DESMOND: Hello, I'm Desmond Berghofer from the Visioneers International Network. I speak to you today in humble awe after having been immersed in a review of the profound wisdom from our global thought leaders, which we have been sending you in 9 episodes over the last few weeks.

I'm here today with my partner Gerri Schwartz to welcome you to Episode 10, which is the destination stop on our Journey of Extraordinary Wisdom. Episode 10 addresses two important questions.

1. What have we learned on this journey to provide a creative solution to a future we can be truly proud of, one in which the next generations thrive and prosper in a peaceful world?

2. And, secondly, Where do we go from here to apply this wisdom on a global scale to actually win the peace?

Gerri will take it from here.

GERRI: Hello everyone, and especially hello to everyone around the world listening to us, welcome. I am really excited to present Episode 10, because it identifies the key components to build the golden peace we introduced in the launch at the beginning of the project, that is, to wage peace as a multi generational diverse global community to achieve large scale peace on a global level.

It is our intention to tell a new story, a story of hope and inspiration, at a time of great existential crises, the story worthy of the generations now alive, but especially the generations who follow us, our children, our grandchildren, our great great grandchildren to the seventh generation.

We live at a time of hyper rapid rate of change. It's happening so quickly that our children and grandchildren will not live lifetimes in the reality of their youth, and that reality will not fully inform their own children's future.

Here is what we must consider then for a change in direction. Our sources of energy must change, our treatment of the environment, the Earth, and all the creatures in it, our approach to our international relationships, treaties, alliances, and even relationships, must change. To safely enter the future, we must understand that we no longer live our lives in a village, or even our parents communities, or cities, or even countries. We and all the generations who follow live in a global diverse international world beyond place, language, belief, and even generation cohorts, and we must become global citizens. Indeed, we must be, and act, and think like global citizens.

But how do we get there? We need not only a global mind change as our wisdom keepers have told us, but we need to change our behavior, because the discoveries you will hear summarized in this episode and the implications they produce, are grounds for new thinking, and these will be the ideas we use to create the Visioneers platform as we present the launch to the next leg of our Visioneers journey on Waging Peace.

We intend to walk our talk. We invite you to join us. There is no time to waste. So, let's begin, let's begin to layout the discoveries, the key discoveries, the new thinking of our champions, as we put together the principles and components we need to win the peace,

So, here is Des to continue.

DESMOND: Hello again. In what follows, I will share with you my response to the question: What have we learned on this extraordinary journey? It's truly exhilarating and sobering to know that we are living at such a momentous time in the history of humanity. May we each find the unique role we are meant to play.

The core wisdom from the wisdom keepers is that the generations of human beings, in particular in industrialized countries, alive today and coming in the future must embrace a change of mind about how to live in the world more lightly and more intelligently, and we must change our behaviour in accord with the change of mind.

We're facing a number of global problems that are tightly interdependent and threatening the future of humanity. Dr. Willis Harman, former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, recognized many years ago that we cannot solve these problems if we try to deal with them separately.

WILLIS: 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's coming from tomorrow. So you can't separate security from the problems of poverty and hunger. 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.

DESMOND: Willis said that we are experiencing trends that simply cannot be allowed to continue.

WILLIS: 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.

DESMOND: As humanity has become increasingly powerful in the way we live on the planet, we've become confused about values and meanings, and we must now ask, What is worth doing? This will lead us into the global mind change.

WILLIS: 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 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.

DESMOND: Part of this fundamental change is new concepts and findings from science.

WILLIS: 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 here is mind, spirit, consciousness appearing in the human brain.

Now, the new picture is, and you can find it all around you, except among, very much 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. Behind the world that physics measures there’s something else.

DESMOND: So this is the first thing we have learned, a fundamental mind change has been spreading across the world, but particularly in industrialized nations, at least since the 1980s when Willis was working. Central to this mind change is the understanding emerging from quantum physics that consciousness exists as a non local energetic field underlying the physical universe. With evolved human minds and brain we have the ability to tap into this field of consciousness to produce solutions on a global scale.

GERRI: Des, I have to come in here, because the implications of what you said are so profound. New evidence has been gathered that reveals that this underlying consciousness you spoke of is the field from which everything emerged and continues to guide the evolution of the universe. This is kind of mind blowing, because we can have access to it through our own human minds, through our intuition and imagination, and we can therefore find the creative solutions we need to ensure the continuing evolution of our own species, and create a safe and a more secure world for us all to live in. That's amazing!

