For the survival of the Earth (not humanity mind you, humanity will survive, but the Earth as a living being), it is necessary that the current destructive materialistic society, based on throw away consumerism, built on cruelty and oppression of sentient rights (towards animals), the destruction of nature, and the exploitation of third world peoples and the under-privelaged everywhere, be replaced by a more wholesome society, a totally new civilization.
This will have to involve initiatives and principles like
new moral insight, based on (a) Human Rights (including social reform, eliminating social injustice, third world sweatshops, etc), (b) Sentient Rights (animal liberation, which would involve lifestyle changes including vegetarianism and veganism), and (c) Environmental Rights (the latter being a spiritual and ecologically self-sustainable attitude (which would include right way of relating to the spiritual forces behind nature). Note that each of these are equally important
spiritual participation new model for business and capitalism (and not, as some suggest, a rejection of the capitalist system).Whether this actually comes to fruition will depend on various factors, the main one being whether the new memes be overcome the entrenched old ones before most nonhuman life on Earth is destroyed and the remainder becomes an impoverished but nevertheless flourishing biota described by paleontologist and science writer Peter Ward in Future Evolution (this may already be foregone conclusion in any case)
The following is a number of links, topics, quotations, etc, along with, where relevant opr where I have gotten around to adding it, my own opinionated commentary.
Let's get one thing clear at the start. Pending the singularity, the human race is Extinction Proof, as Peter Ward has correctly observed in his book Future Evolution. Since the emergence of our kind on the Pleistocene savannahs, we have seen out, and seen to, the extinction of numerous species. This process of extinction is currently increasing at an exponential rate, as increasing human population and needs enroach upon and tear up the last remaining natural environments. The animals have nowhere to go. Their best hope is in zoos, game reserves and national parks. Plants are if anything more threatened. And as for microorganisms, how to identify and culture them, preserving them from extinction. The world we inhabit is becoming increasingly destitute of species. But we, the adaptable human race, who thanks to our all too successful Darwinian conditioning put ourselves first always, will survive. Unless some new species of posthuman evolves from us and suplants us the way we have supplanted the rest of biosphere
It is the end of nature as we know her, but also the beginning of a new nature, a new assortment of organisms that are able to co-exist with humanity, as our pets, our parasites, for food or legal or illegal drugs, as scavengers and opportunists and weeds in the suburbanised, monoculturalised world we have created.
Peter Ward is one of the very few who talks about this, in his provocative book (right), now out of print (see "Future Evolution" by Peter Ward - Salon for more info)
But perhaps even the above is a highly optimistic scenario. In any case, the future is not about whether or not we will exist. It is about what sort of world we will create for ourselves and what remains of the biosphere. Which will also determine what the new biosphere that apperas from this latest mass extiunctyion will be like. And what will be the spiritual role for this world in the Cosmos. Will the Earth of the future be a center of cosmic spiritual transformation, or a spiritual black hole roaming through the cosmos, what Rudolf Steiner calls the "Eighth Sphere" (need to add ref.). Or neither? It remains to be seen. If one is an optimist, then the positive will prevail. According to The Mother, the new world is certain (Agenda, need to find refs.). This despite all appearance s to the contrary. So here are some initiatives, and some comments.
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, by David C Korten. This is an extraordinary book. It looks at the way that the last five thousand years have been ruled by an exploitative and hierarchical form of culture that Korten calls "Empire", or "Dominator Culture", presneting both the whole psychology of it, and a bit of cursory history. Most attention is given to the failure of the "American experiment" through corporate plutocrats, religious theocrats, and neoconservative militarists. Although these are usually associated with the "right", Korten argues strongly that "Empire's" values are as detrimental to conservatism as they are to the reform left. He then provides a case for the alternative, which he calls "Earth Community" -- a people-centered, community-based future, along with practical steps as to how to bring this about. Sure, his typology is really simplistic, us and them sort of thinking, and I don't buy the primordial cooperative society (not matriachy, but similar) thing that he adapted from Riane Eisler, and his alternative big stories or myths to replace the current literalist christian and materialistic consensus, while a decent start, is preliminary at best, as he himself fully admits. He seems to get a lot of his ideas here from Deep Ecologist Joanna Macy and neo-teilhardians like Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme (The Universe Story or Great Story). But on the whole this is a marvelous, optimistic book, that doesn't shirk from looking at the ugly cause of Empire, while at the same time embracing the future in a very positive way. His alterantive story is in fact very much the alternative one now, and is what was also presented at an ecology workshop I went to, a sort of pantheistic science story. According to Korten, and to the conference I went to, these communities, and these organisations, are already emerging now. The process of change is underway.
