Future Positive — Jeremy Rifkin writes: While our radio talk shows and 24-hour cable TV news programs incessantly play off the political rift between conservative and liberal ideologies, the deeper conflict in America has always been the cultural divide between faith versus reason.

At the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state era, the philosophers of the Enlightenment challenged the Age of Faith that governed over the feudal economy with the Age of Reason. Theologians and philosophers have continued to battle over faith vs. reason ever since, their debates often spilling over into the cultural and political arenas, with profound consequences for society.

Today, however, at the outset of a global economy and the biosphere era, a new generation of scientists, scholars, and social reformers are beginning to challenge some of the underlying assumptions of both the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason, taking us into the Age of Empathy.

The empathic advocates argue that, for the most part, both earlier narratives about human nature fail to plumb the depths of what makes us human and therefore leave us with cosmologies that are incomplete stories–that is, they fail to touch the deepest realities of existence. That’s not to dismiss the critical elements that make the stories of faith and reason so compelling. It’s only that something essential is missing–and that something is “embodied experience.” …

Researchers in a diverse range of fields and disciplines are beginning to reprioritize some of the critical features of faith and reason within the context of a broader empathic consciousness. They argue that all of human activity is embodied experience–that is, participation with the other–and that the ability to read and respond to another person “as if ” he or she were oneself is the key to how human beings engage the world, create individual identity, develop language, learn to reason, become social, establish cultural narratives, and define reality and existence.

If empathic consciousness flows from embodied experience and is a celebration of life–our own and that of other beings–how do we square it with faith and reason, which are disembodied ways of looking at reality and steeped in the fear of death?

When we deconstruct the notion of faith, we find that at the core are three essential pillars: awe, trust, and transcendence. The religious impulse begins with the sense of awe, the feeling of the wonder of existence, both the mystery and majesty. Awe is the deepest celebration of life. We marvel at the overwhelming nature of existence, and sense that by our own aliveness, we somehow fit into the wonder we behold.

Although faith is set in motion by a feeling of awe and requires a belief that one’s life has meaning in a larger, universal sense of things, it can be purloined and made into a social construct that exacts obedience, feeds on fear of death, is disembodied in its approach, and establishes rigid boundaries separating the saved from the damned. Many institutionalized religions do just that.

It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life “as if” it were our own. We know that empathy is impossible without imagination. Imagination, however, is impossible without wonder, and wonder is impossible without awe. Empathy represents the deepest expression of awe, and understandably is regarded as the most spiritual of human qualities. …

If empathy did not exist, we could not understand why we feel the way we do, or conceptualize something called an emotion or think rationally. Many scholars have mistakenly associated empathy with just feelings and emotions. If that were all it was, empathic consciousness would be an impossibility.

Reason, then, is the process by which we order the world of feelings in order to create what psychologists call pro-social behavior and sociologists call social intelligence. Empathy is the substance of the process. Reason becomes increasingly sophisticated as societies become more complex, human differentiation more pronounced, and human exchange more diverse. Greater exposure to others increases the volume of feelings that need to be organized. Reason becomes more adept at abstracting and managing the flood of embodied feelings. That’s not to say that reason can’t also be used to exploit others, for example, to advance narcissistic ends or create terror among people.

By reimagining faith and reason as intimate aspects of empathic consciousness, we create a new historical synthesis–the Age of Empathy–that incorporates many of the most powerful and compelling features of the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason, while leaving behind the disembodied story lines that shake the celebration out of life. (03/02/10)

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Future Positive — Gary Lackman writes: On the night of April 6, 1744, one of the most remarkable thinkers of the eighteenth century underwent an astonishing spiritual crisis. That night, Emanuel Swedenborg, a fifty-six-year-old Swedish scientist and statesman, experienced a visitation by Christ. …

After a “psychic storm” erupted with great claps of thunder and a hurricane-like wind threw him from his bed—his own account suggests he had an out-of-the-body experience—Swedenborg found himself “face to face” with Christ. For a deeply religious man like Swedenborg, it was a powerful and disturbing encounter.Looking at Christ’s smile, which Swedenborg thought was as it must have been “when he lived on Earth,” Swedenborg was surprised to hear the Lord ask if he had a “clean bill of health,” a reference to a time when Swedenborg was almost hung for breaking quarantine during the plague. Humbled, Swedenborg replied that he, Christ, knew the answer to this better than he did himself. Christ agreed and replied, “Then do.” Swedenborg took this to mean “Then do.” Swedenborg took this to mean he was to fulfill his promise to abandon his scientific work and to concentrate instead on investigating the spiritual worlds within.

