Personal Life Media

Episode 66: Tom Hayden – Part 2: The Youth-Elder Dialogue from the Sixties to the First Decade of the 21st Century

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with Tom Hayden, known to many around the world as a leading activist for progressive change for the last five decades, spanning both his “youth” and “elder” roles in the ongoing “ethical dialogue” about society’s values – from being a Freedom Rider in the Deep South of the U.S. and a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1961 and author of its visionary call, the Port Huron Statement, to nearly two decades in the Legislature of the State of California passing over one hundred critical measures, to his role in Progressives for Obama and his commentaries on The Huffington Post.  As a writer, he is the author or editor of fifteen books, including the recent Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial and Writings for a Democratic Society.

In Part 1 (Program 65) Tom and I review the post-World War II creation of various institutions, including the United Nations, intended to secure a peaceful and cooperative world, succeeded by the transformational energies of the Sixties world-wide, led primarily by a younger generation and its vision of a coherent social movement that could energize and sustain those ideals in the face of the Cold War, widespread racial intolerance, and the Vietnam War.  This review of our role in social change as youth then leads into the era of the Eighties and Nineties, and sets the stage for a compelling analysis in Part 2 of the current evolutionary challenges of our times that comes full circle.

In Part 2 (Program 66), Tom and I speak in and about the present from the engaged elder perspective of the “wisdom of learned experience”.  I begin by describing the unprecedented breach of trust between the generations that occurred in our youth in the Sixties (“don’t trust anyone over 30”), fueled in large part by the U.S. government’s waging of the Vietnam War with massive deception, later revealed in the apologetic memoirs of Robert McNamara, the then Secretary of Defense, and others.  Tom and I then dialogue – reviewing a number of contemporary topics -- about the nature of leadership, and how a new form of collaborative and transparent leadership and participation (“yes we can”, rather than promises of “I will fight for you”) can restore the existence and vitality of an “ethical dialogue” between the generations, a dialogue that is critically important if we are to meet the new century’s evolutionary challenges.  The youthful “participatory democracy” of the Sixties can come into an evolved mature form in our time, and enable us together to reach a “tipping point” into a transformative, energizing future, rather than a “toppling” point into a great fall backward.

For practical proposals I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode 65: Tom Hayden – The Youth-Elder Dialogue from the Sixties to the First Decade of the 21st Century

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with Tom Hayden, known to many around the world as a leading activist for progressive change for the last five decades, spanning both his “youth” and “elder” roles in the ongoing “ethical dialogue” about society’s values – from being a Freedom Rider in the Deep South of the U.S. and a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1961 and author of its visionary call, the Port Huron Statement, to nearly two decades in the Legislature of the State of California passing over one hundred critical measures, to his role in Progressives for Obama and his commentaries on The Huffington Post.  As a writer, he is the author or editor of fifteen books, including the recent Voices of the Chicago Eight: A Generation on Trial and Writings for a Democratic Society.

In Part 1 Tom and I review the post-World War II creation of various institutions, including the United Nations, intended to secure a peaceful and cooperative world, succeeded by the transformational energies of the Sixties world-wide, led primarily by a younger generation and its vision of a coherent social movement that could energize and sustain those ideals in the face of the Cold War, widespread racial intolerance, and the Vietnam War.  This review of our role in social change as youth then leads into the era of the Eighties and Nineties, and sets the stage for a compelling analysis in Part 2 of the current evolutionary challenges of our times that comes full circle.

For practical proposals I have made in this time of required change, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode 64: George Lakoff – Part 3: The Evolutionary Challenge of the 21st Century for the Political Mind

Episode Description:

In Part 3 of the dialogue -- recorded September 12, 2008 after the Democratic and Republican Party Conventions -- George and I update and expand considerably on the “narrative” themes of the campaign, why the Republicans say that the campaign is not about “issues” but about “personalities”, and how that approach derived from a corporate marketing strategy begun by Nixon and firmly established as Republican precedent by Reagan.  Understanding the modes of manipulation of these “framings” – unconscious to the ordinary voter and not illuminated by the media – is a key to understanding the election as it proceeds, including the formal debates between the candidates.  The collective psyche of the U.S., like that of the planet, is at a critical evolutionary turning point.  As observed by C. G. Jung, if we bring the elements at work in the unconscious to awareness, as we do in participating in these kinds of dialogues, then we open the possibility of fulfilling our higher purpose and destiny, rather than enduring an unconscious fate.

 You can contact me at www.livingdialogues.com, and see also my new website www.newenergycentury.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode 63: George Lakoff – Part 2: The Evolutionary Challenge of the 21st Century for the Political Mind

Episode Description:

In Part 2 of our dialogue, George and I recap how our political choices are influenced by the imprint of our early socialization in our families of origin, and the subsequent acculturation we receive in our education (or lack of it) and in our communities.  As George describes it, our early neurological imprints from our family lead us to think of political parties as a “family” (an idea often reaffirmed by the language of politicians themselves).  The Republican Party in the U.S. he sees as associated with the “strict father” parent and the Democratic Party associated with the “nurturing parents” archetype (belittled and caricatured by the Republicans, abetted by a compliant and somewhat cowed media, as the “Mommy” or “nanny” party, falsely represented as supposedly   taxing the “hard-working” middle class and doling out monies and welfare to the undeserving poor.)

Because of these neurological imprints – manipulated by negative and misleading ads, including outright deliberate deception – many voters do not vote their economic interests based on “the issues” (as one would expect from a Maslow hierarchy of external needs psychological model, based on “kitchen table” issues of food, shelter, and jobs).  Instead, many voters are emotionally triggered and duped by fabricated wedge distractions into voting based on fear, anxiety, and compliance with authority – often against their own interests and that of their children and grandchildren – in order to reaffirm their ”identity” within a group.

The final section is devoted to the dominant “narratives” that are at play between Obama and McCain, what they represent in the collective American psyche, and how they relate to the evolutionary challenge and initiation beyond adolescent group mind we are all confronted with.  Will this election be a Tipping Point and a leap forward, or a Toppling Point in a great fall backward.

 You can contact me at www.livingdialogues.com, and see also my new website www.newenergycentury.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode 62: George Lakoff – The Evolutionary Challenge of the 21st Century for the Political Mind

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with George Lakoff, distinguished professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, and known to many as the author of the previous New York Times best-sellers ‘Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think’, and ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’, and now his latest and very timely book ‘The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain’.

