Groundbreaking Shamanic Cinema: Everything Everywhere All At Once

  

New podcast! A conversation with Mark Allan Kaplan of Integral Cinema Project about the groundbreaking shamanic cinema of Everything Everywhere All At Once. 

We have been blown away, again and again, by the way the film maps a shamanic journey through multiple universes and realities, in a quest for love and connection. 

My personal belief is this staggering film will prove to be as influential on the cinematic language going forward as seminal works like Citizen Kane and The Matrix. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp507Qx6jwQ 

* Yes, it's also the case this film is definitely not everyone's love language.

What Makes a Media Work Integral?

This was a special event for all past and present transformative media shaman course participants, along with members of the wider Integral community. In this session, we explored the big question that everyone has been asking us over the years..."What makes a moving image work Integral?" 

Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., Founder and Executive Director of the Integral Cinema Project, started us off with a deep dive into the basic patterns his years of research have revealed and then we opened it up for a deep community exploration of the topic. 

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.

 

 

Collateral Beauty: Shadow Work with an Overlooked Gem

Virtual Discussion Date: Wednesday, March 17th, 2021 at 12 p.m. PT 

Using media to work with psychological wounds and the Shadow -- to examine all that we have repressed or denied that still lives in the dark parts of our deep unconscious -- can be a powerful transformative experience for all involved.

This month we will be exploring the integrally-informed hidden gem film Collateral Beauty (2016). In the film an advertising executive (Will Smith) crippled by the death of his young daughter pens letters to Love, Death and Time. His loss propels him on a journey of deep shadow work and ultimately not just healing, but profound evolutionary growth and development.

Though not without flaws, Collateral Beauty is a wondrous (and occasionally very funny) work that can touch the hearts and souls of anyone scarred by deep grief. It does something I have never seen a film do: it captures that moment in the midst of a great loss where one can awaken to the beauty of all existence, almost as though that walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death lets us experience the essence of what it means to be alive.

The film imparts an important lesson in working with Shadow material. The key to Shadow work, with or without the use of media as a vehicle of expression, is to find the lesson, the gift that each of our wounds and shadows have to offer us. Through this process our shadows become our teachers and allies as we learn the lessons we need to learn.

Be sure to JOIN US for our live discussion on Wednesday March 17th at 12pm PT.

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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.

 

IMDb Integral Movie and TV List 2020 Updates

 

The following are all the movies and television and streaming series that were tested and added to the Integral Movie and TV List on IMDb in 2020 (listed chronologically by release date):

It's a Wonderful Life (1947) - This Frank Capra Christmas classic is also an early stage integral work that maps how the main character George Bailey (James Stewart) evolves from egocentric to Kosmocentric circles of care and concern in a way that shows us how we can evolve through various stages while also holding onto earlier stage drives and projections. In George's case he holds onto his childhood egoic dream of being a world explorer and doing great and big things, all the while not realizing that he was already doing great and big things as he developed throughout his life. A beautiful journey that teaches us that it is often the little things we do in life that end up having the biggest impact in the long run.  The film is also told directly from the Kosmocentric witness perspective from the angels watching over him beyond the dimension of the world of form.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947) - The quintessential Santa Claus movie of all time, this Christmas classic is perhaps the most magical Santa movie ever and yet it shows no magic directly. The miracles that Santa brings are miracles of consciousness. He is operating at a higher more integral level than everyone else and is able to see how they are trapped in their worldviews and constructs and he gently awakens them to higher dimensions of being and becoming. He is also very human in many ways, sometimes losing his faith that he can save Christmas, which only adds great depth to the wonderful performance by Edmund Gwenn. At the end we get a hint that this man may indeed be Santa Claus, but we are left with only a sense of standing at the edge of a great Kosmic mystery.   

Rashomon (1950) - Profound cinematic masterpiece that puts the viewer in the integral witnessing state of being as the film deconstructs relativism and deconstructionism itself, making the pluralistic structure an object of our awareness and thus helping us to transcend it.

8 1/2 (1963) - Master Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical cinematic masterpiece is actually a deep integrally-informed exploration of the artists struggle to tap into and be a channel for the creative force of the universe. Fellini's main character is a famous filmmaker who is in preproduction of  a film while being unable to access that creative force. His dreams help him seek for it in the past, in waking life the dreams bleed through and take him on a surreal creative journey to gaining that Kosmocentric witness perspective that feeds the artist's soul. 

