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Evolutionary Spirituality

An Ode to Ken Wilber

by Tom Huston

Ken WilberIn case you haven’t seen it yet, Ode magazine just did a great short piece on Earth’s foremost integral authority, Ken Wilber, giving a nice overview of the philosopher and his philosophy. Here’s a taste:

Wilber’s apartment reflects the integral approach that is the theme of his books. Modern technology and sleekly designed furniture seamlessly blend with images and artifacts of ancient Asian spirituality. Even Wilber’s appearance expresses his thinking. His tall, strong body isn’t the body of a philosopher who sits around reading and writing books all day. It’s clear that his brain isn’t the only thing Wilber, 60, exercises. His integral philosophy is more than an intellectual exercise, too. It’s an urgent answer to stubborn, practical problems.

Wilber started looking for answers almost immediately after he graduated from college as a biochemist. By then, he’d realized that the humanities provided a much more interesting field of study for him. “The Sixties had brought a huge influx of Eastern traditions, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychologies,” he recalls. “We were looking at Eastern schools and attempting to integrate these philosophies into Western schools. I was much taken by these incredibly important ideas that we had a chance of discovering.”

You can read the article here. And don’t miss your chance to join Ken Wilber and EnlightenNext founder Andrew Cohen on Saturday, May 9, for their first live virtual seminar: “Living Evolutionary Spirituality and an Integral Life.” It’s going to rock your integral world.

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Apr 27, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

The Power of Integral Consciousness (Think About This #52)

by Tom Huston

In EnlightenNext magazine we often refer to an emerging worldview and way of thinking known as “integral philosophy.” But what is it and why is it so important? In his book Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution, regular EnlightenNext contributor Steve McIntosh offers this succinct explanation of what the integral view is all about:

Integral philosophy is a new understanding of how the influences of evolution affect the development of consciousness and culture. Although aspects of it have been around for a long time, it’s only since the late 1990s that the essential elements of integral philosophy have been coming together into a coherent whole. The power of this new philosophy becomes self-evident to those who use it because it actually raises their consciousness. It’s a philosophy of evolution that literally causes evolution…. When we participate in integral consciousness, when we make meaning from the perspective of the integral worldview and adopt its values, we become endowed with the power to make significant progress in the improvement of both our selves and conditions in the world…. The rise of the integral worldview provides a way for us to literally become the change we want to see in the world.

To watch two preview videos from McIntosh’s new Integral Philosophy DVD set, visit his website here.

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Apr 15, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

A Progressive Revelation of the Absolute (Think About This #51)

by Tom Huston

As the world continues to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which to many people also signifies the origin of the idea of evolution itself, it seems worth noting—as we did in our article “A Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality”—that the general concept of evolution began cooking in human consciousness long before Darwin’s time:

Sixty years before Darwin brought the scientific world to its knees with his theory of biological evolution by means of natural selection and “random variation,” Friedrich Schelling and some of his closest friends… were already claiming that reality as a whole was going somewhere. Nature — and humanity — had a purpose and direction, aligned with a purely spiritual drive, and the striking implications of this idea for humanity’s most basic conceptions of life and God did not pass these men by. In the spring of 1800… Schelling pulled out his latest manuscript-in-progress, System of Transcendental Idealism, and inscribed a simple summation of his budding evolutionary thesis: “History as a whole,” he concluded, “is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute.” It was the clearest formulation yet of a vision — an evolutionary spirituality — that would rock the foundations of philosophy and mysticism for centuries to come.

To read the full article, click here.

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Apr 08, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

The Evolutionary Impulse (Think About This #49)

by Tom Huston

In this compelling excerpt from his column in the last issue of EnlightenNext magazine, editor in chief Andrew Cohen describes the evolutionary impulse, which he believes has been propelling the cosmic process forward since day one:

I have no doubt that the evolutionary process—from the big bang to the present moment—is not merely a random, meaningless event. If one stands back and takes a good, hard look at the entire sweep of the process, all the way from its earliest beginnings, one can see undeniable direction and even, I dare say, purpose in its majestic unfolding. But who or what initiated that process? What energy or intelligence made the choice to take that first miraculous leap from formlessness to form, from nothing whatsoever to energy and light to matter to life to consciousness to self-reflective awareness? Such an audacious move, that instantaneous leap from nothing to the beginning of everything, could only have been made by a force that was nothing less than Godlike. That impulse, that evolutionary impulse, is what I call God. That same impulse is not separate from the most important part of each and every one of us, from our uniquely human drive to create and innovate and, most significantly, from our will to consciously evolve.

To read the entire column, click here.

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Mar 25, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post
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