The Daily Evolver

The ability to remember the past and to imagine the future sets us apart from other animals. A zebra doesn't worry about the lion until the lion is upon it, at which time it reacts. If it escapes it will shake for hours afterwards to release the trauma, and then it's free. But humans have the special ability to imagine that lion attacking over and over again. It must give us some kind of evolutionary advantage or else we wouldn’t have developed this ability. Anxiety is part of the price we pay for our imaginations, and a self-aware consciousness.

This subject is close to Jeff's heart. He describes a four-year period in which he suffered debilitating anxiety as "a black hole of self-focused rumination". He tells Dr. Keith about the medications, the treatments, screaming his head off, and what finally drew him out of that terrible place.

Chögyam Trungpa used to say that anxiety is just the feeling of being a separate self. Research has shown that when we’re connected to each other our anxiety goes way down. Other things that help are assertive action and deep relaxation.

Regardless, all emotions have relevance to our lives and we want to act on them in a healthy, functional way. We can begin by looking at anxiety itself with compassion, acceptance and caring intent.

Some of the things that Jeff and Dr. Keith talk about in the podcast:

• The different types of anxiety disorders and especially the difference between anxiety, fear, and panic

• Alleviating anxiety at difference stages of development

• How our culture supports dissociation in the face of unpleasant emotions

• Turning toward anxiety and coming into the present moment

• The two best anxiety regulating techniques ever developed

We hope you enjoy The Shrink & The Pundit series. Send your questions and feedback using the orange Speakpipe button to the right, or send an email to [email protected].

In this conversation, Steve talks to Jeff about the new paper he released through the Institute for Cultural Evolution, titled "Overcoming Polarization by Evolving Both Right and Left: How Polarity Theory Provides a Path to Political Progress."

Looking at the current political climate in America, Steve writes, "Polarization now extends far beyond the uncompromising logjam in the legislature. Numerous studies have shown that much of the American public is afflicted by 'affective polarization' wherein opposing political camps increasingly dislike, and even loathe, their opponents."

The American political landscape is a big polar contest between the political left and right, and inside these polarities exist other, more refined polarities with values that tug and pull at each other—a "dialectic fractal". Realizing that these naturally-occurring polarities exist, and that they’re meant to be there, can make the whole system friendlier and open up space for greater cooperation.

The ideas that Jeff and Steve explore in this podcast include:

Why we should we care about political polarization

Why centrism doesn't work

How Spiral Dynamics and polarity theory shed light on the challenge

How suppressing one side of a polarity empowers its shadow

How the upside of one pole checks the downside of the other

The practice: increasing the scope of what we are able to value

Send your questions and comments for the show to [email protected]. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on dailyevolver.com.

Einstein's general theory of relativity got its final proof this month as scientists detected the bending of space and time that he predicted one hundred years ago.

The world that Einstein showed us is so much stranger than what we could have imagined. It blew up our safe perceptions about time and space and light and gravity. But the mechanistic universe we inhabited until then wasn't wrong, it was just partial. General relativity includes and transcends Newtonian physics.

So what effect does a four-dimensional reality, one that is interpenetrated with time, have on our view of the world? Is everything that has ever happened still reverberating in this very moment? Jeff looks at general relativity through the lens of integral theory and considers the implications.

In the second segment Jeff is joined live in the studio by Steve McIntosh, integral author and president of the non-profit Institute for Cultural Evolution (ICE). It's a perfect time to discuss Steve's new paper "Overcoming Polarization by Evolving Both Right and Left: How Polarity Theory Provides a Path to Political Progress".

Within a hour of the announcement of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia last week, the Republican leadership announced they would not even consider a nominee put up by President Obama to replace the conservative icon. This is an illustration of just how divided and dysfunctional our political process has become. Is it any wonder that the two "revolution" candidates, Trump and Sanders, the ones that want to blow up the system, are surging in the polls?

Steve and Jeff talk about progressive and conservative as indestructible polarities that need each other to grow and become better – like the poles of masculine and feminine—they'll never merge, but they do change over time, taking on the best aspects of each other. So how do we help the left and the right evolve on their own terms? Listen to the podcast, and for those that want a deeper dive, you can find Steve’s new paper here.

Lastly, Jeff takes a question from a listener, Marilyn, who lives in Canada and works in Oklahoma, and is wondering if she’s taking her life in her hands every time she has a layover in Dallas.