Local Hero (1983) - A magical little integrally-informed off-beat comedy that gradually has us feeling that everything we are seeing in this cinematic reality is at the edge of a vast conscious mystery, giving us a gentle and subtle taste of the Kosmocentric realities beyond the veil of what is known. This veil includes the separation between the manmade world we live in and the natural world we are cut off from as well as the great mystery beyond the stars.  Amidst all this, our main character evolves from egocentric to the early beginnings of  Kosmocentric circles of care and concern in an almost imperceptible way. Everything here is just below and beyond the surface, just beyond our grasp.

Field of Dreams (1989) - This magical film classic explores the healing of shadow material for individuals at various stages of development as they come in contact with the transcendent reality of the Field of Dreams itself. Through this journey we are taken to the edge of what can be known and hints at what is beyond, giving us a taste of the Kosmocentric Integral Witness.

I.Q. (1994) - A sweet little integrally informed romantic comedy that explores Einstein's famous idea that God does not play dice with the universe and applies it to love. The characters and the story subtly  dance  between our reality and hints of that greater force behind it. This wondrous lightness around such deep and heavy concepts produces a beautiful and sweet and silly Kosmo-centric journey.

50 First Dates (2004) - An evolutionary time-loop Kosmic love story where the narrative actually takes us through different circles of care and concern as the main character evolves through them. So we first start with the world as it evolves around him and his ego...then to a connection with another person, his love interest...who is stuck in her own personal 24 hour time-loop…then to her family...then to the greater community (the others at the brain institute) and finally the world at the end when he takes everyone with him as he does research for the planet and humanity itself. Pretty simple and fun movie that is at its heart essentially integral.

Eli Stone (2008): A funny, profound, deep and light integrally-informed series explores the neurological boundaries between brain and consciousness, between spirit and science, and between madness and mysticism. Eli Stone is also a hybrid genre work that beautifully integrates comedy, drama, and musical forms into a wondrously mystical legal procedural show. In the end this magical yet grounded work climaxes with a deep visceral existential experience of transcending the age old question between fate and free will by revealing a beautiful synergy between them.

Atlanta (2016) - An Integrally-informed series that finds hilarity in the absurd while unpacking the core traumas of being black in America. Creator & star Donald Glover (whose alter-ego Childish Gambino scored with the breakout hit This is America) plays Earn, a young Princeton dropout from a low-income neighborhood who begins to manage his cousin, a locally-famous rapper on the verge of breaking big. Atlanta unpacks how race intersects with every domain of society -- from the personal and interpersonal to the social and systemic -- and does so with a metamodern tone of plangent, loopy surreality.

Kevin (Probably) Saves the World (2017) - Fun off-beat comedy TV series with the main character Keven kicking and screaming his way through an integrally-informed transcendent education process. This process forces him to evolve through multiple stages of development on his way to fulfilling his destiny of saving the world…maybe… 

WeRiseUP (2019) - Well-made conscious documentary seeks to empower us to rise to the great challenges we face as a species and meet this moment in history with deep passion. WeRiseUP goes deeper and more expansive than normal works in this genre by anchoring it in an integral framework.

Messiah (2020) - This complex and layered integrally-informed Netflix series unpacks the interrelationship of religion, consciousness, culture and society. This brilliant series seems to be consciously designed to bring more expansive awareness to viewers cross-culturally.

Star Trek: Picard (2020) - The sixth spin-off streaming series in the integrally-informed Star Trek universe is a sequel to the popular Next Generation series and feature films that finds an aging Captain Picard coming out of retirement for one last grand adventure that seeks to complete haunting unanswered questions and story arcs from the Next Generation storyworld. 

Homemade (2020) - This Netflix short film series stitches together a bunch of shorts made by a crop of talented international filmmakers making films in and about quarantine. Together these shorts create a mosaic experience of the pandemic across the globe that gives us a sense of a bigger picture just beyond our reach. Truly beautiful, profound and deeply resonant and inspiring...and operating at the frothy edge of a new form of integrally-informed conscious media.

Palm Springs (2020) - An integrally-informed "Groundhog Day" evolutionary time-loop romantic comedy with two…or even three…or more…characters caught in a time-loop that is helping them all heal and evolve.

Tenet (2020) - Christopher Nolan's mind-bending time-twisting groundbreaking integral temporal cinematic work. Part spy movie, time-travel thriller where the future is at war with the present. Bullets going backwards and forward, people die in one time and come back to life in another, people in the past die in the future while people from the future die in the past. A truly wild temporal ride with the protagonist evolving through all the stages of development both in time and all at once. This film also has perhaps the cinema's first temporal war battle scene and becomes a visceral cinematic training in temporal field awareness.

