The Daily Evolver

If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did He make them out of meat?

How much consciousness do animals possess?

Rivers are people, my friend. And they’ve lawyered up.

This week the topic was obvious: Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the dual storms that battered Texas and Florida in the last couple weeks. In this episode we look at how the climate debate has exacerbated the polarization of our culture, particularly between traditionalists and postmodernists. How is it that the political right and left can have such radically different views of what’s happening with our global climate, and what, if anything, should be done about it? Are we deadlocked? Can we fight our way forward? And why can't science just settle things? As always integral theory helps us sort things out. I hope you enjoy the podcast!

In today’s episode I am the guest of Stephen T. Harper as he kicks off his new podcast, “What’s Your Theory?”, where he interviews people who have “good answers to big questions about how the world works.” And do I have a theory for him! One of the key tenets of integral theory is that human consciousness and culture evolve, and that’s where Steve and I focus. With his enthusiastic curiosity and flex-flow mind, Steve helps me map the “evolution of the interior” from the dawn of humanity to the present day where integral theory is so helpful for making sense of our world. While this podcast is an introduction to integral theory, we use plenty of up-to-the minute topics and headlines to tell the story. Established students of integral theory will get an overview and refresher, and newbies will get a good basic understanding of a foundational integral principle. If you have friends who are interested in an integral on-ramp, this is a conversation you might consider sharing with them as well.

In this episode of Shrink and Pundit, integral psychotherapist Dr Keith Witt and I talk about how intimacy, longevity and happiness are programmed into the human genome, and accessible to all of us. But at a cost. Keith recently participated in an extraordinary conference called Plenitude near Sintra, Portugal. The conference brought together experts from around the world to explore a multidimensional approach to aging well. Join us in our discussion of some surprising and not so surprising data about the current state of longevity research and how it relates to intimacy and happiness from an AQAL perspective.

In this podcast we’ve spliced together the audio from three Facebook Live videos I’ve done over the last couple weeks. I’m really liking these quickie videos as they are giving me a chance to comment on current events in real time, which is particularly handy now that the news is coming at us so fast. Here are the three topics I explore in this podcast: 02:36 Trump is Irredeemably Red 19:18 Loyalty vs Law 37:53 The Uncivil War

In this podcast, Beena and I discuss what she and her team are learning about how adults grow through the predictable stages of adult development while still remaining true to their own journey. We examine how we can consciously participate in our own evolution and growth in a way that creates a more fulfilling, healthy, conscious and fruitful life.

In this episode I am the guest of my longtime friend and integral comrade, Jason Lange, on his new podcast Do The Evolution. We hit some juicy territory in our conversation so I’m sharing it with you here on The Daily Evolver. There are certain questions that evolutionary thinkers ask themselves and each other constantly: What does integral consciousness feel like? How is it different from the postmodern worldview? Can we develop integral capacities through intention and practice? How does integral thinking apply to everyday life and of course … sigh … Trump? Having a good conversation on topics like these is itself a form of integral practice, and I felt literally expanded by this one with Jason. I hope you do too!

Diane Musho Hamilton is at the forefront of one of the most significant spiritual emergents in contemporary culture: the realization of the power of our everyday relationships, even troubled ones, as a means of awakening. For many progressive spiritual practitioners it no longer feels like enough to merely follow an individual meditation practice, as valuable as that is. We want to apply our enlarged selves, skillfully and in real time, to the circumstances of our complex lives, and particularly to our relationships with others. The spiritual potency of relationship is a subject Diane Musho Hamilton explores in her new book, The Zen of You and Me: A Guide to Getting Along with Just About Anyone. Diane grounds her teaching in the enduring cosmic polarity between difference and sameness. It is the sameness we share with others that provides comfort and safety, and the differences we have with them that bring liveliness and creativity. As integralists we are called to integrate these polarities into a dee

Life is wounding. For some of us our wounds are inflicted in the form of major traumas such as a serious injury, painful divorce, career failure or act of abuse or violence. More often, however, we are merely called on to suffer the slings and arrows of everyday life, which can also leave their mark. Contemporary psychology has revealed two major insights into trauma. One is that trauma is pervasive: two-thirds of Americans report experiencing a major trauma in their lives. The other is that trauma is toxic, often kicking off lifetime patterns of depression, anxiety and addiction. One study showed that people who suffer six or more of ten different categories of adverse events lived on average twenty years less that people who had had experienced none of those categories of adverse events. Whether large or little, some trauma is inevitable and necessary for healthy development. Shocks and setbacks shape who we are and can provide the opportunity to develop resilience and a larger perspective.

In this podcast I ask Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh a question on the mind of many integral practitioners: how do we relate to the nationalist passions that are arising in many developed countries around the globe? Nationalism is often expressed as “love it or leave it” nativism, or in the case of the election of Donald Trump as a promise to take America back to an era of perceived past greatness. On the other hand many Green-stage postmodernists reject patriotism entirely. As Steve says, “it is like nails on a chalkboard for people of postmodern consciousness to contemplate the good that America has done in its history.”

