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In the Writer's Cave

Since November 2008, I've been working on my next book, and now it is finally nearing completion, which means that it will still take another few months until I am ready to take it out into the world. My blog of February 2009 described the basic contours of this forthcoming work. Yet at this point, rather than saying more, I want to keep it under wraps until it is complete. So this blog is a kind of placeholder to explain why I have been blogging so infrequently in the past few months. It really does feel like I'm in a cave, so I thought this image would be appropriate. Hope to be in contact with you all when I resurface.

 

German Edition of Integral Consciousness

On December 1, the German publisher Phaenomen-Verlag, based in Hamburg, will release the German translation of my book, entitled: Integrales Bewusstsein und die Zukunft der Evolution. Here is a link to their website:

http://www.phaenomen-verlag.de/index.php?area=1&p=news&newsid=25

The German-speaking people have proven to be among the world’s best philosophers, so having my book come out in German is a great honor. Working with the publisher, Tom Eichler, and translator, Mike Kauschke, has also been a pleasure. I look forward to meeting them both when I travel to Germany to do some speaking. However, because I am now engrossed in writing my next book, the trip to Germany may not happen for a while. But a Spanish translation is now also in the works, so I will have to get back to Europe soon ...

 

Evolutionary Leaders Retreat

This past week I attended the second annual Evolutionary Leaders group retreat spearheaded by Deepak Chopra. The four day invitational event was held at a lovely Franciscan spiritual retreat center in Malibu, California (see photo). About 40 "evolutionary leaders" were in attendance, including Jean Houston, Don Beck, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Marianne Williamson, Bruce Lipton, Carter Phipps, Duane Elgin, and of course, Deepak Chopra. Although the relatively loose structure resulted in more talk than action, I was glad to have gone as it was a pleasure to interact with the many marvelous people who were there. Deepak's natural leadership ability and personal charm helped us through the more difficult moments.

The group discussion showcased both the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of progressive spiritual culture. For example, there was a strong commitment to help bring about a spiritual renaissance, yet many seemed to expect that large segments of our society will be awakened en masse through some kind of miraculous transformation in the year 2012. For me, this combination of compassionate concern for humanity and pseudo magical thinking was simultaneously charming and off-putting. However, my main regret was that there was not more opportunity to engage each other's ideas and to debate what progressive spiritual culture really stands for. Many in the room had heard of the integral perspective, but few were aware of its major tenets or its potential to uplift and empower this postmodern spiritual movement. Perhaps next year the integralists in the group will have an opportunity for more education in this direction.

Overall, it seems that this Evolutionary Leaders group has the potential to become a meaningful voice in our culture. Our petition, entitled "A Call to Conscious Evolution" has already garnered over 40,000 signatures, and these have been achieved mostly through word-of-mouth referrals. See the petition here:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/248704259

As the mainstream media shows growing interest in the "consciousness movement," as they call it, our challenge will be to mature beyond the "New Age" shortcomings that have thus far diminished progressive spirituality's credibility in the eyes of academia and the larger society. Despite the ongoing presence of the "pre/trans fallacy" there is much about progressive spirituality that is beautiful, true, and good.

 

Release of my new Integral Philosophy DVD Set

This week I'm launching a new 2 DVD set on integral philosophy. DVD#1 is an interview of me by Boulder Integral's Jeff Salzman (recorded on February 3, 2009) wherein we cover the essential elements of integral theory. This video interview thus serves as a basic introduction to the integral worldview as I understand it. DVD#2 is a conversation between philosopher Michael Zimmerman and I (recorded on January 8, 2009) on the spiritual implications of evolution. This second DVD is a somewhat more advanced discussion, which covers some of the subject matter of the book I'm now working on (see the previous blog post for a description of this book-in-progress). Both DVDs were filmed at Boulder Integral, and are now being published by my company, Now & Zen. You can watch a 6-minute preview of DVD#1 and a 4-minuite preview of DVD#2 here:

http://www.stevemcintosh.com/Evolution_of_Consciousness.php

Back in 2007 I blogged about the launch of the new Boulder Center for Integral Living (see the blog post of May 9, 2009 on this website). This community center for the fostering of integral culture was founded by Jeff Salzman and his colleague Ross Hostetter, and since its inception in 2007, it has grown into an impressive institution. Its name has been abbreviated to "Boulder Integral" and it is now headquartered in a former church here in downtown Boulder, Colorado. You can see their website at this link:

http://www.boulderintegral.org

During the last two years I have attended (and given) a variety of lectures, workshops, and conferences at Boulder Integral, and I feel that this organization has now made a significant contribution to the emergence of the integral worldview. Moreover, I've become close friends with Jeff (who happens to live two doors down from me) and with Ross and his wife Mary, resulting in me being invited to serve on Boulder Integral's board of directors.

One of the experimental directions pursued by Boulder Integral has been the production of integral videos. In connection with this endeavor, Jeff hired film director David Riordan, who has worked in Hollywood and who directed the recent "Future of Christianity DVD" in partnership with Integral Life. Over the past few months Jeff and David have conducted interviews with a variety of integral thinkers and activists (including the interview in DVD#1) and have now assembled an archive of interviews. They also experimented with a variation on the interview format, taking the form of conversations or dialogues, the first of which was the dialogue between Michael Zimmerman and I, resulting in DVD#2.

Michael Zimmerman is a professional philosopher with a distinguished academic career, and was an original member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute. His new book, Integral Ecology, (co-authored with professor Sean Esbjörn-Hargens) makes a significant contribution to the integral worldview. Michael moved to Boulder in 2006 to become Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado. And shortly thereafter he and I began taking hikes in the local mountains and have now become good friends. Whenever Michael and I would get together the conversation was exceptionally stimulating, so we thought it would be worthwhile to experiment by recording one of our conversations on video, with this new DVD being the outcome.

At the moment, Boulder Integral has no plans to publish these experimental videos as DVDs, so Jeff was happy to let me cherry pick the best of these and distribute them through Now & Zen. Since Now & Zen had previously published a DVD interview of me by EnlightenNext's Carter Phipps, the process of publishing this new Integral Philosophy DVD Set went pretty smoothly. Overall, I'm proud of the results and feel that these videos are a tangible fruit of the excellent work done by everyone involved with Boulder Integral.

 

My Next Book

I haven't blogged in a while because I've started work on my next book, which is, perhaps predictably, about evolution. The thesis of the book is still moving around, so it's too early to commit myself to anything formal. However, I'm trying to bring together a variety of related ideas in an effort to say something original.

First, when we expand the definition of evolution to include the cosmological evolution of matter, the biological evolution of life, and the sociocultural evolution of human history, we find that this overarching theme of universe development has unmistakable symbolic implications. That is, these facts cannot be contained in a purely empirical system -- they have an undeniable metaphysical message. And the metaphysical message that has been attached to them so far -- the message that evolution is a random process that has no purpose and makes no progress -- becomes self-evidently false once we begin to recognize that these different types of development are all nevertheless forms of authentic evolution.

Second, when we look into the evolution of human history and culture, we find that a significant factor in this type of evolution is the underlying evolution of consciousness itself. Prior to humans, the evolution of consciousness in animals proceeded in lockstep with their biology -- for an animal to get appreciably smarter it had to evolve its brain. But humans have demonstrated the remarkable ability to evolve their consciousness in ways that are partially liberated from their biology. The fact that consciousness itself evolves is thus another factor that shows the need for a new metaphysical container or framework for our understanding of evolution as a whole.

Just as the science of physics was radically transformed in the 20th century from Newtonian physics to quantum physics, I will argue that we are now witnessing a similar transformation in the subject of evolution. This new era in our understanding of evolution will include an enlarged recognition of interiors and the indispensable role of purpose in the evolutionary process -- the evident purpose found in all forms of consciousness. This does not signal a retreat from scientific standards of rigor nor an embrace of creationism in any form, but it does show us how materialistic metaphysics are currently exhausted and a new, more adequate metaphysical container for evolution is now demanded by the emerging facts.