Whether Christ meant this or not, Swedenborg took the injunction to heart. For the rest of his life, he mapped out the strange geography of the interior realms, covering a terrain that included not only other planets but also heaven, hell, and an intermediary sphere Swedenborg called the spirit world.

Although in his day he was fêted by nobility and he later inspired individuals as diverse as, to name just a few, the poets William Blake and Charles Baudelaire, the playwright August Strindberg, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, and the Zen master D.T. Suzuki (who called him the Buddha of the North), outside the realms of parapsychology and the history of dissident Christian sects, Emanuel Swedenborg is little known today. This is unfortunate; his work, both as a scientist and as a religious thinker, deserves wider recognition. (02/08/10)

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Future Positive — Timothy Wilken, MD writes: I began using healing mediation to help my patients in the late 1970s. I created individual tapes for each patient, my scripts were based on a blend of breathing techniques, progressive muscular relaxation, autogenic training, guided imagery, and self-hypnosis. These tapes proved to be powerful tools for helping my patients heal both emotional and physical injuries.

In 2007, when I was personally challenged with a serious illness, I reached for them to help me heal myself. Since then I make it my practice to personally use healing meditation daily. While I have memorized many scripts, I am constantly searching for new healing meditations.

It was my great delight to discover Candace Pert’s Psychosomatic Wellness. She has wonderful meditations on this CD album. I try to listen to them daily. I keep them on my iPod so they are handy. (01/28/10)

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Future Positive — Willis W. Harman speaking in 1996: One of the most important aspects of these forces for change is the apparent emergence of a new worldview… On the other hand, there are many indications ofthe possible emergence of a trans-modern picture of reality differing both from the scientific worldview and the traditional religious worldview.

This emerging “trans-modern ” worldview, involves a shift in the locus of authority from external to “inner knowing.” It has basically turned away from the older scientific view that ultimate reality is “fundamental particles,” and trusts perceptions of the wholeness and spiritual aspect of organisms, ecosystems, Gaia and Cosmos. This implies a spiritual reality, and ultimate trust in the authority of the whole. It amounts to a reconciliation of scientific inquiry with the “perennial wisdom” at the core of the world’s spiritual traditions. It continues to involve a confidence in scientific inquiry, but an inquiry whose metaphysical base has shifted from the reductionist, objectivist, positivist base of 19th- and 20th-century science to a more holistic and transcendental metaphysical foundation.

The modern worldview is based on Western science which, in terms of its goals of prediction, control, and generation of manipulative technologies, is amazingly successful. Nevertheless, it is an artifact of Western culture and it does have its limitations. The core of the current challenge to the scientific worldview can be taken to be “consciousness,” which has come to be a code word for a wide range of human experience, including conscious awareness or subjectivity, intentionality, selective attention, intuition, creativity, relationship of mind to healing, spiritual sensibility, and a range of anomalous experience and phenomena. Efforts toward incorporating within the scientific purview any or all of this territory has proven to be an extremely difficult task.

The fundamental reason for this difficulty appears to be that Western science has been caught in a basic dualistic trap – that of considering the subject doing the mapping as separate from the map.Getting a more accurate map (more based on modern physics, more “holistic”, more “systems”) will not solve this problem. Rather, we must realize that thoughts are not merely a reflection on reality, but are also a movement of that reality itself. The mapmaker, the self, the thinking and knowing subject, is actually a product and a performance of that which it seeks to know and represent.

Modern Western science fundamentally entails three important metaphysical assumptions: a. Realism (ontological-leads to epistemological conclusion). There is a real world which is, in essence, physically measurable (positivism). We are embedded in that world, follow its laws, and have evolved from an ancient origin. Mind or consciousness evolved within that world; the world pre-existed before its appearance, and continues to exist and persist independent of consciousness. b. Objectivism (epistemological and ontological) That real world exists independently of mind, and can be studied as object. That is, it is accessible to sense perception and can be intersubjectively observed and validated. c. Reductionism (epistemological). That real world is described by the laws of physics, which apply everywhere. The essence of the scientific endeavor is to provide explanations for complex phenomena in terms of the characteristics of, and interactions among, their component parts.

