We can work in our own communities, we can think globally and act locally. But another thing we can do is to think better thoughts about the world, to challenge our own negativity biases and to have better conversations.
As Ken Wilber says, ‘Thoughts are things.’ There is a morphogenic field of thinking in the kosmos. To think a higher-level thought is actually a contribution to the kosmos. To have a higher level conversation is a contribution to the world. Don’t minimize that.
So watching your own thinking is one thing you can do. And then, get out and open your eyes, and your heart, and your mind, and your hands, and your wallet, and do some good. ~Jeff Salzman
On this Integral Living Room community call we engage a fascinating and important question: how can rational people relate to God?
For most of us progressive, educated and thoroughly modern folk God is a delusion, a vestige of earlier magic and mythic structures of consciousness that naturally falls away as we learn scientific explanations about the great mysteries of existence.
People at every stage of human development grapple with the same ultimate questions: what is the nature of reality, of life…of us? Integral theory tells us that the kosmos consists of matter (3rd person), relationship (2nd person) and awareness (1st person).
Yet we live in a world that is dominated by science, which tends to collapse reality into 3rd person “stuff.” While science reveals breathtaking truths about what the universe is made of and how it evolves, it tells us nothing about why we are here or the meaning of it all.
For science, truth can only be seen, measured and verified by experimentation and evidence. But at the integral stage of consciousness something new happens: we see that there are different kinds of truth and evidence that are equally valid, and thus a new, richer experience of existence begins to emerge.
On this community call we share an excerpt from a fascinating conversation we’ve been having on this topic with integral philosopher Ken Wilber.
As he points out, human beings – and cultures – grow from a magic and mythic world where God is everywhere (pre-modern) to a scientific world where God is nowhere (modern) to…who and what is God in the post-modern and integral worlds?
Ken argues that “God is coming back,” not in the old pre-rational form but in a super-conscious, trans-rational form that has yet to take shape. And, he says, we need a new language to talk about the divine dimensions of reality.
Exploring this new language and new ways of seeing, feeling and talking about the divine dimensions of life is our intention for the Integral Living Room gathering that is coming up in a few weeks (October 9 – 12) at the Integral Center in Boulder, Colorado. As always our main practice at the Living Room is conversation — we believe that every thought and interaction that originate from the higher structures of our consciousness add to the emerging collective wisdom of the world.
We are using the popular documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is a brilliant exposition of the scientific view of our universal origins, to get the conversation going (you can stream all 13 episodes from Amazon or read the synopses on Wikipedia). But our integral odyssey will go much further than science, into the realms of consciousness, awareness, meaning and love.
We hope you enjoy the recorded conversation and join in as the conversation continues at the Integral Living Room in Boulder.
