Symphony of Minds: Feeling Our Way into a Vibrant Future
Symphony of Minds: Feeling Our Way into a Vibrant Future is a webinar co-sponsored by Safe Tech International and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. The webinar brought together people from various fields and advocacy groups to share and cross fertilize minds and hearts, as we try to make sense of these seemingly disruptive and confusing times, and to feel into what may be manifesting on the horizon.
It is evident and palpable that the world is in crisis now on many different fronts. Some of the issues we are now facing touch nearly every one of us profoundly and very personally: 5G, climate change, war, covid, vaccines, satellites, physical and mental health epidemics, political polarization, racism, nuclear weapons, globalization etc. But there is a silver lining. The crises are so impactful they seem to be fast tracking us toward a much-needed global awakening, reckoning, and rethinking of where we’re headed.
As people who care deeply about the state of the world, we advocates/campaigners spend much of our time opposing what is wrong. In so doing, we may inadvertently give power to what we don’t want, rather than to envision, manifest and empower what we do want.
This webinar was an opportunity to link arms with other advocacy groups and thinkers, and together envision what kind of world we want. Shared core values of what we’re working toward can help soften the barriers between silos of advocacy and help grow a grassroots movement of global healing and awakening.
For more details, and access to the transcripts of most presentations, please review the description under this video at https://youtu.be/lYn0vHGmwqI.
Panelists
Jeremy Lent
Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, examines the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His new book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, offers a solid foundation for an integrative worldview that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future. He has been described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age.” Author website: jeremylent.com.
Books:
The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning
www.jeremylent.com
www.liology.org
A Pathway to a Flourishing Future: Online Series
A Guided Exploration of the Web of Meaning: Online Series
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. is Professor Emerita, Dpt. of Anthropology at Smith College and founded Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration (SCBR) in the Peruvian Upper Amazon in 2009 which she directs. She has spent years in India and Peru working with indigenous peoples and with farmers. She was a research associate at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University, for several years in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Along with the Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin, she has directed several research projects questioning the dominance of the modern paradigm of knowledge. In the early 1990’s she decided she could no longer continue doing ethnographic fieldwork – which she had continued doing in the Indian State of Odisha – for moral and political reasons. She was then invited by the Peruvian intellectual-activist group PRATEC to collaborate with them in Peru which she did until 2005. From 2005 to 2009 she collaborated with the Upper Peruvian Amazonian Fair Trade Coffee Cooperative Oro Verde until 2009 when she founded her own center in the same region of the Upper Peruvian Amazon in the State of San Martin. At SCBR in the Upper Peruvian Amazon she works with indigenous communities as well as several High Schools in the province, regenerating the most sustainable and climate reducing pre-Columbian anthropogenic soil known as Terra Preta do Indio (black earth of the Indians). She has authored six books as well as edited or co-edited nine more books and published some 70 articles and book chapters. Her more recent books are: Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World (Oxford U. Pr. New York, 2011); Sacred Soil: Biochar and the Regeneration of the Earth with Robert Tindall and David Shearer, (North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random, 2017) and most recently Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi edited with Stefano Varese, Peter Lang, 2020. She is currently working on a book on Upper Amazonian Shamanism.
Jean Hudon
Jean Hudon, born in Quebec in 1952, has been at the forefront of the global movement to shift our world onto a sustainable, peaceful, healthier path. With the global network of contacts he has developed since 1981, he has launched various initiatives to facilitate peace, environmental awareness and spiritual awakening. He has published two books – a Guiding Manual for a New World, in 1986, and an ecospiritual novel, The Immortal Child, in 1988 — and created and networked since April 2000 hundreds of globally synchronized meditations to help thousands of people experience first-hand their inner connexions with the Web of Life. For the past 10 years, he has devoted much time and effort to help counter the growing threat of electromagnetic pollution. Since 1980 he has lived in an ecohamlet in Quebec where he grows many of his own vegetables, and spends way too much time at the computer to fulfill his passion for networking information and enlightening others as to what makes his heart happy.
