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.

 

 

"The Social Dilemma" and the War on Consciousness

Welcome to the new Media Shaman Studio (formally Conscious Movie-of-the-Month)

Featured Topic: Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) and the war on consciousness.

Virtual Discussion Date: Sunday, October 18th, 2020 at 12 p.m. PT

There is a war on our consciousness. The main battlefield is the social media sphere. Our screens are the frontlines. The targets are our hearts and minds. There is no single enemy. Our freedom and democracy itself are at stake. The war is bleeding into our relationships and onto our streets. Many military historians and strategists believe we are in the middle of World War III. They speak of a new form of war called Nonlinear Warfare. This approach integrates advanced propaganda and social programming techniques with the weaponization of social media platforms, big data and A.I.. This form of warfare has been open-sourced, and nation states, corporate states, political parties and movements, splinter groups, subcultural groups and more are using it to vie for control and power by creating chaos, confusion and polarization in all dimensions of civilization. The other great World Wars included some nations, but not all. This war is covering the entire planet. Every human being in the world is a combatant. Is this the war to end all wars? Is there something more going on? Is this all part of the great transition in consciousness we are called to make during this Age of Transformation?

Join us this month as we begin our new Media Shaman Studio series with an exploration of this war on consciousness and it’s transformative potentials using Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) as our leaping off point. This profoundly resonant documentary delves deeply into how the utopian dreams of those who helped create social media platforms have been shattered by its weaponization against the very ideals they were working toward.

If you have not seen The Social Dilemma you can stream it on Netflix. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the film in the comments section below.. 

And of course join us on October 18th at 12 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film, the war on consciousness it addresses, and how this all 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 the new emergent consciousness this war is calling us toward.

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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 hosts and facilitators, 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. 

If you have not already joined our FREE Media Shaman Studio group, 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.

Watch the video replay of this event HERE.

 

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/

Is Trump the Anti-Christ, and Marianne Williamson the Exorcist We Need

She has been called a New Age Guru and made fun of by political pundits and droves of online trolls following her performance in the democratic debates, but one thing is for sure, Marianne Williamson is stirring things up. The night she was on the debates she was the top trending candidate and many ordinary Americans who had never heard of her were suddenly curious about this best selling inspirational author, spiritual teacher and social activist.

While the powers-that-be tried to give her very little air time, she took those few moments and smashed open the Overton Window causing everyone to stop and take notice. For some, her words were too outside the box for them to grasp, for others, her passionate attempt to speak truth to power and to wake us up to the fact that the emperor has no clothes was at once jolting and refreshing.

And it was perhaps her assessment of President Donald Trump and what it will take to defeat him that was the most profound and most jarring. When she talked about how all our plans and policy ideas are great but they will not defeat Trump, the only thing many of the pundits could hear was that she was not into plans or ideas. And in her closing statement, she went to the heart of the matter, diving into the cultural and social dynamics of Trump’s hold on his followers, but the pundits, once again got caught focusing on her outside the box wording instead of the meaning behind them...

I’m sorry we haven’t talked more tonight about how we’re going to beat Donald Trump. I have an idea about Donald Trump: Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what the man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes. So, Mr. President — if you’re listening — I want you to hear me please: You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field, and sir, love will win. 

Now the love Miss Williamson is talking about is not some airy-fairy New Age love, she is talking about fierce tough-love. She is not here to coddle us or soothe us, she is here to wake us up and to help us use this fierce love to overcome the fear and hatred our President is using to unearth the dark shadows of the American heart and soul. She is not talking about hugging the President and forgiving him and thinking all is good; she is talking about the kind of love that loves and forgives while waking us up and not shielding us or the President from the affects of his and our actions, but making sure we get the help we need and take responsibility for our actions. We are talking about a tough love intervention not a New Age love fest.

President Trump is in many ways the personification of our cultural archetype of the Anti-Christ; a man who represents the opposite of the way we conceive of Jesus and how he lived and what he taught; a man who at the same time has gotten many devout Christians to support him even though he represents the opposite values of their own belief system. And if you have heard Marianne speak about all this before you know she recognizes that Trump is a symptom of a deeper problem, one that requires us to look deeply into our national psyche and work on healing it.

Taking all this into account, we very well could say that Marianne Williamson is the perfect match to take on and exorcise this powerful dark force that is infecting our system. Who better to take on a reality TV master manipulator who knows how to harness fear and hatred for political purposes than a best selling self-help teacher who knows how to ignite the human heart and the love within it…and who better to heal our national wounds and psycho-dynamic shadows than a healer of the soul.

Previously published on Medium.

