One of the most frequent questions we’re asked is, “What can I do to help accelerate the global shift in consciousness that is happening now?”

Recently, our friends at Integral Life released a video to their private membership of its founder and the world’s foremost integral philosopher, Ken Wilber, answering that very question.

You’re likely already familiar with Ken Wilber. But in case you’re not, he’s largely responsible for bringing what we now refer to as “integral philosophy” and “integral spirituality” into the world. It’s easy to say it’s one of the most important accomplishments of the past century.

In fact, President Bill Clinton considers him one of the most important thinkers of our time, and we’ve been influenced by and benefited from Ken’s work immensely. The truth is, few people have the kind of authority that Ken Wilber does when it comes to showing how we can take the next step for humanity.

In the video, he discusses the single most important thing he feels any individual concerned with our global welfare can do to help create an integral world.

Click here to watch the video.

Watching the video, you’ll realize how you–and everyone else involved in this emerging integral movement–are in a unique position to actually push the leading edge of consciousness forward… to help create a global transformation, the likes of which has happened literally only five or six times in history.

We hope you find it valuable, inspiring, and empowering. Listening to messages like Ken’s has never been more important and timely for this moment in our movement’s–and perhaps even humanity’s–history.

A Revolutionary No-Rinse Sprouting Method Produces Massive Amounts of Fresh Foods and Healing Living Oils Quickly and Effortlessly!

Dear Friends:

At a time when a billion people in the underdeveloped world can scarcely find enough food to eat each day, and those of us in the over-developed world are feeling the pinch as well, there is now a simple system for sprouting food and creating “live oils” that can benefit all of us, rich or poor.

Given how important local food independence is in these times when we must build an economy based on real value, I urge you to read this entire email — and order this DVD!

A Revolutionary Way to Grow (and Nourish) the Butterfly Organism

I first learned about the Seeds of Sustainability over a year ago, and have watched my friends and associates at the Interdependent Project build their community and produce their video learning program. It’s ready for prime time now, and not a minute too soon. Imagine a system so easy that it can be used to grow food in any environment, even where there is a shortage of fresh water. And imagine having a way to enhance your own diet with healthy, delicious, nutritious live foods — an abundance of food with a minimum of work and no rinsing.

The Seeds of Sustainability DVD teaches you an excellent way to sustain yourself, and your family, with a method that can work for any situation, whether you are looking to add delicious gourmet super-foods to your diet or are trying to feed hundreds of people fresh healthy living food. This information is truly the modern equivalent of multiplying loaves and fishes for the masses, or as Swami puts it, “Feeding two (or in this case, millions of) birds with one scone.”

Proceeds Support Sustainable Communities

Not only is the team at project SOS donating 10% of their revenue to sustainable communities across the globe, but those very communities and charitable organizations in developing countries will be provided this information free of charge to further their missions and to feed those in need the freshest, most nutrient-dense foods available anywhere on the planet. Learn these simple principles, and you can eat the freshest living foods on the planet, even fresher than organic produce, for a little over the cost of seed. No matter where you live or what time of year it is, you can have fresh, living sprouted vegetables in just a few days, with no daily rinsing.

In addition to the revolutionary no-rinse sprouting method, the Seeds of Sustainability DVD also shows you how to replicate another natural process, the ripening process, to create Living Oils, unlike anything you have ever seen (or tasted!) until now. Learn how to make these beautiful nut butters or oils yourself, or subscribe to be notified when these living oils are available for sale.

Again, 10% of all proceeds go to the Green Fire Foundation, to provide extremely needed infrastructure grants for the existing sustainable communities around the globe who are pioneering the technologies that will herald in the age of the Butterfly; the organism we know as humanity, living together in peace, abundance and harmony with each other and the Earth. By purchasing the educational DVD, you will be supporting yourself, your family, and the very people all over the planet who are building the new infrastructure to catch us all as the caterpillar crumbles.

If you know anyone who is struggling to sustain themselves, consider gifting them a copy of the Seeds of Sustainability DVD. In this cash strapped economy, give a gift that REALLY keeps on giving by planting some Seeds of Sustainability today. The educational video is available as a physical DVD, or as an instant download (even more environmentally friendly).

As you know, it is not often that the Swami puts his Seal of Approval on other people’s goods and services, but in this case I have gladly made an exception. I am passing this on to you because this is a practical program that will begin changing the world for the better NOW. I can personally attest to the high quality of the foods produced using these methods. Give yourself or someone you care about the gift of Self Sustainability. You will be glad you did.

http://www.seedsofsustainability.org

Here is the donation plea and link from Save Tibet.org

All friends of Tibet are deeply saddened by the devastation and loss of life in Yushu, eastern Tibet. The International Campaign for Tibet is working with governments and partners in non-governmental organizations to do what we can to direct aid to Tibetans urgently in need. Contributions to the International Campaign for Tibet are tax-deductible and will support our earthquake relief efforts and fund our not-for-profit organization partners working with Tibetans in Yushu. Click here for information to donate by mail or online.

