A Mind Forged in Two Worlds
In 1951, a Baptist missionary couple in Szechuan Province, China welcomed a son they named James Amon Garrison. The Mao era was closing in. By 1953, the family had relocated to Taiwan, where Jim Garrison spent the next twelve years absorbing two civilizations simultaneously - one shaped by Confucian filial order and Buddhist impermanence, the other by evangelical Christianity and American can-do optimism. He moved to San Jose at fourteen. He never quite settled into just one framework.
That double consciousness never left him. At the University of Santa Clara, he graduated magna cum laude in World History. At Harvard Divinity School, he studied Christology and the history of world religions. At Cambridge, he took on one of the strangest questions in modern theology: How do you account for God's presence at Hiroshima? His doctoral dissertation - "Hiroshima, Apocalyptic and the Antinomial Nature of God" - became the spine of his first published book and the philosophical thread running through everything he would later build.
The short version: Garrison has always been interested in how human beings make meaning inside catastrophe - and what comes next.
"Conversations that matter become actions that make a difference."- Jim Garrison, Humanity Rising
By 1978, Garrison had founded the Radiation and Health Information Service and was deep in anti-nuclear activism. In 1980 came East West Reach. But his most consequential early move was walking into Esalen Institute in 1985 and taking over a Soviet-American cultural exchange program - then quietly transforming it into something else entirely.
Esalen, the California retreat center perched above the Pacific, was already famous for hot springs, countercultural conferences, and the kind of conversations that didn't happen in official diplomatic channels. Garrison saw an opportunity. As Executive Director of the exchange program, he tracked down Abel Aganbegyan - the economist advising Mikhail Gorbachev on perestroika - and arranged a three-week American tour. That introduction rippled outward in ways that are difficult to fully trace but impossible to dismiss. Garrison was doing diplomacy at the edges, where the formal architecture couldn't reach.
At Esalen, the Soviet-American exchanges weren't conducted in boardrooms. They happened in communal baths, during walks along the cliffs above Big Sur, over meals that stretched late into the Pacific night. Jim Garrison understood that real dialogue - the kind that moves policy - requires relaxed bodies and open minds. He designed the exchanges accordingly. Critics who heard "hot tub diplomacy" and smirked missed the point entirely: the informal setting was the method.
When the Cold War ended, Garrison didn't declare victory and move on. He co-founded the Gorbachev Foundation/USA in 1992 at Gorbachev's explicit request - an institution dedicated to building the kind of global civilization that might not repeat the century it had just survived. Three years later, with Senator Alan Cranston alongside, he launched the State of the World Forum. Gorbachev served as Convening Chairman. Mary Robinson, Marc Benioff, Jane Goodall, and Bill Ury all joined the work. From 1995 to 2012, the Forum convened global leadership to ask a simple, nearly impossible question: What does a sustainable world actually look like?
That question turned out to be inseparable from education. If you want a different world, you need people who can think differently about it. And if you want people who can think differently, you need universities that teach differently.
"Education is the cultivation of human creative capacities."- Jim Garrison, John Dewey scholar
In 2005, Garrison became President of Wisdom University. In 2013, he founded Ubiquity University - merging the two institutions and restructuring the whole operation as a for-profit social benefit corporation (B Corp). The pitch wasn't just "online degrees." It was something more audacious: a global learning community organized around academic rigor, social innovation, collaborative creativity, and the development of human consciousness.
Ubiquity offers programs in conscious leadership, transformative business, integral transpersonal psychology, sustainability, and wisdom studies. The curriculum draws on John Dewey's pragmatism, Buddhist philosophy, systems thinking, and a wide catalogue of global intellectual traditions. It's accredited, serious, and weird in the best way.
Garrison's own contribution to Dewey scholarship is substantial. He co-authored Living as Learning: John Dewey in the 21st Century with philosopher Daisaku Ikeda - one of the world's most prolific authors and the leader of Soka Gakkai International - and published Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. His reading of Dewey emphasizes education not as credential delivery but as the awakening of creative intelligence. Virginia Tech honored him with emeritus faculty status in 2021.
Building Institutions for Civilizational Change
The Humanity Rising initiative is Garrison's most recent large-scale convening. Launched in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic on May 22, 2020, it was designed to leverage crisis as an inflection point - a moment when old patterns might crack open and new ones might take root. The format was TED Talk-scale: daily presentations, moderated dialogues, working groups, blogs, and live conversations across time zones. Hundreds of organizations and hundreds of thousands of activists participated. It continues today.
Integral City named him Meshworker of the Year in 2021 - a title that fits. A meshworker isn't a keynote speaker or a thought leader or a disruptor. A meshworker is someone who holds the tension between different nodes in a system and helps them find each other. Garrison has been doing that across continents and decades, stitching together the kinds of conversations that institutions usually keep separate.
He's published articles in HuffPost, contributed to Kosmos Journal and Integral Life, spoken at the Kyiv International Economic Forum, dialogued with Soka Gakkai on humanistic education, and taught at Menla and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In early 2026, he was featured at the Praxis Peace Institute speaking on citizen diplomacy - the same thread he's been pulling since the Esalen days, still taut, still connected to something real.
Mill Valley, California, where Garrison is based, sits at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, twenty minutes from San Francisco, surrounded by redwoods and fog. It's the kind of place that has historically attracted people who wanted to think seriously about the future without entirely leaving the present behind. Garrison fits perfectly.