Whole Life Times may have a Publisher and Editor, but it has never been the expression of one person alone. From its earliest years it has depended upon people willing to share something they have learned, discovered, created, questioned or experienced, and upon other people willing to help those ideas find their way into the world.
That was true when Whole Life Times was a printed magazine circulating around Western Australia in the early 1980s, and it is even more true today. Writers have contributed articles, researchers and practitioners have shared their knowledge, artists and photographers have helped ideas find visual expression, authors and publishers have brought books to our attention, and people involved in environmental, health, educational, cultural and social initiatives have told us about their work. Increasingly, WLT Dialogues allows us to hear directly from people whose lives and work can illuminate the questions explored within the magazine.
Seen in this way, a contributor is much more than someone whose name appears beneath the title of an article. Whole Life Times has always existed within a web of relationships, and the continuing development of WLT is making that web more visible and potentially much more extensive.
A conversation with many voices
A publication concerned with holistic health, sustainable living, personal and spiritual development, ecology, psychology, science, culture, leadership and the future of humanity could never adequately represent those fields through a single perspective. Nor would we want it to.
Whole Life Times is often at its most interesting when different ways of knowing and seeing encounter one another. A scientist may help us understand something about climate, cells or consciousness, while an environmental activist may tell us what is happening on the ground. Indigenous knowledge can invite us into a profoundly different understanding of our relationship with Country and the living Earth. Psychology can illuminate the inner dimensions of human experience, while artists and musicians can sometimes communicate something that analytical language cannot. Philosophers, spiritual teachers and systems thinkers may help us recognise relationships that disappear when knowledge is divided into separate disciplines and specialties.
Sometimes these contributions arrive as articles. Increasingly they also arrive through WLT Dialogues, where conversation gives ideas room to develop and allows unexpected connections to emerge. A Dialogue may subsequently become an article; an article may lead to another Dialogue; a book or piece of research mentioned by a contributor may lead readers into Whole Life Resources; and people and ideas encountered through WLT may connect in turn with WLT Dialogues Live, Gaiarcadia Academy, Special Editions and other parts of the growing Whole Life Universal Field.
Contribution, understood this way, is not simply the provision of content. It is participation in an evolving conversation.
Contributors are not only writers
For many years the conventional magazine meaning of contributor has been someone who writes something for publication. We still warmly welcome that kind of contribution, but our understanding of the word is becoming much broader.
Someone who agrees to be interviewed for a WLT Dialogue is contributing. So is someone who alerts us to an important piece of research, recommends a remarkable book, sends us information about an initiative deserving wider attention, contributes a photograph or illustration, tells us about an event, introduces us to someone we ought to interview, or helps us discover a story we otherwise might never have encountered.
There are also people whose contribution becomes an ongoing relationship. Over its long history Whole Life Times has benefited from editors, writers, advisers, researchers, proofreaders, designers, photographers, interviewees, friends and collaborators who have contributed not only material but ideas, encouragement, introductions and the considerable practical work involved in bringing a publication into existence.
As the WLT archive is progressively restored, indexed and brought into the new website, we hope this page can eventually help acknowledge more of that remarkable history. Rather than merely presenting a static list of names, we would like visitors to be able to discover the people who have contributed across more than four decades, what they contributed, the subjects with which their work is associated, and where those contributions may lead next.
There is, however, an even older dimension to this idea of contribution which is particularly relevant to what Whole Life Times is becoming today.
The idea of a participating community goes back to the beginning
The idea that people might do more than simply read Whole Life Times is not something we have recently added to the publication. It reaches back almost to its beginning.
In the Spring 1983 issue, little more than a year after Whole Life Times first appeared, its Groups Directory included an entry for the Whole Life Universal Society. The Society was described as comprising people interested in holistic living and in “thinking globally while acting locally” for “peace, healing, transformation and consciousness expansion.” Members supported Whole Life Times through their subscriptions while also helping promote a number of related Whole Life Universal initiatives.
Looking back more than forty years later, those initiatives have an intriguing familiarity.
There was Your Whole Life Radio, broadcast on Curtin University FM Radio, which took the ideas and interests surrounding Whole Life Times into another medium. There was the New Images — New Directions for Humankind seminar series, creating opportunities for people to gather around questions of personal, social and planetary transformation. There was also the Mind Body Spirit Festival, another expression of the participatory alternative culture within which Whole Life Times had emerged.
