Essay

1.
                                          Einstein's Legacy

On November 20, 1983 in the International Student House of Stanford University, together with students from around the world, including Africans and Asians, I saw the television film The Day After, whose horror reflected the destruction of Hiroshima, only globally magnified. This film with its graphic despair was afterwards discussed by six prominent Americans, among them Henry Kissinger who said that all the ponderings how to meet the Russian threat are not so important as to analyze the motivations of hate that had invaded the Slavic mass mind. Many years ago Einstein emphasized that no analysis of an enemy, be it a religion or a nation, has a beneficial result unless the analyst himself has stripped his ego from his intellect and given himself a "new heart" by his conscience. He would discover that his fundamental unity with the universe is shared by the enemy.

Not long before his death Einstein said to me in Princeton that the apocalypse, in the form of a nuclear war, is approaching, and only one-fourth of the world's population could survive this holocaust. They would then live in caves, and when the fourth world war comes, they will fight it out with clubs. Now, a generation later, Prof. Paul Ehrlich told us in Stanford University: "In a nuclear war those who are not vaporized, cremated, disemboweled, mashed, or pulped by the nuclear blasts themselves will die slow, agonizing deaths from thirst, starvation, freezing, choking in the smog, and radiation sickness—in the dark." Evgeny Velikhov, Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Scientists, declared at the same time that the nuclear arms stockpile "must be destroyed before it kills the human race. The only conclusion here is that nuclear arms cannot be weapons of war or tools of politicians. They are suicide."

Precisely this: "Tools of politicians. They are suicide," had alarmed Einstein for many years, since, in spite of his warning, President Truman used the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At that time he, as he told me, shut himself away from the world for eight days, refusing to see anyone. He also remarked to me that if he had to live here again he would choose to be a shoe maker and not a scientist. He asked me in our last conversation to mobilize the youth of the world, the communist countries included, to form the World Youth Parliament and prepare them to detach themselves from traditional power politics and exclusive nationalism, racism and religious sectarianism. "We must change the heart of Man," Einstein insisted. "The orthodox religions have failed, as proven by the last two thousand years."
Einstein emphasized that he had chosen me to found the World Youth Parliament, since I had changed my own heart at the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the greatest and bloodiest battle in history, when I made the vow: "God, save me and I will serve You as long as I live." He encouraged me to translate my Verdun manuscript into English (subsequently published as The Holocaust—from a Survivor of Verdun, Harper & Row, NY, 1972) and use it as a means to persuade the youth of the urgency of my mission. "I will not live to see the apocalypse," he said, "but you may, unless you have success in founding the World Youth Parliament, the only effective means, as I see it, for building a world government with members who have a new heart." The properties of the new heart, as Einstein stressed again and again, are based on the new scientific discoveries that Man is the reflection of the universe, that science.cannot be separated from spiritual values: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." "It is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice."

Einstein's warning against traditional politicians had not only personal reasons — he was labeled a communist under McCarthy — but also an historical foundation. We both lived through the era of two politicians whose lives proved the inter action of consciousness and the physical world: Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, who honored Einstein by appointing him Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, had always been a lonely man, which was revealed to me during the First World War. When once he was sitting behind the front on a hospital bench alone, in spite of the many wounded soldiers and medical aides, no one sat next to him. What destroyed the inter¬relatedness and oneness in the Kaiser? No doubt he suffered from a karmic endowment, manifested in one of his idols, Frederick the Great, who was homosexual. Although the Kaiser had married and had seven children, his loneliness emphasized by his crippled left arm drove him to embrace General von Schlieffen's war plans in 1908 and to write six years later those meaningful words on the margin of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia: "Now or never!" The Kaiser, only listening and looking with the outward ear and eye, forbade his court preachers during the war to preach on the theme: Thou shalt not kill. The world was outside of him, and the sermons, to which I, a war volunteer, had to listen behind the front of Verdun, would always end with the words: "We go to battle for God, Kaiser and Fatherland."

The Kaiser's complex nature with his morbid desire to dictate war and peace and go down in history as Wilhelm the Great was, of course, inspired by his aristocratic officers. The commander of our battalion, a baron, told us during the inspection of our loamy uniforms after being relieved from the trenches for eight days, "You look like pigs, and, of course, you are pigs. Man begins with the aristocratic officer." General von Mudra harangued us on Christmas Day 1915 in the Argonne Forest that the shell holes filled with bones were our Christmas beds and the trees torn by shells were our Christmas trees.

