About Joe Perez

Joe Perez is Executive Editor of Spirit's Next Move, Director of Communications and Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for World Spirituality. He has eight years of blogging experience and has seen two of his blogs published as books including Soulfully Gay, a pioneering Integral Spirituality memoir. He is an Honors graduate of Harvard University, has studied at The Divinity School at The University of Chicago, and holds a certificate in Integral Leadership from Pacific Integral. He also blogs at Gay Spirituality.

Spirit’s Next Move is moving!

October 5, 2012 at 5:00 pm by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

Thank you for visiting SpiritsNextMove.net, a spot which has been the home of the Center for World Spirituality’s new blog for the past several months. As part of our organization’s web presence reorganization, we have moved the contents of this blog and will no longer be posting here.

You can find the new Spirit’s Next Move daily blog, better than ever, on the Center for World Spirituality’s main site at www.iEvolve.org. You can find new daily material on the left sidebar of the site. Thanks once again for sticking with us … we look forward to seeing you on the new site!

Filed Under: All Posts, Announcements, Arts & Culture, Belief & Practice, Daily Wisdom, Ecology, Evolution, Featured, Health & Medicine, Learning & Work, Love, Sex & Ethics, More..., Quotes, Shadow & Psyche, Spiritual Community, Spiritual Journey, Sports and Fitness, Unique Self, World Politics

Coming Soon: UniqueSelf.com

June 22, 2012 at 7:41 pm by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

Dear Reader:

I’m excited to announce that the Center for World Spirituality’s long-planned site UniqueSelf.com is nearing completion. The site will provide an educational resource and portal for the Unique Self teaching which is so important to our long-term vision of World Spirituality.

Look for additional details in the next two to three weeks. Meanwhile, please bear with us while we direct less attention to our current websites, Spirit’s Next Move and the Center for World Spirituality think tank site.

Once the new Unique Self is online, we’ll have more announcements to come about how we will be re-organizing and upgrading our web presence to get the most out of each website.

Best wishes,

Joe

Filed Under: All Posts

Being happy with yourself is the most important skill

June 8, 2012 at 11:42 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Leo Babauta (Zen Habits)

If you’re like me, you are constantly learning new skills — gardening, carpentry, pizza-making, languages, sports, and so on. And I think this is a fun and wonderful thing to do.

But what’s the most important skill?

That’s debatable. I think compassion is a huge one, as is mindfulness. I’d go with those two any day of the week.

But if I had to pick just one, it would be this: learning to be happy with yourself.

That seems too simple, to trite! Too mushy and New-Agey! And I’ll grant all of that, but I stand firmly by my pick.

Why? The answer has to do with how this one thing can affect everything else in your life. If you are not happy with yourself, or your body, you become insecure. You think you’re not good enough. You fear being abandoned and alone. You do lots of other things to compensate, and these lead to problems.

So many of the problems people have stem from this one thing — being unhappy with themselves (often in the form of being unhappy with their bodies). Let’s take a look at why, and then look at some ideas of how to master the skill.

Why It Affects Everything

Let’s say you’re unhappy with your body. You think you are too fat, or too skinny, or your butt is too small (or too big). Or your boobs are too small, or your pecs aren’t big enough. Your stomach is flabby, or loose, or covered in stretch marks. Your thighs are too thick. Your hips are too wide, or too narrow. The list goes on and on.

We’ll get into why we’re unhappy in a minute, but for now, just imagine the unlikely scenario that you’re unhappy with your body. What does that do to you? Well, you might be envious of other people (who, you know, are also unhappy with their bodies). You might be worried that you’re not attractive enough to meet someone, and therefore sabotage your chances for a relationship. If you’re in a relationship, you might think your boyfriend/girlfriend will leave you for someone more attractive. You might then act jealously, and do things out of this jealousy that actually leads to your partner being unhappy, and possibly eventually leaving you.

If you’re unhappy with your body, you might not want to look at it. You might obsessively undereat, and then binge eat, and then feel worse about yourself. You might avoid exercise because you don’t want to even think about the problem. You might eat junk food to comfort your bad feelings, and then make the health problems worse.

