The Daily Evolver

Nature is, as poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, “red in tooth and claw.” Human nature is too, so far at least, but a counter-trend is emerging: as evolution progresses, conflict overall becomes less violent and more complex. Complexity arises out of the evolutionary process of differentiating (conflictual) and integrating (fun!). In this episode of The Shrink and the Pundit, integral psychotherapist Keith Witt and I discuss the evolution of human conflict, how it is manifesting in today’s world and what might be next as emerges into integral (second tier) consciousness. The integral awakening is bringing a deeper awareness of interiors, natural hierarchies and flex/flow power dynamics to all human functioning. The result, as Dr Keith says, is that conflict resolution at the cutting edge doesn’t even look like conflict: Second-tier conflicts keep pumping compassion, love, and play into the fractal interface between order and chaos, until it transforms into warmth and intimacy, the gold standards of interpersonal repair. See why I love this guy? I hope you enjoy this edition of The Shrink and the Pundit!

This week I take a look at a recent issue of New York Times’ Sunday Review (2/24), where seven of eighteen articles focus on the real-time evolution of sex and gender relations. The Sunday Review is a quality barometer of the cultural weather in America and is must reading for me each week. In this podcast I endeavor to bring some integral perspective to the following selection of articles: Stop Counting Women: Quotas and tallies won’t bring real progress on gender parity Not the Fun Kind of Feminist: How Trump helped make Andrea Dworkin relevant again What Formula Does for Dads. A young father finds bliss in bottle feeding It’s Not That Men Don’t Know What Consent Is Why the Priesthood Needs Women Why Celibacy Matters. How the critique of Catholicism changes and yet remains the same Just another week in the Culture War. Enjoy! Please forgive the three short sections of defective video

Today my guest is Vince Horn, integrally-informed Dharma teacher and co-founder of the popular podcast, Buddhist Geeks, who discusses how the Buddhist Dharma (teaching) and Sangha (community) are being reimagined for contemporary life. How does a lineage founded on traditional concepts of renunciation, surrender and obedience to a teacher get transmitted into a modern and postmodern culture — without losing its potency? Can awakening itself be practiced in a way that recognizes the integral distinction between waking up (horizontal state development) and growing up (vertical stage development)? These are messy propositions, as is evolution in general, and Vince shares his thinking on how they are emerging. He also explains how his own practice community, Pragmatic Dharma, is experimenting with new forms of Sangha such as virtual networking, transparency and naturally flowing hierarchy. As Vince says “When everyone in a community is more empowered to learn and share it creates an incredible positive feedback loop.”

Every stage of human development creates radical new ways to organize work. The holy grail for today’s companies is to function so that everybody has a real chance to contribute their gifts. Instead of operating top-down, more power must be distributed throughout the organization, giving individuals and teams freedom to self-manage, while staying aligned to the organization’s purpose. Achieving this is the promise of Holacracy, a self-management practice for organizations, developed by my guest Brian Robertson using explicitly integral principles. Over 1000 companies utilize Holacracy today – in healthcare, insurance, banking, retail, technology, nonprofit and government sectors; and in places as diverse as Dubai, Shanghai, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, New York, Bangalore, Las Vegas and rural Africa. Holacracy enables employees to act more like entrepreneurs and self-direct their work instead of reporting to a manager who tells them what to do.”

I invited Brooke McNamara to the Daily Evolver to talk about a project she is launching that I think represents a new way of building creative we-spaces. It’s a 6-week virtual course that provides inspiration, community and an opportunity for creative self-expression to a select group of people who are living in a unique crucible: mothers. Brooke developed the course, Write to the Heart of Motherhood* because, as a poet, she knows writing to be a flexible and potent way for mothers to “connect to our true voice in the middle of our messy lives.” She explains: “The practice of writing is not something I do, but somewhere I go. When I give myself fully to whole-bodied listening for poems, I am never disappointed. Even if nothing comes, the tuning itself creates a presence and vitality in my being that support me profoundly in living and mothering. Poetry, for me, is language that carries both meaning, imagery and story, AND, more importantly, life force itself.” Brooke McNamara is the author of “Feed Your Vow, Poems for Falling into Fullness.” She is also a performing artist, Zen monk and mama to two small boys. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, Rob. * I occasionally feature offerings that I find interesting and which further human development. I have no financial interest in them.

Is there intelligent life beyond Earth? Have alien beings contacted us? What do we make of the thousands of testimonials of human-alien contact, including from scientists, diplomats and astronauts? Yet … where’s the proof? And if there is proof, why is alien contact not the biggest story of the millennia? “It is arguably the most intellectually credible topic on the planet with the most cultural taboo surrounding it.” So says my guest, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens. Many of you know Sean as a leader in the integral community, as producer of three hugely successful Integral Theory Conferences, a respected consultant (founder of MetaIntegral) and author (Metatheory for the 21st Century). Well, it turns out there is another side to Sean. Here’s how he describes it: “For over a decade I’ve been a closeted UFO/ET geek – reading 100s of books and watching 1000s of hours of videos (interviews, documentaries, movies) – all in an attempt to make sense of my own experiences and intuitions around this fascinating and confusing topic. If there is ever a place where multiple perspectives run amuck, bumping into each other and in general creating chaos, it is around aliens and the craft they pilot. Over the last few years, I’ve begun to talk with ‘integralists’ about these topics and I’ve been continually surprised to discover many of them have had their own powerful and evocative experiences with UFOs, ETs, and paranormal realities.” Sean is throwing himself fully into the arena. This year he founded the Institute for Exo Studies (IES), and this fall he debuts the Exo Studies Master Course, a three-month online course “exploring the psychological, sociological, and scientific implications of living in a multidimensional multiverse.” I’ve never met an alien (that I know of) but I jumped at the chance to talk about them with someone whose intelligence and judgment I respect. As I expected, I found our conversation to be quite mind-expanding. I hope you do as well!

