The Daily Evolver

In this thirteen minute excerpt of a conversation from September, Jeff  speaks with Ken Wilber about the pain and suffering inherent in a human life, which begins with the nature of emergence itself. The more we develop, the more aware we are, and the more capacity we have to feel pain. If you go back thousands of years, Ken says, a person just had to get from  infrared (Archaic) altitude to magenta (Indigenous) altitude. There are a limited number of things that can go wrong there. But as time goes on: Our own history gets thicker and thicker. There are more and more levels to us, there are also therefore more and more things that can break down, more and more things that can go wrong.That’s why if you look at the whole 14 billion years as a one year calendar, humans appear in the last few minutes of the last hour of the last day, because we had to transcend and include everything that came before. And all of those things that can go wrong involve pain — but not necessarily suffering. Wherever there is an other, there is fear, so the more we are able to transcend our individual selves the better things get. Pain still happens, of course–in fact we’re even more sensitive to everything–but we’re less identified with it.

In this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit, Dr. Keith reveals what he’s learned in over forty years as a psychotherapist about cultivating integral love relationships, what the shift to a 2nd tier “love operating system” looks and feels like, and how you go about teaching couples to love completely.    Everything is relationship. Only a small sliver of our brains has to do with our sense of individual self—we’re designed to be social, to interact. We’re designed to love. Our development depends upon it. And yet, it isn’t always easy. Lofty concepts aside, what is the most practical way to teach people how to love and be loved? In this conversation with Jeff Salzman, Dr. Keith Witt–our Doctor of Love himself–shares some of what he’s learned in over forty years as a psychologist and therapist, where, he says, “it’s always about teaching people how to love more completely.” So what does an integral view show us about love? In first tier structures of consciousness we tend to focus on what’s broken. The orienting question is how do I fix it? This extends to our relationships with our families, therapists, friends and lovers, and of course ourselves. We are biased towards looking for problems. There is a wisdom in that orientation, naturally—it will help you—but only up to a point. And then it will hold you back. On the other hand, if we enter into relationship with a bias towards showing up and seeing what arises, more often than not what arises are our strengths and virtues. The orientation here is not fixing what is broken, but asking instead what can we create? Dr. Keith calls this a positive, flex-flow approach. The bridge from a fear-based operating system to a love-based operating system is built by fostering a dialectic between these polarities. As aspiring integralists, growing into second tier structures of consciousness, we want to expand our natural curiosity into those places that keep us from loving completely and welcome the conversation between fear and love. “In higher stages of development you want to turn towards your pain, to deconstruct it until it turns into love,” says Dr. Keith, “and then you have to embody it. It takes courage, and usually a lot of help.” Freud’s seminal idea of the unconscious reveals a rich field of practice in intentional development. A hundred years ago people didn’t get that our psyches are influenced by forces outside of our awareness. But now most of us do, so much so that as Jeff says, “by the time we reach the postmodern stage we can’t stand the idea that there’s a place inside of ourselves that we can’t see.” So we get more and more interested in our shadows. The most difficult type of shadow is the kind that we resist. Defensive states cut us off from our sense of self-reflection and are the main impediment to investigating parts of ourselves that may be fragmented and unloved. Changing our defensive states into states of healthy response is one of the main areas that Dr. Keith covers in his teaching because it’s so crucial to loving completely. To learn about defensive states, Dr. Keith suggests you write down the last time you felt threatened. “What was your amplified or numbed emotion, distorted perspective, destructive impulse? Where was your empathy and self-reflection?” As you write, you may notice the balance of emotions changing. Over time your mental and emotional states start to become objects in your awareness. A little bit of daylight is all you need in there to begin making adjustments from a defensive response to a healthy response. People bridging into 2nd tier structures of consciousness begin to do this instinctively—the noticing, the turning-towards. When we think about markers or qualities of 2nd tier consciousness, we think of a radical acceptance of the human condition and an affection for all of its craziness,

