1 The Earth Constitution as Human Self-Actualization Glen T. Martin www.earthconstitution.world The Constitution for the Federation of Earth represents the concept of humanity brought to self- actualization in a comprehensive and synergistic form. This short article broadly reviews the development of this idea in human civilization. We see today that we are at an impasse, a blockage to the further development and actualization of the concept of humanity. This blockage has suicidal consequences in the forms of nuclear holocaust and impending climate collapse. Those of us who care about the future of humanity are under an absolute imperative to transcend the blockage and actualize the concept of humanity in the immediate future. For without this, there appears to be no future at all except planetary omnicide. The concept of humanity emerged during the famous Axial Period in human developmental history and was reflected in the great world religious and philosophical teachers that followed from that period: Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, the author of the Bhagavad Gita, great Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and Mohammed. In the East, there was an identity between the ground of Being, the Brahman, or the vast fullness-emptiness of Sunyata, and the ground of the soul, Atman, or Buddha-nature. In the West, the divine image was embodied in each and every person, and the humanity within the person was considered sacred, inviolable. During the next 2000 years, the concept of the human became progressively ever more associated with planetary authority and governance. In the West, the idea of “Natural Law” (that is the divinely ordained moral law that lay behind all social and authority arrangements on Earth) was believed to obligate even monarchs and emperors to represent and act for the common good of their subjects. In the ancient world Cicero focused on the universality of the moral principles behind all governance systems anywhere on Earth and declared that the local systems of law must embody and implement the universal principles of right that formed the matrix for all earthly government. Thomas Aquinas at the heart of the middle ages declared that a law was no law that did not conform to the Natural Law of justice coming from God: “The force of a law depends on the extent of its justice,” he wrote, again putting the religious and secular authorities of his day under the obligation to recognize the concept of the human (the dignity and rights of each person) as the basis of legitimate governing. With the Renaissance, the concept of sovereignty of the people began to be introduced by such thinkers as Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) and Johannes Althusius (1557-1638). Nicholas of Cusa declared that all earthly power derived from God and required the consent of those governed who were subject to that power. Althusius taught that the people themselves were sovereign, and not their rulers, and that good government needed to be led by representatives of the people.