Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray, Senior Global New Writer | Man aging Editor for World News – The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Here is what I think is very good news. I consider gender equality to be one of the key signs ot cultural awakening. Once you understand that there is continuity of consciousness, and that science tells us that the Eternal Self, what religions call the soul or spirit, episodically manifests and incarnates a personality, that’s you and me, and that incarnation by choice of the Eternal Self can be of either gender, any race, geographic location, socio-economic status, or religion. Our Eternal Self has no gender, and when a society recognizes gender equality, it is a sign of cultural awakening. The glaring misogyny and White supremacy of Trump and his administration are signs that these are people who have no interest in fostering social wellbeing.
LONDON, U.K. — Globally, views on how women are treated are more positive today than they have been at most points in the past decade, particularly compared with the lows recorded during the pandemic. While major gaps between women and men persist, perceptions have improved for both.
In 2025, a median of 72% of all adults across 140 countries said women in their country are treated with respect and dignity, marking a nine-percentage-point increase from 63% in 2022, which was the lowest level since Gallup began tracking this measure consistently in 2015.
Overall, perceptions of how women are treated slipped in the years leading up to 2022 and have risen since then. Women’s views trended downward after the rise to prominence of the #MeToo movement and through the pandemic period, while men’s views were relatively steady but dropped in 2022. Since then, perceptions among both men and women have risen, closely tracking each other.
Between 2022 and 2025, 24 countries recorded increases of at least 10 points in the view […]
Nature lives in constant competition. In an ongoing bid for survival, each plant strives to encroach upon any available tract of land, capture any available drop of water, and reach up to any available ray of sunlight. This indiscriminate growth and expansion is the only way to avoid extinction. The more branches a plant grows, the more flowers each branch may yield; the more flowers, the more fruit; the more fruit the more seeds; and the more seeds, the higher the likelihood that enough will propagate a new generation. Quantity is given precedence over quality, resulting in huge levels of waste. Each species scatters countless seeds in the hope that a few will survive and germinate.
Farming introduces a different intention to nature. A farmer can propagate plants reliably without concern for extinction. His more immediate priority is quality. By scaling back the indiscriminate growth of his vines in spring, he redirects the energy they would normally spend on branches and invigorates their fruits.
As part of nature, our functions also operate quite differently left to their own means or when governed by a specific need. Harnessed to a need, they function efficiently: our moving function initiates the precise sequence of actions to get us from one place to another; our thinking function considers and compares different abstract points of view to problem-solve; our emotional function reads our neighbor’s facial expressions and posture to assess their mood. In the absence of a need, however, our functions do not stop; they continue functioning with the same unchecked momentum of nature, and at the same cost of waste. We fidget, not because we need to move, but to eliminate excess energy. We daydream, not because we need to think, but to eliminate energy. We worry, not because something real is at stake, but to eliminate excess energy.
This indiscriminate functioning must now become the object of our observation. A good place to start is during the first hour of our morning. After a night’s rest, our organism wakes up at a higher energetic level. Retaining energy is always more difficult than eliminating it, so at the beginning of our day our functions will be particularly inclined to slip into various momentums. Our challenge here is not only to observe these energy leaks, but also to find ways to remember to observe them. This means that we need to arrange reminders beforehand. If successful, we will witness our moving function persuading us that we are short of time and must hurry, our thinking function bringing to mind a host of topics for daydreaming and our emotional function recalling unresolved concerns. We will observe how these momentums appear on their own and keep wasting our energy, even if we try to interrupt them. Unless we affirm and reaffirm our aim to resist them, they encroach on our inner landscape and overtake it.
Here our farming lays the ground for answering the question, ‘Who am I?’—or at least, ‘Who am I not?’ Before we began to observe ourselves methodically, we took these psychological dynamics at face value and freely called them ‘I’. “I’m late…” “I fancy…” “I fear…” Now, we realize that haste, daydreaming, and anxiety are states in search of objects. Their causes are not outside but within us. Through self-observation, we have begun to see the mechanism by which our false personality—our false ‘I’—establishes itself. When we had no aim to farm ourselves, these identity thefts and energy leaks were inconsequential. But with an aim to weaken personality and uncover essence, we are forced to bring a critical attitude to these indiscriminate manifestations and consider how to minimize them.
This is our third labor.
About the Founder
Asaf Braverman is the founder of the Old New Method, a worldwide community of people dedicated to self-development.
New docs say Jeffrey Epstein collaborated with the Russian mob to loot the New York Daily News, then tried to help Mort Zuckerman discard it when reporting became inconvenient.
New York subway riders read the latest word on the fate of the Daily News, December 6, 1991, following the death of owner Robert Maxwell. Credit: Norman Y. Lono/AP Photo
Almost nobody noticed earlier this month when the New York Daily Newsannounced what felt like a 500th round of layoffs. Not long ago, the venerable working-class tabloid behind “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” would have been the ideal outlet for demystifying the prodigious evils of the Uptown Epstein network for outer-borough New Yorkers who elected Zohran Mamdani. But the latest iteration of “New York’s Hometown Newspaper” has all of four reporters covering national news.
The “adults in the room” always say a conspiracy theory becomes less plausible for every individual and institution it implicates. But the Epstein network is so vast and so varied it would suggest that the conspiracy is the system, if we had any institutions capable of making sense of it. TheNew York Times is too prissy, too compromised by social standing to reliably narrate the scope of the thing without shifting reflexively into contrarian debunk mode; podcasts and social media are too ephemeral to grasp the magnitude of anything. The organization most ideally suited to the task, Obama-era Gawker, was run out of business by an eight-figure litigation revenge plot masterminded by Peter Thiel, which Jeffrey Epstein generously offered to help bankroll.
Somewhat incredibly, a document in the January 30 Epstein file dump suggests that the New York Daily News was one of these institutions—integral to the Epstein network while grasping to make sense of its tentacles—and that Epstein personally might have played a critical role in exacerbating its wrenching demise.
OUR STORY BEGINS IN 1989, when the Tribune Company, the newspaper conglomerate that had acquired the Daily News in the 1960s, decided to bust its New York unions once and for all. The company hired McKinsey to project that the paper would lose more than $55 million in 1990 alone if no cuts were made, and a Nashville law firm that specialized in busting newspaper unions and advised the company to fly in scabs from Florida and Virginia to put out the paper during the inevitable strike. A Vanity Fair profile depicted publisher Jim Hoge as a courageous figure willing to speak austerity to labor as he had once spoken truth to power.
The paper ended up losing more than $300 million on the strike, including $60 million in cash. Tribune Co. ultimately paid Robert Maxwell, the rotund Czechoslovakia-born mogul who owned London’s Daily Mirror and the book publisher Macmillan, to take the newspaper off its hands. The newsroom was elated. “It was a really, really ugly strike,” remembers LynNell Hancock, a Columbia University journalism professor and former Daily News education reporter whose husband covered sports for the newspaper at the time. “They brought in scabs from the South to put it out, and they were giving it to homeless people in the subways … the poor homeless people were trying to sell the Daily News to make some money.”
Hancock was at The Village Voice at the time while raising two kids in the Bronx. “It was just a very scary time,” she said. “Most people on strike didn’t think their jobs were coming back. Then in comes this great savior, Robert Maxwell, with his bowtie and his big jolly belly, and there wasn’t any serious time to do the kind of digging that needed to be done in order to expose what he was actually doing. We all just wanted to believe it was real.”
By 1992, Zuckerman had painstakingly built a personal brand around being a kind of thinking man’s Donald Trump.
But eight months after buying the paper, Maxwell was dead, the result of something that happened on the 190-foot yacht Lady Ghislaine he’d just purchased from the nephew of Adnan Khashoggi and taken on a suspiciously timed solo trip to the Canary Islands in early November. Two experts consulted by Paris Match said photographs of the corpse Spanish authorities found floating in the Atlantic suggested he’d been “struck by a violent blow to the back of the skull” or perhaps a “blow to the face leading to a fall and a loss of consciousness.” Maxwell’s youngest daughter Ghislaine, the infamous convicted procurer and groomer of hundreds of Epstein victims (after whom the yacht had been named), brought a Mirror reporter along to retrieve the body and load it onto a plane to Jerusalem, where Maxwell was buried and eulogized at a funeral by both the prime minister and president of the country he had served as an intelligence asset before it even existed.
Just before Ghislaine and her entourage departed the islands, however, the reporter was dispatched to find the grieving daughter and finally located her “in the main lounge of the yacht grabbing pieces of paper and ordering the crew to shred all documents laying around.” Within days, it would emerge that $1.4 billion had gone “missing” from the coffers of the Mirror. What exactly became of all the money is one of the oldest enduring sub-mysteries of the Epstein scandal. The insolvent mogul had clearly bought the Daily News in some kind of time-buying scheme, as bankruptcy judge Tina Brozman observed, so that “the Maxwell newspapers could function as a money-laundering device through which Robert and his confederates could siphon funds to and from” entities he controlled in “a great circular ride.” But where had they socked away the siphoned funds?
