Radio Evolve Global - English: Recent Episodes
Thomas Steininger & guests
evolve magazine's weekly webradio is a creative forum for a new, trans-secular spirituality. We are LIVE on air every Thursday from 20:00 - 21:00 Central Europe Time.
Radio evolve invites people who are making visionary contributions to a new, integral and evolutionary culture to join in dialogue. We feature people who are exploring how to live a spiritual life in our changing, complex contemporary world. They include authors, teachers, activists, scientists, artists and more. Out of our desire to creatively combine diverse perspectives into a new integral worldview,
Radio evolve opens up spaces of understanding and encounter to inspire us to a more conscious life. Annette Kaiser, Thomas Hübl, Ervin Laszlo, Prof. Thomas Görnitz, Claus Eurich and many others have joined us so far. We now have over 300 episodes (in German) on philosophy and mysticism, progressive spirituality, science and transcendence, society and cultural policy, ecology and development – and they are all available for you to listen to and download from our archive.
Starting at the beginning of 2018, Radio evolve includes English-language programming. Every other week the program is in English with guests from around the world. Through One World in Dialogue, Thomas and his partner Elizabeth Debold have created a global community that, combined with the listeners of Radio evolve, can help to foster a new global culture of consciousness.
We warmly invite you to experience the aliveness, authenticity, and power of conscious radio.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Geoff Fitch
The integral movement has been a defining factor in the attempt to create a culture that is deeply aware of the inner dimensions of human experience. This movement, which has been grounded in the work of philosopher Ken Wilber, has changed in many ways in the recent years. Some people say that integral had its peak after the turn off the new century. Since then, many have observed a broadening and diversification of the integral movemen. Some even speak of today as a “post-integral moment.”
Geoff Fitch is cofounder of integral Pacific. He has lived through the many developments of integral. In his upcoming course about Cultivating Emergence, he speaks about his own findings in this soul journey. Geoff Fitch emphasizes a new focus on collective wisdom and the important development of a trans-individuated culture.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger speaks with Geoff Fitch about about where integral thinking and doing is moving in the midst of a civilizational crisis.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Louise Marra
Can we re-root in nature? Louise Marra, author of ReRoot: The nature of change for a system of trees, starts this conversation in a very particular way. Introducing herself, she speaks of the mountain that is behind her, the river next to her, and the trees close to her. Louise Marra is from New Zealand. Some of her ancestors are Mauri. Some of her ancestors are European colonizers. Responding to her introduction, Thomas Steininger speaks of his own place: the Taunus Mountains that are next to his office in Frankfurt, the Main River, and the little stream that is flowing through his village. All of a sudden, this conversation became not just a conversation between two people. It became a conversation between two places on the opposite sides of our Earth: New Zealand and Europe, Auckland and Frankfurt, mountains, cities, rivers and landscapes.
In this dialogue. Louise Marra leads us into a deepening of our understanding how our experience on Earth is usually one of separation and aloneness. Opening up to this abundance of our relationships reveals a powerful and culture-changing possibility for experiencing ourselves as humans. We can become again a part of all the living relationships of this planet. How we can do this is the subject of her book, ReRoot, and the online courses around her work.
This week in Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger speaks with Louise Marra about our more-than-human relationships.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with George Pór
Over the last few weeks, many of us have become more aware of how powerful artificial intelligence has become. Many have played with the Chatbot, ChatGTP and are surprised, even stunned, by how this machine is able to deliver intelligent and precise answers to seemingly all aspects of reality. Will we be soon overpowered by AI?
For several decades, George Pór has been researching the potential of human collective wisdom--the kind of wisdom that emerges when we come together in open-hearted and open-minded dialogical fields. Wisdom is a human capacity. Pór sees the potential of a different future, where our potential for collective wisdom and the AI potential for knowledge can be brought together and something that George Pór calls "hybrid wisdom".
This week in Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with George Pór about collective wisdom and ChatGTP.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Mary Adams
These times are times for action. The climate catastrophe needs our full attention. Many people claim that activism is more important right now than any engagement for some “spiritual” transformation of consciousness and culture. Others are concerned that an exclusive focus on activism will miss the mark of what really has to change.
Mary Adams has devoted her entire life to the spiritual search, to awaken consciousness and transform culture. Now she is gluing her hand to the pavement the middle of British highways. She is deliberately taking actions that have led her to a cell in an English prison. Soon, she will be brought before the Court and tried.
Mary is convinced that, in these times, such radical actions are a way to live and spread the transformation of consciousness that we need. She shares her own story about the impact of Gandhian nonviolent resistance on her own consciousness. She also discusses the consciousness of the people she works together with as well as the consciousness of the people on the so-called “other side,” such as police officers, court clerks, and journalists.
In this week on Radio evolve, Mary Adams shares with Thomas Steininger how her activism is not only necessary but also part of the spiritual change we need.
The emotional domain is the gateway to the heart. To become a wholehearted human being, we have to be able to include the full range of our emotional responses, including the pain and difficulty of our lives. Diane Musho Hamilton, teacher of Zen, mediator and meditator, calls this kind of development, emotional maturity or emotional literacy. It involves our willingness to feel, to become awake to our emotional states, and at the same time, a complete willingness to let feeling subside or go, when it no longer serves.
Our troubled times need our emotional maturity, our capacity to feel, to be there for each other and for life itself.
This week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger talks with Diane Musho Hamilton about emotional maturity. (Diane will start an online course on emotional maturity on February 14th.)
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Guy Sengstock
Circling is a dialogical art that has found its way around the globe in recent years. Circling comes in different forms and incarnations—sometimes as Circling, sometimes as Authentic Relating, and sometimes under other names and forms of interpersonal communication. Many people have been touched and inspired by this conversational yoga that deeply opens up the power and creativity of authentic I- You relationships.
Guy Sengstock may be the father of this art. In this deeply personal and biographical conversation, he tells Thomas Steininger how a passion held by some people became a movement that spread through across continents and countries.
In this week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger talks with Guy Sengstock about the origins and foundations of Circling.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Joe Brewer
Sustainability is not enough anymore. Too much damage has been done to our planet. And every minute more damage is happening at a dramatic speed. As a response to this development there’s a new movement forming around the globe, and Joe Brewer is part of this movement beyond mere sustainability. Core to this movement is creating a connection between humans and the bioregions we inhabit. There is a recognition that our role is to find new ways to be stewards of particular landscapes, through developing regional cultures and local, natural, and social feedback loops.
Joe Brewer calls this a cosmo-local approach. Their response is not simply global and unconcerned with where one lives but planetary and committed to a specific region on Earth. Not only have they been able to revive degraded bioregions, they are also connecting with each other all over Earth to find shared new answers to the life crisis that our planet has to endure. As one of the pioneers of this “regenerative cultures movement,” Joe Brewer has been living and working in the Barichara region in Colombia and with a network of bioregions around the world.