2.
May youth of future generations learn from this: Man includes in his own existence the universe. He is not only one with his surroundings but also with the subatomic creation, as well as with the infinite extension of the cosmos. His emotions related to death may have karmic consequences in this life here and in lives to come. How I was influenced by German proverbs! Over the door of one of my elementary classrooms were written the words in Latin: "Sweet and becoming it is to die for one's country." The song we sang while marching into France began: "Victoriously we shall beat France, die as a brave hero!" And we youths in uniform were taught to chant: "We want to hate because we must hate; we want to hate because we know how to hate; we love together, we hate together, we hate together our arch foe England!"

If Man cannot separate his own existence from the world outside then certainly he cannot separate himself from his conscience, the voice of the Cosmic Law or God. When I, during the Battle of Verdun in 1916 was lying in a shell hole half-buried and surrounded by hecatombs of death, I established mental connections making me one with the universe by crying out: "God, save me and I will serve You as long as I live!" That moment I learned, at least subconsciously, that all the classification and summarization of what we observe in the physical world reflect the urge of Man to divide the world into subjects and objects, mind and matter, but there is no fathomable reality outside ourselves; we are both actors and spectators.

After I had learned about the oneness of creation from the Battle of Verdun, I was to learn from Hitler's "Thousand Year Reich" that the creation is expanding, that the formation of life can be an uphill as well as a downhill event and that true understanding of what we are cannot be achieved by the rational mind. Hitler, like the Kaiser or anyone else, had karmic drives already revealed in his youth which betrayed abnormal tendencies in him a sexologist may call sadism. He was to witness as a child the abuse of his mother, also sexually, by his drunken father, a uniformed customs official. Moreover, the father was an illegitimate child of a maid who also had been employed in a Jewish household which was to cause Himmler to make an elaborate investigation — for he coveted Hitler's position — to prove that Hitler had Jewish blood in his veins, but to no avail. This blemish in his ancestry, which caused the father to change his name from Schicklgruber — his mother's maiden name — to Hitler, turned young Adolf into a psychopath. Watching him in the early twenties in Munich addressing the masses, I, as well as many other students, classified this man, with his rolling eyes, foaming mouth and theatrical gestures, as a successful manipulator of the mass mind, who by appealing for violent revenge for the lost war forebode the next war. Hitler was a typical prey of a child's first seven years. Soon German youth, including students, were marching again: "Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the world!"

When I happened to be the guest of Einstein in 1930 in Berlin, hundreds of youth in brown shirts with swastika insignia marched in the street below singing: "When Jewish blood spurts from our knives, then it goes twice as well." To protect Einstein's life I sneaked with him down the servants' stairs and rushed to the police station—no protection. They were already nazified.

About Hitler's psychology I gained some insights from Albert Speer, whom I visited several times in Heidelberg after his release from Spandau Prison, where he had served twenty years for his war crimes. He, the former Armaments Minister of Hitler, revealed to me during long conversations that Hitler's foremost hatred was for German aristocracy, but he needed the generals, whose ancestors earned their titles of barons and counts through fighting wars for their emperors and kings through centuries. His second hate was the Catholic Church, but he needed an army bishop to bless several million Catholic soldiers marching into Poland to conquer land in the east. So Hitler, mass psychologist as he was, chose the Jews, the traditional enemy of the Christians, as the enemy of the Aryan race, declaring them to be subhuman, and gave the smoldering mass instinct an outlet on which to project their frustration and kill. Swastika-adorned students and Gestapo agents searched the houses to haul away manuscripts and books, among them the Jewish Bible, the writings of Einstein, Spinoza, Heine, Voltaire, Zola and my Verdun memoirs and radio transcript about my first conversation with Einstein. These were piled house-high in front of the University of Berlin to be burned, while Goebbels made the inquisition speech to thousands of students circling around the flames with swastika flags. Five years later, in 1938, hundreds of synagogues were set aflame in most German towns, and again some years later six million Jews were gassed, among them over one million children.

