Commonweal is a health and environmental research institute where for three decades we have worked at the interface of personal and planetary healing through focused initiatives in the environment, education, and health. The New School seeks to bring together old and new friends and colleagues from all these areas to explore shared interests in life-long learning and service to life.
What is the community of friends we seek to serve through the New School? These are some preliminary, not definitive, thoughts about who we are and what interests us.
* We believe most of us seek to help others and to serve life. We are acutely conscious of the challenges facing humanity and all life on earth in our time. We feel urgently the need to find ways to move away from our current destructive path and toward the capacity to live at peace with each other and with all life on earth.
* We believe most of us seek to develop wisdom, compassion and joy in our own lives. We are inclined to believe we serve better if we attend to the cultivation of our own minds and hearts. Many of us have contemplative practices of some kind, or we practice some other form of the "remembrance" that the wisdom traditions have evolved to help people return to the wisdom of the heart.
* We are also, for the most part, people who deeply value nature. Many of us recognize that indigenous peoples who live in close contact with nature have often sustained ways of knowing that have been largely lost by industrialized societies. Many of us believe these ways of knowing are precious to the global consciousness that would sustain life.
* Finally, we are people who value culture. And we see the connection between culture, consciousness and sustainability. We seek out books, articles, art, music, films, and conversations that touch and enrich our lives.
Feedback