Spanda Journal, VI,2 | Creativity & Collective Enlightenment

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c r e a t i v i t y & c o l l e c t i v e

e n l i g h t e n m e n t

E D I T O R I A L - s a h la n m o m o VMesocreativity

c ha rl e s tart 1Enlightenment and Creativity:Grappling with the Angel/Devilof «Non-Duality»

ro s a z u bi z ar r eta 9Participatory Public Microcosm:Diversity and Empathy as Generatorsof Creative Wholeness

g e ra rd j . p uc c io 19Democratizing Creativity: How CreativeThinking Contributes to Individual,Organizational and Societal Success

m ó ni c a edwa rd s -s c h ac ht e r 27On the Interrlationships between Creativity,Learning and Social Innovation

lo u is e s u n d e r ar j a n 35Indigenizing Creativity: A CreativeSolution to Orientalism in Cross-Cultural Psychology

s tan i s l av pan i n 41Notion of Evolution and Enlightenmentin the late Nineteenth and earlyTwentieth Century Esoteric Literature

pau l vo n wa rd 47Collective and Evolving HumanConsciousness

s t ev e m c i n to s h 51Toward a Method for EvolvingConsciousness

p i e rr e l év y 59Innovation in Coding

A B S T R A C T S :: S U M M A R I E S 67

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g | C O N T E N T

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year vi, no. 2 � july/december 2015

SPANDA.ORG/PUBLICATIONS

1 | i, 1. 2007 Multicultural Youth

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5 | ii, 1. 2008 Hunger. A Clima(c)tic Perspective

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18 | vi, 1. 2015 Systemic Change

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S P A N D A J O U R N A L V I , 2 /2 0 1 5 ∞ CREATIVITY & COLLECTIVE ENLIGHTENMENT ∞ 3

P | b a C K N u m b E r s

R | N E x T i s s u E 7 | C a p T i O N s

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all works of artreproduced in this issue,

unless otherwise specified,are from

The Lady and The Unicorn

(La dame à la licorne) the modern titlegiven to a series of six tapestries woven

into wool and silk with the mille-fleurs stylein flanders from cartoons drawn in Paris around1500, and interpreted as depicting the five senses:

sight ~ hearing ~ smell ~ taste ~ and touch.e sixth piece displays the words

«À mon seul désir».e tapestry’s meaning has been unriddled

as representing love or understanding.e set,

on display in theMusée National du Moyen Âge in Paris,

is considered one of the greatest worksof art of the Middle ages in Europe.(credit: commons.wikimedia.org)

ù

L A D A M E À L A L I C O R N E ∞ à m o n s e u l d è s i r

roM thE MESotEric PErSPEctivE, crEativity iS

what brings together, and the outcome, of thepolarities merging on the osmotic hymenealmembrane between the inner and the outerworlds – dimensions, realities, realms – joiningthem as a unified reality field into conscious-ness. Seeing things for real by merging the twoviewpoints in an act of awareness annihilates

antinomy, definitely a creative token enacted by the cos-mic energy.The Sun is shining today, what a relief.is thickening of the human perceptionwhile changing skin, transforming andtransmuting into a new being, is one ofa major feats in the process of collectiveconsciousness becoming self-conscious.in such a transition, new organs as wellare shaping up to perceive, frame and in-form the new function being defined andbrought into being.Misnomer, dammapada, the path of the righteous,are coming to mind. until our actions generatevikarma, they are not ‘clean’ enough, not yetkarma-free. any abstraction, as purity or beauty,not embodying at full its corresponsive tangiblepresence in the factual dimension, is read as anideal, partaking of, and to an idea, intangible byits own definition. By whom definitions, shouldthen enquire we? By nature? Natura naturans,or natura naturata? Both? or none of the two?unclear.Still a life-sharp surgery on the whole is in place:a rapture, a throb in consciousness, and it’s alldone. as it were a healing performance, thewhole bloody human history unfolds and its over;the conatus of reunification, the élan, the ent-elechy, the vocation, the call is right here, implant-ed in the soul before its very beginning in thepretemporal void. a vocation to move further hasimprinted its own potency pulling beyond abstrac-tions, pre-sensing unity before dispensing life. eBreath of the compassionate (an-Nafs ar-Rahman)is bipolar: in-take—out-take, inspire and expire,com-passio and love, for the other and our own self.a subtler energy than matter, intangible to the cur-rent scientific tools calibrated on the impaired per-

ception of a shunned reality, needs to gain fullswing at the fore of the human experience.higher and lower frequencies are coming onstage perceived as poles, unless the viewpointrests in their middle sharing both views. notthe impaired understanding of the contempo-rary quest for a third eye atrophied since long bylack of practical function, rather the prospectivedepth of the spiritual-material multidimensionalstance allowing to perceive the overtime dimen-sional whole in this historical time... — and a