A British former telecom executive and apparent intelligence agent named James Hatt approached the Justice Department in 2020 and said that he might have a clue. As it turns out, between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, Hatt regularly socialized with Epstein, Ghislaine, and Ghislaine’s older brother Kevin Maxwell. Hatt had been given a job at the British telecom giant Cable & Wireless PLC and instructed, he says, to “give the UK ideas on how the USSR operated.” At some point, he started work on a project that involved privatizing a Soviet telecom operator on ostensible behalf of the Soviet Union, a task that introduced him to a Canadian Alcatel executive named John William Manconi, who had an impressive seven phone numbers listed under his name in Epstein’s black book and who introduced Hatt to the Maxwell siblings in London.
It’s important to note here that Kevin Maxwell’s approval ratings in early-’90s London were something akin to Bernie Madoff’s in the 2010 Hamptons. Kevin had not only been the most trusted lieutenant to his father during the period he’d siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars from the pension funds of printing press workers, he had authorized numerous transactions out of Mirror coffers and loans to family slush funds secured by the publishing company’s assets after his father’s November 5, 1991, death. Between 1992 and his surprise 1996 acquittal, he lived in constant fear of bugged phones and hidden paparazzi. “UK authorities believed that ROBERT MAXWELL and KEVIN had hidden a great deal of money somewhere in the world (possibly Bulgaria, Russia or satellite states),” the federal prosecutors’ memo on their interview of Hatt states. But had they?
The memo reads almost as if Hatt’s interviewer did not think to ask this question, but Hatt, who did not respond to messages left with his then-attorney or a phone number registered in his name, told prosecutors that Robert Maxwell had instructed his son to approach Epstein about safeguarding the funds the family was extracting from its publishing empire. Then, in the “months after Robert Maxwell’s death,” according to an accompanying summary of the interview, the family “had no bank accounts and no access to money. KEVIN and IAN MAXWELL were declared bankrupt … All kinds of freezing orders. Had to find ways to get money EPSTEIN had held … Had to oversee it be managed and distribute to family members.” Kevin deepened the family’s relationship with Epstein when he “negotiated some kind of understanding with [Epstein] and [Ghislaine] in which [Epstein] would become involved in the Maxwell financial businesses.”
And so, Hatt explained to investigators, Ghislaine and Kevin went to work for Epstein, and the cash provided her (and presumably, the other Maxwells) came primarily from a certain supposedly money-hemorrhaging tabloid. “So much money with EPSTEIN came from the New York Daily News,” the memo reads.
BY THAT POINT, THE DAILY NEWS had ostensibly been acquired in a heavily scrutinized transaction out of bankruptcy court by Mort Zuckerman, a Canadian real estate developer and retired Sunday talk show pundit perhaps best known at that time for having recently dated Gloria Steinem. Given the legal and media scrutiny that accompanied the Maxwell collapse and the depth of the financial hole in its balance sheet, it’s a bit astonishing to imagine that Epstein found a way to turn the newspaper into an illicit cash spigot to support the extravagant lifestyles of Ghislaine and her eight siblings. But in a message to Epstein in his 50th birthday book a decade later, Zuckerman seems to hint at just such a scenario, joking that he had searched the Daily News archives for dirt on his mysterious friend and learned that he had actually been born in Liechtenstein, the tiny European country with notoriously opaque banking laws that had hosted the international headquarters of Maxwell Group Ltd. and most of its hundreds of subsidiaries and shell companies.
Zuckerman had bid against Robert Maxwell to acquire the paper in 1991 and even been photographed with him at a black-tie event around the same time; he won the second auction despite a superior bid from future convict Conrad Black and an embarrassing lawsuit involving his flat-out refusal to pay $2.8 million out of an agreed-upon $3.5 million purchase price for The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1980. (Zuckerman claimed the magazine’s owners had not been up front about its financial precarity; a jury determined otherwise and forced him to pay.)
Media magnate Robert Maxwell on May 11, 1990, with the first edition of The European, launched in London. Credit: Press Association via AP
By 1992, Zuckerman had painstakingly built a personal brand around being a kind of thinking man’s Donald Trump. Born in Montreal to Ukrainian-born owners of a candy and tobacco wholesaler, he spent his first two decades south of the border in Boston with a brief detour in Philadelphia to get a Wharton MBA. He went to Harvard Law, got a job developing suburban industrial and office parks with a prestigious firm, taught urban planning classes at Harvard, filled a Beacon Hill mansion with status paintings and a Chinese houseman, and bought The Atlantic Monthly and the building that housed it in 1980. When he moved south in 1984 to build glitzy skyscrapers and bid against Trump for a project to redevelop Columbus Circle, he dated the aforementioned Steinem (and judged the Miss America pageant after they broke up) and quickly became a ubiquitous presence on political talk shows.
It’s not known how Zuckerman initially met Epstein, but Steinem could have connected them: Prior to Zuckerman, she dated J. Stanley Pottinger, the Republican fixer-turned-novelist who went into business with Epstein selling tax shelters to wealthy clients shortly after the latter was fired from Bear Stearns in 1981.
Though it is on one hand outrageous to imagine that the Maxwell family continued to loot the Daily News while hundreds of attorneys and forensic accountants were ostensibly scouring the globe for the missing $1.4 billion, it might also shed light on how Zuckerman was able to snag the newspaper despite a substantially lower and hazier offer than that of the conservative media baron Black, who ran more than 100 newspapers at the time. Throughout the summer of 1992, Black was portrayed in the bankruptcy’s extensive media coverage as the almost certain new owner of the newspaper. But the purchase kept getting stymied by the newspaper’s blue-collar labor unions, specifically the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union, whose president Doug LaChance (who had served 55 months in federal prison on extortion and racketeering charges in the early 1980s and served more time for failing a drug test later that year) was a reported no-show to three straight scheduled meetings with Black, according to a July dispatch in the Montreal Gazette. (So deep were the union’s organized-crime ties that the Manhattan district attorney would indict the union in pursuit of a virtually unprecedented federal takeover of the NMDU that November, though the union fought the case and maintained its autonomy.)
Zuckerman promptly broke most of the promises and assurances he’d made to the unions. One afternoon after deadline, the staff was called to the front of the newsroom and told they would find envelopes in the basement that would contain either applications to reapply for their jobs or termination notices; the latter group was instructed to leave the premises immediately. As Hancock remembers, columnist Juan González stood up on a desk and called the newsroom over. “Hold up, folks, we’re not going to the basement. Who wants to spend the night in the office?” It wasn’t a plan, per se, but an expression of the solidarity the strike had engendered among the newsroom staff. “We would sneak people down to collect the envelopes, and I was the one who was basically tasked with taking the death list,” Hancock says. “People were coming to me in tears, and by the end of the evening it was 175 people who were axed, and these were our friends, and we were managing phone calls to other newspapers, and then they cut off our phones … it was very traumatic. I didn’t really want to work there anymore, but there was a sense then that we could still fight this.”
Meanwhile and perhaps completely by coincidence, the New York Post was embroiled in an eerily similar crisis. Then-Gov. Mario Cuomo began looking for a “savior” for the Post and supposedly fixed his sights on Steven Hoffenberg, the owner of a predatory lender and debt collection firm that served as a front for a complex and multilayered Ponzi scheme/money-laundering operation whose right-hand man was none other than Jeffrey Epstein. The SEC had been investigating Hoffenberg’s operation for at least five years at that point, but accelerated its probe in response to the Post bid, while Zuckerman, much to the incredulity of the hundreds of reporters who’d been forced to reapply for their old jobs, began giddily poaching the Post’s top talent with $200,000 and $300,000 job offers in what Hoffenberg described as “a crazy kamikaze attack to kill off The Post”; he even sued Zuckerman and two defectors. Ultimately, Rupert Murdoch would return to the paper after winning a special waiver from the merger guidelines that had forced him to divest back in 1987, while Hoffenberg negotiated what he believed would be a wrist-slap from the agency in exchange for his assistance locating investors’ funds and helping the feds navigate the shocking financial underworld his conspirator Epstein inhabited.
The Hatt memoranda give enticing new details about the nature of Epstein’s milieu during this time, including a Georgia-born, Vienna-based Israeli billionaire named Grigory Loutchansky, whose company Nordex—co-founded with fugitive oil trader Marc Rich—served as something of an insurance policy for Hatt’s Latvian telecom business and many other business ventures of the era, and who hired Maxwell’s Bulgarian Africa affairs adviser Ognyan Doynov around the time of his death. Loutchansky was a figure of much awe and admiration among the Maxwells, whom Hatt describes acting as international “fixers” for the oligarch, procuring him a meeting with Bill Clinton in 1993, showing him around Wall Street, and procuring young sex partners for his business partners and a certain “General Ivanov.”
Hatt also gave an indication of how the sex trafficking business might have collided with newspapers, mentioning that the late Swedish media mogul Jan Stenbeck, who founded a company called Modern Times, Inc., that published free tabloids distributed outside subways, had privately admitted that it “had kept Russian girls” who had been sold into prostitution before his sudden death in 2002. The Prospect could find no evidence that the company, which merged its tabloid into amNY in 2020, had ever been accused of such a thing.
