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Everyone a Changemaker: A Conversation with Bill Drayton, CEO and Founder, Ashoka. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on April 25th, 2008.
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Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Ashoka, Youth Ventures, and Get America Working -- three deeply complementary efforts to make the world a better place. Ashoka, the oldest and larger of these ventures, has created a global community of social entrepreneurs in over 70 countries around the world. Bill talks about these three projects in this extended interview with Michael Lerner.
Bill has been a social entrepreneur since he was a New York City elementary school student. He was born to a mother who emigrated from Australia as a young cellist and an American father who, also unafraid to step into the unknown, became an explorer at an equally young age. Public service and strong values run through the stories of both parents' families. These family influences, the rich diversity and openness of life in Manhattan-as well as America's deep cultural concern with equity, which flourished during the Civil Rights years-all interacted with one another and with Bill's temperament to plant Ashoka's earliest roots.
In elementary school, Bill started running a series of newspapers in his school and beyond. In high school he created and built the Asia Society into the largest student organization. By high school he was also a NAACP member and actively engaged in and deeply moved by civil rights work. At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table; and, at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services which, by the time he graduated, engaged one third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation.
Bill's deepening commitments to Asia, especially South Asia, and to civil rights were closely linked. Martin Luther King, Jr. followed Mahatma Gandhi's way, and anyone concerned with inequity within the U.S. could only be more disturbed by the greater inequalities between the world's North and South. Once focused on such a chasm, any entrepreneur would have to ask: "What can I do?" At Harvard and Oxford, Bill did ask. Fully appreciating how central to significant change ("development") entrepreneurs are, his answer was Ashoka.
Bill is also a manager and management consultant. Although he loves and thinks first in historical terms, he is trained in economics, law, and management, the three key-interventionist disciplines. He was a McKinsey and Company consultant for almost ten years, gaining wide experience serving both public and private clients.
For four years, he was Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he had lead responsibility for policy, budget, management, audit, and representing the environment in Administration-wide policy development, notably including budget, energy, and economic policy. He successfully "intrapreneured" a series of major innovations and reforms in the field, ranging from the introduction of emissions trading to the use of economics-defined incentives to remove the advantage of delaying compliance. Later he founded and led Save EPA (an association of professional environmental managers that helped the Congress, press, administration, citizen groups, and public understand and block much of the radically destructive policies proposed by the Administrator Ann Gorsuch and others). Bill also founded and led Environmental Safety (which helps develop and spread better ways of implementing environmental laws). He also served briefly in the White House, and taught both law and management at Stanford Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Bill is currently significantly involved as board chair of Get America Working! and Youth Venture, both major strategic innovations for the public good. He has received many awards for his achievements. He was elected one of the early MacArthur Fellows for his work, including the founding of Ashoka. Yale School of Management gave him its annual Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. The American Society of Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration jointly awarded him their National Public Service Award, and the Common Cause gave him its Public Service Achievement Award. He has also been named a Preiskel-Silverman Fellow for Yale Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently in 2005, he was selected one of America's Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. In the same month he was the recipient of the Yale Law School's highest alumni honor, The Yale Law School Award of Merit- for having made a substantial contribution to Public Service. More info >>
A Conversation with Binka Le Breton, writer and lecturer on environmental and human rights. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on February 22nd, 2008.
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Binka Le Breton lives on a Brazilian rainforest farm, runs the Iracambi Rainforest Research Center, lectures and broadcasts internationally on rainforest and slavery topics, is president of Amigos de Iracambi, is on the board of directors of the Keystone Center and, in her spare time, writes books. Binka's most recent book, The Greatest Gift: The Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang, is based on the 40 years Sister Dorothy Stang spent aiding in the struggle of poor farmers for land rights against logging and development companies in Brazil.
"The Sacred Depths of Nature" with Ursula Goodenough, PhD, Professor of Biology at Washington University. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on December 21st, 2007.
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Ursula Goodenough is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the author of "The Sacred Depths of Nature" (Oxford University Press, 1998), which offers religious perspectives on our scientific understandings of nature, particularly biology at a molecular level.
In 1989, Ursula joined the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) and served continuously on its council and as its president for four years. She has presented papers and seminars on science and religion in numerous arenas, co-chaired five IRAS conferences on Star Island currently serves on the editorial board of Zygon.
As well as her biology courses, Ursula co-teaches The Epic of Evolution, with a physicist and a geologist, for non-science students. Her research has focused on the cell biology and (molecular) genetics of the sexual phase of the life cycle of the unicellular eukaryotic green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and, more recently, on the evolution of the genes governing mating-related traits. Ursula was educated at Radcliffe and Barnard Colleges, Columbia University and Harvard University. She did two years of postdoctoral work at Harvard, and was Assistant and Associate Professor of Biology at Harvard from 1971-1978 before moving to Washington University.
Ursula has written three editions of a widely adopted textbook, Genetics, and has served in numerous capacities in national biomedical arenas, including service on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) review panels, membership on committees of the National Research Council (NRC), editorial boards for several professional journals, and many positions in the American Society for Cell Biology, including the presidency.
"Can Autistic Children Recover? The New Paradigm of Autism Research and Treatment" with Dr. Martha Herbert, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, a Pediatric Neurologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on December 21st, 2007.
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A pediatric neurologist and a brain development researcher, Dr. Martha Herbert's main focus is autism. She received the first Cure Autism Now Innovator Award and directed the Cure Autism Now Foundation's Brain Development Initiative. She is the Co-Chair of the Environmental Health Advisory Board of the Autism Society of America and directs their Treatment Guided Research Initiative (TGRI). Her research program includes studying what makes some autistic brains unusually large and how the parts of the brain are connected and coordinated with each other. To this end Martha utilizes multimodal imaging techniques including MRI, EEG and MEG, is particularly interested in using imaging, in coordination with clinical observation, metabolic biomarkers and animal studies, in shedding light on the physiological level of changes in autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, and on potential domains of plasticity and targets for intervention.
Martha is a member of the MGH Center for Morphometric Analysis, and an affiliate of the Harvard-MIT-MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She is director of the TRANSCEND Research Program, Treatment Research and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Martha earned her medical degree at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Prior to her medical training she obtained a doctoral degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying evolution and development of learning processes in biology and culture in the History of Consciousness program, and then did postdoctoral work in the philosophy and history of science. Martha trained in pediatrics at Cornell University Medical Center and in neurology and child neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she has remained. More info >>
"The Way of the Bees (and Other Pollinators)" with Paul J. Growald, Chairman and Founder of the Coevolution Institute. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on December 14th, 2007.
