Terry's blog

Yesterday’s political news couldn’t have been more important. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a dramatic departure from established law, struck down regulations limiting corporate spending on political advertising, including much of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act.

This ruling is of enormous significance to Integralists and Evolutionaries, because it is about a meta-systemic realignment of the very political mechanisms through which citizens’ choices can shape public decisions.

An Integral Analysis of Money Politics & Media

Americans live in a virtual sea of advertising and public relations messages that are structured (scientifically reverse-engineered, in fact) to influence us outside our conscious awareness. Subliminally, these communications have enormous influence over our buying decisions, attitudes, and votes, even though we think we’re aware of them and are disregarding their influence. This applies equally to commercial and political messages. They influence people up and down the evolutionary scale, but are particularly compelling at earlier levels of development. And ads cost money.  Read more »

I'm writing this in the spacious stillness of Thanksgiving weekend. My life has been moving at high speed, but over this holiday break an opening appeared. The phone barely rang, and a sense of deep peace naturally blossomed. My heart has been overflowing with spontaneous gratitude (or as Brother David Steindl-Rast so beautifully puts it, "great-full-ness".)

I'm grateful for many things—family and friends, my spiritual friends and communities, some inspiring creative projects, amazing partners, and my growing, vibrant communities of integral evolutionary spirituality and service. I'm especially grateful for the opportunity to serve humankind, and our current intensifying wild ride through what is certainly a kind of evolutionary whitewater rafting.

Optimism vs. Pessimism About Humanity's Prospects

Today at breakfast, Bert Parlee and I were discussing our multiple simultaneous emergencies (overpopulation, climate change, culture wars, and the new emerging design vulnerabilities of a single globalized human life-support system).

We considered how attitudes tend to polarize. Many extreme postmodernists feel very pessimistic. Their words are haunted by a quality of dread, a sense of impending calamity. They seem depressed, or even possessed by an overwrought sense of guilt, shame, and foreboding.

And we considered how some of our Integral friends, reacting to the self-fulfilling prophetic defeatism of postmodern anxiety and doubt, have attempted to opt radically for optimism. Since history and evolution are always developmentally progressing forward towards greater depth, complexity, and consciousness, they have installed optimism as an article of faith, perhaps even at the cost of going into denial of the likelihood of the global human economy being tested by some "500-year flood" type events—disastrous systemic shocks and large-scale socioeconomic dislocations.  Read more »

I'm honored to have been asked to join the faculty of The Finance Lab, an innovative collaborative action-oriented thinking project dedicated to envisioning redesign principles through which the world financial system can become a force for sustainable human civilization. The Finance Lab is a joint venture of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, The World Wildlife Fund, and REOS, an international consulting firm. It convenes a diverse team of individuals and institutions from business and finance, government and civil society to initiate and incubate several experiments and prototypes that will practically demonstrate aspects of a financial system that truly serves business, society and the planet. 

The first phase of The Finance Lab was held in July 2009 and brought over 200 people together to explore possible future scenarios for finance. These workshops were held in conjunction with the Scenario Planning and Futures Research Group, part of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) at the University of Oxford's Said Business School. 

The second phase of the Finance Lab is the Open Innovation Lab process, which uses Otto Scharmer's U process in a series of facilitated workshops, stakeholder engagements and design sessions.  It culminates in an event where the Lab's work will be shared with a wider audience.  Read more »

My last blog entry was written as Deborah and I prepared to fly to France so I could MC the 5 day Renaissance2 Great Shift Gathering in Perpignan.

I asked a lot of questions in my last post about the efficacy of such an endeavor. And my report is, I'm happy to say, essentially positive. The key principles I enumerated were very present during the gathering. And although there were certainly a range of vMemes interacting, the emphasis on creating tangible projects with business models remains a deep consideration of all involved. And I still have real hopes for what Renaissance2 can spawn in the weeks, months and years ahead.  Read more »

I want to let you know about an important new book, by a longtime close friend. It's about effective, research-proven ways to light up the circuits in your brain that will bring you more joy, more fulfilling relationships, and more inner peace.

It's called Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love,and Wisdom. It's written by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.—a neuropsychologist and meditation teacher. (Go to www.rickhanson.net/writings/buddhas-brain for moreinformation. You can order it from Amazon here.)

Rick ably unpacks key, un-obvious implications of brain research to help us more skillfully surf the waves of moment-to-moment mental experience. This beautifully written, easy-to-read book gracefully conveys a series of epiphanies that can enable us to achieve self-compassion, balance and happiness.

Combining the latest neuroscience with the deep Buddhist understanding of the mind,  Read more »

My root-guru, Adi Da Samraj, passed a year ago this Thanksgiving in Fiji. He was 69. I was a devotee of this great God-realizer from the age of 22 until I was 37. He not only profoundly transformed my life and consciousness, but, I think, helped transform the entirety of contemporary Western spirituality, even though he is not nearly as widely known as he is influential.

On this anniversary of his passing, I remember him with gratitude, and look back in amazement at his legacy. Please know, words fail here. To speak about Adi Da is to nominate oneself as one of the blind men reporting on the elephant. Adi Da was one part Jesus Christ, one part Picasso, one part Nagarjuna, one part Marlon Brando, and one part Genghis Khan. And more...

