Media Yoga - Media Shaman Studio Event

Research shows that the human brain processes moving-image-based media the same way it processes dreams and the human imagination. When we are deeply immersed in moving images our bodies react as though we are having a lived experience, which gives it the power to deeply affect us individually and collectively.

Renowned French philosopher, sociologist and complex thought pioneer Edgar Morin spoke to the transformative power of media: 

By means of the [cinematic] machine, in their own likeness, our dreams are projected and objectified. They are industrially fabricated, collectively shared. They come back upon our waking life to mold it, to teach us how to live or not to live. We reabsorb them, socialized, useful, or else they lose themselves in us, we lose ourselves in them. There they are stored ectoplasms, astral bodies that feed off our persons and feed us, archives of soul. (The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man)

In essence, moving image media are collective dreams that have a profound impact on how we view ourselves, each other and the world around us. 

As media consumers, every media work we consume is food for our psyches and our souls. Like the food we eat, our media diet has a profound effect on all aspects of our lives. Conscious media creators, too, must therefore be awake to the power of the keys they hold, as well as the responsibility to use it wisely.

Which brings up the question: How do we use this powerful and pervasive aspect of our lives in a healthy and transformative way?

Through many years of research and experimentation, along with actual clinical studies, we have developed an approach to harness the power of media for healthy and transformative purposes using the viewing and creation of moving image media as a form of Media Yoga. While Tibetan Dream Yoga uses individual dreams as yogic practice, this approach uses the collective dreaming of the moving image as a transformative practice that helps us to be able to discern how media is affecting us, what type of media we want to consume and include in our media diet as well as giving us practices to use that diet as a path to help us evolve into higher, deeper and more expansive ways of being and becoming. 

For this month’s Media Shaman Studio we will explore this form of yoga and give you some simple practices you can employ to use media in a healthy and transformative way as a consumer and as a creator.

Be sure to join us for our live discussion on 

Wednesday May 19th at 12pm PT.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

Media Shaman Studio is a monthly in-depth public lecture and discussion series on the relationship between consciousness and media with host and facilitator, Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D and Jonathan Steigman. This series is offered for free and is open to all members of the Conscious Good Creators Network, the general public, and participants in our Media Shaman courses.

 

 

How Consciousness is Embedded in Media

Research shows that when we communicate with each other through any form of media our own consciousness is embedded in that work. In fact, anything we humans create resonates with the consciousness we used to create it.

The Internet, for instance, is a Pluralistic, or postmodern technology that reverberates with the Pluralistic structure of consciousness and the postmodern worldview of multiple relative perspectives. The smartphone, by contrast, is an Integral, or metamodern technology, and as such it integrates multiple forms, functions and dimensions into a single integrated experience. As we use these technologies they affect our brains by laying down new neural pathways which change the way we think and perceive of ourselves, each other and the world around us.

The same is true for the types of media we consume. Media works can be embedded with premodern, modern, postmodern, metamodern and even transmodern structures of consciousness, and these embedded structures in turn affect our own consciousness.

For conscious media consumers and creators, it is thus very important for us to understand how these different structures of consciousness are embedded in media and how they affect us. As conscious media consumers we can then choose the types of media we wish to consume. Equally important, as conscious media creators we must understand our own consciousness and how it affects our work.

To create powerful transformative media, we have to learn how to elevate our own consciousness and that of our work.

For this month’s Media Shaman Studio we will explore these structures of consciousness and how we can use them as conscious media creators and consumers to help elevate and enlighten ourselves, each other and the world.

Be sure to join us for our live discussion on 

Wednesday April 21st at 12pm PT.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

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Media Shaman Studio is a monthly in-depth public lecture and discussion series on the relationship between consciousness and media with host and facilitator, Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D and Jonathan Steigman. This series is offered for free and is open to all members of the Conscious Good Creators Network, the general public, and participants in our Media Shaman courses.

 

 

The Calling of the US Election 2020 Inflection Point

At this moment a major shift is happening in the collective field as we are entering what many are saying will be a major liminal inflection point phase of the Great Transition we are in. This particular inflection point is oriented around the US election and the potential for it to destabilize the US and the world even more.

An inflection point is a major liminal field transition point. Think of those major moments of transformation for the caterpillar as it evolves toward becoming a butterfly. That moment when the caterpillar's body starts to dissolve is an inflection point, as is that moment when its body is completely dissolved, and another inflection point occurs when its new butterfly body structure starts to emerge.

Each inflection point can be traumatic to various degrees. In our situation we are potentially looking at a major flood of disinformation and polarization, along with possible major disruptions and crises extending into any and all dimensions of our everyday reality.

A key is to understand that all this disruption may be required for us to make the shift in consciousness this major inflection point is calling us toward.

So how do we learn the lessons from this grand collective exposure therapy challenge, while limiting the collateral damage and the degree of human suffering? 

First, we need to hold the bigger picture and ask, What are the lessons? We need to be prepared to face our own individual and collective shadows, learn the lessons and share that learning with others. 

We need to take care of ourselves and each other, and expand our circle of care and concern beyond my family, my faith tradition, my community, my political party, my race, my country...to that which is beyond. 