Soul (2020) - A deeply moving, uplifting and transformative Pixar journey into the nature of human existence and the human soul. The main character evolves from an egocentric lost soul unable to see his relationships and the world around him beyond how they either help or hinder the fulfillment of his dreams of success to a Kosmocentric inspired soul, ultimately recognizing the depth and impact of his relationship with others and the world and the full transcendental beauty of all of existence itself. A journey deep into what it means to be human and what it means to be truly alive in all dimensions of sentient beingness.

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The above movies and series have integrally-informed elements to varying degrees according to testing criteria developed during research on the application of Integral Theory to cinematic media theory and practice. According to this research, a cinematic work is deemed to be integral if elements of the integral stage of development are represented in the cinematic form, style, structure, content, and/or are embedded in the material as a presence or atmosphere. These representations of the elements of the integral stage of development can include:

• The exploration and integration of multiple evolving dimensions and perspectives of lesser and greater depth and span;
• The concretion of abstract and interior dimensions and perspectives, such as time and interiority, in the service of evolutionary growth and development;
• An evolutionary story, event, and/or character progression that is given greater than or equal emphasis to conflict resolution, with progression developing vertically through at least three stages or levels of development;
• The evolutionary impulse as a driving force or causality pattern;
• The valuing of truth that is qualified by evolving perspectival fields;
• And/or a Kosmo-centric circle of care and concern that suggests an awareness, integration, and embracing of all of existence. 

It should also be noted that the above works have been tested for having integral elements to ANY degree, which means some of these works have more of these elements than other works on the list. In addition, just because a cinematic work has integral elements does not automatically indicate its quality, though it will have elements of a more expansive worldview to some degree.

Media Shaman Studio - Surfing the Inflection Point: U.S. Inauguration Edition! (January 2021)

Virtual Discussion Date: Wednesday, January 20th, 2021 at 12 p.m. PT 

This January of 2021 finds us in the midst of a major inflection point as multiple polarized reality fields collide, which has brought us to a crisis point in this phase of the age of transformation. Between now and January 20, the date of the U.S. presidential inauguration, the liminal field within, between and around us will continue to expand and deepen, especially here in the United States but also reflected in many other countries around the world. Anything can happen in this moment of human history. The race between the old collapsing paradigms and systems of power and emerging new paradigms and systems has reached a critical point. 

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For our Media Shaman Studio this month we will be holding a special session during the scheduled U.S. inauguration to help us individually and collectively work with this major inflection point in real time, using our Zoom meeting as a mini-mediasphere bubble inside the larger mediasphere, unpacking the events unfolding around us and the reactions to those events as they evolve.  

Be sure to join us for our live discussion on Wednesday January 20th at 12pm PT. 

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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.

 

Shadow Work in the Mediasphere - Xmas Edition!

This December finds us in a very strange liminal moment amidst the ongoing inflection point surrounding the US presidential election. That the election process remains unresolved is just one of the major challenges and tensions between polarized political, ideological and cultural fields, both locally and globally. Meanwhile, the holiday season is upon us and the traditional patterns of connection and celebration are in flux because of the global pandemic. 

After so many months of social isolation and heightened cultural polarization, the holiday season has the potential to create many more stresses and traumatic experiences than what is normally experienced during this time. For many of us the past four years have already been very traumatizing, and much of the world has shared a collective trauma around the pandemic for most of the past year. These traumas can be seen as our individual and collective shadows, because they get buried in the darkness of our unconscious and then profoundly affect our behavior as individuals, groups, cultures and societies. 

This process can be likened to the way the tides beneath the surface of the ocean can remain unseen but nevertheless affect the entire oceanic environment in profoundly powerful ways.

Many of us feel called to work with not only our own personal traumas, but also those of the culture and society as well. Media has a critical role to play in helping us to process these traumas because media acts as a mirror for our consciousness. Our individual and collective shadows are reflected in the shadows of the cinema, the shadows of the internet, and the shadows of the entire mediasphere. All of these combined make up the collective shadow of our collective self.

The mediasphere is deeply intertwined with this whole process as our source of collective information and expression. Through all our various media streams we receive, share and create information between each other, within and between our reality bubbles. Every new tweet, post, video and podcast has the potential to trigger new awarenesses -- or reinforce old biases. They can affirm our constructs of self, others and the world -- or challenge them. Overall, they reflect our individual and collective shadows, all at breakneck pace across multiple domains of our everyday existence. 

Old norms are collapsing all around us, as polarization separates us from each other and distorts our perceptions. For many of us the world has become unstable and our sense of security and safety has been profoundly undermined.

