“Offering Hope for Humanity”: A Review of The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace, by Robert Atkinson

 

(Fort Lauderdale, FL: Light on Light Press, 2025). ISBN: 978-1-958921-72-2

It may come as no surprise that I begin this review by lamenting the state of our world. Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria, Venezuela, Greenland… Grappling with the ramifications and ethics of AI… The condition of the environment and the growing income gap… The nonelected in growing positions of power and policymaking… A cold-blooded murder on a Minneapolis street… Crises in education and healthcare… Living in America, I see all of these issues and more deeply affecting family, friends, and colleagues.

We cannot sit hopeless and in fear. That is crystal clear. The level of cognitive dissonance (much of it a highly coordinated, insidious attack on the masses as a means toward greater control by the half-percent) feels, in my 57 years, to be wholly unprecedented—its concentration and ubiquity a result of the wholesale adoption of social media and other carefully crafted-for-control (yes, that word again) technologies.

Given the state of our world, I welcomed with open arms and an eager heart the opportunity to read and review The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace and interview its author on my podcast. Dr. Robert Atkinson is the award-winning author or coauthor of a dozen books. With degrees in philosophy, folk culture, counseling, and cross-cultural human development, he’s taken a transdisciplinary approached to the world’s most wicked problems, the foremost being an attainable pathway to peace.

Before you stop reading because a little voice in your head is shouting about pie-in-the-sky proposals, platitudes, and prescriptions as handholding hippies sing “Kumbaya” into your brainstem, Dr. Atkinson is clear that this is long-term work, stating in the Preface that there’s no “shortcut” and the process of “elevating consciousness toward wholeness” will take decades, if not centuries.

So now you’re probably thinking, “Decades and centuries? I’m trying to get through to next month without falling deeper into debt… What in the world has this to do with me? What can I do?”

If that is what you’re thinking, you should do yourself—and humanity—a favor and read this book. Dr. Atkinson doesn’t come across at all as a pie-in-the-sky, “Kumbaya”-singing, handholding hippie. His proposed processes reflect the kind of serious, scholarly systems-level thinking being done by the likes of Sir Ken Robinson, Fritjof Capra, James Dyson, and Ervin Lazlo (whose endorsement is featured on the front cover) over the past four decades.

Dr. Robinson’s vision for world peace centers on Unity and Wholeness. As a spiritual storyteller who believes that dualities are human-manufactured concepts that we can mediate and transmogrify into something whole, new, healing, and powerful through the telling of our personal and collective stories, I very much agree.

Over the course of three parts and nearly 300 pages, Dr. Robinson takes us through the micro and macro steps this audacious (but attainable) plan for peace requires, situating it all through religious and spiritual texts and quotes from a wide array of writers, teachers, and thinkers. After all, if we want to achieve Unity and Wholeness, the differences in various systems need to be overcome (mediated and made whole) through drawing attention to their commonalities. From the Hermetic principle of “As above, so below” and the Golden Rule to the spiritual physics of David Bohm, from the Upanishads to Indigenous wisdom, from the words of the Buddha to the teaching of Jesus and the founder of the Baha'i Faith, Baha'u'llah, the author gives us plenty of inspirational, connective quotes to support his vision. We also hear from Deepak Chopra, Carl Jung, Desmond Tutu, Ken Wilber, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the HeartMath Institute.

A pitfall for many people and groups when talking about Unity and Wholeness is fear of homogenization (which manifests as and suppresses through White Privilege and Colonialism). To work toward overcoming this obstacle, I encourage you to read with an open heart and mind the sections on Unity-in-Diversity. This is how we can “transcend oppositional identities of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (p. 18). Continue to the chapter “A Trinity of Unitive Principles,” which are Wholeness, Evolution, and Consciousness. One cannot be reminded enough of how Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was purposely distorted by the robber-baron industrialists, eugenicists, and increasingly racist Republican Party starting in the 1890s.

Part Two really gets us into the whole-systems meat of the matter, with the seven Candles of Unity: thought, political realm, freedom, religion, nations, races, and language. There are also nine unitive principles that are the preconditions for peace: Consciousness, Education, Relationships, Justice, Economics, Global Development, Language, Narratives, and Global Governance. No matter your background, worldview, or level of cynicism and hopelessness, two or three of these Candles and unitive principles will undoubtedly resonate with you. Keep them in your heart and mind so you can contemplate how you can participate in the types of Social Action Projects described in the second half of the section.

Part Three highlights Inner Peace as a necessary pathway to our participation in this Vision. This is micro work than anyone can—and should—be doing. Awareness, power of thought, and our role as spiritual beings are at the forefront. Once we are vibrating at a higher frequency and vibration through this inner work, we’re better able to do the interpersonal work needed for peace and mediating/healing the false duality of Us and Them. Beyond communication, community, collaboration, and communion, which are central to my storytelling and social activist work, Dr. Robinson has me thinking about a fifth C: consultation. Such a gentle, respectful, yet essential and powerful concept.

The next section is a Study Guide, which offers a summation of each chapter, a series of Questions for Consultation, and an inspirational quote. There are also 14 pages of resources, complete with URLs so you can easily find ways to connect and get involved.

I want to close with the famous quote by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” I chose this particular quote because, to dismiss admittedly audacious visions such as the one presented by Dr. Robinson in The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace without carefully considering their soundness and sense is accepting the absence of peace and lack of unity and therefore cooperating with them.