DESMOND: Hello: I'm Desmond Berghofer, co-founder of the Visioneers International Network, and we're beginning today with our wisdom episodes, and here to lead us on the journey as our guide is my partner Dr. Geraldine Schwartz who is a neuropsychologist and understands the potential of the human brain and mind to reach the highest possible levels, and she'll be our guide as a compassionate leader on our journey. So here's Gerri.

GERRI: Hello Everyone: Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening.

We are about to embark on an extraordinary journey together, but this isn't a traditional journey. If it were and I were your guide, there would be known stops along the way that we had chosen, and we would be exploring the stops that other people had done. But this is a completely original project, and if we were meeting in the traditional way, we would be stopping together at an airport, or a train station, a bus depot, or even the dockside, but we would be together

But on this journey we are in sixty two countries, across six continents in twenty four time zones, and we are many on this journey. So let's embark together, in the cloud, as it were, in digital space, and get ready for an adventure. Now an adventure is different from a traditional journey in that there are surprises, things we don't expect, fun.

Imagine you were on such a journey and wanted to meet extraordinary thought leaders because you found one and you sat in their space and you were so moved by the meaning of what they said and how it could affect your life. This time you will be doing that ten times, each one different, each one chosen for what they could contribute to your life and your own contribution.

So, let's get on the journey.

This is truly a global project, and therefore we need to think big, open mind and heart, intuition imagination, creativity, and listen carefully, listen carefully with perhaps a notepad at your side so if you hear a phrase that you want to remember or an idea that you like you can record it.

The purpose of this journey is that we are a collaboratory waging peace. Now a collaboratory is individuals, networks, and organizations working together for higher purpose, and our purpose is to tell a new story, to invent a different kind of future, an evolved future, for ourselves and for the generations that follow.

You will hear on this trip that we are taking, this adventure, our wisdom leaders telling us we cannot continue as we are, because we will get an outcome that none of us would want. So, what an opportunity we have to have a different kind of vision.

Now, we're going to follow the pattern that we started at the launch, and so the first stop will be to understand our wisdom keepers and what we are doing here. When you experience the wisdom keepers you will see an extraordinary interview asking insightful questions as if it were you asking these questions. And by giving answers to these kinds of questions together, not a cameo or a short piece but a meaningful understanding of their life 's work, legacy, and contribution. So, by listening to them for the thirty minutes or so that they are on your screen and in your mind and heart, you will learn something extraordinary each time each one different,

Now, our purpose is that you take the inspiration, the ideas and apply them thoughtfully to consider the potential of your own contribution, that then you turn the lens of your thinking onto your own community and show us the good work being done there. Show us your worthy leaders and nominate them for leadership posts. Let them join the cohort.

So, you have an important part to play, and so listening to this will be extraordinarily meaningful even fun, if you like to learn a lot, but it also has a very serious purpose, and it's an important purpose and an urgent one.

Now, as a complement to the wisdom episodes, every time we send you one we will send you two episodes of the audio theater the audio theater of the Visioneers story. Now why is that important? it's because the visions in that story while they were created at an earlier time, three decades ago, is a story for now and very important.

So let me tell you why this was created and why we're sending it to you, When Desmond first wrote this story, I listened to it bit by bit as it was created, read to me, as it were, orally in an in an audio theater. And I was so taken by this. I had never experienced anything like this, because it was an original kind of presentation. It was a creative visualization, which invited you to play your part into the story. It didn't take very long before I was in the space, before I recognized the characters as friends and colleagues, and that I wanted to play my part, and would you believe I did, and that's why we're here today.

So, when the story was finished and we were about to publish it, I surprised Des by saying it's not good enough to publish this as a book. Lots of people don't read. What about those who would listen to this and still gain the benefit of the story? So, he was convinced and we put together an audio theater, not in the traditional way, because we had no idea how to do this. This was well before people were doing these audio theaters. We mind mapped the story in twenty 30-minute episodes. And then we sat down with this filmmaker, and his dog, and in one take we produced 30 minutes, not from a script, but from a guideline, from a mind map, and those conversations, it was back and forth, it was talking about what we had, what was going on in the story. We were alive with that story. It took five days and when it was all done, we boxed it in a set of tapes, that was the technology in those days. It looked like this when we were much younger [shows the box of tapes]. There were ten of them, 30 minutes on each side. That was in 1992.

