By the Light of Collective Intelligence
Much depends on the strength of the lantern we hold up to see where we are, our surroundings and the possible paths through the deep woods around us. A dim lantern won’t shine deep into the dark. It won’t clarify the looming shadows. How do we make our lantern burn brighter and more stable, since […]
Einstein’s great distinction
I love Einstein’s great distinction that we can’t solve a problem at the level of consciousness that created it. It’s familiar to almost everybody yet it usually goes by very quickly. I invite you to take a moment with me and consider the powerful implications. You can’t solve a problem at the level of consciousness […]
Facebook junk food
A friend wrote about her frustration with Facebook where commercialism and self-aggrandizement rule (she didn’t use those words). Here are a few of my thoughts it, not the whole truth most certainly . . . Mostly they’re from my book Evolutionary YOU: Discovering the depths of radical change which is about escaping the control of […]
Change is a shift in consciousness
My friend John Heney has referred to our normal experience of the world as an “isolating personal performance.” This seems to me a telling phrase, one I can certainly relate to from personal experience. In this essay, I want to take this experience of isolating performance and place it beside the experience of Presence or […]
A deeper welcome and a higher belonging
Many of us find it difficult to accept and trust what we’re seeing, feeling, sensing around climate change and the other the big issues of our time. We lack solid self-support systems and can’t easily trust ourselves. We feel vulnerable and at the mercy of large world forces. We may be concerned about climate change […]
Climate change as celebration of consciousness
Few of us talk about the inner side of climate change, surfacing the inner angst, sense of pressure or despair we may feel. But when we do we see it as a burden and a problem. It shows up as, “Oh my god, how am I going to be with this?” A hundred, a thousand […]
What change will take – and what it might give
Societies and groups can be relatively open to change, or relatively closed. They’re not all equal in this crucial respect. Some are much more able to support evolutionary growth than others. Societies with a rigid “ordained-by-god” structure can severely repress movements for growth, even over many centuries. Our own western democracies since the 18th century […]
The gold in hidden climate change denial
Can it be we’re all grappling with various stages of denial, even those of us who – like me – have been working on it for a while? I think we do know what’s happening, but our knowledge doesn’t easily percolate down to where we actually live. I’ll share very recent thoughts, some coming into […]
On not knowing what to do
Well, there’s a nice image for you! Some of you might recognize it as two cards from the OH deck, a radically improvisational way of generating images. The deck has 88 “frames,” words, and 88 impressionistic images, many of them much less friendly than this one today is. It’s definitely not all sweetness and light. […]
All our efforts are toward Presence
All efforts are toward Presence. All our efforts in therapy or self-help, or whatever are part of a larger effort, our reaching for Presence. But what is Presence? It’s not an object so no words can really catch it. It’s more like the lived experience of right now, a now that we’re not escaping or […]