Radio evolve Global

Tom Atlee

Thomas Steininger in conversation with Tom Atlee

In these times, when politics feels frustrating and our differences feel irreconcilable, Tom Atlee offers a vision of how we can do democracy far better. Tom is the founder of The Co-Intelligence Institute, which is a non-profit that promotes awareness of co-intelligence. His central concern is evolving our current broken political system into something that he calls Wise Democracy.

Tom believes that we can transcend the polarization of debate. We can move beyond trying to make fixed choices about dynamic problems. There are far better ways to work than yes/no, right/wrong and us/them thinking—that are within reach. We already have the ability to have nuanced and deliberative decision making.

Tom’s wisdom offers a beautiful way to rethink what is possible for our democracy. As he puts it: “If you’re not part of problem you can’t be part of the solution.” When people start talking to each other, any system can become an emergent form of governance.

This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Tom Atlee about Wise Democracy.

Bence Ganti

Thomas Steininger in conversation with Bence Ganti

Has our evolution come to a halt? For many years, particularly in the integral community, the idea that we are in a process of never-ending evolution was an animating belief.

European Modernity liberated us from the Middle Ages. Since the Sixties, postmodern pluralism offered the possibility of social justice and by bringing together the best qualities of traditional societies, modern science, and postmodern sensibility a new integral culture would be the next great evolutionary step. However, the culture wars of our present times present us with new questions: Could Chinese totalitarianism be the future of our liberal societies? Maybe Putin and the renaissance of Orthodox Christianity will show Western Europe a new direction. Or perhaps we are entering an era of a digital feudalism run by Silicon Valley.

What is the latest thinking in the integral world about our complex and dangerous times? Where are the new potentials for our evolution? Bence Ganti brings together Integral thinkers and practitioners from around the world to present integral visions for our collective evolution at the Integral European Conference, which will be held May 19-23, online.

This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Bence Ganti about what these integral visions hold for us.

Gibrán Rivera

Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Gibrán Rivera

The norms and values of our world are changing rapidly. The murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, after many similar incidents over many years, sparked a movement, first in the US and then around the globe. That we live in a world that was created by brutal European colonialism and supremacy is becoming a simple fact, rather than something utterly ignored. These are signs of a new waking up, “wokeness,” that is being disparaged by conservatives as a new form of thought policing.

Gibrán Rivera is an internationally renowned master facilitator. He has devoted much of his work and life to the idea of democracy and to the work of emancipatory politics in urban communities. He led community engagement work at Roxbury’s La Alianza Hispana, and, with Tuesday Ryan-Hart, he is currently running a conversation series on race called What Should White People Do? Gibrán is vitally interested in having all of us wake up, into a new way of being together that avoids the rigidities that continue the polarization that is so divisive.

Thomas Steininger, a white European coming from Central Europe, and Gibrán Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico, which is still a US colony, talk on Radio evolve this week about waking up, wokeness, and how we can live together in a world in turmoil.

Alnoor Ladha

Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Alnoor Ladha

Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules (TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers, and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty, and climate change. In a recent Facebook-Video he answered  the question: “What practices do you see as relevant for all global peaceworkers?”  In his answer, he spoke about four essential practices:

Be a good student of our culture, our shared agreements and shared illusions. That is the oxygen that we breath.Disidentify from the culture, which means life-long spiritual and political deprogramming. Our loyalty is not to any system or institution but to Life itself.Transcend the subject-object duality. There are infinite ways into this practice. To hold that as a committed spiritual-political practice is life-long work.The final practice is the practice of animism, to be in dialogue with the living planet and the living cosmos.

Alnoor’s answers were inspiring, and inspired us to seek him out for a conversation.

This week in Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Alnoor Ladha about essential practices for peace workers and change makers.

Kazuma Matoba

Thomas Steininger in dialogue with Kazuma Matoba

How do we, as individuals from a particular culture, become truly global humans?

Truly experiencing ourselves as part of a global, not just local, reality calls for a new consciousness. New practices are beginning to emerge that connect us with our global reality.

Kazuma Matoba, Apl.-Professor for Intercultural Education and Communication at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, has been developing one such practice with the spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl. They call this practice Global Social Witnessing, which is a way of exploring our global social realities through science and art.

As Kazuma Matoba says: “We want to be mentally, emotionally and physically present with all human and living beings who experience intense and profound moments of struggling, doubting, and suffering. When we see people on the news children in famine in Africa or a crying mother with her dead child in Syria-we feel touched and empathetic with these people. This often happens, but the impression is not permanent, because it is just too much for us and we do not always want to deal with it.

These everyday thoughts are deeply rooted in an individualistic dualism. We and the world are separated. Through climate change and refugee crisis, we have begun to realize that we are interconnected. So we can testify to suffering people with belief that we are not separate from them, but we and they are part of a great system.”

In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Kazuma Matoba about the practice of Global Social Witnessing.

