give him one?

So Abraham feels embarrassed, of course, runs out after the man, brings him into the tent, shows him royal hospitality for an entire week, and as he’s ushering his guest out at the end of the week, he thinks to tell him about this conversation that he had with God. And the man listens and says, you know what, Abraham, that kind of God I could believe in. In other words, you know, there are so many stories like that, or just this last week, I was walking in the middle of the West Bank there, talking to a fellow who was saying that he remembered his grandfather used to cut wheat in the fields, and as you cut, you know, he would cut the wheat, and he would set, you know, cut the wheat maybe like seven times on one side, and then he would take some of the wheat every seventh and put it, you know, to his right side rather than his left side, and say, this is for Father Abraham, this is for Father Abraham. And what it was, was he was saving some of the wheat for the poor. And so Abraham is known for that.

There’s another fellow that I met in Jordan who had been born in Hebron, which is the city where Abraham is buried, which is known as the city of the friend, because that’s how Abraham is known in that region. He’s known as the friend, the beloved friend of God. And outside of Abraham’s tomb, he said he remembered as a boy every single day he would go there with his family, and they would drink the soup, which is called the soup of Abraham, which is given for free, a lentil soup. And it was amazing to hear that story, because I’d also been looking into ancient pilgrim’s accounts from a thousand years ago, and a thousand years ago, I found a pilgrim’s account talking about that same soup being offered in the name of Abraham to the travelers, to the poor, to anyone who wanted to have that soup. So he really connotes generosity and hospitality.

And so it’s what people are most proud of there, and it changes our perceptions of the Middle East, because the media gives us one perception, but when you go there, you find something entirely different. And so the path really is a way of step by step. That’s our motto, bringing people together from around the world. Gosh, isn’t it interesting that Abraham, as you were, some of the descriptions you use, loving, compassionate, forgiving, generosity, hospitality, and yet, as you mentioned, often the media and mainstream society, God is framed as, you know, judging. At the end of our life, there’s a judgment, you know, angry, violent, these are all things, unfortunately, that are sometimes shared about God.

And of course, this is part of why Humanities Team was founded. We’re called the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, because our whole focus is that God is exactly what you’re sharing Abraham was known to be, and that the three monotheistic religions grew out of, loving, compassion, forgiving, generosity, hospitality. And when we talk about going within, coming fully alive as part of the divine, it’s going within and connecting with that energy, which is the divine energy, the God energy. That’s what this whole summit is about, is going in and connecting with that energy and just being, bathing in that energy and having it spill over on all parts of our lives. So, so neat to hear that Abraham, in some ways, was an emblem, a model of that.

That’s it, and that’s basically just known for that, it’s that spirit that’s still alive today. People will invite you into their homes and say, in the name of Father Abraham, please have a meal. So, it’s that spirit of hospitality and friendship that’s so desperately needed in the world today, because in a globalized world, there’s so many strangers, and that you can learn from simple villagers who just, they insist you can’t pass their home without them having to offer you something, because you’re a stranger. You’re, you know, you may be a messenger from God, as it were. You know, in fact, there’s a story, the sages of old were reading the Old Testament there, and it’s interesting, because when there are three men who show up to Abraham and his wife Sarah to tell him that he has a child when he’s in his tent, and he washes their feet and treats them with lavish hospitality.

And then in the next chapter of the Bible, those three show up for Abraham’s nephew Lot as angels, and they were saying, how come they show up as men for Abraham, but as angels for his nephew Lot? And after debating it, they came to an answer, and the answer was, for Abraham, they didn’t need to show up as angels, because he could look into the heart of any human being and see the divine within. Ah, yeah, gosh, isn’t that beautiful? And of course, wouldn’t that be true of somebody that clearly was here on a spiritual journey? Abraham is so huge in the evolution of spirituality on the earth, and that he could do as you say, you know, see into people, and really probably even was a healer in some ways.

It is, and the idea of the path really is to honor, you know, honor the past, honor our roots, because, you know, over half of humanity has its roots in the cradle of civilization and the holy land there. It’s to serve the present, you know, because as people walk the path, you give respect, you receive respect, you know, to people who, you know, who feel sometimes disrespected by the world, and there’s economic livelihood, dignity, because it’s all about dignity, and it’s to really envision and build, you know, a better future for all of us, step by step by walking this ancient path. So, I invite any of you who are listening right now, if you’d like to come walk with us, we warmly invite you. As you walk, you build the path. As you walk, you build the path, and just amazing that you walked through, I think you were telling me, the Palestinian West Bank, Galilee, and Northern Jordan.

Right. That’s a lot of ground, isn’t it? That’s it, exactly. The northern part of the West Bank, two beautiful, beautiful, you know, beautiful ancient cities, you know, Roman ruins, I mean, glorious hills with olive trees, and, you know, just see, you know, this was the birth canal of humanity, really, because humanity came out of Africa up the Rift Valley, and that’s where it is, and there are all these birds, millions of birds flowing up. This is kind of the connecting point of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and it’s the place, you know, where our languages, our cultures, where agriculture, where, you know, our religions come from, so you can kind of understand yourself by understanding your roots.

It’s a journey of self-discovery, and at the same time, it’s a journey of discovery of the other, and to realize that the other is your brother, is your sister, and it’s a chance to reconnect the human family step by step. Absolutely. We’re going to, in a little bit, I’m going to ask you questions just about oneness in your own life and your family, Bill, but there’s so much more here in the Abraham Path Initiative I want to get to. Bill’s very modest and hasn’t shared, the Abraham Path Initiative’s been featured in, you know, some major magazines and newspapers worldwide, has it not? I’ve seen it myself.

It hasn’t. Just this month, it was named by National Geographic Traveler Magazine as the world’s best number one new walking trail in the world. So, it’s an amazing honor because, you know, there are obviously a lot of beautiful walking paths in the world, but they named it number one because it’s unique. There’s nothing like it in the world, this kind of chance. It’s so rich.

It’s like, there are all these places that it connects, whether it’s Jerusalem or Bethlehem or, you know, Urfa or, you know, I mean, all these amazing, Hebron, all these amazing places that it connects. And so, it’s, and it’s, it has, last year, I think on ABC, Christiane Arampour did a whole, like, 10-minute section on it of the, on the path, walking the path in Turkey and and, and the West Bank and Israel. Isn’t it perfect that as this world is going through this evolution, the spiritual evolution now, which we can all feel, that this path, the Abraham Path Initiative, which is about awakening to oneness, is being featured as a top destination for people on vacation or during travel. So, what a, what a synchronicity is that, huh? It’s, that’s right.

People, I think, now, when they travel, they’re, more and more, they’re looking for meaning, something they can really, you know, that they can share with each other, share with their families, that can give their lives meaning, and, and they’re looking for slower travel, and that’s what walking does. I mean, the amazing thing about walking is when you walk on the land, you know, you’re, you’re walking side by side with people in a common direction, and it really, it really gives you a deep, deep sense of connection, of, it’s a, it’s a, walking that way is a way of living in oneness. Bill, we’ve, one of our listeners, Allison, in the state of Washington, has asked, is it safe for travelers, and how do we go about scheduling a trip? Sure. The way to do it is you go to the website, AbrahamPath.org, and it’ll give you all the information you need, depending on where you want to go, and so on.

