I’ve been asked to write something about the global polycrisis. Since I have spent my life taking views orthogonal to the collective consensus, this is another such venture. Basically I will argue that a panpsychic or cosmic consciousness may be a necessary but far from sufficient contributor to a better world.

On my bedside table are five books.

• The Poems of Seamus Heaney
• Lao-Tzu’s Taoteching in Red Pine’s translation
• Joseph Campbell’s On Love
• AH Almaas’s Facets of Unity, the Enneagram of Holy Ideas
• Jeffrey Kripal’s Secret Body

Robert Lowell called Heaney “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.” This 1,250-page volume is filled with an astonishing testament to the power of language to remind us of who we truly are. Reading Heaney is one way to live in these times.

Red Pine’sTaoteching is an astonishment of fresh vision from the 6th century BC including selected commentaries from over 2,000 years. Love is at the heart of a considered life. Love is primary. Campbell’s small volume speaks truth of its power and vicissitudes.

AH Almaas’s Facets of Unity is one of the great texts on the enneagram, the mysterious system Gurdjieff first brought west. Oscar Ichazo created the enneagram of personality. Almaas quotes Ichazo at the start of each chapter on each of the nine enneatypes. Here is the Ichazo quote on Point Eight, Holy Truth:

The awareness that the cosmos objectively exists now; that this existence is its own definition, and continues whether an individual understands it or not; and that the individual experiences the truth of Reality most completely when he views each moment fresh, without preconceptions about what should be happening. [p.75]

Here is Campbell:

When people think of marriage as a continuous long love affair, then they are bound for trouble. Because it isn’t. It is in the proper sense an ordeal. And the ordeal is that of individual development. And if there isn’t individual development taking place, well, what is the good of it? [p.11]

Here is Red Pine’s Lao -Tzu:

The great masters of ancient times
focused on the indiscernible
and penetrated the dark
you would never know them
and because you wouldn’t know them
I describe them with reluctance
they were careful as if crossing a river in winter
cautious as if worried about neighbors
reserved like a guest
ephemeral like melting ice
simple like uncarved wood
open like a valley
and murky like puddle
but those who can be like a puddle
become clear when they are still
and those who can be at rest
become alive when they are roused
those who treasure this Way
don’t try to be seen
not trying to be seen
they can hide and stay hidden.
[#15, p.30]

Here is Heaney:

The Rescue

In drifts of sleep I came upon you
Buried to your waist in snow.
You reached your arms out: I came to
Like water in a dream of thaw. p.424

I offer these four authors seemingly at random because they tell you where I am writing from right now and give you a sense that my response to the polycrisis is one steeped in the solace of literature and philosophy, both sacred and profane.

I will now delve more deeply into Kripal whose 13 books I have studied in depth and with whom we are recording a complete set of conversations on his work.The following argument is complex and not for the faint of heart. Here is a link to our recorded conversations so far.

You can find them:

• On our website
• On our YouTube playlist
• On our Soundcloud playlist

His website JeffreyJKripal.com is a masterpiece of concise synopsis. I regard him as a philosopher and historian of religion of the first order. Some day his importance will be recognized.

Here are seven of Kripal’s 30 gnomons [aphorisms], almost hidden as an appendix to his autobiographical work Secret Body.

2. The Human as Two. Each human being is two, that is, each person is simultaneously a conscious constructed ego and a much larger complexly conscious field that normally manifests only in nonordinary states of consciousness and energy…

3. The Erotic Mystic. There is a profound connection between the mystical and the erotic.

4. The Amoral of Transmoral Mystic. There is no necessary or simple connection between the mystical and the ethical.

17. The Traumatic Secret. The paranormal or altered state of consciousness appears to be “let in” through the temporary suppression or dissolution of the socialized ego, which was opened up or fractured through extreme physical, emotional and/or sexual suffering, that is, through what we would today call trauma…

14. The Paranormal Is a Non-Dual Signal. A paranormal event is one in which a material event corresponds more or less precisely to a subjective event or mental state, thereby collapsing the assumed subject-object dualism of our ordinary cognitive and sensory experience and suggesting some deeper super-reality that is neither simply mental nor material but somehow both.

18. The Realist Impulse of the Cosmic Humanities. Mind is real, a fundamental dimension or nonlocal (and nonhistorical) aspect of the universe…Humanists, and particularly historians of mystical literature, hold the key to the future of knowledge—consciousness as cosmic.

30. The New Sacred. Consciousness as such is the new sacred.

pp.428-30

In other words, if I may offer a gloss on Kripal:

Kripal is among those recovering for our time the ancient view that the cosmos is alive and conscious—a view of most original peoples and of great Eastern and Western thinkers up through the 19th century, when materialist science suppressed it, though it lived on in the counter-culture and was encoded in the humanities.

There are a number of portals to this greatly expanded view of consciousness. They include—primary for our purpose here—intense trauma—which the polycrisis is visiting upon us both individually and collectively. But they also include psychedelics, which are now in widespread use, deep meditation, and the natural born or acquired capacities of some individuals to see the invisible.

The materialist science world view has given us many [double-edged] gifts for manipulating the material world. But it gives us no explanation for paranormal phenomena—intuition, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, NDEs [near death experiences], remote viewing, seeing past and future events, and much more.

The panpsychic view [see the excellent Wikipedia entry] can be summarized as follows:

In philosophy of mind, panpsychism (/pænˈsaɪkɪzəm/) is the view that the mind or consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that “the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe”.[2] It is one of the oldest philosophical theories and has been ascribed, in some form, to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer,William James,[3] Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell.[1] In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise oflogical positivism.[3][4] Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness and developments in the fields of neuroscience,psychology, and quantum mechanics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century, because it addresses the hard problem directly.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with the polycrisis? From an ordinary perspective, nothing. I am part of the global community of polycrisis aficionados that circulates new analyses of the polycrisis to each other literally daily. What are the latest horrors? What are the smartest commentaries? Who helps us find hope in the face of what seem overwhelming odds that we are going down the tubes?

But at another level, these five books and the varied but resonant wisdom they contain have everything to do with the polycrisis. Here’s why.

First, the word polycrisis itself, which we (for our sins) helped popularize, is an intrinsically ugly and jargony word. It won’t last. It’s a transient form.

William Gibson is much better: The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.

The language will be debated for a long time. But words like the holocaust of life or the catastrophe or—the internet meme—TEOTWAWKI—the end of the world as we know it—are much closer than polycrisis to the human truth.

Second, we can’t get out of this. We can’t solve it. No one’s in control. The only thing we have is our capacity to respond. The buzz word for adaptive response right now is resilience. It too will get over used but at least it is a beautiful, meaningful word. And the forms resilience work takes are countless. Who or what are you trying to save? Yourself, your family, your organization and its circle, your community, your country, or the world? Or the poorest of the poor? Or the richest of the rich? Take your pick.

Third, many people intuitively believe that the only way beyond his holocaust of life—for that is what is—is a change in consciousness. There’s something to that. But not what they tend to think. They hope that meditating or psychedelics will save us. This is where Ichazo and Kripal come in. They are both arguing from a place that posits the reality of a living cosmos and a cosmic consciousness. But they don’t posit salvation.

Here’s the twist. Both Ichazo and Kripal believe consciousness is the new sacred. Neither believes consciousness carries a human moral code. Their view, broadly speaking, is a panpsychic view—that consciousness is both cosmic and transmoral. And that means that even if more people achieve a panpsychic consciousness, it would not at all necessarily get us out of the planetary stew we are in.

But while a panpsychic view of Reality won’t extricate us, it may give us a better version of Truth than the purely materialist view, which cannot account for psi or other anomalous phenomena. Materialism denies panpsychism but panpsychism embraces the vital but partial truths of materialism.

Imagine that the Reality is that the cosmos is alive and is filled with a plethora of intelligences of many kinds. Imagine that some view us kindly and wish us well, others would use us, and others regard us as a food crop or in some similar way. Imagine that it were possible some day to align whatever is left of humanity and life on earth with the forces of what we would consider Light in the universe—there may even be a cosmic constellation of such forces. Imagine that we avoid a techno-totalitarian Game of Thrones future—which I personally see as the most likely. We can dream, no?

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and other best sellers, has just published The Secret of Secrets, an intensely and accurately researched fiction about a man and woman who set out to save the world from American defense and intelligence agency operatives who have been (in reality) researching the human paranormal potentials and seeking to weaponize them. So if you think this is all baloney, read The Secret of Secrets.

So that’s my orthogonal take on the polycrisis. When we began this work in earnest a decade ago people told me I was deluded—that we would never move the needle on the polycrisis. A decade later, the polycrisis has become one of the principal concerns of the elites and the felt reality of millions around the world. In the past few years it has gone into overdrive. What we can do at the personal, community, national, or global levels to bend it in a better direction or learn resilient responses has itself become a major industry.

What I am arguing here, with Kripal, is that the collective trauma of the polycrisis—plus psychedelic infusions and other portals—will “flip” many more people into varied cosmic states of consciousness. Most traumatized people don’t flip—they simply suffer. But some truly do. I’ve seen it many times in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. The flip isn’t binary—it is a continuum. Trauma can flip us short term or long term. There are both transient states and permanent stages of being flipped. Patti Smith in her exquisite memoir quotes Gogol: “Obstacles are our wings.”

The problem is that these mystical or flipped or partially flipped states don’t carry a shared moral code or operating manual to extricate ourselves. But they do point to a super natural reality that returns us to the ancient wisdom of a living and conscious universe designed to support life [the Anthropic Principal].

But the universe doesn’t appear to favor any one form of life—mayhap it just seeds life everywhere it can flourish and lets it fend for itself with all its ecosystem collaborators and competitors. Just as on earth, so in the cosmos. As above, apparently, so below. Many cosmologists believe planetary civilizations typically extinguish themselves at a certain point just as we seem to be trying hard to do here on earth.

I take solace, with Ichazo, with Lao Tzu, with all the great mystics, or at least many of them, in the magnificent and awesome Reality of a living conscious cosmos. I can’t prove it is living and conscious but I read the tea leaves that way as my conscious choice.

Meanwhile, there is this. The only thing we can truly (if barely) control in our lives is our own consciousness—our own response to our everyday circumstances that in turn are shaped by the holocaust of life we call the polycrisis. How do we choose to spend, in Mary Oliver’s phrase, this one wild and precious life?

In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that God’s kingdom is spread out over the earth but no one sees it. Or, if you prefer the secular version, Baruch Spinoza, that renegade 17th century Dutch Jewish lens grinder, simply said God is Nature. Which fits perfectly with the broader views that cosmic consciousness is an aspect of an ever unfolding living cosmos that constitutes the ultimate reality.

We could do worse than Yeats and the Gita for a close:

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Or consider this from Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita:

Verse 7: “Whenever there is a decline in righteousness and an increase in unrighteousness, O Arjuna, at that time I manifest myself on earth.”

Verse 8: “To protect the good, to destroy the wicked, and to establish righteousness, I come into being from age to age.”

One of the true unknowns about a living conscious cosmos is whether it plays favorites. In Einstein’s words, whether it is friendly (to us) or not. We surmise that the only universe we see is friendly to life writ large—the Anthropic Principle in either its strong or weak variants—though Stephen Hawking and others posit a multiverse—without a shred of evidence—because they cannot bear the thought of some cosmic form of intelligent design. Be that as it may, the question of whether the cosmos plays favorites or not remains—and that might be the key to whether it offers some cosmic moral code.