I start this podcast with a nod to a movie that I think qualifies as a work of integral art: Interstellar. It’s director Christopher Nolan’s latest film, a big-budget science fiction epic starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Most science fiction is bound by scientific materialism, or scientism, the belief that, in integral terms, the seemingly interior aspects of reality are just expressions of the exterior aspects. In this view, consciousness is seen as a throw-off of the synaptic activity of the brain, free will is a delusion that gets us out of bed in the morning, and love is a mélange of chemicals and emotions that tricks us into mating and forming pair bonds. This is the prevailing “religion” of modernism, taken on faith by most of academia, the media and the rising (and welcome) ranks of atheists. It is the philosophical basis for artificial intelligence and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity, which posits that sufficient material complexity will create consciousness. It is epitomized by the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, created first by Carl Sagan in 1980 and reprised last year by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which we explored with Ken Wilber at the last Integral Living Room (you can listen to some of our discussions here). Integralists may be friendly to scientism, recognizing that it serves as a corrective to millennia of magic and myth where humanity was in the thrall of spirits, gods and God. But we also recognize that scientific materialism, like all religions, is itself limited by what it cannot or will not see: the domains of reality that feature novelty-out-of-nothing, enthusiasm, identity, mutuality and love. In other words, the dimensions of reality that are non-material but no less real than material reality. In this more integral view love is as real as a rock. I believe that we are today witnessing the crescendo of scientism in our culture and the beginning of a serious challenge to its supremacy, a theme I feature often in my work. Interstellar is an example of this trend. It is a story told from all four quadrants, where love is explicitly seen as force in the universe. As Anne Hathaway’s character Dr. Amelia Brand says in a voice Nolan clearly wants us to hear: Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful, it has to mean something… Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. David Brooks also writes appreciatively about Interstellar for the same reasons in his column, Love and Gravity, in the New York Times (11/20). As always, Brooks skates close to an integral understanding that love and intelligence are fundamental features of the universe and are present all the way down to the subatomic world. But this isn’t an explicitly religious movie. “Interstellar” is important because amid all the culture wars between science and faith and science and the humanities, the movie illustrates the real symbiosis between these realms. …in the era of quantum entanglement and relativity, everything looks emergent and interconnected. Life looks less like a machine and more like endlessly complex patterns of waves and particles. Vast social engineering projects look less promising, because of the complexity, but webs of loving and meaningful relationships can do amazing good. As the poet Christian Wiman wrote in his masterpiece, “My Bright Abyss,” “If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication.

I start the podcast by sharing the experience I had last weekend visiting the gay pride festival in Palm Springs, California. Palm Springs is a small city of about 45,000 people, just west of Los Angeles. Aside from its fame as a showcase for Mid-century Modern architecture, which overlays a cool calm on the blazing desert, it is known for its concentration of gays, estimated at 35-40% of the population. So gay pride is a big deal. This year they cordoned off ten blocks of the main downtown for shows, displays, and of course a big parade on Sunday morning. Twenty thousand visitors poured in to partake in three days of festivities. And it was all…so civilized. There wasn’t a bare butt or breast in sight. Three or four guys in speedos were handing out fliers, but they seemed a bit self-conscious in the presence of all the children and their gay and straight parents. The whole extended family was there, grandma and grandpa too. The displays and parade floats were sponsored not only by gay organizations but by Well Fargo, Whole Foods and the local car dealers. Nobody was tossing condoms into the crowd. The parade featured the local high school bands and drill teams. As a veteran of the gay pride happenings of the 70‘s and 80‘s, in the darker times of anti-gay legislation and the plague of AIDS, I must say I felt a certain loss. The spirit of being part of a tribe with a real fight on its hands has been subsumed by the reality of our victory and integration into the wider world. Back in the day, when my partner and I joined the Gay March on Washington we walked the streets proudly hand in hand — for the first time in public, tears streaming down our faces — with 500,000 other people who were bonded by the experience of having been shut out, frightened and often abused because of who they loved. The sense of stepping out of the shadows in all our glory was to experience a group identify and aliveness that I have not experienced since. The gay rights movement of the late 20th century has substantially won its two big fights: 1) AIDS, which while not cured is manageable, and 2) social acceptance, with gay marriage now legal in 32 states and a comprehensive Supreme Court ruling expected next summer. So last weekend was a bit of a lesson for me in the power of tribal identity and the pain of its loss. I have a better understanding of why people in today’s tribal cultures are not willing to give up their identity easily. Those of us who have do so are left with the sense that we have lost something precious. But I don’t wish to have it back any more than I wish to go back to childhood. There are bigger, higher battles to be fought, with comrades that are bound together more by creativity than necessity. At integral consciousness we begin to be able to create new tribal connections, but this time they are more more memetic than genetic, more organized around ideas than blood relations. We’re able to experience the juice of being deeply bonded to all kinds of people in ways that are not exclusive but expansive. HEALING RACISM BY POINTING OUT PRIVILEGE One of the key projects of the green altitude of development is to find and bring home those people who have been shut out of previous stages of development: the weak, the sinners, those who don’t have the opportunity to succeed. I often marvel that after millennia of cutthroat conflict and competition humanity’s next move is to become sensitive to the vulnerable and, like a fretful mother, we’re unable to rest until all of the family is at the table. In the last sixty years as the cutting edge of culture has moved into mature orange and green altitudes, we have seen in the developed world the arising of large social movements such as feminism, civil rights and gay rights. These have met with huge success, particularly in the legal area where protection against racial and sexual discrimination has been won and is in the proc...