This week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger speaks with Joe Brewer about the vision of regenerative cultures.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Elizabeth Debold
What is the role of prayer and ritual in our contemporary lives? Many of the 60s generation have rejected prayer along with the idea of a white-bearded old man as God. Yet among younger generations, there is a hunger for ritual and ways of creating connection with that which is larger than ourselves. Given that humans have been creating rituals since the beginning of humanity, how can we come to a new practice of prayer and ritual for our time?
In this conversation, Thomas and Elizabeth explore the nature of prayer as a means of relating to the sacred and clarifying one’s intention and purpose. Using the upcoming 24-hour global meditation and prayer ritual, One World Bearing Witness, that they will host on December 3-4, they explore the importance of creating rituals in a context of global diversity. Featuring the prayers of leading activists and transformative healers, the event creates a space where our prayers for the Earth, humanity, intergenerational trauma, and the beauty of life can be held. In this, which is a subtle form of change-making, it is sacred activism.
Dr. Thomas Steininger and Dr. Elizabeth Debold speak about the sacred activism and prayer that One World Bearing Witness is rooted in.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Carri Munn
One of the characteristics of the current times is that more and more we live in a network of networks. This is actually a radical change--for our human existence, for our organizations, for our society. Everything works differently. But have we really grasped what this means? Carri Munn has been exploring these implications.
A network of networks speaks to a reality where the borders of geography, organizations, and traditions are more open and give space for a new fluidity that global and regional networks. This calls for new ways of working. How do we create connections in this new environment? How do we spark collaboration and how do we catalyze systemic change?
Carri Munn, in her organization converge, has begun to answer these critical questions. She has developed new ideas and practices about how impact networks can become a powerful tool to help us to come together in this fragmented world.
In this week’s Radio evolve,Thomas Steininger talks with Carri Munn about how to create living impact networks.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Adebayo C. Akomolafe
“If colonization places us in boxes, one might think that ‘decolonization’ is the act of coming out of the box. Moving from here to there. But that would be another silent instance of ‘whiteness’: the mythical condition that enlists us in the practice of seeing things as discrete, not relational; as simple, not complex and partial; as dead, not alive and agential,” writes Adebayo C. Akomolafe, Ph.D. “I think decolonization is not about moving from ‘Here’ to ‘There’, as it is a weirding of the distance between the two.”
Born in Nigeria, living in India with his partner and two beautiful children, Bayo is the co-author of the book We Will Tell Our Own Story! He is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on the global crisis, civic action, and social change. He is Coordinating Curator for The Emergence Network, which is “an earth-wide, soil-deep commonwealth of curators that is committed to the art of queering traditional activisms and contemporary patterns of responding to crisis, and opening up new spaces of power in partnership with the nonhuman planet.”
Thomas Steininger speaks with Adebayo C. Akomolafe in Radio evolve about the weird process of decolonizing the mind.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Tomas Björkman
In the accumulation of crises that we are living through right now, it is easy to forget that crises are often a birthing process of the new. Where are the birth places of a coming future and what are these places about? In this time of collapse and dystopian discourse, where are signs of a new beginning? Tomas Björkman, a theorist and an integrative figure in the metamodern movement, sees new potential percolating around the world.
For more than ten years, a movement has been forming around the globe that tries to envision a culture and society beyond both modernity and postmodernity. They attempt to go further than the postmodern critique of modernist Western culture. Now, this metamodern movement is coming of age. Björkman is both a catalyst and chronicler of this metamodern emergence.
What is Björkman witnessing? A new, younger generation is looking for creative ways to hold this explosion of complexity that our time seems to be embedded in. Under the radar of the news media, there are many new experiments--what one could call “laboratories” of a metamodern or integral culture.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Tomas Bjorkman about the future of the metamodern.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Michel Bauwens
The global financial industry and Big Data are working hard to overcome the dramatic civilizational and ecological crises that we witness today. They think that they can control the changes that are coming by developing new institutions that basically run on the old assumptions that created the problems in the first place.
Michel Bauwens is one of the most respected theorists in the emerging field of peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration and a new economy of global commons. He has a different vision. He likens this critical moment of our history as similar to time when Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century. It is a situation where new technologies can be used for different ends. Rather than being instruments of control in the hands of the few, they also can be used to create a future that cares for the planet, people and a democratic, open society.
He calls it the Cosmo-Local Revolution, a revolution where we focus our production again more on our regions and our local environments but at the same time find new forms of global, decentralized forms of collaborations. This gives us the opportunity to work together beyond the logic of commodity and market.
In this week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger speaks with Michel Bauwens about the Cosmo-Local Revolution.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Shelley Sacks
Joseph Beuys, one of the most influential artists of the 20th C., introduced a new vision, a new human possibility. He talked about social sculpture. In social sculpture, the way we think, the way we act, the way we live together, becomes a form of commoning, or connective, eco-social art, a living symphony.
Shelley Sacks, one of his closer students and co-workers, is continuing this work today together with a group of co-creators and multipliers from around the world. They are building on a huge artwork that Beuys created as part of one of the most renowned global art exhibitions, documenta, in Kassel, Germany. In 1982, he planted 7000 oaks in this modern city that has now become a forest in the middle of a city. Sacks and the 7000 HUMANS team offer all of us a way to take Beuys’s remarkable social sculpture ideas further.
They ask us to connect with the image and reality of these 7000 oaks and then to connect with a tree or a place that is important for you. Then, supported by the Internet, you connect with each other around the globe to create a social reality of 7000 humans, 7000 trees, and 7000 commitments in a shared global conversation and investigation. In this social sculpture we create a field of commitment and connect with each other, with the more-than-human world as a living being, a living heart held by each person’s individual commitment to life.
In this episode of Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Shelley Sacks about this social sculpture of 7000 humans, 7000 trees, and 7000 commitments to which we are all invited.
7000 HUMANS is an initiative of the Social Sculpture Lab for New Knowledge and an Eco-Social Future. It grew out of the Kassel21 Social Sculpture Lab hosted by the documenta Archive for the Beuys centenary, curated by Sacks. It is Sacks' response to questions from lab visitor, and permaculture and social process designer, Ulrike Oemisch: “What follows the 7000 oaks?' Ulrike is one of the co-creators of 7000 HUMANS. Now there is a team from many countries taking it forward.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Denys Bakirov
Russia has always had its own history, different from the rest of Europe. The Age of Enlightenment, which transformed many countries in Europe into modern and mostly democratic states, never happened in the same way in the vast Russian empire. Yes, the tsar “Peter the Great” introduced some early modern principles to his country, but Russia stayed a repressive autocratic empire. Also, the Soviet regime copied and radicalized many of the tsaristic structures. What does this suggest for today and the war in Ukraine?
The other history of Russia becomes a tale of humiliation and hubris. During the short democratic experiment in the 1990s, centralized money was under the control of the “old and new” secret service. Humiliated by US-American dominance and demoralized by power games of the KGB and the new oligarchs, Russian society looked for security and identity under president Putin. That started an experiment that in itself became more and more repressive and more and more felt like a hybrid version of the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia. That is the nation that Ukraine is up against.
Denys Bakirov, a lecturer at the University in Charkiw in Ukraine, writes about metamodern theories of society. His particular focus is on the meaning of Putin’s regime for the world we are in now.
