Track Two: The Gathering at Esalen
A narrative account of "Pathways Towards Reconciliation," September 2026, Esalen Institute. Held under the Chatham House Rule.
Liz Hasse and Virginia Thomson
Introduction
In September 2026, a group of international experts, scholars and professionals from three continents wended their way from SFO to Big Sur carrying a question too large for any one of them: how can people who hold no government office, command no armies and sign no treaties help prepare the grounds for peace before the guns go quiet?
Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the room held diplomats and mediators, lawyers and scholars, artists, authors, journalists and civil-society practitioners. Chatham House Rule was adopted, so that what was said could be shared, but who said it could not, and the conversations began.
The organizers had no illusions. Even the seasoned citizen diplomats in attendance had never actually planned future citizen diplomacy or reconciliation projects from the context of a hot war. In considering the possibilities for the aftermath of the current hostile combat, they would look at what had worked in the history of citizen diplomacy, ask how new technologies and altered global configurations might change the options, and test all these ideas against Russia’s war in Ukraine. They started with the example of a city that had every reason to choose hatred and chose something else.
The City That Chose Peace
On August 6, 1945, a volunteer fireman in Hiroshima ran toward the bombing rather than away from it. A week later he lost his left eye to radiation. What he took from the devastation and pain was not rage but a duty: every person, he believed, was obliged to ensure it never happened again.
Despite the staggering toll, over 70,000 civilians killed in minutes, the City of Hiroshima called not for vengeance but for global peace.
The citizen diplomats considered how this could have happened. Some reasons were hard, historical, and political. The United States occupied Japan for seven years and, during the “Reverse Course,” suppressed some narratives. The U.S. sought to have an anti-communist anchor in the region as the Cold War tensions were growing across Eastern Europe. Instead of just demilitarizing Japan, the US began rebuilding the country’s economic and political stability, targeted economic aid reaching $2.2 billion.
Other reasons were cultural. Kaizen, continuous improvement, got the electricity back within days, the schools opened in 45 days, and two-thirds of the buildings rebuilt in three years. Kintsugi, the art of mending broken pottery with gold, shaped the ambition that the city should come back more beautiful than before. Chobu, the search for balance, demanded that something good be set against the bomb. The inscription at Hiroshima’s Peace Park, " Let all the souls here rest in peace; For we shall not repeat the evil," does not say who "we" is, a deliberate ambiguity that let former enemies vow together never to repeat the tragedy of war.
A War Still Burning
The contrast between Hiroshima's quiet memorials and the present war in the Ukraine is glaring. One participant had not slept normally in four years. In August, there had been ten days of nonstop bombing; they described changing apartments three times in one season because the windows were repeatedly blown out and neighborhoods bombed. Forty percent of the food storage around Kyiv has been destroyed in recent weeks. Power was limited to three or four hours a day during the previous winter, and the coming winter promises to be worse. Children have been learning in metro stations and underground shelters for more than four years. Ukraine's population is estimated to have fallen from 40 million to between 18 and 20 million.
On the other side of the conflict were descriptions of Russia’s domestic population. This is now a country in which the word "peace" has lost its place in the language, where saying it in Moscow risks arrest. Some participants spoke of a structural absence of guilt: Russian grammar tends to remove the agent: the cup "was broken" rather than "I broke the cup." They offered an analogous example in political history: the Finnish-Soviet War is remembered in Finland and entirely unknown in Russia. Does this reflect an absence of information, or a reinforced amnesia? One participant spoke of “brainwashing,” insisting that it was an infliction on both sides. One suggested framework divided the country into three Russias: a Russia-Switzerland of the educated and European, a Russia-Saudi Arabia of oil and Putin's court, and a Russia-Africa of the powerless, sent to fight in Ukraine. A strongman mentality, driven by resentment, prevails in Russia. It is difficult to know how much the super-majority domestic support for Putin is due to totalitarian rule, how much due to the rally around a leader in wartime, and how much to ignorance that war even exists. The democratizing forces which the West found compatible, personified by Gorbachev, apparently epitomize weakness for the present population.