To wit, does the cosmos prefer enlightened civilizations living in harmony with their planets, consciously cultivating them as gardens, as Rene Dubos hoped we would cultivate the earth? Or are slave civilizations ruled by technoid insect masters equally welcome? We simply don’t know, though some claim they are given insights to hierarchies of intelligences that favor our better angels—just like medieval angelology.

But even if the cosmos is devoid of favorites and just lets all its life forms play their hands, we can revert to old existential tropes. We can just choose—if the cosmos is a moral void—the ancient values of kindness, discernment, and service—those handy step-down from love, wisdom and will. We can ally ourselves with truth, goodness, and beauty even if modernism denies them and the void takes no notice. It’s like Pascal’s wager. He said we should believe in God because if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, but if it matters, it matters.

So that’s where we are. Whatever the truth, I choose to believe the cosmos favors the forces of love and light that nourish and support life. I choose to distinguish between the fertile darkness of the cosmic womb of all life and the forces of cruelty and annihilation. The cosmos may or may not care. I intuit that it does. I don’t claim that as a moral code. But I believe there are forces out there rooting for us. I find that encouraging. It gives me courage. I believe it serves us to keep our eyes open and our ears and senses primed to see, hear or sense them.

That’s my take. I’m curious. What do you think? Truth emerges from dialogue. Do tell.

Michael

Dear Commonweal Friends:

I hope this finds you well in these difficult times.

We cannot know what will be happening happening in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere as you read this letter. Wars are unpredictable. The toll in lost lives and lost opportunities is tragic. The polycrisis—by whatever name we call it—is unfolding with increasing velocity and force.

We have been thinking about this gathering storm at Commonweal for 47 years. We have explored it intensively for the past decade. Oren Slozberg has wisely made polycrisis resilience the overarching theme of our work in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice.

The personal question for each of us—and for our families and communities—is how we live lives of service in these times. Where do we find hope? How do we protect what is good and beautiful? What do we tell our children? Countless millions of people cannot ask these questions. They can only seek survival. We are fortunate to be able to ask.

This is no time for hopelessness, cynicism, or despair. New opportunities to serve are emerging just as old systems are breaking down. For millennia, humanity has faced long periods when the
world looked as dark as this time does to us. This is what Commonweal is about—finding new and old ways to serve in dark times.

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Eighty
I turned 80 on October 22. I am grateful for a clear mind, a quite healthy body, and a caring heart. My work has changed. I counsel the new leaders. And I continue my own work with four clusters of initiatives. I’ll start with a brief summary of these clusters. Then I’ll address a few in more detail.

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Healing with Cancer
Healing with cancer has been my central work for 40 years. Arlene Allsman is my partner and director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program (CCHP) projects, which include our week-long retreats, our month-long on-line Sanctuary program, our week-end retreats for young breast cancer survivors, and all our alumni activities. Arlene is a wonderful partner.

Miki Scheidel is my partner and creative director of our extraordinary CancerChoices.org website, widely known as the best resource for integrative approaches to cancer on the web. Miki is likewise an extraordinary partner in this equally vital dimension of my life work.

Healing Circles Langley and Healing Circles Global are guided by Diana Lindsay, Oren Slozberg, and their leadership team. Healing Circles includes cancer circles but also offers many other kinds of circles as well. The circles bring community and healing solace to people all around the world. It was a deep joy to co-found Healing Circles with Diana and her husband Kelly and to support the work as it moves forward without asking much from me.

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The Resilience Projects
My vision of Commonweal from the start has been a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth. The cancer work has been at the heart of our work on personal healing. Our resilience projects address planetary healing. This cluster includes Omega, the Omega Resilience Awards (ORA), the Commonweal Resilience Project, and the Resilience Funders Network.

ORA supports three cohorts of seven fellows each in Africa, Latin America, and India. ORA also makes ten $25,000 resilience research grants each year. ORA is led by Mark Valentine, Andrea Frey, Stanley Wu, and Susan Grelock Yusem. ORA is our largest resilience project.

Stanley Wu directs the Commonweal Resilience Project. We have mounted a large solar array that feeds sun power to our Main Building (we’re seeking batteries for a self-contained microgrid.) We’ve placed large water tanks strategically around the site for fire and other emergencies. We are working on many other forms of organizational resilience.

Tamzin Ratcliffe is the new coordinator of the Resilience Funders Network. This brave community of funders grapples with the challenges of the polycrisis. They are far ahead of the rest of the funder community which overwhelmingly thinks in silos. Silo work is necessary. But if you don’t take the polycrisis into account, your strategies may get badly disrupted.

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The New School, CHE, and the Migration Support Project

The New School, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and the Migration Support Project is my third diverse cluster of work. Kyra Epstein is now the co-director of The New School where so much of our healing and resilience work comes together. Kristin Schafer directs the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, which does our work on chemical contaminants. Angela Oh leads our support for the Sanctuary outside Tijuana where Pastor Banda is housing and feeding 1,600 migrants from around the world for the cost of $1 per person per day.

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The Commonweal Archive, the Jenifer Altman Foundation, and Work Beyond Commonweal

My fourth cluster of work is with the Commonweal Archive Project, the Jenifer Altman Foundation, and work beyond Commonweal. The Commonweal Archive Project is rescuing the history of Commonweal from old files and artifacts before it is lost. We need to know where we came from to know where we are going. Erin O’Reilly, Susan Grelock Yusem, and Natalie Tallerico are working with me on the archives. Ann Blake directs the Jenifer Altman Foundation, which has been a significant force in environmental health and justice philanthropy for more than
25 years. My work beyond Commonweal is an essential space for me since I have always been drawn to frontiers of knowledge—some of which are not ready for broader dissemination and others that are simply not part of our Commonweal work.

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This, at 80, constitutes a full plate. It is only possible because of the leadership that each of these projects enjoys. Now I’ll offer you a short tour of some of our work in more depth.

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Our Resilience Work

Our resilience work addresses what is happening in the world. We were a decade ahead in studying the global polycrisis. Last year the polycrisis burst into public awareness. Now the field of polycrisis research and action is flooded with analyses from every corner of the globe. It doesn’t matter much what you call it. There’s a big debate over whether the polycrisis is anything new or whether it is simply history continuing to unfold.

Whatever view you take, the crises are coming thick and fast. The headlines began with the climate emergency. Then COVID-19 added a new layer. Then war broke out in Ukraine. That was when people began to acknowledge the polycrisis. Next came concern about Artificial Intelligence. Then the war in Israel erupted with the Hamas attack and Israel’s response. These are just the headlines.

In the background, global geopolitics is moving toward a multi-polar world. The global economy and finance are in uncharted waters. Technological innovations are exploding beyond Artificial Intelligence. Flows of desperate migrants are larger than ever. Toxic chemicals permeate the entire biosphere. And much more.

Through Omega, ORA, the Commonweal Resilience Project, and the Resilience Funders Network, we are in touch with researchers, analysts, and practitioners around the world. This is an arena of active invention for us since Oren has made resilience the overarching theme of all our Commonweal work. It is a prescient choice.

omega.ngo
omega.ngo/our-work/ora/
omega.ngo/our-work/resilience-funders-network

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The Commonweal Cancer Help Program

CCHP has been the great love of my life at Commonweal over the past 37 years. We recently completed our 221st week-long retreat. The retreats profoundly change lives. Many staff members have worked for decades together. Arlene Allsman, as I said, directs CCHP, Rachel Naomi Remen is our medical director, Frances Weller and Natalie Portis are two of our senior psychotherapists, Angela Madonia teaches yoga, Erlene Chiang teaches qigong, Katrina Mayo-Smith offers sandtray, Elizabeth Evans is our senior masseuse, Waz Thomas coordinates alumni work, and Claire Heart is the master chef in the kitchen.

Due to COVID-19 we have a shorter waiting list. We strongly encourage CCHP alumni who’d like to experience the magic again to return. We equally warmly welcome newbies. CCHP is soul work. The power of love as a healing force is nowhere more evident.

cancerhelpprogram.org

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CancerChoices

Integrative cancer therapies can help people live better and often longer with cancer. It is tragic that so few people have access to these therapies. Integrative cancer therapies and approaches should be the standard of care for cancer.

Our CancerChoices.org website is thriving, with more than 53,000 visitors in the last year. We’re the best source of deep information on integrative cancer choices on the web. This year we added 10 new reviews of complementary therapies; three new stories from cancer survivors; two updated and expanded cancer handbooks on breast cancer and prostate cancer; and two updated and expanded handbooks on managing pain and hot flashes.

Miki Scheidel, as I said, is our creative director, Nancy Hepp is project manager, Laura Pole is our senior clinical consultant, and Melissa Oprish is our new social media coordinator. Many others support the work.

The tragic truth is that for all the billions of dollars that go into cancer research, few people have the navigational skills to integrate the best of conventional and integrative therapies. Integrative cancer care reliably improves quality of life, reduces suffering, prevents or extends time to recurrence, and often extends life as well. These integrative approaches also help people find meaning in these great life transitions. Every person should have access to integrative cancer care.

For a certain kind of person, there are few resources that rival Commonweal in terms of what we offer to help navigate a cancer diagnosis. We are there for people who think for themselves, who have a sense of agency, who believe integral approaches to cancer are fundamentally better, who understand what we offer, and who believe it may help them.

cancerchoices.org

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Kyra Epstein Is the New Co-Director of The New School

I warmly welcome Kyra Epstein as the new co-director of The New School at Commonweal. Kyra has long served as New School coordinator—we are recognizing her leadership contribution. We have passed the 10,000 subscriber mark on our YouTube channel and average 30,000 listens and watches every month (15,000 on YouTube, 17,000 on audio feeds).

Among our top watches and listens in the last six months include:

• Rachel Naomi Remen’s extraordinary conversation with U.S. Surgeon General
  Dr. Vivek Murthy (don’t miss it).
• Gary Cohen, president and co-founder of Health Care Without Harm, on the
  Evolution of the Modern Environment and Health Movement.
• Our spiritual biography of Orland Bishop.
• Our conversations with philosopher Jacob Needleman.
• Our conversations with Beatrice Chestnut on Enneagram, which are our most
  popular videos of all time at The New School.

The New School also has a vast archive of dozens of conversations about integrative cancer care, many co-presented with CancerChoices and Healing Circles. This year, for example, our conversation with Radical Remissions founder Kelly Turner has been watched or listened to almost 13,000 times. The collective CancerChoices/New School conversation playlists were watched or listened to more than 24,000 times this year alone.

tns.commonweal.org

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Sanctuary: How We Help 1,600 Migrants in Tijuana

I have a deep personal resonance with our Sanctuary work—formally the Migration Support Project. Here is Commonweal Board Member Angela Oh’s report:

“The Gift of Compassion (GoCompassion) began its journey with a sanctuary for
migrants in 2019, following the 2018 Fall Gathering. The connection to Pastor Gustavo Banda in Tijuana happened out of an inspiration to send a message that the traumatizing separation of minor children from their parents as they were making way to seek asylum at California’s southern border, was seen and action would be taken. The Migration Support Project is where the on-going support continues.

