(Check here later for dates, times and places of the November 2008 launch!)
THE ROOTS AND FLUTES of humankind Beginning 60,000 years ago in our African birthplace, Werner John tells an illustrated musical story of homo sapiens' journey around the globe. It's our modern origin myth! Words of indigenous tribal members inform the narrative, and the live sound of ancient flutes evokes primal human feelings.
UNEXPECTED HARMONIES within the human family Simple wood flutes are said to be a "universal human instrument". These flutes and their music form a banquet of human cultural flavors and become evidence of our ingenuity, our sense of beauty, our quirkiness, and the feelings and rhythms we all share. Meet some identical instruments that evolved on opposite sides of the globe! And the flutes of widely differing cultures played in harmony can affirm the essential unity at the core of diversity.
FACING THE MUSIC of a world full of people The human adventure is one of the biggest experiments in the history of life on Earth. Out of all the millions of species on Earth, just ONE has now become dominant! In the whole vast evolutionary sweep of life on Earth this is an unprecedented event.
Now, though, this species' massive wave of accomplishment is starting to curl and crash on the shoreline of Earth's physical limits. This is not an "issue". This is epochal. One likely scenario, a catastrophic cascading collapse of life systems around the planet, is quickly gathering momentum.
At the same time, this species is gifted with a crown jewel of evolution: consciousness. It is able to learn from its past, to imagine its future, and to probe vast worlds of intuition and inspiration. Its science provides an extension of physical senses in time and space, monitoring many elements of global health. Its arts move whole cultures. Its web of communication quickens cultural evolution. Therefore it may still have some chance of forestalling the inevitability of relentless growth all the way to massive exhaustion of natural resources.
The experiment will soon be over. The accelerating contest between humans' collective appetite and our collective consciousness seems likely to break one way or the other over the next decade or two. Each of us now alive is becoming more and more aware of the epic life and death story unfolding just outside our everyday experience, even as some of us struggle to turn the precious key life has given us to assist in its own preservation.
BECOMING AN INSTRUMENT of evolution As the magnitude of Earth's increasing imbalance slowly dawns on us, humanity is entering a period of intense soul-searching to discern our true and lasting place in this world. Evolution is said to be the means by which the fittest organisms survive, but in our time biological evolution has become secondary. It is humanity's cultural evolution which will determine what our planet will look like after the human maximum. And our cultural evolution will depend largely on individual leaders' personal or soul evolution. One purpose of these programs is to help inspire the personal evolution of future leaders.
A COUNTERPOINT to the clueless-hopeless continuum As many have realized, a successful path through the next few decades will be dependent on two main things: transforming our old tribal-based urge to magnify the existing differences between groups, leading to conflict; and minimizing, then reversing our degradation of the biosphere. These challenges are both related directly to our incredible success as a species. Perhaps no one is at fault! Perhaps there was no way to avoid this moment in time,, and the global situation simply shines brighter and brighter light on some tendencies in human nature which have reached the end of their usefulness.
So this period can be seen as a time of initiation into new paradigms of successful human life, with each individual's personal power magnified by the cultural web. It's almost like being inside a save-the-world video game, an epic trilogy, or an exciting apocalyptic movie... playing out in slow motion but very real. The point is to catalyze people, especially young people, to develop their best tools and find their own way to contribute to the win we need: a future in balance-- with each other and our planet.