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For this month's Media Shaman Studio we will be exploring how we can use media to work with both our own personal shadow and the collective shadow, and how to understand and address the collective shadow that’s reflected in the mediasphere. This will include how to discern our individual and collective shadow material using individual media works and the collective mediasphere as mirrors for discernment. We will also explore some media-assisted shadow work practices in the creation, reception and sharing of media processes. Finally, we will try to identify various types of media content that can help us at this moment in our lives. 

And, of course, for this holiday season we will be exploring how Christmas films can often put shadow work into the frame of a modern fairy tale, which enables them to tackle difficult themes with a certain detachment and a sense of optimism and hope.

Be sure to join us for our live discussion on Sunday December 20th at 12pm PT

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.

 

State of the Mediasphere - November 2020

Featured Topic: The State of the Mediasphere - November 2020

Virtual Discussion date: Sunday, November 15th, 2020 at 12 p.m. PT

The mediasphere is the collective ecology of the world's media. The mediasphere includes social and streaming media along with all dimensions of the Internet including the Dark, Deep and Surface web. It also encompasses interactive and immersive media like video games and VR, as well as more traditional media such as newspapers, journals, television, movies, radio, books, novels, advertising, press releases and publicity.

Join us this month for a special Media Shaman Studio series event with an exploration of the state of the mediasphere during this major transformative moment in human history. With the US election and various other similar challenge points happening at this time across the globe, the world is facing many great unknowns all at once. 

Instead of featuring a movie or series for us to review for the month we are asking you to try to observe the mediasphere during this month and see if you can get a sense of what is happening locally and non-locally. Go outside your reality bubbles and try to get as many perspectives as possible of events as they unfold around you. If you are taking our Media Shaman Toolkit mini-course, use the sensemaking techniques we talk about there. Be aware of any stories, events, media expressions or general observations that call to you for further exploration. You are invited to share these at the bottom of this posting in the comment area and/or bring them into our live discussion on Sunday November 15th at 12pm PT.

In the live discussion we will share a perception practice to aid your ability to “read” the mediasphere zeitgeist, along with additional tools and maps to help us make sense of what is happening in the mediasphere. We will discuss how to seek the biggest picture we can and how to discern what the calling is for us in relationship to what is unfolding around us.

We will also be exploring how we can face our individual and collective shadow material that is being reflected in the mediasphere without getting caught in polarization or getting overwhelmed by the darkness we see. We will also explore how to help shepherd us through the Great Transition we are going through by helping to seek a new future unlike the past while also trying to help limit the collateral damage and suffering as the systems of the past necessarily collapse around us.

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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. 

 

Surfing the Inflection Point

As we approach election day here in the United States I would like to take a moment to express my deep gratitude to all of you for supporting our work in your own way and to perhaps offer some ways we can use media to help ourselves, those we love and all of humanity through these challenging times.

First, I want to thank everyone who is contributing to my Medicine for Mark GoFundMe campaign, helping to keep me stable until we find a cure. My medicine is helping and I am able to do more than I could before. I still struggle every day to function in many ways but I have a lot of help from family and friends and community services agencies. In the meantime I am doing everything within my power to continue my work and help as many people as possible to navigate the media war on our consciousness, which is part of the great transition we are going through. 

Secondly, I also want to thank all my long time supporters, contributors, co-researchers and co-learners for all that you have done to support and contribute to my work through the Integral Cinema Project.

Media Shaman Offerings

Finally I wish to thank the Transformative Media course participants who helped me awaken to the Media Shaman framing of this whole process. This awakening is not just about my framing of this work. It also includes a deeply personal re-awakening of my own Media Shaman journey which started many years ago when one of my teachers, Barbara Myerhoff, basically told me that I was a Media Shaman...that my stuttering was considered a calling to heal myself and others through media. With this reframing of the work into the Media Shaman framework, that original transformative framing from Dr. Myerhoff flowered inside my being and bore more fruit for my own journey of transformation. 

So you may be wondering what is a media shaman? Media shamans works toward using media to help heal and evolve themselves, others and the world. They transform their own perceptual field into an object in their awareness and an evolutionary accelerator, and help others do the same. The Media Shaman sees the bigger picture and uses media as an individual and collective healing and evolutionary intervention coming from these higher perspectives, attempting to address problems at the level of cause rather than the level of effect. 