Thanks to the courage of a single undocumented graduate student from Cal Berkeley who walked from Oakland to the border, a journey of love and compassion led to a deep connection to the heart work of Pastor Banda at Cañon de Alacrán (Scorpion Canyon). GoCompassion/Commonweal was part of that journey and began by raising funds to buy land so that a dedicated children’s space could be built.

Later, more funds were raised to support building a school for hundreds of children who were part of the human flow into the church sanctuary. Refugees arrive from Haiti,
Honduras, Guatemala, and parts of Mexico where climate change, conflict, and poverty made it necessary to seek asylum.

In the past year, refugees have been migrating from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Brazil,
Pakistan—all learning of the sanctuary through word of mouth. GoCompassion has
committed to delivering clothing, food, blankets, and a minimum of $2,000 per month to help cover costs needed to shelter and feed the migrating families. The pastor estimates it takes $1 a day per person.

Today, in any given week, there are 1,200 to 1,600 people—hundreds of them are
children. GoCompassion will not lose contact as long as Pastor Banda is committed to his vision of providing love and compassion to those seeking safety and security.”

We can’t solve the global tragedy of migrants uprooted from their homes and seeking new lives. But we can make a difference in the lives of the thousands of families and individuals who find their way to Pastor Bandor’s extraordinary sanctuary. The sanctuary isn’t just a place that provides food, shelter, and clothing. It is a place of true spiritual succor deeply aligned with our work in healing. It’s the level at which we know we can make a difference.

gocompassion.org

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Partings (and Stepping Back)

One of the things I have always most hoped is that when the time comes for each of us to step back or depart from Commonweal, we do so with grace and commitment to the well-being of our beloved community of service work. Here are three people who are doing just that.

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David Steinhart
I want to acknowledge the extraordinary contribution of David Steinhart, director of the Juvenile Justice Program at Commonweal since 1992. David is retiring at the end of this year. He is recognized, both within California and nationally, as an advocate, expert, and author on a wide range of youth justice issues.

David was a key contributor to the 2020 landmark youth justice reform (SB 823) that has shut down the state’s troubled youth prison system, the Division of Juvenile Justice (formerly known as the California Youth Authority) as of July 2023. The legislation requires a “realignment” of the youth custody population to local control. He helped design and draft 2021 California legislation establishing local Secure Youth Treatment Facilities for these realigned youth. He was also a prime architect of the 2007 juvenile justice realignment law (SB 81) that moved nonviolent youth out of the state Division of Juvenile Justice and into local control with more than $200 million per year in state funds to support county programs for realigned youth.

David also co-drafted California’s Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act, which has provided local agencies with more than $100 million per year in state funds for youth crime prevention programs since its inception in 2000. Between 2014 and 2020, he was the lead sponsor and drafter of five California laws that now allow many more justice system youth to seal their old offense records, opening pathways to jobs, education, military service, and other re-entry options. Previously, he co-drafted California laws removing children from adult jails, revising the law of youth  emancipation, establishing youth service programs in major California cities,
and increasing children’s access to mental health services.

Nationally, David was the principal advisor on detention risk assessment for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), training justice system personnel on detention reform in more than 30 states. He is the author of the JDAI “Practice Guide on Juvenile Detention Risk Assessment.” Under Commonweal grants from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, between 1994 and 2018 David led on-site trainings on detention best-practices for judges, attorneys, and law enforcement personnel in more than 30 states.

David served for 10 years as the state senate appointee to the California Board of State and Community Corrections, which sets standards for local juvenile facilities and has oversight responsibilities for both juvenile and adult corrections realignment. His final term ended in 2022. While on the board, David chaired the Juvenile Justice Standing Committee and multiple grant allocation and facility standards committees. He served previously on California’s State Juvenile Justice Commission (2007-09); the California Governor’s Juvenile Justice Working Group (2004-05); and the California Juvenile Crime Task Force (1995-6). He previously chaired a national advisory committee for the Positive Youth Justice Initiative of the Sierra Health Foundation, as well as a Youth Justice Policy Board of justice system leaders and experts for the
California Endowment.

David has written extensively on youth corrections realignment, alternatives to youth
incarceration, status offender reforms, teen courts, juvenile boot camps, and detention risk assessment. Formerly, David was policy director for the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and executive director of the California Child, Youth, and Family Coalition.

David has been a treasured partner and friend in Commonweal’s work for 30 years. He has had an immense impact on how young people—overwhelmingly young people of color—are treated in the state juvenile justice system, which once included the largest youth prison system in the world. His untiring efforts on behalf of these young people over three decades made him among the most influential advocates in California on their behalf. We will miss him.

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Jenepher Stowell

I also want to honor Jenepher Stowell as she steps back as director of the Commonweal Retreat Center. Jen is not retiring from her role as senior staff of the CCHP. Jen has been at Commonweal since 1986 and has led the Retreat Center since its inception. It has been home to all Commonweal retreats and residential events. It has also housed a carefully selected community of other service groups who have come back for years for their own retreats.

Jen is also among the most gifted intuitives—readers of the invisible world—we have had at Commonweal. That cherished quiet community would include Marion Weber and Rachel Naomi Remen. Her first project at Commonweal was to renovate an old abandoned 10’x12’ RCA shack on the bluff overlooking the Pacific as a rustic chapel. The chapel became a sanctuary for countless inadvertent pilgrims who have left stones inscribed to their departed beloveds on a rough wooden altar. Others fold messages on scraps of paper and wedge them into cracks like those on the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Jen keeps fresh flowers in the chapel at all times. The floor is covered with a sea grass mat. On occasion, errant cows have poked their heads in and munched on the mat. Jen is a quiet explorer of mystical realms. She has been a beloved friend for almost 40 years. She will be spending more time on the East Coast in a family home in the Hudson Highlands and in Bluff, Utah, where she has helped to lead a land conservation and historic preservation movement that will leave a permanent mark. We’re grateful she will keep her small retreat at Commonweal and will continue to staff the CCHP.

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Waz Thomas

Waz Thomas has also stepped back—but, like Jen, not entirely. Waz has worked with me at Commonweal for 40 years. Our birthdays are a few days apart. He was the first person I hired after Commonweal collapsed seven years into our journey. Our funding dried up and I had to lay off more than 40 staff people, myself included. Then I was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the funding returned, and Waz and I rebuilt Commonweal from the ground up. He has served as general manager and coordinator of the CCHP. Waz still works part time at Commonweal doing, he says, “whatever needs to be done.” He is also the first person people talk to when they apply for the CCHP. He is one of the most unusual people who have ever walked in the door—and we specialize in unusual people.

Waz’s principle avocation is as a collage artist. He cuts up old magazine photos and reconfigures them in extraordinary collage pieces. I had long suggested to Waz that we have an exhibit of his work. One day a year ago he gave me about one thousand of his collages and told me to do whatever I thought best with them. I asked my colleague Erin O’Reilly to help. She was joined by a new Bolinas resident, Jessica Shaefer, a professional curator who thought Waz’s work was extraordinary.

After Jessica hung Waz’s show, my beloved friend of 35 years Rebecca Katz came to visit. Rebecca started work at Commonweal as a temporary cook for the CCHP. She became one of the most renowned “culinary translators” in the country with a half dozen cookbooks to her credit. She then stepped back from her culinary writing career and became an extraordinary painter of large-format canvases of great beauty. I recently did a New School spiritual biography with Rebecca, which you can find on The New School’s website at tns.commonweal.org.

This is Rebecca’s artistic statement:

My inspiration comes from the beauty of the atmosphere—of the sky and how it’s connected with the earth. Every time I look at what nature is presenting in front of me, the clouds, seductive with the constant movement of the atmosphere, I am reminded that life is constantly shifting and never stagnant. I work in acrylic and graphite, using many layers of glazes to achieve the luminosity of the atmospheric quality in my work. I also work wet on wet and use drips to create texture and atmosphere, which alludes to what’s beneath the surface. Layers and layers of paint are applied on the canvas before I even know how the image will present itself in its final form. My paintings
are asking viewers to step into a world of possibility, mystery, magic, and atmosphere and to be transported through color and light and texture.

You can find out more about Rebecca and her work on her website: rebeccakatzart.com.

Rebecca and Waz are longtime friends: Waz was the person who originally invited Rebecca to come as a substitute cook for the CCHP. Rebecca recently saw Waz’s exhibit and was absolutely enchanted. I asked her to be the senior advisor to the Waz Thomas Collection project. She and Jessica are creating a book of Waz’s art and scanning several hundred of his pieces for a permanent high-resolution collection. Waz at first said he would not come to the opening gathering on October 2 but he was so impressed by Jessica’s curation that he decided to show up. His friends gathered from far and wide. It was one of our best art openings in Gallery
Commonweal.

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The Commonweal Archive Project

As the founding generations of Commonweal partners move toward the exit, the task of rescuing and curating the Commonweal archives has fallen to four of us—Erin O’Reilly, Susan Grelock Yusem, Natalie Tallerico, and me. For decades, dozens of boxes of old files have been collecting dust in the Riggers Bay at the back of the Main Building. Erin and I began scouting the collection a year ago. We put a big table in my outer office and brought boxes down for sorting. We found dozens of true treasures of Commonweal’s history. We separated out the “gold” from the rest. Natalie and Erin began to scan it and put it in a large database. The first effort has been to curate work that I have been involved with or thought was important. I have done an extraordinary  amount of writing over the past 48 years. Katherine Fulton, our board vice-chair, who is also my literary executor, insisted that if she was to be my literary executor we had to do the hard work while I am still on this plane. I couldn’t argue with her. An organization has a hard time moving forward for its second half century if it has forgotten where it came from. So, we’ve been hard at work saving what should be saved.

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We Need Your Support

That’s a wrap, dear friends. I will close with a few more words on what turning 80 means to me and why I hope you will continue your vital support for our work at Commonweal.

It’s a rare thing, I’m told, for a founder to turn over the leadership of a nonprofit to his or her successor in a skillful manner. Oren and I have now partnered for more than a decade. It is a tribute to Oren’s immense generosity of spirit that he created this model of distributed intergenerational leadership that continues to offer me and other elders a place at the table where we can contribute as we are able. In for-profit corporations, they know the benefit of keeping founders or previous leaders on board to advise or provide support as they are useful. In the nonprofit world, it is much more rare to do this well.

In two years, Commonweal will reach its second half-century—stronger than it has ever been, with a highly diverse community of board members, program directors, and staff who are making Commonweal anew. It is a joy and a wonder for me to be present at this new creation as Commonweal has begun to serve in ways beyond my imagination.

As you can see, my plate is full. I am beyond grateful for Oren and his team for their skilled leadership of our beloved community. I have three tasks for the years ahead. The first is to do my Commonweal project work well and to offer counsel to the Commonweal leaders when asked. The second is to live as fully as possible and to prepare for the last journey at least in this body. The third is to venture, as I always have for 50 years, to the frontiers of knowledge. Those frontiers are sometimes within Commonweal’s purview. But others are on frontiers where Commonweal is either not yet ready to explore or frontiers where, given its mission, it should never go.

Those are the travel instructions, at 80, for my work now. Be useful to Commonweal. Do my Commonweal work well. And find the places where the helmsman in me can still steer my little craft where I may be called to serve. Who could ask for more?

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If that is my calling now, dear friends, may I ask what you are called to at this time in your life? Are you in this search with me—the endless pilgrimage we walk with our fellow pilgrims—and yet that we must also walk alone?

One thing I ask of you: please continue to walk with Commonweal in the days and years ahead. I ask that you keep Commonweal in your heart.