Why I believe Marianne Williamson is the "real deal"

I believe these are serious times that require serious attention and action. I believe it is vital to help elevate the political discourse in the United States and around the world by getting alternative deeper and more expansive voices into the political and social spheres. We are seeing this happen more and more with the emergence of alternative voices speaking truth to power like those of politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the US, teenage climate warrior Greta Thunberg from Sweden and historian Rutger Bregman from the Netherlands.

There are also several deeper and more expansive voices attempting to speak truth to power among those running for the US presidency in the democratic political field, including Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang. These two candidates are speaking on a different level than our normal political discourse is used to and I believe it is vital to get these voices out there, especially onto the stage at the democratic debates. To do that each candidate needs a certain number of contributors. I have donated $1 to each to do my part and I urge you to do the same.

Here I want to focus on Marianne Williamson and why I think her voice is vital and needs to be taken seriously, because I have a bit of inside information on the candidate and because much of the corporate media has been either directly or subtly discounting her as a "New Age Guru." I know Marianne. Not as a close personal friend but as someone who was in her congregation from the beginning; someone who has been inspired and helped by her on many occasions; and someone who has sat with her one-on-one in counseling sessions. She officiated at my wedding and sat with me and held my hand as I nervously waited for the bride-to-be who was running late. Back in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, I watched her minister to the gay community and sit with the sick and dying when most others were afraid to be near them.

Marianne Williamson officiating at my wedding (1989)

I can personally attest to her being the "real deal"...she is a deep and expansive thinker rooted and grounded in a spiritual and moral center of being, who puts feet to her spirituality. I can attest that she does indeed walk-the-talk! And I believe her talk these days is important for us to hear for she is talking about some of the deep underlying issues that are not truly and clearly being addressed, like the need for us to heal the deep wounds that are haunting us, from the shadows of hatred, slavery, racism, misogyny, corruption, poverty and American imperialism, to the loss of our moral center in almost every sphere from economics to the environment...and most importantly, how she is framing how we deal with the rising threat to our democracy and what we are being called to do to save this grand American experiment. She does not just give us spiritual salve, she is trying to help us see the truth, to feel the pain and suffering spreading around us and recognize the clear and present danger to our freedom and our moral center as a nation...but she is doing so in a way that attempts to help us face these dire issues with a fierce love that does not feed the hate but seeks to heal and transform it...to heal the soul of America...

Covington and the Emergent Collective Intelligence (PODCAST)

In the latest TEHNC Podcast, host Jonathan Steigman and I explore the recent incident where a 16-year-old kid from Covington Catholic School faced off with a Native American elder on the Mall in Washington and how it unfolded on social media with amazing speed. Jonathan and I were struck by how the many different perceptual layers were quickly peeled back, and we unpack the event and surrounding social media whirlwind exploring how we may be witnessing a new collective intelligence being birthed, one that transcends centralized legacy media.

Media Literacy for a Post-Truth Age

Announcing the release of "Media Literacy for a Post-Truth Age," an Integral Cinema Project presentation to the Carey Institute for Global Good outlining an integrally-informed approach to media literacy designed to help people discern what is the truth in this age of fake news, reality bubbles and invisible propaganda networks.

This approach has been developed from an integration of the some of the most recent understandings and advances in the fields of communication theory, propaganda theory and practice, media psychology, human perception research, and Integral, complexity and systems theories. Topics covered include identifying truth frames, discerning types of truth, sorting truth by spotting propaganda framing techniques, and a set of practices for good media literacy hygiene in the post-truth age.

Media Literacy for a Post-Truth Age: An Integrally-Informed Approach to Media Literacy for Media Consumers and Makers from Integral Cinema Project

The 1-2-3 of Healthcare

I am one of the many faces of the recent and current healthcare and financial crisis. It all began when I became ill after having lost my health insurance. I ended up going into major debt paying for my own care, which led to financial ruin and near-homeless. I experienced first-hand the profound tetra-enmeshed nature of the healthcare and financial crisis in our country…feeling and perceiving loss, isolation, and pain on the physical, emotional, communal, and systemic levels of experience. During this whole process I felt a strange kind of connection between the inner and the outer as my own personal health and financial crisis appeared to be reflected in the greater culture and society. I could not help but feel that this was all part of a tetra-evolutionary process. On the individual level, besides my outer physical healing work throughout all this, I have also been attempting to process this whole experience on the using various inner Integral Life Practices, including Shadow work to uncover my own personal Shadow patterns that contributed to this situation. Concurrent with this individual inner-outer work, I have also been attempting to reflect on the collective and social dimensions of my experience by exploring the current healthcare debate from an Integral perspective, using various Integral lenses.