Justice, Revenge, and the Price of Accountability
What separates justice from revenge? The group concluded that while both look backward, the key difference is an institutional mechanism that restores social order. Court --whether the ICC, Nuremberg or tribunals at The Hague -- allow a society to process the past with less personal animosity. In contrast, revenge relies on private, emotional retaliation, which often triggers endless cycles of violence.
However, justice can be harsh, and justice and reconciliation do not always align. For example, Kosovo's Hashim Thaçi was sentenced to 30 years in prison, whereas postwar Japan deliberately prioritized reconciliation over justice so the country could move forward without further conflict. Similarly, some participants noted that the ICC warrant for Putin might be emotionally satisfying but could push the parties farther from peaceful resolution. Others felt that resolution requires accountability which they saw as one component of justice.
Ultimately, the group agreed that reconciliation depends on a nation or group accepting responsibility. Germany, through mandatory Holocaust education, became regarded as one of Europe's safest countries for Jews. Austria, by maintaining ambiguity about its historical victimhood, still sees swastikas appear; one participant shared that a musician had been refused service in a Vienna restaurant simply for speaking Hebrew. Russia, by contrast, was described as framing historical wrongdoing as something “they” did, never “we.”
This divide extended to the current context.
One participant argued that both sides must acknowledge how the US contributed to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, suggesting that Americans are as “brainwashed” as Russians. This sparked several historically informed objections from other participants who rejected the idea that the U.S caused the military conflict and noted also that the U.S still offers a variety of independent and corporate media perspectives (whatever the concern about the propensity of large media outlets to become propaganda tools). As a corollary to the discussion of responsibility, there was a thoughtful discussion about how restoration of a sense of agency is key to healthful reconciliation.
What Reconciliation Work Actually Looks Like
To understand how these tensions around blame and responsibility manifest in the real world, the discussion turned to the empirical practice of reconciliation. Participants shifted the focus from institutional tribunals to diplomatic interventions and grass roots efforts that aim for post-conflict stabilization.
Internal Cohesion as a Prerequisite for Peace -- The operational methodology of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP)—prior to its dissolution under the current administration—offered one vital template. Its strategic initiatives in Ukraine demonstrated that reconciliation is not an exercise in forced forgiveness toward an aggressor; rather, it is a mechanism of domestic resilience. By funding cross-national dialogues, the program aimed to fortify Ukrainian social cohesion and preemptively resolve internal regional resentments before they could be weaponized by Russia’s asymmetric warfare.
Subterranean Diplomacy and Direct Action -- On the direct bilateral track, the contributions of exiled Russian dissidents illustrate reconciliation rooted in utility rather than apology. Shifting the paradigm from a premature plea for forgiveness to an actionable inquiry—"What can I do to help?"—these actors engaged in high-risk humanitarian interventions. Their efforts yielded critical tactical outcomes:
Locating and monitoring Ukrainian prisoners of war held under severe anti-terror classifications within the Russian penal system.
Tracking and repatriating unlawfully deported Ukrainian children.
Facilitating logistical pipelines for Russian military defectors seeking to desert.
3. Historiographical Precedents: Structural Integration vs. Geopolitical Fracture --Participants recalled geopolitical history as both proof of concept and a cautionary tale. The architecture of the European Union successfully transformed the centuries-old Franco-German enmity over Alsace-Lorraine into a shared structure of continental stability. Conversely, wartime diplomacy also shows the cost of missed reconciliation. The 300 letters exchanged between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin from 1941 to 1945 reveals an early vision for a universal Marshall Plan inclusive of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the Truman administration's decision to restrict economic integration to Western Europe solidified fractures of the Cold War—a historical pivot that continues to reverberate.
Verified Evidence as a Foundation for Resolution
Moving from grassroots action to legal infrastructure, the participants considered the critical role of verified data in securing sustainable peace. The discussion emphasized that whether a conflict is resolved through an institutional courtroom verdict or a mediation alternative, neither avenue can succeed without a shared baseline of reliable evidence.