Commonweal is unusual in the great extent to which our work depends on your contributions. Much of our work—like CCHP and Healing Circles—depends almost entirely on your contributions. Many other projects depend in large part on your contributions. The New School, the Migration Support Project, and many more.

If you are of modest means, a $20 monthly contribution on your credit card is immensely valuable to us. If you can afford something more, it means the world to us. If you can put us in your estate planning, I can’t tell you how much that helps. Or, if you can, offer a more significant gift to Commonweal.

I hope Commonweal matters to you. If you go to our donate page, you can give to Commonweal as a whole or choose the project that matters to you. You can make a one-time or sustaining donation. You can send us a check. You can let us know we are in your estate plans. Or if you have good stuff that you no longer need—cars, boats, land, houses, whatever you can imagine being of real value, we’d love to put what you no longer need to work.

I have devoted almost 50 of these 80 years to Commonweal. It is truly only because of you, our beloved community, that we are still here.

So please, don’t put it off, click the donate button, or write a check, or send us a note about including Commonweal in your estate plans, or tell us about some good stuff you’d like us to put to work. If you’d like to discuss a gift or your estate planning with Oren, me, or Arlene Allsman, we’d be delighted to talk with you.

And, if you just don’t have resources to contribute, please just keep us in your thoughts and prayers, or tell people about resources here like Healing Circles or The New School, or just know how deeply you are part of our beloved community as a friend of Commonweal.

With love and gratitude,
Michael Lerner
Co-founder and Board Chair

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Check donations can be mailed to:
Commonweal, PO Box 316, Bolinas, CA 94924
If you would like to support a specific program, please indicate the
program name on the check.

To make a one-time or recurring monthly online donation using your
credit card, bank account or PayPal, please visit
commonweal.org/support/.

I hope this finds you well. This is my summer letter to the Commonweal community. It comes at a special point in our history.

This year I turn 80. Our executive director, Oren Slozberg, turns 60. And it’s 50 years since I co-founded Full Circle, the residential school for at-risk children just outside Bolinas that gave birth to Commonweal three years later in 1976.

Under Oren’s leadership, Commonweal has grown exponentially over the past five years. We have more than doubled our programs, budget, and staff. We are doing a great deal more good in the world—in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice. And we’re focused on strengthening the resilience of all our work in the ever changing conditions created by the global polycrisis.

This year is a good time for us to reflect and to ask what is ours to do in the decades ahead.

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The Commonweal Way

Usually in my letters to you I talk about the work of Commonweal. I talk about the programs I am most engaged with. They include the Cancer Help Program, Healing Circles, Cancer Choices, The New School, the Omega Resilience Awards, and our broader work on the polycrisis through Omega. I talk about the Collaborative for Health and Environment and the work we are doing with refugees at the Sanctuary in Tijuana.

This time, I’ll save those updates for my Fall Letter. In this letter, I am trying to do something much more challenging. I’ve been asked by my colleagues to begin our effort to describe what we call the Commonweal Way. It is one of the greatest challenges I have faced. It is far more difficult, for example, than describing our healing work with cancer, or our work on the global polycrisis.

So here goes. See if you can follow me.

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The Vision

I was given a vision of Commonweal in 1975. I still pause when I walk by the place on Poplar Road in Bolinas where the vision came to me. That morning was overcast with clouds and mist scudding across the mesa. I looked out across the grasslands and pastures to the old RCA transmitter station two miles north where radio communications to the far east began. A stray shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the Main Building with a golden light. That was the moment when the vision was given to me that changed my life. The vision of Commonweal as a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth.

We can debate whether that vision came from within me or came from beyond me. I prefer to believe that it came from beyond me. Either way, it was a kind of miracle.

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Finding Words

From the beginning, I knew that the words for the vision I was given—of a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth—wouldn’t work in many contexts. We needed to find other words that were not so far ahead of their time. One early formulation was “a center for service and research in health and human ecology.” It was accurate but a mouthful. A later one was “a health and environmental research institute.” The elevator speeches depended on who we were talking to. Today, thankfully, we’ve come back to “healing people, healing the planet.” But that still doesn’t say much about what Commonweal actually does.

It’s also important to understand what “healing” means. Healing as we define it is different from curing. Curing means to take a disease or a problem away completely. Healing, by contrast, is a movement toward wholeness. Healing can take place physically, mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually. Healing can happen both in living and in dying. Sometimes great healings take place close to the time of death. Healing, truth be told, is actually a profound mystery, so this brief summary cannot do it justice. I have worked to understand healing for decades and it still eludes me.

Over time, many of us came to quietly enjoy the truth that what Commonweal is couldn’t easily be put into words. I won’t try to answer the question “what is Commonweal?” directly here. But I will try to begin to describe the “Commonweal Way.”

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Three Principles in Action

While describing Commonweal has long been a dilemma, I came over time to believe that we could actually describe the three principles that inform our work. I believe they are: kindness of heart, consciousness of mind, and dedication to service.

These principles speak less to “what” Commonweal is and more to “how” we do the work. Perhaps that “how” actually is the Commonweal Way in its essence. In many traditions, these principles represent our human inheritance. We are all given hearts, heads, and hands. In yoga, for example, bhakti, jnana, and karma yoga are the yogas of the heart, the head, and the hands—when all three are dedicated to lives of service.

What do these principles of kindness, consciousness, and service look like in action? In depth psychology, we speak of “love, wisdom, and will.” So our principles—kindness, consciousness, and dedication to service—are adaptations of these three great archetypal principles that make them more accessible. Let me say a little more about each.

Kindness. Kindness, friends say, is love with its work boots on. Love can mean almost anything. But we all know what kindness feels like. Kindness is our most fundamental value. When you visit Commonweal, you may feel kindness surrounding you.

Consciousness. Consciousness is a word that doesn’t claim too much. Wisdom, by contrast, might seem to claim too much. Socrates remarked that if the Delphic oracle said that if he was the wisest man in Athens it was because he knew that he did not know. That is my working definition of wisdom. We know that we don’t know. At the same time, we may recognize practical wisdom when we see it. So we try at a minimum to be conscious of what we are doing. And we aspire to practical wisdom.

Service. We serve in many ways. One way stands out. “Justice,” Cornel West has said, “is what love looks like in the public sphere.” Justice in the Jewish tradition is an eternal religious obligation. Justice has been a priority at Commonweal from the start, working with children coming out of juvenile halls, and then with four decades of work to close California’s youth prisons.

Humility. Humility flows from our three principles. Humility integrates kindness, consciousness, and service. None of us can do real work alone. We serve best in community. Community requires that we work well together to be effective. Working well together is grounded in humility.

Humility at the archetypal level flows from the recognition that we are all stardust. We are children of the light. We have come forth from the stars. When we die, it is to stardust that we return. “Sic itur ad astra,” Virgil wrote in his Aeneid. “Thus we return to the stars.”

Micah 6-8 in the Bible’s Old Testament summarizes all of this for me:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

There you have these ancient three principles—“act justly” (service), “love mercy” (kindness), and “walk humbly” (consciously, with humility). You find them everywhere in the wisdom teachings once you begin to look.

These are simply my formulations. They may turn out to be useful for a shared understanding of the Commonweal Way. Beyond any shared formulations, we can each ask ourselves the ancient questions that may guide our personal paths in life. Who am I? Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? And to whom (or what) am I accountable? From our answers to these questions may flow our own intuitions as to how we can contribute to the true commonweal—the well being of life on earth.

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Agreements

We may need to arrive at agreements that spell out how our principles apply in our work. We may need to revisit them regularly so that the agreements stay alive. Here are eight possible candidates for such agreements.

Honesty. Honesty is difficult. But it is something we can commit to, especially honesty in financial matters, legal matters, and simple common sense and good practice. None of us are always honest. One of my teachers said speech should be truthful, useful, and peaceful. That’s a tall order. But basic honesty in our work is vital if we are to trust each other. And trust is the coin of the realm.

Clarity. Clarity is essential and yet elusive. I believe in putting things into writing to be sure we agree. I’m not talking about formal documents but just email or other written exchanges that can be called back up. Of course, when it comes to our shared agreements, there’s a benefit in more formal records.

Embracing Error. If you punish error, people hide their mistakes. If you embrace error, people discover how we can learn from what went wrong. Embracing error means making fewer of the same mistakes. Instead we get to make new and more interesting ones. Embracing error makes us a learning community.

Accepting Differences. We’re different. We’re designed to be different. Differences can create our greatest difficulties. They can also forge our greatest strengths. We need ways to resolve differences and grievances when they occur. As Commonweal grows, the need for these practices will grow.

Peaceful Partings. Partings can be notoriously difficult. Funding for projects can run out. Staff members move on or retire. Sometimes good talented people struggle to work well together. That is why I have always asked those I work with to agree, when the time does come to part, to try to part with the same commitment to kindness and shared purpose that we began with. That way we do as little harm as possible to each other and to the shared purpose with which we began.

Forgiveness. Forgiveness is fundamental to the last three agreements I have mentioned—embracing error, accepting our differences, and parting as well as we can when that time comes. Forgiveness is not always easy and may not come all at once. But holding mutual forgiveness as our intention is essential. A teacher of mine once said that when we point a finger at someone, we have three fingers that point back at us. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Overwork. There is an inevitable tendency in nonprofit work to try to do more than we have the capacity to do. This tendency is sometimes self-imposed. But it can also be imposed by the organization. It takes wisdom to manage this tendency. I have struggled with it all my life. Matching our work to our organizational capacity is basic wisdom. Overwork takes a toll on staff morale. People become exhausted and feel they can’t do their best work.

Thomas Merton reminds us of what is truly at stake here:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Overwork is not the “fault” of any single organization. It is among the most common conditions of our time. Many people I know who devote themselves to good work are overwhelmed. Many seem to count their overwhelm as a form of virtue. This common condition is worthy of consideration.

Re-creation. The issue of overwork brings us naturally to the need for re-creation—both on our own and together. This is the ancient wisdom of the Sabbath. Our monthly staff lunches are a wonderful example. Just as Commonweal needs to re-create itself continuously in our service work, we as a community need to re-create ourselves to keep the joy and friendships and energy flowing.

How we select our agreements—so that there are not too many and so we touch on the most important ones—may be among our greatest collective decisions. You will notice that many of the agreements I have suggested focus on facing difficulties of various kinds. To me, these are simply eight basic needs: for honesty, clarity, embracing error, resolving differences, parting with grace, mutual forgiveness, avoiding overwork, and re-creating ourselves in friendship and joy.

Whether these agreements end up contributing to the list of agreements we make together, only time will tell. But they are at least an offering of the kind of agreements we may need—and the need to revisit our agreements and keep them fresh over time.

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Ancient Wisdom Teachings

We can speak of our principles and agreements in the abstract, in action, and in our daily lives. But putting things into words, no matter how necessary, can also trap us. We can get trapped in the belief that words are a substitute for how we actually live, serve, and treat each other. Writing down these principles and agreements can actually backfire. So we should be very cautious as we approach this question.

That is why a part of me hesitates before the challenge of trying to put the Commonweal Way into words. I actually believe the true Commonweal Way is not something we can put into words. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.” In biblical terms, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” The true Commonweal Way, in my view, is a way of being, not something that can be put into words. It is literally beyond words.