"...I find the apparent strengthening of the gun lobby, very, very troubling. I am looking for an integrally informed point of view…and some hope. Thanks for any insights you can offer on this particularly American dilemma of the Second Amendment."

Why are we so different in this regard to every other advanced Western nation, including our gentle neighbors to the north? Jeff explains the American psychograph to Marilyn, and why guns are still such an important part of our identity.

Send your questions and comments for the show to [email protected]. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on dailyevolver.com.

With Donald Trump currently leading the Republican presidential field, the race is finally getting interesting. Few people think he will ultimately prevail, but Trump can absolutely affect the outcome...

There are good reasons why, traditionally, politics and religion are not discussed in polite company. "It's because they express very deep patterns of our thinking and feeling," Jeff says, "if you start screwing with my spiritual beliefs and my politics, you're screwing with me and my whole sense of identity."

In the podcast, Jeff talks about what he calls "integral political practice," the act of observing our attractions and aversions to different political ideas and even to particular candidates. In so doing we are engaging in the most potent practice of consciousness evolution: turning subject into object. He describes what he calls "the remote control test", which is noticing his instant compulsion to change the channel when Ted Cruz appears on the TV.

What exactly is happening there, and more importantly, what's underneath it? Jeff plumbs the depths of his revulsion and finds some surprising truths!

Also in the podcast Jeff talks to author Thomas McConkie about his new book, Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis. Tom was born and raised in the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City and comes from pioneer ancestry. He describes his own crisis of faith and the falling out with his family. "That set me on my path in Buddhism and eventually integral adult development. It was just in the last few years that it felt like a deep soul urge of mine to really, on a personal level, integrate my own Mormon identity."

If you think you know about Mormonism, you might be really surprised by Jeff's conversation with Tom. Find out more about Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis here.

Lastly, Jeff addresses a listener's frustration with the Big History Project, which seems to be trying to answer a lot of the same questions as integral theory, but with much less explanatory power. So why is it so successful in spreading its message to the public?

"I'm a little frustrated about the inability of integral theory...to penetrate public discourse in a similar way," the caller says. So are we! In the podcast, Jeff talks about the strengths of the Big History Project, it's shortcomings, and why, for the time being, books on integral theory are still relegated to the New Age ghetto.

Send your questions and comments for the show to [email protected]. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on dailyevolver.com.

In a healthy intimate relationship, the partners don't have to be turned on by each other all the time, says Dr. Keith, "but they do need to be turned on by each other regularly." Every couple has a balance of how much sex is needed to keep things vibrant, and it's the responsibility of each partner to make it happen.

For many couples, this is something that must be learned and practiced.

In the days of our grandparents, there wasn't much need for sex therapy. Sexual fulfillment was not an expectation for a traditional marriage; it was how you made babies. The dawn of modernity (orange) brought with it a value structure that focused more on the individual. With changing morals and the advent of birth control, the focus of sex became less about procreation and more about pleasure. Our personal sexual fulfillment took priority over social convention, and divorce began to skyrocket.

With the dawn of the postmodern age, couples are faced with additional challenges. The main challenge is how to keep the erotic energy alive when couples are focused on minimizing male/female differences and elevating equality. 'These couples need to practice taking and being taken," says Dr. Keith, "where one person's masculine really focuses on the other person's feminine. One person leads the other person—and the other person allows themselves to be led—into the dance of eroticism."

In some relationships, such as with many gay couples, the roles of masculine and feminine can even be exchanged.

Some of the main topics that Jeff and Dr. Keith discuss in the podcast: The predictors of happy relationships and how to turn those into practices, the energetics of arousal: Giving masculine direction to feminine radiance, the kind of fantasizing that is productive and the kind that isn't, the relationship between sex and shadow, how to raise our children to be sexually healthy adults.

Send your questions and comments for the show to [email protected]. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on dailyevolver.com.

Bernie Sanders started his campaign to be the Democratic nominee for president back in April, "as a 74-year old rumpled, grumpy, self-described old school democratic socialist," says Jeff. "Today he has included and transcended those qualities to transform himself into a sleek political populist taking on a system that he sees as rigged against the people."

Jeff puts Bernie's extraordinary rise into a larger evolutionary context that includes culture, politics and economics. He draws on the work of integral economist Said Dawlabani to describe the way value systems of different developmental stages oscillate between a focus on the individual and a focus on the collective. "The polarity is indestructible," says Jeff, "but as the clock moves forward, these values are expressed in newly emerging ways."