And the question of safety is, there’s a discussion of that on the site, too, is, it is, at least my experience, I can say I’ve walked it many, many times, you know, a dozen or two dozen times, and with many different kinds of groups, young and old, American, European, people from Asia, Buddhists, Buddhist nuns, I mean, because the path is, goes way beyond any, it’s a cultural phenomenon, and it’s, it’s, and everyone has found it very safe. I mean, remarkably safe, because you hear that it’s not safe, you know, when you read the news, but it’s, it’s remarkably safe, and statistically, it’s, it’s much safer than walking in any major city that you could imagine. So it’s, and so if you do it well and right, and there are ways on the website to do it, you can go with guides, and so on, you know, obviously, the world is unpredictable, and you can’t, nothing is absolutely safe, but it’s, but comparatively to almost any other experience, it’s, it’s, especially compared to what we have in our mind, it’s, we’ve, we have, we’ve never had an incident. And Sally from Colorado asks, is, is it for all ages and physical abilities? Absolutely.

And you can make it, yeah, absolutely. It’s for, we’ve had people walk it in their, in their 80s and 90s, and little, little infants and little babies and, or little toddlers, because you can walk it for a few hours, you can walk it for a few days, you can walk it for a week or more, a couple of weeks. So it’s, it’s something you can design to your own needs and abilities. And I also say, I mean, we’re just, we’re, it’s in the infancy, it’s, it’s like a building this, this path, we’re in the first few years. So everyone who goes is a pioneer, you’re a trailblazer, and, and, and, you know, it may bring you a little bit sometimes out of your comfort zone, but that’s the, that’s the whole idea of, of travel, and, but you can design it really to your taste.

So, but, you know, go there always, always, you know, if you go there with an open heart, expecting, you know, just being open, that it’s remarkable, the transformations that people report, you, you will not just both the inner, inner experiences they have, as well as the experiences with others. So yes, you can, it’s, it’s for everyone, really. It’s designed for everyone, because that’s the whole nature of that story of Abraham and the story of the path is, is inclusive. Yeah, boy, and a vacation with meaning and purpose, and you, like you say, that’s what people are looking for these days. So sounds like an ideal consideration here is we’re in early May, and people are thinking about this summer or next summer, a walk along the Abraham path.

And even, and even like the springtime, where I was just now, I mean, that’s when the flowers are coming out, or in the fall, those are great times to walk, because sometimes you have to be mindful of the weather. I mean, the biggest, the biggest danger is, as our local guides like to say, is, you know, is getting, you know, not bringing enough water. That’s the biggest danger. Right. And Dame in, in London, just says, Wow, it sounds like a trek to enlightenment, a spiritual journey that’s a trek to enlightenment.

So that, that sounds pretty inviting. You know, thanks for sharing that, Dame. And in London, sounds to me like that, too. And, and these days, as we’re looking for vacations that are more than just laying out in the sun, this, this sounds pretty appealing. And who better to talk to than Bill, who started the initiative, and who’s just a few days back from his journey over there.

Bill, I’m going to segue here shortly into just a discussion of oneness in your own life, because I know it’s something very important to you, and it’s, and it’s even an energy in your household. But before we go to that, I wanted to just go, you mentioned earlier in the program that you have a PhD in anthropology, and that, you know, the Abraham Path Initiative is about this one human family. You had stated to me a while back that this is, there are related psychological and spiritual truths in this. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know you have already, but just kind of bring in some of these aspects of psychological and spiritual truths here.

Yeah, to me, I mean, I mean, the founding sort of scientific truth of anthropology is, you know, there’s not two human families. There’s only one. We’re, there’s really, and differences are really only skin deep, if that. And so, you know, that unity is key. And of course, that’s the profound spiritual truth in all traditions, that we’re all one.

And psychologically, sometimes, right now, it’s, you know, it’s a little bit hard sometimes for people to kind of really understand and really understand that unity, which is why, you know, a project like the Abraham Path exists. It’s to help give people a tangible experience of what is intangible. As you said to me long ago on a walk, Steve, it’s to make the intangible tangible. So to me, that’s the great, the great challenge. And for some reason, right now, you’re making me remember an old quote that I’ve always liked, a poem, to me, that’s got, that’s the key to the path and the key to getting to Yes, from an American poet who lived in the 30s.

His name was Edwin Markham. And he said, you know, he was talking about the experience of exclusion, which is really, you know, at the heart of every conflict, you know, behind every conflict is this feeling of being excluded. So it goes, they drew a circle and shut me out, a rebel, a heretic, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle, a much bigger circle, and took them in.

And to me, that’s the key here. That’s the key. So much in the world right now, you know, we’re excluding parts of the human family, going back to your question, Steve. And we feel excluded. And there’s so much of that going on in the world today.

And what’s the remedy for exclusion? It’s inclusion. It’s when you, when people draw a circle excluding you, you draw a wider circle by harnessing, you know, the power of oneness, the power of love. Oh, I love that. We drew a circle that drew them in.

And inclusion is the answer where exclusion is so often the focus and reminds me of the Albert Einstein quote, which I don’t have right here in front of me. But, you know, where he talks about, we’re just stuck in this delusion, you know, that if they kept caring for those closest to us, our family and our task, he says, must be to break through that and to reach out and to, you know, basically connect with and love all of the world around us. That’s it, expand that circle of compassion. That’s the great task. It’s not always easy.

Sometimes it’s extremely difficult. And this is why, you know, I’ve devoted my life to kind of practical methods to help to help in that process. But that’s that is the challenge facing humanity. And and as he recognized, you know, you know, being keenly aware of, you know, the atomic bomb physics and that, you know, that that long, long term survival of humanity and of all life on Earth really depends on us. See, Bill, I think you I lost your audio here.

So we lost Bill’s audio connection.

He’ll be right back. We we’ve got Annette Kennedy and D. Meyer here. D. Meyer is one of the co-hosts that’s with me, Annette Kennedy in the background.

And I want to thank them. They helped set up these calls and the whole summit. And they’ll help us get connected again with Bill. Linda in Virginia says, thank you to all. And thanks, Linda, for sharing that.

And there are many other comments that have come in from people who have shared that they are just really appreciating all the wisdom that Bill Urey is sharing with us today. A man of so many gifts and talents. She founded the negotiation project, co-founded the negotiation project at Harvard University. He created this Abraham Path Initiative, and he’s an author of so many books on negotiation and on life. And hopefully we’re going to get him back.

He is actually a model for living in oneness. There are some people that we meet in life who just have this smile that won’t go away. If you live around Boulder and have met Bill Urey, you know what I mean. He’s somebody who just lives in this energy of oneness and compassion and love. He’s that kind of person.

Don Miguel Ruiz is another person who is like that. Don Miguel and his son, Don Jose Ruiz, are going to be on with us tomorrow morning from 830 to 930 Pacific time. But Bill, you’re back. I’m sorry. I lost you.

My landline ran out of battery for some reason. Oh, no worries. Well, I was just sharing that we’re going to segue over to you, you know, Bill Urey and the person, your practices for living in oneness and kind of how that works in your home. I don’t know if you caught what I was sharing. But you know what?

I’m not sure you would say this about yourself. Again, I see you as a very modest person. But you always have such an infectious, you know, contagious smile on your face and just the energy of oneness. You know, your staff has it too. I’m sure they get it from you.

So I’d love to. Also, I see that there are events that you schedule into, including in Brazil. I know you’re leaving for the airport, you said, today to head down into South America. And I’ve seen you promoted for oneness events where lots of people come together. So I’d like to just go to that more personal level of, you know, what is your own process, Bill, for, you know, connecting with the divine and coming fully alive as part of the divine?