We need to let go of all our past ways of being and becoming, to open ourselves to thinking the unthinkable and finding a new way unlike the past.

We need to find a new way of making sense of the world as individuals, and also establish sensemaking networks to help us use collective intelligence to make sense of what is happening and how to respond in this accelerated and complex reality we are moving through. 

We also have to become more conscious of how we consume, share and create media, and attempt to transcend the extreme polarization fields and reality bubbles that have taken over the mediasphere. 

And most of all we need to wake up to the truth of who and what we are beyond polarization, and re-member that each of us is merely a wave in the great molecular and quantum ocean of beingness, and have compassion for those who are lost and afraid of waking up to this truth.

 

 

September 2020 Conscious Media-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Media-of-the-Month is Rebel Wisdom's video podcast series on the War on Sensemaking (2019-2020). 

Virtual Discussion date: Sunday, September 20th, 2020 at 12 p.m. PT 

Why is our information ecology so broken, and what would it take to fix it at scale?

During the pandemic we will be focusing on conscious media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the challenges around us.

Beginning this month a major shift is happening in the collective field as we are entering what many are saying will be a major inflection point phase of the Great Transition we are in. This particular inflection point is oriented around the US election and the potential for it to destabilize the US and the world even more. An inflection point is a major liminal field transition point. Think of those major moments of transformation for the caterpillar as it evolves toward becoming a butterfly. That moment when its body starts to dissolve is an inflection point, as is that moment when its body is completely dissolved, and another inflection point occurs when its new body structure starts to emerge.

Each inflection point can be traumatic to various degrees. In our situation we are potentially looking at a major flood of disinformation and polarization on social media. As the major propaganda networks go to war in the approach up to the election the potential exists for a constitutional crisis, or even a major accelerated collapse of American democracy. Some other countries are going through parallel inflection points in their collective fields as well, and whatever happens in the U.S. or these other countries during this time can have a major impact on our entire global collective field. There is a war to control our consciousness and oftentimes we do not even realize we are being manipulated.

To help us through these heightened challenges we are facing we will this month be exploring Rebel Wisdom's groundbreaking video podcast series on Sensemaking, which is designed to help us upgrade our sensemaking capacities to better navigate the media war that has been going on and is escalating every second. We will be specifically focusing on just the first installment in the series, the War on Sensemaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger, a major cutting edge systems thinker. In this opening installment Daniel unpacks for us the deconstruction of all our old sensemaking systems and sources of information, and how this is part of a major transformation in how humanity makes sense of things and shares information.

Be warned this is very deep and heady stuff, but our understanding is necessary if we want to make this upgrade...because if we don't the human species may not survive. Daniel purposely pushes us to think outside of our previous capacities to help entrain our brains to be able to navigate the emerging new realities we are facing. This is the kind of shift Albert Einstein was alluding to when he said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

So we invite you to buckle in, take a dive deep and attempt to process what Daniel is talking about. Do not worry if you don't get everything; just trying to follow him will start laying down new neural pathways in your brain to help you make the sensemaking transition. And next month we will be offering a workshop to help you incorporate all this into your daily experience.

If you have not seen War on Sensemaking you can stream it from our special playlist we created for the whole series (it is the first video in the series). Of course you are invited to watch as much of the series as you feel drawn to. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the series in the comments section below. And please feel free to ask any theoretical questions you have as well.

And of course join us on September 20th at 12 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the series and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in this new emergent consciousness.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

May 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Cloud Atlas (2012).

Virtual Discussion date: May 23, 2020 at 1 p.m. PT

During the pandemic we will be focusing on media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the challenges around us.

This month we will be exploring Cloud Atlas (2012), another groundbreaking evolutionary cinematic work by long-time Integral filmmakers the Wachowskis, whose Integral conscious cinema classic The Matrix Trilogy was our first Conscious Movie-of-Month selection exactly one year ago.

Cloud Atlas, which was co-directed with Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), is another one of the Wachowskis’ grand cinematic experiments, this time in the form of an extremely complex century's-spanning evolutionary journey. The film explores the complex interweaving of many interconnected souls as they journey through multiple lifetimes, cycling through spiraling patterns of evolution and de-evolution. Amazingly this 2012 film is deeply resonant with these challenging times in the way its cinematic style hauntingly represents the shift in consciousness we are being called to make in this moment in human history. This shift moves us toward an increased capacity for complex multi-generational evolutionary perspective-taking and collective intelligence-based consciousness. Watching this film in many ways gives us a visceral cinematic experience that can potentially help train us in this emergent form of consciousness.

If you have not seen Cloud Atlas you can stream it on most of the major streaming services. We recommend watching the film at least twice, the second time with the intention of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. And of course join us on May 23rd at 1 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in this new emergent consciousness.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

April 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Interstellar (2014).

Virtual Discussion date: April 18, 2020 at 1 p.m. PT

During the pandemic we will be focusing on specific media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain deeper and more expansive understandings of the challenges around us.