However what I am interestied in lightworking, and really radical moral reform. Because it's all tied together, you can't separate animal abuse from human abuse, or eother from environmental abuse. But this will require a change of consciousness and lifestyle on a very fundamental level. Significantly, while environmental and human issues get top billing in these initiatives, universal sentient rights still lags way behind. It truly is the last taboo.
But what of spiritual communities. Well, I'll look briefly at the two most esteemed "new age" communities - Auroville, and Findhorn.
Auroville - a universal New Age community established by The Mother For me, this is the spiritual teaching par excellence. And Auroville - the universal city established by The Mother on the basis of Sri Aurobindo's tecahings - is the attempt to put it into practice. But Auroville can only be as good as the aspirations of the people who comprise it. On the Auroconf mail list I have met many wonderful people, sincere devotees Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, and residents of Auroville. I myself have never been there, except very briefly when i was just a kid and visited India to see Sai Baba. However, a good friend of mindne, someone who has travelled widely visiting alternative communities both here in Australia where I am, and world-wide, has been to Auroville and Findhorn and found both dissapointing. He told me that in Auroville it is all about personal politics, who has the best house, etc. I know from her Collected Works that The Mother was very dissapointed with the original Aurovillians, who, in her words "behaved like animals". This is because she established it with no rules. But very few are at her level. (need to add refs re rules on no drugs etc). Then there is the claim the Mirapuri people make about threats of violence made against them when they were part of Auroville, which forced them to relocate (need to find web ref). Is there smoke without fire. I don't know. For every negative statement, there are many positive. But I would hav eto visit myself. Pending that, I can only remain agnostic.
Mirapuri is the humanistic, european, free-consciousness City of Peace and Future Man in Italy founded by Cyberartist, CyberMusician and Futurist Michel Montecrossa, on the basis of the worldpeace ideals of Sri Aurobindo and Mira Alfassa (The Mother), and with guidance and comission from The Mother.
Mirapuri's first satellite Miravillage has been established in Germany.
Homo-Integralis - Institute for Integral Consciousness-Research and the Future of Man - (in German), affiliated with Mirapuri - English page -
I actually get a much more positive vibe about Mirapuri then I do about Auroville. Genuine insight? Or Intermediate zone? I don't know. Again, all one can do is remain agnostic, until more facts come to hand.
The Findhorn Foundation - Findhorn is a small village in northeast Scotland between Inverness and Aberdeen. It was in the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park that the whole New Age movement was initiatiated in the early 1960s through an extraordinary cooperation between the human and devic kingdoms. See The Magic of Findhorn by Paul Hawken for an entertaining account of the early years, and The Findhorn Garden by The Findhorn Community for the "official" account. A brief history of Findhorn from when it was founded by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean in 1962 to its growth to a major international centre of spiritual education and personal transformation can be found here.
I mentioned my friend who has travelled all over the world, been to alternaticve centers everywhere. He was dissapointed with Findhorn, which he said had too much personal politics. I haven't been there. I don't know. If you have any anecdotes or any experiuences with any of these, or any other, alternative communitiues, please contact me
My Proposal for a New Spiritual Alternative Community. Well, if there is nowhere else suitable, and nowhere else local, maybe it is meant for me to initiate my own? So far, no takers. We will see how the future turns out!
My suggestion for an online Integral Gnostic Community. This was actually inspired by the failure of the Integral Movement (see below)
The California Institute of Integral Studies is an accredited institution of higher learning and research that strives to embody spirit, intellect, and wisdom. (The faculty includes among others Stan Grof - one of the most important new paradigm / transpersonal psychology thinkers). It was established by Haridas Chauduri, a student of Sri Aurobindo's teachings.