Because I, you know, I see that you do that. Well, it’s a lifelong study for me. And it began to be with, for me, my, you know, my great teacher was nature, really, spending time in nature where nature, going for walks and hikes. It’s like, for me, nature is my first kind of like cathedral or mosque or synagogue or temple. It’s always the beauty.

And it brings me back and connects me to who I am and reminds me that I’m part of this larger universe. It brings me into connection. And so I, so one of my daily practices is to go for a hike in the mountains, which is why I live here in Boulder every day to just drink that in, that connectedness, which is that experience of oneness. And then, you know, just in family, I’ve been blessed with a wife and children are very loving. And so there’s a lot of love and laughter in the household.

And even though, as I mentioned just before the call, you know, we’ve had our challenges with my younger daughter having had, you know, 14 surgeries. We’ve really learned deeply from that. And it’s been a great teacher for us. And so it’s a constant daily practice of learning to appreciate every single day and the blessings that life offers. Gosh, you know, yesterday we had Jennifer McClain with us, Barbara Marks Hubbard and Patricia Ellsberg, Barbara’s sister.

And this theme came up repeatedly of just these incredible hardships that they’d experienced in their life. And challenges Barbara Marks Hubbard’s mother died when she was young. Jennifer McClain sharing of many challenges today that are confronting her and just how these challenges were turned around and made into something good, that there was all of this growth and maturity. And I don’t know that they use this word, but I got it from what they said. Evolution, you know, as a spiritual being from these challenges.

It was turned around and made into a positive. Lemon that was made into a lemonade. And at the beginning of the program you were sharing, I didn’t know that your daughter had been through 14 surgeries. Your daughter, I think you said is 16. And yet you also mentioned she was just last month on national television, you know, the Today Show or something and was given a Guinness World Record.

Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I know.

Gabi is her name and she’s been an incredible teacher to me. And yeah, she’s had – she was born with a rare congenital syndrome called Vaters syndrome which affected her spine and her legs and many organs and so on. So we weren’t even sure she was going to live, certainly to walk.

And so it was really – it was a very challenging situation for my wife and me and her two older brothers just to go through. And we, you know, it was – we now look back on that as a kind of blessed shock because it kind of woke us up in some sense and compelled us to do this kind of inner work to look for our inner resources and to do that. But the amazing story is that in January Gabby announced that she – for her 16th birthday she’d always wanted to break a Guinness – she always wanted to beat the Guinness Book of World Records. It was a fantasy of hers as a child. She tried the longest hopscotch course.

I mean, most socks on one foot. But somehow she was doing volleyball tryouts. And, you know, she doesn’t let anything stop her really. She’s – with all her physical challenges she really just goes out for everything. So she’s going out for volleyball and she couldn’t run the miles.

So the coach said, well, why don’t you plank? And so it’s just this abdominal plank position where you drop on your elbows on the floor and you keep your body absolutely rigid. And most of us can hold it for a minute or two before we start to shake. And anyway, when the other kids were coming back in from their mile run the teacher said, Gabby, it’s been 10 minutes. Are you still in that plank position?

And Gabby said yes. And so she – the light bulb went on. She said, Guinness Book of World Records. And so that was last October. In November she had a surgery.

But in January she was – she said, look, for my 16th birthday this is what I want to do. I want to break the world record and I want to use it to raise money for children’s hospital to really – because they helped her, she wanted to help other kids. So she said as her initial target, you know, raising $5,000 for children’s hospital. She wanted to get the word out. And the world record is like 40 minutes.

So it was a lot. But she started training and she was doing pretty well. And then like a week before the current record holder heard about her and wrote a beautiful note. I mean, just really loving note saying, I heard that you’re trying to beat my record. I just want to let you know that last week I broke my own record and it went up from 40 minutes to an hour and five minutes.

So you’re going to have to do – you’re going to have to do that. And, you know, Gabby just with her indomitable spirit just sort of took that ride in stride. And so then on her – two days after her 16th birthday here in Boulder, which was only three weeks ago, she went for an hour and 20 minutes, which was, you know, twice the existing world record. And last week, a week ago, she was on Good Morning America and the Guinness Book of World Records official showed up and certified that she had, in fact, she was holding the – she could hold the abdominal plank longer than any other woman on earth. So awesome.

And then she turned that into a fundraising activity for Children’s Hospital. Wow. Right. And now she’s up to over $55,000. So for Children’s Hospital, her original record was five.

So to me, it’s just an amazing story of just – of grit and determination and love. And, you know, she was surrounded by the community, which were cheering her on as she was doing it. And she just has that inner spirit that’s indomitable that despite all of her challenges, she was going to break a world record. You know, as one person put it, you know, an abdominally challenged teenager takes on the world’s greatest abdominal challenge. And she did it.

I mean, any of you out there, if you’ve ever done a plank, I mean, you could try it. You know, I can’t do more than two minutes before giving up. And on ABC Good Morning America, the host – you know, the host tried to do it as they were interviewing her. They gave up after about a minute. I love that.

What a great quote. Abominably challenged teenager. If you’re interested in learning more about it, you can – her website is – it’s called Gabi, G-A-B-I-U-R-Y.com. And she’s got her little videos and stuff. It’s really – it’s been an amazing lesson.

I’m just really in awe and really speechless at watching her, you know, rise to the challenge and turn, as you say, you know, weaknesses – perceived weaknesses into strengths and really test your limits. She’s certainly been an inspiration for lots of people around the planet who’ve heard about her now through the Internet. Yeah, it seems this is the journey into oneness. Bill, we’ve got about five minutes left because I’ve got a few things I want to share at the end with everybody. There’s another program after this.

I want to get to a few other things too. But with the – with four or five minutes, I want to just go back to your discussion of oneness in your own life because, you know, in today’s world that – where we’re just so overstimulized and there’s so much just digital this and that everywhere. You talked about how you get out. In our case, we’ve got this beautiful outdoors and you get out and hike and you get connected with nature. You said you drink it in.

Other things, just for our listeners, of course, this summit is about coming fully alive as part of the divine. So really coming into that oneness experience and being blessed by it, washed by it and transformed by it. So just final things you want to share that you might recommend to our listeners for living in oneness in our own life and also for creating this energy in our homes such as what you have with your wife and daughter. Well, one thing I find is that, you know, the very first minutes after waking up to me are like time just to be still, whether it’s to meditate, take a few minutes of silence, just don’t check your email first thing, you know, but just really – I like to, you know, I like to go to what I was saying to that spiritual balcony and just kind of just check in with myself and remember this connection with everything and remind myself of what my, you know, my purpose is on this planet, which is to be an instrument for peace and to just, you know, to me one of the great tools, too, is gratitude. I used to think that, you know, that you were grateful because something good had happened to you, but I’ve learned that actually if you’re grateful something good happens to you, that actually gratitude comes before the good thing, not always just after the good thing, because I find that if I can count my blessings and just – it’s a great lesson I’ve learned from my wife, Lizonne, is that I can just remember all the things in life that I feel grateful for.

It’s just a flow. It just – it brings me into the flow of abundance that helps me in my daily life and helps me deal with any challenges that arise. Beautiful. I love what you share, Bill, and how about just with your – are there any things with your wife or your daughter, you know, insofar as this oneness experience, any things come to mind, experiences with either of them or both of them? Never underestimate the importance of laughter and the sense of humor, because even in the most challenging moments, you know, my wife has an incredible sense of humor, and Gabby does too, and just to kind of make light and, you know, and realize that, you know, that as serious as life is, you can’t take it too seriously.