Dr. Thomas Steininger talks with Denys Bakirov about the nature of Putin’s regime in Russia.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Rufus Pollock
Something remarkable is happening in the midst of our civilizational crisis. People around the world, often young people, are looking for new ways to live together, to work together, to think and play together. What unites them is often a desire for a new, mindful way of being in the world. Mindfulness meets society.
Just as the first Renaissance ended the Middle Ages, in the midst of war and turmoil, this may be a second renaissance, a cultural learning process of a new way of being in the world collectively. Maybe something more than the Middle Ages is ending here, and definitely more is at stake.
What are the practices that we need to develop to create a more mindful way of living? How can deep mindful awareness become the conscious ground of our culture? These are questions that Rufus Pollock thinks about. He co-created the organization Life Itself that develops hubs to do research and engage in advocacy to pioneer a wiser culture.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger talks with Dr. Rufus Pollock about what he calls “ontological politics”–new forms of practice where a “mindful being in the world” meets systems-thinking and new integral ways to live on earth.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Franz Josef Allmayer
Can we use the new technological capacities of the internet to create global circles of trust? Franz Josef Allmayer argues exactly that. His company, Hypha, uses blockchain technology to support social activists, environmentalists, and new startup companies in creating autonomous and connected fields. These Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) make it possible for networks of human beings with shared goals and projects to be independent from the international financial markets and the global data industry.
Franz Josef`s vision is to transform our current digital global world into a network of digital cooperatives that can support local and global communities and their spiritual values. Local and global networks linked into living fields of trust and transformation could be the platform for new cultural potentials.
Dr. Thomas Steininger speaks with Franz Josef Allmayer about blockchain technology and how it can support a new culture of dialogical fields.
This is a rebroadcast
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi
Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi make a powerful and unusual team. Each of them works with sensing and presencing the field that holds us. Otto’s pioneering research with Theory U and the Presencing Institute has opened new horizons of human creativity. Awarana is a dance artist and meditation teacher. Together they have developed a new art form, which they call Social Presencing Theatre, a method to develop a collective perception for the social field and to build the capacity to learn how to ongoingly develop such fields. We interviewed Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi together for the last issue of our German magazine evolve, which proved to be a powerful example of creating a social field. This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger shares with us this remarkable conversation with Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi that in itself is a fascinating investigation into the field of social mindfulness.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Vytas Buciunas
Vytas Buciunas worked for many years as an integral development coach in Kyiv. When the Russian army started their invasion in February, the Co-Founder of U-Integral, his Ukraine-based consulting company, had to flee. With his Ukrainian wife and their children, he went to the country of his birth, Lithuania.
The war looks different when you know the history and the specific relationships between the Russians and the Ukrainian people, their differing relationship to authority, to freedom, to NATO and to the West. And this war looks different when you try to look at it from an integral developmental perspective.
Of course, no one has the last word right now on the atrocities that we are witnessing every day in this war. But listening to Vytas Buciunas can changed one’s understanding of this war. His voice is one of deep insight and reflection, embodying an integral understanding of history and the present moment.
Dr. Thomas Steininger speaks with Vytas Buciunas about an Integral Ukrainian perspective on a devastating war in the middle of Europe.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Gibrán Rivera
How can we grow in our mutual understanding in a world that is so badly fragmented? How can we meet when so much resentment is held within all fundamentalist identities, whether the Russian imperial identity of Vladimir Putin or the fundamentalist views of some extreme parts of woke culture? Mainstream culture also puts forth the fundamentalism of scientism and markets. Where can the impulse to want to understand come from? For Gibrán Rivera, the answer lies in the potential both of dialogue and a renewed recognition of the sacred.
Gibrán Rivera is a master facilitator, a consultant committed to transforming organizations into “networks of collaborative leadership.” He devoted his life’s work to the idea of democracy and to the work of emancipatory politics in urban communities.
Dr. Thomas Steininger and Gibrán Rivera speak about how new rituals of dialogue and a new recognition of the sacred can allow us to develop the mutual understanding that our world needs so desperately today.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Alnoor Ladha
Does life have meaning? We live in a time where the modern understanding of life seems to scramble. The cascade of crises that we are confronted with forces us to question our usual sense of meaning. According to Alnoor Lhada, it even forces us to pose this question in a very different way.
Alnoor Ladha is a founding member of /The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world. According to him, the modernist western perspective has a built-in filter that seeks complexity and abstraction. This has all its positive sides but real meaning only opens up in the concreteness of sacredness and presence. This is a dimension that the abstract mind is designed to miss, to fail to grasp. The way we look for meaning is part of the reason why we can’t find meaning in life. Somehow, we have to break our glasses to see in a different way.
In this week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger speaks with Alnoor Ladha about meaning and sacredness.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Tom Cheetham
Imagination may not be what we think it is. What if? What if imagination can open the door to a deeper perception of reality? What if that is its purpose? In a world dominated by scientific rationality, we are taught that imagination is merely fantasy. But what if it holds a key to our humanness? This recognition that imagination is central to us as human beings has been Tom Cheetham’s passion for decades.
Tom Cheetham’s interest in the workings of life took him into biology, and he worked as Professor of Biology. Still finding it hard to grasp what life is through biology, he became a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute where he studied complex systems. Realizing that physics and systems theory rely on abstractions that disconnect with the richness and meaningfulness of living, he began to seek elsewhere.
Cheetham came across the work of Henri Corbin, a French scholar of Iranian Sufism and close friend of C.G. Jung. Henri Corbin and his work revolutionized Tom Cheetham’s idea of what imagination really is and what it can do.
What if true imagination is the opposite of fantasy? What if it is rather a deeply human sense organ, that allows us to open our perception of reality to a form of seeing that our common scientistic and objectified way of thinking and perceiving is blinded to? Thomas Steininger talks with Tom Cheetham about the power of imagination.ue with Tom Cheetham.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Mallika Dutt
We are interdependent with all life. With every inhale we breathe in alchemized oxygen from the trees. With every exhale we nourish the plants. We do live in a web of overlapping ecosystems. But the world that we created is ruled by division and conquest. Do we deeply understand that we belong together—as self, community, systems, and Earth?
As a strategic innovator, Mallika Dutt has pioneered effective approaches for social change through the founding of several nonprofits, including Breakthrough and Sakhi for South Asian Women. She has also provided transformational leadership in her roles as a Program Officer for Human Rights and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Office.
In the last few years, her work has focused on waking leaders up to the truth of our interconnection. She asks us to question our current paradigms. In this world of division and isolation, what can really motivate us to become an agent of our shared well-being with people and planet?
In this week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger talks with Mallika Dutt about Interconnected Leadership.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Hannah Close
What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be in relationship with the ever-unfurling world we find ourselves part of? What, exactly, is community? Who do we mean when we say “we”?
Our time has fractured our relationship to self, other, and the more-than-human world. Can we revitalize our sense of aliveness as creatures of and participants in an animate earth? And how might such a renewal influence our actions towards greater flourishing?
