3. The Foundation’s mission

The question of how to liberate ourselves from suffering and the longing for a more just and happy world are surely as old as humanity. This is, for example, what made Moses the leader who freed his people, Prince Siddharta a Buddha, and Martin Luther King the priest who gave his life for justice….. Sooner or later every human being is confronted with these questions and has to find his or her own answer. We too have formulated our answer with all the honesty and strength that we were capable of. What can we do under our circumstances and conditioning factors, our insignificant size and our scant economic and human resources? It has been impossible to find an answer just by a process of reflection. We had to discover and cultivate a more global and intuitive way of listening to the ‘voice’ that guide us day by day along the path.

Thus we have come to the serene and profound satisfaction of discovering our mission in this life: our Foundation is not an humanitarian NGO, nor one devoted to development, to human rights or the conservation of the environment, but rather a cultural NGO. As a small cultural foundation in a civilization of technology and computers we aim above all to make a modest contribution to a wider and deeper understanding of culture as wisdom and not mere knowledge, as understanding rather than mere information, empathy rather than pure observation. But the message that the Foundation would like to offer lies more in what it is and does –in its own, integral life- than in its words and writings. For this reason our actions of solidarity are, above all, a message to awaken a new consciousness in our society. This does not mean renouncing the need for these actions to be effective, but instead it simply includes effectiveness in a greater whole without making it an absolute criterion. Acting in accordance with our conscience or sharing the fate of the losers may be more important than the effectiveness itself.

Our world suffers increasingly from a individualism that makes us insensitive and inhumane, from an consumerism that plunders the Earth’s resources, from a utilitarianism that discards everything and everyone that is no longer ‘useful’, from a rationalism that reduces and impoverishes the complex and sacred richness of reality. But there is another way to live and be in the world, to perceive and relate to our environment. Without foregoing the capacity to analyze, criticize and discriminate, we must regain the ability of the child, the ‘savage’, the mystic, to perceive directly all that exists, without the considerable subjectivity which we usually project in our relations with others and even on objects and events. We must regain our capacity to be amazed while feeling each and every thing as real, new and wonderful. We must regain our capacity to be moved by the joy and the pain of others and to experience it as if it were our own.