Looking at the issue from Integral Theory’s Big Three of I-We-It or 1st-2nd-3rd Person dimension-perspectives, it seems to me that within the boiling healthcare debate-soup there are 1st Person (1p), 2nd Person (2p), and 3rd Person (3p) competing healthcare reform approaches:

• Individual-Freedom-oriented (1p) free-market “private” healthcare approaches;
• Social-Systemic-oriented (3p) government-run “public” healthcare approaches; and
• Collective-Community-oriented (2p) co-operative/non-profit “semi-public/private” healthcare approaches.

The private (1p) approaches appear to be most heavily associated with the conservative and mythic value meme (vMeme) political camps; The semi-public/private (2p) approaches associated with the centrist and rational vMeme political camps; and public (3p) approaches associated with the progressive and pluralistic vMeme political camps. In between these centers-of-gravity there appears to be varying degrees of attempted integration from those who are on the borders (between mythic/rational and rational/pluralistic vMemes).

Within this debate there also appears to be a fundamental question of whether healthcare is an “inalienable right” or “a privilege.” I believe this question is rooted in the central duality of our country’s doctrines which attempt to include equal measures of individual freedoms and certain socially-protected “inalienable” equal rights. Many of the 1p or private approaches to healthcare appear to champion freedom (individual and market) while forsaking some level of equality (degree of healthcare depends on economic class) and inalienable rights (degree of health is often directly related to an individual’s capacity to pursue the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and Happiness). Alternatively, many of the 3p or public healthcare approaches appear to sacrifice some degree of freedom (individual and market) in exchange for healthcare equality and inalienable rights, and most of the 2p or semi-public/private approaches seem to sacrifice some degree of both freedom and equality.

Then we have the issues of cost and quality. The private (1p) healthcare approaches tend to cost more for the individual person or group directly and cost less in taxation, while offering a relatively high degree of quality for those who can afford it and often a poor degree of quality for those who cannot afford it. The public (3p) approaches appear to cost the individual or group less in direct costs and more in taxation, while offering a more moderate degree of quality to a greater and more equal population. The semi-public/private (2p) approaches generally seem to offer a moderate degree of both cost and quality.

I believe this type of public/private/semi- (1p-2p-3p) tension can also be observed in our approaches to education. While our system is far from perfect, we seem to have achieved some degree of integration between the three perspectives by simultaneously offering public (3p) education, private (1p) education, and semi- public/private (2p) education (charter schools, home-schooling, etc). I think education is a good correlation to healthcare because both education and health affect an individual’s ability to pursue the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and Happiness.

In light of our country’s dual aspiration of individual freedom and socially-protected inalienable equal rights, I believe that a 100% private or a 100% public healthcare system is untenable and fundamentally incongruent with the aspirations and doctrines of our republic. While the nuts and bolts of our education system still needs a lot of work, I believe the 3-tiered structure that has evolved is inherently natural to our country’s ideals and current vMeme structures. Using this model, here is one possible scenario for an Integral “Big Three” approach to healthcare reform…

Basic Healthcare System Design:

• Public Healthcare: Expansion of Medicaid and Medicare into a full-blown public healthcare system for those who cannot afford private care.
• Private Healthcare: Strike a healthy balance of regulation and freedom for the Private Healthcare system (i.e.: Stronger patient rights; allow competition across state-lines; insurance pooling system; and balanced tort-reform).
• Semi-Public/Private Healthcare: Regulatory support and incentives for Cooperative, Charter, and Non-Profit healthcare groups.

Obviously within this kind of three-tiered (1p-2p-3p) system there are a lot of complicated details that would have to be worked out, but I do believe a more Integral approach, like the basic template of the above three perspectives and the inherent dual aspirations of our system, can help a great deal. For example, with this awareness in mind, it seems to me that the notion of requiring all citizens to buy health insurance may go against the individual freedoms doctrines of our country. Interestingly, it seems that with the above proposed three-tier healthcare system, this requirement would be unnecessary, since the public system would be a free system for those who cannot afford private or semi-private/public healthcare.

So here it is…my own personal attempt to jump into the healthcare debate. I toss these words into the healthcare tetra-evolutionary soup with my prayers for vertical transformation for myself, for those in similar and worse situations, and for the greater system in which we live and co-create and co-evolve…

*Originally published at Integral Life

A Spiral Dynamics Perspective on the Responses to President Obama Wining the Nobel Peace Prize

There has been an intense variety of responses to the announcement that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to President Barak Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Here is my Spiral Dynamics meditation on this spectrum of responses to President Obama wining the Nobel Peace Prize:

• “What a Joke” – Their truth is not my truth – Mythic/Blue
• “It is Premature” – He has not done anything “concrete” yet – Rational/Orange
• “What an affirmation” – He has brought hope and ushered in a climate more conducive to peace – Relativistic/Green
• The Integral Response = AH SO…