Our modernist culture has left us somehow homeless. In some corners of the planet, a sense of relatedness to life on earth still thrives. In others, many live with an unsettling sense of alienation. But it is our relationships (to self, other, and Earth) that offer us the greatest sense of belonging. And it is belonging that offers us the meaning we thrive on as a species. This is the meaning of kinship.
Hannah Close is a curator for the transformative education platform Advaya, where she soon will also co-lead an online course on Kinship.
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger will speak with Hanna Close about what it means to belong.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Martin Winiecki
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has said that it is today “easier to imagine the end of the world rather than an end to capitalism.” For those who are advocating and agitating for change, this poses quite a dilemma. Despite the desperate need for change given the metacrises humanity is facing, activism finds itself in a profound crisis of meaning, orientation, and strategy. The mass movements for climate and social justice have managed to mobilize many, but there has not been we any widespread structural transformation. We only see ever greater inequities, emerging totalitarian realities, and a growing danger of ecological and social collapse.
Martin Winiecki is a co-worker at the Tamera Peace Research & Education Center in Portugal. He is also a networker and writer, passionate about bringing about fundamental change in the systems that have us captured. His newest offering is a six-day online course, from January 21-30, entitled “What is System Change?”
This week in Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Martin Winiecki about the possibilities of post-capitalist futures.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Indra Adnan
What does it mean to “wake up” to the realities of the climate crisis and social breakdown? How can we respond?
The internet era has changed the way we learn, connect, and mobilize—for good and for ill. It also demands a new political response. How is that possible since these forces have shaken the current system, that was already broken and dysfunctional?
Indra Adnan, a trained psychotherapist and co-founder of the political platform Alternative UK, focuses in her new book The Politics of Waking Up – Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age on empowering living communities, local and global. Could there be a third force next to established party politics and global business? Adnan believes this is not only possible, but practical. Her vision of “fractal” politics, with an emphasis on new patterns of behavior and viable prototypes of social progress, can be copied and replicated everywhere.
This week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger talks with Indra Adnan about the politics of waking up.
Thomas Steininger in Dialogue with Phoebe Tickell
We are limited to perceiving the world with the senses we have available to us. But we have stopped perceiving the full spectrum of who we are, what a good human life is made up of, and the magic and possibility of a human life and the world that surrounds us.
Often we leave out core parts of what it means to be human: our values, morals, meaning and virtue that shape the way we perceive and envision our world and our future.
Moral Imaginations is a practice that the renegade scientist, systems thinker, and social entrepreneur Phoebe Tickell has developed to start to re-inhabit our moral imagination.
Are you curious?
Find a quiet space and take a moment to relax. Watch this short video and, immediately after the video, take a few minutes to journal about the questions that arise in you:
This week on Radio evolve, Dr. Thomas Steininger talks with Phoebe Tickell about moral imagination.
The Global Heart: Creating a Global Community of Spiritual Practice
Thomas Steininger in Conversation with Elizabeth Debold
Every year, Dr. Elizabeth Debold, creator of One World Bearing Witness, brings together spiritual leaders, sacred activists, and guides from the different regions of the Earth in a global ceremony of diversity-in-unity. The Big Book religions are represented—rabbi, monk, nun, sheik—as are the many colors of shamanic practice from North and South America, Australia, Africa, Greenland. Over a 24-hour period, as the Earth turns once, these guides invite participants to engage live on Zoom in prayer, ritual, song, meditation. It’s an invitation to a global community of practice.
With so many spiritual and healing events online, why create such a 24-hour event? It’s not about offering information or even just a wonderful experience (which it is), Elizabeth says. The purpose is to create a field of global practice that brings together the various facets of the jewel of Spirit on this planet. Can we create a palpable field of unity across the globe that is actually experienced and recognized by the participants?
Join Dr. Thomas Steininger and Dr. Elizabeth Debold in a conversation about how One World Bearing Witness opens the global heart, giving us the experience of the diversity of the human spirit held in unity.
Thomas Steininger in conversation with Diane Musho Hamilton
Terry Patten, the co-author of Integral Life Practice and author of A New Republic of the Heart, died on October 30 after a seven-month journey with a rare and aggressive lung cancer.
Terry died as he lived: with open arms and open heart, offering his own passing as something that we all can learn from so that we can actually face the death of species, ecosystems, and perhaps complex life on this planet.
He said that this life threatening time was also “life brightening,” so infused with love, beauty, and recognition of the preciousness of every living moment. Terry was a true spiritual warrior.
How to honor the life and death of someone whose big heart and curious mind opened worlds for so many?
In this conversation with one of Terry’s dear friends, Diane Musho Hamilton, Thomas Steininger shares the impact of Terry’s life on his own and joins with Diane in exploring Terry’s remarkable gifts and presence. It’s both existentially gripping and inspiring.
Thomas Steininger in conversation with Igor Kufayev
For thousands of years, countless spiritual traditions have developed different way to cultivate the sacred and open to the depth of life.
Can we learn from the experience of those many sages, linaeges, and schools to find clues to a spirituality for our time? Igor Kufayev would definitely say yes.
Igor Kufayev is a contemporary spiritual teacher rooted in a tradition that may be one of last jewels of the Indian subcontinent – Kashmir Shaivism. Kashmir was always one of the creative centers of Indian spiritual culture. It was one of the places where the Buddhist teachings matured and developed over the centuries. In this creative environment, Kashmir Shaivism developed as a response to the world-denying bias of Buddhism and the Advaita tradition. Kashmir Shaivism created a spiritual culture firmly rooted in transcendence but also embracing the creative vibration of life.
In this episode of Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Igor Kufayev about what a metamodern spirituality can learn from Kashmir Shaivism.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Connie Zweig
Our extended longevity is a new opportunity for extended spiritual development. To become an elder is not simply about being older, though. It offers us the opportunity to leave behind past roles, to leave behind the expectations of our careers, and to become who we are authentically meant to be. The Jungian psychologist Connie Zweig, known for her writings on shadow work, wrote The Inner Work of Age: Shifting From Role To Soul about conscious aging. She tells us that the last part of life has a very particular shadow – the unlived life that we could have lived. Confronting ourselves with this shadow opens up a new opportunity to use our freedom to become ourselves in the deepest possible way.
Connie Zweig reveals how inner work can help everyone uncover and explore the unconscious denial and resistance that erupts around key thresholds of later life, attune to your soul’s longing, and emerge renewed as an elder filled with vitality and purpose. Encountering the obstacles in this transition can be a call to reclaim creativity and allow mortality to be a teacher.
In this episode of Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Connie Zweig about the call to become an elder.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Jan Artem Henriksson
In 2015, the UN presented the Sustainable Development Goals, a comprehensive plan for a sustainable world by 2030. The seventeen goals cover a wide range of issues that involve people with different needs, values, and convictions.
But the outer conditions to create a sustainable world need a comparable inner development. We, as individuals and organizations, also have to develop to be able to create greater sustainability. How do we need to develop? What could goals for inner development be?