One of the most terrifying features in the Hitler war was the enthusiastic response of the vast majority of the German Christians, Catholic and Protestant, to the blood-dripping march of their youth into Poland, Belgium, Holland and Norway. The German Reichs Chancellor Bruening, a prominent Catholic, told me in Harvard — we both were refugees — that the concentration camps were an ignominy to Christian conscience. The South German hierarchy urged each Catholic "to fulfill his duty fully and willingly and loyally" and "to devote your full efforts to the service of the' Fatherland and the precious homeland." Two men of Protestant renown, Bishop Lillje and Reinhold Niebuhr, agreed that probably never before in history had nationalistic feelings such a deteriorating impact on the Church. The League for Human Rights, which Einstein and I supported, appealed in vain to the leading clergy of both Christian denominations to alarm their believers to the danger of Hitler being named Reichs Chancellor. The League's office was soon to be closed by the Gestapo and many fellow members were thrown into the concentration camps to die.

3.
If in 1916 I had been driven into the Battle of Verdun to make a mental connection with unseen realities through my vow, so in March 1933 when I barely escaped a mob lynching as Hitler and Hindenburg passed by in their parade from Potsdam on the boulevard Unter den Linden, I made a second vow, this time to myself, not to rest until I had discovered what gives a group mind, religious or political, the nefarious force throughout the history of mankind to obliterate individual conscience with its inherent law: "Thou shalt not murder."

After many years of observations, I have formulated what I may call the sociological law of group formation.

Any mass structure, political or religious, must conform to two principles:
1. Unite the member by using two or three slogans that the least and the last can understand.
2. Point at an outside power with the words, "There is your enemy." This strategy will gear the members to place their trust and security in the group, to the extreme of killing and dying for the group.

The American group mind's ignorance of other cultures caused distrust among' the Vietnamese yearning for peace and economic justice in their land, which in turn prevented the American soldiers from being able to distinguish between the avowed communist enemy and the frightened people in the towns and villages. In spite of all the military might of the greatest industrial nation on earth backing their efforts, the indiscriminate killing of "gooks" and the massacres of whole villages broke the morale of the Americans at home and on the front, as well as encouraged the Vietnamese to embrace the communist slogans of national unity, socialist brotherhood, and freedom from the landowners and capitalist exploiters. The Americans were seen as just another foreign colonializing power. The American group mind, with its centuries old pioneering spirit and immigrant melting-pot philosophy, made it difficult for individual Americans to adhere to their conscience. Many American veterans are now plagued by their conscience with pictures of their crimes sanctioned by war. Also, in Vietnam, the law of the group mind was obeyed with simple slogans like "kill the gooks" and "make the world safe for democracy." Higher aspects of conscience are seldom included in the organized mass mind. Einstein said, "The majority of the ignorant is invincible and guaranteed for all time."

Einstein's message to me emphasized the importance of integrating the spiritual and the physical world. There is no purely objective universe, or as Einstein wrote, "I myself am a part of Nature."

Mankind is now in a bewildering impasse. Youth, not yet in the harness of -the traditional group consciousness whipped by political or religious zeal, will more easily find a way out from this escalating violence represented in the 20-megaton bomb whose explosion has an initial temperature of 150 million °F, a temperature eight times higher than the center of the sun. The way out is the true understanding in which the rational mind plays a secondary role to conscience. Already Plotinus said in the third century:

See all things, not in the process of becoming, but in being, and see themselves in the other. Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore All is everywhere. Man as he now is has ceased to be the All. But when he ceases to be an individual, he raises himself again and penetrates the whole world.

In 1950 Einstein stated, "The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest, doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."

In this century scholarly investigation of religious scriptures reveals that their accounts are fashioned to fit the authors' faith, which is always adapted to one's personal equation. This is especially true for the Christian New Testament, whose earliest writings date back to a generation after Jesus' death, and did not become canonical until the third century. These findings have produced "doubt about the myth" in the minds of many formerly unquestioning believers.

If a study of religious wars in history is not enough to undermine the legitimacy of religious authority, one has only to look in the newspapers of the past decade to read of the bloody disputes between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, the Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka, the Moslems and Christians in Lebanon, the Buddhists and Catholics in Vietnam, the Moslems and Greek Orthodox in Cyprus, the Jews and Moslems in Israel, the Greek Orthodox and the Catholics in Yugoslavia, and the Hindus and Moslems in India.

