Purpose & Vision

When Whole Life Times first appeared in 1982, it carried a statement that was very much of its time, yet expressed an intuition that has continued to run through the publication ever since.

“Out of the stress and flames of a crisis torn planet a human mutation is underway, a new planetary or cosmic species is emerging.”

Almost forty years later, when Whole Life Times was finding new expression in the digital world, that earlier intuition was expressed somewhat differently.

“The vision of Whole Life Times is to be the voice of a new integral humanity and a catalyst for the renewal and transformation of the whole Earth.”

The language had changed, but something important had remained. From its beginnings, Whole Life Times has been interested not only in how we might improve particular aspects of life, but in the possibility that human beings themselves can grow in understanding, consciousness, compassion and responsibility, and that such development is inseparable from the way we relate to one another, to other forms of life and to the Earth that sustains us.

That understanding grew naturally from the alternative lifestyle and environmental movements of the 1970s from which Whole Life Times emerged. Those movements brought together concerns that conventional society often treated separately. Ecology sat alongside community; holistic health alongside personal growth; appropriate technology alongside spirituality; organic gardening and permaculture alongside new approaches to psychology, education and social organisation. There was an experimental quality to much of it, but beneath the experimentation was a serious question about whether human beings could learn to live differently and more wisely.

Whole Life Times inherited much of that spirit. It also inherited an appreciation of participation and community rather than rigid hierarchy, of voluntary service and cooperation, of living more lightly upon the Earth, and of creating spaces in which people could explore alternatives for themselves. These influences help explain why the publication has never fitted comfortably within a single category. It was not simply an environmental magazine, a health magazine, a spiritual magazine or a publication about social change. Its concern was with the relationships between all of these.

Over the years other movements and bodies of thought have enriched that foundation. The four pillars associated with the Australian Greens—ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice, and peace and non-violence—have considerable resonance with values that were already present within Whole Life Times. Yet WLT is not the publication of a political party, nor is its purpose adequately described by any political platform. Its field of concern is both broader and, in some respects, more intimate, because the transformation of society and the Earth cannot finally be separated from questions about the kind of human beings we are becoming.

This is where holistic health and wellbeing belong within the same conversation as ecology and social justice. A healthy society needs healthy people, but human health itself depends upon relationships, community, meaningful activity, clean air and water, nutritious food, functioning ecosystems and a habitable climate. Psychological wellbeing cannot be understood entirely apart from the conditions in which people live, any more than planetary wellbeing can be secured indefinitely by people whose ways of thinking and behaving remain disconnected from the consequences of their actions.

For Whole Life Times, therefore, health has always meant something larger than the absence of illness. It includes physical and psychological wellbeing, but it also opens into questions of meaning, belonging, relationship, purpose and the further development of human potential. Humanistic and transpersonal psychology have contributed to this understanding through their explorations of personal growth, self-actualisation, peak experience, transpersonal experience and the possibilities of consciousness beyond the boundaries of the everyday ego.

The world's religious and wisdom traditions bring another dimension to this conversation. Whole Life Times does not seek to promote one religion or require adherence to a particular spiritual philosophy, but values such as loving-kindness, compassion, service to others, forgiveness, reverence for life and care for those who suffer belong to a human ethical inheritance that crosses many religious and cultural boundaries. They have an obvious place in any serious discussion about what a more humane civilisation might look like.

So too does truth. If compassion asks us to care about what happens to others, truthfulness asks us to look carefully at what is actually happening, including where that may be uncomfortable. Whole Life Times therefore values open inquiry, evidence, intellectual independence and the willingness to question assumptions and concentrations of power. It seeks neither to dictate what readers should believe nor to pretend that every claim or point of view is equally well founded. Its role is to bring forward knowledge, experience, research, ideas and differing perspectives that can help people inquire more deeply and make more informed judgements for themselves.

This is closely related to the role of the reference librarian described in Our Story. The purpose is not to stand at the end of the intellectual journey handing out predetermined answers. It is to help people find pathways through knowledge, to introduce connections that may not initially have been apparent, and sometimes to place beside one another ideas from different disciplines, cultures and traditions that illuminate each other in unexpected ways.

The ecological dimension of this philosophy has also continued to deepen. Permaculture gave memorable expression to an ethic of Earth Care, People Care and responsible sharing, while the work of ecological and evolutionary thinkers has increasingly challenged the assumption that humanity stands somehow apart from nature. We are participants within a living Earth whose atmosphere, oceans, rivers, forests, soils, climate and extraordinary diversity of life make human civilisation possible in the first place.

Seen in this way, sustainability cannot mean merely finding technological means by which contemporary patterns of consumption can continue indefinitely. Technology is enormously important, and Whole Life Times is deeply interested in renewable energy, regenerative technologies, ecological design and scientific innovation, but a sustainable future also asks questions about values, economics, culture, community, consciousness and what we understand a good life to be.

This is one reason the ideas associated with thinkers such as Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ervin Laszlo, Ken Wilber, Matthew Fox, Jean Houston, Anneloes Smitsman and many others have found such natural resonance within the wider field around Whole Life Times. Their approaches differ considerably, and WLT does not ask its readers to subscribe to all of their conclusions. What they share, in different ways, is a willingness to think beyond the fragmented categories through which modern societies have often understood ourselves and the world.