Jan Artem Henriksson is part of a collaborative initiative that tries to find answers to the questions above. The initiative was founded by the Ekskäret Foundation, 29k and The New Division in Sweden, in cooperation with the with Stockholm School of Economics, Karolinska Institute and companies like IKEA, Ericsson and Spotify. They just finished Phase One where they selected 23 categories for human development that could help ensure a sustainable future for our planet. In Phase Two, they will look for ways and techniques how those transformational inner skills can be achieved.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Jan Artem Henriksson about an exciting initiative to articulate and implement Inner Development Goals for a world that needs us to evolve.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Tom Amarque
In the work of evolve, Thomas Steininger and the team see a new edge of culture and consciousness that is emerging. This edge opens up a new We-Space between us, and takes us simultaneously more deeply into our individuation and beyond it. We call this “trans-individuation.”
Tom Amarque, author and publisher, heads the online magazine and podcast series called parallax. Tom and Thomas have been friends for many years. They are collaborators in a shared intention to contribute to a new integral and metamodern culture. At the same time, they emphasize different aspects of this emerging culture. Thomas Steininger focuses on trans-individuation and co-creative presence, while Tom Amarque emphasizes the need of continuous individuation, individual maturity, and a new hero-culture in the “eternal war against chaos.”
In this episode of Radio evolve, Tom Amarque and Thomas Steininger talk about the dialectics and relationship between individuation and trans-individuation.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Joe Brewer
Joe Brewer talks a lot about the global collapse — not the collapse that is going to happen, but the global collapse that we are already in. As Joe says, one of the mistakes we make is that we think of the global collapse as a single catastrophic event when actually it is a long term process. For instance, it took the Roman Empire 300 years to collapse. We are in the midst, and how far we are in, we don’t know.
Joe is a complexity researcher and innovation strategist. He developed communication strategy for the UK World Wildlife Federation and Oxfam, Great Britain, among many other projects. Joe worked for several years at the Center for Complex Systems Research where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems
However, when Joe talks about managing the collapse, he means something very different than one would expect. He does not talk about technological answers but about how can we respond with our humanness to what is happening, about how we need to begin with remorse. He points us in a surprising and deep direction. Can we respond as human beings who are facing this collapse in relationship to each other and with nature? Is it possible that our of these crises a new life can be born?
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Joe Brewer about bringing our full humanity to managing the global collapse.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Tomas Björkman
Tomas Björkman, the Swedish metamodern philanthropist, scientist, and philosopher, wrote a book about how we create our worlds through the deep foundational stories that we tell each other and that hold our worlds together. His book, The World We Create, came out 2019 in English and now also in German as Die Welt die wir erschaffen.
Whether it was the god-given rights of kings in premodernity, the truth of science in Western modernity, or the market that decides everything in our pluralistic postmodern times, there have always been myths that we created and that, as a society, we believed in. These have been the foundations of our world. Today, in the metacrisis that we are living in, none of these myths hold anymore. Can we together consciously create new narratives that serve us better in navigating the complexity of our new metamodern future?
On Radio evolve this week, Thomas Steininger speaks with Tomas Björkman about his book, The World We Create – from God to Market.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Jonathan Pageau
To Jonathan Pageau, stories and symbols are the source of meaning, consciousness, and the inevitable narrative structure of reality in which we live. In a time as raw and confused as ours—when the glut of information streaming through our smartphones is disturbing and apparently contradictory—Pageau speaks of universals and recognizable patterns that live in the symbolic world of our great spiritual traditions. Is this a romantic pull from our collective past or an opening to the future?
As an Eastern Orthodox Christian icon-carver and internationally successful YouTuber, Jonathan Pageau shows how life in the traditions is perceived as an “original participation” that is without a clear divide between natural and supernatural, self and world. Our scientific worldview only allows a world that is measurable and objectifiable. But in reality, we all live in a deeply symbolic world. As soon as we start to honor this again, reality shows its truly enchanted nature.
In this week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Jonathan Pageau about the truth of the symbolic world.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Abhishek Thakore
India is hit very hard by the COVID Crisis right now. The WHO speaks of 4000 deaths per day. Independent researchers from the Economist think that the numbers may be as much as five times higher. The Indian health system is overwhelmed and there are not enough beds and medical supplies for the numbers of people who need care. It’s hard to know how to respond to such a massive breakdown and such urgent need.
Abhishek Thakore, co-founder of the Blue Ribbon Movement in Mumbai, has felt the call to respond. He initiated a self-organizing movement to help, first with direct relief, but then he and his colleagues started to organize circles around the country to help communities with their grief.
Something began to happen in these circles. They started a conversation on how the COVID Crisis can be also a new start for networks of people interested in new perspectives on living together, including technology and business. The COVID Crisis may be the first true global crisis, which also means that we can learn from each other how to respond to the pandemic, its causes and its consequences. It can be a stimulus for changing our cultural priorities and implementing new ideas.
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Abhishek Thakore about an Indian response to COVID.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with John Vervaeke
At this point in human history, Western Civilization is in the midst of an enormous meaning crisis. Unlike earlier cultures that had ways of being guided by wisdom, Modernity—that unique product of the West—focuses on a kind of calculative knowledge that leaves us adrift in a meaningless cosmos. No wonder, after several hundred years of technical brilliance and calculated meaninglessness, we are suffering, says John Vervaeke, from a wisdom famine.
John Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive psychology and science at the University of Toronto. He became well known in some quarters of the internet with his 50-episode Youtube lecture series Awakening From the Meaning Crisis. In his work, John inspires many to see a new emerging integration between the latest findings of cognitive science and the deep human pursuit of meaning, which we also can call spirituality. More than that, John has begun to outline an ecology of practices that can cultivate the wisdom we are seeking—not as a return to the traditions but as a new integration of science and spirituality.
How can a new wisdom culture—a new ecology of wisdom practices—look like that is not in contradiction but in dialogue with the new insights and findings of cognitive science? In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with John Vervaeke about how we can cultivate religion…without religion.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Tom Atlee
In these times, when politics feels frustrating and our differences feel irreconcilable, Tom Atlee offers a vision of how we can do democracy far better. Tom is the founder of The Co-Intelligence Institute, which is a non-profit that promotes awareness of co-intelligence. His central concern is evolving our current broken political system into something that he calls Wise Democracy.
Tom believes that we can transcend the polarization of debate. We can move beyond trying to make fixed choices about dynamic problems. There are far better ways to work than yes/no, right/wrong and us/them thinking—that are within reach. We already have the ability to have nuanced and deliberative decision making.
Tom’s wisdom offers a beautiful way to rethink what is possible for our democracy. As he puts it: “If you’re not part of problem you can’t be part of the solution.” When people start talking to each other, any system can become an emergent form of governance.
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Tom Atlee about Wise Democracy.
Thomas Steininger in conversation with Bence Ganti
Has our evolution come to a halt? For many years, particularly in the integral community, the idea that we are in a process of never-ending evolution was an animating belief.
European Modernity liberated us from the Middle Ages. Since the Sixties, postmodern pluralism offered the possibility of social justice and by bringing together the best qualities of traditional societies, modern science, and postmodern sensibility a new integral culture would be the next great evolutionary step. However, the culture wars of our present times present us with new questions: Could Chinese totalitarianism be the future of our liberal societies? Maybe Putin and the renaissance of Orthodox Christianity will show Western Europe a new direction. Or perhaps we are entering an era of a digital feudalism run by Silicon Valley.
