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This is the complete keynote address delivered by Dr. Alfredo Sfeir-Younis, a distinguished speaker at the Humanity Transformation Conference 2025 (HTC 2025), hosted by The Middle Way Institute. Convened at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, the conference gathered global thinkers to explore the application of ancient spiritual wisdom to modern personal and societal challenges. Dr. Sfeir-Younis’s presentation meticulously addresses the conference's central theme: "Wisdom and Compassion in a Fragmented World." This discourse provides substantive, specialized perspectives intended to guide practitioners in navigating the complexities of the contemporary global milieu.
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00:00Yes, for our next speaker, I'm so honored to welcome, sorry about, I'm just standing by
00:20looking at you, sorry. Our next speaker is a visionary leader who bridges economics,
00:26spirituality, and human transformation. He holds a doctorate in environmental economics,
00:34is a former director at the World Bank, and has served as special representative to the United
00:42Nation. He's also the founder and president of the Sambuling Institute for Human Transformation,
00:49and today he will sharing a profound message titled, Reclaiming the Global Ethics in a Fragmented
00:58World, from me to me and them. Please join me in welcoming with deep respect and gratitude,
01:05Dr. Alfredo Speer-Yunis. Thank you very much. Thank you for this invitation. Thank you to
01:19the Abbott and Vice Abbott for inviting me to come here. Venerable monks, ladies and gentlemen,
01:28the world is indeed fragmented, but the context of this fragmentation is this planetary society.
01:40What happens in one corner of the world affects everyone else, and I think it's very important
01:47to understand that in this planetary society, interdependence, interconnectedness are in their
01:56maximum expression, and this is very fundamental if we are going to address the fragmented world.
02:05I'd like to start by my conclusion given the time for this presentation. If we want to reunite us,
02:14if we want to find integration, if we want to find oneness, it is very fundamental that we together
02:22construct a new planetary ethics. We need to recover an ethics that is based on wisdom and compassion.
02:33It is not about more material wealth. It is not about more material technology.
02:40It is not about markets and consumption. It is about creating the 200% society, a society that is materially rich
02:53and is spiritually rich at the same time. The point of departure in addressing the world fragmentation
03:02is to address our own inner fragmentation. The world fragmentation is the mirror image of our own inner
03:11fragmentation, and we find many forms of individual fragmentation. One of them is physical fragmentation,
03:20the way we treat our body, mental fragmentation, the way we treat our mind, emotional fragmentation,
03:27how we govern the self. And finally, there is a spiritual fragmentation, how do we nurture the being.
03:36This event proposed, you know, to have wisdom and compassion as the key engines for eliminated fragmentation,
03:46and I want to address that specifically. How wisdom and compassion must become our inner engine
03:55to move forward and eliminate this fragmentation, how wisdom and compassion can become the two wings,
04:04you know, of this incredible ego that fly freely all around the world. These two wings, wisdom and compassion,
04:16are fundamental. They are interdependent. They cannot be, you know, the possibility to eliminate
04:24the fragmented world without both at the same time. But this process to eliminate fragmentation
04:33cannot be human-centric. We need to take care of human beings, sentient beings, and nature at the same time.
04:43This is very fundamental because most of the programs that we find around us are human-centric,
04:50you know, at the expense of the environment and ecology, which today is the principal source of suffering,
04:58you know, dukkha, social dukkha, you know, the social suffering of the world.
05:05We have this fragmentation because we live in a duality between the self and the other,
05:11the individual and the collective. And this is what I want to address. How do we eliminate this duality
05:19between the being and the inter-being? And I added to the inter-being, the inter-we, you know, also us.
05:29That's why the title of my conference says, From Me to We and Today.
05:35It seems that our mind is constantly searching for separability. It seems that our mind is very
05:43efficient in duality, and we need to bring it back to make it more efficient in integration.
05:51As it was said before, we are dominated by materialism, by individual materialism.