In my view, the Commonweal Way is actually the way of the ancient wisdom teachings—the perennial philosophy or perennial wisdom as Leibnitz and Aldous Huxley described it. They claimed that there is a single ultimate wisdom at the heart of all great spirit teachings. At the heart of the great wisdom schools was the belief that the true way was forever beyond words, forever shrouded in mystery.

Many in these times deny that such an ultimate wisdom exists. I won’t quarrel. But I seek to live as if such an ultimate wisdom exists. George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, said there is “that of God” within every human being. We could rephrase that in less theocentric language. We could say there is some ultimate dignity in every human being.

The Commonweal Way, in my view, contains nothing new. It is only a form of remembrance. Remembrance of old truths. Remembrance of our human inheritance. If we understand “commonweal” in its true sense—“the well-being of the community”—we can understand why there is nothing new in the Commonweal Way. It is simply how we all work as best we can to make good use of these precious lives we have been given.

That said, there is a perennial necessity to refresh our understanding of these ancient truths. Human consciousness is unequivocally evolving (whether for better or worse is another question). Likewise, the circumstances of life in the global polycrisis are evolving at incredible speed. And our understanding of the science of life and the universe is evolving at warp speed as well.

So while the truths are ancient, the setting in which we are navigating life is one humans have never faced before. Hence the need to revisit ancient truths and test their applicability and the ways we can put them into practice. That is central to our work. That’s why this difficult task of describing the Commonweal Way makes sense to me.

It also makes sense because as Commonweal grows—as our work spreads across the country and around the world, as we shelter 30 different projects and 130 staff, many of whom do not know each other—we literally need some way to say what the principles and agreements are that hold us together as a community.

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Three Focal Areas of Work

The Commonweal Way, it seems to me, is much more than a set of principles and agreements about how we work and treat each other.

We describe our work as generally falling into three focal areas—health & healing, education & the arts, and environment & justice. We have an overarching focus on building resilience for our work in a rapidly changing world.

These three focal areas seem to me to be part of the Commonweal Way. They are not as immutable as the principles. They are more like the agreements, which can also be modified. They may well change or expand over time. For example, I would love to see us work more with poverty, with migration, and with peace-making. But they deserve mention as the foci of our work for decades.

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Structure

Our structure plays an important role in what Commonweal is and how we do things. As Oren says, our structure is inverted. The programs and their directors are at the top of the inverted pyramid. The stewardship council is at the bottom, supporting the programs. Our fundamental agreement with program directors is that they must find the resources for their programs and, in return, they have great freedom to guide their work as they see best. There are a few exceptions, and some talk of more exceptions, but that is the reality, at least for now.

Another key strength of our structure is that we aren’t focused in a single program area. We have the flexibility to engage across a wide range of interests in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice. There is an immense freedom for Commonweal built into our structure at both levels—the freedom of the program directors and our organizational capacity to address the most urgent and most promising issues of our time. Nor are we eternally limited to the three areas in which we currently work. These twin freedoms seem a vital dimension both of what we are and of how we work.

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Practices

Then there are also practices worthy of mention that support us at Commonweal.

Silence is a central practice for many of us at Commonweal. It is central to our healing work. It is a form of meditation. We begin meetings with silence.

The Healing Circles practice is grounded in silence. It is a practice that grew out of the Cancer Help Program and became a global network called Healing Circles Global. It’s a set of practices that work well for peer-led circle work. In this context, these practices may also may serve as a guide to how we work together and treat each other. Many of us start each work session with silence followed by a personal check-in before we begin the work. Many of us find this simple practice strengthens our work and nourishes our lives.

Appreciation of the gifts of diversity has been a principal practice at Commonweal from the start. The meaning of diversity has shifted over five decades. But our commitment to diversity in our community has never wavered. And diversity is deeply based in our core principles, agreements, and practices.

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Kinship

Many things are not shared dimensions of the Commonweal Way but are welcomed within it.

One is a sense of kinship with each other and with all life.

We can speak of all the different paths—scientific, secular, humanistic, religious, spiritual, philosophical, pragmatic, common sense—whatever you choose to call the different ways we understand our lives. If the Commonweal Way has anything unusual about it, it is that we don’t privilege any of these ways above others. We welcome them all.

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Resilience in the Polycrisis

The wild card in any effort to imagine how our work will continue is the reality of the global polycrisis. We have focused on the polycrisis through our Omega.ngo work for the past seven years. We were far ahead of our time in both research and action on the polycrisis. We have made resilience in the polycrisis the overarching theme in all our Commonweal work.

What is the polycrisis? Many global stressors—social, environmental, technological, and economic—are interacting with increasing velocity and force. They are causing future shocks of increasing frequency and intensity. What brought the polycrisis to public awareness was, first, climate change; second, COVID-19; and, third, the Ukraine-Russian War. Concern with artificial intelligence and renewed U.S.-China tensions are among the continuing stream of polycrisis headlines. A more comprehensive list would include dozens of other factors.

I won’t attempt here to address what resilience in the polycrisis means in our work. But we enter the polycrisis with certain resources. The first is the flexibility inherent in our ability to continue to recognize opportunities for service that fit our skills. The second is that the close attention we are paying to the polycrisis prepares us to see where both dangers and opportunities are arising. The third is the physical preparations we are making to sustain access to water, electricity, and communications if the grid goes down. The fourth is the strength of our communities that share these concerns.

How we respond to the dangers and opportunities of the polycrisis will likely determine the future of our work. And since the shape of the future is unknowable, an architecture designed to strengthen our resilience in many ways gives us the best chance to continue to serve.

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Conclusion

With these observations, I bring to an end this first effort to contribute to what we mean when we talk about the Commonweal Way.

I have spoken of our principles of kindness, consciousness, and dedication to service.

I have located these principles in our hearts, our heads, and our hands.

I have shown these principles to be at the heart of the perennial wisdom teachings.

Yet these principles need to be freshly examined for their application in these rapidly changing times.

I have offered a much more mutable and eclectic set of eight possible agreements.

My list includes honesty, clarity, embracing error, accepting differences, peaceful partings, forgiveness, avoiding overwork, and re-creating ourselves in friendship and in joy.

I have underscored that we may develop a better set of agreements as a community—and that they should be revisited and kept fresh over time.

I have described the three focal areas for our work—health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice. These focal areas may change with changing needs over time.

I have delineated our structure including our inverted pyramid of leadership that places the principle role of our program directors at the top.

I have mentioned a few practices, such as silence, the healing circles methods, and our commitment to diversity as central to our work. I’ve spoken of our sense of kinship with each other and all life.

I have described the dangers and opportunities for our work in the global polycrisis and the steps we are taking to strengthen our resilience.

In closing, please remember that this is a tentative first effort to describe what we have long held to be almost beyond words: what Commonweal is and how it works. Now the real work will be in the hands of Oren and the entire Commonweal community.

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Please Help Us Sustain Commonweal

Let me close with this.

As always, we truly and urgently need your sustained and continuing support. Commonweal is rare, indeed, in how deeply we rely on the community of Commonweal friends who have made our work possible for 47 years.

Our work has touched people on every continent on earth. Healing work is central to us. So is earth care. So are the arts and humanities. So is justice.

Now we seek to strengthen Commonweal for the next half century.

We have always needed your help. You are the Commonweal friends who have built our community. You are the friends we turn to now.

You have many ways you can support us. You can give to the individual programs you care about. Or you can support Commonweal as a whole.

You can give online here. Recurring contributions at a level you can afford are the true lifeblood of our work. You can send us a check. You can donate equities. You can donate cars or properties or other things of value. And you can include us in your estate planning. Find out about all of these options on our Support page.

If you want to discuss giving with us, we’d be delighted. You can contact Oren or Arlene Allsman or me, or one of the program directors or coordinators you’d like to support.

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How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? Three years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis.

What happened? 

What Is the Polycrisis?

First, let’s roughly define the polycrisis. Some claim it is nothing new. We believe the polycrisis is new. We believe a confluence of environmental, social, technological, financial-economic, natural and other forces are interacting with ever increasing unpredictability, rapidity and power. We believe these unpredictable interactions are causing future shocks of ever greater frequency and amplitude.

Because the polycrisis looks different, feels different, and is explained differently everywhere, there won’t be any single understanding of it. Think of the polycrisis as a global weather system. Weather everywhere is deeply interrelated, but local weather looks different in each place.

The polycrisis has many names—cascading crises, the metacrisis, the permacrisis, the great unraveling, the great simplification, “the end of the world as we know it” [TEOTWAWKI], and more. In Latin America it’s called “eco-social collapse.” The French call it “collapsologie.” Or one can simply call it turbulent times or a rapidly changing world.

It doesn’t matter much what we call the polycrisis. What matters is whether we recognize that it is real, that we are living in it, and that it is changing our lives. If we accept that much, we will recognize that we have to navigate it—and that good maps are essential to skillful navigation.

Navigating the Great Unraveling

Our friends Asher Miller and Richard Heinberg at the Post Carbon Institute and Resilience.org use this powerful phrase for the task ahead for all of us: “Navigating the great unraveling.” Resilience.org is focused on energy, economy, environment, food and water, and society. Its tagline is “insight and inspiration in turbulent times.” In my judgment, Post Carbon Institute and Resilience.org are among the best and most accessible polycrisis resources in the United States.

At every level, we must learn to navigate the polycrisis. We have no choice. The only choice is whether we prepare to navigate it consciously—or just let it unfold and respond as it does. 

“The future is already here,” the great science fiction writer William Gibson has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.” We know that all over the world millions of people have lived under polycrisis conditions for a very long time. The polycrisis is not new to them. It’s just now coming home to roost everywhere.

What Are the Best Maps and Charts of the Polycrisis?

Let’s look at how some experts are seeking to understand and map the polycrisis. I will be using three overlapping terms to describe these maps. The first is world view maps. The second is systems analysis maps. And the third is narrative maps. These are very crude concepts since all the maps tend to include all these elements in different ways.

The comprehensive worldview maps include orientations like techno-optimism, neo-Marxism, critiques of colonialism and imperialism, religious or spiritual understandings, and many more. It matters whether you believe in an enlightened spiritual future or a future that belongs to the powerful. It matters whether you think we will be governed by humans or trans-humans or algorithms. It matters whether you see the future as hopeful or tragic or perhaps both.

Then there are the systems analysis maps. Unlike worldview maps, systems analysis maps seek to be analytically neutral—albeit there are often deeply embedded biases.

The concerned capitalists of the world and their powerful friends gather annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos to opine on the state of the world. Their Global Risks Report 2023 is extensive and their prognosis dire. They offer a top 10 list of global risks for the next two years and the next ten years, along with a global risks landscape map. An additional Global Risks map puts global risks at the center surrounded by natural ecosystems, security, human health, economic stability, and digital rights. The outer circle then lists perhaps one hundred specific issues.

Kate Raworth’s “Donut Economics” is a highly influential systems map. “Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend—such as a stable climate, fertile soils, and a protective ozone layer. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a playfully serious approach to framing that challenge, and it acts as a compass for human progress this century.”

The elegant donut diagram has an outer circle of an ecological ceiling for nine sectors (climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution and the like.) It has an inner circle of social foundation that lists human needs by sector (food, water, health, education and the like). The map elegantly allows her to show where we have already exceeded the ecological ceiling and where we have undercut the social foundation of human needs. 