Just that sort of sense of joie de vivre, of kind of introducing laughter every single day, to me, is one of the great spiritual bounds of life that is not to be underestimated. I love it. Well, you saved the best for last. I have made notes here. I like that you started with, don’t check email, and then went into the things that you do, the meditation and silence and spiritual balcony and check-in and reminding yourself of your purpose, and then these other things, gratitude, which is something that, you know, how do we get to happiness from happiness?

So just gratitude in advance, and then the power of laughter, of humor. I love it, and I do, once again, I see in you, Bill, somebody who is a walking model for these things. You really always have that contagious energy of oneness in your expression. So I want to thank you so much for being here with us. You have shared just so much wisdom and so much hard energy, and you’ve just been amazing.

So I want to thank you so much. Before I get to other thank yous, just a few things here. Once again, you can go to the livinginone.com site, and then down at the bottom, you’ll see the program replay page. It’s the third one over, and over on the right margin, you’ll see May 8th, William Urey. Go ahead and leave your comments and inspirations there.

As well, we do offer the 48-hour free replay for this. So know that that’s available, and for people that want to, that haven’t been taking notes and maybe have missed some sessions or want to share sessions with friends and family, we do offer this $100 off discount during the summit. You’ll see down at the bottom of that registration page, the second one over is upgrade, and you can click on that, see how the upgrade works and all the different options that are available on that discount that’s available during the summit. Next, I want to share, there’s a session coming up here in about 30 minutes. It’s with Dr. Deborah Rosman.

She’s the president and co-CEO of HeartMath, and HeartMath, of course, has so much wisdom that it brings to this discussion of oneness, and I’ll have three co-hosts with me during that program, Barbara Marks-Hubbard, also Barbara Fields, and Annamarie Paterse, who’s in Humanities team. So there are going to be five of us that are part of that program, and you won’t want to miss it. It starts at 10 a.m. Pacific time. And I want to just close with, again, thanks to Bill Urie for being here with us. So much knowledge, so much wisdom, and just so much heart, too, Bill.

Thank you, and I want to thank my colleagues, Dee Meyer, who’s one of the co-hosts of the Living in Oneness Summit, who’s here with me, Nanette Kennedy, and my other colleagues in Humanities team. And last, and definitely not least, I want to thank all of you, the listeners, who have prioritized time for this discussion of living in oneness and coming fully alive as part of the divine. Thank you for being here, and we will see you all in about 30 minutes.

Okay, well, thanks again, what a wonderful panel, and I’d like to now turn this over to my partner here, Barbara Fields, the Executive Director of the Association for Global New Thought, who is the moderator for this next panel. Barbara, are you here?

Yes, we’re all here. All right, over to you. Looking forward.

Yes, I’m here. Great, thank you very much. Okay, let’s get started. So, thank you all of the listeners who have been very generously joining us since early this morning, eight o’clock Pacific time. We are very happy to be beginning now a panel that’s called A New Leadership Model for the 21st Century.

And joining us are Irvin Laszlo, Ambassador Anwar Chowdhury, Steve McIntosh, and Bill Ury. And before we get started, I’m going to invite my assistant at the Association for Global New Thought, Penny Little, to just give a little bit of background information on each of our panelists today, who could actually, if we were to give all of the accomplishments of these people, it would take quite a long time. But we wanna at least give a little sketch for each one so that you’re fully aware of who you’re in conversation with today. So, Penny, would you do that, please? I will.

Hi, everyone. The first speaker is Irvin Laszlo. He’s the founder and president of the Club of Budapest, Chancellor of the Giordano Bruno University, founder of the General Evolution Research Group, Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Hungarian Academy of Science and International Academy of Philosophy of Science, and Senator of International Medici Academy. He’s also won numerous awards and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and 2005. And next is Ambassador Chowdhury, who has devoted many years as an inspirational champion for sustainable peace and development and has ardently advanced the cause of the global movement for the culture of peace that’s energized civil societies all over the world.

As a career diplomat, permanent representative to the United Nations and Security Council, President of UNICEF Board, UN Undersecretary General, the Senate Senior Special Advisor to the UN General Assembly President and recipient of the Youth Peace Award. It goes on and on. You just can’t list all of his accomplishments. Steve McIntosh is a leader in the integral philosophy movement and author of Evolution’s Purpose, an integral interpretation of the scientific story of our origins and integral consciousness in the future of evolution. He currently works as a founding partner of the New Social Policy Foundation, the Institute for Cultural Evolution.

William Ury co-founded Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and is currently a distinguished senior fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project. He co-authored with Roger Fisher, Getting to Yes, a 10 million copy bestseller translated into over 35 languages, and the author of the award-winning Getting Past No. So those are our four panelist speakers. Thank you, Penny. You’re welcome.

Well, hello everyone in whichever time zone you’re in. Thank you for joining us today. This is, you know, in a certain way, it’s kind of nice to be in conversation with the men leaders of our movement of today. I wanted to let folks know that we’re going to begin by asking a question and having a discussion with Irvin Laszlo. Irvin happens to be in Italy at this point.

We’d saw almost midnight his time. So I thought that we would start there just in case the hour became too late. So I’ll begin and ask a question, Irvin, and then you can just give me your impressions as they come to you. The Club of Budapest has just held its 21st anniversary conference, The Flight of the Butterfly, from the vision of planetary consciousness to a platform for planetary action. Thank God.

Would you please share a little about the title of your conference, what that means to you, and what you feel the conference accomplished, and what you feel this has to say about new leadership models for the 21st century? Well, thanks very much, Barbara, for referring to this. Actually, the conference has not taken place yet, unless you can already read the future, which I can’t. It’s going to be on December 5 and 6. We have just announced it.

Oh, okay, well, I can read the future, evidently. But can you tell us a little bit about what you have in store and why did you choose this topic? Well, you know, the Club of Budapest was founded 21 years ago. And it joined me at that time. This is Dalai Lama with Peter Ustinov, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Yehudim Enyuhim, and Vatka Havel.

And so then others joined us. And the idea was, at that time, we are going to talk about a new consciousness. Well, you know, this was 21 years ago, in 93. And then it seemed that one, especially esoteric, far out, what’s going to come onto the international scene with such an esoteric idea. Well, I think we contributed something because whether with us or without us, despite us, but this idea that a new consciousness is needed to solve our problems, to just to survive on this planet and to evolve, that has taken hold.

And what we meant by planetary consciousness at the time was that it’s not that the planet is conscious. At the time, people didn’t know what we mean by it. Now, of course, people talk about global consciousness, planetary consciousness, et cetera. So it’s a much more part of a standard view of the world. But we thought that we should talk about the need to understand who we are and what kind of a world we live in, and that we are part of this world.

At that time, the concept of oneness wasn’t very much on every day discourse, but we had brought forth the idea for planetary consciousness, the consciousness of our oneness with each other. We actually said so. We wrote a manifesto that I drafted and the Dalai Lama went and worked on it with me, and then we finally published that just over 21 years ago. And there we talk about the planetary consciousness being the feeling and the sensing and the ethics and the ethos, we said, of living on Earth as part of a species, part of one species. So now the time has passed, 21 years have passed.