I start this podcast with some observations about the big Republican win in the U.S. midterm elections. For an Obamapologist like me it is a sad day, marking the end of the Obama agenda. It is not necessarily the end of the Obama era, however. By soundly winning the Senate and bestriding Congress the Republicans have stopped Obama cold, so the question now becomes…will they offer an agenda of their own? If they do I’ll bet they find that Obama still has the bipartisan spirit that launched him into the Presidency in 2008. It’ll be in both their interests to accomplish something, because over the long haul in politics something will always beat nothing. But obstruction can be a good short-term strategy, and has been for the Republicans so far. Stay tuned… MONEY, POWER AND JUSTICE In my main story I address the mother of all first world problems: global capitalism, by responding to a piece written by Joe Corbett entitled Jeff Salzman, Ken Wilber and the Missing Link between Integral Theory and Practice, in which he offers a critique of a conversation I had with Ken Wilber and posted a few weeks ago: The World According to Wilber. Corbett’s essay reveals a fruitful friction often found among integralists. First let me address his opening theoretical argument that when justice is not included on par with the primary human values of goodness, truth and beauty it is a “glaring omission of the L-R [lower right] quadrant”, and therefore the conversation Ken and I had is “entirely devoid of any structural analysis or acknowledgement of social institutions and the prevailing forms of justice within society.” This is nonsense of course; suffice it to say that Ken WIlber, author of AQAL Theory, didn’t just – ooops! – forget about the exterior collective dimension of reality. Indeed Ken and I both talk about the structures of society all the time, including in our conversation. I wouldn’t know how to discuss current events without doing so. Part of the confusion may come from a misreading of AQAL Theory where Ken relates the four quadrants that make up a human being to the three native perspectives a human being can take: first person (I and me), second person (you and we) and third person (it and they). So how do four quadrants flow into three perspectives? Ken situates both the upper right-hand quadrant (U-R) and lower right-hand quadrant (L-R) in the third person world of “its”. Quadrantly speaking, the individual human body (in the UR) and the power/economic systems of societies (in the LR) are respectively the individual and collective exterior dimensions of reality, and can be seen and measured by the senses. Thus third person. Ken goes on to associate the first, second and third person perspectives with what he calls the “big three” philosophical values of goodness, truth and beauty. First person is the domain of beauty (which is deeply subjective), second person is the domain of goodness (how we treat each other) and third person is the domain of truth (what is objectively verifiable). The philosophical relationship between the fundamental values of goodness, truth, beauty and those of justice is a discussion that’s been ongoing at least since Plato. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, check out Steve McIntosh’s terrific thesis on the subject, The Natural Theology of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. PRIMARY VALUES: MOVING TARGETS What Corbett is really saying in his critique is that Ken and I didn’t talk about the L-R quadrant in a way he agrees with, so let’s move on to Corbett’s argument that Ken and I give shor...

Green Halloween is for adults, too I start the podcast by observing that in post-modern (green altitude) subcultures like Boulder, Halloween is as much a holiday for adults as it is for kids. I tell of walking downtown where I saw a woman in an oversized witch’s hat walking a black pug that was wearing a set of shiny black bat wings. At first glance there was no sense that this was a dog in a costume; he looked like a little fat flying creature. People on the sidewalk were laughing, pointing and joking with the woman and each other. It was great street life. This experience is indicative of what happens as we move into green, postmodern consciousness: as adults we want to express ourselves and be seen in our own mature uniqueness. We want to be able to be a little bit bad. We want to turn towards our shadow material (the parts of ourselves we can’t see and don’t know) and explore it in a way that is safe and fruitful. Halloween is a great excuse to do all of this publicly. As evolutionaries it’s also interesting to remember that in humanity’s earlier stages of development (all stages prior to modernity) evil spirits are real. This is true for individuals as well as for cultures at large. I have a friend who grew up in Thailand and lived as an adult for many years in the U.S. She tells me that when she goes back to Thailand she always closes the curtains at night because she was raised to believe that evil spirits look in at you from outside.  She’s surprised at how real this feeling is when she is in Thailand, but when she’s in the West she’s a perfectly modern woman and it doesn’t make any difference. One of the projects of modernity is to wring magic (seen as superstition) out of the system. One of the projects of integral consciousness is to re-enchant our lives by consciously reintegrating the magical stages of our own development. We get back in touch with our own magical childhood. We feel into the spirit-filled world of our early ancestors. As we begin to perceive that Spirit — even spirits — by whatever name are still here, we can relate to them in a way that does not poo-poo or deny them just because they are invisible to science (much of reality is), but we also relate to them in a way that is not limited or gripped by them. So, yes…in the sacred world to come adults dress up for Halloween! Ebola Jumps the shark The second leading story is about one of the nurses who was infected with Ebola in the Dallas hospital by the man who arrived there from Liberia. On Monday she was certified as cured and released from the hospital. In other words, people, it’s been a slow news week. Both of these stories have been dutifully hyped by the media. In fact, Fox News ran the second story with the headline: Dallas Nurse Infected with Ebola Discharged from Hospital, which misrepresents the actual point of the story — she is no longer infected! — by 180 degrees. Of course, the headline serves both Fox’s modernist corporate agenda, which is to keep viewers emotionally hooked and tuned in for advertisers, and also its traditionalist conservative agenda, which is to create a general sense of national chaos and incompetence that benefits the out-of-power party. But the hysteria is not just the right side of the political spectrum; Bill Maher is also wailing from the left, though at a different target. Visibly upset on his show Real Time, he said, “I’m not panicked. I’m pissed at the morons at the hospital in Dallas. In Texas, they hate regulation. They love their freedom, so they couldn’t be bothered to notice that this guy had Ebola.” Even Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, normally a pretty centrist, occasionally integral guy, was all worked up. He delivered a lengthy screed about how Americans are scared and disappointed, how they’ve been let down by the Center for Disease Control and all the experts in charge,