It had a life, people read the book and listened to the audio theater, when it was first done, and then life went on. In 2017we found these tapes again and we listened to them again, and it became clear that it wasn't written for a time thirty years ago, it was written for now, and every year since then it has become more and more urgent that this story be told.

Because the visions, and here's the crunch, the visions in the story show in detail an exciting way as a serial drama what the thought leaders and our wisdom keepers are calling for us to do. In other words, it's an example of an upshifted extraordinary future that we would all love to live in.

So, together the wisdom episodes that call for this kind of future, and a serial exciting drama that you are being sent every two weeks, will create in you an extraordinary sense of meaning and purpose for your own community, and by working with us as a collaboratory from all these places that you are present in, together we can create this extraordinary global vision for the kind of world we would want for our children and grandchildren and the future.

This is a very important thing to do. We welcome you to the beginning of the journey, and look forward to talking to you every two weeks with the next episode and the next, and there will be twelve stops on the journey. You've already had one, now here is the next one, and then at the end we will have a celebration, and in that celebration will be a collection of the ideas that you bring, the new initiatives that come out, of what has happened in the six months that it takes for us to prepare you to actually do this in real time in the mainstream with thousands and thousands of people. So, this is an important moment. We invite you to begin.

And now, I would like to ask my partner, Dr. Desmond Berghofer to continue by telling you more about Episode One.

DESMOND: Hello again. Let me add my welcome to everyone on the journey today.

As Gerri said, we're beginning the follow up to the launch of the Visioneers project held on October 9. 2022, called Waging Peace: Building Humanity's Golden Peace. Over the next few weeks we will be releasing every two weeks ten episodes of wisdom created by our global thought leaders, and these episodes will be a stimulus to the continuation of this waging peace process, and they will encourage the creation of Visioneers leadership circles to bring positive change to communities around the world.

You know, in the twenty first century humanity is facing an incredible challenge to change the waywe are living on the planet. It's not a new problem, but every year it becomes more serious as the difficulties multiply and become more challenging. The roots of the problem go back over centuries, but they became particularly acute in the second half of the twentieth century, when we began to see that the future would be problematic. Now, there were thought leaders back then who understood what was happening and raised their voices of the need for change, and we're going to begin our series with one of the most articulate of those, voices Dr. Willis Harman, who said that there would have to be a complete shift in thinking of people all around the world, which he called a global mind change.

Dr. Harman at the time was the President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences whose mission was to change thinking, to challenge the underlying belief that science and technology would deliver us into a sustainable future. Dr. Harman argued that modern human beings had to change their minds about what they were doing, and that way change much of the behavior in industrial society. So that's the essence of our message today.

Dr. Harman is no longer alive, he's no longer with us, so today's episode has been created by Dr. Dean Radin, who is the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and what he's done is put together a collection of Dr. Harman 's wisdom teachings, including an interview on PBS with Jeffrey Mishlove.

So that's the first part of what we are releasing today, and that will be complemented as Gerri told you by the first two episodes of the Visioneers Audio Theatre. There's also an introduction to the audio theatre, which we shared with you in our most recent bulletin, and it will be there for you to listen to again if you wish.

So when you finish listening to Willis put on the first two episodes of the audio theatre to give yourself a special treat and set forward on the journey.

So here to begin is Dr. Dean Radin introducing Dr. Willis Harman to speak about global mind change

DEAN: Hello I'm Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Our institute was founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. Edgar had a classical mystical experience while he was in the space capsule while it was returning back to Earth. He felt a palpable feeling of oneness with the universe. He was so shocked by that experience that he created our institute. He used the best tools and techniques of science to study the frontiers of consciousness to see if we can understand what mystics throughout history have been trying to tell us about the nature of reality, and about the role of consciousness in the physical world.