These underlying assumptions are directly challenged by a wide range of data regarding “anomalous” phenomena, and by a wide range of human experience. The critical epistemological issue is whether we humans have basically one way of contacting Reality (namely, through the physical senses) or two (the second being the deep intuition). The importance of the issue shows up in a central ontological question namely whether consciousness is caused (by physiological processes in the brain, which in turn are consequences of the long evolutionary process) or causal (in the sense that consciousness is not only a causal factor in present phenomena, but also a causal factor throughout the entire evolutionary process). Western scientific method urges toward the former choice in both cases, whereas the phenomena of consciousness suggest the latter choice in both cases.

A step toward resolving this long-standing impasse may be the recognition that it is, in a sense, a historical accident that physics was taken to be the root science. That led naturally enough to such ideas as seeking objectivity through separating observer and observed; taking reality to be essentially that which can be physically measured; and seeking explanations of the whole in terms of understanding the parts.

But what if the study of living systems had been taken to be the root science, rather than physics? Had this been the case, science would undoubtedly have taken a more holistic turn. It would have recognized that wholes are self-evidently more than the sum of their parts, and would have adopted an epistemology more congenial to living organisms. It might well have adopted a different ontological stance in viewing reality. (01/18/10)

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Integral Enlightenment— Andrew Cohen, Brian Swimme, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Michael Beckwith, Deepak Chopra, Jean Houston, Ken Wilber, Peter Russell, Elisabet Sahtouris, Terry Patten, Michael Dowd, Craig Hamilton, Claire Zammit, Duane Elgin, Tom Atlee, Connie Barlow, Marc Gafni, and John Stewart will each discuss our opportunity for a more positive future, if we humans decide to be kind to each other, and then begin working together to solve our problems.

Over the next 18 weeks, their live presentations can be listened to online with your computer or by telephone. Every speaker has gifted their participation for this program allowing it be offered without charge.

The first presentation begins today, Thursday January 14th at 5:30 PM PST. Craig Hamilton will begin by introducing the series with an overview of the principles and core contributions of the emerging worldview known as Evolutionary Spirituality. He will share the vision and inspiration behind this 18-part series, and lay out the big picture for where we’ll be going in our journey over the next three months.

This is the second free tele-seminar organized by Craig Hamilton. I participated in the first one, and it was more than excellent. This one looks even richer.  If you listen live, you will have the opportunity to interact with the speakers directly. Hope to see you there. (01/14/10)

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Future Positive — Timothy Wilken, MD writes: I would like to recommend a very interesting telecourse on  what is called Evolutionary Enlightenment by Craig Hamilton. Craig was a long time associate of Andrew Cohen. He is currently teaching independently of Andrew, but they shared a “thinking  space” for a number of years.

I just finished the initial presentation of the class that started in October. Craig will present the class again this January, but with some additional evolutionary improvements. The only time Craig isn’t thinking, he is meditating.

The class was both inspiring and highly meaningful. Craig would like us humans to show up in the world as our best selves. This means we should strive to walk our talk. If we say people should be kind to other people, then we should strive to relate to all others we meet during our day with kindness. If we say others should think, before they speak, then we strive to remain in mindfulness throughout our day, and from that perspective, speak with compassion and thoughtfulness. But more than just being thoughtful, kind and compassionate people, Craig wants us to do something. Craig says being is not enough. We also need becoming.

As a student of human intelligence and human knowing, I would describe first enlightenment as the “Understanding of Being.” This is classical enlightenment or “Buddha Enlightenment.” Human intelligence emerges from the integration of Spacial and Temporal Intelligence. Classical enlightenment is Spacial Enlightenment.

Those seekers on the leading edge, are now discussing a second stage enlightenment that transcends and includes the Understanding of Being, this new enlightenment is what I call the “Understanding of Becoming” or Temporal Enlightenment.

