Creating a Global Cultural Shift

This past weekend I conducted a seminar in Copenhagen with 42 people. The weekend was largely devoted to a mutual inquiry through discussion, or what Andrew Cohen has called enlightened communication. Because the weekend is dictated by the participation and contribution of the people present, every event of this type is different and what is miraculously revealing itself is how make up a single investigation….even though the people in them are different each time. This is the third seminar of this type that I have led (or been led by :)) and the forth will be this coming weekend in Sydney, Australia. It see a tremendous potential to create a global collective inquiry through this medium.

In New York last spring I led a weekend with Katherine Miller during which a dynamic investigation into the collective nature of the authentic self led to everyone involved working together to create a comprehensive visual map of both individual and collective consciousness. I will post the model that we came up with after I return to the United States.

Two weeks ago during a one day seminar we explored the conditioning of the postmodern mind. Since we were all products of postmodern culture it became a simple mater of looking into our own experience as it emerged in conversation between us. What we uncovered between us were the elements of extreme materialism and humanism that Andrew Cohen had referred to at a talk earlier in the week as the limitations of post-modern culture.

In Copenhagen last weekend we looked into what the values of a kosmocentric stage of development would be and what values that we currently hold would have to be let go of (at least somewhat) in order for the new value to immerge.
Since doing the Copenhagen weekend an idea was brought to me by a few people which was to connect the 40 people in Copenhagen with the 40 or so in New York into a combine dialog. Now that I am in Australia I realize that I will need to include them as well. So I am thinking about when we could have a conference call together so that we can all talk about what we are discovering.

What makes this so exciting to me is that I can see that it is not just separate people in separate places coming up with slightly different things. Each of the seminars goes in a direction which is unplanned by me. (I often feel that the hardest part of my job is letting the conversation that wants to happen take the forefront.) And when looked at successively, each seminar does seem to be creating another piece in a single investigation. Especially in the case of the recent day in New York and the weekend in Copenhagen it appears in hindsight that the discussion of what values would be in past post-modernism was a perfect follow up to the conversation about what post-modern values were that we had in New York.

You might thing that I was unconsciously directing the second seminar to follow on from the earlier one except that I never intended to bring up values at all. The topic only came up because someone expressed a real desire to know about it. I kept trying to switch attention back to what I thought the topic of the day should be – The Universe Project – and it kept winding its way back to post-postmodern values. Eventually I gave in and started listing what we came up with on a sheet of paper. What will happen next weekend in Sydney I can only guess, but I bet it will be the next piece in some puzzle that we are all working out and that seems to have a life of its own.

I suppose what I need to do now is to keep more detailed records of all of the seminars that occur so that people who are not on them can learn from them. I also will make it explicit clear in Sydney that what we come up with during our time together there will be added to the collective wisdom of an emerging group of global investigators who are using the framework of Evolutionary Enlightenment to generate an interconnected inquiry into the nature of human life and development.

What could possibly be more exciting?