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There is something in me that wants to complicate the manufactured common reality that is so hard to escape in our instant, media-rich culture. It is one thing to have many stories coalesce into one as years pass and history books demand the “official” story. But when it comes to telling the news, there’s an essential need for alternative reports. Alternative reports, reports that have not been manufactured to perpetuate existing values nor to react to them, allow for a deeper understanding, often a more authentic reflection of what happened.

There is an official story of Barack Obama’s inauguration that tells of the sobriety and firmness of his speech, the thrill of the large crowds braving freezing temperatures, the bungled swearing in and the overall “historic” quality of the event. My individual story does not omit these aspects of the day, but it puts them in a very particular context. Inspired by C.G. Jung, I decided I wanted to write a completely personal version of the day’s events.

Jung wrote, “The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.” I think Obama, quoting Alice Walker in his speeches—“We are the ones we have been waiting for”—would agree.

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For the next several Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

In “A Dangerous Taboo,” (page 61) Rob Brezsny discusses the fact that our society’s conventional wisdom perceives pessimism as intelligence, and optimism as naivete. “If you cultivate an affinity for pronoia,” he writes, “people you respect may wonder if you’ve lost your way. You might appear to them as naive, eccentric, unrealistic, misguided, or even stupid.”

I can understand why so many people feel this way. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity’s focus has been simply to stay alive, to survive what the day brings. We’re born, we struggle, and then we die. And after we die, we might be rewarded if we bore our burdens without complaint, or punished if we strayed too far from what’s expected of us. If we have a little fun or make a little progress along the way, that’s great, too, but we certainly shouldn’t expect it.

But, as our friend and coach Maia put it the other day, we’re at the cusp of something new now. We are beginning to see the truth in the Observer effect—our perceptions of things clearly change the thing we are perceiving, whether those things are waves of light or other people. And, grasping this, we begin to understand our own responsibility. If we want a creative, useful, and joyful world, we must learn to perceive in a creative, useful, and joyful way.

Brezsny is exploring this new frontier and asks us to do the same, though rewiring thousands of years of caution, worry, and fear is demanding work. But our task is not to put our heads in the sand and refuse to look at things we don’t like the look of. “Pronoia is fueld by a drive to cultivate happiness and a determination to practice an aggressive form of gratitude that systematically identifies the things that are working well. But it is not a soothing diversion meant for timid Pollyannas strung out on optimistic delusions. It’s not a feel-good New Age fantasy used to deny the harsh facts about existence. Those of us who perceive the world pronoiacally refuse to be polite shills for sentimental hopefulness. On the contrary, we build our optimism not through a repression of difficulty, but rather a vigorous engagement with it.”

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The Concert for Peace has been an annual New Year’s Eve event at St John the Divine Church for 26 years.  The concert was started by Leonard Bernstein in 1983. This year, to commemorate his ninetieth birthday, three excerpts of pieces from West Side Story were chosen to be performed.  My friend and I sat behind the orchestra in old wooden pews carved for individual sitters.

The concert was a beautiful combination of musical performances and spoken word to reflect on for 2009.  Religious leaders from all different faiths spoke briefly on themes of peace, trust, and truth. Harry Smith, one of the Cathedral’s trustees, emphasized that we evaluate our values. He suggested that in these financially difficult times ahead, it would be wise to turn away from trust in things to trust in each other.

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Last week we looked at change in culture and in individuals as a developmental process, where the problems created by one stage lead directly into the next stage. Modernity brought great material wealth into the world, but caused pain and oppression by excluding and devaluing cultures with different values. Postmodernism evened this playing field, re-examining modernity’s achievements and validating the knowledge and worth of other worldviews, but has also brought with it a sense of nihilism and moral relativism.

In response to these problems, another worldview is now arising—integralism. And those of us who are serious about creating a new world must seek to understand and embody this new way of thinking.

Put simply, integralism is about looking at reality as an integrated whole, seeing patterns and changes in a larger context. An integral doctor treats the entire patient, not just the part that’s hurting, and an integral culture embraces all factions within that culture as beloved, valuable pieces of a complex and connected puzzle.

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This week we focused on development—how does it happen and what does it mean. We also focused on a business project that is bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

• Monday we discussed the mechanism by which development happens, when we step back from how we think we are and look at our characteristics clearly—when the subject becomes the object.
• Tuesday and Wednesday we looked into the stages of modernism and postmodernism and all the positive and negative things they’ve brought into the world.
• Thursday Victoria profiled Greendisks, a very cool company which embodies its mission of reducing waste and reusing existing networks as it recycles electronic waste.

Today I’d like to share with you this short video, where spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and Integral theorist Ken Wilber talk about “the adventure of waking up.” Wilber talks about how every time we choose a higher thought or action than what we’re used to, we actually create new structures in consciousness. In this way, as we develop, so does consciousness itself. Cohen picks up this thread, discussing our awesome responsibility at this point in history: “We have to be willing to bridge the gap between our capacity to cognitively appreciate that these things are true, and actually become that realization and that recognition ourselves.”

What both men are saying is that it is up to each of us as individuals to push the boundaries of what we think we are, and, in doing this, we move the playing field as a whole.

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Before we can understand where we’re going, we have to see where we are, so let’s start by talking a bit about modernism and postmodernism.

Modernism began with the Greeks, then disappeared until Europeans picked up the thread in the Renaissance, discovering that reason could improve their lives at least as much as the religions which had previously governed them. Pre-moderns looked to God for answers, but moderns began to look toward science.

It took a long time for people to disembed their religious beliefs from their identities and take up the new tools of rationality, but eventually modernism came to rule the world, and it still does today. In terms of population, more than half the world exists at the traditional, pre-modern stage. But moderns hold almost all of the world’s wealth, and more than half the people in the Western world have their center of gravity in modernism.

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Yesterday we talked about the process by which development occurs—allowing the subject to become the object. Put another way, when we disidentify with what we think we are, we can examine it objectively and make decisions rather than following patterns.

Today and tomorrow, I’d like to spend a little time exploring some of the current stages of cultural development we mentioned in yesterday’s piece, because understanding where we are and where we are headed will help us make the next great leap.

Before I get too far into this, I will say that although the stages of the spiral are real, they are not hard and fast.  Development is a fluid and messy process. The line between levels is never clearly marked, and there is no initiation ceremony for a person moving from one stage to another.

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