Echoes of a WORLD INSTITUTE - Purpose and Outcome, Julius Stulman

Echoes of a World Institute 

Purpose and Outcome

by Julius Stulman 1973

AMONG THE FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSES and assured outcomes of the World Institute will be the enlargement and strengthening growth of that community of free men who understand and work for the continuing evolution of mankind. Such a community does, in the early stages, now exist, though not all of its members knows of each others existence; and the ways of working together, for the most part, have still to be put into effect. These are the men who see beyond our differences and conflicts to the common needs and desires that can unite the human race: the men who, fully aware of our propensity for hatred and folly, see also our capacities for love and reason and who work to strengthen those capacities for love and reason among all men through out the world.

These are an unseen fellowship of people who make a meaningful affirmation of life - not in response to ritualistic indoctrination by some fading orthodoxy but out of their own individual and shared struggle - to be whole, growing and responsible human beings. Such people live in every quarter of the globe. That fellowship embraces Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and open skeptics. They wear every conceivable national costume and every shading of skin pigmentation. They adhere to widely divergent political and economic ideologies, but they share a growing if often concealed conviction that our past and contemporary ideologies have become obsolete. Quite specifically, they exist in eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, and in communist China, as well as in the rest of Europe and Asia, in Africa and the Americas.

Such a community of free men will not create a new conventional mass movement. They will not plot against their governments or betray their national or cultural heritage, though they see that their ultimate loyalty is to mankind, not to a narrow, possessive and aggressive nationalism. They will resist the temptation to define a new orthodoxy, for they know that inherent in the social universe are forces of restless, endless change. They will rather seek to understand the processes of change in order to utilize those forces for carrying out positive purposes and for shaping a pattern of continuing, constructive evolution.

Only in this present age the global, if still small, character of this community has been discovered. Only just now, with the aid of the complex technology available to us, this community of free, broadly competent and responsible men could be brought into meaningful communication with one another. But once they have been provided with a broadly acceptable vehicle through which to work together, they can help support that new leadership that the whole world needs. Only in this age, haunted by the hydrogen bomb, has the incentive for world-wide cooperative growth and development come to have an urgent reality. Only now have we come to see clearly that the world must have a new social facility it never had before. Only now do we know that such a facility can be created.

Inevitably, there are present and potential barriers to the enlargement of this community and to the fullest and productive use of its members. We still have to contend with wars and threats of war, with racial hatred, religious antagonism, political fanaticism. The World Institute, backed by a widely dispersed and influential community of the competent and the concerned, must discover solutions to those conflicts. As other attempts to find solutions, particularly attempts based on the use of force, prove futile, we have an opportunity never before given to man to make obsolete those traditional social mechanisms out of which so much evil and injustice have come.

Some will find it difficult to accept this perception of the future. Spokesmen for various orthodoxies will say that such a dream can be realized only after all the world will have come under the sway of Communism, or western-style democracy, or some kind of religion. However, such a unification by religion or ideology is, for the imaginable future, out of the question. Any serious effort to achieve such a unification of the world will produce world disaster. Increasingly, even some of the devoutly orthodox have come, if reluctantly, to accept this fact. The practical solution lies not in that direction, nor in the direction of any centrally controlled uniformity, but in the direction of creating the instrumentality and the methodology of a noncoercive, nondoctrinaire World institute, which would undertake to serve people and nations of many different kinds, in peace and in freedom, and to promote ongoing programs of international intercultural cooperation.

During just over a year I worked in 1972-73 in the world Institute Jerusalem and came to know its president Julius Stulman a bit. I certainly read his, and others' essays in his "Fields within Fields…. Within Fields". In 1974, I was travelling in Brazil and the USA, and when I could, I visited Stulman at his chambers at 777 United Nations Plaza, looking down upon the UN General Assembly building.

Stulman would then tell me to sit down and shut up, and then he would proceed to tell about some secret machinations at the Kremlin – or tell me what I know (which I might have known, or did not know, that I knew it) – and what to do with it (which I would not have known). Whatever else, he was an incredible psychic.

The last time I met him, however, matters were different. He was not as haughty, in fact quite the reverse. "Forget what I have taught you about the World Institute – I have been wrong all along. There is no need to found the World Institute - it already exists. It had been founded by our forefather Abraham. The one thing that counts is to bring about the spiritual regeneration of Israel. If this is achieved then the entire world will be blessed".

He turned there to me, very personally and focused, and I was surprised at the tone in which he began addressing me, a departure from the past approach he had. Perhaps he was himself a bit surprised. He started to speak to me with great reverence as if I had a key role - but warned me in a harsh way to learn to practice Integrity. Stulman then advised me to drop my various engagements abroad, pack and return to Israel, there to report at the Ḥabad (Chabad) headquarters. He said that while they were not exactly what he thought the necessary teachings were, yet this was the closest to it.[1]