Willis Harman was a Stanford University professor and later a futurist at Stanford Research Institute. He was invited by Edgar to join the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973 and he was President from 1978 up until his death in 1997. One of his primary interests was the many unsustainable challenges faced by humanity, how these challenges would affect our future, and how we might go about changing the trajectory that we're on. This line of research was encapsulated in a book that he wrote called Global Mind Change. The theme of this book is that when one examines the kinds of problems that we face globally, some of which could lead to extinction of whole life on Earth that the usual solutions that are offered are simply inadequate. This is because global problems are tightly interdependent, and also because many of these challenges are due to mistaken assumptions about who and what we are. In other words, if our philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality are even a tiny bit off, and we're missing something really important, especially about the nature and potential of consciousness, then we had better find out where we've been mistaken, and do this quickly because time is running out.

The story that Willis would sometimes tell to illustrate what he meant goes like this. You're walking through a forest and you come upon a stream. You see to your horror that there are babies floating down the stream. Your perfectly understandable impulse is to jump into the stream and save the babies. That's what many charitable foundations do today. They see a problem and immediately dive in and try to fix it. That's fine but it doesn't address the question of how these babies get into the water in the first place. So you're not going to solve the cause of the problem unless you go upstream and find out what's going on. The same story can be applied to all of the world 's problems. We want peace, we want to feed hungry people, we want to address inequities in wealth, to find clean ways of providing energy, address climate change, and so on, but tackling these individual issues and not looking at how they are all interrelated will not provide us a lasting solution.

What follows now is first a thirty second advertisement from Patagonia, which nicely sums up why in the face of all sorts of horrible potential futures we can still be optimistic. That's followed by a ninety second visual summary of Willis 's ideas by Kern Beyer with Willis providing the narration, and then that's followed by a half hour interview of Willis about global mind change, which was part of Jeffrey Mishlove 's interview program that was broadcast for years on PBS called Thinking Allowed. Jeffrey continues that series today as host of new Thinking Allowed, which can be found on You Tube and is highly recommended

WILLIS COMMENTARY: There's no way in the world that we can have national security unless everybody else in the world has national security as well, because we're not going to forget how to make nuclear weapons even if we do decide to dismantle the ones we have. And so then you have to think about national and global security, and then you realize that nobody feels secure when they don't know where their meal is coming from tomorrow, so you can't separate security from the problems of poverty and hunger, and you certainly can't separate security from the problem of environmental deterioration and impacting the life support systems of the planet. And that necessitates a total change in attitude with regard to our relationship to the planet.

So all of these things are interconnected in such a way that there's no solution to one problem, national security or any other, there's no solution to one problem without a solution to them all together. And at first glance that might seem to make the problems much harder and the situation much more complex.

On the contrary, it really doesn't, because what it says is what we need is one fundamental global mind change, and all of the problems become much more solvable than they were before. And I think that's what we are somehow intuitively being led to.

INTRODUCTION TO THINKING ALLOWED: Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.

JEFFREY: Good evening. Our topic tonight is the psychological changes that we've all been experiencing in a global sense around us, or as my guest, Dr Willis Harman, would say, global mind changes. Dr. Harman is the President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito. He's also a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, a professor of engineering at Stanford University, and the author of several books, including An Incomplete Guide to the Future and Higher Creativity. Willis, welcome.

WILLIS: Thank you very much.

JEFFREY: It's a pleasure to have you here. You're one of the people who has been thinking about the global changes that have been going on in our culture in the largest sense and you know, I think, when many people think about the large scale changes, it's very frightening to them. They think about war, pollution. How do you view the large picture.

WILLIS: Well maybe we should think about war and pollution

JEFFREY: In another dimension.

WILLIS: You remind me of the fact that twenty years ago I moved from Stanford University over to SRI international, Stanford Research Institute, at the time to start a group of futurists looking at the changes that were taking place in the world, to help corporations and government agencies with their planning. And after we'd been doing this for a couple of years, one of my staff came to me and said he had to resign because he couldn't stand it to come in day after day and look at the future. So I guess maybe there's something behind your reaction.

