Compilation Part I

Dr. Robert Muller

Born in Belgium in 1923 and raised in the Alsace-Lorraine region in France, Robert Muller experienced constant political and cultural turmoil during his youth. His grandparents had five successive nationalities (French, German, French, German, French) without leaving their village as a result of three wars (1870-1871, 1914-1918, 1939-1945). Often as a child, Robert Muller would look out of his window at the border he could not cross and long for the day when he, like the birds, the clouds, the sun and the stars, would no longer have to observe the imaginary line. Today, thanks to the dream and effort of his compatriot Robert Schuman who similarly hated these borders, Robert Muller's passport reads, "European Union" with the sub-title France, and he is free to cross the abolished borders of fifteen western European countries.

Robert Muller knew the horrors of World War II, of being a refugee, of Nazi occupation and imprisonment. During the war he was a member of the French Resistance. After the war he returned home and earned a Doctorate of Law from the University of Strasbourg. In 1947 he entered and won an essay contest on how to govern the world, the prize of which was an internship at the newly created United Nations.

Dr. Muller devoted the next 40 years of his life behind the scenes at the United Nations focusing his energies on world peace. He rose through the ranks at the UN to the official position of Assistant-Secretary-General. He has been called the "Philosopher" and "Prophet of Hope" of the United Nations. Robert Muller is a deeply spiritual person. From his vantage point of a top level global states-person he has seen a strong connection between spirituality and the political/cultural scene.

Robert Muller created a "World Core Curriculum" and is known throughout the world as the "father of global education." There are 43 Robert Muller schools around the world with more being established each year. The "World Core Curriculum" earned him the UNESCO Peace Education Prize in 1989. Based on this curriculum and his devotion to good causes, Dr. Muller has drawn up a "Framework for World Media Coverage" as a public service, as well as a "Framework for Planetary and Cosmic Consciousness" and a "Framework for the Arts and Culture".

Now Dr. Muller is in active "retirement" at the UN University for Peace he co-created with President Rodrigo Carazo in demilitarized Costa Rica. He is in great demand to make speeches to educational, environmental, spiritual and political conferences around the world. Dr. Muller concentrates his efforts on promoting greater human understanding and global awareness. He has received many awards, e.g. the Albert Schweitzer International Prize for the Humanities, the Eleanor Roosevelt Man of Vision Award and was nominated 21 times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Muller lives most of the year at his small farm overlooking the University of Peace, on a sacred indigenous hill, Mt. Rasur, from which according to indigenous prophecy, a civilization of peace will extend to the entire world. His traditional Costa Rican house is located just up the hill from the Peace Monument of the University. In addition to his duties at the University, he devotes time to his writings and is an internationally acclaimed, multi-lingual speaker and author of many books published in various languages. He has published his Testament to the UN as well as his plans and dreams for a peaceful, happy world.

At the prompting of many of his friends, admirers and non-governmental organizations Robert Muller was a candidate as a global citizen in 1996 for the post of Secretary General of the United Nations.

In 1998 he was appointed co-chairman, with Dr. Karan Singh, of a World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality. The Global Peoples' Assembly in Samoa in April 2000 honored him as its Lifelong Honorary President. In 2002 he received the prestigious World Citizenship Award of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in California. After his Testament to the UN, (see at end of this volume the list of his books in various languages) he wrote also his Testament to Life in three volumes of The Miracle, Joy and Art of Living. On 24 October 2002 - United Nations Day and the day of the award ceremony of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation - the first volume of his biography by Douglas Gillies Prophet, The Hatmaker's Son was launched to the public.

Preface

At this beginning of the third millennium I offer these reflections on the miracle, joy and art of living, written during a half of century of service with the first universal organization on Earth, the United Nations. May they be of help to the individual and collective search for peace, happiness and fulfillment on our beautiful planetary home circling in God's vast, mysterious universe.

The art of optimum happy human living and fulfillment, of proper love and care for our miraculous Earth are the next phase of our evolution. May these markings from my life be a contribution to it.

Volume 1

Chapter 1

Our Place in the Universe

Only a cosmic or heavenly approach, i.e., a correct view of our place in the universe and in time can help us find our right attitude and feelings towards life, our planet, our fellow humans and ourselves.

Life then appears as a true miracle, a tremendous gift of cosmic consciousness, a fabulous glimpse into the incredible, fathomless universe, an opportunity to be co-Creators with God and evolution. Yes, it is an immense luck to be alive.

We humans must still learn to see the largest realities around us: the vastness of the universe and the eternity of time. And yet, how many people pay attention to them? Most of us live blindly, glued to the immediate sights and sounds around us, seldom lifting our eyes, hearts, minds and souls to the heavens and to the breathtaking beauty of the universe.

Spiritual people are blessed with that ability. This is why they are usually happy and serene people: They "know" better.