In a way, we are grown up and we want to celebrate that. We now have about 100 members of the two-thirds of them have very well-known personalities, and we are calling them together to ask which way shall we go. I thought that’s why we gave it the title that let’s think of ourselves as a butterfly, you know, the famous butterfly effect. So our little butterfly flaps its wings and it creates some kind of a little current, a little current of thought about the place and role of consciousness in the world and how we have to enter onto this world with that kind of a new thinking that Einstein talked about, so a new consciousness for the new world. And now that we have reached that age where you’re supposed to be grown up, an adult at 31, we have to ask ourselves, what do we do next?

And since I can’t tell you the future, I can’t tell you what our members are going to tell us, but the question is, among the questions that we are posing is, what can we do? What, how can we, for example, create a sustainable world by reinforcing the current world? Can you do that? Or would you have to look for beyond the current world? Is there such a thing as a sustainable world or sustainable development?

Or is there really a non-linearity in the world, a kind of a development which goes through this chaos point or bifurcation point? And in that case, shall we try to stabilize what there is or shall we try to move onto the next stage and how can we do that? So these are among the questions that we’ll be asking. And then whom should we address? You know, these are things that we should be thinking about it here too, you know?

I know, I see that. And also I’m aware that with Masami and Hiru Sayonji of the Goy Peace Foundation, Byakko Shinkokai and the World Peace Prayer Society, you’re in the process of launching the Fuji Declaration. And I’d like to read just a sentence from the beginning. A new phase in the evolution of human civilization is on the horizon. With deepening states of crisis bringing unrest to all parts of the world, there is a growing need for change in our ways of thinking and acting.

We now have the choice of either spiraling into deepening peril or breaking through to a world of dignity and wellbeing for all. So it seems as if, of course, you’ve given this so much thought, so in this particular declaration, you’re getting closer to answering, hopefully, some of the questions that will be also brought up at the conference, is that right? Yes, yes, Barbara, thanks for bringing that up. I mean, I drafted the declaration and Masami Sayonji has developed it further. But it’s basically, it’s a draft that grew out of what I call first the Oneness Declaration.

And when Masami and Hiru Sayonji came to visit me, well, about eight, nine months ago, and then we realized that that would be a good foundation for developing into a declaration where we are talking about a divine spirit, a divine spark that is at the heart of humanity that we have to rekindle. And I think it’s a very important notion. I think it’s a notion that we have in us this natural instinct or intuition that we do belong to each other. We are part of this planet and there’s no healthy organism that wouldn’t be part of it. And wouldn’t be, at least on some level, whether conscious or just instinctive, would realize that.

So this declaration talks to that point, that we have in us something that will make us whole, that will make us one. And it’s a temporary aberration, as it were, that we are forgetting that and we are moving into the world of just unbridled competition and forgetting our coherence, forgetting our belongingness to one another. So thanks for bringing it up. I should add, perhaps, just to take one second, that we are going to present this declaration and we’re already presenting it through the internet so that people would like to endorse it, they’re most welcome to endorse it and to comment on it. But we are going to be formally launching it at a double event, which is going to take place in two places at the same time on two different dates, even though it’s the same time, on the evening of May 16th at the Concert Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark, and in the morning of May 17th at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan.

Only the evening and Copenhagen and the morning at Mount Fuji is the same time, of course. It’s just a different time zone. So we’re going to have a simultaneous broadcast and telecast on first an event in Copenhagen, then immediately following on that an event at Mount Fuji. And we hope that this declaration will embrace East and West and will rekindle, actually, that spark which is in all of us. Yes, thank you.

We have time before next spring to hear more about this initiative and the people who are listening will have the opportunity to follow that, yes? So I’d like to, I’d now, thank you. In case you have to leave us before we actually come to the end of the panel, I just wanted to thank you again, Irwin, for joining us today. And not only that, but for the lifetime of work that you’ve dedicated to these ideas and these causes. You’re truly a pioneering soul, as Barbara Marks Hubbard would put it, and we appreciate you greatly.

You’re a national, no, you’re an international treasure. Well, your initiative is so important that I will always be happy to be part of it. Oneness is the way forward, you know? And we have to recognize that it’s an imperative. It’s something that, it’s not a chance, it’s something that we have to follow.

The alternative is just too unfortunate even to discuss. But I think we are moving toward oneness and to do this and further this is a very great opportunity. I’m very happy to be part of it. Well, thank you. I appreciated what you said just a little while ago about the fact that maybe humanity is in a state of anomaly right now.

In other words, it’s not really expressing its true nature, but we’ve just hit a glitch in the trajectory of human consciousness over eons of time. And I know that it’s a bit of a stretch to make a segue, but we are talking about leadership models for this new century and this new way of thinking. So I’d like to include now the rest of our panel, starting with the notion that we actually have to challenge ourselves to draw from our own years of self-development, spiritual practice, and expertise, because in our own ways, we’ve been trying to demonstrate or become living models for new leadership in this century. It brings to mind the change, we wish to become the change that we want to see in the world. So from an integral perspective, we can speak of universal intrinsic values that are common and comprehensible to all people.

And this is regardless of the nation or the culture or your religion or ideology. So I think I’m gonna start by asking Steve McIntosh, what is spiritually motivated leadership?

Well, thank you, Barbara, for asking me that excellent question. I can say that leadership in general, I think means fulfilling people’s needs. And at the spiritual level, filling people’s needs means helping them fulfill their self-actualization needs.

So spiritually motivated leadership, I think, is always looking for the spiritual element in whatever work that leadership is engaged in. And the way I like to interpret that, to make it more specific, but still at the general level, is to talk about spiritual leadership in terms of the good, the true, and the beautiful, right? The primary values, as argued by some philosophers, that are really a way of talking about spirit and bringing it into our work that is inclusive of just about everybody’s belief system in one way or another. And focusing on the beautiful, the true, and the good as ways of bringing out spirituality in leadership, I think that means being willing to be self-critical. It means being conscious of the moral duties of leadership.

The morality of interpersonal relationships are often either promoted or they can be significantly diminished by good or bad leadership, conscious leadership, as it’s called. And focusing leadership, always bringing it back to what John Mackey calls higher purpose, right? That relates to the beautiful, the true, and the good as well. So from my perspective, conscious leadership, the model of it is the model of looking for self-actualization in whatever we’re doing. And the way to find, the way to sort of uncover the self-actualizing possibilities of whatever work is being led or followed comes from seeing into the heart of these intrinsic values.

So it’s literally along the lines of the good, the true, and the beautiful that our consciousness evolves. So when I think about a model for leadership, for example, in the 90s when I was in the business world, Peter Senge’s book about learning organizations, The Fifth Discipline, became widespread and very popular. And now, over 20 years later, we’re beginning to see a model which we might call going beyond learning organizations to organizations that are specifically focused on evolving consciousness, evolving the consciousness of the people who are being served, evolving the consciousness of those who are involved in the organization. And that requires that the people who undertake the role of leadership do their best to be aware of their own level of consciousness and try to develop it themselves in the process of leadership itself, can be self-actualizing. And that’s why it kind of comes back to the beautiful, the true, and the good as ways that we can lead spiritually and make the world a better place.

I could add that Global Oneness Day is a tremendous form of spiritual leadership, and I’m really proud to be part of it.

Thanks, Steve. You know, I always notice at certain junctures in these conversations that there seems to be, in some of our minds, a disconnect between the leadership that we have and the leadership that we want. So I’m gonna pose a question to my friend, Bill Ury, who’s very experienced at working at these situations that are very much in real time on the ground and challenging to people in desperate situations all over the world. So, Bill, as a general matter, so many people comment that the world doesn’t have the leaders we need at this critical time in our history, but that’s what we have.