This month we will be exploring Interstellar (2014), another groundbreaking evolutionary cinematic work by integral filmmaker Christopher Nolan, which is eerily prescient to these times while inspiring with its exploration of how to use the power of love to transcend great obstacles.

A civilization on the edge of collapse. Our species is facing possible extinction. A parent faced with the challenge of saving the future for his family and the whole human race. In the face of this great challenge people all around them respond from fear and denial…but some respond with love and courage. Which way will win? Will humanity survive and thrive or will we bury our heads in the sand until there is nothing left?

Years ahead of its time, this integrally-informed science fiction epic attempts to answer this question. It incorporates the capturing of the real physics of outer space while simultaneously concretizing the non-physical dimension of love as a cosmic level force of existence, on the scale of gravity and centrifugal force.

If you have not seen Interstellar you can stream it on most of the major streaming services. We recommend watching the film at least twice, the second time with the intention of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. And then of course join us on April 18th at 1 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

Transformative Media Course for Pandemic Tmes

Announcing our new 14 week online course... 

Transformative Media Creation and Reception for Pandemic Times - 

Designing and Creating Transformative Media Experiences for Self, Other and World 

with Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.

Starting Soon

With most of the planet reeling from this pandemic, we are facing major shifts in ways of being, interacting and engaging with self, others and the world. We at the Integral Cinema Project and Campus Co-Evolve are rising to meet this moment by offering a redesigned version of our popular media course Transformative Media Creation & Reception.

In this course, we will delve into the co-evolutionary relationship between moving-image-based communication media, consciousness, culture and society, and how these media can be used as a driving force for individual and collective development. It will provide you with a comprehensive toolkit for designing media to catalyze healing and growth.

 In this special offering, we will be focusing on each of us creating a short video to help people through these challenging times. NO PREVIOUS MEDIA MAKING EXPERIENCE REQUIRED, although experienced media makers are most welcome and will find this unlike anything else they have ever studied. You will be trained in a groundbreaking new approach to help you tap into the calling of this moment, both for yourself and for the collective. You will learn how to listen to what you are called to communicate through your own unique gifts and talents, and develop it into a short media project with the support of the faculty and learning community of this course. You will be using your smart phones for recording new content and using free online stock footage and sound resources.

 For those of you at home with families we will be offering you ways to make this process part of your kids homeschooling and a way to bring your family together. For those in extended communities, we will offer you ways to communicate with your fellow community members and even include them in your process.

This course is being offered in association with Campus Co-Evolve and is open to all through a "pay-what-feels-right" model, with a suggested donation for those who can afford to contribute and scholarships for as many others as possible.

NOTE: Course session days and times open to change to accommodate as many participants from different time zones as possible and due to the challenges of the times...

For more information and to sign up for this course visit: 

https://campus-coevolve.org/transformative-media/

Campus Co-Evolve: https://campus-coevolve.org/
Admissions: https://campus-coevolve.org/admissions/

Hacking "The Great Hack" - A Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Virtual Discussion

Please join us this Monday September 30th at 6:30pm PST for a live FREE virtual discussion of The Great Hack (2019), the recently released Netflix documentary on the Cambridge Analytica election hacking scandal and the role of Facebook in facilitating the mass data gathering that may have contributed to the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

Together we will explore how this documentary explores the relationship between our consciousness and our evolving media technologies. The Great Hack sounds an alarm that should be heard by all us conscious media makers and consumers. A war is being waged for control of our individual and collective consciousness, with our media, especially social media, being weaponized against us and used to tear our society apart.

We will also be exploring the nature of the new propaganda war on our consciousness and what we can do about it as conscious media consumers and media makers. This important conversation in our community will continue beyond this month’s exploration as we roll out courses to help train ourselves to answer the calling of this moment by using media to raise consciousness. Together, we can help win the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity.

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If you have not already joined our free Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network at: https://conscious-good.mn.co/share/wPseacTS1JFJmxu8?utm_source=manual

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

To find out more about this free event and register to attend visit: https://conscious-good.mn.co/events/hacking-the-great-hack-a-conscious-movie-of-the-month-virtual-discussion

The Big Picture of the NOW

Here, by popular request, is Mark Allan Kaplan, media psychologist and founder and Executive Director of the Integral Cinema Project, explaining why "All problems are problems of consciousness" as he unpacks the current global situation: how we got here, why it's unprecedented in world history, and why media in all its evolving forms may be the best and most powerful tool to awaken us into a new paradigm of being.

If you want to take a deeper dive, Mark will be teaching "Transformative Media Creation and Reception" for Campus-Coevolve.org starting in early October, 2019. (I am a Contributing Faculty Member.) To find out more, please visit: https://campus-coevolve.org/course/transformative-media/

You can also join us for our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month discussion group hosted by the Conscious Good Creators Network and stay tuned for our Conscious Media-making certificate program, also at Conscious Good. To find out more about these offerings visit: https://conscious-good.mn.co/

August-September 2019 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is The Great Hack (2019).