You might have anxiety about all of this, about your body, your health, your girlfriend leaving you. Then you eat more to assuage the anxiety, and it gets worse. Or you shop to make yourself feel better, and you get deeply in debt and your life fills with clutter. Or you drink alcohol or numb yourself with drugs or television so you don’t have to think about all this.

At work, you’re unhappy because you aren’t confident about yourself or your body, so you don’t do the things that require confidence and that would further your career. You might not leave your work to find work you’re more passionate about, because you don’t think you’re good enough. Even at the work you’re in, you do what you can to not think about the unhappiness you have, so you procrastinate with social networks, games, and other diversions.

There’s much more that’s possible, but you get the idea. Not everyone has all of these symptoms, but they’re possible for anyone. Many of our problems stems from this one problem, and fixing it can change everything.

That’s why, if you have a finite amount of time to learn (and we all do), investing that time into learning this one skill can pay off in innumerable ways. It’s the most important skill you can master.

Why We’re Like This

If this is so bad, why are we like this? How did it get this way? Well, there’s no one answer. It’s a building up of lots of reasons, including:

Mass media. We see beautiful celebrities with perfect faces, stomachs, thighs, abs, chests and asses all over the place — on the Internet, on TV and movies, in magazines. Everywhere. They’re celebrated as the pinacle of our society, and we all want to be them in some way. They’re not real, of course — they’re Photoshopped, make-upped, did upped in so many ways that what we see is an illusion. We’re comparing ourselves to an illusion. But even if they were, why would we need to be like them? Why can’t we be like ourselves, and let that be the ideal?
Comments from others. Friends, family members, co-workers, even spouses might make a seemingly innocent comment about our butt or boobs that makes us feel bad about ourselves. These comments are small but hit our self-esteem very hard. They’re not really about us, though, even if we almost always take them to heart. They’re about the other person, who is having a bad day, or jealous of you, or projecting their own insecurities on you, or comparing you to the mass media celebrities they idolize for no good reason. See these comments for what they are, and don’t take them to heart.
Childhood incidents. In childhood, perhaps our parents made some comments about us that made us feel bad. Perhaps our parents got a divorce, or our dad was never around — if dad left mom, maybe that meant she wasn’t good enough for him, and by extension maybe I’m not good enough for someone else? If dad left, maybe it’s because I wasn’t good enough for him? This might sound like psychological mumbo-jumbo, but it’s real. I’ve experienced it, and so have countless others. It doesn’t mean we have to let it rule our lives, but we should be aware that it’s there, and learn to deal with it.
Failures. Perhaps we’ve made some mistakes and failed at some things we tried to do. Honestly, everyone does, but when we do it, we take it to heart. It makes us feel bad about ourselves — we’re not disciplined, we’re not good enough. This leads to further failures, further hurting our self-image.
Health problems. While having thick thighs or a bit of flab on the tummy is nothing to feel bad about — love how you look! — a completely separate problem from how we feel about our bodies is the health of our bodies. We tend to mix them together — being fat makes us feel bad about ourselves, for example — but really they can be separated. We can feel good about our bodies but realize that being overweight can lead to heart disease and diabetes down the road, so it only makes sense to lose some weight. Not because we want to look like a celebrity and feel better about ourselves, but because we want to be healthy. Being healthy, by the way, can help your self-image, and even though I said they can be separated, this is one positive benefit from conflating the two that you should accept happily.
Spiral of negative thoughts. One bad thought leads to another, and then another, until we have a bundle of bad thoughts that become our self-image. This negative self-image can affect everything we do. But this self-image and these bad thoughts are not us — they are things that happen within us, but we don’t have to let them become us. We can cope with them, and turn them into positive thoughts, into gratitude, into happiness.

These are just a few reasons. In fact, so many things affect our self-image that it’s impossible to list them all, but it’s good to start to be aware of them, so we can cope with them.

How to Master the Skill

Let’s say you’ve accepted my premise that learning to be happy with yourself (let’s call it “love thyself”) is the most important skill to master … how do you get started?

The simple answer is practice. The complicated answer is that it takes awhile, because our self-image wasn’t formed overnight and it won’t be changed overnight. That’s OK. Just focus on this moment, and you’ll learn as you go.

I can’t give you a complete guide to learning to love thyself, as that would take a book, and I’m still learning myself, but here are some tips for starting out:

Become aware of your mental movie. You have a movie (perhaps a series of them) that you play inside your head about yourself. Usually we aren’t aware of this, but it happens, throughout the day. The movie is about who we are: you have a flabby stomach, you are fat, you are too skinny, you aren’t disciplined, you aren’t lovable, your braces look weird, you aren’t good at anything. Start to pay attention when this movie plays — it affects everything you do. Realize that this movie isn’t you — it’s just playing in your head. Realize that it isn’t true, and isn’t based on reality. Realize that it can be changed.
Start to make a new movie. This new movie will replace that play-out old one that keeps running in your theater. It will be a Michael Bay production, with a gorgeous lead actor (hey, that’s you!), great visual effects, lots of excitement … except with more character development and a lot smaller budget. Let’s base this movie on reality, not fears from childhood or illusions of celebrities or comments from others. Instead, it should be based on the fact that you are a good person, wonderful even, who is loving, kind, beautiful, passionate. This might not be what you think about yourself, but let’s make the movie like this anyway. Ask other people why you’re lovable (people who are likely to give a kind answer). Use these images in your new movie. When negative images start coming up (my boobs are too small!), cut them out and tell them they have no place in your production. Put better images in.
Consciously play the new movie. Learn to recognize the flicker of the old movie starting, and shut it off. Put the new movie in the projector instead, and play it. Practice this like it’s your new religion. You will get better with constant practice. Put up reminders all around you so you don’t forget.
Learn mental judo. There will be things coming in all around you that will try to attack your new movie. Comments from friends, celebrities, things you see on Facebook. When they are hurtling towards you, learn to lean to one side and let them whiz by. Give them a small shove, with a thought like, “That comment is not about me, it’s about you.” (And then go give your friend a hug — she’s probably having a bad day.) Or a thought like, “That celebrity probably is also worried about her body — having big boobs or a flat stomach doesn’t solve that problem.” Give the celebrity a mental hug, then play your new movie.

You are already perfect — you just need to realize it. You don’t need anything to solve this problem — you already have it. You just need to practice, like it’s the most important thing in your life, because in many ways, it is.

Photo Credit: LaLaLaLiza

Filed Under: All Posts, Health & Medicine, Shadow & Psyche

“We’re all just walking each other home.”

June 6, 2012 at 11:23 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

“We’re all just walking each other home.” ― Ram Dass

For Ram Dass, the story of the spiritual journey as a walk home among friendly people is an important one.

It’s a story that resonates with me more since I turned 40 than earlier in my life, when I would have been more likely to say, “We’re all choosing our own adventure.”

Journey from the Source to the Unknown Self — the great adventure of Life — is also an important story, no disrespect intended to Ram Dass.

The return journey from the Unknown Self to the Source — homeward-bound — is equally important.

These are also what I call the Two Prime Directions of Love, the outward, other-directed drive of Eros, and the inward, same-directed drive of Agape.

My own story about the spiritual life is it’s hard to make universalizing statements about life such as “We’re all just walking each other home.” We are both coming and going, giving and receiving, reaching outward and falling back. We are generally caught in time, and yet we also can recognize a timelessness to existence.

We’re all just walking each other home?

Maybe.

We’re certainly telling stories to each other about what it means to be a human being and have a life worth living. We are also certainly examining those stories in relationship to one another, you listening to me, I listening to you. And it’s in the telling and re-telling of useful, memorable, and true stories that we find ourselves — stories as paradoxically unique and as universal we all are.

Photo Credit: moriza

Filed Under: All Posts, Belief & Practice

A Place where everybody knows your Original Face?

June 4, 2012 at 11:11 am by Joe Perez 1 Comment

By Joe Perez

There’s a recently redesigned and expanded Starbucks Coffee within walking distance from my home in Seattle. I used to go in there quite a bit, but gradually the place has become so busy and noisy that it’s impossible to find a good seat (sometimes it’s even been standing room only), so I’ve found alternatives.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Starbucks was ever a “home away from home,” but it was the spot where I first attended a Seattle Integral meet-up, and where I met many business clients for a while. Now I’ve come across an article in Forbes claiming that Starbucks may be making their coffee shops intentionally a bit uncomfortable so that they drive away people who linger too long in one spot and bump up the customer churn rate.

A Starbucks company spokesperson isn’t exactly denying the claim, so it looks like there’s some truth to it. And it ought not surprise anyone. Starbucks is a publicly held company with an obligation to increase profits. But what does it say about Starbucks customers — which is just about everyone in Seattle and hundreds of millions of people throughout the world — that it matters so much to us?

Alice Walton, writing in Forbes:

The new “let’s make it slightly uncomfortable” model has a larger effect on the psyches of the customers – those who come to work or to play – than we might think at first. This is because the coffee house plays the central role of “Third Place” in our lives – home being the first and work being the second – and Starbucks has always been vocal about its desire to be this third place for its customer. What’s interesting is that humans actually really need this place, and we’ve needed if for practically our whole existence, according to some.

About 20 years ago, Ray Oldenburg, PhD, who wrote a book called The Great Good Place, argued that there are a number of attributes that make a third place a third place: It has to be convenient, inviting, serve something, and have some good regulars (which, he says, is actually more important than having a good host). People have had third places throughout history, and they’ve ranged from taverns to coffee houses to barbershops. They’re definitely better than street corners. Third places are different from first or second ones because we go to them in our in-between time – their voluntariness is what makes them so special and unique.

For millions of people who are not regular church attendees, the coffeehouse is increasingly playing a social role similar to that which churches used to play. We go there to meet people who we know and like. We go there to read a book and listen to soft music. We go there to break bread and drink beverages that alter our state of consciousness. Nobody forces us to go, and we can walk out at any time.

With nearly 20,000 Starbucks locations throughout the world (according to Wikipedia), the coffee giant is not in danger of eclipsing organized religion anytime soon (comparing to about 271,000 physical Catholic churches alone). But I wager that in modern countries Starbucks is adding coffee shops much faster than the Roman Catholic Church is adding new churches, and the Roman Church has had a bit of a headstart.

The world is thirsty for spirituality, and for many of us our heart longs to have Third Places that transcend the boundaries of any one particular organized religion. Coffee shops are substituting for churches at a time when religions have floundered at articulating an earthy, embodied, Fullness-loving vision of spirituality that makes them better places to go to hang out.

It’s a pity that it takes the profit-driven behavior of companies like Starbucks — making seats more uncomfortable, pumping up the volume of the music so it becomes more difficult to study and hold a conversation — to remind us that a beverage retail store cannot truly substitute for a House of Worship. Is it too much to ask that one day we might all walk down the street to our favorite neighborhood spiritual center to hang out with friends and meet new people in love with Life and Love, a place where it is not only okay to Be Yourself, but an expectation and obligation?

Filed Under: All Posts, Arts & Culture, Spiritual Community

Welcome Tony Robbins, Claudia Kleefeld, Mark Schwartz, Richard Schwartz, Bill Little, Lori Galperin, and Charles Randall Paul

June 1, 2012 at 9:30 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

The Center for World Spirituality is delighted to tell you about the newest members of the Center’s Wisdom Council, our amazing group of advisers and dialogue partners.

The new members are:

Richard Barrett is founder and chairman of the Barrett Values Centre and an internationally recognized thought leader on values, culture, leadership and consciousness. An author, speaker and social commentator on the evolution of human values in business and society, he is also a Fellow of the RSA, a United Kingdom-based enlightenment organization.
Lori Galperin, MSW, LCSW initially earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology and later completed her graduate degree in Clinical Social Work at Tulane University. She is an accomplished contributor in the fields of marital and sexual dysfunction, sexual compulsivity, sexual trauma, dissociative and eating disorders. Lori lectures nationally and internationally on these topics and has authored various journal articles and book chapters.
Claudia Kleefeld holds her Bachelor of the Arts from University of Southern California, Los Angeles and a postgraduate degree from The Byam Shaw College of Art. She is a painter and photographer incorporating sound, photography, video, the spoken word and written word into her work. She makes art that considers humanness, examining the voice of the individual as it correlates with the external world.
Dr. Bill Little received his PhD in Physics from Georgia Tech in 1969 and was teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey where he first heard about Religious Science. He returned to New York to continue his Ministerial studies and before long he came back as the Minister at the Monterey Church where he remained until 1987. In 1989, at the request of many friends and supporters, he began Pacific Coast Church. Dr. Bill was awarded a Doctorate in Religious Science in 1986. Also, just for fun, he teaches mathematics at Monterey Peninsula College.
Charles Randall Paul is president and chairman of the Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy, an organization promoting and facilitating communication between people experiencing conflicts inspired by religious differences. He has an M.B.A., Harvard University and a Ph.D. from The University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought.
Anthony Robbins is a world authority on leadership psychology, peace negotiator, humanitarian, strategic advisor to world leaders, successful entrepreneur, honored business strategist, award-winning speaker, internationally best-selling author, authority on peak performance, and innovator in psychology and intervention. His nonprofit, the Anthony Robbins Foundation, provides assistance to inner-city youth, senior citizens, homeless, and feeds millions of people in countries all over the world.
Dr. Mark Schwartz, Sc.D. earned his doctorate in Psychology and Mental Health from Johns Hopkins University and is a licensed psychologist. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Schwartz has achieved international recognition for his contributions in a variety of clinical arenas, including the treatment of intimacy disorders, marital and sexual dysfunction, sexual compulsivity, sexual trauma and eating disorders.
Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and author who has pioneered the application of systems concepts of family therapy to this intrapsychic realm. Dr. Schwartz co-authored, with Michael Nichols, Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods, the most widely used family therapy text in the U.S. He founded the Center for Self Leadership (CSL), which has evolved a comprehensive approach for working with individuals, couples, and families.

Filed Under: Announcements Tagged With: wisdom council

In defense of the Qur’an (from a World Spirituality perspective)

May 29, 2012 at 2:28 pm by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

Today on the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan asks his readers a fair question, crudely stated:

“If there is an argument for why the Quran is so good, please bring it forward. I’ve read the Quran several times and it’s not that good. In fact, it’s conspicuously bad as a moral map, and a spiritual map. You can wander blindfolded into a Barnes & Noble, and the first book you pick off the shelf will have more wisdom than the Quran. The Quran is uniquely barren of wisdom relevant to the 21st century. It’s got a few good lines about patience and generosity, and the rest is just vilification of the infidel,” – Sam Harris. Can any readers counter?

To which I responded today:

Dear Andrew,

The Qur’an is a classic of world spiritual literature far exceeding the disposable drivel that you will pick off the shelf in the vast majority of the books at a Barnes & Noble. I would have thought you know this and could have written a defense yourself. In any event, as non-Muslims, there are many people better qualified than you or I to give a defense of the Qur’an’s merits as a guide to Islamic life and culture.

My own defense as an enthusiast of a world-centric spirituality enthusiastically inclusive of Islam would start with the observation that a classic is to be judged not by reference to its compatibility with the New Atheist mindset of a small minority of people in early 21st century America (i.e., Sam Harris and his readers), but by its enduring influence over well more than a millennium. The claim that the Qur’an is “so good” begins by noting that many millions of people have for many centuries thought it so good, and that in a world of constant cultural evolution it is hermeneutically garbage to assess their aesthetic and spiritual opinions crudely by certain contemporary standards.

You can’t throw the Bible out as barren of wisdom because it sanctions social practices we find offensive today, and you can’t judge spiritual depth simply by how frequently a text enjoins virtues such as patience and generosity. You need to judge the Qur’an more holistically and as a mystical vision, not a self-help tome spouting chicken soup platitudes nearly everyone today will agree with.

At the same time, I want to go beyond saying that the Qur’an is important historically and also claim that the Qur’an is worthy of reading as a spiritual guide for people today … if one does the difficult work of attempting to enter into the prophetic and mystical mindset of Muhammad whose visions and divine communications form the book’s essence. I take into account — as many non-fundamentalists do — Muhammad’s human fallibility and historic/cultural contexts (which leads to many statements that our own cultural worldspace rightfully holds as objectionable), and see it as an ingenious expression of a vision of a completely Integral Universe, one in which there is no secular (i.e., godless) realm, but every facet of existence is harmoniously in sync with every other facet, and the core of that essence is Love. This is a deep and timeless truth that is lost on Sam Harris.

It is also important to note that for Muhammad, every syllable, sound symbol, number, and even the shape of every Arabic letter is a meaningful representation of the Divine, in an aesthetically orderly expression … and the Qur’an’s esoteric nature is one that has inspired Sufi mystics such as Rumi and Hafiz to deep realizations of inner divinity. The Qur’an continues to inspire Muslims and non-Muslims today who are interpreting the scripture not literally (fundamentalists) or merely metaphorically and poetically (progressive religionists) but as a sacred expression of evolving cultural wisdom and mystical realization (integral thinkers) to which everyone in the world is called.

Much love,

Joe Perez

Filed Under: Arts & Culture, Belief & Practice, Featured Tagged With: andrew sullivan, islam, quran, sam harris

Beauty is the most erotic of gifts, the ecstasy of love

May 28, 2012 at 9:34 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

On a discussion of Emerging Integral Art and Aesthetics, a comment by Fareed Artist:

We can also experience states of consciousness where the phenomenal world which forms, truly appears as an illusionistic art-working. We find that Divine Reality is always ever present. Is speaking through all of us, to each of us. Yet for some reason, that presence leaves our consciousness, it passes, and we forget the colors of truth. It is as if we are walking by the most wondrous of all artistic creations, and talking on our cell phones. We don’t recognize the God is right before us.What we find beautiful is that feeling of wholeness, transcendent re-contextualization, that is felt in the heart, and then so in the mind. That is called exquisite beauty, and is transformative. It may speak to us alone, or may be talking to all of us at once, or to each person, one person at a time. It causes us to feel and thereby see, all of life as continually and significantly meaningful. In fact it is always there.

It is experienced. It is the most erotic of gifts. It is the ecstasy of love, being lived, within life and death.

Death then, no longer is a matter of importance, as it is held in that exquisite state of beauty. So it is then, most beautiful, most complete and most whole – as in the end of a song. In this way too, our actions are divinely meaningful, as a worship of all-ness, casting no thing aside.

It is this state of being that is captured, signified in a work of art, or the gesture of a master, for our small minds, so that we can know that big mind, in all her unfathomable, ever changing complexity.

Beauty can be formed from that which we feel is un-harmonius and alienated. Rather, that which is believed to be alienated, can be known in the real. We must learn to turn that pain into life. This is the truth in art.

That it is all of its parts, and is greater even than the sum of all its parts. That it is whole, perfect, even in its separateness, in darkness, in its limitation of delusion. That it is all illusion. It is all art.

(Inspired by Marc Gafni – Spiritual Teacher)

Filed Under: Arts & Culture Tagged With: art, beauty, eros, god

In defense of complexity

May 21, 2012 at 10:20 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

Who’s winning the war over simplicity and complexity? The Daily Dish gives voice to an interesting discussion of evolution and culture. It began yesterday when Andrew Sullivan quoted Robert Bellah, the sociologist of religion, on a scientific matter:

Simplicity has its charms. Some relatively simple organisms have survived in more or less the same form for hundreds of millions of years. The more complex the species, the briefer its life. In some cases this is because species have changed into even more complex forms, yet extinctions have been massive. There have been several species of the genus Homo; now there is one. The one remaining species may be partly responsible for the extinction of its last remaining relative, the Neanderthals. The more complex, the more fragile. Complexity goes against the second law of thermodynamics, that all complex entities tend to fall apart, and it takes more and more energy for complex systems to function.

Today, a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog responds:

Utterly untrue. Bellah is making the fundamental mistake of confusing the fate of the individual entity with the fate of the larger dynamic system of which it’s part. A quick glance at the overall arc of the 4.5 billion year evolution of life on earth shows the inevitable march of complexity. Complexity does not “go against” the second law, any more than does the metabolism of your individual body—it uses it, through a related, albeit higher-order mechanism, to advance higher and higher stages of self-organization.

More complex systems are in fact far more efficient in their use of energy than less complex ones, which—from the thermodynamic perspective—is precisely what drives evolution (biological, social, technological and mental). Dawkins might not like it, but from the system’s science perspective, evolution is not directionless: Increasing complexity is built into the fabric of the universe.

Bellah not only has it deeply wrong on the science, he has it deeply wrong on the implications for philosophy; at least to judge by this short snippet you quote: more complex is not more fragile, it is more robust.

His outlook reads as dour and pessimistic. That’s not the world as it is—that’s Bellah’s projection onto it, based on a deep misreading of the interplay of thermodynamics and biology. The truth may be something almost 180 degrees different—something much more akin to Malick’s vision in “The Tree of Life:” not only is the evolution of biological complexity inevitable, given sufficiently propitious initial conditions, so is the evolution of mental, emotional and spiritual complexity—including consciousness, empathy, compassion, and grace. To cite Einstein, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”

Bellah’s science—again, to judge by a very small snippet—is inherently hostile, at least from our human perspective. Were his science right, we would all perforce become mid-50’s French existentialists. But it’s not. The applicable science is in fact friendly—I would say, grandly, magnificently friendly, even if, from the individual human perspective, humbling, awe-inspiring, or, like Krishna in his cosmic form, or Yahweh in the whirlwind, sometimes terrible to behold.

The anonymous Dish reader gets the better of the famous sociologist here, I think, striking notes that remind me of some of Ken Wilber’s twenty tenets of all holons. It’s so difficult to think about scientific principles such as evolution or entropy without our conscious and unconscious beliefs about the nature of reality sneaking into the equation. A dour-minded existentialist is prone to believe that everything is winding down and dying in a massive frozen heat death. An optimistic-minded American pragmatist is prone to believe that progress is inevitable and the world is what we make of it.

An Integral theorist is inclined towards appreciating that both pessimists and optimists have a piece of the truth, and the truth cannot be separated from the way that individuals construct their beliefs about reality in complex interactions of meaning-making and enactment.

Photo Credit: Fábio Pinheiro

Filed Under: Belief & Practice Tagged With: complexity, evolution, ken wilber, robert bellah, simplicity

Cognitive fixation: the mind’s obstacle to seeing what is right in front of us

May 21, 2012 at 10:02 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

Here’s an item in the news today plus a short exercise.

In “Why We Can’t See What’s Right in Front of Us,” Tony McCaffrey of the Harvard Business Review gives us an explanation for why we can’t see the obvious:

The most famous cognitive obstacle to innovation is functional fixedness — an idea first articulated in the 1930s by Karl Duncker — in which people tend to fixate on the common use of an object. For example, the people on the Titanic overlooked the possibility that the iceberg could have been their lifeboat. Newspapers from the time estimated the size of the iceberg to be between 50-100 feet high and 200-400 feet long. Titanic was navigable for awhile and could have pulled aside the iceberg. Many people could have climbed aboard it to find flat places to stay out of the water for the four hours before help arrived. Fixated on the fact that icebergs sink ships, people overlooked the size and shape of the iceberg (plus the fact that it would not sink).

More mundane examples: in a pinch, people have trouble seeing that a plastic lawn chair could be used as a paddle (turn it over, grab two legs, and start rowing) or that a candle wick could be used to tie things together (scrape the wax away to free the string).

The problem is we tend to just see an object’s use, not the object itself. When we see a common object, the motor cortex of our brain activates in anticipation of using the object in the common way. Part of the meaning of an object is getting ready to use it. If a type of feature is not important for its common use, then we are not cognizant of it. The result: our brain’s incredible inertia to move toward the common. Efficient for everyday life, this automatic neural response is the enemy of innovation.

Read the whole thing.

Creativity doesn’t just happen. It works like a muscle that can be trained, stretching the brain’s inertia towards ordinary uses to genuine creativity. As a practice, right now, look at an object in front of you… and contemplate new uses for it.

Hey, I think I’ve just found a new plaything for my cats!

Photo Credit: Rita Willaert

Filed Under: Arts & Culture Tagged With: creativity, innovation

Self-confidence: a sign that you have arrived spiritually

May 18, 2012 at 7:30 pm by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

Self-confidence is a sign that you have arrived spiritually, according to syndicated columnist Norris Burkes. In “Spirituality: Be your own person,” the Air National Guard chaplain writes:

Jesus … flat out ask[ed] his adoring crowds, “Who do people say that I am?”

The throng fired back some wild-eyed guesses, as some even said he was the ghost of an old prophet.

Others said he was a lunatic, but Jesus brushed those speculations aside and turned to those who were important in his life, his students, and asked, “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter stood and set it straight. “You da man!”

OK, he didn’t exactly say that. Peter said, “You’re the Christ.”

Jesus responded to this astute conclusion with an astounding command. He told them to not tell a soul.

Why would Jesus ask for such anonymity? Some scholars say that he was trying to avoid being crucified prematurely.

I think it was much more.

I think Jesus had arrived at the moment in his life where he knew that he didn’t need to “proclaim” who he was.

His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.

He knew his purpose, and he knew he was the only one who needed to feel contentment in that purpose.

Read the whole thing.

World Spirituality suggests that Burkes has identified an important principal of enlightenment, that moment which he says you stop trying to proclaim who you are and just put your effort into being who God wants you to be. Of course, there are many different ways of interpreting what God wants, and I am using this expression as another way of pointing to the Thou in the I/Thou relationship we all have with All That Is.

Norris says of Jesus: “His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.”

Or … He exuded the confidence of one who was truly himself, fully realized in Unique Self.

Photo Credit: Andy Houghton

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Unique Self Tagged With: christianity, god, jesus, self-confidence, unique self

Is a politics based on World Spirituality conservative or liberal?

May 18, 2012 at 12:10 pm by Joe Perez 1 Comment

By Joe Perez

In truth, there is no division between spirituality and politics that can be found in The Way Things Are. If you believe, as I do, that there is only one True Self and that every unique individual is a completely whole and infinitely valuable Unique Self which is one and the same as that Ultimate Identity, then how can there be a separation?

In an Integral view of ethics, care and justice evolve in ever expanding reach from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to kosmocentric levels. Ultimately, there is a sense of self-identification with responsibility and empathy for all sentient beings in all times and places. Thus, politics — which I define broadly as the expansion of our circle of concern to ever wider levels of embrace — is deeply wedded to our sense of self and our understanding of the nature of reality.

Spirituality and politics are distinct aspects of our human existence, but not separate ways of being. In other words, every spiritual act is also a political act, and every political act is also spiritual. But if spirituality is related as Paul Tillich formulated to our “ultimate concern,” then politics relates to concerns that individuals share with other individuals in their community.

There are family and tribal/organizational politics, there are national and international politics. And as plans in recent decades for human colonization of other worlds has demonstrated, there is even a politics of the relationship between the inhabitants of Earth and everything extraterrestrial. Politics is inescapable, no matter how apolitical one’s views.

If you scan articles written about politics by members of the World Spirituality, Integral Spirituality, or Evolutionary Spirituality communities, you may come away with the impression that most people are progressive. After all, among those in the U.S. you will frequently hear praise of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama — all Democrats. You will hear support for remedying income inequality, addressing climate change, and legalizing same-sex marriage.

But read more closely and you will find a more complex picture.

The liberal and conservative writers divide opinions into warring camps of “the ones who are right” and “opponents.” They advocate positions based on their convictions of the values that are most important to them: for example, civic republican virtues such as self-reliance and individual responsibility for conservatives, and progressive values such as equality, protecting the vulnerable, and giving voice to the voiceless. Conservatives often invoke religion to justify their aims, and liberals invoke secular principles (while those who are religious add that they are motivated by their privately held religious or spiritual convictions).

In contrast, a more authentically Integral approach is grounded in a spiritual view that includes people of all faiths as well as secular perspectives. For instance, as we’ve noted, World Spirituality recognizes an evolution of political views from egocentric to worldcentric and beyond. The values upheld by conservatives and liberals are all embraced as valuable if they lead towards greater levels of love and compassion, and the policies they advocate are assessed on the basis of how they enhance the well-being of all sentient beings.

Thus, people embracing an authentic World Spirituality may take stances that look conservative, liberal, or radical … depending on how they discern the merits of particular choices that must be made in particular contexts at particular times and places. I’m not talking about situational ethics, but context-aware and forward-looking decision-making.

Conservative and liberal values are balanced in practical situations, but not out of a desire for warring parties to compromise irrespective of what is right or wrong. Rather, World Spirituality calls for individuals to enter into political life not with our egos, but in a We-space of Unique Selves joining together to discern how our political life together can allow everyone to be more fully who they are, the heart and mind of God. From this vantage point, petty politics is vanquished and a World Politics more noble, humanizing, and inspiring is permitted to emerge.

Filed Under: Featured, Unique Self, World Politics