So if you had the opportunity to lead a peace process for the 21st century based in an understanding of oneness, let’s say with the current leaders in the Middle East, how would you go about that? What values would be important? What are the kinds of challenges that we face in that critical area of the world that would lead us into the possibility of having a consciousness-based government in that realm? That’s quite a challenge, Barbara. I’m sorry, but it’s just a for instance, if you had the opportunity to lead the peace process.

Okay, well, to me, I was originally trained as an anthropologist, a student of the human story, and my passion happens to be peace. And the way I see it and what I see the Middle East as being kind of a microcosm of we’re living in an age of what anthropologists might call the human family reunion, where all the different tribes on the planet, all the different language groups, and anthropologists might say there are 15,000 of them are for the first time connected to each other, in touch with each other, aware of each other. And like most family reunions that we know, it’s not all peace and light, and there’s a lot of conflict. There’s a lot of anger and even hatred. And so the question is, how do we learn to get along with each other?

And the Middle East, to me, is a little bit like, if humanity were one single body, the Middle East is a little bit like the pinched nerve of the human body. It’s where all the pain tends to get referred. And the question is, how do you release that pain? But the Middle East, to me, when people focus on the Middle East, we focus about them as if it’s them, but it’s actually us. It’s the children of Abraham.

For whatever reason, the Middle East is kind of the symbolic heart of the planet, which is why it draws so much attention. And the struggle that’s going on there, that’s actually a struggle going on in the entire planet right now, and actually within each one of us, is how do we respond to this human family reunion? Do we respond, as some of us are tempted, by separating ourselves and by defending ourselves and attacking others, in other words, by exclusion? Or do we try, as hard as it might be, to include? And those are the two tendencies right now, and the jury is still out about which one will prevail.

But the kind of leadership that we need, going back to your question, is a leadership that’s grounded in the unity of humanity and grounded in the practice of radical inclusion, which involves the very difficult act of including even those who are excluding us. There’s a poem that I’ve always loved from an American poet from the 30s, Edwin Markham, which goes, they drew a circle and shut me out, a rebel, a heretic, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle and took them in. And that, to me, is that strategy of people drawing circles, shutting people out on the basis of religion, on the basis of nationality, on the basis of gender, on the basis of difference in ideology.

We tend to do that, just defensively. We’re pushing them out, and we drop bombs. We kill, whatever we do. And to me, the challenge, which I think, in terms of going back to leadership, which was heralded by people like Gandhi or King or Mandela or Malala, which is to include, which is to include even the excluders. And to me, that’s the basis on which we’d have to kind of reimagine what would go on in the Middle East.

But for example, just to take that very particular thing, is it possible to envision, for example, a community? I mean, I grew up part of my childhood in Europe. I mean, if you were in the ruins of Europe in 1945, and you said, you know, 50 years from now or 60 years from now, this will be the most peaceful, prosperous part of the planet, people would have thought you were insane. But basically, they evolved an inclusive community, economic, political, cultural, based on a kind of an idea of Europe. And the question is, is that possible in the Middle East?

Can we plant the seeds of something that a generation from now or even earlier might be a community, a community of Abraham? You know, I mean, the shared identity, the shared cultural story of that region is this ancient journey taken by Abraham. And based on, you know, based on some kind of shared economy, that happens because it’s the place that so many people care about, billions of people on the planet care about. It has incredible potential for tourism. So for me, the, you know, the future of the Middle East is, you know, do we go, do we go towards terrorism or do we go towards tourism?

And basically, I think the key principle there, I mean, when I go to the Middle East, as I was not too long ago, you know, talking, for example, to leaders on all sides in the Syrian civil war, the word that I keep on hearing, to me, that’s kind of the keynote, which was a word that was mentioned earlier is the word dignity. What would it mean, to ask the question, what would it mean to found a community based on human dignity in all its forms? Personal dignity, economic dignity, being able to make a livelihood, political dignity, having a voice, and cultural dignity, the respect for differences. And to me, that’s where I would begin the conversation about peace. Radical inclusion.

I think when, radical inclusion. I was thinking as you were speaking that sometimes the problem is, we tend to create a demonized stereotype as opposed to realizing that a culture and a region is made up of individuals, human beings with individual thoughts and their own values. And as much as they are products of their culture, they are also unique expressions. And some are more open to the ideas of inclusion than others and that’s a complicated discussion. But I know that in your work, you’ve always looked for how to include those people who are basically ready to move to a higher level of the discussion or open to the possibilities of cooperation and reconciliation rather than the fundamentalist elements which are very hard to change from outside rather than from within.

If you could, just before I ask a question of Ambassador Chowdhury, could you just give us a few minutes to describe what you’ve done with the Abraham Path Initiative? For sure. I have not done anything about that. You are asking me? Oh, no, I’m sorry.

I was asking Bill Ury, Ambassador, before I had a question for you about the United Nations. Okay, I think the sentence did not reach me properly. I’m sorry, yes, please. We’re just wrapping up with Bill’s answer about an initiative that he’s been very involved in in the Middle East. Yeah, the Abraham Path actually has everything to do with this need for inclusion and respect for human dignity.

It’s basically, very simply, it’s a path that retraces the footsteps of Abraham and his family 4,000 years ago that ends up as a thread reconnecting the entire Middle East and going through 10 different countries just following the cultural memory of this journey that unites everyone in that region. So it’s a reminder that we’re all one family in the end, one human family. And Abraham is known for, is loved and revered in that region, as well as around the world for kindness towards strangers, for hospitality, for loving kindness. And that’s a value that I think we all need to remember in this time of globalization. And so the path is a little bit like the famous pilgrimage path in Europe of Santiago de Compostela or the Appalachian Trail here, but going through the Middle East.

And it seemed like a wild and crazy idea, but over the last five or six years, it’s actually coming into incipient reality and it now exists in different parts of the Middle East as a walkable path, welcoming hundreds. And actually there are thousands of people who’ve begun to walk it and it exists. And if you go on the Abraham Path website, abrahampath.org, it’s kind of an online guidebook, but it’s something that’s being created. It’s not really a creation, we’re just dusting off these footsteps, but it’s to evoke the value that people in that region are most proud of, which is a secret to the rest of the world, but which is the way in which strangers, unbelievably, are treated as sacred guests. And if you walk the path, you will find out what I mean, because you stay in people’s homes and they welcome you into their homes.

And so it’s a very different image than the image that we now have of the Middle East, which is all of war and conflict. And it actually reaches back to that divine spark that exists in everyone, and that Irvin Laszlo was talking about. And so I invite everyone to look at it and think about walking it with us, physically or virtually.

That’s a marvelous project, Bill, I have to say. That’s really great.

Yeah, it’s really important that people actually hear about what is possible, not only is possible, but is being demonstrated right now. I believe it was cited as one of the most important new walking paths or journeys of its kind by National Geographic. Isn’t that right, this year? That’s right. The National Geographic Traveler has a kind of cover story about the 10 best new walking trails in the world.

Walking trails like around the Himalayas, or in Provence, or in Wales, or in Italy, in various places. The number one they cited was the Abraham Path. It just suggests that it does exist. It’s an incipient reality, and it’s awaiting all of our footsteps. Exactly, and as Gandhi put it, peace is possible.