Craig uses the word Evolution to represent temporal enlightenment—Evolutionary Enlightenment. Craig asks his students, “How are they going to make the world a better place?” (12/20/09)

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FuturePositive — Timothy Wilken writes: The Age of Conflict ended with Market. The Age of Market is ending now. This is the beginning of the Age of co-Operation. We are privileged to announce a new website based on GIFTegrity—The Gift Help Exchange.

Ilargi at The Automatic Earth advises that American unemployment is actually closer to 23% than 10.7%. He warns us that housing values in the U.S. have another 20% to fall.

Now Readers, It’s time to get serious.

eBay’s servers failed Saturday when over 200 million items were offered for sale

How many people need things, but are so low on cash that they are selling everything in their Garages? And, who is going to buy these 200 million items? Ilargi at The Automatic Earth reports Unemployment is America is closer to 23%. He predicts housing values will drop another 20%.

This is the right time. We are the right people. And, GiveGetShare.com is the right tool. It’s time for co-Operation.

Readers, we are going to need a lot of help if we want to handle a 100 million Gift exchanges. We need software engineers immediately, to help us get our system stabilized, and we may need artists and writers to help us get it looking the way we want it to look. We need to make the system easy to use and easy to connect to. We will be educating as much as we are serving.

Help Us to Help You

We will soon announce a call for volunteers to join GiveGetShare as Staff. A Staff Member would be like any other member, except that they would commit to the regular and spontaneous Gifting of periods of their time to help us solve GiveGetShare problems. There are no fees at GiftGetShare so the members will pay nothing to join. If they are qualified for the position we need. Their contributions of time will tracked and count on their GIFTing profiles.

We will soon be list the skill sets we need on the wish board at GiveGetShare.  These skilled staffing needs can be filled by GIFTors, and most likely most positions will be shared. This truely open source. Most Staff Members will not be able to Gift 40 hours a week, but they might manage 5 hours one week, and 2 the next. That is totally OK. All GIFTs are welcome, thank you very much.

Once we have filled our staff needs, and when our engineers tell us the system is ready for testing. We will begin the public test phase. Stay tuned! ( 11/24/09)

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Future Positive — Charles Eisenstein writes: Humanity today is transitioning into a new Story of the People, a new Story of Self, and a new Story of the World. I sometimes articulate it as “The connected self living in joyous cocreative partnership with Lover Earth.” I explained the paradigm of Lover Earth a little bit in “Money and the Turning of the Age”; no longer do we treat earth as a mother from whom we are entitled to take and take without thought for how much she is capable of giving. Such a relationship is proper for a child. I want my own children to feel free to receive — it is up to me to determine how much I am able to give. But the relationship to a lover is different: to a lover we desire to give as well as to receive, and we desire to create together, each offering our gifts toward a purpose transcending each of us, so that our union becomes greater than the sum of our individuality. And so, humanity-plus-earth is becoming a new thing; out of our sacred union, a third thing will be born. At the peak of our separation from nature, we fell in love with the earth, a moment marked perhaps by the first satellite photographs of our gorgeous planet.

As for the connected self, this is the self of inter-beingness, the self that realizes, not only as an intellectual concept but as a felt experience, that its very being includes the being of all other creatures. Contrary to the self of Descartes, of Adam Smith, of Darwinian biology, it is untrue that more for me is less for you. It is the self of the Gift, the self that knows that as we do unto others, so we do unto ourselves. And, that as we do unto ourselves, so we are in fact doing unto others. Such as self no longer lives in an objective universe of impersonal forces and generic masses. Its every choice shifts the cosmos, and everything that happens in the cosmos in some way happens within the self too.

Just as the rituals of the old world create and sustain it, so also can we use rituals to create and sustain the new world-generating stories. Rituals occupy a special status among all the actions and beliefs that form a story-matrix. Rituals connect us to what is real within that story. They are among our most powerful tools of reality creation. Therefore, if you would like to participate in the creation of the world of the connected self living in cocreative partnership with Lover Earth, I suggest you enact rituals that empower and create this new story. You can easily recognize them, because from within the new story they are natural and true. They are not “rituals,” but an integral part of the new reality. From within it, they make sense. From the perspective of separation they are irrational, but from the perspective of reunion they are not irrational or magical at all. They will, however, feel sacred. (11/11/09)

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science —

. The Heineken Prizes are awarded biennially to five outstanding international scientists and scholars, and one highly talented Dutch visual artist.