DESMOND: Yes, that's right, and I'll have a lot more to say about that as i continue with a review of the teachings of our other wisdom keepers.

Dr. Ervin Laszlo spoke about this. He's the founder of a global think tank called the Club of Budapest, and the Lazlo Institute of New Paradigm Research. He describes it as one of his wisdom principles.

ERVIN: Consciousness is not something that we produce is in our brain or even artificial. consciousness is something that exists in the world, and it is as much of a factor as energy, as information.

DESMOND: Ervin is a systems theorist and he describes the way humanity is living on the Earth as a system that has become unstable, and has reached a point where alternative paths are opening up into the future. This is called a bifurcation point, and it's common to all systems.

ERVIN: The evolutionary process that is in front of us splits, and now we are at the point where we have to decide which side of the bifurcation point we move. Unsustainable becomes even more unsustainable if you don't change, but we can change, and if you do change there is a path in front of us which is a truly evolutionary development. It's a path of oneness.

DESMOND: Ervin tells us that we cannot continue to operate as we are, and we cannot go back to the earlier state. We must choose a new path into the future. If we choose wisely, the human system will upshift to a new way of living in which we understand our fundamental connection to each other as one human family and our connection to nature, and we will choose to live sustainably in peace and in harmony with nature and each other.

David Lorimer, a Visioneers Visionary Leader from the Scientific and Medical Network who interviewed Ervin on our series, sums it up in this way.

DAVID: And making what contribution we can then to the new world that we would all like to see come about, based on the power of love and not love of power.

DESMOND: So, the second thing we've learned is that our way of living on the Earth is a system that has become unstable, and we have reached a bifurcation point where we must choose a new path into the future in which we understand the fundamental interconnectedness of everything in the universe, and particularly our connections to each other and to the natural world and to the field of consciousness just described.

GERRI: Wow! Well, again I'd like to point out the profound implication of Ervin's wisdom here. He says we are one interconnected human family, that if we treat each other well, we benefit. If we harm each other, we also harm ourselves. Ervin calls on us therefore to develop a planetary consciousness, where we recognize this interconnection not only with each other but also with the natural world, and that we recognize in all this that the highest power on Earth that guides our continuing evolution is love, not only passionate love, but love in all its forms. And how different is that from our current mind state.

DESMOND: It's one thing to recognize these principles of living in harmony with each other and with the natural world, but we have to learn how to do that, which is hard, because we've lived for centuries in conflict and competition, and we've aggressively exploited the Earth's resources to sustain our lifestyles.

Dr. Jane Goodall gave us her wisdom and experience on how to do it. After her early work in the 1950s and 1960s studying the behaviour of chimpanzees in the forests of Tanzania in Africa, she went back twenty years later and had an epiphany, a transformative experience.

JANE: Mid 1980s there was this alarming news that forests were disappearing and chimp numbers were dropping, and so I wanted to learn more about these problems, but at the same time as learning the problems faced by the chimpanzees I was seeing the plight of so many African people living in and around chimp territory that's forest. And it came to a head when I flew over the tiny Gombe National Park which in 1960 and even 1970 was part of the great equatorial forest belt stretching to the west coast, and when I flew over in the late 1980s I was shocked to see Gombe was the little island of forest surrounded by bare hills, and I realised that there were more people living there than the land could feed, that they were too poor to buy food from elsewhere, but they were cutting down their trees in their desperation to get more land to feed their growing families or to make money from charcoal or timber.

And so that's when it hit me, if we don't help these people find ways of making a living without destroying their environment, we can't save chimps, forests, or anything else.

DESMOND: Through her Jane Goodall Institute she created a project called Tacare, which is an acronym that has come to mean “take care.”

JANE: So, JI began its community-led method of conservation. And we started small, just by sending a team of select Tanzanians, not arrogant white people, but Tanzanians who went into the twelve villages around Gombe and listened to what they felt we could do to help them grow more food. It meant restoring fertility to the overused farmland, without chemicals, by the way, and better health, better education. We worked with the local authorities to improve, or actually create clinics and better schools. And then we were able to introduce water management programs, scholarships to give girls a chance of secondary education, because it's been shown all around the world as education for women improves, family size tends to drop. So, we provide family planning information, eagerly received, by the way, and then finally we provide micro-finance opportunities so that people can start their own environmentally sustainable businesses.