few other interesting glances unworthy tobe mentioned here, but definitely to be

pursued in some other context.We enjoy high frequencies in all theirmanifestations, aspects, respects andextensions: unplugged. e traditionalanimic architecture is base to all suc-

cessive emanations, emergences. ehighly developed human symbolic func-

tion of the evolutionary take, seems to be aspecific trait of the human species since the primevalchasm, which preinstalled Free-will, a sort of a gPSdevice oriented to navigate to the cosmic Will. as ifit were to catch up on the same vibrational field,allowing the integral perception of reality, until thenin the bare hands of Moirai’s dictate, of ananke,Notwendigkeit, of necessity obscured by the veil ofMaya embroidered with elegance in the soul. Drawing closer to one another who by station of lifewere set at the greatest distance from each other; gratu-ities gathered along the converging journey with amplestore of enjoyments and contemplation, affording roomfor details and pre-competitive foolhardy; and drainedand dried by an impossible truth fed by the unwither-ing tree of Knowledge showered under the fountain ofWisdom, unavoidably devoid of void, a gift, a sponta-neous manifestation of Love thrived in the garden.this Earth is vast, yet small for all the universes athand. Dramatis personæ, Love&Light are very much indemand in this heavy dark sublunar world. is isnothing but hell, the obliteration of all individual-collective-cosmic consciousness, eligible only tohigh-developed unipolar sense-bearers... nonsense!— Exactly! nonsense.

a child dream: utopia.

E D I T O R I A L

m e s o c r e a t i v i t y

S P A N D A J O U R N A L V I , 2 /2 0 1 5 ∞ CREATIVITY & COLLECTIVE ENLIGHTENMENT ∞ V

To be truly ignorant,be content with your own

knowledge.chunag tzu (300 Bc).

F

We ought to unite our endeavours into a criticalmass to transmute permanently further the col-lective consciousness endowed with its awarenessof being, without loosing ourselves in thelabyrinth of thoughts where neither Minos norChartres are to be found, while Ariadne isthreading her lace of pure light in a soul inter-woven into the fabric of life, graced and drawnbeyond duality, afore the original chasm intoHeaven and Hell, before Fiat Lux, Kun, and theAct, the Beginning, the Big Bang: the first mani-festation, emanation, consolidation, and embodi-ment of creativity in the Néant; perceived in adialogical stance depending on the soul’s lati-tude, yet manifesting and unmanifesting at oncethe undifferentiated Void.From the simplest and unmanifested to the man-ifested and complex, with a granted first classreturn ticket from Aleph to Omega & return,with just a few stop-over in due time for the sakeof wisdom and her sisters: the Golden letters of theAlpha-Beth of creation: the 22, 24, 28 or 48 original

sacred emanations writing history and hyerohistoryat once in both worlds; synchronically inscribingmesohistory in our times of return, transcribing ourdaily action in sacred letters into a non-linear pro-gression towards unity, alla zingaresca so to say,into the mesoteric notime at the core of the twoworlds. Good and Bad aren’t contrary, they arecomplementary co-creators within G-d’s activecontemplation of itself, from which a beem ofcreative light is manifested in the mirror. I sent my requests to the unshakable, and almostnone answered my quest, but you. Shaping theinvisible into form, in-forming the unshapeableinto shape, materializing spirit and spiritualizingmatter at once, transmuting subtle energies to finerdegrees to dissolve into the unavoidable void. Indeedour encounter was in depth, but not breadth enoughto contain all possible futures. Virgil, the lyric face ofLatinity, guided clarity, vision, and direction; sin-cerity, patience, and submission; discipline, resilience,action and joy, while Maya was obliterating Freyjawith her mantel. e core of the innerscape, the soulof spirituality, the professional mystical path of seekersand finders, the beginning of all timeless journey wasthere, we savoured it... yet to digest.Creativity meets challenges and draws innovativesolutions, interrelations of transpersonal awaken-ings, intersubjective space, time and notime, cul-ture. We Consciousness is emerging, instantiationingits eruption into matter, invisibly shaping its meta-text imbedded in the pinnacle of joy. Creativity is aself-sparking unity flashing in bringing together theworlds: the original quivering self-conscious pulsationgiving rise to the manifestation, and its propagation inaction. Emanation. Expansion.To share creativity and insights with you was my assumption,my inbreathing aspiration; you were the breath modulatingyourself into me: Ata & Ani, the undivided Androgynousbefore engendering polarity, the complementary identitiesin unity of this couple of old. Enlightenment is taking place in concert, at individualand collective level. Is no longer a mater of scatteredfolks here and there singly achieving and maintaining ahigher state of collective consciousness, rather is con-sciousness’s conscious endeavour in becoming self-conscious, unfolding itself at collective level in sharingthe common ground of the human manifested condi-tion, co-unfolding the creation by conscious agentsof change, puppeteer and puppet at once weavingour mortal destiny out of eternity. e concept itself of isolated bodhisattva does nolonger hold true, we all are, who more some less,

E D I T O R I A L ∞ CREATIVITY & COLLECTIVE ENLIGHTENMENT ∞ VI

*Arguably,

metonymicallyand chthonically moved

by personal interest she couldn’t go further.His last message was way too cryptical:she didn’t take it into the right place.Displaced by a traumatic assault,

she didn’t turn the front to her lover,nor her back: she wasn’t there;

still much into the painof her own existence,

yetin need to be

amended:soon.