The Berkeley Protocol –To combat the proliferation of wartime disinformation, the Berkeley Protocol-- a joint project of the UC Berkeley Law School Human Rights Program and the UN Office of Human Rights—has established a global standard for the sage collection, verification and preservation of open-source digital evidence. Originally formed to document atrocities under Syria’s al-Assad regime, this protocol is now central to the documentation of war crimes in Ukraine, with its methodologies actively disseminated through workshops across Ukraine and the U.S. Its primary objective is to elevate digital data to a rigorous evidentiary standard capable of withstanding legal scrutiny.
Parallel Narratives – An obstacle to achieving a reliable record is Russia’s systematic collection of asymmetric evidence designed to substantiate its own narrative of Ukrainian “Nazi war crimes.” In an era dominated by deepfakes and digital manipulation, these competing parallel tracks severely complicate international consensus. However, participants noted that for genuine reconciliation to occur, both sides must possess the agency to present their respective evidence before a neutral arbiter, allowing each party to confront and examine the claims made by the other.
Strategic Value of Mediation v. Adjudication – Historically human rights disputes in regions like Bolivia and Colombia were occasionally pushed toward mediation due to insufficient evidence for formal prosecution (especially where human rights violations occurred under military regimes). The Berkeley Protocol seeks to invert this dynamic. By providing a means for open-source documentation to meet prosecutorial standards, it helps a party to develop the robust factual foundation required for a sustainable resolution, whether reached by judicial verdict or a well-grounded mediated settlement. Far from a lesser alternative, mediation provides a powerful mechanism where both parties retain agency, confront the established facts, take the process seriously, and actively co-create a sustainable peace.
Russia’s New Curricula
One participant laid out how Russia's classrooms had been transformed since September 2022. Before the war, federal standards set broad outcomes, and teachers were given room to supplement the material. Later, a Federal Basic Education Program mandated detailed grade-by-grade curricula, unified state textbooks governed history, literature and social science, and teacher discretion vanished. In January 2025, a new tenth-grade history textbook, edited by Medinsky, presented the 2014–15 Donbas conflict as local self-defense against the "Kyiv regime" and NATO as an existential threat.
Every Monday features "Conversations About Important Things": love of land and country for the youngest, readiness to serve and fight for those approaching adulthood. Final exams now ask about the "special military operation." Children as young as four or five collect food and clothing for soldiers. An informant culture has returned, with teachers reporting on students and students on teachers. Amnesty International (June 2026) reported the curriculum has extended into occupied Ukraine since 2023. In 2025, 356 minors were added to Russia's register of terrorists and extremists, twelve times the 2021 figure, according to OVD-Info.
AI, Surveillance, and the Machinery of Information Control
The participants turned to a critical prerequisite for both accountability and reconciliation: the preservation of an uncorrupted information ecosystem. In authoritarian contexts, this baseline is actively dismantled by a pervasive state-engineered surveillance architecture that stifles civil connection, enforces self-censorship and weaponizes AI to manipulate collective memory.
Beneath the school curriculum and the surface of civil life, lies an integrated digital structure linking identity, communications, physical movement and online activity. This system relies on a Unified Population Register containing 148 million records and 40 data types, synchronized with facial recognition cameras across cities. A core pillar of this apparatus is "Max," the mandatory state messaging application launched in September 2025. While promoted as a convenient portal for public services, the platform is entirely unencrypted, stored on VK servers and accessible to security agencies.
The psychological consequence of this apparatus is systemic self-censorship: people pre-emptively change their behavior under the assumption of surveillance. Russia’s deployment of "Sovereign AI" –exemplified by GigaChat and YandexGPT –functions as a mechanism of regime sovereignty. Mirroring Chinese models, these systems aggressively filter political discourse. To enforce reliance on the domestic models, the state has dismantled over 400 VPN services while digital tutoring tools are suspected of logging student queries to flag ideologically non-compliant questions.