The matters George and I dialogue about have universal implications to any country and political system, even though we are here focused on examples from the upcoming “tipping (or toppling) point” 2008 election in the United States.  You will find it interesting no matter which country you live in because the archetypal structure of the human brain, as we know, is something we share across the globe and that really is the point of these programs.

We are all called to go beyond the initial adolescent “breaking away” from the oppressive rule of Mother Church and Father Sovereign in the 18th Century European Enlightenment through the celebration of “Reason”, using the printing press and widespread “democratized” dissemination of knowledge as a path to empowering the “middle class” and “the people”, to a more subtle leap of consciousness in the 21st Century.  In our present latter stage adolescent polarization – stuck in rationalized secular and religious “identity” ideologies and estranged from our early heritage of empathy, with our over-emphasis on expressing self through exclusivism and dominance rather than cooperation and co-creative collaboration – we need to move into a nurturing, mature politics based on self-confident, not self-assertive, transpartisan dialogue.

For practical proposals I have made in this vein, you can see my additional website www.newenergycentury.com or contact me at www.livingdialogues.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey.

Episode 61: David Boren – A Letter to America

Episode Description:

In this episode of our Engaged Elder series, I dialogue with David Boren, U.S. senior statesman and advisor to Barack Obama.  David has been the President of the University of Oklahoma since resigning from the U.S. Senate in 1995 to take that position.  He also teaches history classes to incoming freshman at the university, based on the understanding that if a people does not know how they achieved a certain greatness of contribution, they cannot remain great.  During his two-terms in the U.S. Senate he was the longest serving chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and was previously Governor of Oklahoma.

Keying in on his new book, A Letter to America, we talk about the challenges of the 21st Century for the U.S. to develop a new consciousness, a much better educated citizenry, and the financial and energy independence that will be required for America to play a positive collaborative leadership role in our emerging global world.  In particular we talk about the crucial importance of renewing and maintaining a financially self-reliant and educated middle class -- and I outline my original idea for New Energy Bonds as a not previously possible democratized venture vehicle to move from our traditional and no longer working “tax-and-redistribute” economic model to a new 21st century collaborative, share-the-wealth, empowering investment model.

For further detail on the proposals I have made see my website newenergycentury.com or contact me at livingdialogues.com.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

Episode 60: David Maraniss – Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World

Appreciations:

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational. You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification. A breath of fresh air! Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya

Episode Description:

In this book, Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss explores and documents the Olympics that set the tone for the second half of the 20th century, with African American stars Wilma Rudolph and flag-bearer decathlete Rafer Johnson heralding the acceleration of the civil rights movement and the arrival of the women’s rights movement in the U.S. in the sixties, and the intensification of the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the U.S. which prompted the Apollo space mission.

The era-defining 1960 Olympics give great insight into the underlying dynamics of the 2008 Bejing Olympics’ setting the tone for the first half of the 21st century. In his 8-12-08 Op-Ed column in the New York Times, David Brooks described a major aspect of the new U.S.-China rivalry as “the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality”. As our planetary consciousness undergoes its initiation into a potential higher maturity, we see the peoples of the world bouncing back and forth between these two poles of adolescent affirmation and identity. Will China be able to move beyond its insecurity into a dialogue with the Dalai Lama (see Program 59 with Robert Thurman)? Will the U.S. be able to move beyond its oil addiction into a responsible New Energy for a New World policy as I have proposed (see my website newenergycentury.com)? We shall see. Dialogues 59 and 60 help us “live the questions” deeply, as the poet Rilke advocates.

There is more detail about this episode in the Transcription section on the episode page. Please read further. Thank you.

Episode 59: Robert Thurman: Why the Dalai Lama Matters

Appreciations:

“I’m Robert Thurman, and I’m having a lovely time on Living Dialogues with my friend Duncan Campbell.  I learned a lot today from Duncan about America and about the Persian poet Rumi, about many things, about even Tibet.

And I shared with Duncan the insights and inspirations in the book I have written, which is my tribute to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, called Why the Dalai Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the World.  And this book is to inspire us and lift us out of our depression, that “NO we can’t”, which is what we’ve been hearing much too much of, from the world and media and everything.

And luckily now we are hearing “YES we can”, and we have to even hear that and say that to ourselves all the time. We must never accept that something is impossible and is hopeless. With despair comes violence, internal violence of depression, external violence between people.  But out of hope comes love, friendliness, heroism, and that’s what we need today, together today, and that’s what we can manifest. And it is what together we are manifesting in this dialogue.  All the best to you.”  -- Robert Thurman

“In your book you’ve collected from your 45 years of deep friendship with the Dalai Lama many stories of how the Dalai Lama is really, we might say, the great practitioner of what I call ‘the art of dialogue’, the art of communication, both inner dialogue with himself and understanding with great compassion and truthfulness, his own, we might say foibles as well as merits, and those of others…And what you brilliantly illuminate here is why the Dalia Lama matters at every level.  This is not just the “nice man’ who’s talking about being spiritual and kind.  He has a profound and pragmatic understanding of the nature of the planet, including our human hopes and desires, the crises we are all in, and very practical ways to deal with them.

And I will introduce this dialogue by saying that in it, Bob, you also compellingly describe your own analysis and five-part plan, from what we might call a global political perspective of how and why the Dalai Lama and China together could be a key to avoiding World War III.  And so I want to honor you for your life work and for this particular work, but also say what a deep pleasure it always is when you and I come together in these dialogues, and to acknowledge the role of the deep listening audience which is virtually present here that contributes to what has been evoked here in this dialogue.  As you say, “we are all one ocean of dialogue”.

And that is why we are inviting everyone into this dialogue, including the Dalai Lama’s virtual participation as well (whose name ‘dalai’ literally means ‘ocean’, while “lama” means ‘developed person’), since he does not proclaim “listen to what I say”, but rather:  “if you listen to what’s in your own heart, you yourself will have this inner dialogue that will show you and energize you and inspire you to right action”.  And it’s in that spirit that we celebrate this dialogue by honoring the ‘Dalai Lama’ in all of us.”  – Duncan Campbell

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational.  You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification.  A breath of fresh air!  Much love and respect.” –  Amit Kapadiya

Episode Description:
 
In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, I will be featuring a special series of dialogues on this site with myself and other elders in the next few weeks during and after the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. election season.  These dialogues will address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

Following last week’s dialogue with Ted Sorensen, counselor to John F. Kennedy, and this week’s dialogue with Robert Thurman on the Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the World, other elders who will join me in coming weeks include Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss on Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, former Senator David Boren on A Letter to America, George Lakoff on The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain, and others.