And I love this idea of loaning rather than just giving, because if you just give, then the money runs out, and the hand comes out, let me have some more. But if it's a loan and people repay, which we find around ninety percent of the people, if they repay these small loans, they're proud: "This is something I have done."

DESMOND: Jane sees her Tacare project in Africa as a microcosm for what can be done all over the world to help people change their minds and behaviour on how to live sustainably. She describes it in her book "Local Voices, Local Choices."

JANE: We've just produced a book called "Local Voices, Local Choices," which explains the whole of the Tacare program, and the whole view, the whole idea of this book is that we can scale this out because it works so well.

DESMOND: Jane Goodall's other piece of wisdom is to value the power of hope, which she has explained in her latest book, "The Book of Hope."

JANE: I've felt that hope is tremendously important for a very long time, because if people lose hope they become apathetic and they do nothing, and if we all become apathetic and do nothing, we're doomed.

Media is full of doom and gloom, and we do have to know, we do need to know how bad the situation is, although some people still bury their heads in the sand, but if the media would give more time to the amazing projects and the wonderful people that I've been fortunate enough to see and meet around the world, that would inspire them. They will feel, "Gosh, they did that. We could do that. Let's give it a go."

DESMOND: Jane says if we want to see fundamental change in behaviour of people, we must first listen to their concerns, then give them some ideas or more knowledge about what can be done to help, then allow them to make their own decisions on how to move forward. Throughout the process, we need to encourage hope and a positive vision of mission accomplished.

GERRI: I see two implications here. First, and very important, not to underestimate the power of hope. For humanity, hope provides the internal energetic capacity to allow people to focus on solutions.

So, that's one thing, but second, Jane's approach has importance beyond projects of sustainability. It can be applied to situations of all kinds, for example, where people are living in poverty or with other problems in urban settings. Now this process can be used by Visioneers Leadership Circles everywhere, thus enhancing our ability to create our Web of Good Work on our Virtual Expo.

DESMOND: We need to understand that the change we're talking about goes deep into the human psyche. Author and scholar, Anne Baring, speaks with profound sensitivity about this. Anne tells us that we are embarked on a sacred quest to restore a deep sense of the spiritual into human affairs.

She takes us back into deep history to reveal how humanity over millennia has lost the spirituality which filled the consciousness of our ancient ancestors. Nor was that all that was lost, but also a belief in the divine feminine and the equal partnership role of women in human affairs.

ANNE: In the ancient cultures of Egypt and Sumeria, Greece, the goddess was always honored. The goddess was certainly in the early civilizations the primary image that was worshipped by people, and then gradually, around 4000 years ago, it shifted gradually to the image of the great Father God rather than the great Mother Goddess.

And when it shifted, we lost the connection with the sacred Earth. The Earth was no longer sacred, the whole emphasis was on the transcendent image of the Father God, and slowly this cut off our connection with nature, and we no longer regarded nature as sacred, and we no longer regarded all the life of the planet around us as sacred, whereas before it had been part of the goddess. It was the goddess, as it were, or the manifestation, because life came forth from her womb and everything was connected because of that. But with the transcendent Father God you no longer had the sense of relationship and the connection with nature, and so little by little, that was lost. There were specific things which I won't go into which contributed to it, like the myth of the fall, for example, but it was just a general movement from the great Mother Goddess to the great Father God and now we're left with only the image of the male God, and this is a a catastrophe for us.

So, we need to recover that image and that connection in order to re-sacralise the whole planet, and sacralise what we are. We are part of the divinity that we've been worshipping for thousands of years, so this is a huge shift in our understanding, a shift from worshipping something far distant in heaven, so to speak, to participating in the sacred ground of the universe and realising that everything we do, everything we create, comes from that Source and that that Source is Love. That is what holds the whole universe together and us as well.

DESMOND: Anne is excited at how the science of quantum physics is revealing an interconnected living universe in which we are full participants. She's deeply disturbed by how materialist science has taken away the sense of the soul in the universe, and made our lives seem meaningless. David Lorimer puts this in the language of neuroscience.

DAVID: Iain McGilchrist's version of this would be to say that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere are out of balance, the right hemisphere representing the intuitive and the imaginative and the creative, and we're dominated by this mechanistic mentality.

ANNE: And we've cut off the access to the imaginative creative right brain, which is why our culture is so dead, and so lacking in depth, and so lacking in wisdom. This fire of love has to be set going in all our hearts.