Despite the scale of digital autocracy, these participants formulated a forward-looking three-phased framework for leveraging AI to reconstruct accurate factual accounts following a potential authoritarian collapse:
Phase I (Data Preservation) –immediately freeze, preserve and investigate, securing surveillance logs and state data before they are destroyed;
Phase II (Algorithmic Synthesis) -- algorithmic organization of facts, utilizing AI to ingest and process vast collections of police files, court documents and video evidence. By mapping names, dates and chains of command, machine learning can point human investigators toward critical evidence required for transitional justice—structuring facts without autonomously assigning guilt; and
Phase III (Reclaiming Information Commons) -- rebuild the information commons by shoring up independent public archives, restored pluralistic educational curricula and safeguarding free academic inquiry. While some participants cautioned that achieving a neutral nonjudgmental organization of historical material might be overly idealistic, the framework remains a vital blueprint. And this is a group that appreciates the value of accessible well-preserved archives
Participants distinguished between two existential AI threats currently dominating global governance debates:
Alignment Risk: the danger that leading models develop autonomous objectives, and self-replication capabilities render shutdown protocols obsolete.
Open-weight Risk: The danger that rapid proliferation of capable open-weight models (often originating in China) can be downloaded, modified and weaponized by any hostile actor outside any regulatory chain of accountability.
While proprietary American models are currently more powerful and theoretically easier to govern, international regulatory frameworks do not yet exist. Still, the precedent of Cold War nuclear diplomacy offers a degree of historical optimism: long-term rivals with existential arsenals found it rational to negotiate arms control, and citizen diplomacy found meaningful leverage points. Notably, safety-minded engineers at the frontiers of AI are already sharing mutual concerns over AI alignment and the long-term future of humanity, and they are seeking to learn the methodologies of citizen diplomacy.
Wellness, Mental Health
Drawing on Esalen’s expertise in psychoneuroimmunology, PTSD, and cross-cultural healing, participants discussed how reconciliation and structural political arrangements are inherently fragile without systematic, body-centered interventions to repair the frayed social fabric of both societies.
The discussion contrasted the distinct yet profoundly destabilizing, psychological crises unfolding across the conflict landscape:
The Russian Crisis: Returning combatants, including violent convicts granted state amnesty in exchange for military service, re-entering civilian life with untreated PTSD, driving an escalation in domestic violence and societal trauma.
The Ukraine Crisis: Civilians endure the corrosive constant stress of existential warfare, compounded by a deep-seated cultural stigma against seeking psychological help, highlighting an urgent need for widespread public programs for soldiers and the broader civilian population.
To address these intersecting crises, participants proposed a future international colloquium convening health providers from Ukraine, Russia, and globally to coordinate cross-cultural healing strategies.
Those with expertise and experience in addressing psychological resilience and collective trauma advocated for a diversified range of tools:
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: MDMA-assisted psychotherapy protocols developed by MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) with initiatives to train local therapists in high-stress regions like Ukraine and Lebanon;
Somatic and Bio-Technological Interventions: Deploying specialized bodywork, breathwork, advanced neuro-acoustics, and pulsed pressure wave technology such as the Shiftwave chair already being utilized in Ukraine to treat acute trauma in both soldiers and children.
Collective and Grassroots Healing: Implementing "social acupuncture" group frameworks alongside targeted family reconciliation. Heart to Heart's work training pediatric cardiac surgeons in Russia and elsewhere was offered as a model, with its lesson that prepared local partners are key to success.
The conclusion was that no single approach would be enough: psychological, somatic, psychedelic, cultural and medical paths would all be needed. In scaling these interventions, participants looked to the operational model of Heart to Heart Global Cardiac Care, an organization with an established history of training pediatric cardiac surgeons internationally including within Russia and neighboring countries. The lesson of their work is that sustainable successes depend on the cultivation and empowerment of prepared local partners rather than helicoptered in impositions.
Ultimately the consensus to the citizen diplomats was that no single modality can resolve the generational wounds of warfare. Reconciliation will require a multi-tiered approach spanning psychological, somatic, psychedelic, cultural and medical disciplines.