During the months of August and September you are invited to watch the newly-released Netflix documentary The Great Hack on your own. This documentary covers the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the role of Facebook in facilitating the mass data gathering that may have contributed to the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. If you have already seen it, we recommend watching it again with the intent of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before, including the patterns mentioned below. If you do not have a Netflix account or access to one you can get a one-month free trial at Netflix.com. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

During the month we will also be having a Netflix Watch Party, where we can watch the film together and have a running chat discussion in real-time. At the end of the month, we will have a video conference call where we will explore the movie from a conscious, integral and transpersonal perspective, and you will have the opportunity to share more of your personal reflections and ask any questions. Details on both will be forthcoming.

There are many reasons why we have chosen The Great Hack for this month’s selection. It was recommended by one of our group members, plus we received several other synchronistic indicators bringing this work to our attention. Furthermore, its timeliness in relation to what is happening in the media world right now speaks to the challenge of this moment in human history and gives us a taste of a film attempting to tap into the current zeitgeist.

Together we will explore how this documentary explores the relationship between our consciousness and our evolving media technologies. The Great Hack sounds an alarm that should be heard by all us conscious media makers and consumers. A war is being waged for control of our individual and collective consciousness, with our media, especially social media, being weaponized against us and used to tear our society apart.

Join us this month as we explore the nature of the new propaganda war on our consciousness and what we can do about it as conscious media consumers and media makers. This important conversation in our community will continue beyond this month’s exploration as we roll out courses to help train ourselves to answer the calling of this moment by using media to raise consciousness. Together, we can help win the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity.

--------------------------------

If you have not already joined our free Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

"Avatar" and the Co-Evolution of Consciousness, Culture and Society

As we explore the movie Avatar (2009) as our conscious movie-of-the-month, we have the opportunity to use it to more viscerally learn about the different stages of human adult development and how the structures of consciousness of each stage co-evolve with human cultures and societies. We have this opportunity because Avatar masterfully gives us clean and clear examples of each stage and structure through the consciousness of the characters and the cultures and social structures that relate to each stage.

Avatar imagery representing Tribal or Magical consciousness, culture and society

First we have the Tribal or Magical structure of consciousness and stage of development. This is represented by the tribal characters, the cultural worldview represented in them and between them, and the very structures of their society in the film. This stage includes a magical sense of wonder and beauty and a deep connection to nature and to the tribe.

Avatar imagery representing Traditional or Mythic consciousness, culture and society

The next stage of development is the Traditional or Mythic structure of consciousness. This is represented in the human military characters, their cultural worldview, and the social structures and conventions of their world. This stage includes a black or white, right or wrong way of perceiving, being and doing in the world, a tendency toward authoritarianism, and the strict adherence to rules and regulations and a prescribed order.

Avatar character representing Modern or Rational consciousness, culture and society

The next stage of development is the Modern or Rational structure of consciousness. This stage/structure is represented by the business, corporate and politically-oriented characters, most notably the Parker Selfridge business leader character played by Giovanni Ribisi, and the cultural and social patterns of their reality. This stage is marked by an adherence to logic and reason, empirical knowledge, the discounting of anything that is not objectively verifiable, and an almost religious attachment to financial gain as the ultimate goal of human life and interaction.

Avatar character representing Postmodern or Pluralistic consciousness, culture and society

The next stage is the Postmodern or Pluralistic stage of development and structure of consciousness, represented most clearly by the Dr. Grace Augustine social scientist character played by Sigourney Weaver, and the cultural and social constructs surrounding her character. This stage includes a deep recognition and valuing of subjective experience along with an over-arching cross-cultural perspective and an empathy for the suffering of others.

Avatar imagery representing Meta-modern or Integral consciousness, culture and society

And finally the Integral stage and structure is hinted at in the final moments of the film when the main character leaves his human body that is dying and goes fully into his avatar body via a transference of his consciousness by and through the world tree. All we see are his eyes opening in that scene, but we get a sense that he has been to "the other side" and has seen the big-picture of the universe. This big-picture awareness is one of the hallmarks of the Integral structure of consciousness, along with the awareness of all the previous stages and their inherent value and limitations, and how the stages and structures evolve. The Integral structure seeks to see and understand as much as possible from as many perspectives as possible and then integrating it all into a big-picture understanding.

Individuals, cultures and societies tend to co-evolve through these stages and structures. Individuals at the leading edge create and innovate from the new emerging stage and structure, and in turn their creations resonate with the stage and structure they were created from, which then stimulates others in the culture and society to evolve to meet the new stage/structure patterning embedded in these creations. In Avatar while we do not see the various cultures and social structures co-evolving with consciousness, the main character evolves through all of them, which gives us a sense of the arc of development at the heart of this whole co-evolutionary process.


Our research suggests that this type of integration of multiple stages and structures in a cinematic work contributes to the potential success of the film, by giving the film a greater capacity to reach a wider population across the stages of development. This hypothesis is based on the results of an meta-analysis of the most successful films of all times revealing an unusually high percentage of these films having this quality.

“What the Bleep Do We Know” about Tapping into the Zeitgeist?