DESMOND: From Anne we have learned that humanity is not just trying to find practical solutions to vexing problems, but is engaged on a sacred quest to re-sacralise the planet, and restore the role of the divine feminine, so that women and men can combine their power as equals to create a future grounded in values of compassion, respect, trust, and a belief in love as the supreme operating force in the universe.

GERRI: So, Des, you know that I truly believe in what Anne has said. She tells us we need to move humanity's moral compass to create generations who will uplift rather than harm others, and so create a more peaceful and loving world.

DESMOND: From the quiet, calm, reassuring voice of Anne Baring expressing her intense ideas, we come to the flamboyant, colorful language of Dr. Jean Houston, grabbing and riveting our attention on her profound pronouncements. Scholar of philosophy, anthropology, psychology and iconic spokesperson for transformative thought and action, Jean Houston speaks boldly about this moment in history.

JEAN: I believe that we are in these extraordinary times in which the world has been rearranged. The reset button of history has been hit. Well, I really believe that we have an opportunity to play a role in the greatest transition drama that the world has ever seen.

DESMOND: Jean uses the powerful image of the caterpillar transforming into the butterfly as metaphor for what is now happening to humanity on Earth.

JEAN: I believe that just like the caterpillar is coded with the butterfly, we in our present situation, body, mind, system, way of being, you know, wandering around like a caterpillar and yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, eating everything, even having a hard cocoon around us that we dare not get out of, but what emerges is the butterfly, who lives lightly on the Earth.

DESMOND Jean captures the relationship of the human species to the evolving universe in unforgettable language.

JEAN: We are in a state of interdependent co-arising. We move when the cosmos moves, you know, and then to extend the psychological structures, we are not encapsulated bags of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. We are organism, environment, symbiosis, symbiosis, symbionts of the cosmos.

DESMOND: She tells us that if we get ourselves into the right state of consciousness, we have the ability to connect with the field of consciousness of the universe.

JEAN: We are the universe in miniature, we are a fractal of the great whole, and we have in certain states of consciousness and capacities to access this larger domain of knowing, feeling, being, creating.

DESMOND: She tells us we must wake up to our manifest destiny by quoting the closing lines of Christopher Fry's iconic poem "A Sleep of Prisoners."

JEAN: Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us, till we take the longest stride of soul folk ever took. Affairs are now soul-sized, the enterprise is exploration into God. What are we waiting for? It takes so many thousand years to wake, but shall we wake for pity 's sake?

GERRI: Wow! You know Jean is one of my heroines, and for good reason. She's pointing out the urgency and the importance of what our generation has got to do. The implications are so far reaching I can hardly begin to explain. She inspires us to realize our unlimited power to solve the problems that are facing us. We need to let her voice fill our consciousness, as we begin to work on the visioneering projects, to do what others might consider impossible. When we are inspired to realize our unlimited powers to solve the problems that are facing us, according to Jean, we become the people of the breakthrough.

So, those of you who are listening to us now, the people of the breakthrough, that's us.

DESMOND; Next, we hear from an authoritative, professorial voice that builds a conceptual framework to explain how humanity has emerged from its biological origins on the Earth 3.5 billion years ago, to arrive in the lifetimes of current generations into an Age of Knowledge, from 2000-2020, and is now moving into an Age of Consciousness in which we are being challenged to grow up and become an enlightened species that can embrace a global perspective to create a peaceful sustainable future as a global civilization.

Professor Bill Halal from George Washington University uses the perspective of a futurist to analyze historical data to chart the Life Cycle of Evolution. This emerges as an S curve in which the 21st century is at the top, such that we are coming to a culmination, when humanity must achieve a shift to global consciousness and move to a new trajectory, or collapse in breakdown.

BILL: My last book, "Beyond Knowledge: How Technology is Driving an Age of Consciousness," does I think something that's unusual. It uses historic data to map the rise of civilization through what I call the Life Cycle of Evolution. This is science-based project. It's a model of social evolution, and we can use it to anticipate what's coming, and what we see is that we're now leaving the Age of Knowledge. We, the world, has been living in an Age of Knowledge for about two decades, and we've become very familiar with that, but we think that's ending now. We are now living beyond knowledge and entering an Age of Consciousness, and if that is the case, and I think it is, the implications are profound.

For one thing, it means that consciousness implies the end or the culmination I would say of the Life Cycle of Evolution, that is, life on this planet is reaching some kind of a final stage, a stage of maturity.

