Welcome to the New School, a new initiative at Commonweal for people committed to lives of service.

"Truth emerges from dialogue." So say Socrates, Martin Buber, and David Bohm,
echoing the wisdom of wise men and women throughout the ages.

The New School at Commonweal is a community of dialogue.
The New School costs only your time, your most precious possession.

The New School is eclectic. There are no required beliefs or perspectives.
That said, the following five values are widely held in our community:

* We are friends of evolution.
* We care about nature -- the matrix of life on earth.
* We care about culture -- the matrix of human consciousness.
* We seek to be of service, according to our capacities.
* We cultivate our inner lives -- the centered place from which we live.

The New School has one rule for participation: the practice of kindness and civility.

The New School is part of Commonweal, a health, environmental and educational center in Bolinas, California. Commonweal has twelve major programs, each recognized at a state, national, or international level. We serve cancer patients, health professionals, and environmental health scientists and advocates. We advocate for justice for young people. We protect oceans and marine life. Finally, the Commonweal Garden and Regenerative Design Institute teach permaculture to students of all ages from around the world.

While other Commonweal programs are focused in their domains of expertise, The New School focuses on the emergent. We believe that if, through our community of inquiry, we build resilient community and nourish our creative lives at this time of global crisis, we will each find better ways to be of service to others.

The New School is presently a community of about 1000 people, many in the Bay Area, and many who join us by podcast from around the world.
The New School brings us together for conversations, art, musical and theatre events.
The New School is free, and supported by donations whenever possible.
We do sometimes have fees or requested donations for special events or longer workshops.
The New School has sponsored over 80 conversations and events over the past four years.
Most are available for download from the event and audio archives on this webpage.

You can join The New School just by signing up for our listserv (click here)
or simply by showing up for events or downloading our podcasts.
The benefit of joining the listserv is that you will know about upcoming events.

The New School is dedicated to learning what matters together.
We hope you join us.

Welcome to The New School.

Michael Lerner

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

- Albert Einstein

About Podcasting

Interested in subscribing to our podcast to get automatic updates on New School calls? There are a few ways to do this.

1. Subscribe to Google Reader (Streaming audio)
* This is a free service and the only way to get streaming audio of the New School podcast (which means you don't need to store the audio file on your hard drive).
* First, you will need a Gmail account. You can create a new account on the log-in page (URL above).
* Log-in with your Gmail user name and password.
* Inside Google Reader you will see a menu on your left. Click the "Browse" button (next to "Add Subscriptions").
* You can "Search and Browse" for our podcast using these keywords: New School Commonweal.
* Click the Subscribe button and the New School podcast will appear in the left menu under "Add Subscription." Every time you log-in to Google Reader the New School podcast will appear there on the left, and when you click on it, you will see the most recently added programs.

2. Subscribe to the New School podcast
* On every page of the New School website in the top right-hand corner, you will find an iTunes button as well as a Podcast button.
* If you have iTunes, click the iTunes button. You will be directly connected to the iTunes store subsciption page for the New School.
* If you don't use iTunes, click on the Podcast button. This will take you to a page where you can subscribe to the podcast using other podcast software or RSS readers.

To learn more about podcasts, read this Wikipedia entry.

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