Loutchansky, who was believed to have arranged under-the-table Russian oil sales and other illicit commerce from Latvian ports dating back to the 1970s, was a central figure in a theory Western intelligence agencies hatched during the collapse of the Soviet Union that what seemed like an uncontrolled and anarchic descent into kleptocracy was actually the result of a deliberate strategy, in which the KGB “transferred abroad large sums from funds owned by the government and the Communist Party through private companies” for the purpose of “funding political activities” but also creating a global network of organized financial crime and espionage. This theory forms the structural foundation of both Russiagate and many Zionist conspiracy frameworks, because the “schemes were often handled by people [in] possession of networks of companies and contacts abroad, like Soviet citizens who, due to their ethnic or religious background, were allowed to leave the USSR in the 1970s”—almost invariably, Jews headed west by way of Israel, though a smattering of Armenians and Germans were also allowed to travel during that time. At that point, however, the great “conspiracy theory” of the Washington intelligence consensus was that Loutchansky and his ilk were trafficking nuclear materials to Iran. (Imagine if they had succeeded!)
What they were actually doing was setting the stage for a midsized global financial crisis in 1998, when a multibillion-dollar wire transfer from the IMF to Russia went somehow “missing” into a financial black hole with assistance from a rogue Bank of New York employee, and the Russian government was forced to devalue the ruble, which triggered a credit crunch exacerbated by the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. The crisis led to a marked souring in relations between Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and the Clinton administration, which put none other than Mort Zuckerman, who had recently launched a newspaper in Moscow with the investigative journalist Artyom Borovik, to operate as a back channel between Primakov and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger.
ALTHOUGH HIS DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS were ultimately fruitless once the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia commenced, Zuckerman has described this stint in top secret diplomacy as the most thrilling gig of a long and storied career. He was also richer than ever, having made $550 million selling Fast Company, a magazine his publishing team had developed with two former Harvard Business Review editors, in 2000. Sadly, in November 1999 his publishing empire lost Kimberly Jensen, the executive credited with masterminding Fast Company’s success, to a very strange death in an Ocean City, Maryland, motel room. Borovik died in a potentially suspicious plane crash four months later, and Zuckerman parted ways with his right-hand man Fred Drasner not long after that.
The death of Kimberly Jensen was one of the only discernible occasions on which anything ever seemed potentially amiss in the black box of Zuckerman’s privately held publishing empire. A housekeeper found her corpse with a plastic bag over her head 500 miles from her home in Vermont, two days after her husband reported her missing. She had attempted suicide just days earlier in Rhode Island after her bosses had accused her of siphoning company funds to cover expenses she had incurred in a side hustle running a fledgling indie rock label. But her husband Steve Fuchs told TheWall Street Journal that the accusations were overblown, and made in retaliation over some “problems” she had discovered in the way Zuckerman properties were being run. While he was hazy on the specifics, he distinctly remembered her saying she “could save them $22 million”—allegations that were echoed by her friends at the company, according to the New York Post’s original dispatch on the strange death. Weirdly, follow-up stories on Jensen, including an admiring 2,000-word Boston Globe feature published three weeks later, made no mention of the financial improprieties she’d supposedly found, and reached by phone, Fuchs denied he had made any such statements to the Journal, then asked if he could postpone the conversation; he later texted to suggest that the reporter had misinterpreted a story he had told about Jensen’s work on one of Zuckerman’s lawsuits in the 1980s.
Mort Zuckerman leaves a memorial ceremony for Walter Cronkite, September 9, 2009, in New York. Credit: Stephen Chernin/AP Photo
In 2004, Zuckerman decided to go into business with Epstein and launch a new glossy celebrity magazine called Radar, but Epstein’s attorney Darren Indyke internally suggested Zuckerman was using the magazine as a vehicle for collecting rent, utilizing underworked U.S. News staffers and possibly engaging in arbitrage with the magazine’s supply of unused paper. But the two men’s mutual trust appears to have deepened following Epstein’s 2006 arrest and subsequent yearlong semi-imprisonment. In May 2009, Epstein emailed to ask if 32 was too young for a “beautiful, multilingual” Italian architect with whom he wanted to set up his then 72-year-old buddy; “Sign me up asap,” came the reply. A few months later, Zuckerman learned Daily News staffer George Rush was writing an item on Epstein’s settlement with the victim now known as the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and stepped in to broker an “off the record” interview between his friend and the longtime gossip columnist, the former of whom spent the conversation predictably smearing his victims as drug addicts and gold diggers, demonstrating an “utter lack of remorse” and most strangely, claiming that the same offense in New York would have been punishable with a $200 fine, according to a private investigator hired by Giuffre’s attorney. Rush had published the item without fanfare, but was apparently sufficiently skeeved that he mentioned it to a handful of friends and even played portions of the recording for two of them.
Word of the recording dribbled out to victims’ attorneys, one of whom asked Epstein in a February 2010 deposition whether he was familiar with Rush; he claimed not to know who the attorney was talking about. The lawyers smelled perjury, and asked a judge to force Rush to hand over the recording or potentially face jail time for contempt. Epstein emailed Zuckerman with another idea: He was thinking about pressing charges against Rush for recording the interview without his consent, a perfectly legal act in most states that happens to be a felony in Florida, which Epstein, who directed his staff to install hidden video cameras throughout his Palm Beach estate, would have known as well as any journalist.
Rush retired that May after 30 years at the Daily News, by which point the whole enterprise of journalism had begun what seemed like an inexorable slide into terminal decline. When the MTA began outfitting underground stations to receive cellular service in 2011, it became virtually impossible to justify buying a paper or celebrity magazine on one’s commute to and from the office. Hundreds of newsstands shut down entirely. Former staffers say Zuckerman never invested in the project of converting the Daily News into something readers consumed on their phones, though neither did virtually any other newspapers other than The New York Times.
Conrad Black, who would also, surely by coincidence, be accused of using his clout to kill damaging stories on Epstein, had been indicted the year before Epstein’s arrest for looting $80 million out of the company that owned the Chicago Sun-Times. The one exception was Rupert Murdoch, who ran most of his media properties like a sprawling intelligence operation, in which hidden surveillance cameras captured Fox News employees’ every move, executives spied on competitors’ customer databases, and editors systematically hacked into the voicemails and emails of royals, politicians, celebrities, and anyone in the headlines. When the Post broke the story of Giuffre’s allegation that Epstein and Maxwell had trafficked her to Britain’s Prince Andrew, Epstein sent Zuckerman a cranky email complaining that Giuffre “is the exact same type as Strauss Kahns maid,” that the tabloid had hacked his phones, and that he needed his “advice” about “bringing a rico claim against murdoch and the post in NY” given that “I am not the most sympathetic figure however.”
But by then it was Zuckerman who needed Epstein’s advice. Around 2012, the billionaire was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and he wanted to make sure his financial affairs were in order. He had sired a second daughter named Renee in 2008 with an anonymous mother believed to be a donor/surrogate combination; Epstein was in prison at the time, and the two did not appear to have discussed the details. Zuckerman also had two nephews working as executives in his publishing company whom he believed he could entrust to help, but Epstein offered to give his numbers a look, just in case.
THE YEAR OR SO THAT FOLLOWED in Zuckerman-Epstein correspondence is some of the most nuanced and psychologically illuminating stuff in the entire Epstein data dump. Epstein believed, or claimed to believe, that his mogul friend’s finances were a mess, that the JP Morgan private bankers he’d personally recommended were a bunch of rubes, that “significant sums” of Zuckerman’s $2 billion fortune were “in the wrong pockets,” and that it would cost Epstein “between 30 and 40 million dollars” and about 15 months to redesign Zuckerman’s various trusts, but that he could easily save him “literally hundreds of millions.” Epstein affectionately ribbed Zuckerman over his pathological cheapness: “The good news is that I can say with certainty that the cost of your personal dry cleaning has been accounted for perfectly, to the penny, and recorded properly.” But Zuckerman had woefully underbudgeted expenses associated with family members: “pay 15 million to settle not 3,” Epstein advised, regarding unspecified ambiguity in his settlement with his ex-wife.
He also advised Zuckerman to devote himself single-mindedly to preserving his health and sell everything he owned that was “illiquid,” starting with his art and helicopter and the Daily News, whose state of affairs was being undermined, he claimed, by “bad numbers.” This seems at least somewhat likely: In Zuckerman’s annual financial performance materials, the estimated value of the newspaper actually grew slightly, to $505.6 million from $454.6 million, between 2012 and 2013, which seems wildly implausible for a property that was losing tens of millions of dollars every year.
As with everything involving Epstein, it is hard to parse the good-faith advice from his inescapable predatorship. For example, he repeatedly advises Zuckerman to get married because “many of the more tricky issues would be solved. no estate tax. basis step up. guardianship for rene. 100s of millions saved.” But a younger, financially unsophisticated wife of the sort Epstein had proven so expert at both procuring for his friends (Eva Dubin) or merely ingratiating himself to (Soon-Yi Previn, Valeria Chomsky) would also likely entail a lifetime of “commissions” for Epstein in the form of “advice” on elite colleges and charities to which to donate, securities fraud attorneys and reputation managers to retain, social functions to underwrite, and comely au pairs and receptionists and executive assistants to import from former Eastern Bloc countries. Similarly, selling off assets without haggling too much over price might have been sound advice in a year of 30 percent stock market returns, but it also would have provided ample opportunity for Epstein to play both sides of the transaction somehow.