In my preceding dialogues I have talked in various ways about the need to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.

In this particular dialogue, Bob Thurman describes the world-affecting drama that China is currently engaged in with the Tibetan people and the associated environmental destruction imitative of our own Western past.  I bring in parallels with the European settlers of Australia, and of North and South America, and the conscious and unconscious genocide of the native peoples that took place in that settlement, the karmic effects of which are still with us, partially but not entirely expunged, and the restorative efforts recently being made by Australia and Canada -- as well as the issues of New Energy and what’s at stake in the U.S. and elsewhere to make dramatic changes in our energy habits and relationship to the natural world.
 
Of particular interest is Bob’s metaphor of Tibet as a crucial environmental zone for a great part of Asia, the “water tower” of that part of the world, and his statement of the essential need to keep the water clean that flows down from there, what is often called the “roof of the world”, the source of so many great rivers.

In reference to this, I describe water being both external and an inner symbol, mentioning the words of the poet Rumi (honored by UNESCO in naming 2007 the “Year of Rumi”): “we all know the taste of pure water”, and going on to say: “We need to protect not only the water tower of Tibet on the high plateau in protecting the rivers and Lake Manasarovar, but also protecting what you Bob have called the “inner revolution”, what I see as that inner stream of ‘pure water’, consciousness that can literally water our psyche and cleanse us of what the historian Joseph Ellis has referred to as the ‘original sins’ of how peoples have dealt with other peoples, such as slavery and de facto genocide, of the fear-based psychic contractions we all have individually and as nations.”

On the eve of the Bejing-hosted Olympics, I mention examples from past Olympics illustrating these parallels between the history of the West and the East, and Bob describes in detail his five-part plan, inspired by the world-wide work of the Dalai Lama, for how China could accept the overtures for dialogue from the Dalai Lama and develop a multi-faceted cooperation, both political and ecological, that could be a model for the world as well, based on “treating gently those in our power” and ourselves.

Bob observes at one point:  “It’s very hard for us to have faith that good things can happen, but if we’re more realistic, if we look at and follow the science as the Dalai Lama does, if we look at the reality and have faith in it, we will see that really there is only one way the planet can go and that we are rational beings and we do like our lives, and we like the lives of our children…so this approach, this kind of action, will sway realistic beings, which human beings basically are.  We got our evolutionary power by adapting, by being realistic, we will adapt in this crisis moment, in the twenty-first century, and we will save the planet and ourselves.  No question about it.”

Echoing that, we can conclude that kindness and altruistic outlook are not simply good things to embody, they are the truly wise and necessary practical tools of planetary co-existence – cultivating the deeper forces and energies that will lead us into a “kinder, happier twenty-first century”.  As the Dalai Lama’s spoke in addressing the European parliament after 9/11:  “In place of war, which is obsolete now on this planet, reconciliation has to come through dialogue.”

And there is much more in this stimulating and enriching conversation.  Please join us.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative solutions together, to engage our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

 Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the Dialogues I have had with mythologist and keeper of world stories Michael Meade `(Programs 48-51), world-renowned cross-cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien (Program 52), poet and translator of Persian poet Rumi Coleman Barks (Programs 3, 53-54), as well as Programs 13 and 14 with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell (editor of The Enlightened Heart, which contains the poem The Swan by Indian poet Kabir which I mention in Part 3 of my Programs 55-57 with African teacher Sobonfu Some) and Program 58 with Ted Sorensen, counselor to John F. Kennedy.   Also of directly related interest in terms of the founding and traditions of the U.S. during its tipping point 2008 election season, with its implications for global shifts, are my dialogues with historian Joseph Ellis, honored as “the Founders’ historian” by The New York Review of Books (see Programs 38 and 39).

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.  All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the numerous (unsolicited) appreciations received from you.

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Episode 58: Ted Sorensen: Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

Appreciations:

“I’m Ted Sorensen, former counsel to John F. Kennedy and author of the new book Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.  And I have so enjoyed talking for an extended length of time with Duncan Campbell.  Whoever puts him on the air deserves a Nobel, Pulitzer, or any other prize, because clearly this is a program that advances the security and best interest of all the American people, not just a few high-powered lobbyists or special interest groups.  It serves the country well, and I am proud to have been a part of it.  Duncan, I can’t thank you enough.  I have never had a dialogue, much less an interview, anything like this.  And I salute you for the path that you’re following.  Thanks so much.  Keep up the good work.  This has been a joy.” – Ted Sorensen

“And it has been for me too, Ted.  I’ve been so inspired by your example.  So I want to thank you not only for my generation, but for all subsequent generations, for being there, for everything that you have done, and for giving us this latest and great gift of your book Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.  It’s been such a real deep pleasure to connect with you and to spend this time together.” – Duncan Campbell

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational. You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification. A breath of fresh air! Much love and respect.” – July 23, 2008 Amit Kapadiya

Episode Description:
 
In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, I will be featuring a special series of dialogues on this site with myself and other elders in the next few weeks during the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. election season.  These dialogues will address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

Following this dialogue with Ted Sorensen, other elders that will join me in coming weeks include Robert Thurman on the Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the World, Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss on Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, former Senator David Boren on A Letter to America, George Lakoff on The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain, and others.

In my preceding dialogues with African teacher Sobonfu Some and others here on Living Dialogues,  I have talked about how our fragmented, specialized modern culture often lacks a rich, nourishing sense of community, and how there is a yearning for unity and peace awakening in different countries all over the world -- where elders are starting to come forward in this time of planetary crisis, and previously indifferent and discouraged youth are voicing their concerns about the future. I have talked also about the foundational role of intimacy, relationships and appreciation in sharing our stories across generational, ethnic, gender, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that both youth and elders must play in our evolution for it to take place.

In the early part of the 19th century, the German poet and scientist Goethe observed: “The future of any given nation at any given time depends on the thoughts of its youth under five and twenty”.   In the mid-20th century, the psychological historian Erik Erikson (author of Ghandi’s Truth and Youth: Identity and Crisis) called attention to what he termed the “ethical dialogue” which must take place continuously between open-minded elders sharing their experience and responding in co-creative, mutually respectful interchange to the concerns and perspectives of the next generations, in order for a nation’s civilization to survive.