DESMOND: Using a forecasting technology of collective intelligence, Bill sees the decade of the 2020s as pivotal for humanity, where education to provide new learning is key, which is what the Visioneers project is doing in this series on extraordinary wisdom.

BILL: Every stage of evolution has been driven by a revolution in thought. The Industrial Age, for instance, was driven by the Protestant Ethic, the belief in Economic Man focused on self- interest, money, and power. Those values may continue to hold, because they are natural, perhaps, but they have to be supplanted, augmented by a global consciousness, by respect for the planet and cooperation, just to put it very simply. It's, can be, much more complicated than that. We really don't know what a global consciousness will look like, because it's uncharted territory, but it would be something like that.

So, we think a global consciousness is likely to occur, and my studies at Techcast forecasts it as most likely to happen about the year 2030, plus or minus about 5 years, but there's a low probability attached with that, about a 50 percent probability. In other words, the world is teetering on a knife edge between maturity and disaster. That would be a good way to sum it up. And so, what happens in the next few years is pivotal.

I began to see that this was really just the beginning of the journey, because about that time, the post factual stuff started appearing, and I could see this was different. The denial of climate change, for instance, really caught my attention. It was so bizarre, to ignore the reality here, and to engage in wishful thinking that it's not important, it would go away. It just, madness. And that has blossomed now, that is a full blown phenomenon. It's happening around the world, and we have to see it as the beginning of an Age of Consciousness. It's not good consciousness, that's true, but consciousness is an entire domain. It encompasses everything, good consciousness, bad consciousness, everything. And this is just an unfortunate form of consciousness that we have today, and the challenge the world faces is to change this consciousness into a consciousness that is able to create a sustainable world.

DESMOND: Bill shows consciousness as two dimensional. One dimension is Objective Consciousness of data manipulation, which can be handled by the machines that we've built in the Knowledge Age. Beyond that, is Subjective Consciousness, which is the domain of the human mind.

BILL: Scientists agree that there are two fundamentally different aspects of human consciousness. There's Objective Consciousness, which consists of perception, gathering data, storing it in memory, acquiring knowledge to solve problems and making decisions. That's objective and that's what computers are good at, the objective factors, and now right now, the digital revolution is automating all of that.

And this poses the great question on most people's minds. If AI and a digital revolution automate knowledge, then what will people do? Because that's what people are doing now, they're working with knowledge. Well, the answer is that there's a great domain beyond knowledge, Subjective Consciousness, and that consists, I defined it very very simply, I try to be very objective and orderly about it, I think of, in terms of, the factors like emotion, values, and beliefs, and vision, and that sort of thing. You could probably identify different, a dozen different qualities that would fit into the subjective realm, like wisdom, and imagination, and things like that, but there is definitely a subjective realm that transcends knowledge, and it dominates knowledge.

The subjective beliefs will exclude certain knowledge and gravitate towards other forms of knowledge. so the subjective realm dominates knowledge, and that's what we're seeing now, people are choosing to believe wild ideas, just because they prefer to.

So that's the way I think this is working. The digital revolution is automating the objective functions of knowledge, of consciousness, which are knowledge, and is driving attention into the subjective realm.

DESMOND: Will life succeed? Bill is optimistic.

BILL: Life is tenacious. It rarely fails, and I think it probably succeeds in most cases, so I think it's likely to succeed on our planet, but it's an enormous undertaking. We've studied this at Techcast, that's how we estimated the 50 percent probability that we will see a global consciousness in about

2030. We better also understand, we've studied various scenarios, and I've come to see that the most likely way this will emerge is not through one big fell swoop where the leaders of the world get together and say we need a global consciousness. That's not likely to happen. It's likely to evolve incrementally.

GERRI: It's really good to hear a scientist like Bill being optimistic about the future, because we hear so much of the opposite. Remember, we spoke earlier about the hyper rapid rate of change, Bill is telling us that ahead, within a single decade of the 2020s to 2030, plus or minus 5 years, there is evidence that we're moving beyond the Age of Knowledge to the Age of Consciousness. That means that we are very aware of what is going on, and unfortunately the world is not yet up to the task, and we are being challenged at the same time by broad-based megacrises to ruddy well grow up, and to become an enlightened species that can embrace a global consciousness, a thinking perspective that includes the whole diverse wide world.