It’s not in the end entirely clear whether Zuckerman signed the contract with his old friend. Email exchanges with Zuckerman’s nephews Eric and James Gertler depict his condition worsening precipitously in 2015, and suggest Epstein had begun working directly with them to steer donations to Zuckerman’s favored causes, namely Israel and Alzheimer’s research. But Epstein was proven right about one big thing: The DailyNews had needed to find a lucid buyer immediately. Instead, the Gertlers attempted to run it, and for a year the newspaper seemed to be experiencing a renaissance as the Page Six of Resistance Liberalism.
But the brothers could not stop or stomach the bleeding, and in September they finally “sold” the thing, to the detritus of Conrad Black’s old newspaper empire, which had since been commandeered by a two-man private equity firm that was billing the papers $2.7 million to charter its private jet and $5 million for the services of its founder, who had renamed the company “TRONC” (for Tribune Online Company), of all things.
The Gertler brothers sold New York’s hometown newspaper to TRONC for $1, even though its workforce was no longer unionized and its pension liabilities were minimal, even though its staff had been gutted beyond recognition yet it was still collecting $50 million in annual ad revenue, even though the purchase came with a 49 percent interest in a 25-acre tract of land in Jersey City overlooking the Hudson River. TRONC would soon be re-renamed by an even worse pack of private equity guys, the villainous Duke bros of Alden Global Capital, which has optimized what is now a tradition of strip-mining local newspapers.
But a 2018 email from Epstein to a friend who appears to be Steve Bannon about an embittered ex-business partner suggested the transaction was potentially not what it seemed, though the Prospect could find no evidence substantiating or even explicating the claim.
“Fyi, there is a guy, totally nuts, out of jail after 20 years that has been sending letters re me to all agencies, stalking, etc. wants a billion dollars,” he wrote in the middle of an exchange otherwise focused on monitoring the legal maneuvering of various Russiagate conspirators. Journalists had been sniffing around Epstein’s own scandal for the first time in years that year, and perhaps his relish over Trump’s misfortunes had reminded him he had enemies, too. “No real threat, just one more pain.”
Then:
“Steven hoffenberg,” Epstein continued. “He bought the ny daily news for 1 dollar.”
Hoffenberg was found dead in a ratty apartment outside New Haven almost three years to the day after Epstein’s death, after one of Epstein’s most tenacious early victims contacted local police to check in on him. There were reportedly no signs of foul play.
Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room, 1963, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art. The chamber, rigorously purged of human presence, stands as the spatial analogue of Orwell’s 1984, where dangerous memories vanish and institutional erasure governs the space.
Calling All Evolutionary Leaders in Service to Conscious Evolution! This Is Our Moment of Choice!
Together, we can accelerate the evolution of human consciousness and co-create the future. Are we ready to step into our power and take an Evolutionary Leap?
STATEMENT BY THE SOURCE OF SYNERGY FOUNDATION
Deepak Chopra and the Evolutionary Leaders Circle
The Source of Synergy Foundation was founded to support positive global transformation and advance conscious leadership rooted in inner awareness, global responsibility, integrity, and the belief in the inherent dignity of all.Recent disclosures of the Epstein Files have revealed that Dr. Deepak Chopra, co-founder of one of our main projects, the Evolutionary Leaders Circle, exchanged disturbing emails with Epstein that objectify and demean women and girls. Epstein was convicted of sexual abuse and implicated in human trafficking, financial manipulation, and exploitation of minors.While Deepak Chopra has not been investigated or criminally charged, and we do not claim to know the full extent of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, the Source of Synergy Foundation has removed Dr. Chopra from the Evolutionary Leaders Circle, whose mission is to inspire, support, and serve conscious evolution. The lack of full accountability in Dr. Chopra’s most recent public statements and the lack of transparency regarding his association with Epstein do not adhere to the standards of integrity that guide our organization.We stand in unwavering solidarity with the victims and survivors of all forms of exploitation and abuse in their ongoing journey to seek justice and healing. No amount of status, wealth or influence should ever shield abuse or silence those who have suffered. We honor the immense courage it takes to speak truth in the face of power. Exploitation, abuse of power, and complicity are incompatible with the future we seek to build.We are reviewing our policies and procedures to ensure that they reflect the rigor that conscious leadership demands. We commit ourselves to fostering a culture of accountability, transparency, and dignity where exploitation cannot be allowed and where every human being is regarded as sacred.This moment reflects a broader global reckoning. Across sectors, systems built on concentrated power, status above scrutiny, and unchallenged deference to individuals are being questioned. Leadership rooted in personality and influence, rather than values and principles, does not serve the highest good. A recalibration is occurring in the world around us and within ourselves where we are more deeply recognizing and developing our own innate power and capacities.Old patterns of imbalance, power, exploitation, silence, and misplaced trust are being made visible.The unraveling is not the end. It is the beginning of something more honest, more enlightened, and more whole.
Introducing SOUL: The Science of Unitive LoveBy Grant Storry, Jude Currivan and David Lorimer SOUL: The Science Of Unitive Love SOUL, the Science Of Unitive Love, is a collaborative vision co-initiated by Evolutionary Leaders Dr. Jude Currivan, cosmologist, planetary healer, and co-founder of WholeWorld-View, and Grant Storry, systems healer, philosopher-builder, and technology executive. It builds on Jude’s decades of pioneering work in unitive science and cosmology and is being carried forward by a growing community of aligned researchers, organizations, and practitioners, including fellow Evolutionary Leaders Heidi Sparkes Guber, David Lorimer, Dr Elena Mustakova, and Anne-Marie Voorhoeve.
SOUL offers a way of engaging within the world: oriented by Coherence, expressed through relationship, and animated by love.
Founded on the evidence-based unitive science that underpins and frames the Evolutionary Leaders’ adopted unitive narrative, SOUL asks a deceptively simple but profound question: What if love is not merely a human emotion or ethical ideal, but a universal principle intrinsic to the nature of reality itself? From this inquiry, SOUL explores how the universe coheres, evolves, and regenerates through nested relationships -across cosmology, biology, psychology, social systems, consciousness, and lived human experience- revealing Coherence, meaning, belonging, wholeness, and pattern as fundamental features and natural law governing how our shared reality unfolds.
Crucially, SOUL is not only something to understand, but a posture to inhabit, a way of orienting toward Life itself. It offers a Coherent lens through which we meet ourselves, one another, and the living world, recognizing that inner states and outer systems are continuously shaping one another within a shared relational field. In this light, SOUL asks us to consider: What changes when love is approached not as an ideal, but as a principle of Coherence in everyday life? As both theory and lived practice, SOUL invites us to act as Coherent agents, in relationship, aware of our entanglement with all Life; allowing love, consciously embodied as Coherence, to become a practical force for profound transformational healing across personal, collective, and systemic domains.SOUL, featured in Paradigm Explorer: Activating CoherenceConsciousnessLearn more at: WholeWorld-View: SOUL“Love, consciously embodied as Coherence, becomes a practical force for transformation.”
Happy News in Times of DarknessBy Anneloes Smitsman Warm greetings from a very hot and sunny Mauritius. It’s been a little while since our last newsletter, and this one comes packed with good news!Many of you know that for the past year(s), I’ve been fully immersed in bringing Elowyn: Quest of Time into the world, together with an incredible team and mission-aligned partners. I’m happy to share that we’re now very close to the Alpha release—and something unexpected and wonderful has already happened (prior to the official game launch).Just 10 days ago, we launched our first public Elowyn quests with fun rewards to build the community in partnership with Immutable Play. Since then, the Elowyn community has grown by over 16,000 new players, with thousands now playing Elowyn daily. Seeing so many people step into win-win gameplay and get creative with their positive-impact strategies has been deeply moving. Truly a dream come true, and this is only the beginning. We’re soon embarking on Beta development, followed by the official Master release and full launch later this year.If you haven’t joined yet, you’re warmly invited to step in and play Elowyn. For those of you who joined earlier, please note that all accounts have been reset as part of our transition to a new Polygon-supported wallet solution.As our thank you, everyone who joins now receives 100 EWA points, free access to all 144 cards, and several card duplicates. Very soon, you’ll be able to fuse and upgrade cards in the in-game shop and trade them on the in-game marketplace (more on this in upcoming emails).A quick note: we use Sequence as our Polygon wallet solution. Due to international financial regulations, certain countries are currently blocked. If you’re unable to create an in-game wallet, please check the country you’re accessing Elowyn from.We’re also excited to share that we’re once again participating in the Green Game Jam, part of the UNEP-backed Playing for the Planet Alliance. This year, Elowyn will be playing and fundraising for rainforest protection and regeneration—more on that campaign very soon.Join Elowyn here and click the play button on the website via your desktop browser (not yet available on mobile).Watch the new Elowyn trailer(or click the image below). It’s already gone viral on X, YouTube, and TikTok. It’s time now, for a new way to play with new ways to gain…With deep thanks to our Executive Producer, Mitch, and our partner Frag Games for their amazing work on the trailer.