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Investor, venture philanthropist and beekeeper, Paul Growald, is Chairman and Founder of the Coevolution Institute and its Pollinator Partnership including the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, a collaboration of more than 120 groups that is the principal center of work to protect pollinating animals throughout the Americas. He is also a Trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund and donor/advisor to the Growald Family Fund. His main philanthropic interests are in the conservation of ecosystem services as exemplified by pollinators, in the minimization, mitigation and management of climate change, and in policies and politics that impact conservation.
Paul has been an amateur entomologist and naturalist since childhood, and holds degrees in political science and public policy from Northwestern University and Occidental College. Following graduate school Paul worked as Executive Assistant to professor Paul R. Ehrlich at Stanford University, as a feature news service executive editor and reporter, and as a Special Correspondent for The Washington Post. He then founded what became the Second Harvest Food Bank in San Jose, California, and was appointed by the Governor as the first Public Member of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture.
In 1980 he established and managed several businesses, including Small Cities Cable Television, which served 16 towns in Vermont until its sale in 1997, and Upper Valley Broadcasting.
While a long-time resident of San Francisco, Paul served on and chaired the board of directors of the California League of Conservation Voters for more than 20 years. He currently lives on a farm in Vermont, is married, the father of two college-aged sons and the keeper of tens of thousands of honeybees. More info >>
"A Life Exploring Healing" with Virginia Veach, PhD, physical therapist and psychotherapist. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on November 2nd, 2007.
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Virginia Veach is a physical therapist and psychotherapist who has worked extensively with people with cancer and many other life-threatening diseases. In this conversation with Michael Lerner, she describes how she does her work and some of the major influences on the development of her unique approach to healing.
"How Increasing Income Disparities Affect Health" with Nancy E. Adler, PhD, Professor of Psychology, University of California, San Francisco, Vice-Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and Director of the Center for Health and Community. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on November 2nd, 2007.
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Nancy Adler is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Vice-Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and Director of the Center for Health and Community. Nancy came to UCSF to initiate a graduate program in Health Psychology. She has served as director of that program, an NIMH-sponsored postdoctoral program in "Psychology and Medicine: An Integrative Research Approach," and a new postdoctoral "Health and Society Scholars Program" funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Nancy has been awarded the UCSF Chancellor's Award for Advancement of Women and the George Sarlo Prize for excellence in Teaching, and the Outstanding Contribution to Health Psychology award from the American Psychological Association, Division of Health Psychology. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and is currently the Chair of an IOM committee on psychosocial services for cancer survivors.
Nancy's earlier research examined the utility of decision models for understanding health behaviors with particular focus on reproductive health. This work identified determinants of consequences of unwanted pregnancy. Her current work examines the pathways from socioeconomic status (SES) to health. As director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on SES and Health, she coordinates research spanning social, psychological and biological mechanisms by which SES influences health. Within the network she has focused on the role of subjective social status in health. More info >>
"Speaking of Faith," with Krista Tippett, host of the radio program Speaking of Faith. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on October 11th, 2007.
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A journalist and former diplomat, Krista Tippett came up with the idea for Speaking of Faith while consulting for the internationally renowned Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Saint John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota. She has hosted and produced the program since the Speaking of Faith project began as an occasional feature in 2000, before taking on its current form as a national weekly program in 2003.
Tippett is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and a former Fulbright Scholar. She has reported and written for The New York Times, Newsweek, the BBC, and other international news organizations. Tippett also served as special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to West Germany. In 2007, Viking published her first book, Speaking of Faith—Why Religion Matters, and How to Talk About It. Of that book and her program, journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi has written, "there is no more trustworthy guide to the challenges of faith in a dangerous world than Krista Tippett." More info >>
A Conversation with Paul Gorman, Founder and Executive Director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on October 5th, 2007.
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Paul Gorman, Founder and Executive Director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment since 1993, received the Heinz Award for the Environment in 1999. A graduate of Yale and Oxford University, Paul worked in the U.S. Congress and served as press secretary and speechwriter to Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential campaign. He taught at the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College and Adelphi University, hosted a public radio program for 29 years and co-authored How Can I Help? From 1985-91, Paul served as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine's Vice President for Program, overseeing community-based initiatives and helping organize international conferences on religious and environment in Assisi, Oxford and Moscow.
"Saving the World? What International Philanthropy Can and Cannot Do," with David Bonbright, Director of Keystone Accountability. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on September, 20th, 2007.
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David Bonbright has been an international grantmaker with the Ford Foundation in Africa during the end of apartheid and with the Aga Khan Development Network in pre- to post-911 Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Originally from Ross, California, David is based in London with his talented South African filmmaker wife, Elaine Proctor. His mission in recent years, through a project he calls Keystone Accountability, has been to create a better way for foundations, non-governmental organizations, philanthropists and other civil society actors to evaluate the actual effectiveness of third sector projects.
This is important as the absence of commonly agreed and effective approaches to assessing and reporting in the social change space is the biggest constraint to increasing the quality and quantity of international philanthropy and foreign aid. But beyond the "inside baseball" of creating third sector accountability, David is a widely traveled and insightful observer of what is happening in the civil society movement around the world. Please see his recent notes on "Hotel Rwanda" below. More about David Bonbright >>
"Hotel Rwanda" download this pdf file
"Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View," with Richard Tarnas, PhD, professor of philosophy and cultural history at CIIS. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on September 6th, 2007.
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Richard Tarnas, is a professor of philosophy and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He also teaches psychology and cultural history at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. A graduate of Harvard University and Saybrook Institute, and formerly the director of programs at Esalen Institute, he is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that became both a best seller and a required text in many universities. His most recent book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network. It has just been released in paperback by Penguin Putnam. More info >>
"Investing in Women, Equity and Sustainability—a World Bank Perspective." with Rachel Kyte, Director of the Environment and Social Development Department, International Finance Corporation (IFC). Michael Lerner conducted this interview on August 30th, 2007.
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Rachel Kyte, a British national, became Director of the Environment and Social Development Department at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in January 2004. Since joining the department she has stewarded the development and adoption of the new sustainability policy, performance standards and disclosure policy for IFC and overseen an overhaul in internal systems and procedures to support the strategic importance IFC places on environmental and social sustainability. The IFC's new Performance Standards serve as a basis for Equator Principles which have now been adopted by over 50 financial institutions.