Here are our new reframed Media Shaman offerings:

• Media Shaman Toolkit - A 3-part video course to improve your ability to make sense of the world, learn how to use the transformative potential of media, and help yourself and others evolve into the grounded consciousness we need right now (Available now; see video below)
• Media Shaman MasterClass - Our 15 week Transformative Media Creation and Reception Course on using, designing and creating media for the transformation of self, other and world (Course starting in mid-November; see video below). The MasterClass includes a Certificate of Completion and entrance into our ongoing Media Shaman Community of Practice.
• Media Shaman Studio - A free monthly online and live discussion exploration of consciousness and media (formally the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month group) 

Research Breakthrough: Using Media to Accelerate the Evolution of Individual and Collective Consciousness

Together we have made many great discoveries along the way and I want to share with you the biggest one we have come across so far. This discovery happened through our Transformative Media Creation and Reception course at Campus Co-Evolve (the Media Shaman MasterClass), with amazing contributions from all the participants of both cohorts so far and the Campus Co-Evolve team and its founder George Pór. What we discovered together is a way to accelerate the evolution of our individual and collective consciousness using media. This breakthrough is important because all major problems in the world are the product of an unprecedented gap between our technologies and our capacities to use them in a healthy way. This is a gap between the stages of development of our technologies and the stages of development of our individual, cultural and societal consciousness. So the key is for us to accelerate the evolution of our individual and collective consciousness to catch up to our technologies and keep pace with them going forward. And according to our research, the key to this acceleration of the evolution of consciousness is for as many of us as possible to become active observers of our own perceptual field using the very technologies we are trying to catch up with.

So what is the secret here? The secret is that if we train ourselves to continually observe our own perceptual field as an object in our experience, then our perceptual field becomes a developmental accelerator itself. This appears to occur when we use a unique educational process we discovered that trains us to be aware of how media communicates with us and affects us, how consciousness is embedded in our media, and how that embedding affects our own consciousness and perceptual field. This unique educational process is what we are calling media-assisted consciousness training and integrates the following approaches:

• Media metatheory theory and practice, or praxis;
• Individual embodied learning projects combined with collective intelligence research and support teamwork;
• Individual and collective perception practices;
• Media-mirroring techniques, which entails the use of media creation and reception processes as both a mirror for our own consciousness and a learning tool to transform our perceptual field into an object of our experience (Based on the work of Edgar Morin); 
• 3-brain neuroplasticity training to help participants restructure their own neural pathways and reprogram their minds to constantly observe their own perceptual field. 

For more on this breakthrough check out the talk we did with some of the course participants for the Up Convergence Conference and to experience it yourself take the Media Shaman MasterClass in Transformative Media Creation and Reception starting mid-November.

This Moment...

And in this moment, as the world holds its breath, no one can be sure what the world will look like on November 4th. We are in a potentially major liminal inflection point moment, as we discussed in our last update. One of the things we can do is to be one with the uncertainty, entering a liminal space in our own beingness, and move through the moment with full awareness and presence, letting go of what was and opening to what might be...and do our best to Surf the Inflection Point. And if you want some tools to help you navigate through these challenging times, both our Media Shaman Toolkit and the MasterClass are designed to help.

In deep gratitude to you all...Stay well, Stay Safe, Stay Awake.

Mark

Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.
Founder and Executive Director
Integral Cinema Project

Media Shaman Toolkit Preview and Panel Discussion (Video Replay)

WATCH THE VIDEO REPLAY

Betsy Chasse assembles an expert panel on how to make sense and develop media literacy in a Post-Truth Age. The discussion makes the case for all filmmakers and content developers to awaken as Media Shamans, to use media to heal and uplift the individual and the collective. 

She is joined by: Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.  is an independent award-winning filmmaker and the pre-eminent theorist and practitioner of the application of evolutionary metatheories to moving image media. Mark is also the founder and executive director of the Integral Cinema Project.

Jonathan Steigman is a Bay Area activist, filmmaker, magician, communication consultant and independent researcher. Jonathan is also the Director of Communications at the Integral Cinema Project.

Anahita Parseghian is a visionary, strategist, entrepreneur, organizer, somatic trauma therapist, and plant medicine expert. Some of her recent creations include Project OneVoice, Sanity Sanctuary, and Plant Remedy. 

Mark DeNicola is a social media strategist that since 2010 has helped clients meet and exceed their online goals, including helping a number of films hit the #1 spot on the US iTunes documentary sales chart.

Interested in becoming a media shaman?

Learn more about the 3 part video course

July 2020 Conscious Media-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Media-of-the-Month is Amazon's animated streaming series Undone (2019). 

Virtual Discussion date: July 18, 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 Amazon's online streaming series Undone, an amazingly beautiful exploration of the line between madness and enlightenment and the indigenous magic worldview and the modern and postmodern worldviews. This little hybrid animated gem uses multi-layered complex storytelling to take us on a cinematic trip into multiple dimensions of being and becoming and consciousness...and most resonant to the now...it explores the "Undoing" of our reality and that liminal space created by that undoing. 

 If you have not seen Undone you can stream it on Amazon. 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 July 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. 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.

June 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017).

Virtual Discussion date: June 20, 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 Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017), a beautifully simple yet complex integral film that unpacks all the elements around the creation of Winnie the Pooh, and its effects on multiple dimensions of human life and experience. It is the story of an artist trying to elevate the consciousness of all of humanity through his art and how the creative process that unfolded for himself, his loved ones, his country and people all around the world helped to transform them all.

As the story unfolds, Goodbye Christopher Robin examines both the inner psychological aspects and the behavioral aspects of this great creative endeavor, and puts it in the context of the culture and the social systems. So we see how the society is emotionally repressive, how WW I affected the protagonist, how the class (caste) system interacts with the son's upbringing and emotional development, and much more. A key point is that the film is unpacking a Big Picture view and trying to find a higher truth. It's not just a pure Pluralistic film in which everyone's viewpoint is identically valid. It honors that everyone believes their own viewpoint (and inhabits it) but the audience (and some of the characters) can see a larger overview picture by the end.

This work has the potential to give us a deeper understanding of the personal, sociological, psychological and cultural forces at work in the Winnie the Pooh phenomenon and its creation. It also gives us a glimpse of the co-evolutionary process surrounding the impact of a work of art on the individual and the collective and vise versa, including its potential impact on the individual and collective experience of great human challenges like war and the evolution of a culture facing these great challenges.

In times of great challenge, like back then and here and now today, in our moment in time, the artists are called to be midwives of humanity's soul. And this film captures this calling with subtlety and grace.

If you have not seen Goodbye Christopher Robin you can stream it on most of the major streaming services. You can also rent it for free at most public libraries. 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 June 20th 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.

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.

"Interstellar" Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Virtual Discussion (Video)

Here is the video recording of our April 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Live Discussion of the film Interstellar (2014) and its resonance with our current real world challenges.

We had a wonderful session! Big thanks to everyone for making this a deep and profound mindwalk into Interstellar and into our current challenges!

Here are some links for things mentioned in the session:

• Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman (the first integral film)
• Toward an Integral Cinema - an academic article exploring the film and her work as the first integral filmmaker
• Big Picture of the NOW - for a deeper dive into the evolutionary crisis we are facing.

And don't forget to check our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Virtual Discussion Archive for video recordings of all our previous CMoM Virtual Discussions.

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/

March 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time (2018).

Virtual Discussion date: March 21, 2020 at 1 pm (PT)

Join us this month as we explore the feature film A Wrinkle in Time, a beautiful, rich and groundbreaking integrally-informed cinematic work that uses an advanced experimental form of storytelling that attempts to integrate and find a synergy between the masculine/agency and feminine/communion patterns of the Hero's and Heroine's Journey.

This is the second film by director Ava DuVernay that we have explored as one of our Movie-of-the-Month selections, the first one being her feature film Selma (2014). DuVernay is at the vanguard of the new conscious media movement in African American Cinema, and in many ways she is leading the way while also acting as a midwife for a whole new generation of deep feeling and thinking integrative African American conscious media makers.

With this multilayered cinematic work, DuVernay attempts to create this synergy between the masculine and feminine styles of communication through the integration of both agency- and communion-centered camerawork, production design and editing. This is combined with a weaving together of an overarching traditional masculine and action-oriented linear story structure with a more feminine and communion-oriented non-linear story telling approach with multi-layered story streams and spiraling evolutionary arcs of both its characters and its story and the structures of consciousness in and around them.

Regrettably this great and noble cinematic experiment falters at the end with a small yet fatal flaw in the story and character lines of development at a peak transition moment. Because of this and the advanced experimental nature of the work, many critics and audience members had trouble deeply connecting with the film. That said, this is still a great cinematic experiment worth seeing and studying.

As always, you are invited to watch A Wrinkle in Time on your own and then join us for our virtual discussion on March 21st at 1pm Pacific Time. If you have not seen the film you can stream it online on most of the main streaming services or get a free rental from your local library. 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. As always, you are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

Find out more about our free virtual discussion coming up on March 21st HERE.

February 2020 Conscious Media-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Media-of-the-Month is the Netflix streaming series Messiah (2020).