What is the latest thinking in the integral world about our complex and dangerous times? Where are the new potentials for our evolution? Bence Ganti brings together Integral thinkers and practitioners from around the world to present integral visions for our collective evolution at the Integral European Conference, which will be held May 19-23, online.
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Bence Ganti about what these integral visions hold for us.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Gibrán Rivera
The norms and values of our world are changing rapidly. The murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, after many similar incidents over many years, sparked a movement, first in the US and then around the globe. That we live in a world that was created by brutal European colonialism and supremacy is becoming a simple fact, rather than something utterly ignored. These are signs of a new waking up, “wokeness,” that is being disparaged by conservatives as a new form of thought policing.
Gibrán Rivera is an internationally renowned master facilitator. He has devoted much of his work and life to the idea of democracy and to the work of emancipatory politics in urban communities. He led community engagement work at Roxbury’s La Alianza Hispana, and, with Tuesday Ryan-Hart, he is currently running a conversation series on race called What Should White People Do? Gibrán is vitally interested in having all of us wake up, into a new way of being together that avoids the rigidities that continue the polarization that is so divisive.
Thomas Steininger, a white European coming from Central Europe, and Gibrán Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico, which is still a US colony, talk on Radio evolve this week about waking up, wokeness, and how we can live together in a world in turmoil.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Alnoor Ladha
Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules (TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers, and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty, and climate change. In a recent Facebook-Video he answered the question: “What practices do you see as relevant for all global peaceworkers?” In his answer, he spoke about four essential practices:
- Be a good student of our culture, our shared agreements and shared illusions. That is the oxygen that we breath.
- Disidentify from the culture, which means life-long spiritual and political deprogramming. Our loyalty is not to any system or institution but to Life itself.
- Transcend the subject-object duality. There are infinite ways into this practice. To hold that as a committed spiritual-political practice is life-long work.
- The final practice is the practice of animism, to be in dialogue with the living planet and the living cosmos.
Alnoor’s answers were inspiring, and inspired us to seek him out for a conversation.
This week in Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Alnoor Ladha about essential practices for peace workers and change makers.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Kazuma Matoba
How do we, as individuals from a particular culture, become truly global humans?
Truly experiencing ourselves as part of a global, not just local, reality calls for a new consciousness. New practices are beginning to emerge that connect us with our global reality.
Kazuma Matoba, Apl.-Professor for Intercultural Education and Communication at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, has been developing one such practice with the spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl. They call this practice Global Social Witnessing, which is a way of exploring our global social realities through science and art.
As Kazuma Matoba says: “We want to be mentally, emotionally and physically present with all human and living beings who experience intense and profound moments of struggling, doubting, and suffering. When we see people on the news children in famine in Africa or a crying mother with her dead child in Syria-we feel touched and empathetic with these people. This often happens, but the impression is not permanent, because it is just too much for us and we do not always want to deal with it.
These everyday thoughts are deeply rooted in an individualistic dualism. We and the world are separated. Through climate change and refugee crisis, we have begun to realize that we are interconnected. So we can testify to suffering people with belief that we are not separate from them, but we and they are part of a great system.”
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Kazuma Matoba about the practice of Global Social Witnessing.
Thomas Steininger in conversation with Dr. Marjorie Woollacott
Is our awareness just the result of our neurons firing? Are the most sublime states of consciousness that lead us to see the universe as One, just a trick of our wiring? Increasingly, our understanding of consciousness is deeply influenced by the neuroscience and its deeply materialistic understanding of reality.
Dr. Marjorie Woollacott is a neuroscientist. The former chair of the Department of Physiology and a member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, she lived a double life, caught between her experiences of unity in meditation and the materialistic boundaries of her profession. But she had to stand with both feet somewhere—where would that be?
Woollacott decided to look at what other researchers had begun to do in studying meditation and she began to examine consciousness and meditation with all the tools of a scientist. “What is consciousness?” she asks. “Is it an essentially human characteristic or a fundamental characteristic of the universe? Neuroscientists, like myself, are asking questions about the essential characteristics of consciousness, and the extent to which it is dependent on activity in the brain.” Her hope for the future is the development of a “post-materialistic science” that doesn’t simply reduce consciousness to the activity of neurons but respects the rigors of scientific reason.
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Marjorie Woollacott about the potential of a post-materialistic science.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Kejal Savla and Ashok Krishnan
We think democracy has its origin in Europe. To some degree this is true, but it is also a colonial myth. India, for example, experimented with democracy in various ways dating back to the 6th century BCE and even earlier in country villages. That experimentation continues today with the Blue Ribbon Movement, an organization for young leaders/change makers based in Mumbai, India. BRM experiments with SAN (Sarvanumati), a model of full consensus democracy that comes from democratic traditions in villages and the work of Gandhi.
By calling for full consensus, SAN goes beyond the majoritiy/minority model of democracy that can make polarization all too easy. The young leaders of BRM are working with Mohan Hirabai Hiralal, a Gandhian activist who actively took part in the 1970s Gandhian Bihar land-reform movement (one of the biggest nonviolent social movements in history) and studied the practice of traditional democracy in the Indian countryside. In the 1980s, Mohan helped Mendha, a tribal village in Maharashtra, to transform the old traditions of consensus decision-making into a powerful political tool for today.
Now he is helping the Blue Ribbon Movement in Mumbai, India’s thriving world metropolis, to infuse the principles and practices of deep democracy into their network of young leaders. These digital natives are connected not only to each other by mobiles and WIFI, but also around the world.
In this week’s Radio evolve,Thomas Steininger speaks with Kejal Savla and Ashok Krishnan from the Blue Ribbon Movement on their experience of full-consensus as the future of democracy.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Bayo Akomolafe
There are cracks opening up in our world—cracks that have been deepening and widening in the year 2020.
Born in Nigeria and living with his wife in India, Bayo Akomolafe, lecturer, speaker, and poet, curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis.
He frames this project within a feminist ethos inspired by indigenous cosmologies. He considers it a shared art; one that explores the edges of the intelligible. The Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network, Bayo asks us to slow down. He calls for an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a “politics of surprise.”
Inviting us to stay with these cracks, he says: “Now we must inhabit the cracks and ask how to make offerings to those cracks. Now we must seek out a wilder kinship with the alien insurgents that have joined us in the dyadic room of mentorship. A multitudinous space. We must now study with this brokenness to know how to feel, how to see, what to feel, what to imagine, what to ask. Sitting with this non-knowing is generative. We must go down to the underworlds where things are not proper, knowing spiritual companionship as a fugitive ‘undercommons.’ We cannot afford refuge; we must make sanctuary.“
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Bayo Akomolafe on why we must stay with the cracks.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with David Nicol
During one full rotation of the Earth, from the 5th to the 6th of December 2020, hundreds of people will gather together at home, in houses of worship, community centers, and sacred spaces through the global connective power of the internet to bear witness to Earth, our Mother and Home to all of us.