Also: Depolarizing American politics with Steve McIntosh I got a kick out of the following posting on an atheist website: “‘I’ll pray for you’ is a line that religious people say to get credit for doing something, when in reality they’re doing absolutely nothing.” I’m not so sure, and I start the podcast by looking at how prayer and meditation may actually work to relieve other peoples’ suffering. If, as Ken Wilber says, “thoughts are things” – novel ontological objects in the kosmos that add to the evolving storehouse of consciousness – then prayer and meditation may be one thing we can do for those suffering in the ebola epidemic. Insight into the power of prayer is of course nothing new to pre-modern people. Historically all religions, both theistic and nontheistic, have provided methods for interceding with divine powers for human benefit. Modernity came along and debunked these practices as superstitious hocus-pocus, and of course the baby went out with the bathwater. Integral theory creates room to bring prayer back, and in the podcast I talk about some of the ways we can work with it, even without having to necessarily relate to God. Nontheistic Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, for instance, is designed to literally generate love and relief for other people. Integral theory suggests that the movement into second-tier human consciousness is a recapitulation of the original awakening into first tier, when human consciousness arose out of the animal mind. So at second-tier we are new babies again. And just as a newborn baby has to bite his foot a few times before he realize that it belongs to him, we are now waking up to new capacities that have been there all along. One of these capacities is the power of our mind. But it’s a little tricky because it’s not our mind anymore; it’s access to a bigger mind, a bigger heart and bigger creativity that we surrender into. These new territories are not “ours” in the sense of belonging to our individual selves, but are the product of our increased access to the ever-present loving intelligence that is part of the basic fabric of the universe. This has not been proved, as least not to the satisfaction of most scientists, but it is a good working hypothesis that can provide the basis for a trans-rational faith in the power of prayer and intercessory meditation. Praying for those affected by Ebola isn’t the end of what we can do to help of course. We can vote, inveigh, donate — even, if qualified, don our hazmat suit and fly to West Africa. (I’m so impressed with the heroic people who are called there to risk their own safety for the welfare of others.) But praying isn’t a cop-out either. And it’s something we can do right now. Chaos and politics We human beings are, and always have been, failing forward. ~Jeff Salzman I also address the shortcomings of the various institutions entrusted with responding to the crisis, including international medical organizations, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and the hospital in Dallas where an Ebola patient infected two other people. I see these failures less as an indictment of the incompetence of the institutions than as examples of the chaotic nature of life. Every first tier altitude of development has an idea of how the world should be, a steady-state of perfection where things are ordered according to, for example, the word of God (in the amber traditionalist altitude), or rationality (in the orange modern altitude), or the realization of oneness (in the green postmodern altitude). Actual reality always falls far short of the ideal and is subject to endless scapegoating and condemnation. At second tier consciousness we begin to realize that we are part of a moving, evolving world that serially disappoints us at the same time it relentlessly accumulates more intelligence and capacity.

This week Jeff shares some evolutionary insights and encounters he had on his few weeks of hiatus. He starts with a personal story of his own development regarding communion with animals. He also examines a common sticking point for liberals, exemplified by a widely noted public argument between Bill Maher, Sam Harris and Ben Affleck regarding Islamic violence and Islamophobia.