And the priests say rightly: Sursum corda, lift your hearts.

We should never forget our heavenly, cosmic origin and nature.

I would advise every searching human being to place his search and to search his place within these four vastest realities:

the total universe

total time

the total Earth

the total human family.

No dog, no cat, no animal looks at the sky and the stars. They see only their immediate environment. Humans alone can extend their senses into the infinite and eternity. A cell of my body cannot rise above itself and try to understand the secrets of my being, much less of the Earth and of the universe. Only humans can do that. This is the divine, cosmic spark in us. This is why our search for knowledge, or science, is in reality a spiritual quest. This is why we have the privilege and the duty to govern and manage our planet as a sacred trust, as a unique, miraculous, still evolving achievement of the universe.

Perhaps in the evolution of the universe there comes a time when a species has discovered most secrets of its environment and becomes the master and manager of a planet. We seem to have reached that stage in our evolution. It entails vast, staggering responsibilities.

The central challenge of our time, as of all times, is to find the right relationships between humanity, the Earth, the heavens and eternity.

From the mail I receive, from the articles and books I read, from conferences I attend, from UN debates and documents, I have the unmistakable impression that the whole human race is now engaged collectively in seeking its meaning and ways on this planet in the universe. From individual seeking we are passing to collective seeking. We are entering a great new phase of evolution!

The universe is an infinite, eternally changing cosmos of cosmoses, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. And among these cosmoses, blessed with my thirty trillion cells, my brain, my will, my heart and my soul, I am a stupendous cosmos of my own, made of an infinite number of cosmoses linked through matter, energy, senses, heart and soul to the entire Earth and heavens. What immense, beautiful opportunities and responsibilities to do good this implies! What happiness, what luck to be alive!

A durable fame can be achieved in our time only by those who seek the ultimate meaning of life and help formulate the right framework and philosophy of life on our planet, i.e., those who see it correctly within the total Creation and time. We need a new ideology for humanity and for our planet. This is progressively being done in the world's first universal, meta-biological evolutionary organization of the Earth and humanity, the United Nations.

Humanity fully depends on the sun and on this Earth for living. Hence we must respect our star and our planet, cherish them and treat them as sacred. And yet, we seem to have lost contact with them. We sleep and no longer pray when the sun rises. We live imprisoned in cities of steel and cement. We hear radio and watch television instead of contemplating Mother Earth's nature and her wondrous gifts. We are mistaken. We are on a wrong trail, as our Indian brothers say. We should make daily offerings to the sun and to the Earth and say with our brethren and sisters in the monasteries: "This is a good day to live and to glorify God."

We are linked with everything in the heavens and on Earth. And yet, like every blade of grass and grain of sand, we are each unique and unrepeatable in all eternity. What a wonder to be alive!

The sky is so beautiful, so infinitely blue, and yet an astronaut flying to the moon, soon after leaving the Earth enters a world of darkness. Our "infinite" blue is only a few miles thick, a minuscule layer in the immense universe. How lucky we are to live on such a beautiful planet! How intensely we must cherish it, protect it, preserve it! It is all we have and will ever be given in the universe. Nothing will be added to it.

The Earth is a solar child. All life on it derives from the sun. Ancient cultures which worshipped the sun were not wrong.

We should not see the Earth as separate from the sun. We should see the sun, the Earth and all teeming, evolving life forms on our planet as one interdependent whole, as a Sun-Earth reality.

We take our sun and Earth for granted. And yet, they are incredible, mystery-filled, mind-boggling phenomena in the universe. We should be in endless awe and admiration before them, in communion with them.

According to one of the most ancient peoples of this planet, the Yanomami people of Brazil, keepers of the memory of Creation, the role of humans is to protect the continuity of life in our solar system. In order to do that we must all be "lamps of concordant tension".

In the vast universe, we humans are true kings, almost Gods. We know so much, feel so much, dream so much, query so much, discover so much. We will not rest until we see, know, feel and understand all there is in the heavens and on Earth. We unquestionably are of a cosmic nature. We want to reach the outer expanses of the universe. We are a transcending species capable of lifting itself beyond its capacities and senses by a universal urge. We are stupendous little nebulas of life on a tiny, solid, watery, warm planet, trying to reach out for the stars and the outer limits of heaven. What a prodigious species we are! What an exciting adventure it is to be human! What a teeming laboratory, what a palace full of treasures our planet is in the vast universe!

And how could it be otherwise, since we are energy, matter and soul of the universe which has passed through many starforms before our present planetary incarnation? Hence the instinct of our divine or cosmic origin and our longings for the heavens and prayers to God. In each of us is all the past experience of the universe, of all past life forms and all our ancestors. You can therefore best learn the meaning of life by looking deeply into yourself.

We should be ready to report at any time to a celestial inspection team. I hope the United Nations will someday publish a yearly report to the Universe, and the religions yearly reports to God or the gods.