05:58This is very important to realize how this individual materialism is dominating even our
06:04spiritual life, which you just said before. And this is a social doctrine of separability.
06:11The essence of individual materialism is separability is to fragment the world. It feeds on the social
06:18ego. It feeds on the divide, you know, between human beings, sentient beings, and nature.
06:25So those who actually want to go through the path of wisdom and compassion,
06:33and they want to self-realize wisdom and compassion, I want to tell you that it's not a trivial proposition.
06:41You mentioned your age in your presentation. I flew from Chile the day of my birthday, you know,
06:49a day and a half ago. I became 78. So it's very important to understand after 50 years of a spiritual
06:58life, that to self-realize wisdom and compassion, we need to self-realize other virtues, other values,
07:05virtues. You know, like love, equality, cooperation, justice, and so on, what makes your graphic very,
07:12very interesting to, you know, approach and fill up, you know, with other virtues and compassion.
07:20Thus, it is not only about the self-realization, for example, of compassion.
07:26It also requires, simultaneously, a commitment to create a compassionate society.
07:34You know, it's not only about me, me, me, to have a spirituality of the me. We have to have the
07:40spirituality of the inter-being, teaching at hand, and the inter-we. The inter-we is the inter-being
07:47with those of us, what I feel responsible. I'm closer to them. Communities, sangha, you know,
07:54it's an inter-we, because we know we affect everyone in the world. But the ones that are closest,
08:00I take my personal responsibility.
08:05I would like to go to a second point, which are more or less, and very quickly, the attributes of
08:11this fragmentation. You know, because we cannot stay in the theoretical level. And I would say,
08:18I would like to start by saying that we enter globalization with an economic identity.
08:25I remember asking my Chilean fellows, why are you having this free trade agreement with this
08:31Buddhist country? And they say, we don't know, but we can import Buddhas for free, you know, without
08:37taxes. There was no really concern about the culture, the spirituality, the religion, the faith.
08:43It was interesting about economics. And this globalization, which is an economic globalization,
08:50has taken our values, has taken our belief, because we are not only trading goods and services,
08:57you know, we are trading everything. And now it's interesting that 2025, you know,
09:05I gave my first speech at the United Nations in 1996, when I just went to the General Assembly in 1996,
09:13as a World Bank representative to the UN. And I said, what speech should I have?
09:20And it was in front of a panel of, you know, people. And I said, I will speak about the spiritual
09:25dimensions of globalization. And when I said I would like to speak about the spiritual dimensions of
09:33globalization, the fellow critics said, is the World Bank a religious institution? What the
09:40hell are you talking about? You came here to do religion in the United Nations. You know, there was
09:46a lot of confusion among thousands of people sitting there that day. But I said to them at the time that
09:54the fundamental reason, you know, to get rid of this problem with globalization, we needed to have
10:00more transcending in ourselves, to take these eyeglasses of materialism and understand what is
10:07in the next side of the road that we couldn't see. Today, I also say that it needs to be brought
10:15together different laws that dominate life, like the law of karma, the law of interdependence, the law of
10:23correspondence, and the law of the feminine, and many other spiritual laws, is not only transcending.
10:31So the attributes of fragmentation, I list them quickly, I will not delve into them. One is political
10:39polarization, the weakening of democratic institutions, economic inequality, injustice, you know, social
10:47isolation and loneliness, the disease of the soul, not only mental health, we have a problem with,
10:55you know, soul health, the weakening of our institution, we don't trust in our institution,
11:04the environmental destruction we're willing to do, the educational fragmentation that is weakening the
11:10capacity of countries to accumulate wisdom, you know, the lack of belonging. And today, many people
11:17answered to some of the call and said, you know, Alfredo, I don't really care. So I'm happy to be here.
11:24Because if we are here, it's because we do care. And we are willing to do something beyond.
11:32The path to elimination of fragmentation, the Buddha, in the text, in the canonical text,
11:38provides four ways to deal with this fragmentation. I will not go into depth,
11:44Mongodim, because of the time. But one of them is that fragmentation is a state of being.
