I knew about New Dimensions long before I was invited to be interviewed about my new book, male menopause, published in 1997. Michael and Justine Toms founded New Dimensions Radio in 1973 and have recorded groundbreaking conversations with visionaries such as Joseph Campbell, HH the Dalai Lama, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ram Dass, Maya Angelou, Andrew Weil, Stewart Brand, Joanna Marbb and many others.
Recently, I was lucky enough to interview Justine about how New Dimensions have evolved over the past fifty plus years and are working to bring back recordings that are in danger of being lost. I always ask my guests to share their “origin story” of how their business got started and what their original vision was when they started. Here are some of what Justine shared with me:
“I grew up in the Episcopal Church and loved it deeply—the soft solemnity, the hymns, the rhythm of the familiar prayers. But in my early twenties, when I moved to Alabama, my path took a turn. I joined a spirited Southern Baptist church and threw myself into it with all my heart in Sunday school, with love and exuberance that filled the services. us, but even then, beneath the joy, there was a subtle uneasiness that I could not name.
“That concern stayed with me when I moved west to California. There, I was drawn to the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses. As before, I jumped in with both feet—studying, attending meetings, and knocking on doors to spread the “good news.” I wanted to serve, to share what I thought was truth. But beneath that devotion, a quiet question persisted: Was there more?
“At the time, I didn’t see it as a spiritual quest. I thought of it as faithful, obedient. Only later did I realize that what I was following was not a dogma but a deep inner pull towards the widest possible understanding of the spirit. My soul was hungry for something greater than any faith.
“Then I met Michael. He wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness—far from it. But there was something about his calm, listening presence that quietly disarmed me. Before I could let my guard down, though, I had to find out where he stood on spiritual matters. So one day I called him and said, ‘I’d like to come and talk about spiritual things.'” He said yes.
“We talked all night, our conversation included scriptures, science, myth, and mystery. Dawn came, but neither of us was ready to stop. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the moment of conception for New Dimensions.”
“What started as a weekly show on a local station has grown into the longest-running independently produced interview program on public radio, carried by nearly 100 stations in the US, Canada and New Zealand… and now available worldwide as podcasts, audiobooks and YouTube videos.
“Today, our archive contains 4,639 programs. The complete collection covers an extraordinary range of human inquiry: consciousness, healing, physics, mythology, indigenous wisdom, the arts, politics, and the future of civilization.
“Dr. Roberto Trujillo, of the Stanford University Libraries, called it ‘one of the most extraordinary archival collections’ he has encountered in his curatorial career. Others have called it ‘The Alexandria Library of the 21st Century.’
Save 692 rare recordings before they are lost
Justine went on to say,
“In recent years we have devoted much of our time and limited means to the digitization and restoration of many of our classic recordings. 692 have been digitized from their original tapes, but they are unplayable and cannot be made available to the public until they have been properly restored.
“Each program requires about sixteen hours of careful, hands-on restoration to bring back to life. It’s a monumental task, and one that far exceeds what our day-to-day funding can support.”
Here’s a sampling of what’s on some of these iconic recordings:
- Joseph Campbell showed the world that beneath every civilization runs the same deep river of history. Five of his talks await restoration, including “The Myth of the Fool.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller invented “Spaceship Earth” and spent his life proving that human ingenuity could solve what politics could not. Six of his conversations are on file, including “Being with Bucky.”
- Albert Hofmann, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and John Lilly they sat down together in 1977 for “LSD: A Generation Later,” a conversation between the pioneers of consciousness research that will never happen again.
- Jerry Brown, Frank Herbert and Captain Edgar Mitchell teamed up for ‘Space-Age Humanity’: a captain, the author of Dune and an astronaut who walked on the moon, all in one room imagining the future.
- HH the Dalai Lama, Alice Walker, Jack Kornfield, Robert Thurman and Edward James Olmos explore what compassion really requires of us in “Compassion in Action.”
- Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon Papers, reflected on the world we choose to create in “A World of Our Own Making.”
- Werner Erhard, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Marilyn Ferguson and Patricia Sun gathered in 1979 to ask a question: “The future: What will it be?”
- Linus Pauling, the only person in history to receive two Nobel Prizes without sharing, recorded a rare conversation in New Dimensions.
Please help support our efforts to make this wonderful collection available to the world, now and forever.
Justina’s information and how you can donate.
See what your tax-deductible gift makes possible. All donations, no matter how small, are helpful:
- $243 restores a full program.
- $2,430 brings back a full set of ten programs.
Any money raised above our goal will go towards making sure these teachings are accessible to as many people as possible.
Every dollar counts. Please donate what you can and give it to anyone you know who would appreciate this project…
If you want to see my interview with Justine Willis Toms, you can do it here.
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