Human beings are memory machines, for better or for worse. There is an autobiographical narrative that is alive inside all of us, and just as individual memories seem to create me, memories in the morphogenetic field create the collective culture of my family, my society. You could say that the universe is essentially memory and we are each part of a long line that is re-membering our species anew. Our ancestors are alive within us, as is a great longing to re-member where we came from, in the kosmic sense. Dr. Keith says these morphogenetic fields of memory are sometimes evident in family constellation work, when a stranger will have “memories” of our relative while standing in the place of that person. The field of the family comes into that room. Then there are fields of knowing that pass on flashes of great insight. Einstein, Mozart, and so many others, often claimed to have captured something, fully formed. How does this work? Is information traveling at the speed of light into our nervous systems? Is the DNA double helix a perfect shape for the transmission of energy, as some believe? Keith wonders aloud with Jeff about the method of action, and it’s fascinating. When we anticipate the future we’re using the same brain circuitry as if we are remembering something from the past. If I anticipate having a good time tomorrow that actually becomes a “memory” of how I’m going to have a good time tomorrow. If I anticipate a bad time tomorrow then I now have that memory instead. The curse and the blessing of human consciousness is memory. The great apes can’t go more than about a half hour into the future. We can go forever. Each stage of development has a new, organizing principle around memories and trauma. The integral stage is about bringing a consciousness and an intentionality to the process because we realize that we are co-creators — with emergence itself — of our lives and of the kosmos. ~Jeff Salzman Most people are familiar with the effects that major trauma like car accidents, sexual abuse and so on, can have on a person. But our sense of self is also formed by what Dr. Shapiro, the founder of EMDR, calls the “little ‘t’ traumas”, the small humiliations. Dr. Keith explains that compassionate self-observation is necessary but not sufficient to deal with some of the very sticky issues in the psyche. The brain doesn’t give up anything that it associates with survival. As a psychotherapist, Keith’s job is to make his clients more oriented towards reality, discerning the true from the false, the healthy from the unhealthy, and continually choosing the healthy. “The deeper truth is always coherence,” says Dr. Keith, “the deeper truth is always unity, always love.” Memories from “capital ’T’ Traumas” resist re-consolidation (in therapy or over time) because during a traumatic experience, in extreme states of stress, two parts of the brain shut down and one has to do with time. “That’s why someone in a deep rage or depression has this sense that they’re going to be in it forever,” Dr. Keith says. So the therapist practices what’s called a dual focus: while therapist and client are connected in the present moment, in a safe and supportive environment, they make contact with the memory. During this process the therapist makes the client feel valued and worthwhile, while simultaneously being connected to the trauma. This gives the brain an opportunity to re-consolidate the experience, and the positive aspects of the self disconfirm the previous, traumatic memory. The main factor here is the relationship with the therapist. Relationships where there is an emphasis on self-soothing (and therefore emotional self-regulation) are important for this process to work. We can do this in our relationships with each other. Our past keeps coming up,

Ken Wilber is my hero. I mean that quite literally because Ken rescued me – from a life of confusion, fear and frustration as I tried to make sense of our crazy, mixed up world. Ken’s insights, set forth in his nearly thirty books and hundreds of talks and teachings, has organized life on Planet Earth from a disjointed mess into an elegant and meaningful whole. He has created a “theory of everything” that is worthy of the name, and which is helping countless people around the world to lead more intelligent, effective and loving lives. Through his work Ken has revealed deeper dimensions of the prime force that powers the cosmos, evolution, by showing that evolution does not just explain the exterior forms of life, such as cells becoming sponges then fish then reptiles then mammals and ultimately human beings, but that evolution also powers the interior dimensions of the cosmos, and is behind the astonishing development of human consciousness and human culture. To bring this down to everyday terms, Ken has shown me something that I attempt to show in my blog posts and podcasts: that we are evolving creatures in an evolving world. And further that there is a teleology, a directionality, to our evolution such that we human beings are indeed developing into higher dimensions of goodness, truth and beauty. I realize that it doesn’t always look that way as we tune into the day’s news and see that for so many people (and creatures of all kinds), life is anything but good, true and beautiful. But this points to a deeper, paradoxical truth about evolution in general: while in its grand historical sweep evolution is beautiful, in daily application it is often not at all pretty. This realization is powerful, and calls all who realize it to enlist in the project of creating a more good, true and beautiful world. This is perhaps Ken’s greatest teaching to me: that in the final analysis we ourselves are evolution in action. As he as done for four decades now, Ken Wilber continues to illuminate the path forward. So I thought it fitting, as I mark my first hundred episodes of the Daily Evolver, to invite the great man himself onto the podcast. Last week we got together on the phone to take a look at the world as it is turning today, and to see if we can make some little bit of sense of it. We range through politics, religion and culture, from ISIS and Muslim extremism, to the situation in Russia and Ukraine, to political polarization and the future of government, to technology and trans-humanism, to the coming integral tipping point. I’ve had the amazing good fortune to work with Ken over the past ten years and I know him to be not only the smartest person I have ever met, but also one of the wisest and wittiest. He is still the best and most sparkling vehicle for his own teachings, as I think this conversation demonstrates. I hope you enjoy it. Here are some highlights from Ken to whet your appetite: “There’s a race going on now between disaster and enormous breakthroughs. Human beings are transcending and including, transcending and including, which means that as our own history gets thicker and thicker and thicker, there are more and more levels to us. There are also therefore more and more things that can break down, more and more things that can go wrong.” “Virtually all world conflict today is one ethnocentric group versus another ethnocentric group.” Integral values are radically different than any kind of values that we’ve ever seen at any stage of development in any of humanity’s history, ever. Yet integral consciousness hasn’t yet self-identified. Most people that are integral don’t know they’re integral. “My sense is that in twenty years we’re going to hit a second tier tipping point. It will be slow but as people start paying attention to interior degrees of development,