In recent years Ken Wilber has offered well-reasoned criticism and chose to be judiciously circumspect on the subject of Adi Da (after enduring extreme opprobrium for his previous high praise) but he never disavowed what he had previously written about Adi Da's remarkable body of original Dharma. "Da Free John's teaching is, I believe, unsurpassed by that of any other spiritual Hero, of any period, of any place, of any time, of any persuasion" and "it is becoming quite obvious that no one in the fields of psychology, religion, philosophy, or sociology can afford not to be at least a student of Da Free John."

Think of ideas such as "the self-contraction," the idea that "the ego is not an entity but an activity," the phrase "always already," the idea that "the end of the path is the Way from the beginning," the idea of the "paths of yogis saints and sages," and his "seven stages of life." All these seminal phrases and insights entered our contemporary spiritual conversation through Adi Da. Not to mention his remarkable Sacred Image Art.  Read more »

This, the first in my series of monthly newsletters, is written as an open letter from The Crossings, a retreat center near Austin, where the Integral Leadership in Action (ILiA) conference has just concluded.

Tomorrow my wife Deborah and I set out for Perpignan, France, where I've been asked to serve as the Master of Ceremonies at Renaissance2: The Great Shift Gathering, a "network of world-changing networks" that aims to catalyze a whole series of high-impact practical projects in the fields of renewable energy, enlightened enterprise, integral governance, and resilient environments.

Assumptions about Organizational Hierarchies 

The word "integral" evolved etymologically from the Latin root "tangere." This same root is also the source of words like "tactile," "tangible" and "tangent." It means "touch."  The first syllable of the word Integral, "in" is a negation. So, etymologically, "Integral" at its root then, means "that which is untouched."

Something can be untouched only if there's nothing else to touch it. That which includes everything (so that there is nothing "else") is that which is untouched. Thus, Integral means radical inclusivity. This is the essence of Integral - wholeness.

As used commonly, though, this word Integral appears has two aspects. 

One aspect can be seen in related words like "integrated" or "integrating." We use these words to describe what happens when some individual or group, some aspect, element, or idea, which has previously been excluded, is now included in a greater wholeness, and everything shifts, and all the parts then have a new and right relationship to each other.  There is integration. It's about parts coming together rightly and making a more perfect whole. They connote something like "including all the parts and rightly relating them to each other."  Read more »

How can we help those who are demonstrating and dying on the streets?

I think that what we are already doing — paying rapt attention — is the most powerful thing Americans can do to empower Iran’s popular uprising. If the USA is preceived to be attempting to interfere, we empower repression. If we become a factor in the process, we muddy the waters. But if we simply pay attention, with open hearts and minds, and if we let ourselves be affected by what we see, and if we speak publicly about our human and moral perceptions, in public forums that Iranians can access, we help. It will be obvious that we are paying attention, that we are emotionally involved in witnessing their cultural confrontation, that we are moved and inspired by their courage, dignity, and restraint, that we are learning from their examples.

Mutual awareness involves taking new perspectives. That tends to serve growth into more nuanced structures of awareness. In this moment, the world’s simple witnessing awareness is making a subtle, but fundamental and benignly transformative difference. We are helping by sympathetically identifying with their symbolic martyr, Neda, her family, and her nation.

When the whole world is watching, heroes are seen, and thus empowered. (At least their sacrifice does not go unnoticed.) The world’s rapt attention makese a difference. The observed is changed by the presence of the observer. This intersubjective connection, this imperfect empathic urge unites us with Iranians in a larger “we-space.”

It is a subtle difference, and it doesn’t necessarily change behavior, except as new understandings naturally evoke new behavioral choices. But this simple shift might prove to be the "iota" of difference, the “straw” that tips the balance scales (which may tip only over months or years) in favor of reform and progress in Iran.

Integral Perspectives on Iran's Cultural Divide

In Integral terms, the demonstrators can be distinguished from the regime’s supporters by cultural qualities relating to states, stages, and relationships to shadow.

High states are part of the ethos both of the demonstrators and of the regime’s true believers. Most of these high states are evoked by acts of self-transcendence, whether they be self-abnegation or self-sacrifice, whether they be gross physical acts or subtle emotional or mental acts.

Persians are poets and revolutionaries, a heartfelt, brooding, noble, and passionate people. Each year, on Ashura, faithful grassroots Shia men go into a trance and beat themselves bloody to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hosayn Ibn Ali, in memory of whom Shiism originally emerged. Sufi mystics go together into trances in which they dance and sing and enter into ecstatic communion with Allah. Ancient Persian poetry is full of ecstatic mystic language, expressing a rich and passionate love affair with God. Modern Persian poetry is full of ecstatic emotional language, expressing a rich and passionate love affair with life, and pain, and death.

The structure of Iranians’ values are still centered in traditional agreements about symbols, tones, morés and resonances. But their values also now include certain modern and postmodern values like common sense, respect for the dignity of others, thinking for oneself, and the curiosity to observe the modern world directly. Their values are not altogether modern; but they are not exclusively conformist.

Their eyes have noticed a myriad of details and evidence and colors and shades of grey that the regime is telling them aren’t there. “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?” Everyone “in their right mind” knows the regime has lied to them.  Read more »