In addition to the recent destruction in Tibet, last year’s public demonstrations were brutally suppressed by China and film director Yusaku Mizoguchi put together a highly graphic expose of the brutality featuring the Dalai Lama should readers desire to see for themselves why it is so important to help support this cause. The California legislature unfortunately tabled a bill that would have condemned China for human rights abuses.

Pip Cornall is the author of Sustainable Masculinity and delivers a highly successful male violence prevention program. For the last three years, he has also worked closely with Grace Gawler and her cancer patients. Together, they write books and present workshops.

This article speaks to his experience and observations as a support professional in cancer work. He writes because he is terribly upset witnessing good people with cancer making bad decisions that have cost some their lives. His experience with Grace shows that clients who work closely with her have a much better chances of success.

Once upon a time I held very different views. In 1971 I owned a health food eatery in a small Australian surfing town. New to ‘health foods’ I proselytised everybody about the benefits of eating vegetarian. An avid Rodale junkie; in a few short years I became a ‘born again natural food fundamentalist.’ I soon sold my shop and bought a little plot of land in the mountains behind Byron Bay, to go ‘organic.’ I fervently believed in the power of nature to heal our bodies and I mistrusted western medicine. As much as I wanted to believe totally in the nature path, gradually evidence that came my way worked against it.

So I changed? Time is an amazing teacher—it mellows one like fine wine. With time I’ve seen that elements of the nature-health movement was about as fundamentalist as the western medicine I’d mistrusted. As an ‘older’ person you’ve been around a while—you’ve watched things against the backdrop of time—you see what works and what doesn’t. There is no substitute for time!

Three years ago my world changed requiring further adjustments to my ideology. I entered the cancer healing world. Assisting Grace Gawler with her cancer patients, I became privy to a fast growing trend. Many patients had put their faith in extreme diets widely promoted via books and the internet. I saw how they became lulled by nature-cure ideology while simultaneously their bodies were silently ravaged as the cancer spread. These diets included Gerson, vegan, raw and various combinations. They had become nature fundamentalists like me, ignoring contrary evidence and exceptions to the rule.

Because of my belief in nature I’d desperately wanted to see people curing themselves by following the natural path—but I haven’t—and it rocked my foundations like a force 7 earthquake. That was also Grace’s experience in decades of cancer work. In the mid seventies, at the tender age of 21, she’d become full time care giver for her boyfriend, later husband, Ian Gawler, after he lost his leg to bone cancer.

Against all odds she persisted! When family, friends and the medical profession gave him up for dead she always maintained they’d find a cure. Demonstrating her optimism—they married when he had just 2 weeks to live. Imagine if you can; the calibre of this woman—she married a one legged man with cancer when he had two weeks to live. It wasn’t even a good relationship but she refused to desert him. They tried everything and won—he was in remission by 1978. Their story made history in Australia and birthed the famous Gawler Foundation for people with cancer. Her healing skills established, Grace has since assisted 13,000 cancer patients in a career spanning 35 years.

Nobody wanted the nature cures to work more than Grace—she’d been a vegetarian from the age of five, rare at the time in Australia. But, despite her strong beliefs in natural diets, Grace admits she had never personally seen the Gerson or other extreme diets work successfully with cancer patients. I’ve questioned her thoroughly on this topic. Over the years she’d observed some of her wealthier patients go to Gerson style clinics in Mexico and other countries where diet based treatments were legal. Sadly she’s seen many die following such regimes and did not witness any successes. Today she advocates a middle of the road good diet such as healthy Mediterranean but in not at the expense of other treatment.

Indeed even her husband’s recovery has been widely misreported. It’s a well known cancer recovery story and has impacted millions but it is inaccurate! It has been attributed to a vegan diet, meditation and loving support. But Grace states Ian was never on a vegan diet in the 22 years she was his full time cook and care giver—he ate calf liver, fish, other seafood, eggs, and milk products. She said Ian had little luck with meditation while ill; such was the extent of his pain. In fact they pulled out of the Dr Ainslie Meares meditation classes after 6 weeks since Ian was getting sicker and, by his own admission, only developed his meditation skills long after he recovered.

Even medical journals can get it wrong! Incredibly, some years later, when Ian had his remission, Meares claimed his meditation method was responsible and inaccurately wrote of the Gawler experience in the Australian Medical Journal (MJA). Perhaps Meares, like the diet fundamentalists, had his own agenda, to prove his meditation method could cure serious diseases like cancer. If you Google Ian Gawler or Ainslie Meares you’ll find it written in cyber stone—not true, but patients the world over had no reason to doubt and thus faithfully followed the regimes proposed.

Despite decades trying to address what Grace knew to be false information, reports of Ian Gawler’s recovery have spidered out across the internet, vigorously promoted by nature-cure people like I was. Multiply my story by thousands and we see how ‘memes’ are born. (Ideas that grow) Indeed as a trained yoga and meditation teacher, I vigorously promoted the benefits of meditation. ‘Hey did you hear about that guy who cured his cancer doing intense meditation? Yes, another good reason why we should all be meditating.’ I proselytised. Due to my zeal, my ‘emotional fundamentalism,’ certain contradictory information was invisible to me—for example, I’d not remembered the many famous meditation masters who had died from cancer—it would have been an inconvenient truth. Like Dr Meares, I had an agenda!