In my dialogue with Michael Meade in Program 51 and its description, I observed how “the modern mind paradigm and its ‘mid-level’ national myths (including America’s dominance in the late 20th century, sometimes dubbed “the American Century”) are losing their energy and no longer have the hold on the planetary imagination they once did”.  (See also my reference in the Episode Description of Program 51 to Fareed Zakaria, international editor of Newsweek magazine, and his new book The Post-American World).

And so, we begin this special political series with my dialogue with Ted Sorensen, who was the 11 years younger “youth” to John F. Kennedy’s “elder” during their extraordinarily important and visionary collaboration at the beginnings of the nuclear age from 1952 through Kennedy’s death in 1963.  Now a highly-respected elder and sought-after counselor to many worldwide, Ted has performed an invaluable service by taking the last six years to prepare his new book, despite a debilitating stroke which significantly impaired his eyesight, to review documents, and meticulously chronicle, and share with us with his great gift of eloquence, the stories of those years with JFK in a manner supremely relevant to our time.

We start with Ted Sorensen’s elder recollections and stories of John Kennedy because in my view JFK was the first “21st century president” in outlook, a prophetic and inspiring voice -- since the policies he developed, working with Ted and other key advisors, and influenced by a newly-educated (thanks to the G.I. Bill) and awakening public, remain models of the internationalist policies we most need today: honoring both diversity and planetary unity based on cooperation rather than dominance.

Among those very successful policies were the creation, over much political objection at the time, of the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress for Latin America, in addition to mobilizing America’s scientific imagination and can-do technological innovation with his call in May 1961 for the Apollo moonshot program to be completed within 8 years and a few months, facing down the Soviet Cuban missile crisis threat in October 1962 with a successful policy of  “vigilance, patience, and restraint”, and opening dialogue with Nikita Kruschev by unilaterally beginning the nuclear disarmament program in his June 1963 American University speech (the same location where 45 years later, the Kennedy torch would be passed by his family to Barack Obama).

All of these programs went beyond the conventional and self-interested horizons of the petroleum-based “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower warned against, and the fear-based thinking of those who sought dominance rather than mature discourse, including hawkish and lobbyist voices in the Congress and the Pentagon.  The effect of JFK’s brief presidency was prophetic in its vision as to what would be required for a sustainable world, policies we would ignore at our peril in the decades that have followed, described even by liberal historian Sean Wilsey in the title to his book as “The Reagan Era: 1974-2008”.  But despite other regressive policies, Ronald Reagan was himself later inspired by the Kennedy legacy, in seeking his own legacy, to reverse course -- abandoning his neo-conservative confrontational rhetoric calling the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” -- and opening direct talks with Gorbachev, which ultimately led to the end of the 20th Century Cold War.

Having regressed in so many ways in the last decades, we are now in what I am calling a new 21st Century Great Struggle on a planetary scale on many fronts, military, economic, social, environmental (involving proliferating human conflicts over our attachment to scarce resources and resultant health and ecological crises, the 21st century manifestation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), acknowledged by Richard Bramson, for instance, as “a more dangerous time than World Wars I and II put together”.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative solutions together, to engage our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

 Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the Dialogues I have had with mythologist and keeper of world stories Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), world-renowned cross-cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien (Program 52), poet and translator of Persian poet Rumi Coleman Barks (Programs 3, 53-54), as well as Programs 13 and 14 with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell (editor of The Enlightened Heart, which contains the poem The Swan by Indian poet Kabir which I mention in Part 3 of my Programs 55-57 with African teacher Sobonfu Some).   Also of directly related interest in terms of the founding and traditions of the U.S. during its tipping point 2008 election season, with its implications for global shifts, are my dialogues with historian Joseph Ellis, honored as “the Founders’ historian” by The New York Review of Books (see Programs 38 and 39).

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.  All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the numerous (unsolicited) appreciations received from you.

Episode 57: Sobonfu Some – Part 3: The Essential Participation and Wisdom Gifts of Elders and Youth in Evolving Our Cultural Dialogue

Appreciations:

 “Thank you Duncan for all the ways that you are enabling people to share their wisdom, and also for holding the torch for everybody to know how to find their way, and for just having a golden heart.  I just so appreciate you.  It is always so great to talk to you and to see the bright light you always shine on so many different subject matters. So thank you.” - Sobonfu Some
 
“For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you.  It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you.  And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.” - Duncan Campbell

“Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear.  Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview.  Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them. Five Stars!” - May 12, 2008, Sunshiny from Clarksville, Arkansas

Episode Description:
 
You can listen to and see the descriptions of Parts 1 and 2 of this 3-Part Dialogue on Programs 55 and 56 on this site.

The noted anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed:  “For humanity to evolve, the conversation must deepen” – and, we might add, for our societies to flourish and even survive, the conversation must also broaden to include two groups often neglected and marginalized in our political culture:  elders and youth.

As I said in Part 1 of my conversation with Sobonfu Some:
“We are all of us going through an initiation in the sense of being forced out of the comfort zone of whatever our particular literal, metaphorical, or mental “village” may be – just as you were Sobonfu in your life story. We are all now obliged to go out into a wider world, and learn another language or several other emotional languages, and to begin to weave a real planetary consciousness because it’s the only way we’re going to be whole.  I think of dialogue as an essential element of this process.  The dialogue between elders and youth in terms of age – and the dialogue between elder and younger cultures in terms of time on the planet.  The dialogue between men and women, between ethnicities, between nations.  Because everyone in this participation has a particular wisdom and a particular knowledge to give, including the younger cultures and the young people.  Things are changing so fast on the planet that elder persons and cultures don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, no matter how long they have been on the planet.  And so they themselves need this revitalizing connection with the younger ones who carry certain knowledge within them.  And the young in turn need a certain kind of mentoring and embrace and respect in being seen by the elders -- and vice-versa -- in order to realize their full potential.  So it’s such a beautiful but also very challenging initiation that we are being called to.”

In this Part 3, Sobonfu and I bring the larger story full circle in seeing with further perspective the essential roles that both youth and elders must play in our evolution for it to take place.

 Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the Dialogues I have had with Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), Angeles Arrien (Program 52), and Coleman Barks (Programs 53-54), as well as Programs 13 and 14 with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell (editor of The Enlightened Heart, which contains the Kabir poem The Swan which I mention in this Part 3 dialogue with Sobonfu).
 