1:50 EVOLUTION’S LATEST: TWEE… I start this week’s call by noting an article in last Sunday’s New York Times style section entitled: The Millennials are Generation Nice, a psychographic snapshot of the 50 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. This latest generation of adults, likely mirrored by those in other developed countries, are characterized by a declining interest in materialism and an increased dedication to social purpose, vegetarianism and optimism. The article concludes, “Taken together these habits and tastes look less like narcissism than communalism. And its highest value isn’t self-promotion, but its opposite, empathy — and open-minded and -hearted connection to others.” This view supports the thesis of a book I’ve been reading, Twee, The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion and Film, by Mark Spitz. Using the sometimes derogatory word “twee”, which means “excessively sweet or sentimental,” Spitz writes that “Twee can be similarly liberating from the pressure to be cool, swaggering, aggressively macho, and old at heart.” James Parker, in the Atlantic, describes it as “The strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the props departments of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache-ends of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time someone pops open a microbrewed beer.” Spitz identifies several markers of the Twee aesthetic: * Beauty over ugliness. * A sharp, almost incapacitating awareness of darkness, death, and cruelty, which clashes with a steadfast focus on our essential goodness. * A tether to childhood and its attendant innocence and lack of greed. * The utter dispensing with of “cool” as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin. * A healthy suspicion of adulthood. * An interest in sex but a wariness and shyness when it comes to the deed. * A lust for knowledge, whether it’s the sequence of an album, the supporting players in an old Hal Ashby or Robert Altman film, the lesser-known Judy Blume books, or how to grow the perfect purple, Italian, or Chinese eggplant or orange cauliflower. * The cultivation of a passion project, whether it’s a band, a zine, an Indie film, a website, or a food or clothing company. Whatever it is, in the eye of the Twee it is a force of good and something to live for. To me these orientations suggest a consciousness that is differentiating itself from the cynicism, irony and malaise of the post-modern altitude of development. Are we seeing the first signs of a new integral aesthetic? I think so, especially in the emphasis on basic goodness, as well as the impulse to create a personal project that contributes to the world. 12:45 A GOOD WEEK FOR THE OBAMA DOCTRINE Despite pundits left and right decrying Obama’s handling of ISIS extremists in Iraq, we have seen an enormously positive development in the situation as a direct result of what Obama has done and not done. I’m talking about the peaceful and legal replacement of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by the new Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi. Maliki did not go easily and for a few days it looked as if he may even resort to attempting a military coup to maintain power. But in the end he acquiesced and even stood by the new Prime Minister in a demonstration of a constitutional passing of power that is remarkable in that part of the world. In his disastrous last years in office Maliki presided over a Shiite domination of the country, precipitating a ratcheting down of Iraq from a fledgling modern altitude to a neo-tribal one, and creating rifts that enabled ISIS to gain a foothold in the Sunni sectors of the country.  Obama was criticized for “letting this happen”, criticism he pushed back on in his recent

Szandra and Jeff met a few months ago in Budapest when she shared her research with the Integral European Conference. Szandra is an “ecological economist”, and to create a pathway towards the economy to come she uses a method called backcasting. With backcasting the researchers begin with a vision of what they want to exist in say, fifty years, and then they work backwards to see what would have to happen to create it. Szandra conducted her research using two groups of test subjects: one older and steeped in modern values, and a younger group with postmodern sensibilities. The big surprise was how similar the results were between them, as if the vision was there to be discovered regardless of one’s current values. “With regards to the future,” Szandra says, “the information is there, it’s available to us, to know where we should be going.” Both groups agreed on several central premises: 1) that the definition of work would be expanded to include self development and taking care of the larger community, 2) that economies would become more local but with a global awareness, and 3) that the difference between non-profits and for-profits would narrow, with each taking cues from the other. They also saw that education and politics are too intertwined with our economy to keep separate, and that these must be fully integrated in the vision of a future economy. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Here are the main topics that Szandra and Jeff explore  (with time codes): 01:25 WHAT IS BACKCASTING? Backcasting is a powerful tool used in future studies. Instead of forecasting, which begins in the current, existing mindset (presumably the one that created the problem), backcasting begins in the future with a vision of what could be and works backwards to see what would be necessary to achieve it. The technique is often used in transition management and especially for sustainability issues. 09:21 THE REDEFINITION OF WORK The modern mindset sees work as a necessary utility to earn money to consume. Economists think of it this way too. But what if the idea of work was expanded to include self-development, taking care of a loved one, or doing good for the larger community? Any of these things may or may not be monetized, which brings up the issue of a guaranteed basic income. 24:21 GLOBALIZATION AND LOCALIZATION, OR GLOCALIZATION In the vision of a future economy the motto is to think globally and act locally.  Eco-localization refers to local production and consumption imbued with an awareness of how one’s actions may impact other communities. This includes global trade between local economies (hence the word “glocalization”), which means you don’t import things that can be made locally but you may still share culture and “perhaps even have bananas in Hungary,” Szandra says. 32:26 CORPORATE AND POLITICAL GOVERNANCE The study participants saw the for-profit and non-profit sectors merge ideologically. For-profit corporations will not just consider profit but also their social obligations, while non-profits will become more efficient and responsive to the market. Hence the “social economy” will be a new synthesis. Jeff offers the example of the electric car company Tesla who recently released their patents to the world. 42:06 A DIFFERENT KIND OF DEMOCRACY The two groups involved in Szandra’s study both included the role of politics in the new economy, specifically the idea that the decisions should be made by the stakeholders most directly affected by the policies. This begs the question: should deliberative democracy replace the representative model? “The idea of representative democracy is beginning to fade away. People have the urge to participate in decision making and to say that the responsibility s...