Four Futures – Scenario Planning
The afternoon turned to scenario planning, introduced as "devices for ordering perceptions about alternative future environments," hypotheses rather than predictions, built to stretch mental maps. The history of failed forecasting by experts served a warning: the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) founder who saw no reason for anyone to have a computer at home; the 1980s IBM forecast of 295,000 PCs when 25 million were sold.
Four hypothesized AI futures were mapped in quadrants, along two axes, the vertical measuring strategic success and, along the horizontal, the scale of change:
Surveillance State, in which AI watches faces, behavior and license plates, trading privacy for genuine convenience, a future already underway.
The Bubble, in which LLMs prove to be merely "fancy autocorrect," there is no mass unemployment, and investors lose fortunes (AI startups went from 3,000 worldwide in 2023 to oer 60,000 by the end of 2025).
Apocalypse, in which recursive self-improvement outruns an unsolved alignment problem, with "unknown unknowns" the deepest worry.
Utopia, in which Kurzweil's singularity brings abundance, or Reid Hoffman's "boomers" see AI augment rather than replace humanity.
Then participants imagined the newspaper headlines for each future world. In Surveillance State: "Big Bro gets smarter: crime is down, so is privacy." In The Bubble: "4 trillion $$ later, AI asks a human operator: please clarify." In Apocalypse: "Lonely AI looking for a human for prompting." And in Utopia, the one that made the room laugh: "Russians and Americans join forces in the hot tubs at Esalen to discuss AI and the human potential."
In the discussion afterward, many insisted the real future would be a mixture of all four scenarios, and one participant pushed back on calling the future unknowable, noting that science fiction had foreseen these dynamics decades ago. Others pointed to future certainties: climate worsening, brain-computer interfaces coming, political energy growing in unsustainable ways. The question, they said, is whether we act accordingly. Others challenged the notion of a single scale of "superintelligence," invoking Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences.
The Track Two Network, and the Dream of Russia
When the group turned to its own future, as an institute for citizen diplomacy, it found uncertainty about next steps, but grounding in one another and enthusiasm for joint efforts even in despairing times. They described themselves as a "battalion" operating beneath the high-level state players, a rare and resilient web of individuals. The core question was how to nurture and expand this willing and energetic group, and help individuals avoid isolation and feeling a lack of agency.
One participant spoke of a lifelong, personal engagement in Russia: family ties to Dostoevsky and Steinbeck, a first visit in 1971, the circle around Gorbachev and the Perestroika thinkers, the Russian theological philosophers (Solovyov, Berdyaev, Bulgakov) who filled a gap in Western analytic thought, and a single $100,000 gift from Laurance Rockefeller that funded nine books of Russian philosophy. The dream had been Russia as an "extra thruster" for the institute's work. Now things were raw and conflicted: contacts had gone silent, intelligence services complicated any connection, and personal capacity was limited. Still: "if we could start to get back in, it would get hot again."
The risks of such work are real. At USIP, speaking to non-governmental Russians during the war had been politically toxic. Still, only truly non-governmental actors could do it, as with the1980 Track Two Moscow trip that government could not make and that mattered precisely because it was not governmental. Not talking, one argued, is more dangerous than talking, so long as it is done without legitimizing Russia's actions in Ukraine. And as a sign of a universal appetite for peace, they pointed to the Tibetan monks walking from Dallas to Washington, drawing millions with a simple message: peace outside requires peace inside.
The Journalists' Dilemma
The journalists' session opened with a tension. How to navigate competing, often irreconcilable narratives during an active war? One participant, who experienced war firsthand, strongly rejected "both sides" framing, and drew a distinction: examining multiple sides of a political process does not mean validating multiple versions of objective truth. The principles they argued for were prioritizing rigorous factchecking over rumor, striving to find truth and common ground and not an adversarial exercise to win or express hatred, and continually re-test one’s own editorial biases. The example of Israeli filmmakers who won a jury prize in Venice for a Gaza film, only to face accusations of betrayal at home, raised a fundamental question: to what degree is dissent and self-critique permissible within a society engaged in an existential conflict.