This collective spiritual practice, called One World Bearing Witness, will invite many people around globe into a diverse and interconnected set of practices, such as meditation, ritual, song, and prayer. We understand this ritual as a form subtle activism, a term coined by David Nicol, the author of Subtle Activism, who sees rituals like this as a new form of a global social activism.
This week on Radio evolve, David Nicol will talk with Thomas Steininger about the significance of this form of activism, how it evokes a new consciousness, a new worldwide brother- and sisterhood that impowers us to change the world from the inside out.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Gail Bradbrook
“Being rebellious can be childish, but it also can be an initiatory act, saying: – this is not mine. I am not standing in this anymore. – We really have the power to stop this madness.”
Gail Bradbrook is co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental movement with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system. Right now, there are more 375 XR groups in 63 countries.
Gail has been researching, planning and training for mass civil disobedience since 2010. She has been arrested several times for acts of civil disobedience, most recently at the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy in the UK and previously at fracking and incinerator sites.
In this interview with Thomas Steininger she talks about her deeper motivation for her work in the Extinction rebellion, her spirituality, her love for live, her love for this planet.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Jeremy Johnson
As I write these lines, the polling stations in the USA are open. The outcome is uncertain. And it is especially uncertain what will happen if the election is contested. Will there will be riots? Will President Trump encourage heavily armed militias to take to the streets?
This will be a historic choice, not only for America but for the whole world. Will the Americans find a way out of Trumpism? How can the hostile camps find a common democratic foundation again? And what is an integral response to this deadlocked situation?
Jeremy Johnson is the founder Nura Learning, an online platform for transformational education and the president of the International Jean Gebser Society. Living in Saint Petersburg, Florida, he is an integral thinker who has closely observed the political turmoil of the last years in the USA.
In Radio evolve this week, Thomas Steininger talks with Jeremy Johnson about the elections in the USA. Afterwards, at 9 pm, they will dialogue with listeners about how an integral perspective can find answers to the extraordinary situation facing American and the world no matter who wins.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Diane Musho Hamilton
Conversation, that most basic human act, has become increasing difficult in our polarized times. In fact, it’s not even clear how to have a good, decent, deep conversation with others any longer. There are so many minefields around “political correctness” and “identity politics.” How can we listen to different perspectives, let go of our own viewpoints, and at the same time maintain a clear understanding of our desires and goals within every conversation?
Let’s ask Zen meditation teacher Diane Musho Hamilton. Diane, known for her Integrally informed facilitation skills, just wrote the book Compassionate Conversations, together with leadership coach Gabriel Menegale Wilson and the peace activist Kimberly Myosai Loh. They explore how to have effective communication among very different and diverse people. How can we “be for each other” and have truly real and compassionate conversations?
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Diane Hamilton about how to speak and listen from the heart.
Diese Woche in vertauschter Rolle: Aftab Omer, Dekan der Meridian University in Kalifornien, interviewt Thomas Steininger für Meridians Integral Voices program. Aftab interessierte sich für Thomas’ 25 Jahre Erfahrung mit neuen Formen des Dialogs.
“Might it be possible to respond to the multi-dimensional crises of our time with a different kind of speaking and listening? Can we protect and preserve the great storehouse of ideas, stories, and practices embedded in human cultures? These are some of the questions that Aftab asked. Thomas spoke to the alchemical power of care to create new potentials through dialogue that go beyond the words that are shared.”
In dieser Folge von Radio evolve führen wir ein Gespräch mit Thomas Steininger über die Kraft des Dialogs die Demokratie zu vertiefen und Kultur und uns selbst zu transformieren.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Scilla Elworthy
Conflict resolution may be one of the most pressing challenges that we face. How do we bridge deep divides? How do we bring together competing interests? Scilla Elworthy has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times for developing effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics, when she was working with the Oxford Research Group, founded in 1982. She also started Peace Direct, an organization to fund, promote, and learn from local peace-builders in conflict areas. What can she tell us about what is needed to transform conflict?
Elworthy points to one, perhaps surprising, element that has the capacity to transform conflict. She calls it the mighty heart. What she means is very practical and down to earth. In her new book and online course, she describes what she has learned in decades of deep engagement with some of the most intense conflicts on our shared planet.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Scilla Elworthy about ‘courageous conversations,’ anger as a fuel for transformation, and the role of inner Presence in the face of raging conflict.
www.scillaelworthy.com
The Business Plan for Peace www.thebusinessplanforpeace.org
Watch a TED Talk: www.ted.com/talks/scilla_elworthy_fighting_with_non_violence
Die Übersetzung des Booklets The Mighty Heart ist nun erhältlich: Das mächtige Herz.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Lonny Jarrett
Medicine, long been a triumph of modern science, is increasingly running into its own limits. The unholy marriage of the drug companies, health insurance, and medical professionals makes more and more people looking for alternatives. Traditional forms of medicine, particularly elaborate systems like Traditional Chinese Medicine, show that they can treat human ailments successfully. Both accupuncture and qigong have had significant success in treating people even though modern medicine is at a loss to say how they work in materialist scientific terms. How can these alternative treatments be integrated into a more encompassing understanding of medicine that unites East and West? Lonny Jarrett has an answer.
Lonny Jarrett has been active in the field of Chinese medicine since 1980 and is recognized worldwide as a leading practitioner, author, scholar, and teacher of Chinese medicine. He brings a unique evolutionary, ecological, and integral perspective into Chinese medicine that allows a new integration for human health.
In this episode of Radio evolve, Lonny Jarrett talks with Thomas Steininger about how Chinese medicine can help modern science to go beyond its limitations.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Aftab Omer
Aftab Omer, president of Meridian University in California, has focused his work for decades on the emergence of human capacities and transformative learning communities. It’s not surprising that he’s noticed a new dialogical opening in the internet sphere.
With the social distancing due to COVID 19, a new quality of online conversation has been born. And it won’t leave us. Millions of people have now joined the conversation in online conference spaces like Zoom and others.
These are not chat rooms–they are real, live, face-to-face meetings that are local and global, for personal reasons or business purposes. This new live and alive character of global conversations changes the way we can come together.
Someone started to call these meetings “digital campfires.” Just as our ancestors 100,000 years ago came together around campfires and started to develop language, tell stories, and develop culture, our new digital campfires come alive around the globe, giving us an unprecedented way to connect across cultures and distances. We can share personal stories, share information, and start to reform our global culture. Nobody owns these conversations. Nobody owns their creative insights. Aftab Omer calls them the new digital commons.
This week in Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Aftab Omer about the nerw emergence of the dialogical commons in our global cyberspace.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Joe Brewer
The crises that humanity faces are reaching a culmination point: pandemic, financial, wealth gap, food production, and climate. The fundamental life-systems that have supported us are being challenged and are under collapse. According to complexity researcher Joe Brewer, we have reached a point where the veil is finally lifting to reveal the root cause of this metacrisis. Using the very new but simultaneously very old form of agriculture that we now call “Permaculture,” Brewer helps us to understand the different mindset that will allow us to respond to this global emergency. Permaculture, according to Wikipedia, is a “set of design principles centered on whole systems thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems.” What does this mean for our human systems?