3:00 DO FISH HAVE RIGHTS? I started this week’s call with an update on a fish story I told a few weeks ago about the lone koi fish I had in my garden pond, the sole survivor of a holocaust perpetrated earlier in the spring by migrating blue herons. He was hiding under a rock, traumatized I assumed, and not eating long past the end of his winter dormancy. I considered leaving him to his own devices. “Eat or don’t eat,” I thought, absolving myself of responsibility. “If he dies,” I reminded myself, “the pond will be a lot easier to take care of.” But instead I decided to go to the fish store and buy five new koi. When I introduced them to the pond my original fish immediately (I’m talking within three seconds) swam out from under his rock and began schooling with them. Today, six weeks later, they are a happy fish family, swimming, eating, mating, playing in the waterfall and in general living the koi dream. What spurred my decision to add new fish was research I had posted a few days earlier by fish biologist Culum Brown revealing how fish are intelligent, social, emotional beings on par with many mammals. Fast forward to this week, when two of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish and Ezra Klein of VOX, published an extended interview with Professor Brown. In it he talked about the reality of commercial fishing in our oceans, and the suffering it causes the fish… Every major commercial agricultural system has some ethical laws, except for fish. Nobody’s ever asked the questions: “What does a fish want? What does a fish need?” I think, ultimately, the revolution will come. But it’ll be slow, because the implications are huge. For example, I can’t think of a way to possibly catch fish from the open ocean in a massive commercial way to meet demand that would be anyway near our standards for ethics if we think of them like other animals. Currently, you go out, you catch a bunch of fish, you crush most of them to death in a net, you trawl them up from the bottom of the sea – which causes barotrauma for most of them – you dump them on a deck, half suffocate to death, the ones you don’t want get thrown overboard and die anyway, and the ones you keep go on ice, just to preserve the flesh for market reasons. How do you do that in a way that has the fish’s interests involved to any degree? You can’t. So it’s not surprising that there is some fierce opposition to this idea. It would mean a massive change in the way we do things. It also means a massive change in my (and perhaps your) delusion that if we’re eating fish we’re contributing less to the suffering of our animal brethren. 8:50 DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT                   For my main story this week I note a new meme arising among political thinkers: the idea of the modern yet non-liberal state. Two of my favorite columnists, Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post, and David Brooks of the New York Times, both wrote on this topic this week. Both were spurred by a remarkable speech given by the president of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who as he begins his second term in office gives voice to the idea of a non-Western, non-liberal yet modernized country. As David Brooks wrote in his Monday column “The Battle of Regimes”: On July 26 … Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary gave a morbidly fascinating speech in which he argued that liberal capitalism’s day is done. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that decentralized liberal democracy leads to inequality, oligarchy,

