In the 2000 book Cultural Creatives, IONS collaborator and sociologist Paul Ray describes crisis as “transformation without a container.” That same year, IONS left its offices in downtown Sausalito, CA to establish the EarthRise campus in Petaluma (named after the famous EarthRise photo taken by Apollo 8 that provided the very first images of Earth from deep space, changing our perceptions of ourselves and our home forever) as a container for humanity’s transformation. This 194-acre “Global Wisdom Center” would further the scientific understanding and embodied experience of interconnection and expanded human potential to promote the evolution of civilization and our world.
When IONS first imagined EarthRise, there were very few such containers for transformation. Over the ensuing 20 years, a growing number were inspired to follow in our footsteps.
Increasingly, humanity and our planet have been going through major initiations, and so of course has IONS, requiring that we evolve our expression in the world. There is no more significant example of that than the 2021 ending of our stewardship of EarthRise. Set against the economic realities of COVID and climate change, the opportunity to transfer this sacred land to the care of the Hoffman Institute provided IONS an endowment to accelerate our mission and help safeguard the future of noetic sciences for future generations. At the same time, it provided the land itself the opportunity to continue its pivotal, uninterrupted purpose as a natural container and catalyst for evolution in partnership with the Hoffman Institute. We’re profoundly grateful to those visionaries who, by securing EarthRise for IONS over 20 years ago, made so much possible then, and now.
Today, IONS has headquarters with a laboratory in Novato, CA, not far from the beloved Petaluma campus, reflecting the changing world we operate in. To meet the urgent challenges of the 21st century, our container for transformation needs to expand beyond the confines of a particular space or time. Meanwhile, “EarthRise” will always be home.
— Claudia Welss, IONS Board Chair and Interim CEO
Excerpt from The Noetic Post, Special 40th Anniversary Edition (printed Autumn 2012):
As IONS looked ahead to the next century, a bold new initiative took shape: moving its offices to a property that could accommodate a vision of partnership, community, and transformational learning while also furthering its legacy of scientific research. In 2000, with support from the Fetzer Institute, IONS purchased a 194-acre hilltop site 35 minutes north of San Francisco. Formerly the home of a college campus, the property featured plentiful office space, a community building, and retreat center potential. To enhance its research facilities, the Institute purchased a 2800-pound, solid steel, double walled, electromagnetically shielded chamber for studies requiring energetic or sensory isolation. It became the centerpiece of IONS’ NEW LABORATORY— one of few in the world explicitly devoted to studying the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The lab housed a broad array of instrumentation, ranging from monitors of autonomic and central nervous system activity (for example, an electrocardiograph and a 32-channel EEG) to physical detectors of mind-matter interaction (a random event generator, an optical interferometer, and a magnetometer).
IONS was now ready to welcome a wider community of explorers to what Wink Franklin called a “global wisdom center,” where basic research into the nature of consciousness could be carried out side by side with personal journeys of self-inquiry and awakening. It would all take place in a natural setting that was once home to the indigenous Miwok tribe, who lived for generations on the land in peace and ecological harmony.