"Since its founding in 1968, the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco has become recognized worldwide as a unique leader in higher education. While preparing students to work in the areas of psychology, religion, philosophy, and the humanities, the Institute also cultivates qualities graduates will need as leaders of transformative change in their professional work and in society. This is accomplished through a commitment to the reunification of the body, mind, and spirit -- an embodied integration of the intellectual and the spiritual. The Institute's values foster cultural diversity as well as cultural coherence, multiple ways of knowing, spiritual practices, a sense of community rooted in our common humanity, feminist ideals, and sustainability. We are an accredited graduate school offering M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Humanities, Counseling Psychology, East-West Psychology, Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation. Our faculty provides students an opportunity to work closely with leading scholars and researchers in their fields."
For what is wrong with the CIIS, see below
Integral Institute Integral Naked Integral University - based on the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber. I am greatful to Wilber for his grand if flawed attempt at a big picture universal synthesis of everything, for that has inspiring me to work on my own books, to get right what he got wrong. I have however soured to Wilber since originally listing these links; here's why. Nevertheless I find his followers to be very sincere and decent people, with a lot of genuine good will. Unfortunately the organisation as a whole tends to lack gnosis; too much mental and not enough spiritual insight. Too much philosophy (theory) and not enough teaching (practice). This lack of authentic spirituality is one of the things that inspired me to suggest an alternative Gnostic Community. The Wilberian initiative however has a potent outreach, especially in relation to Aurobindonian Integral Yoga, although hopefully this will change with initiatives from the Aurobindonian side such as AUM 2007. It has inspired (Wilberian/PostWilberian) websites like Integral Visioning (including the Integral Encyclopedia Wiki - an open-source collaborative encyclopedia dedicated to discovering, inventing and exemplifying new ways to include and integrate a multiplicity of ideas, articles and discussions, from a wide range of integral perspectives)
There was a time when I looked to the CIIS to provide an alternative to the Wilberian juggernaught (Integral Instutute etc(. I have since been told that the culture there (I guess students etc) is full of marijuana use. That put me off majorly, since marijuana is an insidious drug that has pretty much destroyed any chance of the Australian hippy/alternative scene amounting to anything; I assume in America and elsewhere in the world it is the same. People are weak, and alternative people in their weakness love to take marijuana as their drug of choice, just as the "yobbos" take alcohol. But if anything marijuana is even more insidious; it stays in the bloodstream for weeks (thus influencing the subtle bodies and the aura), can make its way into the fat cells, etc. And because of passive smoke even non-smokers are affected if they are nearby (unlike alcohol). The deva of the plant is actually a sort of parasite on humanity, and in this way it has guaranteed the survival of its species in perpetuity, because humanity is extinction proof any organism that provides an addictive substance humans find unable to resist is also therefore extinction proof.
One thing is certain; the new civilization has to be built by people who are grounded, and spiritually centered, and clear headed, if the mistakes of the past are not to be repeated.
A New Integral Paradigm - A work in progress by yours truly. I'm currently writing a series of books - Integral Metaphysics, Integral Transformation, etc which will provide a new/alternative paradigm integral perspective that will incorporate both science and esotericism. It will also go beyond both the standard alternative "universe story" and wilberian integral theory, also showing how all these perspectives fit in the bigger picture. The spiritual path, spiritual tarnsformation, requires of course not just theory, but practice. These books will include both theory and point teh way to practice.
Based on the emerging, decentralized, commons-based "third mode of production" - described in an essay by Michel Bauwens (see introduction and links); see also the newsletter.
The Noosphere Website "aims at developing a thesaurus of integrative knowledge, especially on psychological, social and philosophical topics, i.e. the sciences where the integrative method is essential for their scientifical plausibilty. The expectation is that by a process of intellectual and factual integration the last stage of the social/universal evolution will be realised, labeled with terms including Socialization, Noosphere and Tertiary Society. " Participation is welcome. The webmaster, Michel Bauwens, has recently completed an important essay on Peer to Peer and Human Evolution. Thus the Teilhard-inspired Noosphere website gives way to The Foundation for P2P Alternatives. See especially 
The Foundation's Blog where many links, comments, and quotes from many different websites and initiatives are posted.