11:51Liberation is a state of being. You know, integration is a state of being. So the Buddha says,
11:58you have to attain very high levels of transcending through meditation, yoga, and so on,
12:04to be able to find that unity. Otherwise, it is impossible to go in the path of integration.
12:11The second method of the Buddha, it says, there is a series of forms of consciousness.
12:19But one of them, nobody's teaching these days. He called it container consciousness.
12:27Because the energy of spirituality is like an upside-down funnel. You do your individual
12:33consciousness work. You know, you do your collective consciousness work. But between the
12:40silo and the mouth of the funnel, there is a state of consciousness, the Buddha teaches,
12:44which is capable to contain both the individual and the collective to eliminate duality.
12:51The third method that the Buddha teaches to deal with fragmentation
12:55has to do with managing the karmic endowment,
12:59the stock of impact of our action during, you know, all our lifetimes, you know,
13:05all the people around the world. And this karmic endowment is responsible for this fragmentation.
13:11We are fragmented because the outcome of the stock of karma we have leads to fragmentation.
13:18So we have to change that path. And the fourth method is very interesting,
13:23that it has to do with the million of identities, artificial identities, you know,
13:30secondary identities we take together for ourselves, be it nationality, color, gender, religion,
13:40you know, whatever it is. The Buddha says that this, you know, secondary identities,
13:45not the identity of the self, not the identities of, you know, our inner self,
13:51they are stopping us, you know, from getting into integration of the self. Remember that I said that
13:59our individual, you know, the world fragmentation is a function of our own inner fragmentation.
14:09The title of this event also deals with wisdom and compassion. You know, each of these two
14:15virtues give for many conferences, you know, but I like to say that wisdom and compassion
14:23are fundamental for the social ethics that I'm looking for as a way to deal with
14:28compassion in a planetary society. Compassion is not empathy or sympathy. Because compassion requires
14:39an obligation and the commitment, the courageous commitment to resolve fragmentation, to resolve
14:47the duality. It's not that I feel what you feel. It's not that I have sympathy for what you feel.
14:53And this commitment needs to come out of this inner light. This commitment needs to come with the pure
15:00mind, you know. Otherwise, we'll keep doing solutions that are absolutely irrelevant for the world. And let
15:07me tell you, I was at the World Bank for 30 years, so I know the type of solutions, you know. In a recent book,
15:14I wrote about a chapter on what does it mean to talk about a Buddhist solution. What is the difference
15:23of a Buddhist solution? I will give two examples and then I end my presentation. Because this is not a
15:30theoretical talk, but we need the canonical foundation. Otherwise, you know, we don't have the right vision
15:38to get where we want to go. The first example is the Buddhist, the Buddha-owned text, you know, about
15:46what are the five instruments of environmental policy. And I'm fascinating because I was the first
15:54environmental economist of the World Bank, you know. I was very young. That profession, nobody understood.
15:59What is an environmental economist? What is this about? I'm talking about the 70s, the early 70s.
16:07The five principles of environmental policy to deal with this fragmented world. One, nonviolence.
16:15I don't need to explain that. Second, abstention from taking lives. It's not about human beings,
16:22you know. We are destroying the natural forest. You know, we are doing many things of taking life,
16:27of many manifestations of life. Interconnectedness. That is to say,
16:31I am because you are. You are because I am. This is a path of togetherness. It's not a path,
16:40it's not a soul of light from Alfredo and said, oh, no, I get enlightened by, you know. I cannot get
16:46enlightened if we not all get enlightened, really. The non-dominance as an instrument. There is no
16:54manifestation of life that has to dominate the other form of life. The Buddha, when he talked about
17:01environmental policy in the sutras, the first thing he says, we have the responsibility of nature.
17:09And the last one is very interesting, is the unconditional love for all beings. This is
17:16fundamental in environmental policy. Mahatma Gandhi used to say, if I don't love, I don't conserve.
