Worldwide Tipping Point has just posted an historic interview with Ken Wilber. The interview provides a glimpse into Kin’s brilliant mind and the stages of cultural development with an exploration of the emergent integral worldview we are presently entering.  Ken offers the best concise description of the sixth great shift we are living through I have heard. You can listen here.

And, Seth Godin’s new book, We Are All Weird, describes this same shift through the lens of a celebration of choice, of treating different people differently and of embracing the notion that everyone deserves the dignity and respect that comes from being heard. The book calls for end of mass and for the beginning of offering people more choices, more interests and giving them more authority to operate in ways that reflect their own unique values. For generations, marketers, industrialists and politicians have tried to force us into little boxes, complying with their idea of what we should buy, use or want. And in an industrial, mass-market driven world, this was efficient and it worked. But what we learned in this new era is that mass limits our choice because it succeeds on conformity. As Godin has identified, a new era of weirdness is upon us. People with more choices, more interests and the power to do something about it are stepping forward and insisting that the world work in a different way. By enabling choice we allow people to survive and thrive.

From the NY Times

An Interview With A.C. Grayling

By TYLER KRUPP and RACHEL STUART

 

This video is part of a weekly series of interviews with contemporary thinkers and philosophers on questions that matter.

A.C. Grayling is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. At the time of this interview, he was professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books, most recently, “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible.” We interviewed Grayling in particular because he’s written prolifically as both a philosopher and public intellectual on many of the themes central to our project. In unusually accessible prose, writing from a humanist perspective, Grayling has continued the Socratic tradition of raising the basic philosophical questions that touch upon our lives. Grayling struck us as a sort of exemplar of the humanist way of life, moving freely in his responses between an incredible range of topics with humor and wit.

 

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View all interviews in the series here.

Tyler Krupp is doctorate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Rachel Stuart received a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from University of California, Berkeley. More of their work can be found at thinkingaloud.com.

By Peter Oldfield, NPD Associate Editor

Recent public debate has rightly and at last asked questions about the formerly sacrosanct realms that drive our scientific and technological pursuits in the realm of astrophysics.

Witness the desire to laser-illumine a point near the center of the Milky Way. This extravagant program, one that happens to be under the aegis of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), supports other international astrophysical consortiums with the same questionable academic prerogatives they’ve all been trotting out for sixty years or more, and now well into the post-modern era.

They appear to be holding an entranced world to ransom, as it were; and it is happening right now in the pristine Atacama Desert of coastal Chile, right in the lap of a deprived local populace.

It is clearly a question of priorities as, contrary to popular sentiment, the ‘wow technologies’ have caused us to lose sight of a more human reality. These costly ventures need to be entirely relegated to their proper place, i.e. of lesser importance than the well-being of every last child in the human family.

You can GoogleEarth the coordinates: 24º 37′ 38″ S, 70º 24′ 15″ W and see this extravagance in broad daylight – and notice the curious structure in the top left hand corner of this picture!

A foot-note:

Why do I use the word ‘enchantment’?

Because it carries that slightly benign implication found in ‘fairyland’, and that, after all, is where we’ve been taken. It prepares us then to contemplate, with kindness toward ourselves, the question “What was our part in this?” And as good an answer as any might be “We fell asleep”.

Now at last we are awakening together to the possibility that our civilizational hubris, a kind of ‘shadow’, in the early Jungian sense, that chose to sacrifice human well-being and our deeper connectedness to the matrix of nature, over the altar of a techno-scientific vision, has not simply faltered but has rather, in Titanic fashion, now hit the ice-berg of complete self-deception.

A desire for transcendence no doubt arises in the hearts and minds of all human collectivities, but we must now ask whether we have confused suitable means for attaining that higher goal.

Confidence in the vision has been building up over centuries of Eurocentric power and expansion. Indeed one can trace it back to that peculiarly western story of Gilgamesh and his doomed empire. It has it’s fullest expression in the current imperial prerogatives assumed by our own leadership.

One cannot help noticing that the most visible and fully constellated image in the American mythos is “The Wizard of Oz”.

Clearly the curtain is about to be drawn on the deceptive techno-wizardry that so completely swept Dorothy and her friends along as they faithfully followed the yellow brick path!

I am once again back on Waiheke Island, New Zealand, a thirty-five minute ferry north of Auckland. I came in during the start of the international rugby matches and all rooms are booked and there are hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Waiheke is a small island with lots of artists, great restaurants, wineries and beauty. It’s winter and yesterdays arrival in sunshine was wonderful. Today it’s raining and windy and a bit chilly which is more typical of winter.

I’ll soon be seeing my good friend Claude Lewenz and catching up on his Village Towns project. In the meantime, if you are interested in a visionary way of life and community, you may want to check out his books and videos and if you or anyone else you know might be interested in helping to birth the first Village Town in the world, an investor overview is available here.

Enjoy Steve Robert’s My Two Cents at CoolMindWarmHeart.com

Steve Roberts black ink drawing: head with wings on a unicycle

Here’s one measure of how the world is heading in a positive direction.

Fifty years ago the epitome of the circus was Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. With its lion tamers, dancing bears, trick horses, performing elephants, monkeys on bikes, and seals bouncing beach balls on their noses, the implicit message was Man Over Beast. Even the aerialists, tightrope walkers, jugglers, fire-eaters, knife-throwers and human pretzels were an example of Man Over the Beast Within. Today, the epitome of the circus is Cirque du Soleil, whose implicit message is The Celebration of Humanity. Indeed, Cirque leaves most churches in the dust when it comes to inspiring the integration of body, mind and spirit: the criteria for living as a whole person.

Here are hundreds of the planet’s most exceptional performers and everyone who gives them life, all striving to convey a vision of dignity, joy, depth, a world without limits, jubilation, playfulness, breaking the bonds of ignorance, overcoming indifference, etcetera, etcetera. And, needing to open themselves perhaps more completely than they ever imagined possible in order to even approach pulling it off.

Excellence at Cirque du Soleil is not a matter of taming beasts, but of bringing forth the unfathomable beauty within each person, including members of the audience.

Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it by the barbaric choices we make everyday in the name of goodness, humankind’s evolution has been a continual, and actually relatively speedy, awakening of consciousness.

According to a monk friend of mine, about 1500 years before Jesus, Moses preached an idea revolutionary for the time: “Don’t kill your brother.” When Jesus came along, he advised something that was, for his time, equally radical: “Love your brother.” Today, we’re gulping at another notion: “You are your brother,” which is to say, there’s nothing in “them” that isn’t part of us. That’s a pretty big shift in just 3500 years, but such is the nature of our unfolding.

Cirque du Soleil is an example of life on the leading edge of that unfolding. Yet Cirque is not unique. Many organizations are home to people I like to call ruthless saints.

These are men and women engaged in a practice of growing their attunement to the unconditional love and support of the universe––and are uncompromising in assessing the extent to which their work in the world expresses that attunement.

One sign on their fridge says “No Blame.” Another says “Everyone is Our Teacher.”

The growing number of ruthless saints is the real proof that the world is moving in a positive direction. And the best news is you might meet one anywhere.

In the mirror, for instance.