When discussing how to cover the adversary, for example, interviewing Putin's supporters, one journalist emphasized the necessity of speaking with any willing actor, including former Kremlin aides, to let individuals reveal themselves through unedited dialogue
How did Russian media become propaganda? Not overnight, they said, and not by Putin alone. They dissected an insidious process: first, “don't ask that question” at the press conference. Then, “this guest might cause problems.” Then, this story is “better not covered.” Then an editor is replaced, a journalist offered a better salary, an apartment, proximity to power, until professional compromise is completely normalized. Vladimir Solovyov and Dmitry Kiselyov, once pro-Western journalists, are now leading propagandists. Repeat a falsehood a hundred times and you begin to believe it, and perhaps that happened to Putin himself. One analogy lingered: state propaganda functions like the hotel employee who upon hearing screams through a hotel wall, reframes the victim as a monster.
Propaganda does not merely distort facts: it alters the entire narrative structure surrounding reality.
A participant designated a Russian foreign agent in 2024 now observes unsettling echoes in the US of these control mechanisms. With a clear caveat --Russia is not America, and Trump is not Putin—these observers warned that certain authoritarian mechanisms are universal, and can alter an ecosystem almost overnight: enemies created, inconvenient facts relabeled as "somebody else's version of reality," exclusion of critical journalists from formal White House press briefings, severe media ownership consolidation exemplified by Sinclair Broadcast Group capturing an outsized share of local TV stations. Propaganda's real aim, these participants discussed, is not to make you believe a lie but to induce cognitive exhaustion and leave the population confused about what is real.
Are there still independent Russian voices in the media? Criticizing the war is illegal; state labels like "foreign agent," "undesirable" and "terrorist" are used to criminalize journalists; most Western outlets are blocked; independent outlets have exploded in exile but struggle for financial survival. Alternative models such as China Digital Times are described as "resistance media," systematically archiving censored content and amplifying silenced voices. The group noted the loss of substantial institutional support, noting that Internews had successfully built independent media across 100 countries until its $150 million USAID funding was eliminated, leaving a gap that private philanthropy only partially filled.
To counter this fragmentation, participants proposed revitalizing a modern Space Bridge, a contemporary iteration of the Cold War initiative would facilitate structured live-broadcast dialogues between Ukrainians, Russians and Americans on national television, an important first step toward post-war communication. A closing thought: a foundational principle for Track Two diplomacy is the necessity of looking for the positive intent behind even destructive or hostile positions as the basis for meaningful dialogue.
Stories, Music, and the Older Ways
With the literature session, the gathering shifted focus from journalism’s battlefield to the domain of cultural production. What can a novel achieve that a news report cannot? Journalists seek certainty and guidance; fiction writers embrace uncertainty and invite readers to explore the contradictions of human nature. One participant described how a novel by Sergei Lebedev helped them grasp the subterranean motivations of Russian characters. Personal stories, others said, bridge misunderstandings and foster empathy. Even writers with troubling politics produce great work, so politics cannot be the measure of literary merit. The conversation moved through Gogol, a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian and “fathered” Russian literature, whose influence reached Kafka; through Dostoevsky and Nabokov. A contemporary of Gogol (the two never met), de Tocqueville prophesized in 1835 that America and Russia would rise as continental powers, one built on individual freedom, the other on centralized authority. Esalen's own historical debt to Russian creative methodologies came up, specifically the psychological and performative lineages of Konstantin Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov. Someone described writing a novel as a channeled process, and the group agreed to start a Track Two reading list.
Then the arts took the floor, and the focus turned to music as a vehicle for historical confrontation and reconciliation. A composer showed excerpts of her work, demonstrating how sonic architecture can process historical trauma without falling into overt political accusation. Her Russian Requiem, commissioned in 2003 by Bremen (the organization that commissioned Brahms's German Requiem), was meant not to accuse but to celebrate Russian culture while facing its history of repression, setting poets from Derzhavin and Pushkin through Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Mandelstam and Brodsky to the texts of the Panikhida. At the Bremen premiere, the city’s church bells rang for twenty minutes outside before the performance while Russian church bells resounded inside the hall, and the orchestra entered from backstage in silence omitting the standard applause to honor the dead. The composer highlighted how music can reframe spaces of geopolitical fracture. In Tallinn, during a dispute over Soviet statues, Estonian and Latvian musicians performed in a former Baltic Fleet factory where local children had covered the walls with the poetry written in chalk.