The implication is that we have no time to lose. We have no time to lose because a change in behavior is key. Digital technology and Artificial Intelligence will handle the data and the objective form of knowledge, but human beings will need to focus on engaging their subjective consciousness, through intuition, creativity, and especially imagination, imagination to fashion a future worthy of our noble species.

Now, education in the meaning of global citizenship for youth and young adults still in high school and university directed to the development of strategic creative thinking and problem solving will be key to their understanding their own power and their own possibilities from a new science perspective.

DESMOND: Indeed, but it's one thing to learn how one must act to be a global citizen and treat each other, treat others with respect and compassion and take care of the Earth, but it's even more powerful to meet someone who is the embodiment of all those values and learn from his example. We were fortunate on our wisdom journey to have that opportunity in meeting Dr. Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and Chancellor of the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Robert spent 40 years at the United Nations, almost from the beginning of the organization when he went to New York as an intern in 1948 until his retirement in 1986. He stood out as the spiritual voice of the organization when he spoke about the importance of love to delegates when it was certainly not usual to do so.

ROBERT: I discovered that to believe in humanity and to have the personal decision that you will not let evil and the misdoings of others drag you down to be very fundamental. Love is something extraordinary, and we should pay more attention to words like peace, hope, faith, thankfulness, and so on.

DESMOND: Robert's sensitivity to love in all its forms as the underlying power for a successful society was recognised by anyone who met him and experienced his extraordinarily large presence. Friend and colleague Dr. Doug Roche, Canadian parliamentarian and UN delegate and Visioneers Hero of Humanity, put it this way: "He gave us love. He gave the world love. He reflected a boundless love for humanity. This was the motivation, the dynamism, the very essence of Robert."

For Robert the primary objective of the human being is happiness. His life and writings are a testament to the importance of happiness.

ROBERT: For me to be alive was something absolutely extraordinary, to see all the people. My father was surprised that I took off my cap each time there was an old man or an old lady. Why you do that? Oh, because they know so much, and I hope that someday I will know as much as these old people know. So, for me life was something absolutely extraordinary, and by having this feeling towards life I felt that happiness was almost a duty.

DESMOND: He sets the context for humanity's new concern to take care of the Earth.

CHANTAL: The planet Earth as your patient sounds like it's sick and getting sicker. What do we do to heal it?

ROBERT: Well, we're making a lot of noise. I created the first world environment conference. I brought together the first world conference on the on the climate in 1979, and they said, Muller is crazy, and what do you see in the newspapers that now governments are trying to save the climate of this planet.

You see, we have done everything in the preceding period humanity, humanity, humanity, humanity, and we have succeeded. The longevity has increased from 40 to 60 years in the poor countries, to 72 years in the United States. The children's mortality has almost collapsed, has almost disappeared. There are no world epidemics anymore. We have done wonderful humanity, but we totally forgot about the Earth until in 1972 we discovered that something was getting wrong, and it was called the environment.

DESMOND: He was always guided by an underlying spirituality.

ROBERT: When you do something positive, some strange forces begin to work in your direction, and when you have dreams where you have ideas, you are recompensed ten times by incredible happiness and successes.

DESMOND: Robert Muller moved with a large presence that always captivated those around him, as expressed by his interviewer Chantal Westerman.

CHANTAL: I'm at my best when I'm around someone like you.

DESMOND: And demonstrated by the joy he brought to an audience of students parents and teachers in Vancouver when he unexpectedly took out his harmonica and played Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

ROBERT: So, I'm going to have another dream, namely, to play the "Ode to Joy" here in this beautiful library and that's what you're going to hear. I'm sorry not to have such beautiful performances as you had before, but on those ten little holes I will try my best, OK.

GERRI: I remember that moment, when they started to stand up, and then everyone stood up. The energy in that room was incredible.

What can you say about Robert Muller other than he was the quintessential global citizen, and he was a quality human being. He is a model for everyone, and the implication of what you have just heard is to spread it wide and far as a message of hope for all, and especially for young people, who really need that kind of inspiration right now.

So, you take a lesson from Robert and be your own example of goodness.

DESMOND: We continue our learning through the presentation of on-the-ground, practical action to create peace in the world. An inspirational strategy has been created by a nonprofit organization called International Cities of Peace under the leadership of Fred Arment from the USA.

FRED: The Visioneers International Network is evidentiary proof that beneath the violent headlines there is a rising of peacemakers, a gathering of the like-minded, an intellectual, spiritual, physical changing of the guard.

