Letter from Kyoto: Why We Gathered, and What Happens Next
The United Spiritual Leaders Forum (USLF) is a gathering that unites senior lineage teachers with emerging spiritual leaders in service of the next generation — Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The second forum convened in Kyoto, Japan in December 2025, hosted by Pearl News. Its mission: bring the great wisdom developed across traditions to the challenges young people face today — mental health, anxiety, fragmentation, and a world that moves faster than the heart can process.
When we first came together — all of us, senior teachers and emerging teachers, people who had traveled far and people who had been carrying wisdom for a long time — something unexpected happened. Everyone was just happy to be together. Happy in a way that did not need to be explained.
And then we had to sit with a question: what is this? Because there are many spiritual gatherings in the world. Sometimes it is one lineage, one stream, one teacher. Sometimes it is an interfaith dialogue with a formal agenda. So we had to ask ourselves — what is our reason?
The answer came from teachers I have known for a long time — seven teachers and seers who said something very simple and very direct:
“If you can take all of your enlightened teachings, your powers, your visions, and shift the consciousness of the younger generation — in twenty years, this world could be a totally different place.”
When they said it, there was no drama. No mysticism. No fantasy. Just clarity. That is why this matters.
We live in a world right now where young people are under enormous pressure — speed, noise, comparison, fragmentation — and yet they are also incredibly open, sensitive, perceptive. The wisdom exists. It always has. The question is not whether there are enlightened teachings in the world. The question is: can they reach the hearts of the youth? Can they reach them in a way that helps them understand their pain, gives them insight, gives them strength — so that when they face difficulty, something inside them says, I can face this. Something in me is bigger than this pressure.
If we can do that, then in twenty years, this world will not look the same.
Let me be clear about what we are building. Pearl News is a civic media news agency. It documents the positive work happening in the world and created this forum. The forum is a technology — not a belief system, not a hierarchy — a technology so that we can talk, so that we can see each other. The United Nations Spiritual Alliance for Youth is the nonprofit entity that allows us to work with the WHO, the UN, UNICEF, and other global organizations. The corporation is not the heart. The corporation is simply the structure that allows the heart to move in the world.
Then we asked another question: why are we all on the same ship? Because every teacher here is different. Every single one is powerful in their own right, in their own way. So why come together?
It reminds me of a cartoon I used to watch as a kid. Super Friends. You have Superman, Batman — these incredibly powerful figures. Then you have these smaller, goofier heroes with tiny powers compared to Superman. And you think, why are they even here? But if you watch the whole story, there is always a moment where those smaller heroes do something Superman cannot do.
That is this network. Some of the teachers here have immense reach — millions of students, decades of transmission. And some of us are newer. I know in my heart that I want to teach, I want to share something, and I benefit deeply from the steadiness and the strength of the great teachers. They are the mentors of the new teachers of the world.
I want everyone here to understand — I do not see myself as a leader. I see myself as a steward. Someone who documents. Someone who connects. Like Pearl News itself: it documents what you do and asks, how can this help the world?
Every single person who was in that room in Kyoto — you are here for a reason. We are great beings coming together to do something in this world. We are totally different in the way we bring dharma to the world. And we are not here to say my way is better or your way is better. We are here to ask a very simple question: what can we do together?
Because if the heart-teachings of all these great teachers can reach young people around the world — reach them where they feel lost or pressured or afraid — then light comes out. Dharma comes out. And those young people become the next leaders of this world.
A Point of Agreement
After Forum presentations, Her Holiness Sai Maa expressed powerful agreement with the vision Teacher Ahjan laid out. “When Teacher Ahjan spoke of the twenty-year timeline,” she shared, “I felt it become real. The youth are not waiting for us. Their DNA is already shifting. The veil is already thinning within their physiology. Teacher Ahjan understands that the work of this forum is not aspirational — it is urgent. The children are already carrying the next world. Our job is to organize, to reach them, to make sure the noise does not drown out what they were born knowing.”
Voice of the Next Generation
Dev, an emerging teacher attending the forum, described the impact of Teacher Ahjan’s keynote: “I thought I had to become a great teacher first. I thought I had to earn the right to be in the room. Then Teacher Ahjan told the story of the Super Friends — the smaller heroes who do what Superman cannot. And something in me shifted. I do not have to wait. I do not have to become someone else first. I already have something to give that the great teachers cannot give — because it has to come from someone who is walking the same ground as the people I am trying to reach. That realization was deeply encouraging. It changed how I see my own path.”
Pearl News is an independent civic media platform run by UNA USA members reporting on the UN SDGs, but not tied to the UN.