So I’d like to go on, and now, Ambassador Chowdhury, I’d like to speak with you for a moment. You’ve devoted so much of your life in service of a more peaceful and just world through the United Nations. You know how much good an enormous global organization can accomplish, and you know how challenging it can be to accomplish things through an enormous bureaucracy. So I’d like to ask you to speak a little bit about what signs of a new leadership for the 21st century do you see within the UN itself, and what are some of the things that characterize that kind of leadership? Well, before doing that, Dr. Fields, I would recollect what happened in May, on 20th of May in 2010, when the humanities team initiated 50,000 signatures from 168 countries appealing to the world body, the United Nations, to declare an annual global oneness day recognizing humanity’s inner unity.

They were not received by anybody from the United Nations. I came out of the United Nations a few years before that, and as a former Under Secretary General, civil society decided that they will hand over the petition to me, and I was delighted, honored, and excited to receive those petitions in front of the meditation room of the United Nations on 20th of May, 2010. And this year, that year was the first UN for the first global oneness day because the petitioners appealed to the member states and the United Nations to declare such a day, and I told them that given the politics of the United Nations, it may be an uphill task for many years to achieve that decision. So I suggested to them that go ahead and declare one chosen day as a global oneness day initiated by the civil society of the world, so that that is what resulted in the, it was 24th of October, and happy United Nations to all of you because that is the day which was chosen to have the first global oneness day observed in 2010. And from that, every year we are now having this, and I’m delighted I had participated in few of your earlier days, and this one.

So I believe that this, on that occasion, I said that unless we have a sense of solidarity among the peoples of the world, all our efforts for development and peace and security will go nowhere. And I think the concept of oneness brings about an appreciation of humanity’s interdependence, which supports tolerance, understanding, and solidarity. These are the necessary steps towards peace. So let me mention that United Nations as the most universal body existing now had been able to trigger many initiatives which has enriched humanity as a whole in terms of regular processes in life, and also in terms of bringing nations, regions of the world together. And I would like to emphasize on this occasion in the context of your question, the panel before us discussed spirituality in the world, in the context of global oneness.

And I believe that spirituality and oneness are conceptually very well integrated, and that is very important for us to bear in mind as we are talking about new leadership. So what I would suggest that in this context that leadership will not emerge on its own unless it has a citizenry or it has peoples who would throw up that kind of leadership of the new era that we are expecting to enter. And that is closely linked with the idea or the concept of what the UN is now espousing very strongly, that is the concept of global citizenship. Global citizenship is an important element in the Global Education First Initiative of the Secretary General of the United Nations. He has launched that initiative in 2012, and out of the three objectives of that initiative, the third one, the first one is, of course, increasing enrollment in the schools, creating facilities.

Third, second is the quality of education. And third, that education should lead to creation of global citizens all over the world. I think that is a very important conceptual and practical effort which is being made by the United Nations to connect with the newer visions that are emerging now throughout the world. And I think that global solidarity perception will be strengthened by global citizenship which can be promoted through education. And I believe that two things are very well connected, and the UN had been in the forefront of in making initiatives and efforts in these two areas.

The first is, of course, the culture of peace, which was created through a conceptual development that one has to have peace first. The inner peace is very important. So that we can transform that into a global peace. So peace within is very important for all of us, for the humanity to embrace global peace. And that program of action of the United Nations on the culture of peace has been energizing civil society, the member states, organizations, and institutions in a big way.

We have been having a political sort of support to that conceptual development and actions reflecting implementation of those. That program of action is coming through a high-level global forum that the president of the United Nations General Assembly is convening every year since 2012. So that is a kind of new leadership that I believe that UN is encouraging and is also supporting in a very effective way. The United Nations, I believe, is composed of firstly member states, secondly the secretariat, thousands of UN staff led by the UN Secretary General, and third, I believe, third group is civil society, the people’s organizations who need to support the work and need to actually effectively implement the decisions of the United Nations, be it for the Millennium Development Goals, and now we are creating the Sustainable Development Goals for the next 15 years. So all these things cannot be implemented effectively, particularly at the national level, without civil society.

And so leadership has- I am, no, please, I would just like- Let me conclude with one more sentence. And all these things are now coming to the forefront with the strong support to equality of women’s participation. And I believe that leadership, new leadership, has to recognize and include equal and full participation of women at all decision-making levels. That is an essential element without which no new leadership model can be thought of in this world. And I think United Nations is supporting those areas in a very strong way.

I am done. Well, I’m certainly not going to argue with your last point. My motto is, she who does the work has the power. So I’d like to continue a thought that you initiated a moment ago, and it has to do with all the different levels of participation that go into forming new leadership. So I think this question is for Steve McIntosh.

We had a conversation not too long ago, and we talked about distinguishing between hierarchical leadership and shared leadership more at a grassroots level. How to balance the gifts of enlightened institutions with those of enlightened citizenship, which Ambassador Chowdhury was just now referring to. So given that we all have different roles to play that reflects our passion or our purpose, and we can’t really measure this by what’s more or less valuable, how do we translate this into collaboration and cooperation at both levels?

Various

Well, that’s an excellent question. I think, though, you said we can’t really judge this in terms of what’s more valuable or less valuable.

I think that’s indeed our duty. You know, that’s the duty of effective leadership is to be able to see which way is forward, to sort of, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I conceive of leadership as filling people’s needs. And people’s needs are often directly related to the problems that they face, you know, both the material and spiritual, cultural, spiritual, all kinds of problems. So solving those problems involves having a keen sense of the direction of greater value, the direction of solution. So I think it’s our duty to be aware that too much hierarchy is certainly a negative thing, but to vilify hierarchy and eliminate it all in any kind of leadership situation could be equally dysfunctional, you know, cooperation and competition, so to speak, these are in a polarity where each side meets the other, right, each side generates value in its own way, and the two sides of any kind of polarity like that generate value most effectively when they’re ruled by the other side of the polarity, right, rather than being stifled by it.

But to translate this into something pragmatic, one of the things that, our central focus at the moment with the Institute for Cultural Evolution, which is this nonprofit think tank I’m founding with some others, we’re working on developing an effective method for evolving consciousness, for raising consciousness, because in some ways, every problem, almost every human problem, except for maybe a natural disaster, can be understood as a problem of consciousness, because if we could effectively raise consciousness or evolve consciousness around these problems, we’d have an effective solution. I mean, if we’re participating in the emergence of a new worldview, as you spoke of at the beginning, then this worldview, like the emergence of previous worldviews in history, is gonna need an essential method. So just like the modernist worldview brought forth the scientific method, right, which improved the human condition immensely, the worldview that we’re participating in now, I think, promises to have a kind of a method. I mean, if we were as good at raising consciousness as we are at curing disease, if we had a science of the internal realms of consciousness and culture that was, could sort of reach hold and grab hold of people’s consciousness, gently persuading them to take a wider view, or to persuade them into a higher level of awareness, then we’d have something equivalent to a kind of a second enlightenment. So that’s how I conceive of leadership in terms of the evolution of consciousness, and getting practical about it means exploring and developing this method.

Well, that sounds like it’s not exactly a quantifiable methodology in terms that we’ve encountered before, because it’s easy enough to understand biology and neurophysiology in linear terms. But the kinds of practices that you’re talking about now are a little less precise in that way. So, I mean, the concept of it is absolutely intriguing, and I know that you’re doing some incredible work, but I wonder how this translates among different cultures outside of our Western way of thinking.

