Trio 1: Responses
Here are some of the additional responses and resources that participants have shared via email, following the Trio events. Responses (comments) are included by permission.
Trio 1: Work-Life Balance and Courage
1. materials from Daniel Moulin
Three Great Men Died that Day--JFK, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley
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2. Materials fom Kelly O'Donnell
**Subway Hero in Harlem (CBS news report, 2007)
http://www.wimp.com/subwayhero/
**Moral Courage (short reflection from our weblog)
http://coremembercare.blogspot.fr/search/label/popularity
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3. Materials from Czikus Carierre
Friends,
It was a privilege to be with all of you yesterday and to be partner to our sharing. There is a lot I took away but I would like to re-iterate my commitment not to let my cynicism (as a sign of feeling powerless and helpless) prevail over my sense of 'can-do'.
I was reflecting this morning on Philip Zimbardo's Ted talk in which he talks about 'not the bad apple', but the 'bad barrel' -the (socio-economic, cultural, psychologic, spiritual) environment in which 'apples turn bad':
While I was cutting up mangoes to put into a healthy fruit yoghurt…it occurred to me that there was a time, not too long ago, when quite a number of people realised that our human culture was at a cross roads, AND that they even had a sense which way humanity should go. I am talking about some 40-50 years ago, which started with what was called at the time the 'human potential movement'. Kelly and Michele will be able to trace it back in the development of psychology. The human potential movement was most prominently expressed in the ' EST trainings' of Werner Erhard, now called Landmark Education (check them out on-line).
From the Internet:
Human-Potential Movement
Definition
The human-potential movement is a term used for humanistic psychotherapies that first became popular in the 1960s and early 1970s. The movement emphasized the development of individuals through such techniques as encounter groups, sensitivity training, and primal therapy. Although the human-potential movement and humanistic therapy are sometimes used as synonyms, in reality, humanistic therapy preceded the human-potential movement and provided the movement's theoretical base. Humanistic therapy flourished in the 1940s and 1950s. Its theorists were mostly psychologists rather than medical doctors. They included Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Everett Shostrom, Carl Rogers, and Fritz Perls.
The human-potential movement and humanistic therapy is distinguished by the following emphases:
· A concern for what is uniquely human rather than what humans share with other animals.
· A focus on each person's open-ended growth rather than reshaping individuals to fit society's demands.
· An interest in the here-and-now rather than in a person's childhood history or supposed unconscious conflicts.
· A holistic approach concerned with all levels of human being and functioning—not just the intellectual—including creative and spiritual functioning.
· A focus on psychological health rather than disturbance.
Purpose
The purpose of humanistic therapy is to allow a person to make full use of his or her personal capacities leading to self-actualization. Self-actualization requires the integration of all the components of one's unique personality. These elements or components of personality include the physical, emotional, intellectual, behavioral, and spiritual. The marks of a self-actualized person are maturity, self-awareness, and authenticity. Humanistic therapists think that most people—not only those with obvious problems—can benefit from opportunities for self-development. Humanistic therapy uses both individual and group approaches.
Precautions
Psychotic patients, substance abusers, and persons with severe personality disorders or disorders of impulse control may not be appropriate for treatment with humanistic methods.
Description
Humanistic approaches to individual treatment usually follow the same format as other forms of outpatient counseling. Therapists may be medical doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, or clergy. Humanistic group treatment formats are flexible, and a wide range of treatment methods are used, ranging from encounter groups and therapy groups to assertiveness training and consciousness-raising groups. In addition, the humanistic tradition has fostered the publication of self-help books for people interested in psychological self-improvement.
Risks
The chief risks include the reinforcement of self-centered tendencies in some patients and the dangers resulting from encounter groups led by persons without adequate training. Poorly led encounter groups can be traumatic to persons with low tolerance for confrontation or "uncovering" of private issues.
Normal results
The anticipated outcome of humanistic therapy is a greater degree of personal wholeness, self-acceptance, and exploration of one's potential. In group treatment, participants are expected to grow in interpersonal empathy and relationship skills. However, there have been few controlled studies to determine the reasonableness of these expectations.