Julian Gresser
Julian Gresser is an international attorney, professional negotiator, inventor, and recognized expert on East Asia, and CEO of Big Heart Technologies, a humanitarian Benefit Corporation founded to provide tools and resources to empower collaborative innovation and negotiation training. As a negotiator his most dramatic success involved helping a San Francisco-based trading company transform its $8 million after-tax branch into a $1 billion Japanese company in seven years. He has served as legal advisor to numerous U.S., Japanese, and European companies on a wide array of business issues, including joint ventures, limited (venture capital) partnerships, technology licensing, export controls and customs fraud, antitrust, and intellectual property protection, particularly patent infringement disputes. Julian Gresser has been twice Visiting Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese law at the Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at MIT, Doshisha University (Kyoto) and the Beijing University. He has been a senior consultant to the U.S. State Department, The World Bank, The Prime Minister’s Office of Japan, The People’s Republic of China, and the European Commission (where he trained the Commission’s Japanese negotiating teams).
www.alliancesfordiscovery.org
www.resiliencemultiplier.com
www.bbilan.org
Bruce Gagnon
Bruce Gagnon has coordinated the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space since the organization was founded in 1992. He is a Vietnam-era veteran and was trained as an organizer by the United Farm Workers Union. He lives in Bath, Maine and regularly protests at the Bath Iron Works navy shipyard where Aegis destroyers, with ‘missile defense’ interceptor missiles, are built just blocks from his home.
Book: Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories from a Fading Empire (2005 & 2008 editions).
www.space4peace.blogspot.com
Henna Maria
Henna Maria is an activist, speaker, poet and practitioner of ancestral healing arts, which she learnt apprenticing with the Shipibo tribe in the Amazon rainforest. In 2019 Henna and her husband Richard built their own healing sanctuary Wistin Origins in the mountains of Andalucía. 2019 Henna also founded Dawn of Peace, a creative community and peace organisation. Her activism focuses on educating people about the spiritual reality of life, human and animal rights, medical freedom and self-sovereignty. In 2021, Henna founded the international Police for Freedom movement – educating police and civilians about our natural rights in order to rehumanise our societies and restore trust between the security forces and the people.
Kazuaki Tanahashi
Kazuaki Tanahashi, born in Japan and active in the United States since 1977, is an artist, writer, and worker for peace and the environment. His publications include Painting Peace: Art in a Time of Global Crisis. He is the founding director of A World Without Armies and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
Moderators
Amber Yang
Amber Yang is the social media coordinator for Stop 5G International, and the restorative justice specialist and wellness coordinator for a Northern California school district. She is a regular contributor to Project Censored, a grassroots media watchdog group who regularly write about the importance of critical media literacy and the “news that didn’t make the news”—including wireless radiation and 5G issues.
www.projectcensored.org/?s=Amber+yang
Kenn Burrows
Kenn Burrows has been an educator and consultant for over forty years, teaching Holistic Health Studies at San Francisco State University since 1991. He is founder and Director of The Holistic Health Learning Center (HHLC), a unique interdisciplinary library and community action center integrating personal, social, and environmental aspects of health. Since 2004, he has produced the biennial conference: The Future of Health Care. For the 2020 conference, see: Digital Living—Promises and Perils. Since 2001, under his direction, the HHLC has hosted Food Awareness Month (October) exploring concerns about modern food choices and the Gandhi-King Season for Nonviolence – a 64-day (1/30-4/4) educational campaign demonstrating that nonviolence can empower our personal and collective lives.
He is also a member of the Executive Board of Media Freedom Foundation which oversees Project Censored, a national effort educating the public about media literacy and the importance of independent news, and the common good. He also serves as faculty advisor to the student organization, Project Censored—SF State (2009-now), where students research and write independent news stories as part of a national voting process to select the top independent news stories of the year. Selected students have their writing published in Censored, an annual media literacy handbook. Mr. Burrows is a regular contributor to Censored, writing about the importance of constructive (solution-based) news—news stories that empower individuals and communities by highlighting human goodness, creativity and collaborative power. In Censored 2020, Mr. Burrows and two past students wrote the closing chapter: Our Collective Crisis and Constructive Journalism—Growing the Good and Possible.
Prior to coming to SF State, he taught at Foothill Community College for twelve years and operated Stress-Care, a corporate training and consulting company. His current research and teaching interests include: holistic philosophy (inquiry into the complexity, vitality and beauty inherent in nature/whole systems), stress and self-care skills, narrative analysis, new forms of activism, and the evolution of consciousness and culture: fostering nonviolence, creativity and a sustainable, humane future.
Click HERE to read our August 29 newsletter with additional information and insights about the three events planned for September.