Here are some excerpts from this Part 3:

Sobonfu:  I really believe that in order to be able to change the way things are, if we want to make peace or live in peace in this world, we have to really begin with our children, our youth, and with our elders…So far I haven’t seen any culture survive without their children…and the same with the elders, because the elders are the grounding force in the community. We don’t actually ask enough of their input and yet they have much to share.  We simply think of them as being old.  But in our Dagara tradition, the word “old” means someone who has been cooked in the juice of life and has now this lasting effect…

So if we can begin to see in our elders someone who has wisdom, great ways to share that wisdom, then we won’t have to recreate the wheel of life all over.  We can simply draw from their wisdom and continue to stand proudly on the shoulders of our ancestors in order to be able to bring our gifts in the best possible way.  But until that happens, until our elders and our children, our youth, receive support and respect, we are always going to feel lost in the middle because no one is there to support us or to create a bridge for us to walk on…

Duncan:  …Some of the things that have been fragmented, and “broken” in Alice Walker’s phrase, by the younger, modern culture we might see as a necessary ritualistic and initiatic breaking away from prior traditional concepts that became and have become too closed.  In any kind of mystery of initiation there is a breaking away.  There is a breaking down and a replacement with a new and different form.  If we look at this from a planetary perspective we might say that the intensity of the individualism of theWest has itself become too closed and stuck, and so has in that very stuckness called forth teachers from the older cultures such as your own and such as yourself and others from many parts of the world, as well as new fresh perspectives from a younger generation, to come and work together in a kind of mutual weaving and mutual healing, becoming whole, and mutual co-creation of a new planetary wisdom culture…

We are working together to create a planetary culture by appreciating the history of our own and different cultures and sharing our stories. This is what I have sometimes called the “repository of lived wisdom”, the “deep memory and stories of the culture” that reside in true elders of whatever chronological age, and I have such appreciation for the gifts that you have given…I believe part of it from my own perspective is that we are all becoming planetary citizens…

It reminds me when I was traveling in the great ancient holy city of Varanasi in India, where one of the things I wanted to do was to make a personal pilgrimage to honor the connection and appreciation I felt with the great 15th century poet, Kabir, a weaver by trade who was both Hindu and Muslim and beyond both.  My guide and I searched and searched until we found his effectively anonymous birthplace. It was marked by a tiny temple, next to a little “tank”, as they call it, a small pool of water constructed in the middle of an urban neighborhood with winding alleyways.  There were twelve people gathered around the temple at sunset saying his poetry, and they invited me to share in our mutual appreciation of Kabir.  I spoke a poem of his that had touched me deeply -- about the heart’s journey, symbolized by the flight of a swan, to its own true home (translated in its own pilgrimage from the original Hindi into English by Tagore, then into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, then back into English by Milosz and Robert Hass).  In return they said to me:  “Yes, very good -- Kabir says ‘we are all pilgrims on this great earth’”.  I think from any culture in any time period we are all pilgrims (the Canterbury Tales comes to mind), sharing our stories as we go along together through this heartfelt journey into and ceaselessly manifesting the beauty of the creation which is our common source.”
 
 And that is precisely what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.  All the best, Duncan.

Episode 56: Sobonfu Some – Part 2: The Gifts of Intimacy, Relationship and Appreciation as Evolution’s Essence

Appreciations:

 “Thank you Duncan for all the ways that you are enabling people to share their wisdom, and also for holding the torch for everybody to know how to find their way, and for just having a golden heart.  I just so appreciate you.  It is always so great to talk to you and to see the bright light you always shine on so many different subject matters. So thank you.” - Sobonfu Some
 
“For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you.  It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you.  And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.” - Duncan Campbell

“Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear.  Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview.  Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them. Five Stars!” - May 12, 2008, Sunshiny from Clarksville, Arkansas

Episode Description:
 
You can listen to and see the description of Part 1 of this 3-Part Dialogue on Program 55 on this site.

In this Part 2, Sobonfu and I dialogue about the foundational role of intimacy, relationships and appreciation in extending and bringing to fruition the initiations we spoke about in Part 1, and finding and living our purpose and how our name has a meaning.  This also includes a fascinating and playful dialogue on the cross-cultural understanding of age from Sobonfu’s tradition, illuminating how to access a perception at once wise and childlike that sees and appreciates each new situation appropriately in its essence without judgmentalism.  Black Elk, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Angeles Arrien, Henry Miller, Lao Tzu, and others find their way into these shared stories and perceptions.

Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the Dialogues I have had with Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), Angeles Arrien (Program 52), and Coleman Barks (Programs 53-54).
 
Here are some excerpts from this Part 2:
 
Duncan:  In our prior dialogue we talked about your life and how you came here from the Dagara tribe in West Africa, landing originally in the middle of winter in Detroit, Michigan and the ways in which in that particular initiation you discovered the absence of community when you had to make a life directly here in a strange country and one really quite far removed from the intimacy of the small village life rich in ritual and wisdom of the old ways that you had come from in Africa. And since arriving here many years ago in 1991 you have not only learned English but you've shared the wisdom and beauty of your own experience and initiation and all of its challenges and ups and downs of initiation in several books, including one entitled "The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient Teachings in the Ways of Relationships".

And in that book, given my own calling to dialogue and evolution, I was inspired by your focus on relationships. Because I think it’s a bridge to the deeper sense of community that you teach about and bring forth in your work…..the very multi-faceted deep way that you have talked about relationship as being part of a core of the human experience and one that you have found as Alice Walker put it, somewhat "broken" here in the West when you arrived.
Sobonfu: Right……Relationship really basically is something, its just like air that everybody needs. It’s just something that we all crave whether we are out in the street or somewhere in our private office or even being in the monastery. We all long to be loved, to be seen, to be valued…..acceptance is what we are looking for. When we are accepted we feel a part of something bigger. We feel doorways opening to us that we didn't know existed before. So the road to intimacy in my tradition not only include people, the environment you are in, but also Sprit, the Divine. Because no true intimacy can be without the present sense and the blessing of the Divine.

So as a result intimacy becomes like the foundation stone for each human being to step on, on which the relationship is going to be created. So for me, when I talk about intimacy, when I talk about my relationship, I am always look for what is the bigger purpose for me to encounter this person. What is Spirit wanting me to do here and so forth. However as much as the human ego would like it to be about us, it is not about us. It’s about something higher. It’s about trying to bring a gift out into the world. and that's why we encounter new people. Even if it’s a brief moment or a long-term relationship they all have their purpose. So for me, relationship, spirit, community, all go hand in hand because you cannot uphold a relationship all by yourself. You need the support of community and you need the support of Spirit and so forth.

