Posts tagged Culture
From X to Y: Tracking the Evolution of Gen Y Consciousness Through Music
Mar 27th
One of the things we are trying to investigate with this blog is the question, who are we? And because all of us writing on this blog are 30 or under, we’ve naturally been interested in what it means to be Gen Y– how the time period and cultural context we’ve grown up in have shaped the way we see and live in the world than someone who was born earlier.
One of the most illuminating ways to look into who we are as a generation that I’ve found is through music, so I thought I’d give you my take on the evolution of Gen Y consciousness through the popular rock music of the last 20 years. This is just the beginning, but hopefully it will open up some larger questions about who we are as a product of Gen Y culture. Read the rest of this entry »
Spiritual Revolution
Sep 12th
I’ve always found it difficult to articulate why spirituality isn’t just something cool that I’m interested in but that it’s actually something important, an imperative for any individual interested in changing the world to understand and embrace. But last weekend that changed; I experienced something that I think can convey spirituality’s relevance in the 21st century.
Last Saturday I participated in a conference call with 21 other Gen Y’ers (people born between 1978 and 1996), from 7 different countries (America, Canada, Denmark, England, Holland, Iran, and Turkey), who are passionate about the spiritual teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. In fact, most of us on the call had just returned from a 21-day retreat with Andrew Cohen, the creator of Evolutionary Enlightenment, founder of EnlightenNext and inspiration for Merge. On this retreat all of us awoke to the fact that our deepest identity is not personal, national, or even earthly, but instead, Kosmic. We saw that every aspect of our life—our body, mind, culture and planet—is an expression of the evolutionary process that began 14 billion years ago with the big bang. But most importantly, on this retreat we realized that we have a very special role in this process because the universe is actually starting to become conscious and understand itself through us. Therefore we, as the highest expression of the Kosmic evolutionary process that we know of, are now in the drivers seat. Read the rest of this entry »
Out of the Swamp Radio Show – 2/20/09
Feb 26th
Here’s the latest episode from our weekly Friday morning spot on Burlington, Vermont’s “Howie Rose Show”:
Right-click here to download mp3.
And here are some thoughts about the show:
One benefit of our Burlington Radio Show on Friday mornings is that we are starting to bring out and make objective the strands of postmodern culture that shape our ideas, values, and actions, but that we aren’t necessarily aware of. One of these maxims that came out on last Friday’s call was our dependence on balance as a guiding principle–and how diametrically opposed balance and evolution can be.
We spoke about two of the sacred balancing cows of our generation: the balancing of masculine and feminine energy and the quest to balance humanity with our collective impact on the earth. The all too familiar idea is that the world has gotten out of balance due to our over emphasis on industry, consumerism, masculinity, and other modern sins. Now we need to (continue to) restore the balance by bringing in the opposite of those energies–local economy, living simply, femininity, and others.
That the world is suffering from ecological and cultural disasters is not in doubt. Thank God that movements to protect the environment, bring equality, respect cultures and peoples have become part of our value set! These are all movements that I have been part of, as most of us have, to some degree or another. I remember long nights sorting waste in my college’s Physical Plant to determine how many pounds of recyclables were getting tossed by careless college brats. Ahhh, the crusade against the non-recycling hold-outs was a Holy War and I was Earth’s knight in shining armor. With my Nalgene full of superiority juice, my friends and I would snatch discarded plastic bottles out of the trash cans and pile them into the recycling bins, glaring with contempt at the evil sinners–our dorm room neighbors–who we condemned as consciously plotting to destroy the world.
The desire to push back against the problems created by the previous generation’s stunning scientific, economic, and political development was very strong. But that structure of pushing back against progress, (in its own context, modernism IS progressive, least we forget), is in danger of getting in the way now that we are poised to move into a new stage of creative explosion. In this conversation, we are talking about aligning with the universe’s creative energy, as ourselves, a leap forward that will throw anyone off balance. I wonder if it isn’t the knee-jerk attachment to balance in life that is holding us to our postmodern moorings. Perhaps we need to speak about the fact that moving forward into a new value-sphere doesn’t mean giving up the good postmodern values– they will always be part of us. It means giving up our attachment to them, at the expense of adopting new ones.
We are talking about what comes next. As Diane so aptly put on the show (see audio, above), we are talking about the move from postmodern to an evolutionary worldview, not from modern to postmodern.
Looking forward to more!
Gen Y Reads Only 9 Minutes a Day
Feb 26th
…according to this article from Inter Press Service. But I suspect that doesn’t include reading IMs or txts.
Seduced by TV, the Internet, video games and text messaging, young people are famously reading less and less — 15-to 24-year-olds in the United States spend less than nine minutes a day reading for pleasure, according to 2008 U.S. Department of Labour statistics.
WWJGD?
Feb 26th
If you’ve never seen the superb 60 Minutes segment on Generation Y (who writhe about in the deepest, darkest depths of the postmodern swamp) titled “The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming,” it’s definitely worth checking out. And then you can watch this Gen-Y-made spoof of the 60 Minutes report, which poses the question that I’m sure is on many parents’ and employers’ minds: When it comes to Gen Y, what would Jane Goodall do?