Elowyn: Quest of Time – Official Alpha Trailer | Battle Moloch in Win-Win CCG
A dark force is rising. Shadows grow stronger. Fears run deep. When hope falls asleep, people forget the promises they swore to keep.
Transform the world of winners and losers with new rules to play, new ways to gain. Join Elowyn: Quest of Time – the epic strategy card game where every choice matters! The stakes are high. Only an unlikely alliance between Shadow Arcs and Guardians can stop the rise of Moloch — the giant of greed and domination.www.earthwise.games
Launching uniphi Culture & Leadership DiagnosticBy Peter Matthies I’m super excited to unveil our uniphi Culture & Leadership Diagnostic, which we’ve been creating & testing for the past 2 years.
For 20 years, I’ve worked with leaders who genuinely care about their people.
They know their revenue. They know their margins. They know their headcount.
But when I ask: “How are your people really experiencing your leadership?”
Most pause. Not because they don’t care. But because they don’t actually know.Of course there are tools available that measure engagement. But when I ask leaders, I hear is this: Often too superficial. Too political. Don’t lead to real change.
So over the past two years, we’ve been quietly building something different. It’s called uniphi™.
It’s not another engagement survey but a culture & leadership diagnostic that provides Data You Can FeelInsights You Can Work WithReal Conversations.uniphi helps founders, CEOs, and HR leaders see: Where culture is strong Where leadership & culture needs improving What their people feel (but don’t say) And what to actually do next
What we’ve learned so far: Culture isn’t soft. It’s just rarely measured well.
www.evolutionaryleaders.net/opportunitiesWelcome to the Evolutionary Leaders new portal to OPPORTUNITIES – upcoming events, courses, journeys and more, all led by members of the community of Evolutionary Leaders. Check in often when you’re looking for new, exciting experiences to empower your contributions to the conscious evolution of humanity!Here are some of the opportunities for the coming month:
How to Meditate Without Even Trying By Peter Russell I’ve been busy working on a new book, How to Meditate Without Even Trying, which will be published by New World Library on March 24th. Moreover, I’m excited to say that Eckhart Tolle has written a delightful forward.
Some of you may recognize this as the title of my online course. It began as a handbook to that course, but as I worked on it, I found myself adding practices I’ve shared over the years in groups, lectures, and videos—material that had never been brought together in one place. The result is a much more comprehensive book, How to Meditate Without Even Trying.
I’ve also posted a new video (see below).
In it, Eckhart Tolle and I discuss the nature of consciousness. We explore a question that often gets blurred in scientific discussions: while the brain may shape the changing experiences that arise in consciousness—the “contents” of consciousness—does it actually create consciousness itself? Or is consciousness already present in all living systems? Watch Here
Peter Russell and Eckhart Tolle explore the nature of consciousness. The conventional scientific view treats it as a byproduct of brain chemistry. Peter claims there are actually two questions here which get confused. 1. Does the brain determine the changing experiences that arise in consciousness – the “contents” of consciousness? 2 Does the brain create the ever-present faculty of consciousness itself? He proposes that the confusion is exacerbated from our use of the word consciousness as a noun – some “thing” we can know. Instead, it is better to treat it as a verb – “knowing”: the permanent quality of being that knows our ever-changing thoughts and experiences.
Videos and Podcasts
Nina Meyerhof Presents Children’s Torch of Hope to Walk for Peace Monks
During the 109th and final day of the Walk for Peace pilgrimage, Dr. Nina Meyerhof gifted the Torch of Hope to with Venerable Bhikkhu Paññākāra and the walk for peace monks in front of the Lincoln monument in Washington, DC.
Was Patriarchy a Detour?With Riane Eisler, Heather Ensworth and Sandie Sedgbeer
History, Trauma & the Sacred Feminine When did we begin to believe that domination and hierarchy were inevitable? In this Synergy Sessions episode, Sandie Sedgbeer explores an alternative historical and psychological narrative with Riane Eisler and Heather Ensworth, drawing on research across disciplines to re-examine long-held assumptions about human nature.
Free Teaching on the Medicine WheelBy Alberto VilloldoIn this video, I explain: • Why everything ultimately is energetics • Why we don’t wait for crisis to upgrade the field • Why this is not about learning — but becoming, embodying • And why this path reclaims us as the authors of our destinyWe are living in times of rapid change. The future is happening quickly.And we have to create the health, the meaning, and the destiny we want to take with us. Your place around the fire is calling you back to it, and if you feel it, I encourage you to watch this teaching.This Training is currently available as:
6-MONTH ONLINE PROGRAM FINAL Class starting: March 9th, 2026 or 28-DAY IMMERSIVE RESIDENTIAL PROGRAM Croatia (August 2026), Chile (November 2026)See video invitation here
The Cell is a ComputerBy Bruce Lipton
Integral City – The Master Code of CareMarilyn Hamilton with Puria
In this interview we talk about:What can we learn in organizing cities from the beehivesThe master code and frequency of careWhat is Integral City workWhat are the four voices we need to include in city dialoguesHow can cities find the double sustainability loopIf you wish individual support on your journey of awakening, healing or embodiment of your most evolved being: https://puria.org
Between Realms and ReasonWith Karuna and Sandie Segbeer
From Glamour to Grace What if awakening begins not with effort… but with awareness? In this deeply reflective episode of Between Realms and Reason, Karuna shares her journey from the world of fashion to the path of Kundalini Yoga, meditation, and conscious awakening. Through lived experience and spiritual insight, she explores how sound, vibration, and mantra serve as gateways to healing, awareness, and inner transformation — supporting both personal growth and collective evolution.
Articles
2030 Peace Moonshot: Creating a Global Culture of Peace By David Gershon The First Earth Run: Inspiration for the 2030 Peace Moonshot In 1986, at the height of the Cold War, the author conceived and organized a global initiative in partnership with UNICEF and ABC Television: the passing of a torch of peace around the world. Called the First Earth Run, it was witnessed by a billion people through global media and involved 25 million participants and 45 heads of state across 62 countries. Wherever the torch of peace traveled, wars stopped, and humanity experienced a shared sense of peace.
This global peace initiative produced outcomes once considered impossible. Military adversaries laid down their arms. Communities united across political, religious, and national divides. Two Cold War antagonists, President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and President Reagan of the United States, both endorsed the effort, transcending their differences. Heads of state collaborated with grassroots NGOs. A new move on the geopolitical chessboard was born with remarkable outcomes.
These events prompted important questions: What lessons could be carried forward? How could one translate the knowledge gleaned from mobilizing humanity for a global moment in time into behavior change at scale — the ultimate social impact measurement? Answering these questions would require a deep exploration of behavior change, community empowerment, large-scale system transformation, and the science of tipping points.
Over the following decades, and much trial and error, this exploration led to the creation of the Peace on Earth by 2030 Moonshot — a bold, systemic plan to create a global culture of peace by the end of the decade . Fig.1. Communities across the world mobilized to participate in the First Earth Run in 1986. (Photo Credits: Haroldo de Faria Castro; UNICEF; Robert Goodearl)
The 2030 Peace Moonshot The Peace Moonshot is built around a three-part transformative architecture. A Peace Game transforms individuals through peace practices. A Peace Zone transforms communities through cooperation. A Global Peace Movement ignites collective purpose and momentum. When these three operate together, peace becomes self-reinforcing.
This transformational architecture scales peace from behavior change to system change. Personal practices create new social behaviors. Repeated behaviors in communities become new social norms. New social norms across communities shift the operating system of society. Peace scales the same way all durable change scales — through norms.
While the Peace Moonshot’s primary goal is creating a global culture of peace, it is also designed to strengthen the conditions needed for all positive change initiatives to succeed. By addressing root causes of obstacles, such as lack of cooperation or community polarization, it enables more effective action across society.
Just as the best way to influence a river is by acting upstream, the Peace Moonshot targets these upstream interventions to improve outcomes downstream, where most social change happens. When communities build cooperation and collective agency, they are better equipped to address challenges such as poverty, health, education, and environmental sustainability. This is the benefit provided by establishing a culture of peace.
From 2020 to 2025, the Peace Moonshot initiative piloted its two transformative social innovations: the Peace Game and Peace Zones.
The Peace Game pilot engaged thousands of participants who carried out tens of thousands of Peace Actions across hundreds of cities impacting millions of people. In parallel, five multi-year Peace Zone pilots were launched — two in the United States and one each in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa which modeled cooperation strategies. To support scaling these efforts, more than 70 partner organizations were mobilized, including Rotary, which brings a global network of 46,000 clubs spanning over 200 countries.
Based on the successful pilot implementation and knowledge acquired from these platforms, Empowerment Institute and its partners, who are leading the initiative, have now begun the scaling phase. The goal from 2026 to 2030 is to achieve peace tipping points by engaging 40 million people globally in the Peace Game and establishing 10,000 Peace Zones worldwide.
