Integral Civic Consciousness (Think About This)
by Ross Robertson
John Bunzl is a successful UK businessman with a simple yet powerful idea for how to practically address difficult international issues like climate change. It’s called Simultaneous Policy (“Simpol” for short), “a peaceful political strategy to democratically drive all the world’s nations to apply global solutions to global problems.” Sound interesting? It did to us, too. So after meeting Bunzl at EnlightenNext’s Midsummer Renaissance Festival in London this past July, we began to explore some of his fascinating “integral” critiques of progressive politics and the controversial idea of global governance.
According to Bunzl, even people whose lives are deeply informed by “world-centric” values, and who are already familiar with things like integral philosophy and an evolutionary worldview, tend to approach issues of global politics from more limited “nation-centric” points of view. In other words, our “civic consciousness,” as he puts it, often lags behind our perspective on things like economics and technology, whose global forces and dynamics we more easily appreciate. Because of this lack of “integral civic consciousness,” Bunzl explains, many of us typically fail to recognize the deeper systemic nature of seemingly intractable global problems, and therefore misplace our efforts to change things—or simply fall into debilitating cynicism and despair: Continue reading…
In anticipation of her appearance at the EnlightenNext Midsummer Renaissance Festival in London on July 30-31, 2011, Dr. Elizabeth Debold, senior editor of EnlightenNext magazine, wrote a short, provocative piece for The Guardian that began, somewhat pointedly and rather tongue-in-cheek, with her proposal that women are at risk of turning back the clock by participating in a dangerous trend—the refusal to take leadership and actively engage in creating cultural change:
One of the most underappreciated figures in the history of evolutionary spirituality is the German philosopher and linguist Jean Gebser. His masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin (1949), outlines his unique vision of the emergence of human consciousness. Gebser tracks human history through a series of “mutations,” or structures of consciousness, from the archaic mind of our ancestors to the more contemporary stage of mental focused awareness. In one particularly evocative passage, Gebser reflects on the beginnings of this mental awareness, as represented by the myth of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom who was born from the head of Zeus. To Gebser, such powerful imagery captures the heroic struggle of human development: 