A graduate of the University of London and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, she has worked extensively within the environment, women's and health movements as a policy analyst and advocate. Rachel has worked with and for private sector concerns on private/public partnerships in the fields of health and environment and has served as an advisor, and on the boards of a number of NGOs, private philanthropic foundations, the United Nations, and government. She has taught negotiation and public policy at a number of institutions.
"Beyond Borders: Local Architectural and Urban Planning Solutions for Global Political and Social Problems" with California architect, Teddy Cruz. Chris Desser conducted this interview on July 26th, 2007.
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Teddy Cruz's work dwells at the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, inspiring a practice and pedagogy that emerges out of the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research and design production. He has taught and lectured in various universities in the U.S. and Latin America, and in 1994 he conceived and began the LA/LA Latin America / Los Angeles studio, an experimental summer workshop at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. During 2000-05, he was associate professor in the school of architecture at Woodbury University in San Diego where he began Border Institute (BI) to further research the urban phenomena at the border between the US and Mexico. He has been recently appointed associate professor in Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. His firm, Estudio Teddy Cruz, was selected among eight other firms as one of the national "Emergent Voices" in architecture by the Urban League in New York City.
click here for information about Estudio Teddy Cruz
click here for information about Casa Familiar
Chris Desser is a fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, a think tank focused on developing the concept of The Commons as an overarching analytical structure organizing across sectors and disciplines. She served on the California Coastal Commission and the San Francisco Commission for the Environment. In 2003, she co-founded Women's Voices, Women Vote, a project that successfully increased the participation of single women in the electoral process. Chris was the director of the Funder's Working Group on New Technology, an association of foundations concerned with the environmental, cultural and political implications of emerging technologies such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. She was co-editor of Living with the Genie: Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery (Island Press, 2003).
"Birth and the Healing Wisdom of Earth-Based Traditions" with Arisika Razak, RN, CNM (Certified Nurse Midwife), MPH, Program Director, Integrative Health Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and Carol Densmore, CNM, MPH, Director of the Cambridge Health Alliance Doula Program. This conversation was moderated by Michael Lerner on July 20th, 2007.
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Arisika Razak's work integrates the disciplines of Women's Studies/ Women's Spirituality, and Women's Health and Spiritual Dance, through the incorporation of the teachings of earth-based spiritual traditions, women's spirituality, and women's health into the language of movement and dance.
She has worked as a nurse midwife, health care provider, and health care administrator for over 25 years, serving as staff nurse-midwife and director of the Nurse-Midwife Service at Highland Hospital in Oakland; director of the Alameda County Pre-term Delivery Prevention Project, and Assistant Administrator for Ancillary services at Cowell Hospital, UC Berkeley. More about Arisika Razak>>
Carol Densmore brings 25 years of experience in education, program development, and clinical care to her current position as the Director of the Cambridge Health Alliance Doula Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This unique, multicultural program offers emotional, social, and educational support for childbearing women at the Cambridge Birth Center and Cambridge Hospital. She has attended births in Boston area hospitals and homes, a Mexican border birth center and an Indian desert village. In India, she traveled extensively and researched the training of village health workers and traditional midwives. Carol is interested in the impact of culturally sensitive social support on women's access to their own healing resources and existing health services, as well as the power of support to affect the success of health promotion measures and outcomes. She holds Master's Degrees in Education and in Public Health from Boston University and is a Certified Nurse Midwife.
"Living Cosmologies: Nature and Spirit Converging" with Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Co-Directors of the Forum on Religion & Ecology. This conversation took place on July 12, 2007.
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click here to download a transcript of this conversation
Mary Evelyn Tucker is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Scholar at Yale University where she has appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies as well as the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies. She is a co-founder and co-director with John Grim of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. Together they organized a series of ten conferences on World Religions and Ecology at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase (Open Court Press, 2003) and many other books. More about Mary Evelyn Tucker>>
As a professor of religion John Grim taught courses in Native American and Indigenous religions, religion and ecology, ritual, and mysticism in the world's religions. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, Yale University and President of the American Teilhard Association. His published works include: The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983) and, with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a co-edited volume entitled Worldviews and Ecology (Orbis, 1994, 5th printing 2000). More about John Grim>>
Some highlights from this talk:
Mary Evelyn Tucker: "[Thomas Berry's] essay, The New Story, ends with this sense of an inspiring and guiding force of the universe. If the universe evolved and brought forth the galaxies and stars and planets and moved toward the earth and the emergence of life itself, then we can rely on these huge, vast cosmological forces for guidance into the future. And that's one of his great gifts to the present moment, that the human does have a special role. And that's why the ecological crisis needs to give you a sense of a story to orient us in our 'great work,' as he would say, for our planet and its survival."
John Grim: "I sense there is a broad call among people who are awakening to this issue now towards an ecological reformation. And I think it's very helpful, especially on the Protestant side of Christianity, to find in that language and in that type of historical resonance of that period what happened in the Reformation to awaken a new religious understanding. I sense that Matthew [Fox] is a very good example of someone who is exploring this life-way dimension, trying to see the original blessings of the cosmos that we live in and how that understanding and awakening to cosmology begins to inform dimensions of our life that we've separated out or considered as totally different realms."
Mary Evelyn Tucker: "I think what is interesting is that, within all of these traditions as they're awakening to ecological crisis and struggling to respond to the death of life on the planet, that a variety of approaches are emerging, even within Christianity. A couple of months ago I attended a conference at the Vatican on climate change, where there is a very clear and keen concern about climate change from the point of view of the effect of the poor around the world. But as well, the Greek Orthodox patriarch [Bartholomew] has been a huge leader on these ideas and has had a symposium titled Religion, Science, and the Environment, especially focused on water."
Mary Evelyn Tucker: "Thomas [Berry] always felt that in the unity described as Heaven, Earth, and human, the humans completed these vast cosmological forces described as the ten thousand things, or Heaven and Earth; and that the human has this special role in Confucianism, not dissimilar to Teilhard in fact, as the co-creator with these dynamic forces of the universe. And that's why the role of the human as establishing an engaged politics, an effective educational system, and harmonious societies were the guiding principles for Confucian literati, scholars, and officials. And it's why it's one of the oldest continuing civilizations on the planet."
