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

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.

The intention of the New School is to create a growing tapestry of interwoven conversations and experiences that nourish the body, the mind and the heart in ways that move us individually and collectively toward the consciousness we seek.

We intend to do this without any of the paraphernalia of classes, curricula, credit and the like that encumber so much of education. We emphasize again that we seek to co-invent the New School together with the community of friends who are drawn to explore learning for life.

We are creating a series of recorded interviews and in-person gatherings to explore these shared interests. Please look on our Home page for a listing of our upcoming conversations and on our Events page for information about our live events.

These conversations are recorded for radio broadcast every other Thursday on KWMR in Point Reyes, CA and are available as podcasts and MP3 downloads on the Audio Archives page.

Welcome to the beginning of the New School. We are grateful for your interest and welcome your comments.

"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