How do i see it? I see us going through a very profound change, more profound than the scientific revolution. To recognize what's at stake I think is not whether we'll make the change or not, but whether we'll make it smoothly, or whether we'll fragment into religious wars and the other kinds of things that have happened to societies in the past when they change.

JEFFREY: In other words, change is inevitable, our only choice is whether we're going to do it joyfully or painfully.

WILLIS: We've been pregnant a long time, and so it's a question of what kind of a birth, you know.

JEFFREY: What are the large trends that interest you the most?

WILLIS: Well I don't know whether it's a matter of interest. There are certain trends that come to my attention because they have a good deal to do with the fact that this change is imminent. Some of them are trends that can't continue, I mean like the trend toward greater and greater armaments and more and more countries armed to the teeth, or there are certain economic trends, I think, that can't continue. Certain environmental trends that can't continue. So that's pushing us toward the necessity of a change. On the other hand, there are changes taking place in the way we look at ourselves and our relationship to the universe, and our relationship to our knowledge system. There's a new positive vision emerging, so that's one of the trends that is important.

JEFFREY: You headed a team at SRI international that wrote a very influential report called Changing Images of Man in which you looked at the idea that human beings are beginning to conceive of ourselves in ways that are new.

WIILIS: That's true, it was almost fifteen years ago, and that was a very risky thing for the Kettering Foundation to do at the time, or at least they viewed it that way, to raise the question, is something happening that is so fundamental that you could say that the basic image of human beings is shifting from what it had been to something new. Now this was in the early 1970s, and we came up with the conclusion that yes there was a lot of evidence that there was.

JEFFREY: The interesting thing for me in looking at that report and perhaps what makes it unusual, is having a background in parapsychology I was aware of my current image, I wasn't so much aware of what the image of man had been. It was so different. Where do you see us going ultimately?

WILLIS: You know that's not a question you answer in twenty words or less, Where I see us going, first of all, more and more recognition of the trends that really can't continue, more widespread sober recognition of that, but at the same time more recognition that we have just been limiting ourselves, that we've got potentialities we haven't used, been using.

JEFFREY: That we have the inner resources to cope with the problems in spite of their enormous magnitude.

WILLIS: You know one of the analogies that's very important to me is the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Steps. The first two steps are recognized by everybody to be the most difficult, and the first one is we come to recognize that we were powerless over alcohol that our lives have become unmanageable. Everybody resists recognizing that their lives have become unmanageable, and we as a society resist recognizing that society has become unmanageable. But the second step is we come to see that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. In other words, our own inner resources properly used, recognized and used, could restore us to sanity. And sanity is the keyword. That is the issue. On the planet it is not the environment or the nuclear weapons or any of the other things we hear about. It's the issue of sanity.

JEFFREY: And so we're moving towards a higher level, perhaps, or at least potentially a psychological integration?

WILLIS: I think so, that is, we have had a set of assumptions that really served us extremely well, brought us technology until there's hardly anything you can imagine wanting to do that you couldn't do if you put in enough resources, you know, even Star Wars. But now the question is what's really worth doing and we're very confused about values and meanings and those issues science doesn't shed any light on. And so we have this ever growing ability to technologically accomplish almost any goal we set our minds to and an ever growing confusion about where it is we're really trying to go.

You know, I recognize this going to Washington. You used to go to Washington in search of research contracts. That was the main reason i went, but there was a sense that there was a plan, we were aiming at something. You knew where we were headed. When you talk to people in Washington these days, they're hoping we will get through the next budget cycle, or that whatever it is that's likely to happen, it won't happen on their watch, we'll make it through the next election, there is no goal out there, there's no picture of a viable global future, that everybody is shaping their policy by.

JEFFREY: The new frontier or the great society. We don't have anything comparable today. But at an inner level you've pointed out in your own reports and in your work that there are things that are happening that people are recognizing values that are coming more at a grassroots level.

