Between Christmas and New Year’s in December 1982, forty Indigenous Elders, spiritual leaders, community members, and development practitioners gathered on the high plains of Southern Alberta. For four days and four nights, they prayed, held ceremony, reflected, and consulted together. They were seeking to understand the spiritual and natural laws by which individuals, families, communities, nations, and ultimately the whole Human Family could heal, develop, and live together in a sustainable, harmonious, and prosperous world.
From that sacred gathering, held during a full lunar eclipse, the first four foundational principles began to emerge. Through continued prayer, consultation, practical experience, and service, they developed into seven principles by 1987. Following further gatherings and consultations in 1993 and 1994, they unfolded into the complete body of the Sixteen Guiding Principles.
No one person invented these principles, nor were they created as an abstract theory. They emerged through a living, collective process of listening: listening to the Elders, to one another, to Mother Earth, to the dreams and visions arising among the people, and to the guidance of the unseen spiritual world. During the past forty-four years, they have been applied to healing, education, leadership, cultural restoration, reconciliation, economic development, environmental protection, community building, and spiritual renewal across the Americas, into Asia, and in other parts of the world.
Behind the principles stand the prayers, ceremonies, sacrifices, and lived experiences of more than a thousand Elders, spiritual leaders, community builders, families, young people, educators, and other relatives who contributed to their development and application.
All of these beloved Elders have now entered the spiritual world, but their prayers and guidance remain alive within this work. The Sixteen Principles therefore carry far more than words. They carry generations of Indigenous wisdom and forty-four years of prayer, ceremony, consultation, testing, learning, and practical experience. They have roots, memory, spiritual ancestry, and a sacred responsibility to the generations yet unborn.
The international importance of the principles became increasingly visible in 1995 and 1996. In 1995, the World Commission on Culture and Development, led by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, issued its landmark report, Our Creative Diversity. Then, in April 1996, at United Nations Headquarters in New York City, the Sixteen Principles were formally presented to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and the World Commission through a presentation entitled “Visions, Realities and Guiding Principles for the Future.” The principles, begun through the prayers and ceremonies of Indigenous Elders, were carried into the House of Nations and offered as a gift to the entire Human Family.
For forty-four years, the principles have been prayed about, spoken, written, taught, discussed, tested, and lived. Now they are entering another stage of their journey. They are beginning to sing.
Human beings have developed powerful systems for understanding the visible world. Mathematics helps us comprehend relationships within the physical dimensions of time, space, movement, proportion, and form. Spoken and written languages allow us to communicate knowledge, history, experience, and intention. Sacred symbols—the circle, the tree, the four directions, the river, the fire, and the changing seasons—carry layers of understanding that ordinary words may not be able to contain.
Yet an unseen world also exists: the world of spirit, prayer, intuition, dreams, visions, memory, love, grief, beauty, and inner transformation. These realities cannot always be measured mathematically or explained through ordinary language. Their presence is known through what they awaken within us and through the courage, compassion, healing, and service they call forth from our lives.
Throughout human history, the arts have bridged these visible and unseen worlds. Ceremony, storytelling, dance, painting, carving, poetry, theatre, and music allow us to experience truths that the intellect alone may be unable to reach. At their highest level, the arts do not merely entertain us. They reveal something to us. They awaken something within us. They help us remember who we are and envision who we can become.
Among all the arts, music possesses a unique power to cross boundaries. A melody does not require a passport. Rhythm does not recognize national borders. The human voice can communicate tenderness, grief, courage, longing, joy, and hope even when the listener does not understand every word. Music can reach places within the human heart that argument cannot. It can awaken memories we did not know we carried, bring grief to the surface, open pathways toward healing, and help strangers recognize something of themselves in one another.
Music also teaches us one of unity’s deepest meanings. Harmony does not require every voice to become the same. Each voice can remain distinct while contributing to something greater. A drum does not need to become a flute. A low voice does not need to become a high voice. English does not need to become Spanish, and Spanish does not need to become English. Each language can speak from its own beauty, history, rhythm, and way of understanding the world, while joining the other in harmony. This is unity in diversity made audible.
This is the deeper purpose of the Living Music of the Sixteen Principles. Each principle will receive its own musical voice, emotional atmosphere, imagery, symbolism, rhythm, and message. Through music, each principle can move beyond being an intellectual statement and become a living experience. People will not only read what a principle means. They will be invited to hear it, feel it, imagine it, and recognize how they might live it.