John Grim: "I'm so struck by the emphasis in Thomas [Berry's] reflection that it wasn't simply a rational intelligence that gave us our distinguishing human characteristic but that deep affectivity, as if ways of coming to know were also embedded in the senses: it was an embodied knowing."
"Finding What is Real" with Peter Kingsley. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on June 21st, 2007.
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Peter Kingsley is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work on the origins of western spirituality, philosophy and culture. He is the author of the books Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, and Reality.
Peter emigrated with his wife to the United States in 2002, and teaches and writes in North Georgia. He is currently a Research Associate at Emory University in Atlanta as well as an honorary Professor both at the University of New Mexico and at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Peter Kingsley's website>>
Click here for a selection of articles by Peter Kingsley
Some highlights from this talk:
"Nobody denies that Parmenides is the father of Western logic. So he is presenting the rules of logic; or rather he is presenting through his own mouth the rules of logic that have been given to him by the goddess, by the Queen of the Dead. And of course you can go two ways with this, which is something I find so fascinating. You can either go the way of analyzing the laws of logic, the principles, which is what many people tend to do. Or else you can ask what does this logic, that Parmenides presents, point to? And this is something so mysterious for me because scholars who spend their whole lifetimes analyzing and writing about and discussing and teaching Parmenides' poem: they not only ignore the poetic context and the poetic form he used. They also ignore what the logic is pointing to. And everything that Parmenides is proving has to do with oneness. It's all pointing to the truth that everything is one, everything is completely one. That is the soul that comes through logic. That's what logic originally came into existence in the West for: to prove the oneness of all existence and all beings."
"When one touches the wisdom and the beauty of these ancient traditions of healing or of wisdom, they enter your bloodstream. They become a part of you. And I'm very, very aware that this essence of ancient Western civilization has to, is actually asking, is begging now, to be brought into consciousness and applied in the modern world."
"Empedocles is such a mystery. He is such a trickster. He has such an extraordinary sense of humor. It's very, very hard for me to speak objectively about him. But just to try: As Parmenides is the founder of logic, Empedocles is indisputably an essential figure in Western culture and science and philosophy because he introduced the theory of the four elements which was to be so fundamental for many, many hundreds of years in chemistry and other sciences; and because he laid the groundwork for physics, cosmology, and many, many other disciplines. And yet all of this, all of these wonderful disciplines that he actually introduced to the Western world, he introduced, just like Parmenides, from a divine world that we no longer understand. And so it's like we take the gift but we forget where the gift came from. And one of the points that I like to make, because I find it personally so revelatory, is that Empedocles distinctly states at the beginning of his cosmological poem—his teaching about physics and the world and everything—that you're not going to be able to understand anything of what he says unless you take his words in in a certain way, unless you tend them in a certain way, unless you breathe in a certain way. In other words, unless you have a certain meditation practice right at the beginning; and especially unless you treat his words with respect, even with devotion. Of course that's something that in this modern world, where everything is so much up for grabs, it's very easy for us to forget. There is this very, very simple quality of devotion right at the basis of Western science, Western physics, Western cosmology. It was based on an attitude of needing to have the right attitude, otherwise not only will reality elude us but reality will actually fly away from us. It will avoid us. And Empedocles talks about this in very, very beautiful terms. The truth will only go where it is welcome. Otherwise it will just fly away, go back to where it comes from. It has to be welcomed with the appropriate attitude."
A Conversation on Permaculture with Geoff Lawton, Permaculture Consultant, Designer & Teacher. Penny Livingston-Stark conducted this interview on June 14th, 2007.
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Since 1985, Geoff Lawton has undertaken thousands of positions consulting, designing, teaching and implementing in seventeen different countries around the world. Clients have included private individuals, groups, communities, governments, aid organizations, non-government organisations and multi-national companies.
In October 1997, Bill Mollison, upon his retirement, asked Geoff to establish and direct a new Permaculture Research Institute on the 147 acre Tagari Farm previously developed by Bill. Geoff Lawton developed the site over three years and established The Permaculture Research Institute as a registered charity and global networking centre for permaculture projects. Geoff Lawton is the Managing Director of The Permaculture Research Institute. More info>>
Internationally recognized as a prominent permaculture teacher, designer and speaker, Penny Livingston-Stark is the Founder of Sustainable Living Designs, The Permaculture Institute of Northern California and Regenerative Design Institute.
Penny has been working professionally in the land management and development field for 25 years and has extensive experience in all phases of ecologically sound landscape design and construction as well as the use of natural non-toxic building materials. She specializes in site planning & design of resource-rich landscapes, integrating rainwater collection, edible landscaping, pond and water systems, habitat development and watershed restoration for homes, co-housing communities, businesses and diverse-yield perennial farms.
She co-created the Ecological Design Program and its curriculum at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture and co-founded the West Marin Grower's Group, West Marin Farmer's Market and the Community Land Trust Association of Marin. More>>
"Why Can't We Be Good?: Overcoming Obstacles to Our Higher Ideals" with Jacob Needleman. Steve Heilig conducted this interview on June 7th, 2007.
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Jacob Needleman is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and the author of many books, including The American Soul, The Wisdom of Love, Time and the Soul, The Heart of Philosophy, Lost Christianity, and Money and The Meaning of Life. In addition to his teaching and writing, he serves as a consultant in the fields of psychology, education, medical ethics, philanthropy, and business, and has been featured on Bill Moyers's acclaimed PBS series A World of Ideas. Jacob Needleman's website>>
Steve Heilig is the Director of Public Health and Education for The San Francisco Medical Society and a Research Associate for The Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) at Commonweal.
This conversation was held on June 7th, and recorded without a live audience.
Some highlights from this talk:
"When I started studying spiritual traditions in graduate school in California—Buddhism and then finally Christianity and Judaism—I started a very deep study of religious traditions: what are the ideas of all the great spiritual traditions of the world. And I realized there was a single unitary vision. And my aim in writing was to try to see if there was a bridge, where the ancient values and ideas about human beings and the universe could throw light on actual, contemporary, concrete problems of our culture and our personal lives."
"I had no idea that it was right in front of me, a kind of practical step that we can all take to becoming the moral beings we wish to be. And that bridge was in my classroom with the work of listening to another person. Listening becomes a deeply moral action. And this is something we can all practice. And I discovered—working with my students and working with them working each other—that there is an actual spiritual discipline, and work, of listening to another person, particularly when they disagree with us. And that requires that we step back from our own ego, from our own opinions, and let the other person in. Not to agree or disagree, but simply to let their thought into my own mind. And when I step back from myself in that way, I begin to be a much more moral person. There's a relation that establishes with another human being."