DESMOND: Fred explains the concept of International Cities of Peace in building a culture of peace.

FRED: The Covid 19 pandemic has given us a wake-up call. It is one more way we have learned, along with many other potential existential threats, that we must accelerate change in the way we organize for peace. Just as technology and industry are changing at a rapid pace, peace must evolve quickly and must change before our challenges overwhelm us. Peace work must evolve quickly, we must find the best strategies. We can no longer simply rely on nation states whose essential mission is to compete with other nation states for resources and dominance.

That's where Cities of Peace comes in. Villages towns and cities are the organizing units closest to our family units. The objectives of our communities are very straightforward: keep our families safe, make sure our children are not hungry and have a roof over their heads, provide the highest quality of life such as clean water and education, so that each individual can find their purpose.

This is how International Cities of Peace defines peace: safety, prosperity, and quality of life for each and every person in the community. And International Cities of Peace has a bold and achievable vision. We are headed toward 1000 cities of peace in 100 countries by year 2025. I hope you'll help. It is a vision that is attainable, sustainable, practical, and evolutionary.

DESMOND: There is a simple but stimulating process for citizens to register their city as a City of Peace.

FRED: Now the next thing, you know, that's what we came here to hear, how to establish a city of peace. What is the process? And the process is very straightforward. It's intended to be very simple, five steps, but it's very profound. The people who go through this process have always said that this has created a new life a new structure for how they live and how they work in their community.

The first is you get signatures on a letter of intent. You write a vision mission and goal statement for the city and this is where people have to really think about how they work for peace in community and this is what separates all the cities of peace, their vision, their mission and goals, it's all unique, every single one of them is different.

GERRI: So, Cities of Peace, that's a big project, not for the individual team or peace team in a city, but overall, because through that initiative of just a few peace-loving people in these various places, a magnificent project like that has already reached 400 cities, and it's on its way to 1000 cities in 2025.

International Cities of Peace is a demonstration that people of every kind across the whole planet, from the largest city to the smallest most remote village, have the ability in common to create a culture of peace that can spread around the world.

DESMOND: Our wisdom journey concludes with a burst of inspirational advice contained in poetry and propositions presented by two Visioneers Visionary Leaders, George and Sedena Cappannelli from Santa Fe New Mexico in the USA. They declare that we are seeing a demographic revolution where people over the age of 50 will soon be in the majority in industrialized countries. The challenges of our time have built up under the watch of this demographic, and they must now take responsibility to lead the search for solutions.

George delivers his belief powerfully in a poem called "Not Quietly."

George and Sedena introduced this episode by declaring the synchronicity between their work and the Visioneers project.

SEDENA: Hi, I'm Sedena Cappannelli.

GEORGE: And I'm George Cappannelli. We're cofounders of Age Nation from New Mexico and co- producers of the award winning Ageless Living television series.

SEDENA: And we're also proud members of the Visioneers. We're so pleased to be with you and to celebrate the launch of this exciting, innovative, and much needed initiative, designed to share with you wisdom, insights, and recommendations and live strategies, presented by a truly remarkable group of authors, experts, and leaders.

GEORGE: The Visioneers have a goal and that's to wage peace in a time of division disruption and confusion, to inspire, and inform, and create a vital living library that can give us hope and also support the evolution of human consciousness, and not just in this time but for generations to come.

SEDENA: So, this video you're about to see is part of our Ageless Living television series, and it will introduce you to some of our work that's designed to inform, inspire, and provide solutions for who we call people who weren't born yesterday, and also younger people who are now inheriting our future. And the short program will also share some valuable information about the demographic revolution that will eventually see 50 percent or more of the populations in the major industrialized countries in our world 50 and older at the same time for the first time in history.

GEORGE: We also hope this video will help you remember that no one is ever too young or too old to live their dreams, never too old or too young to sing the unique note that only we can sing in the song of life.

So, welcome to Ageless Living. Welcome to this international launch of this global initiative. We hope you'll join us and all the Visioneers in making the future more sane, constructive, compassionate, and more committed to peace and to the greatest good for the greatest number.

SEDENA: And so we want to leave you with this ancient African proverb:

GEORGE: "If you want to go fast, go alone.

SEDENA: If you want to go far, go together."

GEORGE: So, what do you say?

SEDENA: I say we go together. Why don't you join us please.

DESMOND: From then on, it's a steady stream of inspirational calls for action.