To simplify my argument: This human potential movement had the potential to result in social, cultural, spiritual and economic transformation; transformation as described by
Marylin Ferguson in her book The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (1980)
The book was re-published in August 2009, probably because her ideas are now 'ideas whose time has come'. Below follow two reviews from Amazon. Please note: the reviews are very recent, probably a sign of its current relevance.
Connie L. Gretsch 7 oct 2012
I have been carrying this book around since it first came out in the 80's. For me it represented hope for the future because it presented a logical answer to practices and systems that were not working in this country. Now I see some of the areas described in the book changing such as, healing and education (Flying and Seeing, a chapter from the book). However, they seem to be changing on the fringe, with some problems when placed in the mainstream. The problems are basically financial support to make change grow. Power entities, who control most of the wealth in this country,should embrace change. But I believe that Marilyn Ferguson's predictions of transformation and social reform and her systematic plans for transition will keep moving on. If you are a person, who believes in the change that is needed for this country to survive, this book should be on your shelf as a reference. If you don't read the whole book use the paradigms,which are conveniently located at the end of each chapter.
PERHAPS THE FOUNDATIONAL WORK OF THE "NEW AGE", October 23, 2013
By Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) -
This review is from: The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Paperback) Marilyn Ferguson (1938-2008) was an American author, editor and public speaker; a founding member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology; and editor of the science newsletter "Brain/Mind Bulletin" from 1975 to 1996. She also wrote Aquarius Now: Radical Common Sense And Reclaiming Our Personal Sovereignty, The brain revolution;: The frontiers of mind research, and PragMagic: PragMagic Magic for Everyday Living - Ten Years of Scientific Breakthroughts, Exciting Ideas and Personal Experiments That Can Profoundly Change Your Life.
She wrote in the original Introduction to this 1980 book, "while outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement... It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. 'It'---this movement---was a conspiracy! ... I shied away from the word 'transformation' ... Yet we seem to know now that our society must be remade, not just mended... this conspiracy, whose roots are old and deep in human history, belongs to all of us. This book charts its dimensions---for those who belong to it in spirit but have not known how many others share their sense of possibility, and for those who despair but are willing to consider the evidence for hope."
She states, "This book is about that master context. It is a book of evidence ... pointing unmistakably to deep personal and cultural change. It is a guide to seeing paradigms, asking new questions, understanding the shifts, great and small, behind this immediate transformation... It is also an attempt to show that what has been considered an elitist movement by some is profoundly inclusive, open to anyone who wants to be part of it." (Pg. 40-41)
She points out, "For many Aquarian Conspirators, an involvement in health care was a major stimulus to transformation. Just as the search for self becomes a search for health, so the pursuit of health can lead to greater self-awareness." (Pg. 257-258) She observes, "Of the Aquarian Conspirators surveyed, more were involved in education than in any other single category of work." (Pg. 280) She also notes, "Personal transformation has a greater impact on relationships than on any other realm of life." (Pg. 390)
One cannot "turn back the clock" to 1980, of course, and thus re-live the impact of this book when it was first published. (And by comparison, her 2005 book 'Aquarius Now' is a very modest effort.) But if time (not to mention economic uncertainty, ongoing wars and conflict, terrorism, etc.) has caused the optimistic outlook of this book to seem "misplaced," the book remains a compelling vision of "what MIGHT have been," and it remains an important book for anyone interested in personal and SOCIAL transformation.
Below is a, quite recent, review of another epoch making book of the time, with a similar perspective on a potential new era:
FRITJOF CAPRA
The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture by Fritjof Capra (Aug1983)
An antidote for determinism, November 2, 2009
By Justin Ritchie (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture.
Like the current era, the United States of the mid-70's and early 80's were tinged with a new batch of thinkers making strong cases for the reorganization of society. Interestingly, this period corresponds to the time when the United States peaked in domestic oil production. Economic growth slowed to a crawl and people were considering social alternatives before the aggressive economic policies and financial deregulation of the 80's and 90's led to the creation of financial accumulation instead of growth in wealth, distracting those seriously considering alternatives to economic growth and the industrial production/consumer infrastructure that had defined modernism in the period after World War II. Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point falls into the aforementioned category of ideas that were ripe at the time they were published and then pushed by the wayside when rampant domestic economic growth supported by global tolerance of the US Dollar allowed massive trade deficits to accumulate, creating the illusion of prosperity.
Now that the economic illusion of the last three decades has started to fade, The Turning Point was an eerie read. Capra's commentary on a number of trends for a future where humanity adhered to the outdated paradigm of prosperity only from growth, a biomedical paradigm centered on eradicating microorganisms and a science based on specialization and determinism are revealing themselves in the headlines. Dr. Capra, a theoretical physicist by training and practice, was wise to integrate a holistic view of humanity and to offer an alternative for society that perhaps we've only now wizened enough to appreciate. Key to his thesis is the idea that our world, our governments and our scientists operate as if the deterministic paradigm of the Enlightenment period hasn't changed. Ignoring the reality of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, biology and modern science has crippled society from the truth of the natural world. We've forgotten that nature does not guarantee our existence! In providing an all encompassing critique of society, Capra does not seek to denigrate the colleagues in other fields but merely to offer a well reasoned and referenced approach to modernizing the way we choose to organize our species.
Starting by providing the background of why we need to change, essentially the problem statement, Capra states the crises of society and defines the importance of the Chinese concept of wu wei, the idea that we must refrain from action contrary to nature. As Chuang Tzu says, "Nonaction does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied."
"In all these fields the limitations of the classical, Cartesian world view are now becoming apparent. To transcend the classical models, scientists will have to go beyond the mechanistic and reductionist approach as we have done in physics, and develop holistic and ecological views. Although their theories will need to be consistent with those of modern physics, the concepts of physics will generally not be appropriate as a model for the other sciences... Scientists will not need to be reluctant to adopt a holistic framework for fear of being unscientific. Modern physics can show them that such a framework is not only scientific but is in agreement with the most advanced scientific theories of physical reality." (p. 49)
Capra continues by describing a history of the old world view, the mechanistic reductionist approach that has led to our current predicament. The history of our materialistic success and the limits to our knowledge of the world is retraced through Copernicus, Descartes, Bacon and Newton. This approach has led to a world where, in the words of R.D. Laing as quoted by Capra, "Out go sight, sound, taste, touch and smell and along with them has since gone aesthetics and ethical sensibility, values, quality, form; all feelings, motives, intentions, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse." (p.55)
The Turning Point then follows the development of the new physics that started in 1905 when Einstein published his papers on the photoelectric effect and the theory of General Relativity. The photoelectric effect winning the 1921 Nobel Prize and laying the groundwork for quantum mechanics, leading to Heisenberg's discovery of the Uncertainty Principle, an actual physical concept that there are limits to knowledge. Later, Schrodinger's work in demonstrating the electrons and protons that we visualize as balls on a pool table are actually probability clouds, that the foundation of reality is a probability. This work led to John Bell's discovery that our physical reality is subject to non-local phenomena... that the measurement of the spin of a particle in one location will change the spin of a particle in another location, the "spooky action at a distance" that is beginning to make our world look more like one envisioned by the alchemists (well... maybe alchemists like Isaac Newton). And now we've discovered that these non-local connections may be responsible for many basic actions in biology like memory and even consciousness.