4.
Having lived now almost a century and having experienced two world wars, the continuing Cold War, including a dozen minor wars, and now approaching what Einstein calls the apocalypse, I should like to suggest to you youth who aspire to be leaders in the world to participate in the World Youth Parliament, thereby endorsing seven leading thoughts:

1. In the beginning was the word and the word is Unfoldment. It is established that human beings have lived many millions of years, and probably evolved from creatures beginning in the water. There is no identifiable cause and effect. It is impossible to draw dividing lines in nature between the microscopic/ macroscopic, living/nonliving, and conscious/unconscious. Einstein remarked that the analysis of matter depends on the mind of the observer.

2. The fundamental life process is relatedness and exchange. Nothing exists which is not alive. What exists needs not only contact between its own kind but with everything that exists. The atoms in a human body have connections with the farthest living entities, the stars. If there were isolation, life would stop. The breath I breathe consists of about 10 sextillion (10²²) atoms and the earth's atmosphere can contain about 10 sextillion breaths, which means that each time I breathe I am drawing about one atom from each of the breaths in the atmosphere. With some four billion people each breathing twenty-thousand breaths a day, I breathe in each time about a million atoms breathed personally at sometime by any other person on Earth. There is an endless flow of living entities from one organism to another, from the interaction of subatomic particles to the interaction of galaxies.

3. There is no discovery of truth with just the rational mind. There is no purely objective universe. The consciousness of Man may claim, "My thoughts are based on ideals." The unconscious will claim, "My thoughts are based on interests of the three dimensional self formed in the first seven years, as well as on one's karmic weight from the past."

4. Every life form represents the cosmic whole. Disease is also a means to evolve to higher levels of understanding and compassion. Persons who work with the Cosmic Law move uphill, while those who work with the ego's power drives move downhill. In Genesis the serpent tells Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and become like God, an allegory for trusting in one's isolating ego. This is the first step to nuclear holocaust.

5. Man's wholeness and therefore holiness is guaranteed by his intention — Man has a free will — to realize the unity of spirit and matter. There is no purely objective world. Every created substance, from the subatomic particle to the rock to the human breath to the leaf to the whale to the ocean to the sun, has a dynamic relation to the creative principle or God.

6. Every fundamental thought, if not related to Allness, can become a tool of propaganda with disastrous consequences as the study of the New Testament reveals. Jesus was a teacher of wisdom and unconditional love, who was influenced by, if not a member of, the Essenes, a semi-monastic order preparing itself physically and spiritually for the imminent apocalyptical battle. The only record of Jesus in the Roman Law was that he was one of two thousand Jews who had died on a Roman cross for the alleged crime of political rebellion against Rome. Jesus belonged to the working class of rebellious Galilee, despised by the Jerusalemites who would ask, "What good can come out of Nazareth?" That he, like his father, was a carpenter and the oldest child of his mother Miriam, emphasizes all the more his genius to simplify one's relationship to God to that of a child trusting in his loving father. Since the Gospel of Mark is the earliest and probably the truest account of Jesus, the power of Jesus' intuition and unconditional love, using simple sentence construction, with the verb carrying the central thought, will insure him an eternal role to play in the human conscience. Jesus' teachings in the synagogues and on the land attracted thousands of Jewish workers to be his disciples.

A generation or two later two members of the higher class instigated a movement which was to obey the law of the group mind: Use slogans that every member can understand and point at an entity outside the group: "There is the enemy!" Luke, inspired by Paul, adds to the heritage of Jesus his own cultural values as an educated Greek doctor, portraying the Jews as enemies of the one true religion and elevating Jesus to the God-Man son of a virgin. Luke is the great example that interests and not ideals determine the actions of Man.

Many years ago Albert Schweitzer told me that the presentation of Jesus in the New Testament deals more with wishful thinking than with historical truth. "If you, Willi Hermanns, want to be religious, don't adjust your faith to theories, but come with me to Lambarene in. Equatorial Africa, where I have built an hospital, and help me to treat the lepers." My conscience told me that I should rather fulfill my promise to Einstein by helping avoid a third world war.