The composer’s upcoming projects continue to explore linguistic and narrative pluralism. A revival of her Gogol opera, premiered in 2011, is planned with the text in Russian and Gogol's inner dialogues in Ukrainian. Her Arctica symphony, National Geographic's first commission of a classical composition, took them to the North Pole and Greenland for a deep cross-cultural collaboration. The piece features a libretto spanning fourteen Arctic languages, advised by a council of Arctic elders, with the solo piano embodying the Angakok (the shaman). One movement is built on the Inuit song duel, in which opponents drum, sing and ridicule each other, and the party who draws the most laughter wins. Conflict resolved by jokes and laughter was a Chekhovian talent not lost on this room of diplomats.
This session concluded with a presentation on the preservation of oral traditions. A participant described forty years of studying the djembe under the legendary Guinean master drummer Mamadi Keïta, and a 2007 initiative, "Foloko Kandala: Messengers of Tradition," that took students from around the world to remote villages to demonstrate to young people – increasingly migrating to urban centers -- that their music holds profound global value. At the final performance, an audience of hundreds walked three days came to listen. The theme running through these presentations was a profound sense of loss: traditions, languages and songs disappearing as the young migrate.
Closing Reflections
As the sessions drew together, themes surfaced. Reconciliation should be defined not as liking one another but as recognizing mutual need and being able to work together. Ukraine, one said, was becoming a nation through the war: "We didn't choose this, but we had to defend our democracy." The abandonment of Ukraine's nuclear weapons, which Clinton later acknowledged as a mistake, and the failure of the Budapest Agreement's guarantors, loomed in the background. Transparency alone is not enough, since “brainwashed” or not, people rarely seek out contradicting documents, and indoctrination from age four or five makes reversal extremely hard. Reconciliation may only become possible when a significant portion of a population is able to shift from a tribal attitude of "who is ours" to a recognition of shared human values.
Esalen and Track Two's potential contribution: improving how we disagree through dialogue.
In the end, there was no cohesive sense of the future, only certain elements that could be expected. This gathering clearly demonstrated that arts and literature remain broad avenues for cultural bridging. We have also experienced at our recent convenings how climate science, Antarctic preservation, and vitality of the oceans provide another fertile plain for exchange. The transboundary frontiers of health science, healing practices and the human potential continue to provide a space for Track Two collaboration. We’ve explored the protection (and demise) of privacy from a cross-border, humanistic perspective. The promise and ramifications of AI for humanity are now an unbounded sandbox beckoning our global, transdisciplinary inquiry. Track Two must continue to help create the circumstances for enhancing collaborative exchange and truly meeting in potentially peaceful fields.
We met with a question about how ordinary people and non-governmental organizations could help prepare for post-war reconciliation even while the war is waged. We left without a specific plan, but with the ingredients for starting some initiatives and sustaining other efforts: a network, a shared sense of duty, a commitment to continuing various concrete aspects of our dialogue, and the determined decision to work on the future, a future where humans can meaningfully, and mostly peacefully, co-exist.
For Track Two, nurturing and growing our networks is key. This work sustains a long legacy at Esalen and Track Two. We know that we must continue establishing backchannel trust and communications between individuals from conflicting regions often long before formal, "Track One" government negotiations are politically possible, sometimes while governmental diplomacy is failing. Our importance lies in the way we connect pivotal individuals when opportunity arises. We will continue to create those opportunities, identifying the issues in which hostile actors necessarily share an interest. We will continue to search for and help identify those key participants and to bring experience, resources, expertise and intentionality to de-escalate tensions and humanize the “other.”