What the Bleep Do We Know (2004)

Exploring What the Bleep Do We Know (2004) as this month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month selection has made clear that one of the major hallmarks of this work is that it somehow tapped into the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times. The historical data suggests that a media works’ potential to achieve financial success or major transformative impact is directly related to its relationship to the zeitgeist, or collective field at the time of its release. Even traditional entertainment industry watchers have recognized this issue, as reflected in this Hollywood Reporter article from 2015. This is a wonderful insight, to be sure, but it begs a larger question: Is it possible to create a media work with the intention of connecting with the zeitgeist? Or is this too subtle and complex a connection for us to work with on a conscious and direct level?

Using What the Bleep as a case study I think is valuable for helping us examine this question. What we have learned from the filmmakers William Arntz and Betsy Chasse, and one of the distributors of the film, Ron Laurie, during this month was that they were conscious of it happening on some level at some point during the creation process, and they attempted to ride the wave the best they could in each of their own ways and as a team. Exploring their distribution efforts, we see an example of using an integral approach to consciously tap into the zeitgeist wave and maximize the ride…which they did successfully.

I have been researching this potential to consciously tap into the zeitgeist, or as we say in Integral Theory, tapping into the “evolutionary impulse,” or the driving force of the evolving universe. From this perspective the zeitgeist can be seen as the current collective field within the evolutionary stream of a culture and society. The key to tapping into it is to become conscious of the evolutionary arc behind this wave. Becoming conscious of the evolutionary arc that has led to any given moment in the life of an individual or the collective has the potential to give us the capacity to sense the energy of trajectory of this collective wave, and in turn the evolutionary impulse behind it. While this is a very complex and subtle process our research suggests it is indeed possible to consciously tap into the zeitgeist and evolutionary impulse, and thus increase our chances of both audience reach and transformative impact.

To learn more about this process and how you can ride the zeitgeist wave yourself, be sure to join Trina Wyatt, myself and special guest, What the Bleep co-creator, Betsy Chasse for our live virtual chat on Wednesday June 26th at 6 pm PST.

Inside “What the Bleep Do We Know” - A Special Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Experience for June 2019

Our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month exploration for June 2019 is What the Bleep Do We Know (2004). This month we have a special treat for all us conscious media creators and fans, one of the filmmakers who worked on the film, our very own Betsy Chasse, will be joining us in our exploration along with some potential surprise guests from the production team, sharing some of their behind the scenes experiences and perspectives on the film with us both online during the month and in our virtual chat at the end of the month (date and time to be announced).

You are invited to watch What the Bleep Do We Know on your own and feel free to share your thoughts, reflections, musings and questions about the film in our group’s online discussion forum.

We chose What the Bleep Do We Know because it is considered by many to be a landmark work in the conscious media movement, being one of the very first movies about consciousness to penetrate the mass market. It was also groundbreaking in terms of visually capturing patterns of consciousness itself and creating what is now called the hybrid documentary style, integrating interviews with both compelling narrative and powerful visual storytelling.

This film was also created during the transition between analogue and digital filmmaking and was one of the first films to tap into the cultural creative field of consciousness. Because of this the film was traversing two major evolutionary convergence streams, technological and cultural, and is a great example of a work that was in synchronicity with the zeitgeist edge of the evolution of consciousness. We are blessed to have the opportunity to hear from the filmmakers themselves about what it was like to create a work at this leading edge, and while What the Bleep Do We Know is not an integral film, all of this makes it is a fascinating case study from an integral-evolutionary perspective.

Please join your hosts Trina Wyatt and Mark Allan Kaplan and our very special guests in this very special conscious movie adventure…

Breaking the Wheel: Reflections on Game of Thrones, Selma and the Great Transition

Game of Thrones (2011-2019) Final Episode

For those of you who have been watching Game of Thrones, this is a special week...the week of the series finale. For many viewers, outsized expectations combined with mixed feelings about the final two seasons make it difficult to see the finale in a clear and deep way. Many viewers online are expressing disappointment at how the show finally turned out, while others have decidedly mixed feelings. Part of this may be due to the show’s need to wrap itself up before the book series on which it is based has even been completed. While author George R. R. Martin told the creators of the show how his saga will end, the show runners have had to create the meat around the foundational bones of the story themselves, and do it in a shorter span of time.

After a deep analysis of the series it appears that the GoT finale and the show as a whole stands as a brilliant work of integral cinema, integrating multiple dimensions of being and becoming. The series arc depicts the evolutionary transition away from the monarchy system and into the stirrings of representative democracy. Meanwhile, it lays bare the full arc of Daenerys’ rise as an authoritarian demagogue, strongly echoing the current political situation and evolutionary transition we are facing today.

For those of us who loved the movie Selma (2014) who are also fans of GoT, we can find some very fascinating parallels and differences between the transformations of consciousness explored in these two works. Selma is, of course, a story about a real-life event and GoT is a fictional representation of real-life processes and patterns. Both explore societal transitions, and both have resonances connected with the structures of consciousness that support prejudice, bigotry and slavery...and the struggle to transcend these structures. One explores the process of attempting to create a better world where violence is used (GoT) and the other, where non-violent civil disobedience is used (Selma).