Our planet is so small and part of such a tiny solar system among trillions of solar systems of a small galaxy among trillions of galaxies of a cluster of galaxies among trillions of super-galaxies, that our efforts to understand Creation resemble those of a flea trying to understand the whole planet Earth! And yet, we are doing it!

We live in the universe. Hence we are universal beings. We must pursue our evolutionary elevation into fully transcended cosmic beings. We are a rare, unique form of life at the spearhead of cosmic evolution. It is our duty toward the universe, from which we come and receive everything, to fulfill our cosmic destiny. As a first step, we must define that destiny!

Every year, the UN receives a report on radio waves in the universe to detect if there are any other life forms in the heavens. Not a single one has so far been received. We might well be all alone and unique in the cosmos!

Kepler was right when through astronomy and astrology he tried to determine the cosmic laws which should rule life on Earth. And we are right when we try to lift ourselves by our bootstraps through science, religions and world organizations to the heavens in order to fully grasp our cosmic nature, celestial home and destiny.

The spinning of our planet around the sun seems immense to us. And yet, in the vast universe, the Earth is so small that it can barely be seen from the sun! At a distance of a few light years, our planet becomes invisible, a mere speck of dust in the universe. And yet, we are. We are even a lot! The cosmic microbe I am is able to be conscious of most of the universe, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small!

Once in a museum I saw on a huge wall the photograph of the Milky Way, our galaxy. I looked for our sun and planet and found only an arrow with these words: "The sun cannot be seen but is located somewhere in this area."

I was dumbfounded: "If not even our sun and Earth can be seen, how small and irrelevant I must be in the universe!"

But after a while, my optimism took over again and I said to myself: "No, I am not irrelevant and minuscule! I am as big as that galaxy because I belong to a species which was able to take that picture."

In the past, it was only exceptional, genial, godly beings like Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, or sensitive artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven who were cosmic beings. Today every child can be educated (inducated) into a cosmic being, thanks to the tremendous knowledge humanity now possesses.

Humanity has now a computer-photography of the remotest milky way of galaxies. Its distance is 15 billion light-years away! Multiply 300.000 km (the distance covered by light in a second) by 60, again by 60, then by 24, then by 365 and finally by 15 billion, and you will obtain the staggering figure of kilometers of 142 followed by 21 zeros!

On a clear night, the human eye can see about 6000 objects in the sky: satellites, planets, stars and galaxies. Through the biggest telescope on Earth, astronomers can see 40 billion objects. With the first telescope in space, we can see from 5 to 10 trillion objects in heaven! And with the first under-sea telescope we will even "see" black holes, quasars and galactic nuclei!

The same is happening with the infinitely small. More than 200 sub-particles of the atom have been discovered. The distance of one of them to the next higher particle is comparable to the distance between our Earth and the sun!

Tell this to a cave-man, to Socrates or to George Washington to see their reactions! We must be proud to be living today. This is said to all children on the first day of their attendance of a Robert Muller School, the new schools of global, cosmic education.

Remark of a little boy to his mother when he came home from a Robert Muller school:

"Mammy, did you know that we are living in heaven?"

Every head of state and every human being should remember this and derive from it a deep joy and sense of responsibility.

Someday soon we will discover our true cosmic meaning. Then everything will fall into place on planet Earth. Then government will become a sacred duty, a respect for divine, cosmic laws and no longer the object of narrow humans wills, whims, interests, gains and ambitions.

A face glued to another face cannot see that face. Until we saw our total Earth from space, we could not see the Earth, we could not understand her. We saw the stars and the heavens and we discovered God, the Father. Now we can see the Earth, and we discover beautiful goddess Eartha, Gaia, our Mother in all languages.

The first duty of Earth government will be to determine what is right in the total framework of the universe, of time, of our planet and of humanity. Then the real, most advanced human history will begin!

If you want to have a sense of infinity and of eternity, look at the sky and the stars. If you want to see the beauty of the small, look at a flower or a grain of sand.

As William Blake said so beautifully:

"To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour."

If you wish to give children a glimpse of the immensity of the universe, of the vast expanses of the infinitely large and of the teeming complexity of the infinitely small, i.e. the colossal range of human knowledge, take them on the same day to an astronomical observatory and to an atomic bubble chamber!

On a wall in my office on the top floor of the United Nations I had this list of major segments of our place in the universe. It reaches from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. On each of these layers, humanity has begun to cooperate actively in one or several of its world agencies:

Our planetary home in the universe

Astrophysics and outer space

Our relations with the sun

The Earth's physics

The Earth's climate

The atmosphere

The biosphere

The seas and oceans

The polar caps

The arable lands

The deserts

The mountains

The Earth's water

Plant life

Animal life

Human life

The Earth's energy

The Earth's crust