Virtual Discussion date: February 22, 2020 at 1 pm (PT)

Join us this month as we explore the brand new Netflix series Messiah, an integrally-informed exploration of the messiah archetype with clear and profound examples of how to capture deep shifts in our consciousness and our paradigms of self, other and world.

This series is a complex and layered work which unpacks the interrelationship of religion, consciousness, culture and society. It is also deeply reflective of what is happening in the world right now by elegantly journeying into and through multiple dimensions of the culture war and civilization-wide paradigm shift we are currently facing.

As always, you are invited to watch Messiah on your own and then join us for our virtual discussion on February 22nd at 1pm Pacific Time. In the meantime, you are invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the series in our group's online discussion forum.

Messiah is currently streaming on Netflix. If you do not have a subscription to the service they offer a 30 day free trial.

Find out more about our free virtual discussion on February 22nd HERE.

Integral Cinema 2019 Year in Review

Welcome to 2020! 2019 has been a major transition year for the Integral Cinema Project. We shifted our energy and focus toward meeting the challenges humanity is facing as part of the current global-scale evolutionary crisis (which is the root cause of all our current global-scale challenges like climate change, mass species extinctions, wealth inequality, rising ethno-nationalism and more). Our research on the co-evolution of the moving image, consciousness, technology, culture and society indicates all these crises are the products of the growing gap between the evolution of our technologies and the evolution of our collective consciousness. We seem to lack the collective capacity to use these advanced technologies for healthy, life-sustaining and life-flourishing purposes.

Our research suggests our best shot at limiting the potential suffering related to this major evolutionary transition is by using our advanced technologies to help accelerate the evolution of individual and collective consciousness. Because of the short time we have to heal this gap between our collective consciousness and our technologies before the projected collapse of our current civilizational structures, we are focusing our attention on training as many integral (r)evolutionary change agents to use these advanced media technologies to accelerate the evolution of individual and collective consciousness, open sourcing our data, tools and practices to the world, and developing a global at-scale evolutionary media intervention.

This year the Integral Cinema Project embarked on a number of exciting new ventures...

The Cinevolve Inititive

This year the Integral Cinema Project embarked on a number of exciting new ventures. We have been called to codify what we’ve learned and put it into practice so we can begin to train media makers to understand Integral thinking and incorporate it into their own work. The time for research and theory-building expands to include a new initiative to put our findings out into the world! To this end, we have joined forces with other evolutionary-oriented institutions and organizations including Conscious Good Networks and Campus Co-Evolve, and created The Cinevolve Initiative, a Manhattan Project-style research and enactment initiative to uplift humanity through these challenging times by storifying and gamifying the stages of human development and the evolution of individual and collective consciousness. Operating under the auspices of the Integral Cinema Project, Cinevolve aims to create “proof of concept” content and train others to do so as well.

Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This year we joined with the Conscious Good Creators Network to bring integral cinema theory and practice to this collective of transformative media makers from around the world through our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month (CMoM) integral movie review and discussion series. The following are the 2019 CMoM virtual discussions:

• The Matrix
• Selma
• What the Bleep Do We Know?
• Avatar
• The Great Hack
• Game of Thrones
• Black Panther
• Inception

Integral Cinema Courses 2019

This year also saw the beginning of our initiative to train as many media-makers in integral cinematic consciousness as possible to help assist humanity in navigating through our current evolutionary crisis/transition.

• Transformative Media Creation and Reception - This year we also joined forces Campus Co-Evolve to create a Transformative Media Creation and Reception course to train evolutionary change agent and activists from around the world to use media in support of their efforts to help humanity evolve.
• Conscious Media-Making 101 - In this introductory course for the Conscious Good Creators Network, Integral Cinema Project founder Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. explores what is conscious media and conscious media-making, what are some of the different potential forms of conscious media-making, and how different states and stages of consciousness effect the media-making process. Mark also explores how these structures of consciousness within us are communicated between us, the works we create and the individuals and collectives that experience our works…and how this knowledge can be used to create deeper and more transformative media experiences for creators and viewers on the individual and collective levels.

Integral Movie and TV List Updates 2019

The following are all the 2019 movies and TV series that tested positive for having integral elements and have been added to our IMDb Integral Movie and TV List.

