Who Are We?

Since 1992 the Marion Institute, sponsor of the Metahistory website, has been searching for ways to deepen the dialogue about who we are and where we come from. Io initiate this dialogue, in 2002 the Institute launched Metahistory.org as a creative experiment on the internet, a way of reaching a globally dispersed audience concerned with worldwide social change. In deciding to establish this site, the Institute feels it has found the most effective way to broaden this conversation and to engage more interested parties in the quest.

Many individuals, including both experimental and scholarly investigators, have contributed to the Institute’s conferences and workshops, and these intellectual leaders will contribute to our website, now called Metahistory Quest, in a variety of ways, shaping the site’s content in new and, we hope, surprising ways. It is our intention to invite them as well as others to contribute to an organic and fluid development of our new project, the quest for a way beyond the conditioning of our histories. Thus, a whole "family" of investigators and thoughtful scholars will eventually be participating in the dialogue to be unfolded in this site.

Five members who comprise the core team of metahistory.org and the sister site, futureprimitive.org:

MICHAEL BALDWIN, Publisher: Michael is co-founder (1992) and president of the Marion Institute, which spoonsor’s the metahistory.org website. His principal goal is to catalyze a steadily growing dialogue between Metahistory Quest and individuals and organizations committed to change, to a sane and sustainable future for all species. He will work closely with Joanna in the creation and evolution of the site’s interactive portal, Womb Dialogues, and on the development of Links.

JOHN LASH, co-founder and Principal author, is one of the foremost exponents of the power of myth to direct and shape an individual’s life, as well as history itself. Described as the true successor of Mircea Eliade, John is a lifelong student of world mythology, Tantra, the pre-Christian Mysteries, alchemy, and naked-eye astronomy. His published works include The Seeker’s Handbook: The Complete Guide to Spiritual Pathfinding (Crown, 1991), Twins and the Double (Thames & Hudson, 1993), The Hero - Manhood and Power (Thames & Hudson, 1995), and Quest for the Zodiac (Starhenge Books, 1999). John has lectured widely in the United States and Europe.

JOANNA HARCOURT-SMITH, Link-Liaison and moderator of Womb Dialogues, as well as a contributing writer. Joanna was a pioneer of the consciousness revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last twenty years she has dedicated her life to the practice of sobriety and loving- kindness. She is a sacramentalist and a self-proclaimed Heartmender, a job assigned to her through a dream in 1995.

IAN BALDWIN, co-founder, contributing writer and editor: Troglodyte, witness to the clouds above, the earth and waters below, the living things within, interlocutor in the line of beauty, servant to Gaia. Painter. Editor and publisher, co-founder with Margo Baldwin of Chelsea Green, publisher of The Man Who Planted Trees and other books for living in the Post-Petroleum Era.

PHILIP BALDWIN, co-founder and site coordinator, is an artist working in glass. Currently based in Paris, he has worked in Europe for the past twenty-five years together with his Swiss collaborator, Monica Guggisberg. A founding director of the Marion Institute, Philip seeks the improbable holy grail of experiencing and knowing who we are and where we come from as the best pathway out of the bind we’re in and toward a more joyous future. He believes the metahistorical quest is at the heart of this pathway.

Our Commitment

At Metahistory Quest we are deeply concerned with the spiritual crisis facing humanity, a crisis whose main symptom are alienation from nature, mindless consumption of natural resources, and enslavement (individually and collectively) to everything that enhances our delusional sense of control and our narcissistic self-concern. The crisis challenges us to forge a positive, life-affirming response. Metahistory enables us to go beyond the conditioning of our histories, the ensemble of personal, familial, racial, cultural and collective scripts that bind us to divisive attitudes and destructive behavior. We regard the beliefs encoded in these histories suspect unless they help us realize the true potential of ourselves, the spirit of humanitas in coevolution with Gaia and all her creation.

Metahistory Quest is eclectic and open-ended. We are dedicated to an existentially radical and continuously evolving process of discovery and creative elaboration of various systems of modern knowledge and ancient wisdom. In the spirit of the post-modern era there is no "one" system or "answer" to the widespread yearning for spiritual certainty. The committed search for truth and unique illuminating discoveries along the way comprise an open path, and that honest openness is the vital core of a person’s spirituality.

Metahistory Quest invites you to join us and engage creatively in making a new story for our species. Systemic change at the level of "Western Civilization" cannot occur unless the individual life pattern and the external social order are simultaneously confronted within each seeker’s heart and mind. This makes for a powerful creative tension that is the essence of our journey.

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