Gathering of Evolutionaries at the Chopra Center

Thanks to the help of Gerard Senehi and Carter Phipps, I’ve been invited to a special event at the Chopra Foundation in Carlsbad, California on July 26 and 27. This event is described as a “gathering of thirty evolutionary visionary pioneers whose radical new ways of thinking and interpreting human experience have expanded our knowledge of evolving consciousness and its impact on the way we lead our daily lives and respond to world issues.” Other participants include Brian Swimme, Jean Houston, Marianne Williamson, Michael Beckwith, Duane Elgin, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and of course, Deepak Chopra. The event is designed to help us “evolutionaries” coordinate our mutual efforts and otherwise get to know each other better. In furtherance of this social goal, we’ll be having dinner at the home of Dr. Chopra and his wife Gita on Saturday night.

As a newcomer to the marketplace of ideas, I’m obviously pleased to be invited, but I’m not sure how the “subversive” nature of the integral worldview will be received by these leaders of postmodernism. In anticipation of the event, the organizers asked the participants to fill out a questionnaire about “the great shift” that is occurring. So I provide one of my answers, below, as a preview of the position I’ll be taking at this gathering:

Question: How could this collective coming together of leaders be most instrumental in bringing public awareness to the great shift that is occurring?

Answer: First, we could demythologize the idea of “the great shift”, recognizing that there is not just one shift, there are actually many shifts in consciousness going on simultaneously in the world—a shift from pre-traditional to traditional in Africa, a shift from traditional to modern in Asia, and in America, and ongoing shift from modern to postmodern, as well as the beginning of a shift from postmodern to integral.

We could also be more discerning about the nature and behavior of cultural evolution, and recognize the fallaciousness of the wishful thinking that expects that the world is going to “wake up” and suddenly become “cultural creative” in a miraculous transformation.

Progressive culture has already made significant progress in the fight for human rights; through the progress it has made in raising our society’s concern for the environment; and in the way that American culture has now become more tolerant of alternative lifestyles and more conscious of the values of spiritual pluralism. Although there is obviously much more work to be done in these areas, when we compare our current national culture to the state of American culture in the 1950s, it appears that evolution has been achieved through the rise of progressive postmodernism. And this postmodern worldview is continuing to actively develop and persuade people about the importance of its issues and concerns. Yet there are also signs that this worldview is no longer showing the same creative vitality and dynamism that characterized its emergence in the 1960s and its consolidation in the 1990s. Postmodern culture is growing, but there are many signs that in this decade it is growing at a decreasing rate than its rate of growth in the 1990s.

Thus, at the current rate of growth it may actually take generations before the majority of the American body politic becomes conscious enough to effectively deal with our environmental crisis and create the kind of moral society that spiritual progressives envision. And just scolding people, just admonishing them to care more and be more responsible is not going to produce the results we need. The pace at which our global problems are increasingly becoming “more local” requires that spiritual progressives find a way to become more effective at raising consciousness—and this is where the integral perspective can be of great assistance.


I’ll post a follow-up blog entry in August to recount my experience of this auspicious meeting.