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I work as a psychotherapist with an emphasis on transformational learning - a blend of psychoanalytic and transpersonal approaches, and am the author of Self Actualization and Unselfish Love and co-author of Families Helping Families: Living with Schizophrenia, as well as Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation. My interests and life have taken parallel courses, which together have woven a complex tapestry: spirituality and meditation on the one hand, and political psychology on the other. I have studied and practiced with Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Mata Amritanandamayi and Gurumayi Chidvilasanda, and continue a daily practice of meditation. My early political education began with the writings of the founding fathers. Over time this led to involvement in the anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear movements. I was interested in the powerful molding of prevailing political and economic dynamics by what C. Wright Mills called the military-industrial complex. In time I have come to the conclusion that, despite various interest groups' attempts to minimize or trivialize the concept, the deep state is a reality - decisively and covertly shaping events on both the domestic and international fronts. I am interested in an exceptionally promising alternative source of energy that has yet to see the light of day. I see the current period as a precarious form of initiation rite into the beginning of adulthood for our species, and hope to do whatever I can to help us reach this goal. Meanwhile, I seek daily to recall the reality that the same awareness (the Ever-Present-Origin) looks out through all of our eyes, and actualize this in my relationship with other beings.
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 12, 2023 Toward a Mature Global Civilization
"Although human societies have confronted major hurdles throughout history, the challenges of our times are unique in one crucial respect: they are planetary in scope." Series: Species Forerunners (4 Articles, 14174 views)
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 31, 2023 IMAGINING OUR FUTURE: PERILS AND PROMISE Story 1: The Global Brain Is Waking Up
Given challenges of climate disruption, energy shortages, resource wars, deep poverty and our own tendencies to feel indifference and even despair, is it worth asking questions about our own place on earth?
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One answer is that we need to be able to step back and get our bearings - to disidentify from stories about destruction and raise our vision to see the other side of the coin - the promises inherent in this era. Series: Positive Visions of the Future (5 Articles, 18418 views)
(65 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 19, 2021 Enzo and our Planetary Marathon
To honour our shared humanity and in a bid to highlight our pressing concerns for the condition of mankind and our planet, Irene Fowler (Nigeria) and I (U.S.A.) collaborated on the publication of this article.
(44 comments) SHARE Monday, April 11, 2022 The Progress of the Soul
"The discovery of the highest frequency of sexuality arises from the love experience. It has nothing to do with relationships being either homosexual or heterosexual. It has to do with two human beings bringing pleasure to one another in a way that opens frequencies of consciousness. You have bought many ideas about what is proper and what is improper within sexual expression." Series: Evolutionary Intelligence (1 Articles, 4849 views)
(17 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 24, 2022 Evolutionary Intelligence - A Planetary Rite of Passage
"This is a clarion call to reclaim the universal, boundless state of consciousness that has periodically surfaced in the human evolutionary journey. If we are to survive the materialistic nightmare that currently threatens our existence on Earth, our choice is clear: awaken or perish. The good news is that the awakening has already begun."
(29 comments) SHARE Friday, May 28, 2021 Self-Actualization for the Benefit of the World
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
Self-actualizing people are those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and self-fulfillment. Values that self-actualizers appreciate: truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self-sufficiency.
Abraham Maslow
(41 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 13, 2024 Imagining our Future" FORWARD INTO THE PAST - A New Birth: Interbeing
As we engage in the "struggle" to create a world that works for all living beings--those of us who feel called to contribute to the healing of the Earth can expect to be sorely challenged. My sense is that we can all benefit from an awareness of our family's historical roots. We will also need to draw sustenance by consciously recalling the wisdom of elders and allies. That way we will realize that we are not "in it alone". Series: Positive Visions of the Future (5 Articles, 18418 views)
(42 comments) SHARE Friday, May 14, 2021 Loving Awareness
"At another level when I'm in his presence I experience ecstasy and bliss from the depth of the love that our relationship has for me. And that's a drunken kind of love where I often find myself just dissolved into tears because I've just never experienced such profound love from any being."
Ram Dass
(86 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 26, 2021 "The Five Elephants in the Room"
Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there's a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I'm no longer alone."
Edward Snowden
(62 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 21, 2022 Giving
Although this is not a final truth, A.A. suggests the self-accepting affirmation: "I am someone." The acceptance and affirmation of "someness" closes the door to infantile claim of being "all or nothing."
For a further step in human growth see the video - available on Amazon.com - of Ram Dass' "Becoming Nobody."