"The question of [his book, The American Soul] was the meaning of America really. And I tried to discover—I did discover, I think—that the deepest meaning of America, with all its might and power and great constitution and everything, is that it makes it possible for people to come together and work at discovering their own individual conscience, their own individual moral nature. That to me is the whole reason, ultimately, for the founding and creation of America. And the greatest of our founding fathers understood that—that what was needed was a safe place to search for conscience. And yes it was an economic and political issue, and military issues came up, but it was all there to protect the individual human being coming together with others to search for some contact with their higher nature, which I'm calling conscience in this book."
"I have the view, and I try to argue it in this book, that the human being was not made for pleasure, was not made to gratify the ego, was not made to make money, was not made to have babies, it was made to serve something bigger than oneself. We are built to serve. And the only happiness we're ever going to get is when we begin to serve something that is bigger and better than just our own individual ego. And that might be all kinds of good causes. And ultimately it comes to serve something higher than ourselves, from which we descended and to which we belong. Now, how we find that is going to be up to us, and this means working with each other. But my point, and I try to show it in the book, is we are only really happy when we are giving, not when we are getting. We have a pleasure when we get, and it's good to get, but for what? For what? What I'm trying to say is we get, we take, and it's good only to the extent that it enables us to give. Now that may sound moralistic and all that, but I believe it is the deepest truth of our human nature."
"The Politics of the Brokenhearted: On Holding the Tensions of Democracy" with Parker Palmer, Founder and Senior Advisor of the Center for Courage & Renewal and author of several books including, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation and A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, June 4th, 2007.
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Dr. Palmer served for fifteen years as Senior Associate of the American Association of Higher Education. He now serves as Senior Advisor to the Fetzer Institute. He founded the Center for Courage & Renewal, which oversees the "Courage to Teach" program for K-12 educators across the country and parallel programs for people in other professions, including medicine, law, ministry and philanthropy. More about Parker Palmer>>
Deepening the American Dream: Reflections on the Inner Life and Spirit of Democracy
Some highlights from this talk:
"I think that all of the people I've ever admired in life are people of whom it might be said, "they were men and women of suffering and acquainted with grief," to quote an Old Testament or Hebrew Bible phrase. They were people with broken hearts, whose hearts had been broken by an open-hearted engagement with the world. And with the folks I work with, teachers, doctors, lawyers, community organizers, peace activists, clergy men and women—anyone who does their work with an open heart is going to have their heart broken.... And so the question isn't whether our hearts are going to be broken, the question is, how are we going to hold the brokenheartedness? And which way will it go with us? Will it go toward destruction, or will it go toward choosing life and creativity?"
"I can't site chapter and verse, but I think it's a deep subtext running through wisdom traditions that when they speak about the heart they don't mean this modern, reductionistic, psychologized sense of simply the seat of the emotions, or even what we might call more wisely and more richly, emotional intelligence. I think the heart was understood as that core place in the human self, that place of "being" in human being, that place of identity and integrity, that essence of who we are, where all of our faculties converge. So this is not simply an emotional place, it's also at the very least a thinking place. And we do have the words of one of the ancient theologians in the Christian tradition, who said that the best kind of thinking comes when the mind is descended into the heart, pointing very directly toward this image of a human being thinking not from the top of the tower, as it were, not from that sort of arrogant place that we get in to when all we bring to our work is our heads, and that sort of superior view we can get from on high. But when the mind, as it were, bows down and descends into the core of the human self, when one is thinking with one's feeling function, with one's body, with one's relationships, with one's intuitions, with one's aesthetic sensibilities, as well as one's rationality and one's empirical sensibilities, then we recognize what emerges from that as profound and wise. It's not intellectual hackwork of the sort that happens when the soup we serve each other is this thin soup made only of rationality and data."
"I think what our times require of us is a profound understanding of how we're all called to stand in the tragic gap between what is and what could and should be, without falling out into one side or the other of that gap. If you fall into too much isness, too much reality, I think what you fall into is corrosive cynicism: you simply say, well, this is the way it is and I'll cut a deal with that, I'll get my piece and more if I can, and let the Devil take the hindmost. If on the other hand you fall into too much possibility, you revert to a kind of irrelevant idealism, where you float above the fray, unanchored in the ground of reality that's all around you. So both corrosive cynicism and irrelevant idealism take us out of the action, as it were."
"Making Change as Treatment for Despair" a conversation with Charlotte Brody, RN, and Rachel Naomi Remen, MD. This conversation took place on May 31st, 2007.
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Charlotte Brody, RN, is Executive Director of Commonweal, and a founder and former Executive Director of Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition of 443 organizations in 52 countries working to make health care more environmentally responsible and sustainable. She is also on the Steering Committee of the Safe Cosmetics Campaign. A registered nurse and mother of two, Charlotte has served as the Organizing Director for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in Falls Church, Virginia, the Executive Director of a Planned Parenthood affiliate in North Carolina and the Coordinator of the Carolina Brown Lung Association, an occupational safety and health organization focused on cotton textile workers.
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, is Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. She is Founder and Director of The Healer's Art Curriculum, which was featured in US News & World Report in 2002 and 2005 and is presently taught in 54 medical schools here and abroad. Her intensive CME programs have enabled thousands of physicians to deepen their sense of calling and service. Dr. Remen is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead Books, 1996) and the national bestseller, My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging (Riverhead Books, 2000). Dr. Rachel Remen's website>>
Some highlights from this talk:
Rachel: "For me, a big turning point in my ability to make a difference is recognizing that my instinctive reaction is not always the strategic reaction, and that the strategy always involved the mutual meeting ground, the common meeting place, where people have the same interests, and the same hopes, and the same dreams, and the same fears. And in finding that meeting place it's like finding the pivot point in the situation. Sometimes a very small group of people can identify that pivot point and then the whole propeller of the situation turns because they exerted their force at just the right pivot point, which is the meeting place between people, where they can step out of their positions, which may have hardened over years, and step into a much more vulnerable place, which is their hopes. And my sense is that we protect our hopes, often, with a show of anger, because our hopes make us feel more vulnerable. Except, it's inside out: our hopes are really our strengths."