Selma (2014)

The transition explored in GoT is about the shift from the traditional (mythic) to the modern (rational) structures of consciousness, where violence has been historically the most used transitional catalyst. Selma, on the other hand, explores part of the transition from the modern (rational) to the postmodern (pluralistic) structures of consciousness, where non-violence tends to be the most potent choice. Both of these methods relate to our current situation since the transition we are going through includes a conflict between the traditional (mythic), modern (rational) and postmodern (pluralistic) structures of consciousness, all at the same time.

In many ways, these types of transitions between different structures of consciousness and the cultural and social systems that have been built up around them requires one to “break the wheel” of the old system in order to make room for something new to emerge like in GoT…while there are also times when all we need do is try to fix the wheel like in Selma, there are also other times when it seems like the wheel of the old system breaks down by itself as it reaches these evolutionary transition points, like this moment we are all facing in our world today...and stories like these can help us see clearer and deeper and more expansively where we are and what we are called to evolve through and toward.

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*Special thanks to Jonathan Steigman for his editorial assistance in creating this article and for his contributions to the research into the “Game of Thrones” series.

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Breaking the Wheel: Reflections on Game of Thrones, Selma and the Great Transition, Integral Cinematic Arts Journal, May 21, 2019. Available at: https://medium.com/integral-cinema/breaking-the-wheel-4fca74846a12

Healers in the Hood: Reflections on the Passing of John Singleton, "Selma" and the New Consciousness in African American Cinema

John Singleton at the Premiere of “Selma” (2014)

As part of the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club hosted by Conscious Good Creators Network, we are viewing the film Selma (2014) as our monthly selection. I was struck by the news of African American filmmaker John Singleton (1968–2019) passing away just a few days before we started. I noticed some synchronicities or resonances between our choice of film and the life, work and passing of Singleton. Selma is the work of African American filmmaker Ava DuVernay who is part of a whole new movement and consciousness within African American cinema that most likely would not exist without Singleton’s groundbreaking work.

Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay pays tribute to John Singleton Twitter (2019) 

 
The history of African American cinema has been profoundly affected by the history of African Americans and their struggle against great individual, cultural, social and systemic injustices and challenges. The evolutionary journey of African American media artists and their works is like a creative mirror on our collective journey as a country. Because of this great injustice gap, the evolution of African American cinema is the story of many creative, cultural and social groundbreakers fighting against a system that was and still is in many ways rigged against people of color.

Every generation has had courageous individuals who sought to break some of these barriers and open the doors to those generations to come. John Singleton was one of the brave creative souls who raised and deepened the cinematic consciousness of African American cinema by unpacking the overt and covert effects of living within the shadows of racism. His breakout film Boyz n the Hood (1991), made when he was just 23, depicted the everyday lives and realities of African Americans, going deeply personal to tap into the universal.

Since his passing many African American film scholars, critics, historians and commentators have written about Singleton’s various contributions to African American cinema and American cinema in general, including: What Hollywood Owes to John Singleton, his Influence on African American Cinema, and how he Changed Black Culture on Film Forever.

My colleague Jonathan Steigman and I created a video podcast series called New Black Cinema for White People in which we take a deep dive into the new generation of masterful young filmmakers standing on the shoulders of John Singleton and other trailblazing African American media artists. One of the groundbreaking elements of the works by this new generation is their use of both subtle and extremely overt complex communication to pierce the veil of structural white supremacy. From broad satire to quiet drama, from big budget pop culture films to low budget independent works, these filmmakers are working at the top of their game and creating cinematic works designed to raise the consciousness of American culture and society to the hidden dimensions of racism and structural white supremacy. By exploring the personal and collective costs of the hidden dimensions of racism, these creators seek a way to transcend and heal them with love and compassion for all sides.

Ava DuVernay is one of this movement’s leaders, helping and mentoring others the way Singleton did. DuVernay and this group of the new wave in African American cinema are operating at an integral or near-integral structure of consciousness, integrating all the gifts from the previous generations of activists and artists. One of these gifts is the integration of Singleton’s collective through the personal stories approach with a higher, deeper and more expansive “big picture” perspective producing more complex and multi-layered storytelling.

In Selma, DuVernay unpacks the personal, interpersonal, cultural and social dimensions of Martin Luther King’s racial and social justice consciousness raising effort during the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches in 1965. So we have a film about the consciousness raising efforts of Dr. King and others on the individual and collective front lines, made by a filmmaker who herself seeks to raise consciousness even further around these issues through her works. In this, DuVernay and her cohort in this new generation are standing on the shoulders of those who came before them, including Singleton, and pushing the dialogue ever forward.

And so, this month, we take this moment to mourn and honor the passing of one of these groundbreakers as we explore one of the cinematic works that has sprung from the creative garden he helped seed.

References

• What Hollywood Owes to John Singleton https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/04/john-singleton-appreciation-boyz-n-the-hood
• John Singleton’s Influence on African American Cinema https://www.tvovermind.com/john-singletons-influence-on-african-american-cinema/
• John Singleton Changed Black Culture on Film Forever https://www.laweekly.com/arts/john-singleton-changed-black-culture-on-film-forever-10150468
• New Black Cinema for White People (Podcast Series) https://vimeo.com/album/5379791

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*Special thanks to Jonathan Steigman for his editorial assistance in creating this article and for his contributions to the research into this new movement in African American Cinema.