It has been a hundred years since humanity spun into the chaos of the First World War. Peter Jackson’s acclaimed new documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” brings vivid new life to the experience of British soldiers fighting on the western front. Using newly released footage from the Imperial War Museum, Jackson and his team worked four years to digitally restore, smooth, colorize and convert the film into 3D. The narration is told completely by former soldiers, in their own voices, from interviews recorded by the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. WWI is a case study of human evolution. Britain entered the war as a traditional culture (amber altitude), full of romantic visions of honor, duty and the glories of war. Young men, thrilled by the promise of adventure, clamored to answer the call. Once at the front, they soon realized that they were in a meat-grinder, beset not only by age-old battle curses like hunger, cold, mud, sickness, rats and lice, but also the emergent features of modern weaponry: aerial bombs, poison gas, machine guns, flame-throwers and tanks. Yet the men endured, no longer sustained by romance or politics, but like warriors of all time, by the dense connection created between men whose next breaths depend on each other (red altitude). Those who survived returned to a country that in the meantime had largely modernized both in structure and thought (orange altitude), a country more interested in looking forward than past. The soldiers found themselves out of work, invisible and misunderstood by all but their fellow fighters. Jackson leaves it there, but the developmental story continues, with a new postmodern view (green altitude) arising in Germany out of the rubble of defeat. This is exemplified by the classic war novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Also told from the point of view of the soldier – this time a German soldier – it is a scathing condemnation of a civilization that could create such suffering. The book was an immediate international sensation, translated into 22 languages, and brought a potent blast of green consciousness to the world (and into my life fifty years later). But alas, it was soon to be banned by the Nazis … humanity had more of the lesson to learn, and still has.

For Valentine’s Day, integral couples therapist Tom Habib returns to share his insights into what he calls the “couples’ line of development.” In previous episodes he laid out the trajectory most couples take — from initial attraction, to role-partnering, to mutual respect, to what he calls first love, where intimacy begins to blossom into an exciting new we-space that transcends (while including) the stages that came before. Today Tom returns to focus on an essential yet surprising requirement of the first love stage, which guides his therapy with couples: relationships reach first love when each person is free to safely and consciously express their inner child. Neediness, hurt, joy, tantrums — all are welcome as long as they are held within clear boundaries (four minutes for a tantrum, for instance) and attended by a caring, nurturing partner in the adult role. One of the most beautiful integral projects is to reach back to reclaim the juice and enchantment of our childhood stages. In this episode, Tom shares insights and methods that show us how to do it in the delicious context of couple love. Tom Habib joins us from his home in San Juan Capistrano, California. You can find more of his work at drtomhabib.com.

The idea of human progress has been widely discredited since the wars and genocides of the mid-20th-century. But what if the 20th century also featured the largest (and largest percentage) of people living in peace and prosperity, eclipsed only by the 21st century so far, which is dramatically even more peaceful and prosperous? This argument is made by Steve Pinker, author of “Enlightenment Now” and leading rehabilitator of progress in the mainstream intelligentsia. His nemesis, historian Niall Ferguson (“The Square and the Tower”), thinks Pinker stands a good chance of becoming a historical joke, like author Norman Angell, who predicted in 1911 that war would soon be a thing of the past. In this episode I attempt to bring some integral thinking to a debate between Pinker and Ferguson hosted by Fareed Zakaria in his GPS Sunday show on CNN. Plus! You’ll get to swoon over Bradley Cooper in real time, just like Lady Gaga …

Integral practitioners talk a lot about creating a more spacious consciousness, one that includes more of reality. To that end we do things like place people and cultures on maps. We tease apart distinctions, we “transcend and include” and “differentiate and integrate” — all in an effort to increase the resolution of our worldview, as one would zoom into a google map to reveal more of what is already there. But does creating more space mean we’re creating more distance? Is the process of making distinctions also exacerbating differences? Might all our maps just be holding us in place? This is the jist of a thoughtful question I received from a listener, Kc Daugirdas in LA. He asks: “This space versus distance thing has been bothering me in all the domains that integral claims to integrate. I’m haunted by the suspicion that in the process of ‘transcending and including,’ we lose something. I’m farther from this, I’m farther from that. So where am I? What am I close to now?” Ultimately this is a spiritual inquiry and is found at the center of many great religious traditions as the paradox of One and the Many, or the Creator and the Creation, or Emptiness and Form. The teaching calls on us to identify with both the wave and the ocean. As the wave we are a momentary manifestation unique in all of time and space. As the ocean we are all waves simultaneously, as well as the infinite potentiality of waves. And since we contain everything, whatever we need is already just right there. We differentiate, God integrates. Part of our evolutionary journey is to have a progressively deeper realization of this great, paradoxical truth. Like all spiritual teachings, it can be absorbed in three ways: it can be understood by the mind (the outer teaching), it can be experienced in the physical and energy bodies (the inner teaching) and then … it can blow you away and deliver you into a re-enchanted world (the secret teaching). Go for the goosebumps! I end with a tribute to Mary Oliver, a well-loved American poet who died on January 17. She was often heard at integral events I attended, and I came to appreciate her own unique way of capturing the interpenetration of the One in the Many. Here I share a reading of one of her most popular poems, The Summer Day.