Due to a technical glitch the first two minutes of the podcast are low quality, then it gets better.  5:20  BOYHOOD I start this week’s call with a brief review of a new movie that I would nominate as an integral masterwork: Boyhood, by Richard Linklater. Shot over a period of 12 years, Boyhood traces the life of Mason, an ordinary Texas boy in his development from first grade through high school graduation. The actors, featuring Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and the lead character played by Ellar Coltrane, grow and age through the movie. The story and dialogue were written over time as well, sometimes shortly before a scene was filmed, and are designed to bring forth the essence of the actors themselves, especially the young leading man.   Mason grows up in the movie right before our eyes, from an introspective yet spirited six-year-old, to an awkward adolescent hiding behind his hair, to a wry, thoughtful young man seeking to understand the world as he records it with his ever-present camera. Though much happens in the movie none of it is extraordinary. And Mason himself isn’t particularly interesting — which allows him to be interesting in every particular. He has his problems to be sure, with his sister, friends, parents, stepparents and a girl, but the movie is not about that. It’s about growth itself, which alone turns out to be a potent narrative driver. We literally get to watch Mason grow. We see the shape of Mason’s face change in real time, along with his voice, his mannerisms and his thinking, creating an emerging, essential Mason-ness that is unique in all of time and space. In this way Boyhood reveals the most astonishing secret of all: everybody is fascinating. Every life is worth penetrating and appreciating. Also of interest to evolutionaries, the movie revolves around the fourth dimension: time. Virtually all stories have a trajectory that unfolds over time. But with Boyhood, the passing of time is the theme, and it invites us to feel into the power of emergence in our own lives. I just hope Richard Linklater, the wise, sweet genius behind this movie is busy on the sequel, Adulthood. 11:25 THE CHALLENGE OF SUFFERING “How can I be fully happy when I know anybody on the planet is suffering? The answer is I can’t be fully happy. I ought not be fully happy. I have to hold what’s going on within the larger field, in the greater space of…joy? Bliss? There are other names for it but it includes suffering. It’s not the opposite of suffering anymore. When we have that online then actions in the right quadrants, what we can do to help people, become more clear and useful.” ~Jeff Salzman I think one of the main challenges we face as we enter integral consciousness is that we become aware of two realities that are often unseen and irreconcilable at first tier. The first reality is that from the larger perspective of history the human condition has gotten better, in all four quadrants, steadily and dramatically. Today, those of us living in the developed world are blessed with lives of astonishing ease and plenty relative to virtually any time, place or people. On the other hand children are being blown up by bombs. The 24/7 footage from Gaza is just the most immediate example of the ugliness of the second reality: that for millions of people in pockets around the world life is as desperate and abject as the worst of anything we have seen in history. Good thing we can take multiple perspectives. In the podcast I address the challenge of suffering more as an inquiry than as a commentary, and invite listeners to share their thoughts. The topic was stimulated last week when I received this message from a long-time listener, Peggy Babcock: I was glad to hear that you’d be talking about both Ukraine and Gaza yesterday. And I confess to a certain level of disappointme...

03:35 HOLACRACY IS A HIT! I start this week’s call with a pat on the back to my old friend Brian Robertson, who is getting big mainstream attention for holacracy, the organizational governance system he has developed. Inspired by integral theory, holacracy attempts to replicate in business organizations the holonic structure of the cosmos, where independent entities integrate to create more complex entities (for example atoms create molecules, which create cells, which create organisms). Holacracy replaces a typical business hierarchy with a series of interlocking circles of people, each responsible for a task, from planning the company picnic to managing its finances. It’s particularly popular in the tech world where creativity and responsiveness are paramount, and hundreds of companies have adopted holacracy, including Zappos, the online shoe company owned by Amazon. Here’s a terrific article from Ezra Klein’s cool new website,Vox, which explains holacracy’s basic principles and showcases its success. On the call I also share my personal experience with holacracy when in 2007 the Integral Institute served as a laboratory for its development. 12:05 PLANE DOWN IN UKRAINE This tragedy of the Malaysian airliner being shot down over Ukraine serves to illustrate how much harder it is these days to oppress another country. In the bad old days, the Soviet Union could just roll in the tanks (Czechoslovakia, 1968) or starve a rebel population to death (Stalin’s forced starvation of over five million Ukrainian “separatists” in 1932-33). But today Vladimir Putin has to act in Ukraine through Russian proxies that range in competence from professional to ragtag to, apparently, drunk. The downing of the civilian jetliner appears to be a mistake perpetrated by one of the less disciplined of the Russian militias. In addition to the human tragedy, it is bad news for Putin as it has riveted the world’s attention on his stealth campaign to destabilize his neighbor. The question I explore in the call is what is the appropriate response from the West — and who is responsible to carry it out? My conclusion is that this is a case for European leadership. America is slowly resigning its position as the world’s police. This causes all sorts of anxiety on all sides, of course, but it is an inevitable and intelligent move for our country, and one for which I believe President Obama will be admired by history. Is it because America is war weary? No, though the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have been long and grueling, they are relatively minor compared to the cost of other US wars in terms of lives and treasure. Americans aren’t war weary as much as we are orange and green (the modern and post-modern stages of development), which means we are war weary on behalf of all of humanity. As modernity comes more fully online in the interiors and exteriors of a culture we are entering the post-war world. So Europe, what will it be? Greater sanctions for Russia, which will in turn hurt your own economies? This is a fascinating question for Americans because much of Europe, most importantly Germany, is at least a half a stage higher in development than we are. They may very well decide that it’s not worth it to punish Putin by adding significant suffering to their own people. But is this just appeasement that delays the inevitable day where Putin will have to be stopped militarily? The story will continue to unfold… LISTENER POLL: Should America offer “lethal aid” (guns, tanks, missiles) to the Ukrainians? Result: Yes 7%; No 93% 34:50 ROCKETS FLY IN GAZA It feels like deja vu with this latest conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the damage and suffering are concrete, immediate and heartbreaking.