Duncan: And one of the things I am think of as you are speaking Sobonfu is that in traditional societies all over the world from time in memorial there has been the recognition of the need for the human being to first leave the community in a kind of initiation of aloneness to see certain kinds of visions or images which reveal to the individual what their unique gift is in the world; their unique mission we might say. Before they then come back to be able to share that as a part of the piece of the larger puzzle of the community. And we think in modern times of Black Elk (as recounted in Black Elk Speaks) in his vision quest and his wonderful saying when he came back from his own alone time separated from he community and had his great vision he came back and said: "I understood more than I saw. And I saw more than I can say. And what I can say is that I saw the hoop of my people and the hoops of all peoples surrounding the central mountain, Mt. Harney” (that happens to be the sacred mountain in his particular geographic location of South Dakota in the United States). And then he said as Joseph Campbell put it the all important addendum: “but the central mountain is everywhere”.

And in that statement we see that this journey that human beings have made from time immemorial from the collective embrace of the womb of the mother, the womb of the family, the womb of the community out into a lonely journey of let us say adolescent initiation into the deeper mysteries of the world. And then the coming back into community, in maturity, and being able to embody one could say the sacred marriage of the inner masculine and the inner feminine and then to make a living marriage and to create new life so that the community of beings can continue in the great universal drama.  Human and planetary evolution is something that has an inner structure that is similar everywhere in the world. And as each one of us tells his or her story about how they have gone through that great timeless initiation we add to each others storehouse of understanding and acceptance. And oddly enough it is often a gift of hearing someone else's story that allows each of us to accept ourselves more deeply than we have before.

Sobonfu: Right. Absolutely. I think those are the stories that are important because the circle is not always there for people to share their story. So in meeting somebody new and in them sharing their story, in us sharing our story, we have already created a bridge that is safe for each on of us to walk on. And also for us to be able to open and to share what is that gift is that we are bringing. That is what is so beautiful in this time when it’s possible for people to basically be able to travel everywhere, to meet new people and to share their story. And every single time that they have shared with somebody and they have also listened and received this story of the other person something new is born out of them. A new level of their gift begins to shine again. And that is that beauty that we are all searching for in sharing our own story.

Duncan:  And that is precisely what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.  All the best, Duncan.

Episode 55: Sobonfu Some – Part 1: Welcoming the Soul Home Through Initiation

Appreciations:

 “Thank you Duncan for all the ways that you are enabling people to share their wisdom, and also for holding the torch for everybody to know how to find their way, and for just having a golden heart.  I just so appreciate you.  It is always so great to talk to you and to see the bright light you always shine on so many different subject matters. So thank you.” - Sobonfu Some
 
“For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you.  It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you.  And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.” - Duncan Campbell

“Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear.  Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview.  Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them. Five Stars!” -  May 12, 2008, Sunshiny from Clarksville, Arkansas

Episode Description:
 
Part 1 of a 3-Part Dialogue:

Let me begin by introducing my great friend Sobonfu Some.  Sobonfu was born and raised in Burkina Faso, the former Upper Volta in Africa, and she is an initiated member of the Dagara tribe of West Africa.  Her voice was one of the first in recent times to bring African spirituality to the West.  She continually travels the world, conducting seminars and workshops that offer her perspective on birth, pregnancy, community, healing, intimacy, rituals, the sacred quality of everyday life and much more.  She is the founder of Ancestors’ Wisdom Spring, and her books include Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community; The Spirit of Intimacy:
Ancient Teachings in the Ways of Relationships; and Falling out of Grace.

As I mentioned in the last of the three dialogues on this site with myself and Coleman Barks (listen to Program 54 and see its Episode Description), we in modern industrial cultures “need to balance both the modern mind’s excessive emphasis on the mental (which can leave us feeling, in the poet Rumi’s words, “empty and frightened” in our fragmented, specialized culture, often lacking a rich, nourishing sense of community), with our indigenous heritage of appreciating the embrace of the earth...We need to develop this dynamic equipoise of spirit and soul in order to develop our own elderhood, as Rumi did in his time, in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century, to create not just a localized sanity, but a planetary civilization which can communicate with and within all of its component parts so we don’t just self-destruct”.  In imparting her birth tradition’s ancient teachings, often through the intimate and (to us) amazing yet accessible details of her own lived experience that we describe and situate in these dialogues, Sobonfu, in the words of Alice Walker, is a teacher that “can help us put together so many things that our modern Western world has broken”.

In this first Dialogue we explore the extraordinary (to those of us in modern cultures) initiations which welcomed Sobonfu’s spirit into this world and prepared here for her soul’s unfoldment and revealed to her her life’s purpose and mission.  As I mention in this dialogue, the “hearing ritual” which took place while Sobonfu was still in her mother’s womb and which she describes in this dialogue, is evocative of the recent work in the West of the brilliant Jungian James Hillman in his book The Soul’s Code and Caroline Myss in her Sacred Contracts (see Programs 17 and 18 on this site) in how we might discover our soul’s purpose.  In Sobonfu’s words:  “We had this ritual in my tribe and village because as a human being you always want your life to be a reflection of what you think you are creating and you are forgetting that there is something that the greater universe has in place for you.”

Here are some excerpts from this Part 1: 

“Duncan:  And I think now that its part of a whole process that seems to be awakening in different countries all over the world, where elders are being called forward from many indigenous cultures at this time.  Organizations are being formed spontaneously as it were, as in the fulfillment of ancient prophecies that there would come a time when having lost something really essential in the human soul, we are now having to work together at an international transnational level with many different gifts coming from many different cultures to in a sense put it all back together again, that which has been broken.  And some cultures to heal ourselves requires even going beyond our own culture.

Sobonfu:   Yes, right! And as you know, many people say, the time is right, I agree.  Especially with many indigenous communities that have held on to their own wisdom for so long and the world is changing.  And the young people in those communities are not necessarily going to be the ones to unfold this wisdom.  And so there is a need to have it be alive somewhere.  And also because people are really ready for this kind of wisdom and are willing to receive them in the forms that they come without wanting to change them, dissect them, or make them look like something else.  And that is the beauty in it, and of course, you know, each one of these tribes coming have wisdom, it is a conversion of all that bring together the truth.  That the human soul and spirit is so craving.  Because not just one way is going to make it work for us.