17:23I will only conserve in the planet what I love. And this is fundamental. The second example
17:31is to begin to think about the components of the social ethic, you know, to eliminate fragmentation.
17:39One is to understand the totality of life. This is not just a phrase. It took me many, many years
17:47to self-realize, not to talk about it, that Mother Earth is a being, you know. It's a very,
17:56very fundamental path in my life. Total interdependence. To take care of what has been created.
18:04We are not the owners of the planet. The future generation also has rights. There has never been a
18:12right to destroy. And human and spiritual values matters. These six or seven elements are the sort of
18:24the tip of the iceberg of a social ethics to move the world into integration. Let me end now.
18:31First of all, I must say that it's our obligation, not our choice only. It's our obligation that we
18:43need to eradicate suffering in this planet. The suffering, not only the emotional suffering,
18:49the suffering provoked by economics, provoked by politics, provoked by social, provoked by
18:57institutions, provoked by businesses, and so on and so forth. Wisdom and compassion work together.
19:06But you can choose others. You remember I said that to self-realize wisdom and compassion,
19:11you need to self-realize other virtues and values. Well, choose that virtue or value for which you think
19:17you have comparative advantage. I do seminars on this and people say, no, Alfredo, I like to take
19:23justice. I like to take cooperation and so on. But start now, today, practicing, practicing, practicing,
19:31because as you go up the pyramid of virtue, in a sense at the top, you will self-realize all virtues.
19:39But there is something you don't need to be religious, to be Hindu, to be Buddhist, to be nothing,
19:46or PhD, or master's degree, to do right now, which is SEVA service, unconditional service,
19:55and do merits, boom. This I was taught by the Abbott and the Vice Abbott when I met them 25 years ago.
20:02I asked them, how should I educate my grandchildren? And they told me, the only thing your grandchildren
20:10need to know is to know how to make merits. So when they go to my farm, they are doing all the time
20:18merits to understand that they don't need. They are really tiny young boys and girls.
20:25The other thing is that we need a new social doctrine. We need a new social doctrine that is
20:32capable to eliminate individual materialism. Today in the world, there is a big gap,
20:37a big gap in social doctrine, because globalization collapsed. And this individual materialism is
20:45collapsing because it's not really satisfying the needs, the spiritual needs, and even the material
20:52needs of many people in the planet. My question to you today is, what is going to fill that gap?
20:59This is the responsibility of a seminar, of a conference like this. I think that it's important
21:17that we become ourselves. It's important to understand that it's up to us to eliminate the
21:27world fragmentation. It's not up to institutions. We are waiting for some institution to take a step
21:34to integrate the world. This is the wrong approach. We live in the world of citizenry. For the first time,
21:43we are all connected. Look at what happened in Nepal. The young people, through connectivity,
21:48you know, they brought a revolution in Nepal and even elected the new president of Nepal.
21:56You know, we have to be bold today because we are able to do it. Not only we are able to do it,
22:05we must do it. Otherwise, we should not be here. This is not the point to have another lecture,
22:11to have another speech, to have another beautiful world. It is the moment of action.
22:17So to end, I ask you, how do you want to be judged by future generations? Do you want to be judged by
22:25that person who never saw change? Do you want to be judged by the person who saw change,
22:33but negated change? Do you want to be judged as a person who is always against change? Alfredo, but.
22:43Do you want to be that person who is a victim of change, like millions of people in the planet?
22:50Or do you want to be an architect of change? I want to be remembered by my grandchildren
22:57as an architect of change. And I hope you do too. Thank you very much.
23:07Wow. Such a powerful message. I was just like sitting there and like,
23:16this is up to us, right? All of us to take the chance. Thank you so much, Dr. Alfredo,
23:23for your powerful inspiration. I'm so grateful to be here and listen to all these three extraordinary
23:31speakers.
23:41And now.
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