		The Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics The oldest of the Heineken Prizes. Awarded since 1964
		The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine Awarded since 1989 to researchers and others in the medical field
		The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences First awarded in 1990, the prize is awarded in recognition of significant achievements in environmental science.
		The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History First awarded in 1990. Originally intended for research into European history, this prize will be eligible to all history researchers from 2006.
		The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science Established in 2005, this new prize is the first international prize awarded for outstanding achievements in cognitive science in general.
		The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art Awarded to artists living and working in the Netherlands since 1988.

Future Positive — Timothy Wilken writes: The American political economic system is is classified by synergic science as a neutral system. Neutral systems require unlimited resources to grow and thrive.

Neutrality means you don’t need help from others. You are so rich that you can survive all by yourself. And, we Americans have been very rich for the last 100 years. Now I know some of you will scream, RICH! I am not rich. But really you are. You see we Americans have so much cheap energy we don’t even notice it. We modern humans have been sucking petroleum out of the ground as hard as we can for those 100 years. We don’t pay for it. We do pay for the straw, but not for the oil.

In 1981, Buckminster Fuller calculated the real cost of that oil, if we were paying for the oil itself and not just the cost of sucking it out of the ground. Buckminster Fuller estimated that the real value of one gallon of gasoline was ~$1,000,000. Correcting for inflation to 2008, that would be $2,340,000 for every gallon of gasoline. How many gallons of gas did you use this month? Then consider the fact that most of our electricity is generated by burning petroleum, so how many gallons did you use to heat your home, or cool your home, or run your electric appliances and cook your food, and pump and heat the water for your bathrooms and laundrys? One survey in 2007 estimated that the average American consumes 7.8 gallons of gasoline each week. That would be 405 gallons a year times $2.34 million per gallon. This comes to ~$1 billion per year for every living American. In a lifetime, Americans are consuming non-renewal resources worth billions of dollars. Now we humans can only continue to waste such great wealth, if wealth is unlimited.

Guess what? Santa Clause is dead. We are running out of oil. The earth itself, and certainly the oil reserves of earth are finite. That means they are limited. …

Think back for a moment to the year 1801, only two hundred years ago, that was a time when there was no gasoline, no refined oil, no natural gas, and no electrical power derived from oil and gas. As a thought experiment, try to  imagine what life was like at the beginning of the 19th century. If you were transported back two hundred years, how would the lack of petroleum affect your lifestyle?

While we might accurately imagine the loss of cheap energy from petroleum, most of us would overlook the 70,000 products that are manufactured using petroleum as a raw feedstock. This includes plastics, acrylics, cosmetics, paints, varnishes, asphalts, fertilizers, medications, etc., etc., etc.. Now, in addition to our loss of cheap energy and the 70,000 products that you and I have come to depend on, imagine our sharing that impoverished Earth with over six billion other humans?

When the price of oil reaches $2,000,000 a gallon. How much oil will you use? Listen at the sounds as your automobiles sit in the driveway without gas, listen as all your appliances and electrical pumps all go silent. Not even the sound of running water. Nice and quiet, huh.Now think of the physical work you will have to do to suvive. Think you might need help? Perhaps you really aren’t independent.

As things start to get scarce, the humans lose their option for Neutrality. Soon they have to learn to do without. They go without owning their own homes. They go without higher education for their children. They go without free time for recreation as they are forced to get a second job. Or, they sidestep back into the adversary world – they steal, embezzle, or defraud. …

Today, it is up to us. You and me. Our governments can’t help us. They don’t understand the problem. Our corporations can’t help us they don’t understand the problem. We can only rely on ourselves. Individuals of integrity will need to join together to build a new model of society that depends on co-Operation and abundance. And, by abundance I am referring to an abundance of integrity, intelligence and responsibility. Then we can begin restructuring our society in ways that will lead to a relative abundance even within the finite world we inhabit.

Wake up Humanity! WE must learn “to hang together,” or as Benjamin Franklin predicted, “we will most assuredly hang separately.” (09/30/09)

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