Charlotte: "I remember beating myself up because I didn't think I was principled enough. And what I really thought was wrong with me was that I understood the other person's position. I understood, out of their story, why they might think that and so I would be moved by that. And I just thought I was such a wimp. You know, that if I had any politics at all, if I was principled at all, I would argue my position until death. And I couldn't go there, and I was embarrassed."
Rachel: "I find it absolutely fascinating that, in the world, often people are taught that their strengths are their shortcomings, and also that their shortcomings--their ability to hold a position no matter what--are their strengths. And my sense is that what may be needed is the ability to honor your own integrity and the integrity of the other person's position, and not take these in the sense of, 'one of these is right,' but "both of them may be true,' 'both of them have a story behind them,' and 'can we make a new story out of both of these stories, a story that's going to allow us both to live, and to go forward, and to see the connection.' One of the great stories, of course, is that the world is broken and we have to now act on it and fix it; that's one story. But the feminine story is different than that. The feminine story is about a hidden wholeness in the world."
Charlotte: "I think there are a lot of stories that we could tell about change that's come because the group asking most powerfully for that change got to the heart, got around the armor, and got heard."
"Healing Inside Out: A Poet's Quest, A Mother's Journey" with Sandra Steingraber, PhD, ecologist, cancer survivor, and author of Living Downstream and Having Faith, May 14th, 2007.
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Sandra Steingraber received her doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan and master's degree in English from Illinois State University. She is the author of Post-Diagnosis, a volume of poetry, and coauthor of a book on ecology and human rights in Africa, The Spoils of Famine. She has taught biology at Columbia College, Chicago, held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Radcliffe/Harvard, and Northeastern University, and served on President Clinton's National Action Plan on Breast Cancer. Sandra Steingraber's website>>
CHE (Collaborative on Health and the Environment) interview with Sandra Steingraber
Some highlights from this talk:
"There are a million things that suddenly you have to learn about, that you never thought about before, when you become a new parent. But for me that responsibility includes the evidence linking air pollution to premature birth, or mercury contamination in fish to learning disabilities. Not only as an ecologist responsible for starting a public conversation about the contaminants in air, food, and water, but it becomes part of my responsibility as a mother as well. And I don't really feel any sense of conflict between the joy of parenting and the responsibility of taking care of the environment. They both spring from the love one feels for one's child."
"I wanted very much to make clear to the delegates [of the international negotiations for the Stockholm Convention] that there were two true things about breast milk. One is that it's absolutely the best food for human infants. There's just no substitute for it. Breast milk is literally alive. It's swarming with white blood cells that protect babies against infectious diseases until they're own immune system can get set up. It has 130 different oligosaccharides in it whose job it is to go into the brain and serve as blazes along these trails that migrating infant neurons are supposed to follow, so the brain can get wired up correctly—which is why breastfed babies go on to have better eyesight, better hearing, higher IQ, better balance and coordination and so forth. So I wanted to talk about the glories of breast milk. On the other hand, the other thing about breast milk is that it is the most chemically contaminated food on the planet, for which there is no substitute.... And so that's a very hard place to be to hold those two true things: it's the best food for babies, and it's the most contaminated human food on the planet. How can we hold that in our head at the same time? And it seemed to me that if we could actually hold the bottle in our hands and look at it.... I wanted people to see that [breast milk] is an ecological substance that changes as the baby's need changes and the mother's diet changes, and yet I wanted them to hold a liquid [knowing] they'll never hold a human food that has more dioxin, more pesticides, more flame retardants, more rocket fuel than this."
"Nurturing the Inner Life in Education" with Rachael Kessler, Director of Passageways Institute and author of The Soul of Education: Helping Students Find Connection, Compassion, and Character at School and Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal. This conversation took place on May 17th, 2007.
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Rachael Kessler is recognized by Daniel Goleman as a "leader in a new movement for emotional literacy," and has developed a framework for nurturing the inner life of students and teachers that honors the interests of educators, parents, and policy-makers. Her groundbreaking book, The Soul of Education: Helping Students Find Connection, Compassion, and Character at School (ASCD 2000), was distributed to over 110,000 educators worldwide. Her work has been endorsed by educators across the spectrum of religious and political belief, progressive to conservative, fundamentalist to agnostic. Howard Gardner wrote that her "examination of the quest for meaning among today's adolescents is both daring and needed." more about Rachael Kessler>>
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, is Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. She is Founder and Director of The Healer's Art Curriculum, which was featured in US News & World Report in 2002 and 2005 and is presently taught in 54 medical schools here and abroad. Her intensive CME programs have enabled thousands of physicians to deepen their sense of calling and service. Dr. Rachel Remen's website>>
Some highlights from this talk:
Rachael Kessler, "The Commission on Children at Risk had some had some rather astonishing findings in 2003, that the need for meaningful connection and the need to address the spiritual void in young people, the search for meaning, were two key factors that have never really been identified in looking at preventing of self-destructive behaviors.... These questions are not only not being addressed in public schools in general, but they're rarely even given a forum for being asked."
Rachael Kessler, "When we talk about the inner life in Passageways we are talking about that very essential dimension of being human that longs for meaning, that longs for meaningful connection, for integrity, and also for the growth of compassion. That's, I think, the simplest way of talking about it. In my books and in my talks, I give a word picture of the experience of what it's like when soul enters a classroom. And I talk about how masks begin to drop away, and young people share the joys and the success that they were afraid even their best friends would be jealous of. And they share the vulnerability and the fear that they thought would make them look weak in front of students they compete with or teachers who judge them. And some of them share their faith, and others share their cynicism or even despair. And when they look deeply into their own stories, and when they listen deeply to others—especially people whom they have totally dismissed and disrespected—when they listen deeply into those stories, they begin to discover empathy, sometimes compassion, and occasionally forgiveness. And that experience is what I call "the soul of education."
Dr. Rachel Remen, "One of the first things that we do with medical students is to teach them what we call generous listening, which is that they listen, not to agree or disagree, not even to understand, but simply to know what is true for another person, to receive that truth and witness it, just to be there for it. And that one simple approach seems to revolutionize the relationships between these highly competitive, very isolated, very masked young people, and they create for each other a place of safety where they can speak their truth. And in our profession, of course, the major value or quality is harmlessness, the Hippocratic oath, do no harm--they become harmless to one another through this generous listening, and that makes all the difference.