Duncan:  And I think that’s the point, yes, for all of us…that we are all of us going through an initiation in a sense of being forced out of the comfort zone of whatever our particular village may be, literally or metaphorically as you were.  And in a sense obliged to go out into a wider world and learn another language or several other emotional languages and to begin to weave a real planetary consciousness because it’s the only way that we are going to be healed.  And I think of dialogue as an essential element of this.  The dialogue between elders and youth in terms of age.  The dialogue between elder cultures and you, younger cultures in terms of time on the planet.  The dialogue between men and women.  Because everyone in this participation has a particular wisdom and a particular knowledge to give including the younger cultures and young people.  Things are changing so fast on the planet that elders don’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle, no matter how long they have been on the planet.  And so they themselves need this revitalizing rejuvenating connection with the young who carry certain knowledge within them.  And the young in turn need a certain kind of mentoring and embrace and respect in being seen by the elders in order to realize their full potential.  So it’s such a beautiful but also very challenging initiation that we are being called to.

Sobonfu:  Right.  Absolutely.  And it is an initiation that we have to go through if we are all going to survive.   Now, there is no way of going around it.

Duncan:  Well and that’s it.  There is no way of going around it and so we go through it like a birth canal.  We really can’t short circuit it in any way and we come as you put it so beautifully, to find the wisdom and the humor in failure, to find yourself in your core essence when you as you entitled one of your books, you fall out of grace.  To find the way the children can be celebrated in community and the ongoingness of life even when you feel the most alienated, lets say, even from your own tradition.  For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you.  It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you.  And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.
 
Sobonfu:  Thank you!  I feel the same.  I am very honored to have you and the people who are really good and sincere friends, which is something to cherish these days when you find one.  So thank you for being there with your golden and welcoming heart.

Duncan:  I agree.  When you do find a friend, and you find a friendly community it is something to be valued and cherished.  And the community that we find that we find in your books, Sobonfu, is one such friend.”

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.  All the best, Duncan.

Episode 54: Coleman Barks: The Soul of Rumi – Part 3

"Duncan you are a real national treasure, you make me smile, and I love that you ask me to be on your program...I just love how you come up with ways to tie these insights we discover together.  I don't know how you do it.  It's inspired..." – Coleman Barks

I described Part 1 (See Program 3 on this site below) of this three-part dialogue with Coleman as follows:

This three-part dialogue on The Soul of Rumi is a great embodiment of the experience and value of dialogue, showcasing Rumi's life and poetry as a perspective of timeless wisdom and inspiration.   For those unfamiliar with Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in Turkey, this first program will be a great introduction, and a "feast" for the great many around the world already deeply appreciative of his work.  In recognition of the worldwide inspiration for communication created by Rumi in evoking the spirit and experience of unity beyond religious, cultural and ideological boundaries, UNESCO proclaimed 2007 as “The Year of Rumi”.  As noted in my prior dialogue with Larry Dossey, M.D. (See Program 2 below), Rumi has remarkably become today -- 800 years after his birth on September 30, 1207 -- simultaneously the most-listened to and revered poet in Afghanistan and the most-published poet in America.  His continually growing popularity in the U.S. is due in large part to the incomparable translations by the great American translator and poet, Coleman Barks.

This then is a link to the co-creation of a "dialogue consciousness worldview" that Living Dialogues is promoting and holding space for. 

Part 2 was described in these words:

Rumi’s poetry inspires in these dark times when we are trying to create a civilization without elders – that is to say, we are in the process of becoming elders ourselves in times of uncertainty, encountering unprecedented global conflicts and climate change. As I say in the dialogue, Rumi functions as an elder in our human journey as a species, whose words resonate down over eight centuries, across national, ethnic, religious, and language barriers, expressing the unifying essence we all share.  In the words of another eloquent member of the species, John F. Kenndy, 45 years ago this month in his historic American University speech proclaiming the world’s first nuclear disarmament initiative, in the name of creating together a planetary peace that would be beneficial for all mankind:  “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children’s future; and we are all mortal.”

To go forward on this great journey together, we need to develop the paradoxical consciousness which can hold our universal moral values and experience together inclusively and beyond ideology with our human diversity.  In that vein, this poem of Rumi serves as an inspiration and touchstone for the spontaneous investigations and ruminations evoked in this dialogue:

Today, like very other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.  Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

In Part 3, Coleman and I explore a number of different aspects of the need to balance both the modern mind’s excessive emphasis on the mental, the sky (which can leave us feeling “empty and frightened” in our fragmented, specialized culture), with our indigenous heritage of appreciating the embrace of the earth -- as expressed in the open-ended conciseness of the Rumi poem quoted in the paragraph just above (ending the summary of Part 2 of this ongoing Dialogue).  We need to develop this dynamic equipoise of spirit and soul in order to develop our own elderhood, as Rumi did in his time, in order meet the challenges of the 21st century, to create not just a localized sanity, but a planetary civilization which can communicate with and within all of its component parts so we don’t self-destruct.  Here are some excerpts:

Duncan Campbell: Well it’s wonderful you know to, end, as it were, on this note of openness, that, this acceptance of the uncertainty and bewilderment again is that kind of razor’s edge of going beyond any kind of duality, you know, between confusion on the one hand and apparent but evanescent clarity on the other. That you’re somehow magically holding both poles together and honoring both and in so doing reaching a higher state of, as you put it, balance, of compassion, or love.

Coleman Barks: Hmm, right, yeah. I think that’s true, it’s a, it’s a shaky walk –laughs- that we do here with our left foot and then our right foot. We explore things in the world and then we meditate on those, and then we, as we walk, the path unfolds. Yeah.

Duncan Campbell: In a sense, you know, some have called it the wisdom of uncertainty of actually embracing the uncertainty as the deepest wisdom and walking forward confidently but not because you know where the next step is going to land.

Coleman Barks: Right. He says there is an excess in spiritual searching that is profound ignorance. And he says, “Let that ignorance be our teacher.” –laughs- you know, so it’s good to have a mystic who says let ignorance be our teacher. Yeah, he also, in terms of this balance thing, he also honors; a lot of mystics praise the sky, the openness of that. He praises the ground, as well. He says, you got to have somewhere to plant your grief seeds, you got to hoe. And he says, try to be more like the ground. The ground has a great generosity and it takes our compost and makes beauty. It takes in the rough clod, he says, and gives back an ear of corn. So try to be more like that, give back better, like the ground does.