A third systems analysis comes from Thomas Homer-Dixon and his colleagues at the Cascade Institute in British Columbia. Homer-Dixon is among the foremost analysts of the polycrisis. In books like “The Upside of Down” and “Command Hope,” he has explored the polycrisis in depth. His thinking is deeply influential in Canada and internationally. I can’t point to a single map because Cascade Institute has produced multiple maps. In my judgment Homer-Dixon shows what sophisticated scholarly study of the polycrisis looks like—and why governments and others around the world should invest in it. 

A fourth systems map comes from the Fan Initiative which also has a strong team of scientific experts behind it. The Fan has an influential categorization of twelve “blades” of the fan that interact. They include toxification, soils, population, oceans, health, governance, freshwater, energy, economy, climate, biodiversity and behavior. 

There are academic centers focused on variants of the polycrisis like the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. Their research interests include biotechnology, artificial intelligence, technology risks more generally, environmental risks, and justice risks. Unlike the other projects above, they are less comprehensive on the polycrisis and more focused on explicitly existential risks to human survival. 

Another outstanding contributor to polycrisis understanding is Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification and his podcasts, Frankly. His tagline is “people, society and earth’s systems midway through the carbon pulse.” Here’s an example of his thinking: “How do the catalysts triggering the SVB collapse compare to the 2008 financial crisis? What might world financial market reactions indicate as we move closer to The Great Simplification?.. One thing I’m pretty confident of: world governments and central banks are gonna need bigger boats as more and more entities require bailouts and guarantees. Eventually that ‘boat’ may become so large that it will be ‘Too Big to Save.’” 

A major recent development in the field is the United Nation (UN) Foundation’s Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment. “The UN Foundation announced today the new Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), to be led by Ruth Richardson as its inaugural Executive Director. The three-year initiative is designed to contribute to the emerging field of systemic risk analysis with particular attention to helping leaders and practitioners—especially those in the public sector—better understand, assess, and incorporate sensitivity to systemic risks into their decision-making. It will work closely with practitioners, multilaterals, academics, the public and private sectors, as well as other partners across institutions, sectors, and geographies.” 

Historically, one of the most influential of all systems analyses of the polycrisis came from Donella Meadows and her colleagues in their report to the Club of Rome, “Limits to Growth” in 1972. What is remarkable about their model is that it has proven highly accurate for fifty years. 

These are simply examples. What they have in common is their effort to understand the underlying drivers of the polycrisis and their interactions in some systematic way.

Narrative Maps

There is another way of thinking about the polycrisis that we might call narrative maps. We are taking this approach in our Omega Resilience Awards project, which focuses on exploring polycrisis maps with younger leaders in the Global South.

This approach focuses on exploring different narratives of the polycrisis as they are understood in different places and different situations. These are not necessarily systematic maps. This is story telling or meaning-making in a vast variety of forms.

Many contemporary commentators offer us narrative maps—though these maps are also often systematic. The Columbia historian Adam Tooze, the New York Times contributor Ezra Klein and the Financial Times Chief Economics Commentator Martin Wolff are analysts whose ongoing analyses of different dimensions of the polycrisis are widely respected.

Science fiction—or speculative fiction—offers another influential example of a narrative approach. “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson is a brilliant example of the genre of speculative utopian fiction that examines in detail how the climate crisis could actually be resolved. 

Poets, novelists, film-makers, artists, and video game producers are among the many creative people who are telling stories and making narrative maps of the polycrisis. 

A Map of Ten Top Polycrisis Drivers

What I offer below is a phenomenological map focused on issues as they emerge in the informed public media. This map is designed to change as the global polycrisis “weather system” changes. It is a kind of “polycrisis weather report.” My map is a mix of a worldview, systems and narrative map.

My starting point is the question I posed at the start. Why did the polycrisis explode into global awareness this year? I suggest that the polycrisis emerged as three principle drivers accelerated in sequence—climate, COVID, and the Ukraine war. 

First, public attention was focused on the climate emergency. Then COVID turned the world upside down. Then a completely unexpected land war erupted in the middle of Europe. That war forced a great power confrontation, scrambled alliances around the world, and accelerated the last phase of the breakdown of American global hegemony. These three developments unfolding in sequence are, I believe, what brought the polycrisis to global attention.

Once the polycrisis was firmly established in the informed media and public mind, new developments kept confirming the increasing pace of global change and the reality of the polycrisis.

The new United States-China cold war is a classic example of the inevitable conflict between a rising power and a declining hegemon. The United States—unwisely from a geopolitical perspective—undertook to confront both Russia and China at the same time, hence driving these two great powers into alliance.

The new breakout developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are again transforming the world. Bill Gates has likened this new technology to the development of the computer in terms of its significance. 

Almost every few months, a new salient polycrisis driver seems to emerge. You can’t fully grasp this process with abstract systems maps alone. You need a “changing global weather systems” map that tracks the phenomenological developments in the public media and public mind.

The Polycrisis Pop Charts

What I attempt here is a phenomenological map of what informed Western media are throwing up the “Polycrisis Pop Charts.” I borrow the “pop charts” analogy from popular music where the pop charts track the popularity of different songs. Polycrisis drivers are like pop songs that move up and down the polycrisis pop charts of public attention. Some stay at or near the top for long periods of time. Others enjoy only a brief stay.

Here are seven diverse candidates to add to a potential high level public awareness threat matrix for a “Polycrisis Top 10.” (climate, COVID, and conflicts without end are already on the Top Ten list.)

•  The end of American hegemony. The multi-centric geopolitical realignment of the world is taking place rapidly. Russia, China, Iran and other countries have aligned against Western domination. India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil, and other countries are asserting their own independent interests, often playing both sides off against each other. The end of American hegemony is coinciding with the end of 500 years of Western domination of the world. It also coincides with the end of Western colonialism and imperialism. While these interlinked forms of dominance have been eroding for decades, the rapidity of developments now is astonishing.
• The resurgence of autocratic regimes. The western democratic model of free markets and representative democracy has never worked everywhere. (One can argue it never worked anywhere, but that is a different conversation.) Newly empowered by technologies of mass surveillance, a growing number of autocratic leaders of “illiberal democracies” and more totalitarian regimes are asserting themselves. They are far less constrained today by eroding democratic norms. They are far less concerned about American or Western disapproval. They regard the Western democracies as weak and decadent. They are more assertive of shared cross-ideological interests. In many places, the autocrats have strong, or at least majoritarian, support from their home populations. It may be true that the impulse toward freedom is universal. But that aspiration must be measured against other goods provided by regimes that meet essential human needs—for food, energy, shelter, economic progress, health, education, safety and the like. China is an excellent example. In a polycrisis world, it is an open question as to what forms of governance will actually work best in the interests of the people of different nations.
• The explosion of AI technologies. Brought to public awareness by GP-Chatbox, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and others, the developers of AI technologies have abandoned caution—even as hundreds of scientists signed a letter urging a moratorium based on potentially catastrophic risks. A survey of AI scientists found them estimating a 10% chance that AI could ultimately wipe out human life on earth. AI is not alone. Biotech, nanotech, and robotics are what Bill Joy famously called the three “technologies of mass destruction.” The difference between these technologies of mass destruction and weapons of mass destruction, Joy said, was that the weapons required a large industrial base while the technologies could be cooked up by someone working out of their bedroom and posted to the Internet. This category is actually a stand-in for all the explosive technological developments transforming our world literally beyond understanding.
• Global financial system chaos. Economic researchers warn that the global debt overhang may soon be “too big to avoid failure.” The likelihood of a global recession, or worse, is believed to be increasing. The fight to control inflation without ending growth puts central banks in a quandary. On the other hand, ending conventional growth as we know it is essential to a better future. The dollar as the dominant global currency may well be coming to an end. It is overdue in historical terms.
• The migration crisis. Over 100 million forcibly displaced people are desperately seeking refuge as barriers to safe havens go up everywhere. The number will continue to grow exponentially. The migration crisis is among the greatest human tragedies of the polycrisis. No one has compassionate solutions that are politically acceptable in the West—or elsewhere for that matter. But mitigation strategies are profoundly important—curbing climate change, improving food production, reducing conflict, making home countries safer, aiding those caught at frontiers, and much more.
• The risk of a nuclear accident or tactical nuclear arms use. The focus is Ukraine, but the risk is global. So is the risk of the use of dirty bombs or the deliberate targeting of nuclear plants by terrorists or a nuclear meltdown caused by an electric grid going down from a terrorist attack or other causes.
• World food, water, work and safety deficits. Billions of people around the world are at increasing risk for the basics of life. This is more an outcome measure than a primary driver, except that this outcome drives all kinds of other feedback loops. 

This list is, as I said, highly arbitrary. My list is heavy on the end of American hegemony, the rise of new autocracies, financial chaos, the migration crisis, nuclear risk, and the global food, water, and safety deficits. I add these seven to the list that set off polycrisis awareness—climate, COVID, and conflict without end.

What seems incontrovertible is that the number of polycrisis drivers keeps increasing and their interactions are every more rapid, unpredictable, and powerful.

Disaster Capitalism and Other Opportunities

The other side of any global threat matrix list consists of the global opportunities for advantage that countries, corporations, communities, and non-state actors are exploring on all sides. Whether it is disaster capitalism, opportunities for criminal gangs, cybercrimes, or legitimate new markets, the opportunists are enlivened everywhere. Likewise there are truly hopeful developments. We have to keep in mind breakout developments on the upside. Whatever the future brings, there will be winners and losers—even if the winners inhabit a devastated planet of universal scarcities. 

The Thucydides Trap–the Prospect for U.S.-China War

The Chinese-mediated detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia has underscored China’s new role as a global power broker. 

French President Macron was criticized by allies for his China visit and his explicit push for European geopolitical and economic autonomy. But many other European Union leaders think along Macron’s lines. Europe has no intention of giving up trade with China. Volkswagen and the chemical giant BSF are planning major expansions in China to offset the high cost of operating in Europe. The better European environmental regulations, the more attractive markets and manufacturing bases like China become.

Both Europe and China have lasting strategic reasons to build economic and political ties that lessen the threat to both an unreliable and fading global hegemon. Both China and Europe are caught for now balancing their conflicts over the Ukraine and Taiwan against their long-term interests in economic ties and strategic autonomy. But in the longer run, both know the Ukraine war will end, the Taiwan conflict will resolve, and they need each other in the new multi-polar world.

The Biden administration’s call for a global alliance of democracies against authoritarians rings increasingly hollow to people around the world. There is too long a history of what 500 years of Western hegemony has wrought. There is too much awareness of America’s classic hegemonic descent. The U.S. has wasted blood and treasure in foreign wars, devastated counties in the name of defending democracy, overturned democratic governments that threatened U.S. interests, and moved from soft power supporting shared interests to hard power for increasingly nationalistic goals. This is the well known trajectory of fading hegemons.

The U.S.-China confrontation is also the classic “Thucydides Trap.” In 12 of 16 past cases, the confrontation between a ruling power and a rising power led to war. The world has a great deal at stake in avoiding it.

A Multi-Centric Sci-fi Future?

The world simply isn’t buying the American narrative any longer. There are too many persuasive counter-narratives emerging from the Global South, from neo-Marxism, from post-colonial writers, and indeed from the internal critiques within the Global North and within America—to say nothing of counter-narratives from right wing nationalist parties, which appeal to very large numbers of people in countries around the world.