Evolving Beyond Neo-Hippie Consciousness
Feb 19th
Boulder, Berkeley, Burlington, Portland, the West Village, Asheville, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Eugene. For any self-respecting grandchild of the 60s, growing up in America as a “neo-hippie” during the final decades of the twentieth century and first decade of the next, these postmodern Xanadus are as magnetic as Paris might have been to an 18th-century revolutionary or New York might have been to a 1920s jazz enthusiast. Famous for being the most evolved expression of the counterculture that emerged during the 60s, these LOHAS (short for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) centers with their organic food stores, biodiesel bumper stickers, vegan literacy, and yoga classes–oh so many yoga classes–are enclaves for young idealists amidst a sea of American modern conservatism, where nothing is left unrecycled, all voices are given a chance to speak, and every coffee shop serves soymilk.
As a card-carrying member of this neo-hippie culture, born in 1978 to politically liberal parents who prided themselves as leaders in the Voluntary Simplicity movement of the 80s, I can remember being entranced by these iconic places…and their lifestyle, seeing them as examples of what a perfect culture might look like.
That was, of course, until I actually moved there. Working on an organic farm just outside the beautiful city of Eugene, Oregon, with a fulfilling marriage, a daily meditation practice, and access to thousands of acres of wilderness only a bike-ride away, it seemed, at least on the surface, as if I had achieved some kind of neo-hippie enlightenment–the perfect merger of my values and my life. But after the initial organic glow wore off, I discovered that underneath the perfectly greened facade, I was lacking something significant: a deeper engagement with life at the most fundamental level, a full embrace of why I am actually here, and–God forbid–a reckoning with what I might actually owe this incredible life process that bore me.
As it turns out, my story is by no means unique. In fact there are hundreds of thousands just like me, each living with a particular twist on this cultural outlook. Some are more into music, for others it’s outdoor adventure sports, for some it’s sustainability, and for others it’s all about social activism. But each has found an almost religiously postmodern orientation around which to build their life. And all share something in common…the deep and often unrecognized yearning for something more.
And that’s the good news. Growing out of this postmodern cultural stage is a new orientation toward the world. Some call it integral. Some call it evolutionary or Kosmocentric. This orientation is based on the recognition that the aspiration for spiritual development and cultural change in the most advanced pockets of human culture on the planet today, are the most recent expression of deep-time process of cosmic evolution that is waking up to itself through us. And for anyone who dares to engage with them, these new perspectives shine an objective light on our current predicament–global, spiritual, culture–and open new doors for what’s possible in the future.
My introduction to this evolutionary worldview came from the American spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, his teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment, and his publication, EnlightenNext magazine (formerly What Is Enlightenment?). Andrew’s message was just radical enough to actually snap me out of this postmodern haze long enough to start to consider the possibility of something much bigger than I had started to settle for. He was asking questions that I always wanted to ask, but never really had words for, like, “What does Enlightenment look like in our postmodern world, particularly in light of all the insights into the cosmic evolutionary process that has led us to this particular moment in history?” and “What does it mean to cultivate true spiritual, moral, and philosophical integrity in a cultural landscape that has never really demanded it from us?” and “How do we create a truly Enlightened culture here on earth?”
I was so compelled by Andrew’s vision that I eventually became his spiritual student–a concept that was previously quite foreign to me–moving to his spiritual community in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, and joining the editorial staff ofEnlightenNext magazine. But in spite of my hope that by leaving my old life behind I would also leave behind the old cultural assumptions that had caused me to seek out something new, I’ve discovered that it isn’t quite that simple. Every day, I’m amazed at how much my ideas, reactions, opinions, and aspirations are shaped by deeply ingrained cultural structures. And I’ve learned that to truly create something new in culture—something fresh, creative, and unbound by history—what is required is a deeper, ongoing grappling with these cultural strands that weave us…which I’ve found to be a very challenging—and enlightening—process.
In order to take this on, earlier this year I teamed up with several of my EnlightenNext colleagues, Diane Bensel, Tom Huston, and my wife, Christiana Briddell–themselves products of a similar time and place as I am–to explore how this new evolutionary perspective has emerged from and conflicts with the neo-hippie consciousness that resides deeply within our cultural DNA. The primary venue for this exploration is a Friday morning community radio show out of Burlington, Vermont—one of the supremest of the supreme neo-hippie incubators.
Each week we explore, with our host, FP Cassini–himself an aficionado of Evolutionary Enlightenment–a different topic relating to the yeasty border between this new emerging evolutionary perspective and the postmodern worldview that it is trying to move beyond, including “Is Wal-Mart really that bad?,” “Meditation as a foundation for a creative life,” “What is the purpose of a romantic relationship if you don’t believe in soulmates?,” and “What if the Universe actually doesn’t exist for your own personal happiness and well-being?” This blog was born out of our inquiry, in an effort to broaden our conversation beyond the small listening audience of the show, where we can expand on the questions and inquiries pursued on the show, post audio recordings of the show itself, and hopefully start a lively dialogue among other postmodern souls who also feel a deep yearning for something…more.
We hope that the inquiry will be a fruitful one for neo-hippies and their close cousins the world over who are interested in understanding the cultural landscape in which we all live in order to open new doors for what’s possible. It’s time for at least a few of us to step forward, stretch our legs, and boldly leap out of the swamp of the postmodern status quo.
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