Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“We follow Aryeh Neier in describing the three types as “blue,” “red,” and “green” rights. Roughly, on his model “blue” rights are civil and political rights: the rights to individual liberties…“Red” rights are economic and social rights, rights that focus more on the quality of life. “Green” rights are collective rights such as the right…
“Well first of all, there is present in the structural pattern in the development of human consciousness and culture what we might describe as the dialectic of “progress and pathology”…for every new set of advances, for every new worldview stage that emerges beyond what came before, we find that there is pathology, or problems, or …
“Nothing endures but change” –Heraclitus Throughout my life I have encountered people who think differently than me; people who have different beliefs, ideas, convictions, and ideologies than me. This is inevitable. But what I’ve found to be most problematic about engaging with someone who has a differing opinion, stance, viewpoint or idea on something is…
“[Relaxation and rigidity are at opposite ends of the spectrum], and the rigidity of our quantitative way of understanding our world has boxed things and set up very complicated, but still linear, relationships. This is a product of industry, of mechanization, [and] this kind of thinking goes way back. And the problem with this thinking…
“Ritual for me is a kind of like serious play. It’s play that you take seriously. As play, though, it doesn’t have an end outside of itself. It’s not like work or labor then in that sense, where you might be doing something now that may be grueling and difficult in order to produce a…
According to McGrath, though the esoteric schools represent a diverse set of theories and practices, they are nonetheless “united by a common enemy: the desacralization of nature (material nature, human nature, cosmological nature) by techno-science and capitalist consumerism.” He argues that critiques of esotericism as “regressive,” “anti-modern,” and “anti-scientific” are misguided. Although esotericism shares modernity’s…
To make that more tangible: when I look outside my window at home, I can see a lake (Champlain), mountains (the Adirondacks), darkening blue sky with an airplane crossing it, a few boats on the water, some trees, a family of bicyclists riding along the bike path down below, and so on. Or, alternatively, I…
Every problem in the world can be understood, at least partially, as a problem of consciousness. So it follows that the solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as environmental degradation and climate change, nuclear proliferation and terrorism, hunger and overpopulation, unregulated globalization and gross inequality, can all be effectively ameliorated by raising or changing the…
It is a basic tenet of systems theory that for a system to be optimized, its subsystems must be sub-optimized (their agency must be brought within the communal embrace of the higher holonic level of the system as a whole). When we look at the evolutionary system that is the spiral of development in consciousness…