I’m concerned that such urban myths snowball into dangerous avalanches which result in unnecessary deaths. In her practice Grace attracts numerous ‘end stage’ patients aware of her reputation for getting the ‘worst cases’ through.’ Many of these are close to death having tried to emulate what they believed to be the Gawler’s path to wellness. Unfairly it falls on Grace to straighten them out. It comes as a shock to be told the accurate account—especially after having endured years doing 3 or more hours daily meditation (with resultant social isolation) and distress from extreme diets and fasting.

Grace says the Gawler story is perhaps one of the most misreported in the new age healing industry but tragically, it is not isolated. Unfortunately there are other prominent ‘celebrities’ in the cancer healing industry whose stories don’t equate with their medical histories. Desperate patients are vulnerable and will want to believe what they read if it offers hope for them—but it must not be false hope.

Fear of surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments drive many to the internet where anecdotal cancer healing miracles abound. Upon deeper scrutiny, many are flimsy at best and few are evidence based. Just because a story is repeated on numerous websites does not testify to its veracity as Grace knows in their own healing situation. Nature-health fundamentalists such as I have been, pick up and spread the stories without much thought to the consequences—cancer patients may live or die depending on the accuracy of the information. I now realise I have a responsibility to promote the truth—as we all do.

The fundamentalist approach (if you don’t think it is fundamentalist, try talking to a raw food advocate about this topic) can be one sided and makes it even harder for desperate patients to navigate the cancer maze. Beware, of your own fundamentalism—like me, you will want to believe you can cure cancer with a raw food diet, meditating 3-5 hours a day or eating apricot kernels–whether true or not.

With millions of web articles responding to a Google search for vegetarianism, vegan, raw diets, meditation cancer cures—many misquoting the Gawler story; Grace advises patients doing internet searches to insist that the claims made by self-proclaimed cancer ‘experts’ who supposedly cured their cancer by ‘natural’ means, be medically authenticated (view the medical records)

For genuine recoveries from cancer that are medically recorded, Grace recommends the IONS publication available on the internet for free – Spontaneous Remission – An Annoted Bibliography. Most of Grace’s memoirs are available for free via Google books. Grace also refers prostate cancer patients to the work of Dr ‘Snuffy’ Myers found on Youtube and the internet. Grace suggests that you be informed, choose wisely, walk the middle path, take the ebst from all modalities—you life may depend on it.

http://www.noetic.org/research/sr/main.html

http://www.prostateforum.com

A former Physical Education and Outdoor Skills teacher, Pip Cornall has worked with young people for over four decades. Pip is concerned by male violence accounting for more than 95% of all violence. From a global perspective this threatens the very existence of our world and at a local level means communities live in fear from gangs, domestic violence, murders, theft and graffiti.

Male challenge is one of Pip’s greatest passions and provides resources to help boys become good men, to help men promote healthy masculine norms, to help parents and single mums raise boys to become good men, and helps sport and sporting communities endorse sensible forms of masculinity.

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?

Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

This isn’t just sermonizing. This is the age of research, so there’s data to back this up. Over the past few decades, teams of researchers have been studying happiness. Their work, which seemed flimsy at first, has developed an impressive rigor, and one of the key findings is that, just as the old sages predicted, worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through.

For example, the relationship between happiness and income is complicated, and after a point, tenuous. It is true that poor nations become happier as they become middle-class nations. But once the basic necessities have been achieved, future income is lightly connected to well-being. Growing countries are slightly less happy than countries with slower growth rates, according to Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution and Eduardo Lora. The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness. On the other hand, it has become a much more unequal country, but this inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness.

On a personal scale, winning the lottery doesn’t seem to produce lasting gains in well-being. People aren’t happiest during the years when they are winning the most promotions. Instead, people are happy in their 20’s, dip in middle age and then, on average, hit peak happiness just after retirement at age 65.

People get slightly happier as they climb the income scale, but this depends on how they experience growth. Does wealth inflame unrealistic expectations? Does it destabilize settled relationships? Or does it flow from a virtuous cycle in which an interesting job produces hard work that in turn leads to more interesting opportunities?

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.

The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.

This may be changing. There is a rash of compelling books — including “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” by David Halpern and “The Politics of Happiness” by Derek Bok — that argue that public institutions should pay attention to well-being and not just material growth narrowly conceived.

Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side.

Not exactly, says British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson.

For decades, Wilkinson has studied why some societies are healthier than others. He found that what the healthiest societies have in common is not that they have more—more income, more education, or more wealth—but that what they have is more equitably shared.

In fact, it turns out that not only disease, but a whole host of social problems ranging from mental illness to drug use are worse in unequal societies. In his latest book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, co-written with Kate Pickett, Wilkinson details the pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, encouraging excessive consumption.

The good news is that increased equality has the opposite effect: statistics show that communities without large gaps between rich and poor are more resilient and their members live longer, happier lives.

YES! Magazine web editor Brooke Jarvis sat down with Richard Wilkinson to discuss the surprising importance of equality—and the best ways to build it.

To read the interview, click here.