Cooperative Spirituality - see resources page for many useful links - blog by
Mushin J. Schilling, a very spiritual individual and true gnostic who I know originally from his comments on Visser's Wilber Watch, more recently he has commented on my Integral Transformations blog; he has a blog and cyberspace presence on Zaadz too.
The following very insightful observations by John Heron on Cultural development and moral insight give a good overview of the spiritual quality of a society or civilization, based on the consensus morality of that particular society (hyperlinks not in the original)
Evolution as a concept seems best left to natural processes. Otherwise intellectual bids to know what evolution is up to culturally and what is coming next culturally, rapidly convert into hegemonic arrogance and attempts at social and intellectual control. Cultural development is a different category and is very close in my view to the way in which human realization of a doctrine of rights, in theory and practice, unfolds.
There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight and not in an evolutionary logic:
- Autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation.
- Narrow democratic cultures which practise political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.
- Wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation.
- Commons peer-to-peer cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human edeavour.
These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.
- Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy.
- Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only.
- Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres.
- The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavour.
We Change. org is about promoting and enabling this change, one human being at a time: changing ourselves and changing the way we relate to the world for our own benefit and for the benefit of the whole humanity.
Zaadz - from the Dutch word for "seed"; an online networking community empowering people to change the world, established by Brian Johnson, a life coach and very enthusiastic guy with a very positive attitude. Currently still mostly Wilberian and Cohenist inspired, but that seems to be changing, as more people join and the community breaks free of its original limitations. I get a very positive vibe about this project. It may be that through forums like this the Integral movement will be able to grow beyond its current limitations. Brian also has the idea of spirituial capitalism; so far nothing has happened but in the future, maybe. So it will be interetsing. Even if this spiritual capitalism doesn't take off (and I do admit to some scepticism), just the development of this virtual spiritual community will make everything worthwhile. Given the lack of success with real-life communes, where people are in each other's faces and there is too much ego and personality, or alternatively they are lazy or into drugs, maybe online communities are teh way that spiritual collectives will develop.
Earth Vision - a new site centered around deep ecology and spiritual ecology, via distribution of ebooks in a not-for-profit-operation (ebooks for sale, but minimal traffic in that regard, enough to support activities). It is the premise of EARTH VISION that in order for humanity to cherish nature, humanity must first recognize nature as a reflection of the very soul of its own being. See also the links (LYNX) page. One ebook is available free.
Paragonian Business Academy - Building the Infrastructure for the Sharing Economy
The New Political Compass by Paul Ray
 |
Left versus Right doesn't work any more
A century ago, Left vs. Right meant progressives and unionists vs. big business and maybe the Ku Klux Klan. But that was before nuclear weapons could destroy life on the planet, before the civil rights movement and women's movement, before the insurgent radicals of the religious Right came back into politics, and before saving the planet from ecological destruction and globalization became a huge issue. Both the issues and the constituencies of the US have evolved, but our political rhetoric stays frozen in century-old lingo and metaphors, and so have our political parties and our politicians. When we add new data about values and political positions, it becomes obvious that this image of our politics is beyond inadequate, it's hopelessly wrong and misleading. With only 31 percent of the population fitting the image of Left versus Right, it simply doesn't have a future. My data for the New Political Compass come from a 1995 values survey that included just enough political information to do this analysis....The underlying structure of the data shows the opposition of liberal Left versus social conservative, crossed by the opposition of the New Progressives versus the Big Business Conservatives. The only ones left in the "center" are the politically alienated, the ignorant, and the studiedly apolitical. |
Paul Ray's full report: 
New Political Compass, 167 kb;
Cenocracy (Going Beyond Democracy) - Cenocracy means New Government. History may well record it as Cenodemocracy, which means New Peoples Government. It is based upon a new philosophy of developmental biology
News for a Synergetic Earth CommUnity of Minds : Working Together Future Positive Time-binding Trust - The Knowing Unity - an inspiring website with extracts, links and on-line books (including Edward Haskell's Full Circle) by Timothy Wilken
Culture, Networking & Environment
- links for transformation
 |
|
|