WILLIS: I think this is a time to be really upbeat if you see what's really going on. I was a little depressed fifteen years ago when we could see these problems coming and you'd go around like a modern Paul Revere, you know, shouting "the problems are coming, the problems are coming," and nobody wanted to hear that. Now I don't have to try to convince anybody in the world of business or finance or government that the problems are coming. They can see them. Now the question is, is there something we can do?

JEFFREY: So you're going around pointing to solutions.

WILLIS: Well at least to the change that might make the problems solvable.

JEFFREY: Well I think it'd be very interesting, Willis, considering your current stature on the Board of Regents and with the Institute of Noetic Sciences to talk a little bit about two things. I’m sure our viewers want to know. What in the world does noetic sciences mean and what the Institute of Noetic Sciences is, but also what about your journey starting out as a professor of engineering at Stanford University for twenty years and then certainly one of the most eminent futurists in the world for twenty years. in your work. And now you're doing this funny thing called noetics. What kind of a journey has that been for you?

WILLIS: Well, let me answer the questions in reverse order. Thirty two years ago I had an upending experience in a summer seminar that started it all off. Most people have some sort of story like that. They began to see that something needed to change in their own lives. Well, then I floundered around a lot. I looked into all sorts of corners. Did the psychologists know anything? Do the group therapists know something? Who knows something that's valuable with regard to this personal journey, but then I began to get interested in the idea that some of the systems analysis tools we had in engineering could be applied to social problems and so that was the occasion for moving over to Stanford Research Institute to try that out.

JEFFREY: A kind of so-called social engineering?

WILLIS: Well I don't like that term and I don't think that was really it. It was focused on the future. It focused on charting the alternative paths to the future so that we would be in a better position to choose one.

JEFFREY: And this work was widely read by corporations and various think tanks and universities?

WILLIS: I don't think so, I don't think it was even widely read by the agencies and government that gave us the first contracts. On the other hand, our reports got on the xerox circuit and they began to be talked about.

JEFFREY: More at a grassroots level,

WILLIS: Even grassroots bureaucrats, and so on, but as time went on, I got more and more convinced of something that really twenty years ago was a pretty preposterous story. And that was that we're going through a kind of mind change, especially in the industrial society, but really all around the globe. It just takes different forms in the third world countries. We're going through a kind of mind change that is as fundamental as the scientific revolution was, but it has more to do with the reassessment of values and meanings, whereas the scientific revolution had more to do with how do you find out knowledge and apply it to technology. And so as I became more and more convinced of that I was softened up for what happened next, which was that Edgar Mitchell came by and said I set up this Institute of Noetic Sciences five years ago, and he explained to me that the word noetic comes from the Greek word nous and it relates originally, it had two meanings, one more to the intellectual rational analytical side of the mind, the other one to the intuitive side, and it was used, for example, by William James in Varieties of Religious Experience to connote the intuitive, the deep intuition, the deep mystical side.

JEFFREY: And the intuitive religious experience?

WILLIS: Yes, and so that was really where Edgar Mitchell picked it up, and he had to have a word, that seemed like a good one that you couldn't shoot at too much because you didn't really know what it meant, and the function of this organization was to foster in various ways the development of a kind of missing area of science, the exploration of our own lives, especially with the emphasis on the subjective experience.

JEFFREY: Which is new, because in a sense much of science had thrown out subjective experience, the human mind, as being even valuable for scientific inquiry.

WILLIS: And thereby hangs a tale. Yes that's true.

JEFFREY: A very tool of inquiry itself was ignored.

WILLIS: So it was an interesting experience to me to realize that I had all sorts of reasons for saying no, that I really had a pretty good position in SRI, and it was probably smarter for me to stay there, but I ended up saying that I really couldn't do otherwise, that I was just pulled to this particular challenge. And so the Institute of Noetic Sciences, not because of me but because of changing times went from a few group members to about twelve thousand now, and we have an annual budget that's approaching a million dollars a year, and yet we're supported entirely by gifts. We have hardly any contracts that ever come up, but it's mostly gifts from foundations and from individuals.

JEFFREY: And the thrust of this institute then is to look at the role of the mind in science, and in nature?