Duncan Campbell: I remember that, yes. It was just really so striking when I read it, try to be like the ground is. Give back better than you receive, in other words, whatever seeds fall into your life of experience that you enrich and nurture them and give back beauty rather than bitter fruit or some dried husk.

And I think that’s part of the theme of the masculine and the feminine in a way, that there is traditionally that association of the masculine with the spirit or the sky and the association of the feminine with the soul or the soil. Soul and soil. Soil is mater, matrix, mother, material. Some honoring of form, honoring of incarnation, honoring of things as they are without thinking they need to be somehow transcended. Already there’s divinity in body if we could but release ourselves into it. For me that’s a constant theme with Rumi, this open ended-ness of his. I’m very moved by this. Calling us back into honoring the earth itself and honoring the ground, and to emulate it, to be like it, to have dignity and generosity and courage of receiving toxicity, and finding a way to dissolve it and giving back better than you’ve received.

. . . . . . .

Duncan Campbell: Well one of the things that Joseph Campbell said that really struck me was in one of his conversations with Fraser Boa was that when a culture arrives at the point where it emphasizes the economic and the military to the relative exclusion of other values, it’s always the sign of a late stage culture. (CB: Wow.) And when asked about this by Paul Ray (see Program 37 on this site) and Sherry Anderson, who wrote the book, The Cultural Creatives, when they talked with him oh, maybe 1982, they said: “’Well, what can we do about this Joe?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I can just tell you what’s happening. I can’t fix it’ and then he laughed.”  And in another, separate conversation, that Duane Elgin recounted to me that he had had with Joe Campbell in that same time period (see Programs 40, 41, and 42 on this site), Joe responded to a similar question by saying:  “Not my job.  Your job in this next generation.”  And then he laughed as well.

So, you know, Coleman,  we’re just in a stage now, where like Rome, I would say the modernist culture centered in America, the global corporatist culture has lost touch, relatively speaking, with that deep source of generativity and I think there’s no mystery in that sense why Rumi, has ironically, become the most popular published poet in America today, because there is that sort of void that’s calling to us. There’s that desire to reestablish a sense of generative balance that you talked about right at the beginning. The need is to “find the Grail” in a new contemporary co-creative and cooperative way, to once again “green the kingdom (the Planet)” from “ the wasteland” (in T.S. Eliot’s poem describing the modern world) that it is becoming.  And Rumi in his timeless poetry is calling forth this sense of generative balance from us and we’re collaborating actually with Rumi as an elder spirit of the species from hundreds of years ago. He is perhaps as present or more present today in those of us that hear his call than he was in his own community, in his own time, in the 13th century.

Coleman Barks:  Yes, and I think it’s important to take up on a point Joe Campbell was making in that quotation you cited, that we talk about poetry and even ecstatic poetry in this time, when it might seem so extraneous, because it’s important to the inner ecology. It gives the soul a place that it can enjoy living. You know, and it nourishes it. I find as I read these Rumi poems to people in these terrible times, after the 9/11 terrorist attack and before whatever the next one is, that they feel fed somehow by these poems in a way that’s important.

Duncan Campbell: I think that’s the balance that has to be struck if we’re going to go forward, it’s something that I think we can look to the experience of Rome and what happened when that balance was not struck. We may repeat that history or we may be able to go beyond it. But I think that’s what’s up, it seems to be at this point, and I think Joe Campbell really put his finger on it when he said if we lens it exclusively or preponderantly through the economic and military viewpoint – the merely measurable and mental viewpoint -- we’ve lost touch with some crucial and essential part of ourselves. So that when we talk about ecstatic poetry, the word ecstasy itself means “to stand outside of”.  To stand outside of is the literal translation of ex-stasis, so we need to train ourselves to “stand outside of” the existing either-or, polarizing paradigm and reclaim some more fundamental aspect of our universal and shared humanity which can be the bridge building that will lead beyond the impasse.

And in the end, we need to remember that Rumi exhorts us not to go to meet on a morally relativistic “field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing”, but to meet in a “field beyond ideas [exclusivistic and polarizing, ideological and rigid] of wrongdoing and rightdoing”, a very different place of open-hearted, open-minded cross-cultural common communication, no longer clinging to our narrow idea of being the only one who is or ones who are “right”, but to learn from one another and to be in dialogue and work together.

After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.  All the best, Duncan.

Episode 53: Coleman Barks: The Soul of Rumi – Part 2

"Duncan you are a real national treasure, you make me smile, and I love that you ask me to be on your program...I just love how you come up with ways to tie these insights we discover together.  I don't know how you do it.  It's inspired..." – Coleman Barks

I described Part 1 (See Program 3 on this site below) of this three-part dialogue with Coleman as follows:

This three-part dialogue on The Soul of Rumi is a great embodiment of the experience and value of dialogue, showcasing Rumi's life and poetry as a perspective of timeless wisdom and inspiration.   For those unfamiliar with Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet born in Afghanistan who lived most of his life in Turkey, this first program will be a great introduction, and a "feast" for the great many around the world already deeply appreciative of his work.  In recognition of the worldwide inspiration for communication created by Rumi in evoking the spirit and experience of unity beyond religious, cultural and ideological boundaries, UNESCO proclaimed 2007 as “The Year of Rumi”.  As noted in my prior dialogue with Larry Dossey, M.D. (See Program 2 below), Rumi has remarkably become today -- 800 years after his birth on September 30, 1207 -- simultaneously the most-listened to and revered poet in Afghanistan and the most-published poet in America.  His continually growing popularity in the U.S. is due in large part to the incomparable translations by the great American translator and poet, Coleman Barks.

This then is a link to the co-creation of a "dialogue consciousness worldview" that Living Dialogues is promoting and holding space for. 

In this Part 2

Rumi’s poetry inspires in these dark times when we are trying to create a civilization without elders – that is to say, we are in the process of becoming elders ourselves in times of uncertainty, encountering unprecedented global conflicts and climate change. As I say in the dialogue, Rumi functions as an elder in our human journey as a species, whose words resonate down over eight centuries, across national, ethnic, religious, and language barriers, expressing the unifying essence we all share.  In the words of another eloquent member of the species, John F. Kenndy, 45 years ago this month in his historic American University speech proclaiming the world’s first nuclear disarmament initiative, in the name of creating together a planetary peace that would be beneficial for all mankind:  “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children’s future; and w