Dr. Marjorie Woollacott

Thomas Steininger in conversation with Dr. Marjorie Woollacott

Is our awareness just the result of our neurons firing? Are the most sublime states of consciousness that lead us to see the universe as One, just a trick of our wiring? Increasingly, our understanding of consciousness is deeply influenced by the neuroscience and its deeply materialistic understanding of reality.

Dr. Marjorie Woollacott is a neuroscientist. The former chair of the Department of Physiology and a member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, she lived a double life, caught between her experiences of unity in meditation and the materialistic boundaries of her profession. But she had to stand with both feet somewhere—where would that be?

Woollacott decided to look at what other researchers had begun to do in studying meditation and she began to examine consciousness and meditation with all the tools of a scientist. “What is consciousness?” she asks. “Is it an essentially human characteristic or a fundamental characteristic of the universe? Neuroscientists, like myself, are asking questions about the essential characteristics of consciousness, and the extent to which it is dependent on activity in the brain.” Her hope for the future is the development of a “post-materialistic science” that doesn’t simply reduce consciousness to the activity of neurons but respects the rigors of scientific reason.

This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Marjorie Woollacott about the potential of a post-materialistic science.

Kejal Savla

Thomas Steininger in conversation with Kejal Savla and Ashok Krishnan

We think democracy has its origin in Europe. To some degree this is true, but it is also a colonial myth. India, for example, experimented with democracy in various ways dating back to the 6th century BCE and even earlier in country villages. That experimentation continues today with the Blue Ribbon Movement, an organization for young leaders/change makers based in Mumbai, India. BRM experiments with SAN (Sarvanumati), a model of full consensus democracy that comes from democratic traditions in villages and the work of Gandhi.

Ashok Krishnan

By calling for full consensus, SAN goes beyond the majoritiy/minority model of democracy that can make polarization all too easy. The young leaders of BRM are working with Mohan Hirabai Hiralal, a Gandhian activist who actively took part in the 1970s Gandhian Bihar land-reform movement (one of the biggest nonviolent social movements in history) and studied the practice of traditional democracy in the Indian countryside. In the 1980s, Mohan helped Mendha, a tribal village in Maharashtra, to transform the old traditions of consensus decision-making into a powerful political tool for today.

Now he is helping the Blue Ribbon Movement in Mumbai, India’s thriving world metropolis, to infuse the principles and practices of deep democracy into their network of young leaders. These digital natives are connected not only to each other by mobiles and WIFI, but also around the world.

Bayo Akomolafe

Thomas Steininger in conversation with Bayo Akomolafe

There are cracks opening up in our world—cracks that have been deepening and widening in the year 2020.

Born in Nigeria and living with his wife in India, Bayo Akomolafe, lecturer, speaker, and poet, curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis.

He frames this project within a feminist ethos inspired by indigenous cosmologies. He considers it a shared art; one that explores the edges of the intelligible. The Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network, Bayo asks us to slow down. He calls for an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a “politics of surprise.”

Inviting us to stay with these cracks, he says: “Now we must inhabit the cracks and ask how to make offerings to those cracks. Now we must seek out a wilder kinship with the alien insurgents that have joined us in the dyadic room of mentorship. A multitudinous space. We must now study with this brokenness to know how to feel, how to see, what to feel, what to imagine, what to ask. Sitting with this non-knowing is generative. We must go down to the underworlds where things are not proper, knowing spiritual companionship as a fugitive ‘undercommons.’ We cannot afford refuge; we must make sanctuary.“

This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Bayo Akomolafe on why we must stay with the cracks.

David Nicol

Thomas Steininger in conversation with David Nicol

During one full rotation of the Earth, from the 5th to the 6th of December 2020, hundreds of people will gather together at home, in houses of worship, community centers, and sacred spaces through the global connective power of the internet to bear witness to Earth, our Mother and Home to all of us.

This collective spiritual practice, called One World Bearing Witness, will invite many people around globe into a diverse and interconnected set of practices, such as meditation, ritual, song, and prayer. We understand this ritual as a form subtle activism, a term coined by David Nicol, the author of Subtle Activism, who sees rituals like this as a new form of a global social activism.

This week on Radio evolve, David Nicol will talk with Thomas Steininger about the significance of this form of activism, how it evokes a new consciousness, a new worldwide brother- and sisterhood that impowers us to change the world from the inside out.

Gail Bradbrook

Thomas Steininger in conversation with Gail Bradbrook

“Being rebellious can be childish, but it also can be an initiatory act, saying: – this is not mine. I am not standing in this anymore. – We really have the power to stop this madness.”

Gail Bradbrook is co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental movement with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system. Right now, there are more 375 XR groups in 63 countries.

Gail has been researching, planning and training for mass civil disobedience since 2010. She has been arrested several times for acts of civil disobedience, most recently at the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy in the UK and previously at fracking and incinerator sites.

In this interview with Thomas Steininger she talks about her deeper motivation for her work in the Extinction rebellion, her spirituality, her love for live, her love for this planet.