WILLIS: To look at the role of the mind in human life through science, but through a science that has expanded its methodology in whatever ways may be appropriate to do that.

JEFFREY: Maybe you could just summarize some of the areas that the Institute has been involved in.

WILLIS: Well one whole cluster of them have to do with the role of the mind in healing, and well first of all the role of the mind in creating illness. It's a pretty remarkable capability that I have that if set my mind a certain way I can create stomach ulcers or cardiovascular disease or something else, but the flip side of that of course is that I can create my own healing, and as a matter of fact that's the only kind of healing that ever takes place. You may use various sorts of placebos to help bring it about, but we ultimately decide to heal ourselves. There are all sorts of specific ways of trying to look at that, for example, the role of positive emotions in healing as contrasted with the role of negative emotions in illness.

There's certain things you can learn from multiple personalities, studies of multiple personalities. They're very fascinating special cases because whereas you ordinarily think of yourself as one personality and one body, these are cases where the body is run by a committee and in many cases the committee doesn't even get along with one another.

JEFFREY: Or even know each other.

WILLIS: Sometimes they don't know one another, and they take over one at a time ordinarily, but nevertheless some of the members of that committee may have very special capabilities. One of them may know an extraordinary amount about healing, for example, and another one may know an extraordinary amount about fundamental questions about the nature of reality. And so far from just studying these as pathology now the new approach is to study them as really very interesting cases, and of course what brought this new interest around in considerable measure was the discovery that when the personality shifts all sorts of body changes take place in body chemistry. One body, the same body, may have allergies, for example, with one personality and not with another or diabetic tendencies.

JEFFREY: Or different brain waves perhaps.

WILLIS: Yes, in one case one body one personality had astigmatism, the same eyes in the same body with a different personality in charge had perfect eyes with no astigmatism.

JEFFREY: So, what we're looking at is the mind body relationship.

WILLIS: The mind body relationship re-examined, and you know, it's been examined through the history of science but always with the same view. We don't ordinarily think of science as having some cultural bias in it some fundamental assumptions. Of course, it does. The funding patterns would bias, if, for example, you bias certain kinds of research that the science society is interested in and not other kinds that they're not, but there are more fundamental biases than that. Anybody who's studied science knows that positivism, that is the assumption that what's real is what's measurable, that's basic to science, so also is reductionism, the idea that you understand something when you understand how the atoms and the molecules are moving around.

Now those very basic assumptions are even being challenged today because you can't deal with subjective experience without relaxing those somehow.

JEFFREY: Willis, this seems extremely significant to me in the sense that these strictures that you’ve been describing have in effect been the mainstream of a materialistic culture for five hundred years. We've been reacting in so many ways against, you know, the medieval religious viewpoint and now it's as if the large scale pendulum of history is swinging back again.

WILLIS: I think that's exactly right. I think it's important to remember what did happen in the time of the scientific revolution. It wasn't just a group of scientists that decided to have the Earth revolve around the sun or something like that. It was as if there was a whole cultural change in western Europe and it amounted to a challenge of the old authority system.

JEFFREY: I mean, prior to the scientific period it was the church and the cathedrals and the religious laws that virtually ran our whole society, and I think there's certainly a large element of society that is afraid if we look at the mind again too seriously, we're going to bring back another so-called age of superstition.

WILLIS: I think there's something like that, and you know no doubt there will be some tendency to swing off to extremes, but it doesn't have to happen that that way, and it doesn't look to me as though

it is, actually. What you can see in the culture is something that really would have been quite unbelievable. Let's remind ourselves that the idea not only that the Earth rotates and it's spherical but that it goes around the sun. That concept, you know, was just very hard for people in the middle ages to grasp, and they also feared that the society, the social values would disintegrate and dire things would happen if you challenge the authority system. And something of the same sort is going on but if you examine, it you listen to what people are talking about in the culture and the topics like incarnation and karma and consciousness and things that they will talk about, near death experiences.

JEFFREY: One of my favorite topics.