SEDENA: We believe the world today calls us in support of a news story. It invites us to acknowledge at least in part our role in creating the challenges that we now face, and to sing the unique note that each of us has to sing in this orchestra of life.

GEORGE: No matter how old you are, no matter what your gender is, no matter what your race or ethnicity or economic status or political persuasion, we believe it's still time to heed the call and to help give birth to this new story called Ageless Living.

Life is like a a good book, or a musical composition, and if you only read the first few chapters, or you only hum the first few choruses, then the truth of the matter is, you're going to miss the really juicy stuff, the conflicts, the breakdowns, the breakthroughs, and the finale. And that's where the real emotional intellectual and spiritual wisdom of life comes from.

DESMOND: And Vancouver 's Shakespearean actor, Christopher Gaze gives inspiration from Gerri's poem "Sapiens Part Two."

CHRIS: As I stand transfixed, the gaudy colours of a vivid intense reality come into view, the new race, strong in body, beautiful in form and feature, in every kind and colour, spirits glowing, the electric connections between them visible, crackling, vibrant, full of grace. Sapiens Part Two.

How, oh how, can we begin this sacred holy mission, built on the noble, the wise, and the seeming miracles of our moment in the human journey, to create a wondrous future, full of the grace we can now actually imagine?

DESMOND: People over 50 will soon be in the majority in industrialized countries. The challenges we face have built up under their watch. They have the responsibility and life experience and skills to find new creative solutions.

George and Sedena have given us a feast of possibilities. Let's take them at their word and step

Forward as Sapiens Part Two to build the truly wondrous future we can actually imagine.

GERRI: So, Desmond, given what you've said about George and Sedena and the other wisdom keepers, what are the key implications in Episodes 1 to 9 that can form the elements that the Visioneers can use to lay the digital foundations in a bold magnificent form of observable evidence of thousands of stories of humanity's evolution towards goodness?

So, here's what we have so far.

We have the people with their profiles laid out in nine corridors of different activities. It's an international people's exposition we call the Virtual Expo. So far, it features leaders in a Web of Good Work, and there are hundreds of them, and we are waiting for your nominations to add to this virtual exposition.

Second, we have the resources these people have created, an extraordinary modern library, inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria, featuring the best work of our time. We call it the Visioneers Masterworks Emporium. It features books, film, documentaries, the arts, music, poetry. This is the platform of resources ready to display humanity's extraordinary good work.

And third, we have built the Wall of Stories with color-coded bricks featuring stories of people and projects, and we have linked this to the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals to show progress on actually achieving these goals. And this is now ready to include your additional stories of good work, worthy people, and excellent projects.

So, here is what we are asked to do, all of us. Women and men, and people of every age and diversity, will need to step forward together with a powerful creative leadership to provide thousands of new strategic and creative solutions, crafted in their own image, creating their own vision, and displaying their own culture so the root causes of the problems can be addressed.

DESMOND: All of this is grounded in the understanding based on scientific discovery and evidence that we are connected at the level of our DNA in a world immersed in a non-local energetic field of consciousness to which our evolved human minds have access for creative solutions. In this way we will move beyond the Age of Knowledge into an Age of Consciousness.

GERRI: So, imagine the road ahead, where millions of us who have already changed our mind walk proudly to lead the way. Some others walk tentatively behind. But for many millions of others, old ideas are firmly embedded in conflict, greed, and bad action of every kind, and that still dominates the global mind, and it makes matters worse, because they focus on a past and returning to it that's no longer possible. So, we are on the path, and we come to that bifurcation point that Ervin spoke of, the place where we have choices, and we choose to take the path away from our current reality, by embracing the new thinking presented by our wisdom keepers.

So, as Jean Houston says, people of the breakthrough, fellow global citizens, we are ready to act. Decide to participate, participate to become part of a multi generational community working together as peacemakers, and peace builders of Humanity's Golden Peace.

We have work to do, but it's good work, it's fun good work, it's inspiring work, because you don't get any place where you don't have the vision. Well now we have the vision of what this is. We can see it, we can feel it, we can taste it, it's in our hearts, and we understand it in our minds, and we will share it.

And all over the globe soldiers of peace are waiting enthusiastically, are hungry to participate, to get on that road themselves, and to include their own fellow global citizens in the communities in which they live.

So, we have a lot more to share. Expect our conclusion and our celebration, on how not only to wage peace, but how to win the peace.

See you soon.