Development Begins from Within
Healing is a Necessary Part of Human and Community Transformation
**Lyrics and Music inspired and drawn from Four Worlds Sixteen Principles for Creating a Sustainable, Harmonious, Prosperous World by Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr. and his Beloved Niece, Susanne Kasack. **
The first principle, Development Comes from Within, teaches that healing and development unfold from within each person, relationship, family, community, or nation. Assistance and resources may come from outside, but the vision, willingness, courage, and spiritual power required for lasting transformation must awaken within. Through music, this principle can become an inward journey—a movement from silence to awakening, from uncertainty to vision, and from powerlessness to recognizing the sacred capacity already living within us.
The principle of Vision can become music that draws us toward the people and communities we can become. Culturally Based can become a musical return to language, identity, ceremony, memory, and ancestral wisdom. Interconnectedness can be heard through many instruments responding to one another, each distinct yet inseparable from the whole. Unity can become harmony, Participation the joining of many voices, and Justice the steady rhythm ensuring that no one is excluded from the circle.
Spirituality can be felt within the silence between the notes—the unseen presence giving meaning and life to everything we hear. Learning can unfold through listening, repetition, response, discovery, and change. Sustainability can be expressed through rhythms that renew and continue without exhausting the source from which they arise. Move to the Positive can become a musical movement from sorrow toward hope—not denying the world’s suffering, but directing our energy toward the positive reality we seek to create. Be the Change You Want to See can become the great concluding invitation: not merely to listen to the music, but to live it.
No principle stands alone. Ultimately, all Sixteen Principles will flow together, one leading naturally into the next, forming a single, continuous musical journey of healing, vision, cultural identity, interconnectedness, unity, participation, justice, spirituality, balance, learning, sustainability, compassionate action, and harmonious prosperity. Like sixteen streams joining one mighty river, they will become one complete body of Living Music.
This first glimpse is being shared in English and Spanish. The words may change slightly from one language to another because a living translation is not simply a mechanical exchange of words. Every language carries its own spirit, worldview, rhythm, memory, and way of expressing relationship. Yet the spiritual meaning, emotion, and living essence of the principles remain one.
Eventually, the music can be carried into many more languages. Each language opens another doorway into the same living circle and contributes something unique to the greater experience. The purpose is not to create one global culture or to erase the beautiful differences among Peoples. The purpose is to awaken a global harmony in which the identity, wisdom, language, and gifts of every culture are protected, honored, and shared.
Music also opens the doorway to dreams and visions. A true vision allows us to experience inwardly something that has not yet been fully created outwardly. Before we can build a peaceful world, we must be able to imagine it. Before we can imagine it, we must believe it is possible. Sometimes, before we can believe it, we must first be allowed to feel it. Music can give us that experience. It can allow us to feel what harmony sounds like, what unity feels like, and what becomes possible when many distinct voices listen and respond to one another with respect. That inner experience can become the seed of outward action.
This musical journey is being shared as part of the 22nd anniversary of the 11 Days of Global Unity, from September 11 through September 21, and this year’s worldwide call for Global Peace Through Unity. During these eleven days, people, families, communities, spiritual traditions, organizations, artists, musicians, educators, peacebuilders, institutions, and nations are invited to unite their prayers, voices, creative gifts, and compassionate actions in one worldwide demonstration that peace is possible.
The journey culminates on September 21, the United Nations International Day of Peace, which calls for a worldwide twenty-four-hour ceasefire and global day of nonviolence. We are asking humanity to make that commitment visible and measurable. For one complete day, can we stop the killing, lay down the weapons, suspend acts of violence, protect innocent lives, and choose another way?
One day will not end every war or heal every division. But one verified twenty-four-hour global ceasefire would demonstrate something of historic importance: humanity can stop. War is not inevitable. Violence is not our destiny. Peace is not an impossible dream. If we can stop for one day, we can begin to understand what is required to stop for two. If we can protect life for twenty-four hours, we can begin building the relationships, agreements, institutions, and spiritual foundations needed to protect life every day.
Living Music is therefore much more than a collection of songs. It is a shared global ceremony—a way of bringing the visible and unseen worlds together through sound, language, symbolism, beauty, prayer, imagination, and collective intention. Each song carries one part of the greater vision. Each language opens another doorway. Each singer becomes a carrier of the principles, and each listener is invited to become a participant.
The music does not ask us only to admire peace; it calls us to practice peace. It does not ask us only to speak about unity; it calls us to build unity. It does not ask us only to hope for change; it calls us to embody the change we seek.
What you are about to hear is Development Comes from Within and** Healing is a Necessary Part of Human and Community Transformation** of the Sixteen Guiding Principles. This is only a glimpse of the greater musical vision now unfolding—one principle opening into another, one language answering another, and many distinct voices joining in a living harmony.
Listen not only with the mind, but with the heart and spirit. Listen for the prayers behind the words, the Elders behind the principles, the ancestors behind the music, and the generations yet unborn whose future is now entrusted to us.