Veteran actor Albert Hall, paid an extended visit to Kosmos Headquarters in July. Mr. Hall’s most famous film role was in 1979, when he played Chief Phillips in Francis Ford Coppola’s award-winning Apocalypse Now.

A long-time admirer and subscriber to Kosmos, Mr. Hall spent several days in dialogue with Editor Nancy Roof and Special Project Director, Dot Maver about the mission of Kosmos.

A 2015 Kosmos Seed Grant ‘Project of Promise’, the Seattle-Havana-Tehran Poster Show is a city-to-city collaborative exhibit featuring over 60 recent contemporary arts and culture posters. The show serves as a survey of contemporary popular culture and cutting-edge design from the U.S., Cuba and Iran. Posters are organized into “triplets”—one from each city—that share something common, such as color, shape, or subject matter. This ambitious project seeks to unite three politically and geographically disparate cities through the arts and spark a lively exchange.

By Andreas Weber, Kosmos Journal, Spring | Summer 2015

For 150 years, biology, the ‘science of life,’ made no great effort to answer the question of what life really is. Biologists had a concept they thought to be sufficient for their research: Most of them assumed organisms to be tiny machines.

Today, this belief has been shaken. Only a few years ago we witnessed researchers celebrating the ‘decoding’ of the human genome as a secular breakthrough. They seemed to be on the verge of unraveling the mechanics of life. But not much has happened since then. The boom has come to a standstill. We don’t hear much from geneticists these days. Certainly, they have been charting the arrangement of genes for a growing number of organisms. But at the next step—understanding exactly how genes make the body and how the body gives rise to feeling and consciousness—the view that life is organized like a chain of military orders fails. In genetic research, developmental biology, and brain research, scientists are increasingly realizing that they can only understand living beings if they re-introduce a factor into biology that has been thoroughly purged from it for centuries: subjectivity.

By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

I belong to the generation whose spiritual story was about bringing spiritual traditions and their practices from the East to Europe and America. These practices, such as meditation or mindfulness, have now taken root in the West, and the traditions, for example Buddhism, Sufism, Yoga and others have opened doors for many, many people, giving us access to rich and meaningful inner experiences. And we have also begun to reclaim the wisdom of our indigenous traditions.

But there is now a pressing need for the next generation to take up this story in a new way, to bring these practices into action to create lasting and meaningful change in our inner and outer environment—not action built upon profit but action built upon spiritual ideals and the unity of all.

Kosmos Project Director, Dot Maver recently Skyped with 27 participants from five countries who were in Barcelona, Spain July 21 thru July 31 for ‘breaking walls 2015’. Dot, on the committee that directs the Global movement for the Culture of Peace, a movement which breaking walls draws from, voiced her support to ‘breaking walls’ artists and ambassadors, commending their “unique role in building tolerance, understanding and peace.”

‘breaking walls’ ignites global dialogue among the leaders of tomorrow by creating artistic, educational and ensemble-building opportunities for disenfranchised youth to become those empathetic and system-changing leaders.