Dr. Rachel Remen, "I have come over many years to trust the wisdom that's in the group That it's not up to me to be the source of all healing response. That when something is raised the response of the group is often profound and far beyond what I would have thought was in the room."
"Environmental Health Science: Human and Ecosystem Health," with Pete Myers, PhD. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on May 7th, 2007.
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Pete Myers is founder, CEO, and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is also coauthor of Our Stolen Future (1996), which explores the threats posed by man-made chemical contaminants to fetal development and human health, and he is Senior Advisor to the United Nations Foundation (Washington, DC). From 1990-2002 Myers was director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, a private foundation supporting efforts to protect the global environment and to prevent nuclear war. He received his doctorate in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Virginia.
Some highlights from this talk:
"All this time we've been talking about problems. We've got to start showing there are practical, realistic solutions... Green chemistry needs a lot of help. The way John Warner puts it, he says, If you're a mechanic and you work on a car, you've got a toolkit. It may be one of those shelved toolkits on rollers that has 17 drawers in it. And a standard mechanic can open any one of those drawers and have countless tools to choose from. If you imagine the green chemistry counterpart to that, most of the drawers are still empty... I think one of the most important things we can do right now is to figure out how to get more resources into the field of green chemistry, so that we have the replacements, so when we identify something that is dangerous, not only can we offer an alternative to the consumer, but we can argue in front of people making public health decisions that that molecule isn't necessary because there's a replacement."
"The Invisible Revolution of the Inner-net," with Nipun Mehta, Co-founder of CharityFocus.org website, on the "Invisible Revolution of the Inner-net." Michael Lerner conducted this interview on April 17th, 2007.
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CharityFocus is an all volunteer run 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that endeavors to leverage technology for inspiring greater volunteerism and providing meaningful volunteer opportunities for all who want them.
In January 2005, Nipun Mehta and his wife, Guri, anteed-up. They left everything to head on an open-ended, unscripted walking pilgrimage across India to "use our hands to do random acts of kindness, use our heads to profile inspiring people, and use our hearts to cultivate truth." More about Nipun Mehta>>
Some highlights from this talk:
"I really am rooted in impermanence, and I'd like to be even more so, in the deeper layers of my mind, to be rooted in impermanence. And that's really a practice for me. I think a lot of times we tend to find security in permanent things. Oh I've got this; I have this; I can hold on to this. And that tends to be our security and our comfort zone. And over the years I've realized that you can't really hold on to anything. Everything is just going to change, and it's constantly changing. So if you're really going to be a happy person, you need to be rooted in constant change. You need to be okay with things transitioning from one form to another."
"I think that so many times younger people are talked down to; they're talked at rather than talked with. And I think that is sort of the biggest strategic mistake... I actually do see them as me, that is my view. And bowing down to them is no problem, it's not like an exceptional thing that I do. I would do it anytime. I really have that view and I found that works really well—to see them as equals, to see them as co-creators of a shared life that we are doing. And that is true at a deep spiritual level. We are all co-creating."
"Race, Justice, and the American Dream," with Idelisse Malavé, former Executive Director of the Tides Foundation, and Gihan Perera, Executive Director of the Miami Workers Center, April 3rd, 2007.
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Responsible for the overall management of the Tides Foundation since 1996, Idelisse Malavé works with Tides staff to deliver excellent service and create opportunities for donors to increase the impact of their grantmaking. Over a twenty-five-year career dedicated to social justice, Idelisse litigated civil rights cases with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, represented women in family law matters, and co-authored a bestseller, Mother Daughter Revolution. She was a founding board member of the New York Women's Foundation and served as Vice President of the Ms. Foundation for Women for six years before coming to Tides.
Gihan Perera co-founded the Miami Workers Center together with Tony Romano in 1999. Gihan is a native of Sri Lanka and grew up in South Los Angeles. He is a strategist, published writer, and public speaker. Prior to founding the Center, Gihan was a union organizer, leading union recognition and contract agreement campaigns in Miami, South, and North Carolina. He began his activism at an early age and became a trainer and recruitment director for the AFL-CIO's Organizing Institute before completing college work. Gihan serves on the board of the local ACLU, PRE (Philanthropy for Racial Equality), and the Miami Light Project. He holds a bachelor's degree in International Development Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
"Commons and Consciousness," with Chris Desser, Fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, March 29th, 2007.
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Chris Desser is a fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, a think tank focused on developing the concept of The Commons as an overarching analytical structure organizing across sectors and disciplines. She served on the California Coastal Commission and the San Francisco Commission for the Environment. In 2003, she co-founded Women's Voices, Women Vote, a project that successfully increased the participation of single women in the electoral process. Chris was the director of the Funder's Working Group on New Technology, an association of foundations concerned with the environmental, cultural and political implications of emerging technologies such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. She was co-editor of Living with the Genie: Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery (Island Press, 2003).
Some highlights from this talk:
"For me meditation practice... creates a place for me of rock bottom truth. Which isn't to say that true things aren't unfolding in the process, but it is a place where one just knows. And that knowing is—it's not just that it's a comfortable place to be, it's an essential place to be... and I think that that rock bottom truth is for me a place of clarity of intent."
"I find that the way I learn things in the world is a dialectical way. And the way that my expression is the richest is dialectical; and by that I mean, through a conversation like this with you that helps me think about things perhaps a little differently than I had before."
On the Commons, A Project of the Tomales Bay Institute
Introduction to Commons Discussion Session at Bioneers 2006
Remarks for the Women Donors Network, February 2006
"Changemakers," with Sushmita Ghosh, President Emeritus and current member of Ashoka's Leadership Team. Michael Lerner conducted this interview on March 22nd, 2007.
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Born in India, Sushmita Ghosh was a journalist who rose through the ranks to become President of Ashoka, the global network of social entrepreneurs. In this conversation she describes Ashoka and her new work with Changemakers, an Ashoka program that extends social entrepreneurship to a wider global community. More info>>
Changemakers is pioneering a transparent online community that "open sources" innovative solutions to social problems worldwide. With its focus on thematic, collaborative competitions, it has sourced over 500 high-impact action blueprints for solving social problems.
Some highlights from this talk:
"It was very important for us to use our entire network—which spread across fields, across subject matter, across geography—to look at each problem and say, what can everyone do to solve this issue?"
"The stories began reporting not just about this social entrepreneurial who was a hero, but how a bunch of people took initiative in their own way and connected. So the whole dynamic becomes not just about one person being great, but strategies for connecting with greatness"
"Intuition and Grantmaking," with Chet Tchozewski, the Founder of Global Greengrants Fund, March 19th, 2007.