• High Flying Bird (Netflix, 2019) - Steven Soderbergh's elegantly complex exploration of the personal, interpersonal, cultural, social and historical dimensions of African American basketball behind-the-scenes politics that gives us a beautiful and deeply resonant "big picture" multi-dimensional perspective on the effects of structurally embedded white supremacy. 
• Undone (Amazon Prime, 2019) - Amazingly beautiful exploration of the line between madness and enlightenment and the indigenous magic worldview and the modern and postmodern worldviews. This little hybrid animated gem using complex storytelling to take on cinematic trip into multiple dimensions of being and becoming.  
• The Mandalorian (Disney+, 2019) - The first live-action series of the integrally-informed Star Wars Saga that marks a return to the saga's mythic storytelling roots in a clean and simple story structure. It also grounds us back intp an essential "Force"-oriented story that pulls our heart-strings with the introduction of "Baby Yoda". In many ways this series feels like an attempt to heal some of the fans wounds of the missteps taken in The Last Jedi and Solo and it appears to be doing just that. 
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Disney/Lucasfilm, 2019) - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a masterpiece of integral-archetypal filmmaking completing the integrally-informed Star Wars Saga triple-trilogy journey with a visceral cinematic synergy that beautifully brings together multiple saga-wide storyworld streams to a wondrous crescendo. A must-see for integrally-informed Star Wars fans.

Integral Cinema Publications 2019

The following is a list of all our publications published in 2019:

• Avatar and the Co-Evolution of Consciousness, Culture and Society - An exploration of the Co-Evolutionary relationship of consciousness, cultural worldviews and societal structures and how it is reflected in "Avatar."
• Cinema and the Evolutionary Emotional-Aesthetics of Sri Aurobindo - This is a research report on one of our current research projects exploring the integral-evolutionary theories and approaches of Sri Aurobindo's work.
• Breaking the Wheel: Reflections on Game of Thrones, Selma and the Great Transition - An  exploration of the parallels between the "Game of Thrones" series (2011-2019), our current evolutionary moment and the movie "Selma" (2014).
• Healers in the Hood: Reflections on the Passing of John Singleton, Selma and the New Consciousness in African American Cinema - An exploration of the connections between the passing of African American filmmaker John Singleton, the film "Selma by African American filmmaker Ava DuVernay and the new movement in African American Cinema towards a more complex and comprehensive integral conscious-raising approach to capturing and confronting the continuing challenges faced by African Americans including structural and hidden racism and white supremacy.
• 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.
• The Pluralistic Worldview of Netflix’s Unbelievable - An examination of the ways the show is solidly Pluralistic, and how it could have been more Integral.

T.E.H.N.C. Podcast - Integral Cinema Sessions 2019

The following are this years integral cinema video podcast sessions between Integral Cinema Project founder Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. and our Director of Communications and the host of the TEHNC Podcast series, Jonathan Steigman.

• New Black Cinema: Roundup - Jonathan and Mark do a roundup of the latest works in the movement we have dubbed "The New Black Cinema." From "Black Panther" to "Black Lightning," from "Blindspotting" to "If Beale Street Could Talk," we discuss the state-of-the-art in New Black Cinema and its integral and near-integral underpinnings. 
• Why the Game of Thrones finale is BRILLIANT! - Jonathan and Mark make the case that the GoT finale managed several extraordinary moves that deepened and anchored the entire series. With the finale, the whole arc and purpose of Game of Thrones became clear. The show is about the transition from the Mythic structure and the end of feudalism...and the rise and fall of an authoritarian demagogue with weapons of mass destruction. 
• The Big Picture of the NOW - Jonathan interviews Mark as he explains why "All problems are problems of consciousness" and 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.  
• Why The Rise of Skywalker is brilliant! (and why it matters) - Mark and Jonathan make the case that: 1. J.J. Abrams took an impossible task and delivered beyond our expectations in this final installment of the Star Wars trilogies; 2. The Star Wars saga has important resonances throughout our culture and society, beyond almost any other popular work; 3. Critics (and film theorists and scholars) by and large don't know how to read the film, or evolutionary media in general. 

Community Partnerships 

In addition to the above projects we have been doing this last year with our partners, we are working with them in various other ways as well.

• Campus Co-Evolve - We are developing additional transformative media courses and a Transformative Media Community of Practice with Campus Co-Evolve and working with the Campus’s founder, collective intelligence pioneer George Pór, to develop a collective intelligence approach to media-making. 
• Conscious Good - We are developing additional courses and workshops with the Conscious Good Creators Network, we advised them on a research study exploring the connection between consciousness and media, and some of our integral cinema research findings were presented by Conscious Good founder Trina Wyatt at the Visionaries Summit, which was also attended by Integral Cinema Project founder Mark Allan Kaplan and Director of Communications Jonathan Steigman. 
• Transformative Technology Community - This year we became a community partner with the Transformative Technology community of the San Francisco Bay Area, we were on the support team for the TransTech 2019 Conference, and we attended the TransTech Academy incubator for a second year in a row as well.