As I hope to demonstrate, the new form of "minimal metaphysics" that is required for our deeper understanding of evolution involves the recognition of the essential role of beauty, truth, and goodness in the developmental process. These intrinsic values serve to kindle the evolutionary impulse, pulling evolution forward by luring consciousness into increasingly more evolved states and stages. And as we discover these larger truths within the evolutionary process we come to appreciate Alfred North Whitehead's consciousness-centric definition of evolution, which holds that:

"Evolution is an increase in the ability to experience what is intrinsically valuable."

Obviously, these statements require extensive explanation and argumentation to be credible, but this is why I'm writing the book! I'll provide updates on my progress as the writing unfolds. In the meantime, please don't hesitate to email me with your thoughts and suggestions on this exciting and controversial subject.

 

"We All Speak Arabic" Memorial — cultural healing for Iraq

As of this writing, it looks like the war in Iraq is winding down. So as we prepare to leave, I feel strongly that for all we have destroyed, and for all we have tried to build back up in the way of security and infrastructure, we also need to try to reconstruct some cultural interiors in Iraq—we need to restore some of the dignity of the Iraqi people and pay tribute to their once and future greatness.

Toward this end, I have conceived and designed a teaching memorial for Baghdad called: "We All Speak Arabic." This memorial would celebrate the accomplishments in mathematics achieved during the golden age of Islam—many of which were actually made in Baghdad.

The “We all speak Arabic” memorial would celebrate Islamic civilization’s significant contributions to our international system of decimal numbers and to mathematics in general. The actual forms of our numbers, zero through ten, are taken directly from Arabic script! Think about how important ones and zeros are to the digital age. So this memorial would tell the story of Islam’s achievements in mathematics during their golden age. These mathematical achievements were adopted by Europe several hundred years later and made a big difference in the development of capitalism in Italy, and in Western civilization in general. Numbers (Arabic numbers) are the world’s only universal language, and now is the perfect time to thank Arabians and restore some of their pride as a people through this memorial.

I have a beautiful design for the memorial (the attached image is only a placeholder) that combines traditional Islamic architectural motifs with sacred geometry and some high-tech elements for a stunning appearance. Inside the open air memorial there would be exhibits informing visitors about the accomplishments of great Arabic mathematicians, such as Al-Khwarizmi.

From a cultural standpoint, the developed world can now help the evolution of Islamic civilization by showing respect and gratitude. A memorial such as this would thus help to heal the animosity that is an ongoing threat to peace, reducing the anti-American resentment that is so prevalent in the Middle East. Just as the Vietnam War memorial provided cultural healing for America, this memorial could help heal the “internal wounds” and restore some much-needed dignity to the Iraqi people, and to Islam in general. This kind of project can also contribute to the reduction of violence and the recruiting of terrorists. Although food, medicine, security, and investment are all needed, we can’t ignore the “internal” cultural side of the problem either. Now that we have torn down the memorials to Saddam Hussein, we need to replace them with something positive—now that we have removed the dictator, we need to restore hope. And it is through symbolic gestures such as this memorial that hope and morale can be restored. This could also generally benefit international relations between Islam and the West, which would ultimately redound to the benefit of Americans.

Initial Steps to implementing this idea include the architectural rendering (CAD drawings and model making) for the memorial, as well as the collection of contents for the educational exhibits. Prior to actual construction, we could create a “virtual tour” of the memorial’s design, viewable on-line. This would build support and help in the organization of a diplomatic mission to Iraq to secure the cooperation of the Iraqi government and find an appropriate site for the memorial to be constructed.

The optimal outcome would be that the memorial would become a symbol of pride for Iraqis. Similar to the way the Statue of Liberty (a similar gifted memorial) has become a symbol of pride for America. Measurements of success would include international media coverage of the memorial, both in its idea phase, in its construction phase, and ongoing thereafter. Success could also be measured by opinion polls of Iraqi people in their attitudes toward America and the West, and by the state of long term relations between the U.S. and Iraq. Once we raise initial seed capital, a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Foundation could be set up to receive the additional money needed and administer the creation of the project. If you would like to help with this project, send me an email: steve@stevemcintosh.com