Steve Bannon is Donald Trump’s favorite philosopher. Trump sometimes jokes that he doesn't know “whether Bannon is alt-right or alt-left,” but either way Bannon has given voice to the visceral impulse of populist nationalism that Donald Trump has expressed for decades. So what does Bannon believe? A pillar of his worldview is contained in a school of history called Strauss-Howe generational theory, developed by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which states that human events can be loosely organized in terms of recurring eighty year cycles, or saecula, which unfold in four twenty year turnings.

The Trump Presidency is an evolutionary correction for a culture whose leading edge “is in a 50-car pileup.” This is the thesis of Ken Wilber’s excellent new eBook, Trump and a Post-Truth World, and the kickoff point of a wide ranging conversation I had with Ken last week. Here's Ken's argument: Every now and then, evolution itself has to adjust course, in light of new information on how its path is unfolding, and it starts (apparently spontaneously but with this deeper morphic field actually operating) by making various moves that are, in effect, self-correcting evolutionary realignments. The leading-edge of cultural evolution is today—and has been for four or five decades—the green wave (“green” meaning the basic stage of human development known to various developmental models as pluralistic, postmodern, relativistic, individualistic, beginning self-actualization, human-bond, multicultural, etc.—and generically referred to as “postmodern”).

Inaugurated with bogus crowd claims and tales of voter fraud, the post-truth presidency of Donald Trump is upon us. Trump lives in a Red “warrior” worldspace alive with apparitions, rumors, conspiracies, and above all, scheming enemies. Placed in the context of cultural evolution Trump’s view actually represent a pre-truth mentality, typical of the world prior to modernity where warlords and monarchs ruled unconstrained by the divisions of power. This is a world where “might is right”, a world of plunder where the goal not just to defeat the enemy but to take their oil. A world where we don’t just build a wall, we make the Mexicans pay for it. (Take heart though; in an actual Red world Trump would not just make them pay for it, he would make them build it, as slaves. So there is that.) Modernity is fighting back against pre-truth thinking with objective facts, evidence and a plea for regular order, but it has been hobbled by the post-truth worldview of postmodernity, where all truth claims are sus

Ok, folks, we’ve had 45 consecutive mornings of waking up and wrapping our heads around the fact that Donald J. Trump is going to be the next president of the United States of America. What do we know now that we didn’t know before? To the degree that we can discern a pattern, we see that Trump will govern the same way he campaigned: as a disrupter. And he is doubling down on that approach with a team and cabinet of disrupters. What will happen? Here is where I’m grateful for my Buddhist training in “don’t know mind,” a practice of watching one’s mind try to make sense of something that is unknown. The fruit of the practice is the realization that you are more happy and effective, and life is more rich and vivid, when you recognize that every moment is unknowable and thus full of possibility.

The Shrink and the Pundit is an ongoing discussion between Jeff and his longtime friend, Dr. Keith Witt, a leading Integral psychotherapist. In this podcast they explore the topic of self-love. Dr. Keith traces the relationship that each of us has with our own “self-sense” from birth (actually gestation), when we fall from the paradise of the womb and begin the process of growth into ever new worlds of conditional love. That pattern continues until we reach higher stages of development, where a more integrated sense of self is able to love what has previously been in shadow. Listen in as Jeff and Dr. Keith discuss how to cultivate “a warm sense of oneness with yourself as being good, caring and beautiful.”

My colleagues Diane Hamilton and Terry Patten are here at my home, preparing for the Integral Living Room gathering which begins tomorrow. They arrived a day early, yesterday (November 8), so we could celebrate Hillary Clinton's victory together. Ha ha! Instead we, like millions of people, are trying to come to terms with the victory of Donald Trump. Suddenly we are embarking on a new adventure together -- one that Diane, Terry and I, at least, would never have chosen. We recorded a conversation of our process to share with you, in case it might help you make sense of things as well.

Defeat Trump! Not because he is a big alpha figure who would bust up the establishment. Not because he's vulgar. Not because lacks a coherent policy vision. Those things can actually be evolutionarily potent in their proper measure. No, the real problem with Donald Trump is that in important lines of development he is arrested at the level of a five-year-old. Keep nukes out of the hands of children. Make sure to vote!

This episode was recorded on Monday, October 10th, the day after the second Presidential debate (the debate preceded by Trump’s press conference with four women who accuse Bill and Hillary Clinton of abuse). In it Jeff chats with Integral besties Diane Musho Hamilton and Terry Patten and test drives his theory that this campaign, as appalling as it is, is a powerful engine of cultural evolution and is moving us to a more intelligent and humane place.