Sure, well, there’s plenty of metrics that we could apply to measuring the evolution of consciousness. I think the most reliable one is the fruits of the beautiful, the true, and the good that people can bear in their lives, whether it’s the fruits of beauty, truth, and goodness in an organization, or the fruits of the spirit in the lives of individuals.

Again, this calls not really the context where we can get into some of the more meaty details of that, but measuring it and grabbing hold, making concrete what was once abstract or vague is part of the task of leadership for the 21st century.

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. It’s intriguing. I’ve switched tracks a little bit. I know that Bill Ury accompanied my friends at the Association for Global New Thought and other world leaders and thinkers to a couple of events where we met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Bill, I think you were in India and in Italy with us, right? I was in Italy, yeah, in Trent and Rome, yeah, uh-huh. Right, and I just wanted to mention for a moment that we came from many different places for those meetings, and we had a lot of different orientations among us, but there seemed to be a kind of great universal leveler of the playing field in His Holiness the Dalai Lama who was speaking in very clear terms of values like compassion and kindness and nonviolence, not because they were Buddhist or because they belonged to any segment of the society, but because they seemed to be intrinsic values shared by all human beings. So I wonder if you remember anything about that experience and that you could share now. I do, they were called the Synthesis Dialogues, and it was a really unusual meeting of people from civil society, people from many different faith backgrounds, and meeting with the Dalai Lama.

And one thing that always strikes me is just, was the Dalai Lama telling us a story about a monk who had come to him who had been imprisoned and tortured, actually, for many years in a prison in China. And when he arrived to see the Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama asked him, were you afraid during all those years of imprisonment? And the monk said, yes, I was afraid. And the Dalai Lama, what were you most afraid of? And he said, I was most afraid of losing compassion for my jailers.

And that story of that monk, I mean, someone who had gone through incredible suffering, and yet what his focus was, was not losing that spark, that light, that allowed him to understand and feel compassion and empathy for his jailers, to me, points the way to what very practically, we need to relearn and learn which is a kind of empathy that all of us have that gift of empathy, every child has it. And it’s about cultivating it. And I’m inspired by many different schools and innovation of how do you kind of cultivate that ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes? And perhaps the key practice in that is the practice, very practically, of listening, of actually listening, not in the way that we ordinarily think of listening, which is just hearing the words, but actually listening to what’s behind the words, listening to the human being there, listening to their heart. And coming back to the theme of leadership, to me, that’s my dream is a world in which every child, we teach listening as importantly as we teach reading, that in fact, listening is learning how to read and it’s learning how to connect.

And to me, that’s the practice of oneness. And I look forward to a world in which leaders are, we choose our leaders based on how well they listen, not just on how well they talk. Did you just come up with that one on the spot? I did. Because that’s really a good point.

I like that. You know, it makes, pardon? It is also very important. Listen, but also act accordingly. Yes, I think there’s a sequence there.

In fact, when I’m speaking with all of you, it comes to mind that before we talk about what our new leaders consist of, we’re actually having a conversation about an actual new way of defining leadership itself. I think it might in the future look very different than it has in the past. And I think that some of the methods we use now for global communications, most importantly, internet and social media, have changed, especially for the next generation culture, have changed the playing field quite significantly. And their ability to listen and interact with one another in generations that come after us is painting for them quite a different picture than the one that we grew up with, which was an extremely exclusive and separatist picture. And I hold out great hope for the future because I’m in contact with some of these younger ones who really have a much broader understanding of brothers and sisters in other cultures because they grew up interacting with these people and they don’t really see them as different or other.

Is there anyone on the panel who would like to comment about that? I would like, this is Anwarul Chowdhury, and I would like to emphasize also the other sort of side of identifying new leadership. That is, the leadership has to also grow from the citizenry, the people. And that is why I emphasized the aspect of global citizenship. Today’s people, given the interdependence and interconnectedness of the world, has to feel as a part of a bigger human family.

They have to believe in oneness of humanity. That is extremely important. Unless we grow up learning that, I think the leadership which will come out of our society’s communities will not reflect the true leaders that we need to run the world in a peaceful, nonviolent way. And at the same time, develop in a way that it makes the quality of each of our community’s lives better. Bill, you’ve got an amazing daughter who’s 16, 17, 16 now?

Is that right? Right. What are, so I can imagine some of the conversations you’re having in your kitchen these days, what are some of Gabby’s thoughts about where the world is going? Well, she’s actually had a rather unusual story. She came to those synthesis dialogues that you were talking about in Rome.

And so did your dog, by the way. Your poodle. All sentient beings. And she’s grown up in a world where she speaks many different languages, Portuguese and Spanish and English. Her mother’s from Brazil.

So she’s a global citizen, as the ambassador was saying, and as are her brothers. And one thing I think that they’re clear about is young people these days are connected through the web in a way that’s just seamless across the world. And for example, she set as a goal for herself for her 16th birthday. She had many, many surgeries in her life in a hospital, and she decided for her 16th birthday that she was gonna break a world record for holding the abdominal plank. And it was impossible for her because she was abdominally challenged.

But lo and behold, on her 16th birthday, she was able to actually hold this position, which I can barely hold for a minute. She was able to hold it for an hour and 20 minutes and break the world record and enter this Guinness Book of World Records. And doing it, and this is key, she decided to do it to raise awareness and for children who have to spend time in hospitals and raise funds. So she raised funds for the children’s hospital here from all over the world, from at least 30 or 40 different countries using the web. And that’s a kind of a, and I think her video that she circulated went to, I think, over 150 different countries, over 100,000 downloads.

And she was able to raise in a few days, $58,000 for children who have special needs like her. And it just, to me, is an example of the leadership of young people these days, super empowered by the power of the web and their ability to reach each other across the world. And so that’s the kind of, that inspires me to think about what the next generation can do to actually bring about this global leadership that’s so dearly needed. I know, that video is one of the few things that actually brought me to tears in quite a long time. I mean, it’s an incredible story.

And as we’re winding up here, we’ve just got a couple minutes left, and I’m gonna ask you all just to share a couple of thoughts. But I think it’s important that, not only should we be sober and informed about the real challenges that we face in terms of leadership in the world, but because this is Global Wonders Day, and because we’re here on the planet to manifest whatever, what we will, and I would prefer to choose hope rather than annihilation. When I think about things like that, and what young people are doing today, I would like to leave us with the idea that there’s hope and there’s blessing and there’s joy that we can invoke everywhere if we just listen and pay attention and open our eyes. So Steve or Bill or Ambassador Chowdhury or Irvin, if you still happen to be with us, does anyone have any parting remarks? Well, I believe this is Anwar Chowdhury again, and I believe that a deeper understanding of global oneness is very key.

And that is why I believe that this day will contribute in a big way to creating the global citizens that we are talking about. And I believe that all the people who are involved and connected with energizing summit on the occasion of the Global Oneness Day needs to be commended immensely by all of us. And I believe that this is a wonderful initiative and should expand more and more in the coming years. Well, thank you. Thank you all so much, Ambassador Chowdhury and Steve McIntosh and Bill Urie and Irvin, who’s not with us on the call.

But thank you for making the time today. You know, I know to me and to the many people who are listening from all over the world that this is very, very important to hear from you and we’re very grateful for your time. So before we move on to our next panel, which is actually a keynote interview by Steve Farrell with Marianne Williamson, I’d like to say again, thank you and goodbye, and we’ll take about 10 seconds of silence before we move on to the next program.

Thank you, Barbara. Thank you.

Thank you for leading us.