The Daily Evolver

Today Jeff is joined by his dear friend and colleague Diane Musho Hamilton for a fascinating conversation about the changing nature of spiritual practice. Together they look at what is emerging in terms of:

Interested? You can join Diane and an international sanga of practitioners for a 10-week inquiry into this important topic, in “The Future of Zen Practice: Exploring the Encounter of Tradition and Innovation”, presented via the Zoom video platform.

Diane Musho Hamilton is a leading integral teacher and also a Zen Sensei whose sanga, Two Arrows Zen, operates out of a urban Zendo in Salt Lake City and a beautiful new Mountain Zendo in the red rocks country of Southern Utah.

“Looking to Future Generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe and virtue will be triumphant.” — Charles Darwin

Today Jeff talks with Dr. David Loye about his new book, Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin’s Theory and Why We Need It Today. In his book David reveals a set of fundamental teachings clearly presented by Charles Darwin, but which have been virtually ignored by his followers for over 100 years. In short Darwin identified two drivers of evolution: competition (“survival of the fittest“), but also and equally what he unabashedly called love, and which he elucidated in terms of compassion, moral sense, appreciation of beauty and even spirit.

Scientists built the evolutionary edifice exclusively on the first half of Darwin’s teachings, creating what David calls “the hole in the modern mind” and providing justification for a selfish and disenchanted view of humanity. David argues that re-integrating the second half of Darwin’s teachings is the palliative humanity needs today, and necessary to create a more humane and sustainable world.

At age 93, David Loye personifies an important era in the history of evolutionary thought. His extraordinary journey starts with a historic, secret meeting in cold war Budapest among a select group of evolutionary scientists from both sides of the iron curtain. It led not just to his discoveries about Darwin, but to his own evolutionary thinking laid out in 30 books, including insights into “self-organization,” which Ken Wilber calls “one of the most important topics alive today.“

David is joined in this interview by his wife Rianne Eisler, herself a formidable evolutionary thinker and writer. Her most famous book, The Chalice and the Blade, is in its 56th printing.

David Loye is a psychologist, evolutionary systems scientist and a former member of the faculty at both the Princeton and UCLA Schools of Medicine. He is a co-founder of two international organizations for updating and expanding evolutionary studies: The General Evolution Research Group, and The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences.

“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”Mr. Spock, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Today Jeff is joined by fellow integral nerds Cindy Wigglesworth and Corey deVos in this warmhearted appreciation of the venerable Star Trek franchise, one of the oldest and most robust pop culture franchises in existence.

Spanning more than 50 years, 741 episodes across six different series (The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, Enterprise, and now Discovery), and 14 feature films, the lore and philosophy of Star Trek runs incredibly deep, making it incredibly ripe for an integral voyage into its most significant themes and messages.

At its heart, Star Trek is a show about our own evolving morality. The very best episodes across its numerous series are often about how to make the most difficult ethical choices when no easy solutions can be found. But the ethics of Star Trek are not mere dogmatic values floating in some idealistic interstellar vacuum — these values are enacted and renewed time and time again every time they intersect different civilizations and different conflicting notions of “the greater good”.

“Universal law is for lackeys; context is for kings.”Captain Lorca, Star Trek: Discovery

In other words, Starfleet values are not mere codes of conduct to be memorized and executed. These are not black-and-white values. As Corey says in his review, Star Trek: Discovery and the Moral Arc of the Universe, “it’s about having a very strict Prime Directive, and understanding why it must never ever be broken — and then knowing exactly when you need to break it.” Starfleet values are not inert, they are more like hyper-objects that, when enacted, actually pull the characters (and the audience, and the writers, and the showrunners…) into higher, deeper, more evolved waves of being, inviting all of us to explore more subtle, more sensible, and more sophisticated considerations in our own moment-to-moment ethical algorithms.

In this respect, when it comes to its morality, its humanitarianism, its underlying philosophies, and its capacity to activate the better angels of our being, the Star Trek franchise more or less stands alone in our increasingly dystopian media landscape, and continues to offer us an aspirational roadmap to help us climb our way out of the bizarro mirror universe we currently seem to be inhabiting.

“Our species can only survive if we have obstacles to overcome. You remove those obstacles. Without them to strengthen us, we will weaken and die.”James T. Kirk, Metamorphosis

We often talk about the difference between “integral art” (artworks that are created from an integral consciousness) versus “enacting art integrally” (engaging any given work of art from an integral point of view). Every now and again, we get the rare opportunity to do both simultaneously, as we do here in this integral celebration (and integral enactment) of the Star Trek franchise.

So open hailing frequencies, set phasers to stun, and prepare to boldly go where no Star Trek review has gone before.

Written by Corey deVos

“Live now; make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”Jean-Luc Picard, Inner Light

Today Jeff is joined by Dr. Warren Farrell, who has co-authored (with John Gray) a new book, The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. The book illustrates how boys are falling behind girls in crucial metrics of well-being: in academics (61% of college degrees will go to females by 2020), in mental and physical health (boys commit suicide at six times the rate of girls), in behavioral problems, career prospects, even life expectancy.

Warren brings an integral sensibility to the situation by advocating a path forward that expands options for boys to find purpose and meaning, much as girls are able to do as a result of the feminist revolution. He also emphases the role of fathers and postive male role models for boys. As Gail Sheehy, author of Passages, writes of The Boy Crisis:  “As an activist in the women’s movement, I’m proud of expanding life choices for our daughters. But no one did the same for our sons—until now.”

Warren will help you think differently about the issues of sexual dynamics, and how we can move forward into a future where there are more ways to be human and fulfilled for all sexes.

Dr. Warren Farrell  is the author the the bestseller, The Myth of Male Power, and is the only man in the U.S. to have been elected three times to the Board of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City.

Today Jeff talks with Scott Ford, author of Integral Consciousness in Sport: Unifying Body, Mind and Spirit Through Flow.

Scott, an elite tennis coach for decades, is at the leading edge of thinking and practices for enhancing athletic performance. He has mapped out a five-stage developmental sequence of athletic performance, the first three of which are familiar:

Stage 3, online for less than 50 years, is where many elite athletes function today.

But it is at stage 4 and 5 that things get more interesting. At these higher stages we are working with flow or the zone, that elusive state where the player and the game merge. This “subject / object collapse” is what Scott calls “flowing presence” and is the gateway not just to greater performance, but to a profound enjoyment and fulfillment in the act itself.

Scott is also a founding member of the Sports, Energy and Consciousness Group, a collective of doctors, psychologists, scientists, world-class athletes and leading-edge coaching, which is having its third annual conference in San Rafael this July.

In this podcast Scott offers a specific practice for entering flow, which is applicable for “in the zone” performance in all aspects of life.