5.

7. The writing of the New Testament should serve as an example to youth to analyze the "personal equation" of the leaders of the group which one is tempted to join. Without exception, all of Hitler's co-workers, Bormann, Speer, Hess, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering — I happened to encounter them all — embraced the ancient German proverb: "Pray to those higher than you, step on those lower than you." In the New Testament the Jews became the out-group for the Christian power structure. As history shows, there were many little Hitlers in the Church, from the Popes to the Holy Roman Emperor. If you, youth, would like to learn of the personal equation of religious leaders, study Ranke's history of the Popes, the book considered besides Nietzsche's works to be the greatest contribution to German literature in the last century. This does not mean that the Christian Church has no guiding values! She has fostered the growth of great spiritual leaders. Francis of Assisi remains a cosmic giant; he embraced the leper and called the sun and moon his brother and sister. And then the modern trend in the Church: Pope John XXIII fought the two-thousand years group consciousness of the Catholic Church. Shortly before his death he said:

Today we are conscious, that for many centuries blindness covered our eyes, so that the beauty of Your chosen people was no longer to be seen and in their faces the features of our preferred brothers could no longer be recognized.

We understand that a mark of Cain stands written on our foreheads. During the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood that we shed or he has wept tears that we have caused, due to our forgetting Your love.

Forgive us the curse which we falsely fastened on their name Jew. Forgive us, that we nailed You in their flesh for the second time on the cross. Because we knew not what we did...

      (Lapide, Pinchas; Rom und die Juden, Herder Verlag, Freiburg, 1967)

This is an evolutionary admission that a religious group mind can be guilty of crimes and needs to publicly confess them. Some 250 million Jews were slaughtered over the last two thousand years. And Hitler, who sang in the children's choir and was an altar boy, boasted to his close friends, among them Speer, "I learned my anti-Semitism -from the Church."

The change of the heart of Man is not achieved by going to church. Solemn ceremonies unfolded on the altar, sermons, and statements of beliefs have not succeeded to tame the beast in Man. When I asked German youth, "Why do you sing: 'When Jewish blood spurts from our knives, then things go twice as well.'? Wasn't Jesus a Jew?" I was answered, "Hitler is our God." On the altar of a German Christian Church, I saw Hitler's book Mein Kampf lying beside the Bible. The new heart of Man, which Einstein demands for the security of the future, can only be created through Man's awareness of his true self and not only through participation in ritual. Raymond of Aguilers describes the capture of Jerusalem by the Christian Crusaders in 1099: "They rode in blood up to the knees and the bits of the horses by the just and wonderful judgment of God."

In 1950 when I wanted to address the students of the University of Istanbul, I was told that they would not listen to Christian ethics. The Crusaders, after hearing Mass in the morning, killed the males, raped the women, chased the Jews with their children into the synagogues and burned them. When at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in 1962 I asked one of the defendants whether he had no compunction to gas a million children, he answered, "I went to church, made confessions and was forgiven. I was only obeying orders." When I presented the same question to Dr. Lucas, the medical examiner on the ramp of the Auschwitz train station who picked out the healthy from those to be sent directly to the gas chamber, he replied, "I am a believing Lutheran and at home read the Bible every night with my two daughters."

Youth of the world, accept Einstein's legacy if you want to stop the pernicious slogan of the group mind: "I am better than you, and therefore you are my enemy," a slogan fed by Man's personal equation: "I am endowed with causal and independent qualities to lead my exclusive life." There is no objective world unaffected by human consciousness. What is eternal is the Cosmic Law, which can only be deciphered by Man's conscience.
When Einstein said, "We must change the heart in order to understand creation," he rejected the three-dimensional Man. We are not influenced by outside forces according to cause and effect described by the rational mind. We must create images to establish mental connections. "You must," said Einstein to me, "learn to subordinate intellect to intuition. Intellect analyzes what we already possess; intuition embraces the unknown." He then insisted that intuition must answer to conscience and not, as Hitler used it, be fed by the pseudo conscience of the ego and the group mind. Conscience is an individual endowment connecting Man with the Creative Principle or God, revealing the unique purpose of the individual's cosmic relationship, a purpose that knows no death but unfolds for better or worse in the future lives, according to the spiritual values Man has gained in this life and in past lives.

