Do you live in community and sometimes wonder about the challenges you experience? Or despair over the polarisation at play in the world today, despite the efforts of the last few decades to create a more peaceful and sustainable environment? Friday October 6th 2017 – Leading American Philosopher Ken Wilber will deliver a free live stream from the Universal Hall, Findhorn to participants from over 45 countries, an event calling forth the ‘Transformational Communities of Tomorrow’.
>We are living in the time of the ‘culture wars’ with different sets of ideas fighting each – Alt-right, Antifa, Trump, Clinton and Brexit, to name a few. The current polarisation we are seeing in society is driving the emergence of a new set of ideas or worldview as humanity upgrades its operating system to meet the complexity of current problems. In this groundbreaking talk, Ken Wilber will show the dynamic relationships between these people, groups and events to offer a new way forward.
The discussion builds on research from leading developmental psychologists from around the world, which is showing how the mental models that filter what we value come in recognisable stages in response to the challenges life brings us. These psychological stages are like human software, controlling what we like and dislike. The intense dynamics between people at these specific and recognisable stages are the source of the current polarised political landscape.
Developmental psychologists are showing that people grow in specific and recognisable stages. For example, in society we see people with traditional values who like law and order and structure and tend to identify strongly with their nation. People outgrow this to develop a rational, scientific achievement mindset and then grow into what was the leading edge – the egalitarian or ‘green’ worldview that likes everything being equal and fair. This research from psychologists has not yet become mainstream, so one person’s ‘software’ fights another person’s ‘software’ without realising that the stages or ‘pieces of softwares’ are part of the same emergent operating system!
One of the global epicentres for the transformation to the green or egalitarian worldview from the early 1960’s onwards has been the community around the Findhorn Foundation in north-east Scotland. Because of this early emergence, it is one of the first communities to recognise the limitations of the ‘green’ stage, leading to the awareness of a totally new mental model being referred to as integrated or integral. Integral recognises that all the previous pieces of software fit together as necessary steps in a developmental pathway.
The world’s leading theorist of this development is master philosopher and integral theory author Ken Wilber, from the US. He will be in dialogue with Integral Zen Master Doshin Roshi as they explore together the ‘Transformational Communities of Tomorrow’. This is a rare opportunity to hear from these two awakened minds.
Here in preparation, Doshin engages in conversation with Jeff Salzman from The Daily Evolver asking the question, from an integral perspective, “What have the contributions of the post modern egalitarian movement been?” A conversation highly relevant to transformational communities as we explore our evolution amidst the challenges of today.
By Jonathan Dover
Integral View
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