The Whole Life Universal Society itself can now be seen as an early precursor of what we are developing as the Whole Life Universal Field. Your Whole Life Radio belongs to the lineage from which contemporary initiatives such as Whole Life Times Connect have emerged, while New Images — New Directions for Humankind anticipated something of the conversational and educational purpose now expressed through WLT Dialogues and, more recently, WLT Dialogues Live — Conversations That Matter.
The lineage of today's Gaiarcadia Academy and Gaiarcadia Summits reaches into that same fertile period of experimentation. The Mind Body Spirit Festival, the gatherings and ConFests associated with the Down To Earth movement, and the Down To Earth Association's Moontime School for Alternatives were different expressions of a common impulse: people coming together not merely to hear about alternatives, but to experience them, discuss them, teach and learn from one another, experiment with different ways of living and explore possibilities for personal and social transformation.
It would be misleading to suggest that today's initiatives are simply renamed versions of those earlier ones. They are not. The world has changed enormously, our understanding of many of the issues has developed, and the technologies now available for connecting people and knowledge would have been difficult to imagine in 1983. Yet there is a recognisable continuity of intention running through them.
That continuity matters because it tells us that the participatory community we are now seeking to develop around Whole Life Times is not an appendage to its publishing activities. Participation was there near the beginning.
From the WLU Society to a contemporary human network
The Whole Life Universal Society was open to anyone, with membership by donation. Its members helped support Whole Life Times while also helping the wider Whole Life Universal activities of the period reach other people.
We would not simply recreate that 1983 membership model today. What we can carry forward is the underlying principle: people who value the work can become participants in making it possible and helping it travel.
That principle provides a natural foundation for something we are now beginning to develop: WLT Ambassadors.
A WLT Ambassador helps good ideas travel.
Long before the internet or social media existed, Whole Life Times depended upon human networks. One person handed a copy of the magazine to another, mentioned an article to a friend, brought copies to a meeting or community centre, told somebody about an event, or introduced two people who discovered that they had something worthwhile to share with one another.
Digital networks have enormously expanded what is possible, but the underlying human principle has hardly changed. Most of us belong to overlapping circles of family, friendship, professional relationships, organisations, communities and interests. Those people in turn belong to other networks, and an idea passed thoughtfully from one person to another can therefore travel far beyond the person with whom it began.
Professional networks such as LinkedIn make some of these relationships particularly visible. Someone may have hundreds of direct connections and, through them, access to a vastly larger network of second-degree relationships. Yet the real opportunity is not simply numerical reach. It lies in the trust carried through human relationships. An introduction from someone who knows two people and understands why they ought to meet can be far more valuable than broadcasting a message indiscriminately to thousands.
That is why we do not envisage WLT Ambassadors as unpaid marketers or social-media influencers. We are much more interested in the intelligence of genuine human relationships.
A WLT Ambassador might share an article with people who would genuinely appreciate it, invite friends or colleagues to a forthcoming WLT Dialogues Live conversation, introduce Whole Life Times to an organisation whose work belongs within one of our subject areas, suggest a future contributor, connect us with someone who would make an exceptional interviewee, recommend a researcher whose work deserves attention, or simply say to somebody, “I think you might find this interesting.”
You don't need an enormous social-media following to become an important part of the WLT human network. Sometimes one thoughtful introduction is more valuable than thousands of impressions.
As the Ambassador idea develops, we envisage people in many countries and many walks of life helping WLT discover people, knowledge, initiatives and possibilities that deserve wider attention, while also helping worthwhile WLT material reach communities that may benefit from it. In that sense, the Ambassador programme can become less a promotional network than a network of connection.
Supporting something you value
There are other ways of contributing that deserve their own names, although we do not see them as rigid categories or ranks in a hierarchy.
Some people simply want to support what Whole Life Times is doing. They may subscribe, tell others about WLT, attend an event, share a Dialogue, volunteer their skills, make introductions, contribute material or help in ways we have not yet imagined. WLT Supporter can therefore remain a deliberately broad description, allowing people to participate without feeling that they have to fit themselves into a particular role.
Others may choose to support WLT financially. Whole Life Times began as a free publication and, more than forty years later, remains freely available. Maintaining and expanding that principle nevertheless requires resources. Publishing, website development, archive restoration, video production, WLT Dialogues, live events, research and educational activities all involve costs, including many that are largely invisible to the reader.
A WLT Donor is someone who makes a financial gift because they value the purpose of Whole Life Times and want to help sustain or extend it. Some may make a modest one-off contribution; others may choose to provide regular support or help make a particular project possible. What matters is not the size of the contribution but the shared wish to help worthwhile knowledge remain accessible.