(15 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 22, 2022 Sacred Embrace: The Erotic Jesus Pt. 2
We can wonder about the source of resistance to the notion that Jesus was a sexual being. Why has Christianity so often taught that sexuality is a vile, disgusting thing? Why has it so rarely regarded sexuality as a source of creativity, or a doorway to the Divine and a participation in the continually creating God?
Beyond this, our extremely secular culture has conditioned us to regard such questions irrelevant. Series: Gnostic Christianity (2 Articles, 4553 views)
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, January 15, 2024 Imagining our Future - Perils and Promise: Story 4. We Are in a Process of Planetary Birth - Pt. 1
"There's a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with the Earth. Our personal and collective happiness and survival depends on it. This kind of enlightenment is crucial to a collective awakening. In Buddhism we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth"and living species are in danger." - Thich Nhat Hanh Series: Positive Visions of the Future (5 Articles, 18418 views)
(48 comments) SHARE Monday, September 4, 2023 Joanna Macy - Climate Crisis as a Spiritual Path
Joanna has lived a profoundly eventful external and inner life. She has grown tremendously and helped others to grow within and turn toward the world in service. She has lived in many countries, learning about service to society - and helped people to not deny their grief and caring for Life on Earth, but to work through these natural and use their long-repressed energy to help create a life-sustaining society. Series: Species Forerunners (4 Articles, 14174 views)
(24 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 10, 2021 The Scapegoat
The shadow refers to the dark, unlived, and repressed side of our conscious self. Elements of the shadow that we do not accept tend to function behind our back, leaking out when we least expect it.
If we have not sufficiently integrated a part of our personal shadow, the collective shadow is able to sneak in through the back door.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 22, 2023 IMAGINING OUR FUTURE: PERILS AND PROMISE: Story 2. Humanity Is on an Heroic Journey
What if the most difficult challenges facing humanity are not devising solutions to the energy or climate crisis or our other self-generated predicaments?
What if, instead, we are challenged to bring positive images of the human journey into our collective awareness?
We need to be able to step back: to disidentify from stories about destruction and raise our vision to see the other side of the coin. Series: Positive Visions of the Future (5 Articles, 18418 views)
(15 comments) SHARE Friday, August 19, 2022 Buddy, Can You (S)Par a Digm? Pt.2
Paradigms are the lenses that shape the way we view our lives. When they no longer fit our needs, we can experience great perceptual distortions.
Even without the help of obsolete paradigms we can misperceive a great deal. Bob Wilson was walking through the Castro district, a section known as a place where gay people gather. He saw a sign saying, "Half-Gay Cleaners;" yet when he looked again, it said, "Half Day - Cleaners." Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43159 views)
(21 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 6, 2021 Bodhichitta - Opening the Heart-Mind
The Buddha said that we are never separated from enlightenment.
Even at the times we feel most stuck, we are never alienated from the awakened state. This is a revolutionary assertion. Even ordinary people like us with hang-ups and confusion have this mind of enlightenment called bodhichitta.
The openness and warmth of bodhichitta is in fact our true nature and condition.
(15 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 8, 2022 Rush, Rush, Rush, Rush vs. "The Sacred Pause"
Paradoxically, by silently learning to watch the ego (called in the East as "the monkey mind") play out its pretensions, we deepen our capacity for humor.
At the same time, we tune into our intuitive awareness, often seeing solutions to problems that evaded us through our use of the thinking mind.
This will be a necessity, rather than a luxury, in the difficult times ahead.
(52 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 4, 2023 Flatland
Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness
Sri Aurobindo, who used his own consciousness as a laboratory, discovered and described the following levels of awareness, which he expected to flower as we evolve:
Ordinary egoic mind, Higher mind, Illumined mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, Supermind. Series: The evolution of human consciousness and culture (4 Articles, 8114 views)
(38 comments) SHARE Friday, September 24, 2021 Are we critical thinkers or "useful idiots?"
Contemporary politics provides numerous examples in which people fail to use critical-thinking. There are many obstacles to critical thinking including, overconfidence, obsession with fantasies, and disregard for truth, among others. Critical thinking opens doors to possibilities, helping us see possibilities in problems. Critical thinking helps us discover the essence of a problem, and explore viable solutions.
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(65 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 15, 2023 Seeds of the New: Species Forerunners -Tom Yeomans and an Application of Spiritual Psychology
"Everyone on earth shares the fate of the earth, and everyone has a contribution to make.
"To do this we need to learn to work deliberately on the process of inner transformation and the development of spiritual strength and vision in each person, young and old. We need to learn to support the spiritual maturation of individual, group, and species, so that we can... deal with the great challenges that face us today."--T.Y. Series: Species Forerunners (4 Articles, 14174 views)
(54 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 4, 2021 The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Maslow broke radically new ground concerning human possibilities. He is considered a founder of Humanistic Psychology, which gave rise to a number of approaches to therapy, guided by the assumption that people possess the inner resources for growth, healing and optimal functioning and that the point of therapy is to help remove obstacles to individuals' achieving them. He brought to light the fact known as "Peak Experiences."
(16 comments) SHARE Friday, August 5, 2022 We Need a New Self-Help Group: "Humans Anonymous"
It will avail nothing if we stay the same and expect the world to change. There is plenty of work to do in the public sphere. However, we must not limit ourselves to focusing on the outer world. We also need to look inward, working on our own consciousness. We need to become willing to grow emotionally, mentally and spiritually - in essence, recreating ourselves to express transpersonal qualities - beyond the intellect.
(81 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 29, 2021 Death - the Final Frontier Pt.
These contemplations on death carry a particularly poignant truth today. Evolution always proceeds by way of extreme crises. These appear to be on the way. Andrew Harvey: "This allows me to accept all "horrific news... as necessary wake-up calls [dispelling] any false illusions... the darkness is indispensable to emergence, because only so biting and savage a [situation] could drive us to [the surrender of the separate ego."
(15 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 6, 2022 What is the Sacred Feminine? The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Secrets it Contains - Pt. 1
For the last several thousand years, the religious belief systems of our world have been patriarchal, which sanctioned societal ethics that elevated God the Father over Mother Earth and man over woman. It is time to balance the masculine and feminine principles within our belief systems, our religious doctrine, our cultural ethos and within ourselves. Universal order is maintained through balance and mutual respect.
(20 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 24, 2022 Maturity and the Soul
"I have come to use the word 'soul' to express...the core consciousness in each of us that holds the potential and pattern of our full unique, maturity. This soul is seeking realization and expression in everyday life and its presence is within us from birth - death. I am...using the word in its existential meaning of human vitality and depth, core qualities and values"and particularly life... purpose/direction."
Tom Yeomans
(20 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 22, 2021 The American Prison System, the Prison-Ashram Project and Other Alternatives Pt. 4
"" an offender has been subjected to unfair or excessive punishment and treatment more degrading than that prescribed by law, he comes to justify his act which he could not have justified when he committed it. He decides to 'get even' for his unjust treatment in prison, and take reprisals through further crime at the first opportunity."
Erving Goffman
(34 comments) SHARE Friday, October 8, 2021 Are We Learning Disabled? No Wonder our World is in Such a Mess.
Edgar Morin has been advocating a shift towards complexity thinking for many decades. In doing so he has laid down a tantalizing challenge to think more complexly about everything from self to society to planet, while suggesting a creative, dynamic view of the world. His contribution to the paradigm of complexity depends on the fusion of Western and Eastern thinking.
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(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 9, 2018 Jean Gebser and the Recovery of Humanity
Human consciousness has developed and matured in stages. We have entered the threshold of a new level of consciousness. How this will impact the "world probematique" remains to be seen. Nevertheless, seeing where we're come from may offer glimpses on where we may go, especially when it comes to the cul de sac in which we currently find ourselves.
(19 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 29, 2022 Facing Fear
"The third story is called the Great Turning...
"Whatever situations we face, we can choose our response. When facing overwhelming challenges, we might feel that our actions don't count for much. Yet the kind of response we make, and the degree to which we believe they count, are shaped by the way we think and feel about hope."
Joanna Macy
As systems theory states, we do n't know what ripples can flow out from our actions.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 2, 2022 "Humans Anonymous"
It will avail nothing if we stay the same and expect the world to change.
There is plenty of work to do in the public sphere. However, we must not limit ourselves to focusing on the external world.
We also need to look inward and to work on our own consciousness.
We need to become willing to grow emotionally, mentally and spiritually - in essence recreating ourselves to become able to express transpersonal qualities.
(13 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 25, 2018 Some Thoughts on our Collective Predicament -- The Recovery of Humanity
This piece is designed as an introduction to a series of occasional notes, based in the idea that we have become inured, and in a sense "addicted", to a worldview/paradigm that is ready to be outgrown. These ideas, of necessity, will be developed in a step by step format -- each step building on former entries.
(19 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 23, 2020 Mechanisms of Escape from Freedom
Powerlessness leads to the kind of escape that we find in the authoritarian character or else to a compulsive conforming. if we don't see the unconscious suffering of the average "robot," we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture: the readiness to accept any ideology or leader if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to a person's life.
(29 comments) SHARE Monday, August 2, 2021 Death: The Final Frontier - Pt.1
In the modern world, many of us deny death, and are taught that death involves nothing but annihilation. Many of us live with a subliminal terror of this event, and believe that even talking frankly about it is morbid. Others look at death with a naïve, thoughtless cheerfulness, and assume that it is nothing to worry about. Yet, all the great spiritual traditions have told us clearly that death is not the end. Is it?
. Series: Death: The Final Frontier (1 Articles, 1954 views)
(17 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 18, 2021 Jesus of Nazareth - Psychedelic Guru - An Alternate View; Part 2
"Like all great spiritual Masters, Jesus taught one thing: presence. Ultimate reality, the luminous... is always right here, right now... The portrait of Jesus that emerges from the authentic passages of the Gospels is of a man who has emptied himself of desires, doctrines, rules - and who has been filled with the... Unnameable. Because he has let go of the merely personal, he is no one, he is everyone."
Stephen Mitchell Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43159 views)
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 16, 2021 Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation: Applied Principles of Psychosynthesis with Schizophrenic Clients
"I have come to see this soul journey as an expression of a deep need, even drive, within us to seek the fulfillment of our human wholeness and to realize the destiny we sense is ours at this core level. Many obstacles, inner and outer, always appear, and the journey is never easy, and yet something in us is compelled to take it. It is a central aspect of human experience - light and dark, high and low..."
- Thomas Yeomans
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 13, 2020 Umberto Eco's 14 Common Features of Fascism
Phil Mershon:
""fascism holds that moral conceptions, as applied to mankind, are absurd, and... impede the natural course of events: nationalism, ethnocentrism, militarism, and global conquest as an extension of realpolitik"implemented by the domination of the masses" guide the natural inheritors of... civilization to a series of battles in which the global state apparatus, in conjunction corporations subjugate mankind."
(33 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 2, 2021 Nobility of Soul
"Beneath the fears and needs, the aggression and the pain, whoever we encounter is a being, who, like us, has the tremendous potential for understanding and compassion, whose goodness is there to be touched."
Jack Kornfield Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43159 views)
(36 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 26, 2021 We Are Giving Birth to a New Level of Awareness - and Labor can be Long and Difficult
Gebser has very cogently argued that human consciousness has developed over time via mutations. In terms of what is currently happening, we can use the metaphor of birth, or alternatively that of interference patterns in physics. In either case it should not be surprising that we are experiencing turmoil and turbulence. We need not allow the difficulties to blind us to what is emerging - in the present and the coming decades.
(34 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 12, 2022 Nero Would Be Proud
After hundreds of thousands of years, humanity has begun to move into a time of great transition.
While many may sense that something is afoot, most of us have not yet awakened to the reality that we have reached a time of choice, unprecedented in its urgency, severity, and scale.
We must now recognize that the Earth is a tightly interconnected system that is currently breaking down and moving toward collapse.
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, November 19, 2021 Transformation: Applied Principles of Psychosynthesis with Schizophrenic Clients and Their Families Pt. 2
"I have come to see our human life, individual and collective, as a journey of soul on earth. This soul is universal and archetypal in all cultures, though named in myriad different ways"the word 'soul' [expresses] the experience of the core consciousness in each of us that holds the potential and pattern of our full, unique, maturity."
Thomas Yeomans
(54 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 16, 2020 In a Relationship with an Abusive President: Will the Country be a Trauma Victim or Trauma Survivor?
We are in a relationship with an abusive president. The question is whether we will choose to be "trauma victims" or "trauma survivors." A country's president is often at some level envisioned much like a father. We find ourselves in an analogous condition to children living in a family with an unpredictably rageful, out-of-control father. Such circumstances can have damaging, often powerfully traumatic effects.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 5, 2022 Personal Trauma and World Conditions - Transcending Paradigms - Part 8
Questioning everything - one's life, beliefs and worldview - is the key part of discovering our inherent power to create the world we meet. It takes great courage to question our existence, and even greater strength is required to know and recognize the truth when we see it. If events in our world steadily escalate into chaos and confusion, many of us will be compelled to wake up and really think about what is occurring. Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43159 views)
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 5, 2020 What we're in for if Donald Trump wins this election; A Brief Psychological Assessment of Donald J. Trump
We require a president with the intellectual and emotional maturity needed to lead our country and represent us on the world stage. It seems that too many Americans think that tyranny could never happen here. Yet if we fail to educate ourselves to the first stages of tyranny and the traits of a person who becomes a tyrant, how will recognize it when it happens?
(13 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 28, 2021 Prison - Our Shadow Writ Large - and Bringing Light into the Darkness
The prison milieu tends to reinforce strongly held opinions regarding the intractability of inmates. One thing is clear: feedback from the environment is responded to not by learning, but rather a single-minded focus - remaining in control and command, "one-up" on others. Accompanying this focus of attention is another: the need to remain ever more vigilant against treachery by those whose whose obedience one has compelled. Series: Our Collective Predicament (3 Articles, 4655 views)
(17 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 17, 2022 Healing Shame: Transcending our Paradigms Pt. 5
The most paradoxical aspect of shame is that it is the core motivator of super-achieving and the under-achieving, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.
Shame is one of the most potent tools of the societal control paradigm. It gains control of a person from within and replaces brute force, which requires energy and can lead to a boomerang effect. Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43159 views)
(44 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 13, 2020 A Caterpillar, A Butterfly and Donald Trump
We are living in a time of disintegration. For the moment Donald Trump is the maestro of this highly discordant symphony. However, it is possible to step back and view his actions as representative of a culture that is antiquated, worn-out and in fact obsolete. In the midst of the chaos Trump has brought to the fore, a new, life-affirming and sustainable culture beckons.
SHARE Sunday, August 12, 2018 Duane Elgin and the Maturing of Humanity
All of the humans alive today apparently descended from a very small community of several thousand persons living in South Africa around 65,000 years ago.Members of this community moved out of Africa and spread rapidly around the Earth. From a small band of hunter-gathers we have come to the edge of a planetary-scale civilization of more than seven billion humans.New challenges face us as we move from separation to community.
(17 comments) SHARE Friday, August 13, 2021 The Birth of a New Human Species
"I believe that humankind has entered into the most critical stage of a death-rebirth mystery...It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, an entrance into a profoundly different way of being in the cosmos."
--- Richard Tarnas
(53 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 24, 2020 Addiction, Humility, and the Fate of the Earth
This article is about our collective free will as a species. At this pivotal time our predicament calls us to bring to bear: great intelligence and knowledge, penetrating insight and far-reaching vision, and dedication to address the perils our human civilization faces. We need to discern how we might survive these adversity factors and even grow from them.
(19 comments) SHARE Friday, March 26, 2021 Developing Authentic Power: If We Are a Wave, Are We Willing To Know We Are The Ocean? The Path to Survival. Pt. 6
Thom Hartmann summarizes the indigenous worldview as a succinct, simple solution to our world's problems:
"Return to the ancient and honest ways in which humans participated in the web of life on the earth, seeing yourselves and all things as sacred and interpenetrated. Listen to the voice of all life, and feel the heartbeat of Mother Earth."
(13 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 27, 2021 Awakening to the Energy We Call God - Pt.2
Aldous Huxley discussed the essential common core of spiritual wisdom as profound insights that have endured across centuries and cultures - a treasure house of humankind's accumulated wisdom.
There is an essential idea to which the Perennial Philosophy points: that we have tragically underestimated ourselves and the deepest cause of suffering in life. Series: Awakening to the Energy We Call God (3 Articles, 4327 views)
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, October 3, 2022 Transcending Paradigms - Systematic Assertiveness - 7
Our primitive survival responses include coping with difficult people by fight or flight - becoming aggressive or avoiding other people. The alternative is verbal assertiveness.
The unique difference between ourselves and other animal species is our interpersonal verbal problem-solving ability.
Pulling Your Own Strings:
youtube.com/ watch?v= WLJYCd4Wq6E Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43159 views)
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, July 27, 2018 The Authoritarian Personality
Much of the trouble facing our species involves misuse of power. Although this power-over, rather than power-with paradigm - like empire - has seen its time come and go. Still there are many people and institutions who are deeply wedded to this way of life, will fight to hold on to power and have little interest in introspection. The alternative is learning to empower others and allow others to empower us. Courage is needed.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 20, 2023 IMAGINING OUR FUTURE: PERILS AND PROMISE: Story 3. Humanity Is Growing Up
If we are to move into our early adulthood as a species and grow beyond our adolescent consciousness, we will need to develop greater capacities to consciously work to restore the resilience and integrity of our Earth's eco-system, consider the impact of our actions on the rest of life (including future generations), and bring fresh awareness and sacred regard for the living universe that is our home. Series: Positive Visions of the Future (5 Articles, 18418 views)
(25 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 30, 2021 Cultivating a Resilient Self Amidst Social Chaos - Part 1
We need the kind of strength that is flexible to accommodate rapidly changing conditions. We will also need wisdom, compassion, and a capacity for loving ourselves, our fellow humans, and kindred Earth creatures. Here are some tools to accomplish these goals.
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, April 2, 2021 The Prison-Ashram Project
Viktor Frankl wrote: "What would give light, must endure burning."
When we are unable to move horizontally (forward or backward), we are sometimes drawn to move inwardly - deepening our awareness. What we can discover illuminates the grace of being "stuck." With guidance, suffering can become a rite of passage, a death and rebirth toward personal and spiritual growth. Series: Our Collective Predicament (3 Articles, 4655 views)
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, June 1, 2020 The Authoritarian Character in a Time of Turmoil
Today we are immersed in a disoriented and fragmented world - faced with dwindling resources, including supplies of nonrenewable energy, a destabilized global climate, mounting environmental pollution, expanding population growth and rampant corruption. This is a formula for ecological collapse and social anarchy.
Authoritarianism is a crucial obstacle to our survival and further evolution as a species.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 4, 2020 Seeking Solutions to the "World Problematique." Breakdown or Breakthrough.
Our world is in crisis. Global challenges abound. The dark side is the imminent danger of the breakdown of interdependent societies with the perspective of extermination of civilized human life. The bright side marks a possible entrance to a new stage of evolution of humanity, to the self-organization of a humane world society. Systems research and the science of complexity can help us master the current transformation.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 6, 2023 Species Forerunners: Can Humanity Grow Up in Time?
"The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.
"Individual thought is mostly the result of collective thought and of interaction with other people.
"The language is entirely collective, and most of the thoughts in it are. Everybody does his own thing to those thoughts - he makes a contribution.
"But very few change them very much."
David Bohm, Physicist, On Dialogue Series: Species Forerunners (4 Articles, 14174 views)
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 23, 2020 In Relationship With An Abusive President, Will We Be Trauma Victims or Trauma Survivors? - Part 2: A Larger Context
"...for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler's regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can't happen again."
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, August 31, 2020 Overcoming Fear of Freedom
"...more at work here than the use of coarse language or a display of incivility by a sitting president; there is also a flirtation with violence, the rhetoric of white supremacy, and the language of expulsion and elimination. Trump's embrace of unthinkable terror takes on an even more onerous tone as the language of dehumanization and cruelty materializes into policies that work to expel people from any sense of community..."
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 26, 2020 The Childhood of Tyrants
Beaten children become humiliated and confused, although soon are taught that the beating is "for their own good" and does no lasting harm. Much later, this type of beating becomes a part of their own so-called good parenting--forming the basis for much violence in the world.
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 16, 2021 Cultivating a Resilient Self Amidst Social Chaos - Part 3: The Spiritual Dimension
The word "soul" encompasses the beauty and strength of an experience of connection to the spiritual dimension-one that cannot be reduced to one word, but remains an ineffable experience, which is very central to the human condition and which we can recognize as common to all, in all in the midst of our differences.
(11 comments) SHARE Monday, July 6, 2020 The Four Stages of Spiritual Growth
"In the last analysis, the current global crisis is a psychospiritual crisis; it reflects the level of consciousness evolution of the human species. It is, therefore, hard to imagine that it could be resolved without a radical inner transformation of humanity on a large scale and its rise to a higher level of emotional maturity and spiritual awareness...This is not only possible - it is already underway. Series: Awakening to the Energy We Call God (3 Articles, 4327 views)
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 15, 2018 Our Need for Positive Meta-Narratives for Cultural Transformation
We operate - often unknowingly - via stories or beliefs regarding where we came from, who we are and where we are going. Given the state of the world, our species has a clear need for fresh, life-enhancing narratives (or assumptions). Alternative, inspiring stories are presented in this piece.
(20 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 21, 2021 Awakening to the Energy We Call God - Part 1
As Einstein put it:
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us."
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 10, 2022 Transcending Paradigms: The Most Important Challenge of our Time Pt. 4
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon described our world this way: "Throughout the ages, people have said that the world is in the midst of big change. But the level and degree of global change that we face today is far more profound than at any other period in my adult lifetime. I call this period the Great Transition." Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43159 views)
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 28, 2018 Totalitarian States of Mind in Organizations - Recovery of Humanity
Power-over scenarios are still rampant in organizations. This, naturally,provides rich food for authoritarians. Yet, it is an error to think that dominance resides in one person only.e.g. the "boss". Work groups are interdependent and emotionally based thought-forms (such as anxiety - as we know) are quite contagious. An alternative perspective is offered.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, July 17, 2023 The Only Game in Town: The Relevance of Higher Levels of Consciousness to our World Crisis - 1
Despite the multitude of perils we face Edgar Morin sees many reasons for urging one another to continue to exert the effort necessary for making this promise a reality. There is cause for hope, and for work stresses Morin, on a number of grounds.
There is first the resilience of life itself. All living beings, he reminds us, regenerate themselves through being naturally and non-coercively directed toward their own future. Series: The evolution of human consciousness and culture (4 Articles, 8114 views)
SHARE Thursday, May 14, 2020 Domination
To make the necessary great transition to equality and sustainability involves recognizing that, as a species and despite our many differences, we have been on a common journey. To survive we must turn our attention to discovering how the human family can live sustainably on Earth. Transforming our predicament involves appreciating our history of
being divided. This article reviews the "new authoritarianism".
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 26, 2018 Our Collective Predicament; Authoritarianism, Patriarchy and The Recovery of Humanity
In a great many spheres of human life we are once again becoming accustomed to a dominator/dominated, even sadomasochistic, style of being governed. Ignorance, fear, aggression and a wish to cling to the familiar are on the rise and becoming the norm. Meanwhile, various forms of apathy and paralysis spread. Insight - the ability to see things just as they are is both a first, final, and dependable way out of this morass.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 30, 2020 Our Shared Quandary
Human beings and the bio-community to which we belong are in trouble. We have already entered into a time in which we are beset by unrelenting forces of overpopulation, a destabilized global climate, dwindling supplies of nonrenewable energy, and mounting environmental pollution. It is likely that human civilization will either collapse into chaos or ascend in a process of profound transformation.
(15 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 24, 2020 Evil and The Malignant Narcissist
Erich Fromm first coined the term "malignant narcissism" in 1964, describing it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity."
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 4, 2020 Dumbin' Us Down
Many of us at home and abroad, are incredulously asking how the American people lifted Donald Trump into the position of President of the United States.
Will we be enduring four more years with Donald Trump at the helm? Why is our next election predicted to be even close, not to mention, "highly competitive?" Trump's approval rating has remained steady between 40% and 44%. Why aren't more of us utterly appalled?
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 8, 2021 The American Prison System as a Failure in Human Being: Enter The Prison-Ashram Project
"Unfortunately, many of those nonviolent offenders will no longer be nonviolent by the time they leave prison. Prisons are not scaring offenders away from crime; they are incapacitating them so they are hardly fit for anything else... Many wardens, judges, and other officials know this, but it has become political suicide to admit it publicly."
Bo Lozoff Series: Our Collective Predicament (3 Articles, 4655 views)
(36 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 5, 2022 Jesus, Christianity and the Oppression of Women
Jean-Yves Leloup's translation and commentary on the apocryphal gospel texts reveal unique teachings that emphasize the eminence of the divine feminine and an abiding love of nature over the dualistic and ascetic interpretations of Christianity presented elsewhere. What emerges from this important text and commentary is a renewal of the sacred feminine in the Western spiritual tradition and a new vision for Christianity. Series: Gnostic Christianity (2 Articles, 4553 views)
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, February 5, 2021 Cultivating a Resilient Self Amidst Social Chaos - Part 2
Existential psychotherapy sought to address "terminal superficiality" in western man. "Not knowing who one really is," not being able to engage in life from the depths of one's being, necessarily creates inner conflicts. Beyond simply managing symptoms, this approach seeks to enable clients to grapple with the root causes of their symptoms. Underlying these issues is the search for Being.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, July 30, 2018 Our Collective Predicament and the Power of Group-Think
One of the ways we jettison the responsibility for crucial decisions in group-contexts is by bowing to the will of the majority. As far back as 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville warned that a form of autocratic rule in the United States could easily take just this form. It takes a strong and centered individual to resist the seductive pull of majority rule in small groups. This is another way we seek to "escape from freedom."
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, July 10, 2020 The Value of Cataclysm
Humanity appears to be divided against itself and pitted against nature.
With devotion, good fortune, genuine remorse, endurance and much effort, the crises in which we will predictably continue to find ourselves may together act as an evolutionary catalyst: motivating the human species to move to a higher level of awareness and skillful action by forcing the issue: what might be called "emergence through emergency."
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, June 8, 2020 Of Trump, Caterpillars, and Butterflies
Trump is a representative of Control Culture writ large. In Slater's analogy the caterpillar stands for the existing culture, with an emphasis on domination over people and environment, growth as the critical aspect of economy, and the belief in separation and conflict. The butterfly stands for an emerging, more mature culture that values cooperation, democracy, a sustainable economy, and a belief that everything is connected.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 6, 2021 The Energy We (Sometimes) Call Infinite Consciousness - Pt.3 - Transformative Practices
"Hugging meditation is a combination of East and West. According to the practice, you have to really hug the person you are hugging. You have to make him very real in your arms"You breathe consciously while hugging, and you hug with your body, mind and heart. "Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, he is so precious to me.
Thich Nhat Hanh Series: Awakening to the Energy We Call God (3 Articles, 4327 views)
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 16, 2022 The Untold Truth about the Martin Luther King Assassination
"...history...is an eternal reminder to a generation
depending on nuclear and atomic energy, a generation depending on physical violence, that love is the only creative,
redemptive, transforming power in the universe."
(25 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 2, 2021 Deep, Positive Stories For the Future
We cannot avoid the urgency and importance of the collective effort of imagining and building a global "eco-civilization" - one that recognizes that we all inhabit the same Earth and want the ecosystem to be strong and resilient to sustain a global civilization into the distant future.
(25 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 10, 2020 The Essential Adventure of our Time
Facing the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, people can dare to be comfortable with uncertainty if they are in solidarity with each other. Feeling overwhelmed easily becomes traumatizing. But once people have tasted that they can, with each other, speak about what they see and feel is happening to our world, a number of things happen. There is a trust and realization of, "Oh my god, I'm not alone."
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 5, 2018 School Daze and the Recovery of Humanity
Can education teach us to think for ourselves - or is repetition and "the party line" the best we can do?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, August 31, 2018 Integrative vs. Control Culture - An Overview
We are in the midst of a transformation from one set of global values and habits of mind, called here, "control culture" and the other, "integrative culture." The first is in the process of dying, exhausting itself in an attempt to stay alive and dominant, the second, integrative culture, is still in the process of being born. Naturally, this is a disorienting and disconcerting time.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, November 27, 2020 Honoring our Pain for the World
We now have a previously unprecedented communications capability to connect and share our learning with our local and global neighbors as we create a new civilization into being.
We the People have the right, the means, and the power. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
And the time is now. The window of opportunity is fast closing.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 21, 2021 Reconciliation Pt. 2 - Easier Said Than Done
"There is an important distinction between forgiveness and simply allowing others wrongdoing. Where wrong action is concerned, it may be necessary to take appropriate counteraction to stop it.
"Toward the actor you can choose not to develop anger and hatred. This is where the power of forgiveness lies - not losing sight of the humanity of the person while responding to the wrong with clarity and firmness."
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, January 18, 2021 Reconciliation: Toward a Unified World
There are so many divisions that alienate us - one from another. Yet, in order to survive as a species in the coming years, we must find way to bridge our divisions and learn to create a habitable, sustainable planet.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 11, 2020 Planet Earth - The Titanic?
While much attention is understandably on the upcoming election, we may not be thinking much about the upcoming decades. But the problems we are facing are not going away and in fact are likely to worsen if we proceed with business as usual. After tens of thousands of years, humanity has begun to move into a time of great transition. In reality we are hitting an "evolutionary wall" and need to make a pivotal turn as a species.
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, January 11, 2021 Dystopians R' Us
The message of the prophets of old: "Change your ways of seeing and living in the world because the path you are currently on will lead to disaster." At the core of our consciousness is a wellspring of caring and compassion. What David Korten has called "the Great Turning" emerges from shifts occurring in our hearts, minds, and views of reality.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 2, 2018 "Achtung, Baby!"
Monopolizing exchanges in one to one conversation is something with which almost all of us are familiar. It is a microcosm of the larger phenomena we have looked at to date. We can not build a cooperative, sustainable world when this is an unconscious norm.