May 2019 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

The Conscious Movie-of-the-Month for May 2019 is Selma (2014).

You are invited to watch Selma on your own and feel free to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

At the end of the month, on Wednesday May 29th at 7:00pm Pacific Time we will have a video conference call where I will share my reflections on the movie from a conscious, integral and transpersonal perspective and you will have the opportunity to share more of your personal reflections and ask any questions.

If you have not already joined our free Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

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In an effort to be "conscious" of diversity as we embark on our second conscious movie exploration, we are feeling called for us to explore Selma by African American woman filmmaker Ava DuVernay, an amazing work that cinematically explores Martin Luther King's effort to elevate American collective consciousness. Selma includes one of the best montages of awakening collective awareness ever created, and directly addresses Dr King's conscious effort to affect the evolution of consciousness on the individual and collective levels.

DuVernay is a pioneer in feminine approaches to cinematic expression, as well as developing a synergy of masculine and feminine approaches, and this film offers a great representation of her contribution to this dimension of the evolution of cinematic consciousness.

Selma is also a major work from the new consciousness-raising efforts of a group of young and talented African American filmmakers that DuVernay is part of as well as being a leader for this new movement in African American Cinema.

This film is also an important work for us conscious media creators to study during these profoundly challenging times, for it gives us a glimpse of the consciousness it takes to raise collective consciousness through media and direct-action combined. And for all us media consumers it can help us viscerally connect to the process of media expression from real life events through the lens of media and into our own conscious fields.

I will be sharing more on the film during the month here online and on our video conference call on the 29th and invite you to join the conversation.

Thank you for continuing to join us on this adventure...time to get our revolutionary spirits awakened, pop us some popcorn and dive into this cinematic blueprint for elevating consciousness on a grand scale...

Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Live Discussion (April 2019) - "The Matrix"

This video is a recording of the April 2019 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Video Conference Call - Exploring "The Matrix" with Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. 

Date: April 25, 2019
Sponsor: Conscious Good Creators Network
Group: Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club

"The Matrix" and the Evolution of Consciousness

Or, taking the Red Pill and waking up to the coming of Winter: Reflections on meta-perspectival storytelling, The Matrix, Game of Thrones and our current global situation

According to my research into the potential co-evolution of the moving image, consciousness, culture and society, The Matrix (1999) helped to introduce a higher form of cinematic consciousness* into mainstream pop culture. The foundation of this higher form of cinematic consciousness could be called meta-perspectival storytelling.

Meta-perspectival storytelling refers to stories that unfold through both major and minor shifts in perspective that often reveal whole new ways of understanding and experiencing the storyworld unfolding before us. Think of the red-blue pill moment in The Matrix, or the self-as-ghost revelation at the end of The Sixth Sense (1999), the shifting realities of a television series like Lost (2004) or the progressive, reality-shaking awakening of characters to the true coming threat of winter in Game of Thrones (2011). All of these works use meta-perspectival storytelling to drive their stories and characters to greater levels of understanding and capacities.

This form of storytelling has been around for a while in various forms but not until the release of both The Matrix and The Sixth Sense in 1999, did this form penetrate the pop culture cinematic language in a big way. Since then, more and more cinematic works have been using this form of storytelling, creating deeper and more expansive works with layers and layers of perceptual realities that hide and reveal themselves over time, guiding us and the characters to greater levels of understanding and revelation. Meta-perspectival storytelling is born out of a specific stage of development and structure of consciousness, often referred to as Integral Consciousness. The key to this structure of consciousness is the drive to understand all dimensions and perspectives of our reality and integrate them into a meaningful whole, a "big picture" meta-perspective.

I find it beautifully symbolic that this month is the 20th anniversary of The Matrix (1999-2019), the film that helped birth this expansion of cinematic consciousness, and the start of the final season of Game of Thrones (2011-2019), the series that helped to evolve this form of storytelling to new levels of richness, depth and complexity for a global scale audience that more easily and deeply understands, embodies and enjoys this form of consciousness and storytelling.

I also find it rather haunting and inspiring to look at how this evolution of storytelling and viewer consciousness coincides with the ever deepening and expanding deconstruction of so many of our individual and collective mental, emotional and perspectival constructs within and around us. This deconstruction has culminated in the whirlwind of reality bubbles, fake news, propaganda networks and "alternate truth" in which we currently find ourselves. I have to wonder if all these meta-perspectival stories feeding our imaginations these last twenty years are an expression of our collective consciousness preparing us to make some big perspectival transition, helping more and more of us to wake up to the coming of our own global climate change and political, cultural and social regression winter, and to individually and collectively search for the red pill that will wake us all up in time.



*NOTE: Cinematic consciousness as I define it comes from my research into the relationship between the moving image, consciousness, culture and society. This research suggests that human beings project their structures of consciousness into their creative works. This in turn appears to create similar composite structures of consciousness embedded in these works. In a sense these embedded consciousness structures create a kind of cinematic consciousness that lives within the constructed cinematic reality of these moving images. And this cinematic consciousness in turn affects viewer consciousness.