Yet, in a multi-centric world, it’s hard to see how the narrative we need—for new global governance structures that bring us together in the urgent global cause—will attract sufficient support.

It looks more and more to this observer as if the future will be a multi-centric world of ever-shifting alliances in which hybrid warfare and lower level conflicts among state, corporate, and non-state actors will launch us into an entirely unpredictable sci-fi future. That’s only one scenario, but in my mind it is the most likely one. 

Archipelagos – Linking Islands of Coherence in a Sea of Chaos

There are hopeful trends. Many of the global stressors have substantial upsides. Systems theory makes it clear that we can create virtuous cascades as well as endure negative ones. This is a central thesis of Homer-Dixon’s work at the Cascade Institute.

At a recent Commonweal conference with leaders of our Omega Resilience Awards hubs in India, Nigeria and Argentina, Mark Valentine mentioned Ilya Priogene’s observation on the power of “islands of coherence” in a complex system in chaos. Here’s the quote:

“Ilya Priogene demonstrated scientifically that when complex systems are far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence can shift the entire system to a higher order.”

We liked this concept of focusing on creating “linked islands of coherence” at the grassroots level and at every possible level. It’s doable, achievable, and hopeful. Many of the Nordic countries are engaged in conscious efforts to create societal resilience in the polycrisis. So is Switzerland, so is New Zealand. They may become islands of coherence that offer hope and models for others.

Local communities, grassroots social movements, service organizations, and local governments are slowly coming to grips with the reality of the polycrisis. And they are crafting solutions. New economy theorists and practitioners are imagining ways to strengthen resilient local economies based on self-help, local currencies, and more.

Polycrisis Thinking as a Lens for Exploring Resilience

We believe the polycrisis cannot generate a single strategic agenda. Unlike the climate emergency, or the fight against hunger, the polycrisis doesn’t lend itself to universal shared objectives and solutions. 

Rather, polycrisis awareness is a lens through which we can assess the most effective strategies for whatever we are working on. As one colleague put it, “if you don’t factor in the polycrisis, your strategies are far more likely to fail.”

For example, imagine that the power grid goes down whether from a cyberattack or other causes. Or imagine that the food system breaks down leaving people dependent on local food resources. Or imagine a financial collapse takes place and we enter a new global depression. Who would be prepared to respond—and how?

One of the lessons from past disasters is how rapidly the structures that sustain life can collapse. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to think about these questions. Their survival needs or personal concerns are too urgent. But it helps if in every community or organization at least some people think this way.

Cultivating a “Polycrisis Eye”

It is entirely possible to cultivate a “polycrisis eye” that enables you to watch developments across many spheres and witness the unfolding of the polycrisis in all its complexity and unpredictability. When I read the news I am constantly tracking these intersections. 

If Russian gas is cut back in the EU, Norway becomes the bloc’s primary supplier despite cries of anguish from its environmental community. Likewise Biden breaks a pledge and allows new oil development in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. Germany closes its last three nuclear plants which makes it more dependent on fossil fuels and renewables. The constant eruption of new developments continuously reconfigures whatever sector they appear in and those changes flow out to other sectors as well.

So it’s not just the polycrisis world view maps, the polycrisis systems maps, and the polycrisis narrative maps that help us navigate. It’s cultivating a “polycrisis eye” with which to watch as this accelerating global weather system evolves, changing local weather conditions everywhere. A “polycrisis eye” refines our ability to use a “polycrisis lens” to understand and navigate this turbulent time.

A Caveat

Though I have continuously referenced polycrisis analyses emanating from the Global South and the emerging multicentric world, this essay has drawn primarily from Global North examples of polycrisis maps and thinking. The principal reason is that while the Global South and the multi-centric world have experienced by far the greatest burden of the polycrisis,the polycrisis analysis has developed primarily in Europe (where the term first emerged) and the United States. That said, one of our principle goals at Omega and the Omega Resilience Awards is to support polycrisis analyses and narratives emerging in Africa, India and Latin America. Those analyses will be the subject of later essays.

A Crown of Feminine Design

We can hold the ultimate hope—the real hope—that we will emerge from this time of chaos and peril to build a better world. It might ideally be, as Randy Hayes, the founder of Rainforest Action Network proposes, a world of continental networks of bio-regional economies. 

The critical question for global governance is whether a new set of global institutions can emerge to replace the Bretton Woods institutions from World War II. There may be a remote possibility that this will happen—as it does in “Ministry for the Future.” But in a polycentric world of widely diverse interests, it will be hard to achieve. 

At the community level, most disaster preparedness has common themes. Communities need to be able to meet basic human needs for food, water, clothing, shelter, energy, safety, communications, and the spirit and tools to rebuild a better way of life. Building this capacity builds resilient communities—islands of coherence that could shift the whole chaotic system toward a higher level of functioning.

We know what local and regional self-reliance and resilience look like. Less than a century ago, community self-reliance was a way of life all around the world. It is still practiced in many communities today. If we can remember those lessons we’ll have a better chance, come what may. This is what Nate Hagens envisions as “the great simplification.”

All around the world people are coming together in the face of all the challenges to create communities of hope and resilience. They work with the skills and tools available to them. The fight for a better world is never won. It goes on forever. We’ll do that best if we are clear-eyed about what we are facing.

Whatever happens, our consciousness will have a powerful impact on how we face whatever is coming. Like all great life crises, the polycrisis has the potential to awaken us to what really matters in our lives. Perhaps the polycrisis could even stimulate a great global awakening of what we all need to do together to create a more liveable world. It’s possible. 

I close with this line from the great Indian saint Sri Aurobindo, “ the future, if there is to be a future, must wear a crown of feminine design.” The structures of wealth and power that we have built in this world are mostly of masculine design. We might amend Aurobindo and say that the future, if it is to be a compassionate one, must honor Mother Earth and evoke the feminine in us all.

That’s a thought worth holding.

Stay strong. Keep the faith. It’s the most interesting way to live.

Michael

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Dear TNS Friends,

What a strange time.

Awareness of the global polycrisis—whatever we choose to call it—is deepening across the country and around the world.

We’ve formally launched our new website, omega.ngo. You can sign up to get Stanley Wu’s highly regarded The Long View, a free monthly summary of the best coverage of polycrisis news and views, right here. It will take you to our online magazine, our bookshelf, our videos and podcasts.

The polycrisis consists of the sum total of all the environmental, social, technological, financial/economic stressors and other stressors (earthquakes and more). They are all interacting unpredictably and with increasing speed and force. We are experiencing future shocks of ever greater size and frequency.

The polycrisis has many names, many narratives, many appearances. It doesn’t matter much what we call it. We just need to know it’s real.

We can’t escape the polycrisis. We must perforce navigate it. Navigating it wisely may be a life and death matter. We can seek to bend the arc of the polycrisis toward better outcomes. We can consciously learn to live and love and flourish in the polycrisis as best we can.

We don’t offer a single point of view. We know the polycrisis looks different everywhere. We know you experience depends on who you are, where you are, what conditions you live under, and indeed what your life orientation and story about yourself and the world is.

So we’re curating those stories, those narratives, from around the world.

Our deepest hope is humanity will survive this bottleneck in human evolution and grow into a mature and compassionate global civilization that fulfills our true human destiny.

We also deeply believe that we can’t navigate well without good maps of what i actually happening. That requires looking very directly at some grievous truths about where we are and what we face. But it also requires looking at hopeful prospects we may ignore in the face of all the negative trends.

We hope you’ll join us for this journey—this adventure, really—into the heart of the global polycrisis. Together, we give each other the courage, hope and  strength to work for a better world. No matter what we face, we’ll do far better if we walk together.

Join us at omega.ngo.

I want to thank each of you who contributed, or continued to contribute, to The New School in 2022. You’ve made a critical contribution to our work. It’s never too late to add your support. So if you intended to contribute, or are moved to now, we welcome support at any level you can afford. You can do so right here.

****

This past year was the year that the polycrisis exploded as a global meme. “Polycrisis” was the word of the year 2022 in the Collins Dictionary. The World Economic Forum in Davos where the ultra-wealthy and their acolytes gather to pontificate declared 2023 “the year of the polycrisis.”

“The theme of our meeting in Davos is cooperation in a fragmented world,” [WEF Chair Klaus] Klaus stated. In what the WEF calls the “Year of the Polycrisis,” Klaus declared that “economic, environmental, social, and geopolitical crises are converging and conflating, creating an extremely versatile and uncertain future.”

The Financial Times observed:

Shortly before October’s International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington, DC, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers surveyed the global scene. “I can remember previous moments of equal or even greater gravity for the world economy,” he said. “But I cannot remember moments when there were . . . as many cross-currents as there are right now…”

Summers thought the term “polycrisis,” popularized in recent months by the economic historian and Financial Times contributing editor Adam Tooze, “apt” as a way of capturing a historical moment characterised by multiple global crises unfolding at the same time on an almost unprecedented scale. Tooze didn’t coin the word, however. It appears to have first been used in the late 1990s by the French social scientists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern, who employed it to describe the “interwoven and overlapping crises” facing humanity, especially in the ecological sphere.

Adam Tooze has indeed played a critical role in popularizing the polycrisis as a descriptive term for what is happening. Tooze has credited Thomas Homer-Dixon as his source. Homer-Dixon directs the Cascade Institute in British Columbia. A year or so ago he called us at Omega/Commonweal to say that he and his staff had surveyed the options and decided that our adoption of “global polycrisis” to describe the world situation was the best choice. He wanted to let us know he planned to adopt it. We were delighted, and subsequently named the Cascade Institute as a recipient of one of our Omega Resilience Award Research Grants. Tooze, an eminent Columbia University historian and author of an invaluable blog that many of us read religiously, then played a critical role in its wide dissemination and adoption.

****

Let’s pay homage to all the other terms that have been, are being, and will be used to describe the polycrisis. Over the last few decades in academic and policy circles it was called “the human dilemma” or “the global problematique.” Donella Meadows and her colleagues called their Club of Rome report “Limits to Growth.” Recognizing the threat, the Brundtland Commission spoke hopefully of “our common future.” The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 popularized the idea of a “sustainable future” based on a North-South swap of Northern technologies for a Southern commitment to a sustainable path to development.  But the North didn’t deliver. The last three decades have witnessed a continuing expansion of the intersecting crises.

The term polycrisis is not and won’t be uncontested. Nor will its companion term, “resilience,” which we also use. Over time, both terms will be adopted as forms of greenwashing. They will become overused just as “sustainability” became overused.  Some of the other terms in use now are “the metacrisis,” “the permacrisis,” and, on the web, “the end of the world as we know it”—TEOTWAWKI—is the acronym handle it goes by.

Some of our close colleagues have offered such elegant terms as “the great simplification” (Nate Hagens) or “navigating the great unravelling” (Resilience.org).

****

We could cite dozens of others who are exploring the polycrisis. You can find our polycrisis work at omega.ngo, which houses a number of our partnerships including the Omega Collaborative, the Omega Resilience Awards, and the Resilience Funders Network.  Conceptually, we are working on a framework of three “baskets” for our work—community, learning, and leadership. More to come on how we group our projects in those three baskets.

The main point is this: whatever we call the polycrisis, it is the mother of all the diverse forces that are reshaping our lives and the world with increasing rapidity and force. We can’t escape the polycrisis. We have to navigate it, one way or another. The real question is how we navigate it in our daily personal lives, our community lives, our work lives, and throughout networks of access and trust.

