Every once in a while, Chris MacRae posts from London to the OpenSpace listserv with analysis and invitations to participate in the ‘preneurial’ planetary revolution. His work is also aesthetically fascinating: sentences of density and brilliance reminiscent of the best of Bucky Fuller. I’m on board.

From his blog Open Space Races:

What would be your 3 most terrifying mistakes of the 1980s? Terrifying mistakes are like taking a wrong crossroads and compounding exponentials that get you more and more lost.

As a mathematician, nomination 1: the spreadsheets, having leadership teams ruled by chasing its quarterly numbers instead of connecting goodwill too – leads to exponential misgovernance of the world’s largest organisations: where well over 90% of future wealth potential is unseen.

2. The failure to introduce open space into the MBA curriculum since all service economy dynamics depend on facilitating positive emotional intelligences and promoting love of collaborating trustworthily around purpose win-win-winning over fear of being cut or siloised – see value100 and entrepreneurial literature applied to service economy or learning networks.

3. Not opening up “death of distance” space races transparently for every global market sector – setting sail to progress the most innovative value multiplications for humanity is a very different leadership game than externalising risk on the society who least knows the human degradation your sector’s greatest risk is capable of compounding either through corruption or by turning a blind eye to conflict resolution.

Tom Atlee forwards news of an emerging “trans-partisan” movement:

Imagine leaders from MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club, Common Cause, the National Council of Churches and other left leaders sitting down for four days of respectful conversation with leaders from the Christian Coalition, the American Legion, The Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform, and other right leaders. Imagine that these folks not only hear each other, but actually come up with programs they can work on together.

Now step back from your imagination into reality…because that’s what happened last December.

One of the many intriguing passages from the conference report:

To re-unite America as a functioning “democratic republic” that balances and integrates the ideals of a democracy — freedom, equality, and protection of the common good — with the values of a republic — order, responsibility and efficiency — requires the establishment of new means for ongoing citizen and leader/expert re-engagement external to the current “red-blue” political system.

…We are considering a series of facilitated, trans-partisan expert/public figure/citizen dialogues in cities around the country on a handful of core national issues that emerged from the retreat (election integrity, terrorism/Iraq, media integrity, growth/energy/global warming, privacy/civil liberties, etc.) as well as large scale, local citizen dialogues/meetups (in conjunction with Meetup.com and national membership organizations) all of which culminate in a trans-partisan We the People National Convention in 2008 (a 3 day national civic dialogue) whose non-coercive (soft) power rests in its national organization, transpartisan integrity, and moral authority.

I can’t help imagining that it’s so clear that the wheels are falling off of the Cheney/Bush hypermilitarist phantasy that even Grover Norquist and the right wing citizens groups are hedging their bets, thinking “do we really want our kids to go off the cliff with these guys?” Oops, I’m still learning how to be trans-partisan.

The other night I met my old friend, ex-girlfriend Astrid to gather some friends and sing a couple of dozen Beatles songs while I accompanied on guitar. Astrid’s friend Judith is a fluid and inventive vocalist, and we tightened up our harmonies and got into a groove of laughter and memories, easing the spells of hoarseness and calluses.

The melodies and lines echo through our lives.

your day breaks
your mind aches
there will be times when
all the things you said
will fill your head
you won’t forget her

One of the more popular graduate programs at my alma mater CIIS is called Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, and one of the more popular teachers in that program is Rick Tarnas, whose 1991 book “The Passion of the Western Mind” is now required reading in dozens of universities. Rick has co-taught a course for many years with the pioneering psychology researcher Stan Grof, and the title of their course is the title of Rick’s new book: “Cosmos and Psyche.”

One striking introduction to the new book is a review by Gerry Goddard on the Barnes&Noble site.

If an eminent scholar and acclaimed cultural historian were to publish a major study of human history insightfully analyzing and interpreting various notable epochs and their formative figures, then the intellectual community would be entirely open to, and interested in, what this person had to say. If this person were at the same time to present a variety of parallel phenomena — geographic, political, biological etc. — demonstrating correlations between these two lines of phenomena, then the intellectual community would be moved to seriously consider and engage this new knowledge. But what if, most boldly, the phenomena being demonstrated as parallel with the mozaic of cultural history were to be the major alignments of the outermost planets — what then?

Richard Tarnas, author of the acclaimed cultural history, ‘Passion of the Western Mind’, has presented us with just such a paradigmatically challenging and mind-expanding account of a human-cosmic connection. With ‘Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View’, he has produced a penetrating analysis of the complex thematic character of a number of generally recognized significant historical moments and epochs, revealing how the peaks and valleys of the earthly course of human unfolding demonstrate a rhythmic concordance with the peaks and valleys of the outer-planetary dance.

…By revealing the very architecture of the evolving collective psyche in resonance with a ‘re-enchanted’ cosmos, Cosmos and Psyche points us toward a greater coherence beyond postmodern fragmentation. Rather than our universe being solely dead matter and rocks banging around according to the laws of physics, as Tarnas explains, it is the confirmation of the cosmological dimension as meaningful that provides the missing dimension of all new paradigm strategies which, especially after Jung, deal very well with psyche but leave cosmos out of the picture.

My interest in astrology has its peaks and valleys. There have been astonishing connections between outer planet transits of my natal chart and transformative junctures in my life. There have also been periods like now, when there are so many active transits that I can’t readily distinguish their meanings relative to the complexity of what I am experiencing.

Tarnas honors the individual natal chart while focusing upon the complex spatial relationships of the outer planets as accurate indicators of the dance of archetypal qualities emerging and interacting in the human psyche in personal and powerfully collective ways.

The fundamental pursuit here is one that should spread to universities everywhere: that Everything is alive, intelligent, and mysterious, and our practices of knowledge and relationship are called to be ever more celebratory, courteous, and beautiful.

From the 16th-century Kabbalistic master, Rabbi Chayyim Vital,
quoting his teacher Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, in Sefer Ru’ach
Ha’Kodesh (Book of the Holy Spirit), Teaching No. 3… (Literal
translation by Gershon Winkler)

hee’ney behold
ee’vuy the density
v’ga’sus and thickness
ha’a'veer of the air
ey’no does not
mey’nee’ach allow
l’sha’ya’avor that there should pass
v’yey’reyd and descend
kol the voice
ha’ruch’nee of the spirit
b’to’cho that is within it

v’om’nom however
ka’asher when it is that
ha’o'fo’t the birds
maf’ree’cheen fly
ba’a'veer in the air
heym they
chot’cheem they slice
u’bo’k'eem and they split apart
ha’a'veer the air

v’ahz and then
ha’kol the voice
ha’ch’ruz that is calling out
o’ver passes
derech through (literally: the way)
sham there

as is written in Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 10:20…

kee for
o’f bird
ha’sha’mayyim of the skies
yo’leech shall cause to journey
et the
ha’kol the voice
u’ba’al and those who master
k’na’fa’yim wings
ya’ggeed shall communicate
davar word

Tonight I’m reading an interview with spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen:

Most people never awaken to the authentic self and therefore they don’t even understand why ego is such a problem. It’s only through the experience of the authentic self that you can begin to see what an obstruction ego actually is and find the all-important strength and inspiration to transcend it. When you taste that part of yourself in which ego has never existed, and experience the untainted love of life and unbounded passion for its evolution, you will want, at times even desperately, to free your self-sense from any attachment to ego and its endless distractions. So the only way to go beyond ego is to want to go beyond ego more than anything else.

What’s so important about the awakening of the authentic self is that through it you spontaneously experience an emotional connection with the vast evolutionary context that we’ve been speaking about. And in this, you discover what could be called a moral imperative in relationship to the need to evolve. It arises from the depths of your own soul—I must evolve for the sake of evolution itself. Consciousness can only evolve through me, and it won’t happen unless I wholeheartedly and unconditionally give myself to that process. And what’s significant here is that this is not imposed on you from anywhere outside yourself; you actually awaken to it. When the awakening human discovers this moral imperative to evolve, then a new path has been found. Why? Because one has literally discovered within oneself the very reason for being a human being.

I have seen the word “ego” used in so many ways that it loses its impact. But Cohen is specific about it:

in the spiritual sense, ego can be simply defined as narcissism, a deeply compulsive fascination with one’s own image and sense of oneself as a unique individual. This translates into an unwholesome emotional and psychological enslavement to a profoundly self-centered relationship to life. Narcissism is the postmodern disease, and as long as we are lost in it we will be unavailable, unable to truly respond to the spiritual impulse and its imperative to evolve.

Indeed, we are so concerned with the image that we have of ourselves in the mirror of our own awareness that it makes it difficult to have any authentic relationship with the vast and extraordinary life-process we all are a part of. Because of this, too many of us end up spending most of our lives just treading water, not evolving at all. So you see, in this vast context, ego is seen in a very different light than it usually appears: as literally an anti-evolutionary force.

“My teacher said to me,
-Become one with the knot itself,
til it dissolves away.
-Sweep the garden.
-Any size.”
–Gary Snyder

From Don Hanlon Johnson’s website:

Embodiment is not a curse, not an affliction, but the only opportunity we shall be given to learn the poetry of mortal dwelling. – David Michael Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being