Conscious Movie-of-the-Month - "The Matrix" - Live Call

Announcing the first Conscious Movie-of-the-Month live video call. This month we will be exploring this months movie The Matrix (1999).

At the end of the month, on Thursday April 25th at 7:00pm Pacific Time we will have a video conference call where I will share my reflections on the movie from a conscious, integral and transpersonal perspective and you will have the opportunity to share more of your personal reflections and ask any questions.

If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a FREE membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

If you are already a member, you are invited to watch The Matrix on your own and feel free to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

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The Matrix seems like a great movie for us to start with because this month is the 20th anniversary of the film's release and because it represents various different forms of what constitutes a conscious movie...

The viewing experience of The Matrix has given many viewers a consciousness raising experience, myself included. I vividly remember the first time I saw the film. I saw it opening week back when it was released in theaters in the Spring of 1999. It just blew me away and gave me a deep and profound altered state of consciousness. When the movie was over and I came out of the theater, everything seemed so much more real...the twinkling stars in the early evening sky, the subtle spring fragrances wafting through the air, the collective dance of the movie goers streaming in and out of the theater, and so much more...and at the same time I was contemplating deep questions about the nature of the reality I was seeing and the life I was living.

The Matrix was also consciously created to affect viewer consciousness. The Wachowski's studied Integral Theory before making the film and were attempting to apply the integral structure of consciousness to the narrative, visual, auditory and time-based expressive elements of the movie in order to elevate viewer consciousness.

The Matrix is also of major historical significance in that it introduced a more complex form of cinematic storytelling into pop movie culture, which has had an influence on collective consciousness by advancing the evolution of cinematic consciousness and helping to catalyze a shift in the co-evolution of cinematic consciousness and viewer consciousness.

Cinematic consciousness as I define it comes from my research into the relationship between the moving image, consciousness, culture and society. This research suggests that human beings project their structures of consciousness into their creative works. This in turn appears to create similar composite structures of consciousness embedded in these works. In a sense these embedded consciousness structures create a kind of cinematic consciousness that lives within the constructed cinematic reality of these moving images. And this cinematic consciousness in turn affects viewer consciousness.

I will be sharing more on the film during the month in our groups online forum and on our video conference call on the 25th. I will also be sharing with the group a Conscious Movie Viewing Practice for members to play with if they feel so moved to do so.

If you are interested in joining me on this adventure...it's time to login, take the Red Pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes...

SIGN UP FOR FREE

April 2019 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

The Conscious Movie-of-the-Month for April 2019 is The Matrix (1999).

The Matrix (1999)

Welcome to the first Conscious Movie-of-the-Month exploration.

If you have not already joined our free Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

If you are already a member, you are invited to watch The Matrix on your own and feel free to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

At the end of the month, on Thursday April 25th at 7:00pm Pacific Time we will have a video conference call where I will share my reflections on the movie from a conscious, integral and transpersonal perspective and you will have the opportunity to share more of your personal reflections and ask any questions.

Thanks to group member Harry LeBlanc for suggesting The Matrix.

________________________

The Matrix seems like a great movie for us to start with because this month is the 20th anniversary of the film's release and because it represents various different forms of what constitutes a conscious movie...

The viewing experience of The Matrix has given many viewers a consciousness raising experience, myself included. I vividly remember the first time I saw the film. I saw it opening week back when it was released in theaters in the Spring of 1999. It just blew me away and gave me a deep and profound altered state of consciousness. When the movie was over and I came out of the theater, everything seemed so much more real...the twinkling stars in the early evening sky, the subtle spring fragrances wafting through the air, the collective dance of the movie goers streaming in and out of the theater, and so much more...and at the same time I was contemplating deep questions about the nature of the reality I was seeing and the life I was living.

The Matrix was also consciously created to affect viewer consciousness...the creators, The Wachowskis, studied Integral Theory and were attempting to apply the integral structure of consciousness to the narrative, visual, auditory and time-based expressive elements of the movie in order to elevate viewer consciousness.

The Matrix is also of major historical significance in that it introduced a more complex form of cinematic storytelling into pop movie culture, which has had an influence on collective consciousness by advancing the evolution of cinematic consciousness and helping to catalyze a shift in the co-evolution of cinematic consciousness and viewer consciousness.

Cinematic consciousness as I define it comes from my research into the relationship between the moving image, consciousness, culture and society. This research suggests that human beings project their structures of consciousness into their creative works. This in turn appears to create similar composite structures of consciousness embedded in these works. In a sense these embedded consciousness structures create a kind of cinematic consciousness that lives within the constructed cinematic reality of these moving images. And this cinematic consciousness in turn affects viewer consciousness.

I will be sharing more on the film during the month here online and on our video conference call on the 25th. I will also be sharing with you a Conscious Movie Viewing Practice for you to play with if you feel so moved to do so.

Thank you for joining me on this adventure...time to take the Red Pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes...