I wouldn’t say that we’re angry about the future. For me, I am very angry about our recent past - since Ronald Reagan ripped off the solar panels that Jimmy Carter put on the White House. Carter was a great proponent of conservation.

The problem that I have is that I feel so tiny or insignificant sometimes. Apathy is easy to fall into, especially when it feels overwhelming… If there was a way to not be overwhelmed by the ever-expanding world of issues, I would do more.

There is no recourse to not living a green lifestyle. At least there are some laws that can punish corporations for dumping, etc.  Maybe there needs to be more laws like this that apply to our lifestyles (San Francisco has a law that requires its people to compost).

Technology is advancing fast. Some advances do make current methods obsolete. For example, new solar power balloons can make 300% as much as like sized solar panels with much cheaper materials. This makes me feel like investing in solar panel technology might be premature if something so much better is around the corner.

Another big thing that I feel keeps us from moving forward is the truth that there is no right answer to address our problems. Currently, we all try to conserve energy, reduce pollution, etc., but the green lifestyle handbook has thousands of little “green tips”. There are so many things that we can do to protect the environment, that it mires further progress on the matter. How is anybody supposed to decide which tips are going to make the biggest difference?

What was transformative about the Obama moment in history was that people had someone to believe in and felt that they were a part of something bigger than them ... a vehicle for transformative change in the world ... and that made them feel good - inspired. However, after that high has worn off and we are back to reality, we see that business as usual is still in place in politics on the higher level, making many people from the grassroots level feel overwhelmed by the immensity of change that needs to take place. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done ecologically, psychologically, socially and politically ... while the monetary machine that is American Imperialism is the biggest resistor of all.

People are inundated with the negative influence of powerful players in the media and in the realm of politics. Whole belief systems need to be altered ... fought against. I must admit to my own pessimism when it comes to fighting against the deep layers of ignorance that is so pervasive in our society. But, as an off and on Buddhist, I do believe in utilizing my skill set to liberate others from suffering in ignorance. It’s my duty as a human being.

But, some people’s ignorance is bliss. They think that everything is fine and we are just making a lot of noise over nothing. People believe that the isms and politcal corruption are normal and will always be around. Thus, related to that, I personally believe that anger is fine. Anger is good. It’s an appropriate emotional response to variant forms of oppression. You just can’t allow that anger to permit you to oppress/harm others.

After reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire, I reflected on his epilogue about change. He believes that hope lives in the fact that throughout history people have gathered, fought and challenged the status quo to shift things. We just have to be the voices that generate that gathering to get people inspired to actually do things, not only in the world, but possibly more important ... in their own ways of perceiving reality and interrelatedness. Some of the most “conscious” people are still stuck in racism, classim, homophobia and could care less about the mountain outside of their city.

There’s work to be done, but, that’s why we’re alive ... in this moment.

Do you think that this may have something do with how “action” is defined? I’m not so sure that it’s about growing up as much as it is effecting change from where you are, right now; in the work that you do, the activities you involve yourself in, the causes you support, speaking out against the bullshit, etc. Ones entire life can be active from that stance.

I have faith ... from within the concept of emptiness ... that things can change. But, on a concrete level, I see enough hatred and violence to doubt. I truly believe, on a very rudimentary level, that change takes place in ones own consciousness first. Can people, thus society, change/transform/evolve? Yes. Will they? That’s another question all together. I don’t think that we can say for sure. I think we can only do what we can from our sphere of influence and hope for the best.

How are we to look the reality of continued hatred, violence and disregard in the face and truly believe in individuals ability to change? From my stance, we have to be able to look at and wrestle with what is. It’s emotionally taxing. But, it’s our reality. My question is, and has been, how do we get individuals to look into this reality, their role in it, how their own hearts and minds have been conditioned by it, and get them to unlearn the damage, transcend their egos, and revolutionize their consciousness? It’s hard work ... heavy, heavy magic. For me, that’s how we grow up, mature. We take on the arduous, serious task of psychological transformation.

But, maybe it’s not that deep. ??

utopian screenplays! that sounds awesome. he (and you) should read “island” by aldous huxley. that book is crying out to be made into a movie.

what you say about change of consciousness ... i think it’s true. and i also think that internal and external changes happen together. just one example: humanity’s consciousness has literally evolved due to having better access to nutritious food. and as our consciousness evolves we learn even more about how to eat optimally.

internal and external change together because they are the same process. and action can apply to either side of the coin. what we’re doing right now is internal action—looking into our values, discussing what’s important to us, sifting through options and ideas. and obviously, the world needs us to take these values out and express them in material reality as well.

i guess i just see a lot of us very stuck—wishing things were different, but feeling powerless to change them. that’s what i want to try to get inside, so i can flip it. because the truth is that we are incredibly powerful, far more than most anyone who’s ever been born. i mean, we can talk to people on the other side of the earth, fly to go see them, spend hours underwater, speak multiple languages, even create virtual realities. so why do so many of us still feel, and act, helpless?

i know i have felt helpless. sometimes i still do. but something changed for me when i started looking at where we are from a broader context, when i connected the victories of the past with the actions and mindsets of the people who won them, when i could see us riding a wave of development that has carried us this far, and when i realized that it’s now up to us to keep that wave going.

there is hatred, evil, and violence in the world. there is all of that within each of us as well. but i think many people are ready for—are DESPERATE for—something different, something more powerful, more self-determined and holistic and developmental. i see that possibility, and i feel it, and i want to share it and run with it with others who feel the same!

i’m just grappling with how ...

I forgot to cite that quote on schema:
Book: Subjects Matter: every teacher’s guide to content area reading By Daniels and Zemelman 2004

“If the universe is continually evolving our way of being needs to be evolving with it.”

Yes!! I think there’s something really valuable also in recognizing the mechanisms by which evolution occurs—the dialectic process, based on conflict and resolution at a higher level—so that we can make the choice to align with it. Like instead of getting stuck in thesis (the status quo) or antithesis (reaction against the status quo), consciously looking for a way to see the two in a new way that includes and transcends both (synthesis).

If we’re aware of the dynamics, we can actually become conscious agents of evolution, of natural selection. Of course, we already are—we already decide what lives and dies on a daily basis—but we don’t take full responsibility for it. Having power and knowing how to use it are two different things ...

hmm, i dunno if i agree with krishnamurti on our lack of internal evolution. a hundred years ago, no one gave a crap about anyone except their family, community, or possibly their nation. now, though, we have thousands of people lending money to entrepreneurs on the other side of the world via kiva. even fifty years ago, the vast majority of women could not imagine any kind of life outside of being a wife and mother. now, women have the freedom—internally and externally—to choose a family, a career, or any combination of the two. and even twenty years ago, no one could have imagined a black man as president—jesse jackson was a novelty, not a serious contender. and now, well, obviously we’re past that.

throughout our history and especially in the last 200 years, there have been serious advances in how we see our place in the world and our relationship to each other. our options, our depth, and our circles of care have grown dramatically. some people even think that our capacity for interiority has even grown, which is why we see so many more psychological injuries in the more recent wars as compared to wars of the past. our capacity to feel has actually grown.

becoming conscious agents of change is a difficult task, but looking back and really seeing how far we’ve come gives me confidence and hope and fire that we can keep it going.

and keep in mind, not everyone has to get to the next level. at the time that the american revolution happened, only about 10% of the colonists made meaning at the modern level—embracing individuality, freedom, reason, etc. but that 10% was able to get the ball rolling for one of the greatest shifts ever to take place in human history.

so what i’m all about is connecting the next 10%—the integral 10% who see past the culture war, see past the negativity, see past the strife to the new possibilities that we can create.

don’t you think, though, that the advances that come about when people fight for their rights are manifestations of cultural, and individual, evolution?

the insights you describe from traditional eastern religions are valuable—no doubt about it—and must be carried forward into the future we’re creating. but although ancient cultures had great insights, they also had pathologies which led to the next stage of development, modernism.

traditional cultures were/are great at law and order, cohesiveness, group identity, religious authority, and spiritual revelation. modernism grew out of the pathologies of this, though—the desire to understand nature through reason rather than religion. this led to its own set of pathologies and excesses—environmental destruction, colonialism/imperialism—from which postmodern pluralism sprang. and now we’re seeing the pathologies of pluralism, so our next stage must be about integration at a higher level.

intro to the spiral dynamics theory of cultural evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics

the point is that *every* worldview has pathologies—traditional, modern, postmodern. every stage of cultural evolution has its own genius, and its own pathologies. and that’s a good thing! because without pathologies—without problems—we would have no reason to evolve, to move onto the next thing. problems at one stage inevitably lead to resolutions in the next, which then lead to more problems, and more resolutions. this is the process by which evolution works.

there’s no doubt, as i said before, that traditional cultures have their wisdoms. but would you want to live in one? i for one really value the individual freedom, education, and health afforded me by industrialized society, even as i recognize and work to transform its problems and pathologies.

you are correct that lots of what we in the west are discovering now is related to wisdoms that were unearthed ages ago in the east. the difference now is that we have the ability to see these old wisdoms in a new context—the context of evolution.

buddhism (like judaism, christianity, islam, and hinduism) arose in a world that everyone thought was flat, in a universe that everyone thought was static. understanding the developmental, evolutionary process that is nature brings all these ancient traditions into, literally, a new world. beingness—the present moment—enlightenment is only one part of the picture. the other part is becomingness—development—evolution. the great traditions are still great, but must be reviewed and revised. our understanding of evolution—which only was able to arise through the rise of reason—changes the game irrevocably.

it’s not an either/or scenario. cultures are not good or bad—each has good and bad aspects, things that work and things that don’t. it’s our job to use all the tools at our disposal to sift through and bring forward what works while leaving behind what doesn’t. from timeless spiritual wisdom to cutting-edge scientific discovery to a morality that takes in everything that came before it—we have many tools in our arsenal and we need to use them all.

the world is not yet perfect, but that’s hardly evidence that evolution hasn’t occurred. that fact is that we *can* look back and see development in human history. abolition, women’s rights, civil rights, environmentalism are all evidence that we have come a long way.

that’s not to say that we haven’t still got a long way to do—it’s just acknowledging that humanity has indeed evolved, moreso psychologically and culturally than physically. we are players in the evolutionary story, and, for the first time, beginning to be conscious of the larger story we play a part in. and the enormity of this discovery can’t be underestimated.

it’s huge, and new. not something that anyone knew in ancient greece or in ancient egypt or in any part of the world up until darwin. it’s a revelation that came out of science and rationality, not out of the kind of divine revelation that traditional religions espouse.

however i don’t think that makes it any less divine. as “thank god for evolution” author michael dowd puts it, “facts are god’s native tongue” ...

I have so much to say about this stuff that you will likely get bored by time I’m finished. But, here goes nothing.

After looking at the link that you provided and reading what you state here, one of the main issues that I have with this theoretical outlook is that it tends to generalize global experience ... which, absolutely, cannot be done. The Maya, Dogon of West Africa, Buddhists and Hindus did not believe that the world was flat. That was a European idea. The fact that people tend to generalize what was going on in Europe to the rest of the globe is still a marker of a superiority complex ... believing that the rest of the world was well behind.

Abolition, women’s rights, civil rights, etc. are issues that the United States has had to deal with in order to diffuse massive resistance. Abolition can’t be a marker of coming a long way, psychological evolution, when Jim Crow laws lasted for the next 90 years. The mentality was still the same, practices were different. That’s not evolution. Furthermore, you can’t generalize that. Meaning that what was going on in the U.S. in 1865 was vastly different than what was going on in Japan in 1865.

Women got the right to vote, but European countries were still trying to Colonize Africa, India, China, South & Central America. The level of brutality used in most of the instances was absolutely astonishing. If that’s evolution, we have some serious problems. A fine historical example of the lack of psychological evolution is in capital punishment. We’ve gone from stoning, to crosses, to guillotine’s, to burning at the stake, to hangings, to the electric chair, to lethal injection. The mentality is the same, the practices are different ... and this is over thousands of years.

Environmentalism cannot be seen as cultural evolution because, environmentalism is only a response to how industrialization has destroyed natural systems. CO2 emmissions, logging, polluted waters, endangered species ... these are products of industrialization. There would not be a need for environmentalism if it weren’t for how nature has been degraded.

Also, there is just absolutely zero proof of psychological evolution or evolution in consciousness and culture. Change is a better word; evolution misses the mark completely.

Spiral Dynamics tries to lump all of human experience into one bubble based in era’s. That’s impossible to do because of people’s climates, locations, histories and cultures. It would be intellectually easier for us if things were able to be simplified in that way, but ... it just can’t be done. There’s no way to compare Tibet of 1900 with The United States of 1900; two completely different civilizations. There’s no way to compare Ancient Egypt to any civilization as wikipedia has hunter/gatherers living there 1.8 million years ago. Other civilizations were not in existence ... not even close. Hitler of the 1930’s, Amin of the 1970’s.

... continuing ...

hey brandon, i have a lot to say on this topic, too, obviously. :) don’t worry, i’m not bored!

thanks for taking the time to check out that link! it’s important to note that spiral dynamics is not looking at everyone on the earth evolving as a monolithic whole. no one is saying that 1900 america and 1900 japan and the 1900 indonesia were the same. even within a single culture, there can be many worldviews at play (this is where stuff like the US culture war comes from). there are people in the united states making meaning at a traditional level, and there are people in saudi arabia who are as postmodern and you and me.

even within an individual, there can be different value systems in different parts of our lives. for instance, i know women who are liberated (postmodern) as can be at work, but who fully live in traditional gender roles once they go home. it’s not cut and dried, but that doesn’t mean that the patterns aren’t there.

and how could the abolition of slavery NOT mark a step forward in human consciousness? did it mark complete transcendence of racial inequaly in the US? of course not. but the fundamental fact that, as a society, we decided that it was not all right for one person to own another is a huge step forward. you can’t look at the racial politics in america today and say there’s been no progress since 1850. it’s simply inaccurate. doesn’t mean everyone is at the same place; doesn’t mean there isn’t still work to be done. evolution is a messy process. but most of us have come forward.

the reason evolution changes the game of all of the great religions—eastern and western—is because, through the discovery of evolution, we have learned that the universe is NOT simply about transcendence. it’s also about development. as you say in your comment, we have a lot more work to do on our ideas about evolution—that in and of itself is evolution: taking ideas and testing them, refining them, discussing them like you and i are doing right now. that’s evolution right there. sometimes it takes a really long time, but sometimes it happens in leaps and bounds—and this is true of both biological and cultural evolution. right now is one of those times that we need the leaps-and-bounds kind…

all i’m trying to get across is that we live in a developmental universe, and to do the leaps-and-bound changing we need to do, we humans can and must align ourselves with that drive to develop, to evolve, to take where we are and what we have and consciously create something new out of it.  we can’t go back and all be classical buddhists because we have changed, the world we’re living in has changed.

on one level, of course, nothing has changed—in the timeless, spaceless ground of all being things are always the same. but there is another part to the universe, and that is the manifest realm, where everything evolves, constantly. the buddhists didn’t understand that. nor did the mayans, nor did galileo or copernicus. this isn’t an east vs. west or north vs. south or rich vs. poor thing. it’s a new discovery of how the universe works: manifest and unmanifest, changing and changeless. and it’s taking us some time to understand it.

consciousness does evolve, on an individual and cultural level. so does material reality. we do need to reach for transcendence and realization that we are all one whole. but that whole is evolving through time, as a whole and as many parts. so transcendence isn’t enough. we also have to move our asses and create.

you are probably right, jojo. i do like to get all detailed and stuff. i honestly don’t know how to break the stuff me & brandon were talking about down tho—dunno if there is a way to. but there is probably a way to get similar points across in a more concrete way. i’ll work on it!

Why I listen to Krishnamurti (I failed to provide a link.):

The Core of the Teachings
Written by Krishnamurti in 1980 at the request of his biographer Mary Lutyens.

The core of Krishnamurti’s teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said, “Truth is a pathless land”. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.

Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships, and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity. So he is not an individual.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not choice. It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.