In this powerful conversation, Joe Brewer explains how we need to undergo a process of “re-indigenousation” of modern humanity. In his own global project called “Earth Regenerators,” he teaches both the conceptual frameworks and practical tools for regenerating Earth–both the planet and the soil.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Joe Brewer about how “re-indigenousation” is an answer to the metacrisis.
Thomas Steininger im Gespräch mit Michel Bauwens
We are living in a time of fundamental transition. Just as the printing press led to a collapse of medieval society in Europe, which marked the dramatic beginning of Early Modernity, our global interconnectivity is changing our society into something that we have not seen before.
It started with the enthusiasm of the early internet age, where people collaborated, creating software and projects together, revealing the thrilling potential of equal opportunity, creativity, and innovation.
Then the internet giants, like Google and Facebook, created new forms of dependence and control. More recently, companies like Uber and Airbnb connect consumers and, at the same time, destroy local businesses. And of course, the viral information revolution started a new epidemic of fake news.
Even though we think we have seen it all already, according to Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, we have just begun. By his observation, we are in the midst of a system change where a new collaborative culture, with a new recognition of collective contribution to a shared common good, is emergent now.
This new culture of the “commons” can come out of this chaotic and dramatic time of transition. Michel Bauwans offers a deeper understanding of the transition that we are experiencing right now, allowing us to see that our crises can be a big transition into a new culture of collaboration.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Michel Bauwens about the Peer-to-Peer Revolution and the chance to develop a new cooperative society.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Jordan Hall
Obviously, we are in a time of crisis – with the Corona Virus, the economy, the finance industry, climate change, and more. But could these all have a culmination point? Is there a meta-crisis at the center of all of these? Jordan Hall suggests that there is. He calls it a crisis of sense making. Our modern post-war society was based on systems of institutions, bodies of democratic governance, academic scientific institutions, finance and media institutions. These systems developed and held highly specialized knowledge and power hierarchies that managed the progress of the industrial world. Jordan Hall calls them the “Blue Church” and their aproach to reality as “managerial consciousness.”
But at least the since the 1990s, the world started to change dramatically. Jordan Hall notes that we live in an explosion of speed and complexity. In the networked global reality of the internet, he tells us, the modern means of managing society where each area is in an isolated “silo” of knowledge and power does not seem to work anymore. What do we do? Jordan Hall takes us to the edge of his own research and observation. There is a new networked form of collective sense making, he says, still in its infancy and, right now, riddled with dangerous childhood diseases. But as the old paradigm of a manageable world fails, this very new awareness- and data-based collective sense making seems to hold answers that can help create a livable future on Earth.
In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Jordan Hall about the crisis of sense making…and the emerging response of collective sense making.
Thomas Steininger in conversation with Peter Merry
With the crisis of the coronaviurs and the shuddering economy, the systems that we have depended on are collapsing, and at the same time, something new is moving between human beings–even in social isolation. So many people are responding to this humanitarian crisis with heart and generosity: volunteers helping the elderly get groceries, healthcare workers risking their lives, and people connecting people online in new ways. To Peter Merry, Chief Innovation Officer at Ubiquity University, and co-founder of the Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence, this seems to be a new movement with a new potential, Humanity Rising.
The spontaneous rising and coming together of human beings globally has some kind of magic. There are no big organisations organizing people. Many things are happening in a very spontaneous way. Our shared global and local situation is creating this new wave of engagement. This emerging movement has been called an awareness-based new global power.
Inspired by this unique moment of opening and potential for change, Peter Merry has been working to bring radical thinkers and experts together from around the globe to explore the emergent direction of this new movement. Humanity Rising is the result: an online forum of deep engagement that will help set a direction post-crisis.
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Peter Merry about how the emerging global crisis could allow a new humanity to rise.
Thomas Steininger in conversation with Terry Patten
There is so much that needs to be done in response to this global crisis–from everyday practicalities to potential system changes to confronting our own death or that of a loved one. But what is the foundation from which we are responding? How do we stay open to all that is happening and not shut down?
We need strong spiritual foundation to remain responsive and to hold perspective. For Terry Patten, this is a time to practice gratitude. Terry is an internationally known integral thinker, social activist, and author of A New Republic of the Heart. He sees the twin processes of gratitude and grieving as an essential part of what can keep us grounded and present at this critical time. As he says, “We can evolve our practice of grieving; it doesn’t have to collapse our hearts; it can expand them.”
Perhaps the one certainty of this period of time is unpredicatable and unprecedented change. Two months ago it would have been unimaginable to think that most of the world would be in some form of quarantine or isolation. Practicing to be with radical uncertainty, to be grateful to life as it is, gives us an anchor through this turbulence. Terry provides us with an example and different ways we can connect to our hearts and the preciousness of human relationship in order to meet the further challenges of this time.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Soryu Forall
The coronavirus is an enormous challenge for the world and for each of us. How can we stay present, open, and vulnerable during this historic stress test of our own health, psychological stability, and society? At the same time, panic can become a pandemic that can shred the cohesion and compassion in our communities. How do we not panic and not bury our heads in the sand? To be human also simply means to be really present, to be present and to stay in relationship with each other. This calls us to spiritual maturity, which is something that Soryu Forall sees as essential as we collectively face an increasingly uncertain future.
Soryu Forall, an American Buddhist teacher and founder of the Monastic Academy in Vermont, sees spiritual training as critical for developing the equanimity to deal with the chaos of climate change and global disruption. His “Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth” (MAPLE) aims to develop leaders who can create deeply sustainable communities of resilience and compassion for All of Life. Soryu Forall has trained mindfulness teachers all over the world and is known for his fight against systemic injustice and the empowerment of youth.
Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Prof. Leo Burke
It is stating the obvious to say that climate collapse is one of the biggest crises of our time, and may, in fact, be one of the biggest in the history of our beautiful planet.
The two sides of the crisis seem very clear. On one hand, there is our living planet that over billions of years has created a thriving and evolving ecosystem that in itself is a big living organism, beautiful, fragile, and alive. On the other hand, there is our modernist capitalist culture, which is based on a materialist, monetarised perspective on reality. From this perspective, nothing is really real that cannot be measured and then valued in money. This materialist perception on reality has become the biggest threat to life on earth. And Big Business, particularly Big Oil, leads the campaign to insist that this is the only reality--thereby threatening the diversity of life on Earth.
Enter Leo Burke. While he would agree that there is truth to this perspective, Dr. Burke has a different story to tell. In his professional role, Dr. Burke is Professor of Management and Director of the Global Commons Initiative at University of Notre Dame. As part of a "Climate Investing" initiative, last year he participated in two meetings with CEOs and other leading managers of some the world's biggest oil companies at the Vatican, where the Pope was also present. The question at these meetings was simple, "What can we, the oil companies, do to stop climate change?" Was this just a high level "green washing" show? Or does the climate crisis have the potential to bring us humans--all of us--together in a new way?
This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Prof. Leo Burke talks about his heartening experiences with a new post-oppositional form of climate activism.