We can try to bend the arc of the polycrisis toward better outcomes for people and other living creatures—and for our future and the future of the earth.

****

So that’s the story from Commonweal as 2023 begins. Commonweal Executive Director Oren Slozberg has chosen to make resilience the overarching theme of all our work at Commonweal—in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice. We’re exploring what that means—personally, within Commonweal, and with our friends and partners around the world.

We profoundly welcome you to share the journey with us. While the challenges are many, we approach the future with a certain hope about what we as humans can learn from the polycrisis—how we can grow and transform ourselves into a mature planetary community living at peace with ourselves and the living earth.

You can contact us on the Omega website.

Stay with us at Commonweal, at The New School, and at Omega.

Let’s live lives of purpose, service, compassion, wisdom and joy.

With love and gratitude,
Michael

Commonweal Labyrinth in Fog. Photo: Peter Cunningham.

Dear Commonweal Friends,

I hope this letter finds each of you as well as you can be in these tumultuous times.

Oren Slozberg: A Leader for Commonweal

In September, I turned over the helm at Commonweal to my beloved friend and partner Oren Slozberg. Oren has worked with us at Commonweal for nine years. He has led Commonweal as executive director for five years. His extraordinary wisdom, kindness, and commitment to Commonweal are known to all. We could not ask for a more inspired leader for Commonweal’s future.

The time was right. This is a long-planned and carefully executed next step in what Oren rightly calls “intergenerational leadership” at Commonweal. As far as our community is concerned, little has changed. I am able to focus far more intensively on the work I was put here to do.

Commonweal is in a new phase. Oren is meeting the challenge of doing all that we can in a time of global tumult, tragedy, and opportunities for us to be of service. I could not be more grateful for the work we are now doing. And for Oren’s leadership.

Our Founding Vision: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth

Forty-seven years ago, I walked on Poplar Road in Bolinas. Poplar is a long, straight, dirt road filled with ruts that slow cars to a walking pace. It was a windswept cloudy morning with wisps of low fog swept in from the ocean.

Halfway to the end of Poplar, I paused to look out at the old RCA Antenna Farm—a mile or two north across waving fields of grass and a deep cleft of forest. My eyes quite naturally lit on the old white RCA office building nestled in a grove of trees.

Without any warning, a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and low-scudding fog. The shaft of light illuminated the building with a glowing radiance.

I received, in that moment, an astonishing and unbidden vision. I foresaw that we would build a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth on that land—long sacred to Native Americans—where radio communications across the Pacific began.

Forty-seven years later—46 since Commonweal was incorporated—we are near the half century mark of a journey that stretches far into the future before us.

Ten Ways to Serve

I am not leaving Commonweal. I remain Board president. I’m focused on the projects that need me in different ways.

They include the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices, Healing Circles Global, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, Omega, The New School, the Jenifer Altman Foundation, and Mosaic—The Founder Archive Project.

Here’s where I’m most directly engaged.

Arlene Allsman is now director of the Cancer Help Program. We’ve completed 215 week-long retreats over 36 years. Arlene also leads our retreats for Bay Area Young Survivors (BAYS) and our online Sanctuary program. I am forever grateful for our partnership.

Miki Scheidel, Nancy Hepp, and Laura Pole guide CancerChoices—our beautiful new integrative cancer care website.

Our Omega polycrisis resilience projects have a strong leadership team including Stanley Wu, Mark Valentine, Andrea Frey, and Susan Grelock Yusem.

Kyra Epstein beautifully leads our work at The New School.

Ann Blake is executive director of the Jenifer Altman Foundation, which continues to play a significant role in environmental health and justice globally. We were co-founders of the Health and Environmental Funders Network and work in strategic partnerships.

Mosaic—Telling the Stories of Commonweal—is new. Erin O’Reilly and Susan Grelock Yusem are my partners. We are weaving together the stories of Commonweal from past to present to future.

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Four other projects remain especially close to my heart.

I co-founded Healing Circles Langley and Healing Circles Global with Diana and Kelly Lindsay. Diana and Oren and a wonderful team sustain this brilliant global work.

I co-founded the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, also global in reach, now celebrating 20 years of work and beautifully led by Kristin Schafer.

The Migrant Support Project supports Gift of Love in Tijuana, a church sanctuary housing more than 1,200 migrants and asylum seekers. Founded by Angela Oh and Ming Tu through their Gift of Compassion project at Commonweal, this is heart work for me.

The Commonweal Garden and Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine, led by Anna O’Malley, MD, with James Stark’s strong support in the garden, is a source of enduring regenerative power and beauty.

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Other Commonweal projects too numerous to name are close to my heart. They are a testament to Oren’s extraordinary leadership.

Seven More Partners

Seven other long-time partners must be named. Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, co-founder of the Cancer Help Program. Waz Thomas, past Commonweal General Manager and also co-founder of the Cancer Help Program. Jenepher Stowell, director of the Retreat Center. Burr Heneman, who co-founded Commonweal with me. Steve Heilig, a longtime partner with The New School, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and other projects. Neil Gendel, a remarkable friend of many decades. Above all, Sharyle Patton, my life partner and director of the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center. They have walked with me for decades. Forgive me for all those I cannot name.

Commonweal: the Next 50 Years

How is Commonweal doing? Beautifully. Oren has long guided our community with his able Stewardship Council and with the strong support of COO Arlene Allsman and CFO Vanessa Marcotte. We have an extraordinary and committed Board of Directors.

Our work is only beginning. We have the vision, wisdom, compassion, and dedication to service to carry our work forward for the next 50 years.

How am I? Infinitely grateful for the work that lies ahead and the companionship of the whole Commonweal community. It is pure grace to be here to participate in this work of healing and service.

Please Support Commonweal

Once again, I ask you with all my heart to continue to support our work at Commonweal. We welcome your support for the programs and projects of your choice. We also deeply welcome your support for all our work—for Commonweal as a whole.

You can send us a check to us at the address below, or donate online at commonweal.org. We’re profoundly grateful for one-time donations and also for monthly donations on your credit card. You’d be surprised how an affordable monthly donation adds up.

Also, if you’d like to include our work in your estate planning, or have things of value you’d like to contribute—from real estate to cars to anything else—please reach out to Oren, to Arlene Allsman, or to me. We’d love to hear from you.

Stay with our beloved community. We are in troubled times. We all built Commonweal together—and will keep building it together.

With love and prayers,
Michael Lerner, President

Make a one-time or recurring monthly online donation using your credit card, bank account or PayPal on our website.

Check donations can be mailed to: Commonweal PO Box 316 Bolinas, CA 94924
If you would like to support a specific program, please indicate the program name on the check.

The Commonweal bluff at night. Photo: Power of Hope 2022

Dear New School Friends,

Call the world, if you please, “the Vale of Soul Making,” [wrote the poet John Keats to a friend.] Then you will understand the use of the world.

I hope this finds you as well as you can be in troubled times. Truth is, times have been troubled for many people around the world for centuries, even millennia. So troubled times are not new. What hasn’t happened before any time recently is that the troubles are landing on the doorsteps of people who have enjoyed some measure of peace and security—however tenuous that peace and security may have been.

A great sadness is settling on the world. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a centrist Republican who writes thoughtful essays, put it this way:

The negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life. The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic.

The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions—related to stress, sadness, anger, worry and physical pain—hit a record high last year.

Gallup asks people in this survey to rate their lives on a scale from zero to 10, with zero meaning you’re living your worst possible life and 10 meaning you’re living your best. Sixteen years ago, only 1.6 percent of people worldwide rated their life as a zero. As of last year, the share of people reporting the worst possible lives has more than quadrupled. The unhappiest people are even unhappier. In 2006, the bottom fifth of the population gave themselves an average score of 2.5. Fifteen years later, that average score in the bottom quintile had dropped to 1.2.

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Given the reality of the global polycrisis, which we have been writing to you about for more than four years, it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that a veil of sorrow is descending.  In our circles, people usually speak of this as “eco-grief,” but that is far too narrow a description. Billions of people who don’t have the space to think much about ecology are simply suffering from widely different effects of the polycrisis.

Climate, COVID and conflicts-without-end are the headline issues. But there are dozens more—environmental, social, technological and financial/economic. “Poly-grief” would be more descriptive. Just a profound general sorrow at what humans are doing to this beautiful planet we have been given.

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There is a way. There is a way beyond endless grief, sorrow, and despair. It is not an easy way. But the truth remains that even in the most desperate circumstances, some people find ways to make meaning in their lives that goes beyond even the most dreadful personal and communal sorrows.

We just completed our 216th week-long Commonweal Cancer Help Program. This was our 37th anniversary retreat. Eight people came together from across the country. All of them dealing with cancers, many life-threatening. I have spent 216 weeks of my life in these retreats. Those who come have been my greatest teachers.

When we ask on their intake forms what are the three greatest stressors in their lives, many now list the state of the world as one of them—even though they personally are facing life-threatening illnesses. And yet by the end of the week, every single one of the participants had found some measure of relief from their suffering—sometimes a transformative measure of change.

Don’t forget all the vast catastrophes that have visited humanity throughout the ages. The Black Plague, the 1916 flu pandemic, all the great wars and lasting oppressions. Maimonides said it was not permitted to count the days till the coming of the Messiah. Early Christians likewise thought they lived in End Times. So our sense that our times are uniquely troubling, while based on irrefutable science and real trends, are not unique in the widespread “felt sense” that the world was ending.

And in fact we know the world won’t end. We might, but actually that is unlikely any time soon. We are simply living in a time of immense, profound global suffering and sorrow.

We can’t escape the polycrisis—it is far too complex. But we can if we so choose do everything in our power to make things better. At least for those we love, and better still for those whose lives we have the power to touch. The latter circle is actually a surprisingly wide one. There are so many ways that a word, a smile, a small gesture, can change someone’s day—and sometimes someone’s life.

One of the great teachings of the 40 years I have spent immersed in cancer work is that “a wound is not only a wound, it is an opening.” As Dame Edith Sittwell said of William Blake, “he was cracked, but it was through the crack that the light flowed.” Each of us is cracked by our lives, our humanity, and our sorrows. We each have the capacity to transform our wounds into openings.

We also know that whole civilizations can change fundamentally with great wounds—though not always for the better. We happen to be living at the edge of great political events in the United States and around the world, integral expressions of the polycrisis. And while Europe and the United States are trending rightward, and Russia and China are trending authoritarian as well, let us not ignore the fact that Larin America is trending decisively progressive. The great struggle to achieve a more just and sustainable world is far from over.

The antidote to despair is action. To act on behalf of what we believe to be the right. The antidote to hatred is compassion. The antidote to selfishness is service to others. These are ancient teachings.

So we can dream of a better world, fight for a better world, and live our way into a better world wherever we find ourselves. We can be part of the invisible community of friends of evolution, friends of life, friends of compassion that exists in every country and every community on earth.

That’s what we are about at The New School. We offer a creative space to explore nature, culture, and the inner life. If The New School touches your life, we truly hope you will contribute what you can to keeping us on the air and on the ground with virtual and actual gatherings and events that touch lives around the world.

Please join us as part of the invisible network around the world of friends of compassion.  You can contribute right here—either a one time gift or an ongoing monthly gift you can afford.

With deepest gratitude,
Michael