6.
The Cosmic Law can be read by signposts one's conscience places on crossroads. Man's free will decides which direction he will take. Is his free will fed by spiritual entities living in his flesh or by entities provided by his conscience? This ques tion I had to solve when I, the Kaiser's volunteer in the First World War, was captured by the French at Verdun. Instead of killing me as was customary in the midst of a raging battle, they led me to the German underground fort at Thiaumont to serve as interpreter for the French demanding the surrender of the stronghold. The German commander of the fort pointed his pistol at me, crying, "Traitor!" I, jumping aside, cried, "Have you no conscience?" This word "conscience" opened the eyes of the German commander. He saw the gas bomb, which the French had ready to throw into the fort's entrance shaft to kill the hundreds of Germans below, as well as the machine gun aiming at him and me. He dropped his hand and said, "I surrender."

The Iron Cross which I received on return from French captivity I only wore once, when I needed a passport to cross the border on my flight from the Gestapo. To me this medal was a symbol of the belligerent German mass mind.

History has demonstrated that youth are given identities to support the survival of a group. The instant identity Hitler gave youth by telling them, "You are members of the Aryan Master Race — Germany!" and pointing to the Jews as the subhuman race and cause of their frustration brought death to millions of German youth. The drug subculture and terrorist groups around the world of the last decade are radical examples of the con tinued abasement of youth and their future by promising instant identity.

After my experiences on this three-dimensional earth through three generations, I have discovered what the human being should say of himself: "I am soul substance, I am creation individualized. My consciousness has subatomic as well as stellar characteristics. I am indivisible and inscrutable, without beginning, without end. No longer do I seek my identity in the group but in my conscience. The existence of my conscience is revealed in the world's religions, philosophies and cultural treasures, as long as they sponsor the inner Man and not "pomp and circumstance." The first word of creation is being, and being means eternal unfoldment."

After our escape to the police in 1930, Einstein gave me as thanks a card on which he had written: "In memory of this event March 30, 1930."

May these five words he wrote be a testimony to you youth, that no group consciousness, political or religious, can be changed unless the individual heart be changed.

Youth of the world, let us accept Einstein's legacy by founding the World Youth Parliament and the Cosmic Religion uniting all the world's religions and ethical systems in the changed heart of the individual.

In the last conversation I had with Einstein in the Summer of 1954, which is recorded in my book Einstein and the Poet—In Search of the Cosmic Man (Branden Press, Brookline Hill, MA, 1983), I saw in Einstein's house in Princeton a serene statue of the Madonna and was impressed. That imagination was more important than intellect to Einstein, was proven by his giving to Miriam the mother of Jesus and "my Jewish Mama" a prominent place in his living room. What would Einstein say, I wondered, if I spoke to him about the reported apparitions of her, about those visions of Swedenborg regarding the existence of heaven and hell, or about my faith in the Twenty-third Psalm, which has empowered me to heal the cancer and asthma of people on their deathbed? Probably what he had said the previous year regarding human rights: "These ideals and convictions, which derived from the experience of history as well as from the craving for beauty and harmony, usually have in theory been readily accepted by men, but at all times been trampled upon by the same people under the pressure of their animal instinct."

Youth, who will realize the cosmic religious feelings in your hearts, work with your intuition and you will discover as I did at Verdun the oneness of Man with creation, visible and invisible. Every person as well as the objects he collects have vibrations. Your conscience will discern the vibrational quality of your daily experiences. In vibrations cosmic laws are involved; as Einstein said, "God is subtle, but He is not malicious."

Not only Einstein, already Stresemann, Briand and Chamberlain, whom I as a student of diplomacy met at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1926, wanted to help create an international student movement in the world as a forerunner of a World Youth Parliament, and Jane Addams invited me in Geneva to use her Hull House in Chicago as a base, but the Nazi terror in Germany and later the anti-communist paranoia in America, which threat ened Einstein, Thomas Mann and many other refugees, including me, with the loss of our citizenship, postponed my efforts to realize the legacy of Einstein.