A WLT Sponsor enters into a somewhat different relationship. Sponsorship may involve a person, business, foundation, educational institution or other organisation supporting a particular WLT activity and receiving appropriate acknowledgement or promotional recognition in return. Whole Life Times has worked with advertisers and supporters throughout its history, and sponsorship can become another way of helping important work happen, provided that the relationship is transparent and editorial independence remains clear. Supporting Whole Life Times should never mean purchasing control over what Whole Life Times says.
Then there are WLT Partners: people, organisations and initiatives with whom we develop a more sustained collaborative relationship because there is sufficient alignment of purpose to make working together worthwhile. A partnership might grow around an event, a series of Dialogues, research, education, publishing, a Special Edition, a project or something that has not yet been imagined.
These roles need not be mutually exclusive. Someone first encountered as an interviewee may later become a regular contributor. A reader may become an Ambassador. A contributor may introduce a future Partner. A Donor may also write an article. A Sponsor may independently possess knowledge or experience worth sharing. An Ambassador may eventually become one of WLT's most valuable sources of new relationships.
The label is secondary. The relationship and what becomes possible through it are what matter.
From contributors to a community of participation
This broader understanding of contribution reflects something that has been present within Whole Life Times from its beginnings. WLT was created not simply to transmit information from a publisher to an audience, but to help information become useful—to connect people with ideas, resources, possibilities and one another.
That remains the intention. What has changed is the scale on which it may now become possible.
The printed Whole Life Times of the early 1980s was constrained by geography, printing costs, physical distribution and the number of pages that could fit into an issue. Your Whole Life Radio required a local radio transmitter. A seminar or festival required people to be physically present. Introductions were made through letters, telephone calls and face-to-face conversations.
Today an article can be read on the other side of the world moments after it is published. A WLT Dialogue can bring the thinking of someone in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas into the home of somebody in Fremantle, and a live online conversation can gather participants from many of those places at once. An Ambassador in one country can introduce us to somebody in another. A quarterly magazine can lead to a video, a book, a research paper, an organisation, an event or another person, while the Subject Directory can increasingly help readers follow those connections across issues and across decades.
The archive itself can gradually become another participant in this process. As earlier issues are restored, indexed and connected with contemporary material, contributors from different periods can effectively enter into conversation with one another. A question being explored in 2026 may lead a visitor back to something published in 1983, while an aspiration expressed in 1983 can be reconsidered in light of what has happened during the intervening forty-three years.
Increasingly capable artificial intelligence adds another dimension that would have been almost unimaginable when Whole Life Times began. Used wisely, it can help us navigate a body of knowledge too large for any one person to hold in mind, discover relationships among people and ideas, and eventually allow The Whole Life Universal Guide to help visitors explore the growing Whole Life Universal Field. The purpose is not to replace the people whose knowledge, experience and creativity make that field valuable, but to help their contributions become more discoverable and more meaningfully connected.
An invitation
When we speak, then, of the Contributors to Whole Life Times, we mean something much larger than a masthead.
We mean the writers and interviewees, certainly, but also researchers, practitioners, educators, thinkers, activists, artists, photographers, reviewers and storytellers. We mean people who recommend a book or suggest a subject, who make an introduction or alert us to work deserving attention. We mean Ambassadors who help good ideas travel, Supporters who strengthen the community around WLT, Donors and Sponsors who help make the work financially possible, and Partners with whom new possibilities can be created.
And we mean people we have not yet met.
Somewhere, perhaps on the other side of the world, someone may be doing extraordinary work that very few of us yet know about. Someone reading Whole Life Times may know that person—or know somebody who knows somebody who does. Somewhere else, a reader may encounter an idea in WLT that answers a question they have been carrying for years and then pass it to another person for whom it proves equally important. A conversation may lead to an introduction, an introduction to a collaboration, and a collaboration to something none of the people involved could have created independently.
More than forty years ago, the Whole Life Universal Society brought together people who wanted to support Whole Life Times while participating in a wider movement concerned with holistic living, peace, healing, transformation and consciousness expansion. The means available to that community were comparatively modest: a printed magazine, radio, seminars, festivals, gatherings, letters, telephones and conversations between people.
Today we have possibilities that could scarcely have been imagined then. Yet underneath all that technological change lies something very human and surprisingly familiar: people sharing what they know, helping one another discover what matters, introducing people who ought to meet, supporting work they believe deserves to exist, and thinking globally while acting locally while remaining conscious of the larger whole.
The Whole Life Universal Society of 1983 belonged to an earlier expression of that aspiration. The Whole Life Universal Field now emerging can carry it much further.
>Whole Life Times provides one of its meeting places. Its contributors—and the relationships among them—bring it to life.