While physicists were busy revolutionizing our outlook on the fundamentals of the universe, the mechanistic paradigm of the past had already taken hold on the methods of every other field. Our biologists had taken a mechanistic view of life. From a biology textbook quoted by Capra, "One of the acid tests of understanding an object is the ability to put it together from its component parts. " (Capra p. 102) An approach that ironically is quite opposed to the study of life. We've now realized that the mapping of the human genome has yielded many beautiful computer models but little else. The biomedical model which concentrates on the mechanisms of smaller and smaller fragments of the body has yielded an approach that views disease as, "the malfunctioning of biological organisms which are studied from the point of view of cellular and molecular biology; the doctor's role is to intervene, either physically or chemically, to correct the malfunctioning of a specific mechanism." (p.123) The ingestion of many chemicals and execution of complicated surgeries has resulted in ever rising health care costs, and while saving many lives has primarily served as an excuse for lifestyles that run counter to human nature. "We prefer to talk about our children's hyperactivity or learning disability rather than examine the inadequacy of our schools; we prefer to be told that we suffer from hypertension rather than change our over-competitive business world; we accept ever increasing rates of cancer rather than investigate how the chemical industry poisons our food to increase its profits." (p.163)
In psychology, Capra advocated that the rational approach of Freudian analysis would need to be transcended to explore the subtler aspects of the human psyche. The incorporation of altered states of consciousness into mainstream psychological studies could yield insights into our human predicament. I'd like to summarize more here but this is a dense critique of many psychologists.
Capra's exception to economics is that we've mechanistically reduced people into rational actors, using our education systems to produce a standardized robot class with predictable consumer society that ignores collective values and the psychological need for community. Key to this chapter is the point that the advantages won by the worker in the modern world is generally to the detriment of workers and citizens in the developing world... the great sleight of hand trick made possible by technology and economy. The automation of daily life through complex technologies reduces employment and centers on a capital based approach which is highly inflationary, an economic reality that can be seen by looking at charts of US Dollar inflation over the last hundred years. This section is the most important of the entire book and highly relevant to our current situation.
Capra then follows these critiques with answers for each field through a systems view of life that incorporates feedbacks and recognition of evolution through cooperation. A health model that acknowledges holistic principles and a psychology grown from Jung can provide a basis for this new society. Tackling energy, Capra explains the physics and the economics behind our immediate need for a solar economy.
I've tried to summarize all 419 pages but so much has slipped through the cracks. While it is easy to view the predicaments of the current global situation, Capra's writings aren't the least bit outdated and a specifically resonant with its solutions. If you are disheartened by the problems of overpopulation, energy crises, etc... (the list can go on forever) do yourself a favor and read the solutions Capra advocates in The Turning Point.
So, apparently, somewhere along the line the train of the human potential movement got derailed, going from a 'broad-gauge rails' of potential holistic growth and transformation to a 'narrow gauge', short-sighted 'economic growth at-all-cost'. Ferguson, Capra and others may have been ahead of their time, but, maybe, their ideas' time has finally come.
This brings me to an interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton, biologist, on: 'The Power of Consciousness', www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYYXq1Ox4sk, as a bridge to where we seem to be heading now. It is well worth watching, because it summarises in a (one hour long) nut shell -from cell to consciousness- our personal, psychological, spiritual, social, cultural, etc. predicaments and what we can do about it.
Which brings me to where I wanted to end up: the reason for optimism, because it looks like, finally, there are some courageous thinkers, writers, journalists and (not so ordinary) ordinary people (e.g. the 'Occupy...' people) who are willing to stick out their neck and call a spade a spade: our society doesn't work, the human spirit is not healthy, endangering the entire earth world as well as humanity as a species.
A few titles worth reading, with regard to what hopefully is going to become a profound transformation: economically, socially, culturally, psychologically, spiritually, rather than just a socio-economic revolution.
Naomi Klein (of the 'Shock Doctrine): How Science Is Telling Us To Revolt (New Statesman 29 Oct 2013, Commondreams.org 29 oct 2013)
Tom Hedges: An Economic Alternative To Exploitative Free Market Capitalism (Commondreams.org,
Feb 2013)
Chris Hedges: -Let's get this class war started (Truthdig.com, 20 oct 2013)
-Our Invisible Revolution (Truthdig.com, 28 Oct 2013)
Ralph Nader: Waiting for the Spark pf Revolution (The Cap Times, April 20 2013)