The Einstein-Hermanns Foundation has been established to pass on the legacy to you, the youth of today and tomorrow, and will serve as a center to coordinate the growth and communication of a network of local groups. These groups will sponsor lectures and seminars to change the heart of Man, that individuals in their community can discover the truth of Cosmic Religion within them. They will also help support a youth from the age of 18 to 28, who has participated in a student or worker exchange program in a foreign land, shows proficiency in speaking a second language and has placed his or her security in their conscience and not in a group, to attend the World Youth Parliament. The Parliament will be hosted by a different country each year, with the international participants staying with families in the nearby area. Each country will have a right to one vote on issues of international concern, all for the purpose of changing the heart of Man, which traditional religious, educational and political systems have neglected due to self-interests.

May these new foundations of a World Youth Parliament and a Cosmic Religion, open the way to one humanity with one parliament to stimulate individuals of each culture to decide from his inner being and thereby grasp the Cosmic Law.

7.
Because of the traditional religions, people for thousands of years have killed people, first with stones and clubs, then with knives, spears and bows and arrows, then in knightly shining armor with swords, then in marching uniform with guns and cannons, and now with tanks, jets and rockets. In the arsenals, under the land and under the sea, are rockets with nuclear warheads, the new tools of the politicians.

The remarks of Henry Kissinger regarding these new "tools of the politicians" — the very words used by the Russian Scientist Evgeny Velikhov — caused me not to end this open letter to you, youth of the world, without glancing at Russia and its communistic regime. What moved Marx to take the pen in the hand to write his famous book Das Kapital? As a German exile in London, having witnessed the exploitation of the poor, where even children had to work in factories to make ends meet in their homes, he became a great economic theoretician and the founder of economic history and sociology. That the communism in Russia could become the practical offspring of Marx was conditioned by the exploitation of the workers and peasants for hundreds of years by the Russian nobility, headed by the Czar and assisted by the Russian Church. Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky describe the slavery of the Russian masses to give its aristocratic class and the leaders of the army that hate-soaked monopoly that had for centuries sent millions to work in prisons, many to be executed, or sent to Siberia. Dostoyevsky was one of the many thinkers to be sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian penal colony. That the fury of the masses, culminating in the losing war of the Czar in 1917, accepted Lenin, a Marxist, as their leader, confirms the cosmic law, which I may like to coin here in the words: God is the spiritual reaction to human action.

I myself had an insight into the Russian inhuman policy of Czarism when in 1921 I helped a young Russian refugee to be accepted in the University of Berlin. His mother, a baroness, told me how the masses burned her castle and she and her children, thanks to a faithful servant, could flee with the sled over the frozen lakes to Finland. She as a young girl had witnessed an incident in Kiev when the masses were told by Russian officials that the Jews were guilty of their misery. Her father, General Rofalsky, an admirer of the Old Testament, had the cavalry mount their horses and drive the masses out of the Jewish quarters to save thousands of Jewish lives. The Psalms had given this general a new heart, Einstein's formula to save the world. These Russian pogroms against the Jews were as old as the alliance of the Church with the ruling elite, beginning with the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.

May you, youth, especially Americans, subdue the feeling of superiority when meeting Russian youth, lest the World Youth Parliament splits into I-am-better-than-thou group thoughts, which in the Vietnam War drove the young South Vietnamese into our enemy's camp, the North Vietnamese communists, instead of trying to understand them and earn their friendship.

Come, youth, create your future no longer with your ego but with your conscience, which knows only one family, the earth family living in the eternal now. Let the history books about the patriotic past of your nation be lighthouses marking the hidden reefs of the mass mind created by the bloodstained karma of its forebears for thousands of years. Arise, youth of the world, have self-awareness that speaks: "My free will is affiliated with the cosmic purpose of unfoldment and not with the defense of the three-dimensional status quo of the ego and group mind."

It is my intention that the Einstein-Hermanns Foundation become the valuable means to prevent, what Einstein called the nuclear apocalypse. Einstein's conditio sine qua non: the creation of the new heart, lest humanity perishes, or as he once stated, "More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else," reflected his knowledge of the Bible. Almost three thousand years ago Job said: "Lo, all these things God works with Man, to bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living."

Your inquiries and suggestions are requested.

                                                   William Hermanns, PhD, Prof. em.
                                                   President and Founding Director
                                                   The Einstein-Hermanns Foundation
                                                    Stanford, November 1983