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In this conversation, Chet describes the critical role intuition plays if you want to distribute small grants to thousands of grassroots organizations in over one hundred countries.
Chet Tchozewski is the founder and Executive Director of the Global Greengrants Fund, an international environmental foundation that makes small grants to grassroots environmental groups in developing nations around the globe. Since 1993 Greengrants has made in excess of 3000 grants, in over 100 countries, totaling about $10 million.
He was awarded the prestigious Robert W. Scrivner Award for Creative Philanthropy by the Council on Foundation, an award that honors grantmakers who "possess a combination of vision, principle and personal commitment to making a difference in a creative way through grantmaking."
Intuition, Trust and a Great River of Money, Alliance Magazine
"The Embodied Soul," with Thomas Yeomans, PhD, the Founder and Director of the Concord Institute, April 6th 2007.
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Thomas Yeomans' education was first in Music, Classics, and Comparative Literature, particularly poetry, and then—a sharp turn, with the advent of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology in the 60's—in Education and Psychology.
In 1990 he founded the Concord Institute, in Concord, MA, and shifted his focus gradually from Psychosynthesis to formulating and developing Spiritual/Global Psychology. He has pursued this endeavor in the last decade and a half through teaching, training professionals, writing, and consulting to individuals and organizations. During this time he worked in various European countries as well as throughout North America, and in the 90's he helped a group of Russian doctors and psychologists from the Harmony Institute in St. Petersburg found a post-graduate training institute called the International School for Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Group Leadership.
Some highlights from this talk:
"If you think about the most mature people you know, these are not people who are caught in their personality dynamics. On the other hand, they haven't disassociated. They're very particular human beings, but there's a quality of radiance, of wisdom, of connection, of presence, of gift, of beauty—and again, there are many different words you can use—that's coming through them. And they may not even be that aware of it. It is something that they've lived so deeply and they've made this gradual shift that I'm talking about, that they're now living in the world as souls."
"Kosmos is a beautiful word in Greek, because it means beauty, and it means the beauty of the whole and it also, again drawing off Pythagoras, means deep order, that there's a deep order to the world, to the universe, that is not random...When a person is deeply connected to their soul—when they've ripened as a soul, when soul and personality are integrated in the way I've talked about—they have an increasing experience of kosmos. They have an increasing experience. It's an immediate apperception of how incredibly beautiful, both in the sense of beauty and in the sense of how deeply orderly—it's not mechanic order, it's not arbitrary order, it's this organic order which is beautiful. People have this perception—almost like that's how the soul is seeing the world all the time. And we fragment that perception because of our suffering, because of our inability to stay connected. At the moment... we are beauty blind... As we restore our sight in that way, we will be able to save the world."
An essay by Tom Yeomans: The Embodied Soul: Spirituality in the Twenty-first Century
"Entangled Minds, Are We Linked Together More Deeply Than We Imagine?" with Dean Radin, PhD, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, March 5th, 2007.
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Photo Credit: John Zeuli
In this conversation, Radin describes the surprising reach of the substantial scientific literature on psi phenomena, and wonders whether psi phenomena are not ultimately an example of the universe talking to itself.
Some highlights from this talk:
"The concept of things being separate doesn't exist at a deep physical level. All that remains are relationships between things."
"[Entangled Minds] reframes the notion of psychic abilities from some magical power that transcends the physical universe to something that is an expected reflection of the interconnectedness of the universe itself."
"Herbal Therapies and Integrative Approaches to Women's Health," with Fredi Kronenberg, PhD, Director of the The Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at Columbia University, February 22nd, 2007.
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Dr. Fredi Kronenberg is Professor of Clinical Physiology and Director of the The Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons. She received her BS from Cornell University in neurobiology and behavior and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in physiology, where she researched thermoregulatory and reproductive physiology. Her postdoctoral research at Columbia University initiated her work in women's health and menopause. She is a leading expert in the endocrinology and thermoregulatory physiology of menopausal hot flashes, and alternative therapies to treat them.
"Aging & Dying" with Ram Dass and Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, Director of The Institute for Health and Illness at Commonweal. This call was moderated by Michael Lerner on February 6th, 2007.
Download this audio file or subscribe to our podcasts or download the transcript of this conversation.
Ram Dass is a widely admired American spiritual teacher who suffered a disabling stroke some years ago and wrote about the experience in "Fierce Grace." Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, is Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. Now living on Maui, Ram Dass talked with Rachel Naomi Remen and Michael Lerner about what his stroke taught him, and how he now works with others around issues of healing, aging and dying.
Some highlights from this talk:
"Compassion is when you're one with the person... then their suffering becomes our suffering and my suffering becomes our suffering... and then we are both souls dealing with the consciousness of the incarnation."
"The heart is where the oneness is."
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen's website
"Implications of Ecological Health," with Ted Schettler, MD, Medical Director of the Science and Environmental Health Network and Chair of the Science Working Group of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, February 5th, 2007.
Download this audio file or subscribe to our podcasts or read the transcript of this talk.
Ted Schettler is science director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. He has a medical degree from Case Western Reserve University and a masters in public health from Harvard University. He is co-author of Generations at Risk: Reproductive Health and the Environment, which examines reproductive and developmental health effects of exposure to a variety of environmental toxicants. He is also co-author of In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, which discusses the impact of environmental exposures on neurological development in children. He has published a number of articles on related topics in peer-reviewed journals and has served on advisory committees of the US EPA and National Academy of Sciences.
This talk describes how his exploration of the effects of chemical contaminants on environmental health have led him into a comprehensive perspective on the interaction of genes, gene expression, nutrition, stress, income disparities, chemicals, and many other factors in human health.
Some highlights from this talk:
"But I do think if we're able, in the far distant future to look back on this period of time we will see that, the period of time in which we've been living was characterized by an extraordinary and unjustified faith in the development of technologies that were not at all invented in the wisdom of the world. What I think, at least for me, has characterized the indigenous ways of knowing, thinking and behaving, is that it was born out of a real wisdom of how to be in the world. You know if we look at certain species that have been around for sixty-five million years, there's a certain wisdom that's imbedded in these organisms and similarly certain social ways of organizing that are based on a wiser understanding of the world, and so I think that it's truly essential that we try to rediscover that as part of this effort toward restoration and building resilience."