WILLIS: So, we didn't talk about a quarter of a century ago, we really just didn't, and you realize that there's a permission to talk about a lot of things that they didn't used to be, but if you get underneath that you see the most revolutionary thing of all. We have all been taught this picture of material evolution of the universe, the stars and the planets and the life forms and finally the human being, and finally at the culmination of that there is mind, spirit, consciousness appearing in the human brain. Now the new picture is, and you can find it all around you, except among the scientists is that yes the evolutionary picture looks OK. There was material evolution of stars and planets and life forms and human beings, but consciousness, mind, spirit, universal mind was there all along. It didn't wait for neuronal cells to develop in the human brain. And furthermore each of us in the depths of ourselves taps into that whole thing. Now that's the sort of picture that if anybody had believed that openly thirty years ago, it would have been assumed to be some sort of bizarre thing that they brought in from eastern philosophical religions,

JEFFREY: Now it's almost at the base of quantum physics.

WILLIS: Well, it's tolerable to talk about physics in a whole new way in which you recognize that behind the world that physics measures there's something else.

JEFFREY: But how is all of this going to be of relevance, let's say, to the people who are watching this program right now before we bring this work back home, so to speak?

WILLIS: For one thing, the personal journey of everyone is, you know, it's just important to people in ways that at least if it was important we didn't talk about it three or four decades ago. but not only that. There are changes taking place in the institutions. It's amazing to see the shift that's taking place in executive development, management training. Where people are being encouraged to recognize untapped resources in themselves, to recognize that they are using intuitive abilities, and they're being encouraged to use intuitive abilities, abilities that not too long ago we would have said, you know, those aren't things that tough minded male executives use. Feminine intuition, yes, maybe some spooky phenomena, or maybe not, but intuition that seems to go beyond physical explanations.

JEFFREY: In other words, instead of trying to make their people into better employees corporations are now trying to make their employees into better people.

WILLIS: That's a big part of it, or put it another way, management used to be using the power of the manager to shape the resources including the people and focus them on the task that's to be accomplished, which of course is also decided by management. Now the new concept of management is totally different. Management is giving away power. Management in this new sense is helping people to discover their own creativity, empowering others.

JEFFREY: Empowering other people.

WILLIS: And then out of that the course of the institution will come. Now that's happening mainly in small corporations. It's not happening in the great tremendous ones yet.

JEFFREY: Well, if you were to use this television interview as an opportunity in some way to empower the hundreds or thousands of people who may be viewing, what would you say, what would you do. How could you communicate that to a television audience?

WILLIS: Very simple, there's only one thing to do, recognize that you have powers of the mind that you're not using, that you have wisdom, knowledge that you're not using, that you make choices unconsciously as well as consciously, and you can get acquainted with those, and then make the intention to find out about that, and that intention will guide you to everything else.

JEFFREY: That's very beautiful, Willis, and I presume that what you're saying in effect is the story of your own journey from, as you described, an engineer who was sort of out of sorts for a while to a person who is now a member of the Regents of the University of California.

WILLIS: Well, it's the story that you might like to have told. The actual story is that I resisted all of that every step of the way, and we all have a certain tendency to do that. I feared a lot. I didn't want to make those steps. I didn't want to declare that intention to myself, and some good friends pushed me everywhere here and there, and, you know, looking back, I asked, well what on earth was I doing all that time? But nonetheless that seems to be a very familiar story. What we want most we also resist most. And that's our predicament, but once we recognize that, it becomes much more fun than misery. You recognize that you're playing a kind of game with yourself and it's sort of like hide and seek, and that's a lot more fun than not realizing that you're playing a game with yourself and taking all the problems of your own life and of the world with deadly seriousness.

JEFFREY: If there were viewers amongst our audience who were let's say just entering into college, as I'm sure there are, and you as a person who really is at the pinnacle of the educational system in California right now, what would you say to a young person?

WILLIS: That the most important learning comes from within. It's nothing that you will ever get from professors and be tested on in final exams and that that kind of learning goes on all of your life, and I can testify that it accelerates after age sixty. Beyond sixty eight or so I can't tell you.

JEFFREY: Is that voice being heard within the Board of Regents within the university system? Is this a new voice within the establishment.