Transformation of Individuals: The Peace Game “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” — Preamble to UNESCO Charter
The peace plan posits that lasting peace starts with a shift in human consciousness. Through the Peace Game, individuals are empowered to transform internal barriers like fear, prejudice, and indifference. This is achieved through an engaging app that uses gamified behavior change and a peer support system called a Peace Team. A research study on the Peace Game found participants became empowered, collaborative, empathetic, and willing to help and connect with others. […]Read the full article on Medium hereIf you wish to accelerate the social impact of your organization, create a Peace Zone in your community, or contribute in another way, you are invited to become a Peace Moonshot partner. To learn more, visit https://peace2030.earth/partners. To play the Peace Game, visit https://peace2030.earth.
Don’t Eat (some of) Your GreensBy Lynne McTaggartFor at least 70 years, the West has been consumed by the notion of healthy eating, but what exactly constitutes ‘health foods’ has been a highly moveable feast, with a new theory emerging with each new decade.
Ever since Ancel Keys published his Seven Countries studies in the 1950s to determine the source of heart disease, the consensus has been that a high fat diet and high blood cholesterol are the primary culprits of heart disease.
Most significantly, Keys’ partial research (conveniently eliminating further evidence from nine other countries that didn’t support his theory) spawned the entire low-fat industry and the notion that saturated fats caused the build-up of cholesterol in the blood.
To this day, most of mainstream medicine still supports the fat-are-bad-for-us theory, encouraging anyone over 50 to take statins as a preventive measure.
What was considered gospel for all those decades is now being debunked by new evidence showing that cholesterol and fats are essential to brain health and that statins and low-fat diets (often full of highly processed ‘healthy’ alternatives) may be responsible for the current epidemic of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
In the last decade, carbohydrates have become the demon food group. Those in the vanguard of healthy eating have ditched low-fat, added back meat and saturated fats, and are now minimizing all the white stuff – potatoes, white rice, processed foods of all sorts – sticking to low-glycemic foods that convert into sugar slowly. At the centerpiece of high protein, low carb eating is plant foods: dark greens like spinach, sweet potatoes instead of the white variety, plus nuts, especially almonds, and for treats, dark chocolate with cocoa content of 70 percent or more.
Every last book on diet and nutrition now emphasizes drinking regular green smoothies, packed with almonds, chia seeds and protein powder in the morning; baking with almond flour instead of wheat flour; consuming lots of legumes; and filling your plate with dark leafy greens. But this too can be a recipe for ill health.
Many of these so-called superfoods contain high levels of a substance called ‘oxalates’ (the common name for oxalic acid), a naturally occurring substance present in many plant foods like leafy greens, nuts, and soybeans and other legumes.
When consumed in high amounts, this anti-nutrient can bind to calcium during digestion, preventing absorption of vital nutrients and causing a raft of problems, from joint pain and irritable bowel to skin issues, sinusitis and, most problematically, kidney stones.
The toxicity of oxalates is nothing new. Oxalic acid was used in the 1700s as an industrial substance and cleaning powder, and 200 years ago, medical reports discussed cases of accidental poisoning with it – some even causing kidney failure. In the mid-1800s, doctors connected oxalates with everything from fatigue and bladder pain to arthritis.
Nevertheless, in modern times, only doctors those specializing in kidney disease have made the connection between kidney function and high oxalate foods since three-quarters of kidney stones contain calcium oxalate. […] Read the full article here
On Sacred RelationshipA remedy for an increasingly transactional culture By Stephen Dinan
How do we relate to others in a way that liberates ourselves and helps to heal the world? Today I offer my reflections on sacred relationship, which I believe sits at the heart of personal and cultural renewal. As the fabric of public trust continues to fray, our ability to engage in meaningful, life-affirming connections becomes not only a personal path but a planetary remedy.Sacred relationship is not limited to romance or long-term intimacy. It can emerge in a five minute encounter or grow across decades. It is a way of engaging that sees, honors, and amplifies the divine essence in the other person and blesses their highest becoming. It is grounded in love but includes a more attuned, empowering way of engaging as well.This orientation creates a third presence between people — not just you and me but a field of shared coherence that begins to grow between us. Sacred relationship is a triad: Self, Other, and the Bond, which we can call friendship, alliance, partnership or something unique. Each part of the tried requires care, curiosity, and attunement.By contrast, a transactional relationship centers on extraction: what can I get from this person? This orientation objectifies. The other becomes a means to an end – a vehicle or stepping stone to get more of something I desire. In keeping the focus on the egoic, separate self, it lacks care for the other person and reinforces a sense of isolation for both parties. The result? Disconnection, cynicism, and cultural polarization.When relationships are governed by self-interest alone, trust withers. And when enough breakdowns of trust accumulate, we begin to anticipate betrayal. Suspicion becomes the norm. Self-preservation becomes the baseline.Transactional relationships reinforce a culture of greed and selfishness because people get the clear signal that others won’t look out for their best interests, which leads to more suspicion, fear, and self-preservation.Many of the signals of transactional relationships are subtle. Most people aren’t aware of how they act in more transactional ways that corrode the quality of our relationship field. Here are a few examples that are common and contribute to a more transactional relational culture. […]Read the full article on Substack here
A Moment in TimeBy Kristin Engvig After many years of convening women from around the world, today I felt a profound happiness (about it again).There was a time when my focus on inner development was overlooked, sometimes even questioned. Yet the systems change required to create a paradigm in which we truly flourish cannot be built by addressing the world and the workplace alone.
We must also address ourselves.
Our inner lives. Our balance of feminine and masculine. Our body, mind, and heart.
Over the past 29 years, I am also deeply proud that many women who have walked this path have gone both far and deep. With that depth, our collective consciousness has risen. Worldwide.
Today, as we enter the Chinese New Year, I find myself reflecting on our long-standing connections with China and on the wisdom that has shaped this journey.
I remember one of our speakers and my Chinese Qi Gong master, Bi Sung , once telling me: “If you wish to increase your consciousness, there are two things you must do: – Meditate. – And serve the world with your heart.”
Her words have stayed with me.
It is not enough to educate and empower; we must cultivate inner connection and stillness. And it is not enough to meditate in solitude; we must bring our awakened heart into service. Inner cultivation and outer contribution belong together.
A Shift in the Field In recent weeks, I have held several women’s circles, a deeper evolution of the Mobilizing Women meetings.
I have such passion for coming together again.
Because unlike earlier years, when my conversations about consciousness or spiritual intelligence were met with skepticism, something has shifted.
I have always believed in wholeness: integrating inner and outer, feminine and masculine, body and soul. To transform systems, we must become the solution.
There were moments when I felt out of place in a world that prized intellect and competition, while WIN also stood for collaboration, harmony, and a whole-systems view. The integration of the two.
Today, I sense readiness.
A longing for luminous leadership. For deeper connection to Earth, to one another, and to what lies beyond us.
An Open Letter to Spiritual & Harmonic Leaders: From Outrage to Harmonic ActionHow Awakening Leaders Respond to a Fractured WorldBy Julie KrullPicture on MediumNote to the reader: This letter is written in a moment of collective reckoning and offered as a stabilizing response for those committed to healing without collapse. As evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris often reminded us, humanity appears to be moving from a long adolescence into an early adulthood as a species. This letter is written from — and for — that developmental threshold.
Dear leaders, teachers, practitioners, and stewards of the future — Beloved Imaginal Souls,
We are living in a time of exposure. Not just of individuals, but of systems.
Not just of behavior, but of underlying architectures of power, silence, and complicity.
What was once hidden is surfacing. What was once tolerated is being questioned. What was once “just how things work” is no longer holding. This is not merely a political or cultural reckoning. It is a developmental threshold — one that asks something deeper of us as a species.
This is not a moment for spiritual bypass. Nor is it a moment for outrage or moral theater. It is a moment for adult consciousness.
First: We Feel, Then We Regulate Before we respond, we allow ourselves to feel. Shock, grief, anger, outrage, betrayal, fear — these are natural and necessary human responses when harm and corruption are exposed. Feeling them does not make us reactive; denying them does.
There are moments when anger is appropriate. When outrage signals a moral boundary. When grief tells the truth about what has been lost. These emotions are not evidence of weakness. They are evidence that our hearts are awake.
But feeling is not the same as leading from dysregulation.
Harmonic leadership begins when we learn to hold the tension of the opposites: to feel deeply and remain steady, to honor emotion and stay coherent, to allow intensity without being overtaken by it.
We take care of ourselves responsibly. We ground in the body. We breathe. We slow perception. We allow sensation to move — without collapsing into it or acting it out unconsciously. Because dysregulated leadership amplifies chaos. Reactive leadership fragments the field.
Coherence is not emotional numbness. It is the capacity to stay present with what is real. And coherence is not a preference — it is infrastructure.
Second: We Center Harm Without Losing Humanity Harm is real. Those harmed matter. Their dignity, safety, and healing must not be sacrificed to preserve reputations, institutions, or comfort.
Justice is not anti-love. Consequences are not unspiritual. Boundaries are not duality. At the same time, compassion does not require denial, and accountability does not require dehumanization. Withdrawing support is not exiling a soul. Naming harm is not hatred. Refusing alignment is not cruelty.
