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Table of Contents:
  1. Introduction
  2. Preface
  3. Foreward
  4. Part 1: Introduction
  5. Part 2: The Problem
  6. Profit, Power and Progress
  7. Democracy
  8. Education
  9. Religion
  10. Primitive Beliefs
  11. Part 3: The Solution
  12. Earth
  13. Religion
  14. Sacredness: A New Understanding
  15. Spiritual
  16. Sacred Construct
  17. Critical Mind Shift
  18. Three Simple Rules
  19. Our Competing Sets of Survival Instincts
  20. The Foundational Relationships
  21. Relationship With Self
  22. Opportunity and Responsibility
  23. About the Author

Seven Words that can Change the World

A NaturalNews Special Report by Joseph R. Simonetta


Part 1: Introduction

As a child, I wondered,
“Why do we create so many problems?”

Allow me to relate to you the nature of my background. It will help you understand how I arrived at the conclusions you will find in this book. Please grant me this indulgence.

As a child, I was disturbed by the insensitive and unkind ways we humans treat each other. I recognized that the pattern was wrong and unsustainable. “Why do we create so many problems?” I wondered. “Life need not be this difficult,” I thought. At that young age, I could not understand much beyond my instinct that something was wrong. Ahead were many roads for me to travel and much to learn.

As I experienced and observed life as a young man and later as an adult, I continued to be troubled deeply by cruel and destructive behavior that I witnessed over and over. I was disturbed that our world is thick with suffering, inequity, injustice, and exploitation. I was haunted without relief by how we destroy each other, our environment, and even our own bodies and minds. I wondered how we could live amidst abundance yet simultaneously exist in a sea of anxiety, fear, insecurity, greed, and self-centeredness.

I had a desperate need to understand. My inherent nature, contemplative and proactive, drove me into the classrooms of our world. My curiosity and sense of adventure propelled me. My abilities and discipline enabled and sustained me. Circumstances and serendipity allowed me. I became, and I am to this day, a student of life.

In my travels and experiences, I was aware of my motion but not my destination. The latter I knew to be distant. It would reveal itself only after an arduous journey, just as a great mountain yields its summit only after one conquers its lesser peaks. Victories and defeats nourished and thrashed me. I forged on in search of the common but elusive thread that weaves through and binds all relationships. I immersed myself in rich learning experiences in a broad range of seemingly unrelated fields. I feel as if I have lived numerous lifetimes.

Over time, external forms began to dissolve into a transparency that revealed glimpses of the underlying foundation that girds our existence. Clarity emerged that liberated me from much of the cultural programming to which we are subjected relentlessly. I began to see and understand the cause and effect relationships of life. Once clear, I was able to ask and answer some fundamental questions. I examined our religious belief systems because, for many of us, they color our observations and form the basis for our decisions that result in our actions. I searched to discover that which is sacred. While all religions claim to have sacred qualities, I was determined to identify those things, in this life, that are truly sacred.

Drawing on my life’s experiences, and study and still more experiences as a student at Harvard and Yale Divinity Schools, I finally found what I was after. It is a way of relating that is not arbitrary but imperative. It addresses the reality that everything in our world is related and that the proper manner of these relationships must be understood and practiced if we are to survive as a species. This manner of relating is characterized by qualities that nourish and sustain the relationships of life, as opposed to those that damage and destroy them. It may be that which Lao Tzu refers to in the Tao Te Ching (The Way of Life) written twenty-six hundred years ago. The answers are simple, elegant really, but elusive. They have to do with what I refer to as the foundational relationships of life, sacred relationships. Out of and within these, all relationships and endeavors follow and occur. As you read on, you will understand.

The odyssey of my life that propelled me through a labyrinth of rich educational experiences convinces me that we humans must find a new track on which to travel. It is evident that there is a need for a belief system more relevant to the complex and increasingly sophisticated age in which we live, a belief system with the potential to achieve universal acceptance. A belief system responsive to the problems of our time and capable of drawing people everywhere together. Of most importance, a belief system that can reduce ignorance and suffering and expand knowledge and justice. I concluded, after I spoke with many others, that there are countless people—an ever-growing number—who seek such a belief system.

While there are many who are satisfied with their present belief systems, there are at least as many who are not. Curious to know what my fellow divinity students at Harvard thought about the need for a new belief system, I took a formal written survey of their opinions. Most, I found, were dissatisfied and felt a need for revisions to their belief systems or desired an entirely new one that would address current issues with current knowledge.

Within the diverse survey responses of my fellow students were unifying themes. There was a strong call for a universal belief system that would be acceptable to everyone and that would honor the dignity of each person. There was an abiding respect for diversity that allows for and encourages both individuality and blending within the reality of our interdependence. There was a desire for a non-patriarchal belief system and an equitable distribution of power. There was a desire for a belief system that is more contemporary and more relevant to life in this world. There was a passion for social change and the elimination of inequities. There was a wish that people around the world would develop a global sense of community that transcends the limited notion of nation-states, because we all have fundamental needs in common. There was a call for truth and knowledge. Resonating throughout the responses was a clarion call for recognition of the sacredness of the natural world, and that the care and respect for planet Earth is a “sacred” duty.

I was encouraged by the results of that survey. For many years, I spent countless hours sifting through volumes of information in hallowed university halls and the not so hallowed streets of many cities searching for answers. Now, I discovered that the answers I found and the belief system to which those answers led me addressed all of the concerns that the survey revealed, and more. Let me take you through an overview of what I perceive to be our problem. Following that is the architecture—the design and structure—of the solution.




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