Sanders is an authentic, committed expression of the green, postmodern value system. With its emphasis on the collective, green is a proponent for a strong safety net, highly subsidized or even centralized health care, and education. "It's just generally a move to a social contract that distributes more of the pie to more people," Jeff says.

Is it our destiny in the U.S. to move toward democratic socialism á la Northern Europe? Should we get behind the true believer and take our chances on Bernie's crusade? Or ought we opt for Hillary Clinton's incremental approach, which she describes as "sensible and achievable"? And how about the perennial Republican model of private enterprise, smaller government and lower taxes? Is there an integral approach that might honor the best of what each of these worldviews has to offer?

Also in the podcast: A viral video of a wedding in Auckland, New Zealand, where a newlywed husband and wife watch their family members perform the Haka, a dance from the Maori tradition. "This is an example of the power of integrating developmental levels in a healthy way, as a work of creative expression and performance art," says Jeff.

Plus, Jeff recommends a new series on PBS called "First Peoples", which hits two bullseyes for integralists. First, it unfolds a beautiful narrative of the evolution of early humanity, showing how we arose out of Africa 200,000 years ago to take over the world. Second, it reveals how contemporary scientists are incorporating non-rational ways of knowing, featuring Arturo Gonzales, the celebrated Mexican paleontologist, who discovered Eva de Navarone, the oldest skeleton ever found in the Americas, with the aid of a shaman and a psychedelic drug made from the glands of a Mexican toad.

Send your questions and comments for the show to [email protected]. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on dailyevolver.com.

As we see with integral theory, art is often the leading edge of cultural and consciousness evolution, and jazz today continues to lead the way. In this two-part series, "The soul of jazz", Greg takes us through the history of jazz from its roots in the magic, mythic and traditional interiors of African Americans at the turn of the last century, through the modern and postmodern strains of the mid and late 20th Century, to the more wild wooly contemporary scene. He points out the evolutionarily potent and ultimately integral qualities jazz conveys as it confronts enduring human polarities such as the individual vs the group, tragedy vs comedy, competition vs cooperation, and structure vs freedom.

This is part two of a two-part series.

Send your questions and comments for the show to [email protected]. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on DailyEvolver.com.

There is political correctness, it turns out, at every stage of development, from the capitol crime of blasphemy at the traditional/amber stage to the prejudices and microaggressions you may not even know you’ve inflicted at the postmodern/green stage. Jeff shows how they are pushing humanity into new, ever more humane and compassionate territory. Also, Obama’s last State of the Union address.

By Jeff Salzman

I’ve long enjoyed music critic Greg Thomas's insightful posts on Integral Life, where he write about jazz.

Not that I like jazz music. Truth is, I've always found jazz to be annoying. I can't tap my foot to it. I can't sing it in the shower. Like a lot of artforms, when we don't understand them, jazz has shown up to me as noise.

Of course like all good integral practitioners, I want to turn toward the object of my annoyance. I know it's not the fault of jazz that I don’t get it. Millions of people are ecstatic over it, and I want to have what they're having.

So I was thrilled when Greg came to one of my programs at the Integral Center last summer, and I invited him to stay with me. During downtimes we had some great one-on-ones where Greg did his best to initiate me into the jazz idiom. He explained how jazz expresses American culture. He told stories of various artists and songs. He played some of his favorite pieces and schooled me in what was going on. He turned out to be just the teacher I was looking for, and I began to get the beat.

Greg's mastery is obvious, and he is indeed one of the nation's leading experts on jazz. For several years Greg was a jazz columnist for the New York Daily News. He's a consultant with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and with Jazz at Lincoln Center, the largest organization in the world dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation of jazz.

As we see with integral theory, art is often the leading edge of cultural and consciousness evolution, and jazz today continues to lead the way.

In this two-part series on the soul of jazz, Greg takes us through the history of jazz from its roots in the magic, mythic and traditional interiors of African Americans at the turn of the last century, through the modern and postmodern strains of the mid and late 20th Century, to the more wild wooly contemporary scene. He points out the evolutionarily potent and ultimately integral qualities jazz conveys as it confronts enduring human polarities such as the individual vs the group, tragedy vs comedy, competition vs cooperation, and structure vs freedom.

This is part one of our conversation...

Send your questions and comments for the show to [email protected]. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on DailyEvolver.com.