The Natural Order of the Universe is Wholeness and UnityUnitive Consciousness is Our Archetypal Inheritance By Bob Atkinson To realize the preconditions necessary for bringing about the unity of the human family, we need to see the big picture of why this is our origin and our destiny.
Unity is the glue maintaining the wholeness-in-motion of all things. At the mystic heart of all sacred traditions – and now at the leading edge of the latest scientific findings – is the knowledge that a hidden thread of wholeness connects and unites all things in existence. Love is the underlying force of Creation.There is an inherent unity to the Universe. All the planets in the sky above have been created to be in perfect alignment with each other. All the cells and organs in the human body have been created to be in perfect alignment with each other. These macro and micro levels were designed to fit perfectly together expressing harmony, balance, and unity.
All things came into being through the supreme attractive force of Love. All of Creation is a sacred wholeness-in-motion, the embodiment of Love-in-action. The cause of the existence of the entire Creation is Love-in-action, the force that maintains unity throughout.
From its inception, an archetypal unity pervaded the entire Cosmos. This original wholeness was the essence of the Cosmos, with all beings emerging out of the same elemental substance, bound together by the same power of attraction.
This attractive force of unity manifests coherence between all atoms of the component parts of Creation, from mineral to vegetable to the animal kingdom and beyond, as expressed in the love emanating from the human heart. […]Read the full article on Substack here
Artificial Intelligence, Human Stupidity, and Weapons of Mass DistractionBy Anodea JudithIf animals could talk, I sometimes wonder what they might have said as humans made their late arrival to the evolutionary party.
“Hey, there’s this new species,” Bear says. “They walk on two feet and have really big brains. They use tools and complex language. They can figure things out we can’t even begin to understand.”
Fox flicks his tail. “And they’re spreading fast. Soon they’ll be everywhere.”
Horse, ever hopeful, offers, “Maybe they’re here to help the rest of us survive and prosper.”
Cow chews thoughtfully. “Or maybe they’re going to round us up for food.”
History suggests Cow had the better instincts.
Fast-forward a blink of evolutionary time, and now it’s our turn to whisper nervously around the fire.
“There’s this new intelligence,” the pundits say. “It learns faster than we do. It writes, paints, diagnoses disease, drives cars, predicts wars. It may cure cancer. It may end jobs. It may save us. It may replace us.”
Will artificial intelligence be our savior or our demise?
And beneath that question, a quieter one: Is AI really the problem — or is human stupidity the greater threat?
Every Advantage Has a Shadow
Every technology offers an advantage. Guns over swords. Chainsaws over axes. Cars over walking. Computers over memory.
Each leap makes life faster, easier, and more powerful, allowing us to do more with less. And each leap carries consequences we conveniently ignore.
Guns are the leading cause of death in children in America. Chainsaws leveled ancient forests in a generation. Cars and planes contribute to climate catastrophe. Screens connect us everywhere, yet leave us lonelier than ever.
It isn’t the tools themselves that betray us. It’s our failure to use them wisely. And that is a failure of human intelligence.
We wage wars that solve nothing. We poison the ecosystems that feed us. We ignore the rise of dictatorships until it’s too late. We repeat the same historical mistakes with astonishing confidence.
From this perspective, humanity doesn’t look like the most intelligent species on Earth. But maybe stupidity isn’t the right word.
On the Concept of Paradigms and a New Paradigm for Evolving Cooperative SystemsBy David Sloan Wilson Our 21st-century crises are rooted in outdated, individualistic paradigms. A new complexity and evolution-based paradigm can better guide science, policy, and collective action. How we act upon the world depends upon how we conceptualize the world. Life is far too complex to pay attention to everything. Instead, our ideas draw our attention to a tiny slice of reality and process this information in ways that “make sense;” in other words, that help us to survive and thrive in the world to which we are so largely blind.
The multiple crises facing the world today are therefore symptoms of a crisis taking place inside our heads. Our ideas are failing us. Perhaps they served us better in the past, or served at least some of us, but now they seem poised to bring about the ruin of us all. It’s not just a matter of good or bad intentions. Even the best-intentioned person can behave ruinously based on ideas that “made sense” to them but didn’t happen to play out as intended in the real world. Such a person is like the character of a folk tale who is granted a wish and ends up regretting what they wished for.
The phrase “new paradigm” is often used to convey the need for a way of thinking that is truly different and not just a nudging of current ways of thought. Yet, the concept of paradigms is notoriously fuzzy, and even people who are highly aligned in their good intentions differ in their articulation of what “the” new paradigm might be. If the concept of a new paradigm becomes too pluralistic, then the word paradigm loses its meaning.
This essay has two goals: The first is to provide an operational definition of the word “paradigm” that captures the idea of multiple sets of ideas guiding action. My second goal is to identify both an old paradigm that needs to be shed and a new paradigm that needs to be adopted. I see this in broad historical terms as a transition from the individualism and reductionism of past centuries to the holism and interactionism of the 21st century.
The overall tone of my essay is optimistic. There really is a new way of thinking that has emerged over roughly the last 50 years, which can help us navigate the world much better than older patterns of thought. The new paradigm is not something we need to search for or bring about in the future. It already exists for a sizeable community of thinkers and doers—although this community is a tiny fraction of those who need to know about it. Hence, the urgent need is to catalyze something that is already in progress. […]Read the full article here
A Little Love Letter to CommunityLet’s fire up this horse year with truth-full compassion By Shilpa JainFeb 14, 2026Dear Beloved Community,
Buckle up my friends; it’s that time again. The Lunar New Year is nearly upon us, and this time around, it suggests a doozy of change.
We are moving from a very intense 2025 Yin Wood Snake year — where the energetic impulse was ‘to shed [and] find intimacy in what is dying’ — into a yet-to-be-known 2026 Yang Fire Horse year, which ‘powers revolutions fated by the stars’ (according to the wisdom of my friend and artist Kylie Tseng; see her incredible images below). This love letter is for both of us, you and me. I am sending it from my tender heart to yours, so we can prepare to hold each other for what lies ahead. I’ve been praying that this Fire Horse year will not be a fire hose year. Regardless, I know I’ll be needing you as much as ever, and I want you to know you can count on me, too. That’s what community love is all about, in my humble opinion.
As this year comes to a close, I have been feeling the impacts of the shedding of old worldviews and institutions. Whether seen in the DOGE-ing that kicked us in the gut at the top of the year, or in the ceaselessly violent ‘cease-fire’ in Gaza, or in the funding of a few billionaires’ tax cuts over healthcare and nutritional assistance for millions, or in the heinous cover-up of the Epstein scandal, or in the ICE goon squads that intensified these last months, I have felt that snake shedding its skin almost daily. The thin veneer of civility and progress has systematically been pulled off, and the depth and breadth of the pervasive sicknesses of greed, hatred, and separation have been revealed.
Yet, even though so many moments of this last year have been horrifying and painful, I also think they have illuminated what matters most — love for each other, care for Mama Earth, truth and honesty, and standing up to stop injustice and violence — all while building up pathways of self-care, mutual aid, interconnected solidarity, and other kinds of kinship routes. I love that the ideology of ‘neighborism’ has emerged from the heart and soul of Minnesota’s people power — the sense that protecting the people around you, regardless of who they are and where they come from, is more valuable than anything else.* That feels like the intimacy that is most needed now. And, it is what I want to invite more of this year.
How can we take the released energy of truthfulness into the New Year with gusto? How can we continue to shed the veneer of separation and fold deeper into the intimacy of connection? How can heart-powered creativity be nurtured as a driving force of change? What does that look like for each of us, personally and collectively? And how can we hold each other in these revolutionary times?
Heart-powered revolutions have me thinking about compassion. I’ve written about the compass of compassion before, and I sense the invitations for empathy, forgiveness, curiosity, and stillness will continue to be helpful directions to explore. And yet, one of the things I’ve noticed recently is how compassion can get twisted into a form of avoidance, which then weakens the power of our communities. […]Read the full article on Substack here
Consciousness Was Never MysticalBy Anoop Kumar Consciousness was never mystical.
It’s the only thing we have ever experienced. What is truly mystical is the “physical” world – which, mysteriously, nobody has ever seemed to contact in the absence of consciousness.
Hmm…. Let’s straighten things out a bit and state what we know for sure.
We are conscious. Through consciousness we experience many things, including a “physical” world and a “physical” body. Neuroscience, physics, and tech are up to their necks in investigating these relationships.
What if healthcare caught up? We would lose *nothing* of what we know today, yet also gain the wisdom of all traditions across time. Not a bad deal.
We’re connecting the real problems/opportunities in healthcare, like cost, quality, payments, access, knowledge, healing, scale, blind spots, AI, and more with the theory that consciousness is fundamental and matter is its pattern.
Whoa Nelly! That’s a chasm and then some! Don’t worry. We got this. There’s a bridge.
The bridge is the Numocore Core Models, which are five models of human nature subtle and rigorous enough to be grounded in the primacy of consciousness while also being practical enough to be applied to intractable healthcare problems.
We’ve taken two big steps so far.