WILLIS: Here and there in corners.

JEFFREY: Or are you just the gadfly?

WILLIS: I think I'll decline to answer that. No, it's exciting, everywhere I go. I can go to another continent. I can go to developing countries, and if i search for it, if I look for it, I can find people who are very very conscious that they're going through this search and discovery in their own lives, and furthermore they know the whole world is, and they're part of that network.

JEFFREY: You've traveled all over the world, Willis, is there any one thing, one movement or one activity or project that really epitomizes this for you that gets you the most excited?

WILLIS: Probably not, because I have a tendency to get excited with the piece of it that I saw last. Right at the moment that's what's going on in management development, because I've been spending some time with that, but also development of third world countries, the peace movement, the greens movements, the ecological movements, especially the deep ecology part of it, all of those things are going on, and furthermore in the Bay Area they're all obvious, they're right in front of us.

JEFFREY: Well, I think to many people. myself included. all of these things seem a little disparate, disconnected, I don't see the common thread that runs through all of these. Sometimes they seem antagonistic to each other.

WILLIS: Well, and sometimes they're antagonistic within the same movement. You may have one group that thinks we have to tackle the environmental problems with higher technology and more management yes, and another group that says we have to change our relationship to the Earth, and that's all part of the same movement. So yes, it is true there are those among us who are trying to hold us back and get us back to the past when things worked, and there are others who are trying to go ahead and use more technology and more management with bigger programs to solve the problems that way, and then there's this spreading quiet group that says no, we have to change our minds about the whole thing, and that group has been getting bigger for a quarter of a century, and that's the one I’m betting on.

JEFFREY: We're coming back to the issue that we discussed in the beginning of this interview, the question is sanity. It seems as if, you know, all of these voices going in different directions is an expression of maybe a cultural insanity, and the quiet still voice of the group, the people who seem to be tuning into some current that you've been describing, maybe is that where our new sanity is?

WILLIS: I'm always careful to avoid using the word insanity, but surely when you say the arms race is good for the economy, mass consumption of things that we don't even need is good for the economy, and therefore good for the society, and we should make our social decisions that way, and science is good for us when it denies the reality of the human mind and spirit, you know, that's not terribly sane.

GERRI: Hello again everyone. You have just been watching the most extraordinary wisdom of Willis Harman. His calling for global mind change thirty years ago, what foresight, and how important it is today, because we are trying to create a new story and a new way of thinking, which is exactly what he was calling for all that long time ago. So there you have the first episode of wisdom, and what we'd like you to do is to share these episodes and share this project with your friends and colleagues and family, people of like mind and heart, who would be good as fellow travellers on this journey. And you can share it with them easily at anytime along the way because we will be posting every episode as it is released and all the things that we're sending you as they are released on our website. So you can relisten to them and you can invite somebody to start from the beginning.

So there you are. You have the opportunity to participate and be part of this project. Give us some of the ideas that you have and some of the good thinking that you're doing along the way. Contact us, we're waiting to hear from you, and in the end we'll pay attention to these ideas, and craft the plan of action for the rest of the year.

So, we're ready to leave now, and in order to do so giving you the sense of the energy of this project we are going to ask you to listen for a very short time to the extraordinary music played by Dr. Robert Muller on his harmonica, playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Now Dr. Muller was a very important person at the United Nations. He participated in the founding of thirty-three of the United Nations agencies that are doing such good humanitarian work today, when this is so needed. He was a very important person for a long time and he was Chancellor of the University for Peace in Costa Rica. And he came to Vancouver at our invitation to talk to the children, and we invited teams of children from grade six, just twelve year olds, to university students, twenty one teams of students and their teachers and their parents, and there they were listening to Robert Muller's advice and wisdom and by the time he comes to doing what you're going to see on the screen everybody was loving him and as you'll see they give him a standing ovation at the end.

So, taking away the energy of everything we've presented today, sharing it with those you love and respect and feel can make a contribution, here is Robert Muller playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

ROBERT: [Plays ‘Ode to Joy’]