Thomas Berry's vision of an emerging Ecozoic era, for example, invites us to imagine a period in which human civilisation learns to live in a mutually enhancing relationship with the larger community of life. Contemporary discussion of eco-civilisation asks a related question at the scale of societies and cultures: what would civilisation become if ecological reality were not treated as a peripheral concern, but became part of the foundation upon which economics, technology, settlement, agriculture, education and governance were conceived?

Alongside this is another question that has accompanied Whole Life Times almost from its beginning: what kind of human being might such a civilisation require?

The language of a “new planetary or cosmic species” used in 1982 can today be understood less literally and more developmentally. Jean Houston and Anneloes Smitsman, among others, have explored the idea of the future human: not simply a hypothetical person who might exist generations from now, but people alive today who begin to embody capacities, values and forms of consciousness that may need to become more widespread if humanity is to navigate the transition ahead.

From this perspective, the future is not something that merely happens to us. Elements of it are already being lived into existence through the choices people make, the relationships they cultivate, the knowledge they develop, the institutions they create and the values they embody. Personal growth and planetary transformation cease to look like unrelated projects. They become different dimensions of the same evolutionary challenge.

This is close to what Whole Life Times means by an integral humanity. Integral does not mean that everyone becomes the same, accepts a single philosophy or dissolves genuine differences of culture, belief and perspective. It means becoming increasingly capable of seeing wholes as well as parts, relationships as well as objects, and multiple dimensions of a problem rather than reducing it prematurely to whichever dimension happens to be most familiar to us.

An integral approach can value science without imagining that everything meaningful can be reduced to what current scientific instruments can measure. It can value spirituality without abandoning critical thought. It can value individual freedom while recognising our responsibilities to community. It can value economic creativity while asking what economies ultimately exist to serve. It can welcome technological innovation while asking about consequences, ethics and ecological limits. And it can care deeply about humanity while recognising that human flourishing is inseparable from the flourishing of the larger living Earth.

This is also why Whole Life Times is values-based without seeking to become doctrinaire. We are not neutral about compassion, human dignity, ecological destruction, truthfulness, peace, justice or the wellbeing of future generations. At the same time, a publication concerned with learning and transformation must leave room for questioning, disagreement, uncertainty and the revision of ideas in the light of better knowledge.

The phrase from 2021 describing WLT as “the voice of a new integral humanity” should therefore not be understood as a claim that Whole Life Times speaks for humanity. It is better understood as an aspiration to give voice to, and help connect, some of the people, ideas, discoveries, practices and emerging possibilities through which a more integral humanity may be taking shape.

Increasingly, that voice is not confined to the pages of the magazine. Whole Life Times Dialogues allows us to listen at greater depth to thinkers, researchers, practitioners, activists, educators, artists and change agents. Whole Life Times Connect can bring readers and participants into conversation around the ideas appearing in the magazine. Special Editions can explore important themes in greater depth, while the growing subject directory and resource pathways can allow a reader who encounters one idea to follow it into related fields of knowledge.

Whole Life Times also has a particularly close relationship with Gaiarcadia Academy, whose educational, scholarly and convening activities provide opportunities to explore many of these questions through dialogue, learning and gathering. WLT can serve as something of its editorial voice and town crier, carrying ideas, conversations, people and developments arising within Gaiarcadia into a much wider community while also bringing people and knowledge discovered through WLT into that educational field.

These relationships are becoming part of the larger Whole Life Universal Field, through which publishing, education, dialogue, resources, ethical commerce, projects and participation can increasingly connect with one another. Within that field, Whole Life Times retains a distinctive responsibility. Its task is to remain curious, independent and outward-looking: to notice what is emerging, ask worthwhile questions, introduce people who may have something important to contribute, make connections across disciplines and cultures, and help knowledge travel.

Over time, the digital possibilities available to us may allow this original reference-library purpose to develop much further. The expanding WLT archive, its articles, Dialogues, Special Editions, books, research resources and subject pathways can eventually become part of a much richer field of searchable knowledge, assisted by The Whole Life Universal Guide. Yet even as artificial intelligence becomes capable of helping people navigate that knowledge, the purpose should remain profoundly human: not simply to provide more information more quickly, but to help people ask better questions, encounter perspectives beyond their existing horizons and understand relationships that might otherwise remain unseen.

Ultimately, the purpose of Whole Life Times is therefore both modest and ambitious. We cannot prescribe the future, and no publication can bring about the transformation of humanity or the Earth. What WLT can do is contribute: by informing, connecting, questioning, encouraging dialogue, preserving worthwhile knowledge, amplifying constructive work, helping people discover one another and keeping open the possibility that the crises of our time may also become catalysts for learning and transformation.

The vision with which Whole Life Times began has consequently not been abandoned. It has grown more nuanced and, perhaps, more grounded. We continue to believe that human beings are capable of development, that cultures and civilisations can change, and that the relationship between humanity and the Earth need not remain as destructive as it has too often become. We also recognise that the future will not be created by ideas alone, but by people who embody those ideas in the ways they live, care, create, communicate, organise, teach, heal, restore and serve.

If Whole Life Times can help some of those people find knowledge they need, discover one another, see connections they had not previously seen and feel encouraged to participate in the work of creating healthier lives, more compassionate communities and a flourishing living Earth, it will be fulfilling the purpose from which it began.

And perhaps that is what it means, in our own time, to become both a voice of an emerging integral humanity and a catalyst for the renewal and transformation of the whole Earth.