(1) We’ve created a beta AI based on Anthropic’s Claude to start explaining the Core Models in such a way that executives, holistic practitioners (including doctors), policy wonks, and anyone else can appreciate what the primacy of consciousness looks like and how to apply it to healthcare. (No medical advice though. We’ll develop and partner with clinical teams to deploy that.) The focus is on understanding and building solutions, not meandering. You can get to know Numos here: numocore.health/numos
(2) We’ve created a prototype of a new health system where you can watch videos on healing (and upload your insights about health, healing, and healthcare) and even book practitioners, all organized by the Core Models. This is early stage so we have a few videos and a couple amazing practitioners (please support them!). Play around and see how it works: numocore.health
Healing is possible when we discover the pattern behind all healing. We believe that pattern starts with the primacy of consciousness and extends outward in an infinite tapestry of organized, understandable, customized modalities. Real personalized medicine that heals, scales affordably, and offers independence – that’s what Numocore is about.
Consciousness is playing an ever bigger role in healthcare, wellness, and public health – and as it does, all of these will merge. The trajectory is clear, irreversible, and accelerating.
Please check out the above pages and let us know: *what’s good *what needs improvement *what’s missing Thank you! Healing is possible.
Find the Love Within the DarknessBy Clare Dubois To everyone else out there that is also really struggling with the daily onslaught of toxic sludge that is Epstein’s legacy – a few offerings.
This does all have to come out. In the same way the the body needs to shake out its poisons and a mind needs to dissolve its conditioning in order to heal enough to create a new state of being (or in our case, a new world order) healing requires the toxic to be seen and alchemized in order for transformation to occur. This is what is happening now, and this simply has to happen so we’re going to need to hold each others hands on the journey, because the journey is asking to be made, and made by all of us.
Almost more than the truth itself – the fact of how the system protects its own sickness needs to be seen in all its gory. How the system itself is sick. This excruciating process seems to be what is needed for the world at large to finally be able to grok just how readily those in power protect others in power, as blatantly as simply redacting their names for all to see. The process literally screams ‘we are hiding the perpetrators’ and I (and many of us) just want to throw up.
With every corrupt move, the conscious awareness and light of the masses is pressing into the murk, is gathering its true power, no longer satisfied to simply look away, building a tidal wave of momentum that is our collective demand for transparency. It’s an energetic mechanism of presence and relentless focus that if wielded consciously is steadily going to lift the scabs off all these unhealed nightmarish wounds of inhumanness. The truth will out, because the truth is love, and love will not allow this darkness to stay hidden forever.
When addressing trauma, one does not try to manhandle it into a different shape, one sits inside the unbearable with as much presence, compassion, and love as possible, until the system becomes conscious of itself and begins to realign. One has to look fully into the face of the nightmare, with all the love one possesses, until one begins to find the love within the darkness. Until lostness starts to find itself found. Until the exile dissolves into belonging. Until the agony is met with enough understanding to let go of the clench.
That is alchemy.
That is actual transformation.
When whatever has been held in exile, separation, damnation, horror, self loathing, confusion and anguish is met with sufficient compassion and presence to begin to recognize something other within itself, that is the beginning of a path back into unity.
Somehow, on a daily basis, I am asking us all to sit with the full extent of our compassion and presence and feel what is asking to be felt. Feel what is being dragged up from the shadows. Feel these structures and patterns of behavior that have existed because separation has been sought and accomplished so completely through cruelty wearing so many different kinds of faces.
Separation is a lie, because beneath anything and everything you could ever experience that is the very worst of everything, Love still exists. It does. I know this from my own incredibly gritty experience.
Beneath it all, love still exists. Please, let’s hold each other there.Photo: Lake Baikal in Siberia, by Alexi Trofimov
Be Brave in LoveBy Christian Sorensen “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.” ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi, presidential address to the First Gujarat Political Conference, November 3, 1917
One aspect of living wholeheartedly is loving those around you freely and fully. This can be a challenge because we have all been wounded and hurt by love at one time or another. Rejection can be hard, and we are all rejected at some point as we search for those people who are ready for and can accept our love and appreciation. The key is in not allowing the pain of the past to lock up our hearts and pull us away from the power of connecting with others on a deep level.
We are called to be brave in love! We must be bold and daring! If you hold yourself back because of past hurts, you deny yourself the joy, connection, and passion you feel when you share who you are with someone who is ready to see and know you. Sometimes it takes courage to take that first step forward to speak your truth and share your heart. When you do this, you see that it is always worth sharing your love because when you are brave in love and share yourself freely, the gifts and blessings outweigh any pain the past may have held.
Spiritual Contemplation: Think about what experiences from your past may be holding you back from sharing your love fully and freely? How can you step out bravely to open to love in a new way?
Affirmation: I bravely share my love with the world!
Personal Message: Continuing the 3-Year MiracleBy Patricia AlbereThree years ago, around this time, I shared with you that I was diagnosed with 4th-stage metastatic breast cancer that had moved into my pancreas, bones, and liver. After a period when it seemed the treatment wasn’t working, something shifted, and I began to feel better.
What first looked like a six-month life expectancy in January 2023 has now become over three years of miracles. A friend of mine called this period “An Unexpected Epilogue.”
With the treatment and prayers I’ve received, everyone — including my doctors — has been amazed at how much life and vitality I’ve had despite what my body has been going through. Each month and each year has felt like another expression of the miracle that I — and the Evolutionary Collective — have been living inside of.
Recently, however, the treatments have lost their effectiveness, and my body is showing signs that it is ready for a new reality. I’ve made the decision to stop further treatment and embrace the dying process (again). I’m considering this my graduation from being human (one can only hope).
There is a process and discovery unfolding about where things are going, and I want people to feel the excitement of that. I hope to share more in the coming weeks about the momentum we’re inside of and the future unfolding for the Evolutionary Collective and the larger world.
What feels most important to say right now is this: an evolutionary movement is underway, and it is very exciting.
Death itself carries a certain clarity. There is also an evolutionary clarity. When the world is at a particular threshold, something becomes vivid about what matters and how to draw closer to it.
In a world where so much competes for our attention, we are invited to ask what truly deserves it. We are not in an ordinary moment. We are in the midst of one of those times.
The most important question for such times is: “How do we listen for and stay awake to where evolution is taking us?”
Because there is a positive possibility in where we are being led.
I don’t know how long I personally have on this planet. But as a teacher, I know this beautiful creation — the Evolutionary Collective — is real. A family and community of unity. What everyone is looking for, we actually have.
I feel assured that what has been built has true existence and will continue, whether I am physically here or not.
Many of you already know Carolyne Mathlin, our Executive Director. Carolyne is one of our senior Mutual Awakening Teachers and has worked closely with me for the past eight years.
Two years ago, Sherry Pae joined our team. She brings a lifetime of mastery at the intersection of medical expertise, holistic healing, and spiritual development. She was a Critical Care Nurse for over two decades before moving into alternative practice for more than 30 years. During that time, she co-founded and directed one of the country’s first Holistic Healing Centers, blending modern medicine with alternative healing approaches. She later served as a faculty member at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, holding the position of Dean of Advanced Studies in both the United States and Europe, and Dean of the School in Europe. Her leadership has helped shape the future of healing and personal transformation.
I have complete confidence in Sherry and Carolyne’s ability to carry this work into its next evolution. You’ll be hearing more from them once I can no longer communicate with you directly.
No matter what happens to my body, I know that my Life continues from within shared unity. When the miracle of what was happening around me first became clear, I immediately thought, “I will live.” And it had nothing to do with my physical survival.
Thank you for being in this conversation and for being part of what is coming through to be known and lived by us now — and into the future.
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Our Moment of Choice is a perfect gift for friends, family – or yourself! And its wide variety of brief chapters by diverse visionaries makes it a great choice for book clubs and study groups. Enjoy! Learn more about Our Moment of Choice at www.OurMomentofChoice.comOur Moment of Choice: Visions and Hope for the Future, with chapters by 43 members of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle, is a winner of four awards including a gold Nautilus.
We Answered the Call to Conscious Evolution Help Us to Reach 50,000 – we’re getting SO close! Meet some of those who have joined Barbara Marx Hubbard, Gregg Braden, Bruce Lipton and other Evolutionary Leaders in making a Call to Conscious Evolution to collectively help accelerate the shift in global consciousness and create a world that works for everyone.ANSWER THE CALL!www.evolutionaryleaders.net/acalltoconsciousevolutionWE ANSWERED THE CALL:
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For at least 70 years, the West has been consumed by the notion of healthy eating, but what exactly constitutes ‘health foods’ has been a highly moveable feast, with a new theory emerging with each new decade. 
There was a time when my focus on inner development was overlooked, sometimes even questioned. Yet the systems change required to create a paradigm in which we truly flourish cannot be built by addressing the world and the workplace alone.
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There is an inherent unity to the Universe. All the planets in the sky above have been created to be in perfect alignment with each other. All the cells and organs in the human body have been created to be in perfect alignment with each other. These macro and micro levels were designed to fit perfectly together expressing harmony, balance, and unity.
If animals could talk, I sometimes wonder what they might have said as humans made their late arrival to the evolutionary party.
We Answered the Call to Conscious Evolution
This newsletter reaches thousands on the