A lesson:in spirit of serving

Pacta sunt servanda,souls surgery of Beauty:

the first aesthetical-ethical emanation;the ecstatic orgasm of divine consciousness;

the residual foundational substratumof all manifested worlds,

What else?What else are you asking for?

Your beauty isn’t enough,I seek beauty, truth, and goodness at once,the paradigm of this chalice still holds true,

∞ for me at l[e]ast. ∞

consciously co-creating the critical mass to move fur-ther in this commonly shared direction. Consciously.e stillness of creation takes place in notime, beforeand beyond all time, in the present. Being at the core of the innerscape land, the mesotericdimesnion is the most advanced human condition,certainly not its final stage – which does not exist assuch anyway – as we are hazardously ongoing on atransitional pace, steady, fresh, and each time anew.is point in time is allowing the élan to reach out to itsfurther home, demeure and di-mansion, to temporarilyand finally perform its closing dance-step next to nihil: atthe entrance point of Aleph hermetic door. e space-time fault granting access to the next collective tier isnow wide shut open. Janua cœeli, the door of the gods,and Janua inferni, the door of men, are joining top-down and bottom-up, at mid-course, to inspire theirmiddle outcome on the mesoteric domain; igniting theflow of energies form one realm into the other, with itsdistinctive unmistakable back and fro’ swing, to ensurea safely landing on the Sun, Shams, the Self. Innova-tion and spirituality are joining forces for the commongood: creativity is knocking at the door: who is goingto let her in? Who? Me, You We? I, ou ee? Wetrice blow at the gate before the two guardians angels –the polarities – presiding over the threshold woulddare ask further. We granted them permission ofleave, and we gladly stepped in. Into paradise, nextdoor to heaven, ready to perform our speciality: theacrobatic six-winged triple-jump into immortality.Yet, still we are here, encoding forward-thinkingand, ultimately, co-building our new home aftersuch a long journeying astray. is is a time towiden the heart in welcoming the other in our-selves, giving free way to the feminine energy ofaccouil and compassio very much in demandnowadays. We all are migrants, drifting fromone landstage to the next, until a welcomingland is lastly found to rest the bones of our skele-ton, the supporting structure of the soul, beforeagain and again transmuting its worldly matteracross the excelsis thresholds to allow all compo-nents to return to their elemental realms.Age is shaping life into death. Past the WinterSolstice of life, let’s spring again high: still yang ison stage, but it is yin to lead this time around.is is the time of inversion of polarities, the sea-son of a collectively leaping into our next phase:the unfolding exponential yin logarithmic growt-ing into collective consciousness. Even thoughspeaking of time in such a context doesn’t reallymake much sense, as we all are impressed by theEmpress in us, by her imprint.

As a matter of fact it’s hard to deal with such atopic in a few pages and the short lapse betweenone issue and the next. Indeed this is a brief collec-tion of dots for friends and colleagues to unfold,and to build on further and farther. A pity thatsome couldn’t make it for lack of time. e manon the roof was pledging for a sign from heaven tosave him from his underworld deluge, but he missedthe three rescue vessels heaven had sent him, as hedidn’t recognize them. Lack of awareness. Awarenessof our creative action between the two worlds, co-cre-ating the next tier, level, realm or dimension – choseyour preferred one – but, please, let’s move one. eseare the last available chances to really start-jump intothe next phase: no fear, blank, neutral, transparent, atpeace, fresh, just as it is, achieving unity in life. In closing: some interesting aspects of collective enlight-enment are its transmissibility by way of catalysing reso-nance fields; and how creative humans can conceive,impart and pass on this spark to their forebears anddescendant while healing and enlivening the collectiveconsciousness. To be born form awakened parents is nota guaranty, as indeed there are many orders and grada-tions of enlightenment yet to be awaken – namely, onefor each plane of consciousness – often marred by cogni-tive limitations as resting on personal experience, by nomeans perfect and by all means perfectible.

∑

Here is presented the first series of relevant views on the topic – moreto come soon – seen by our authors from their differing anglesand perspectives, each forging a distinct tile of the mosaic, andtogether tessellating the whole into coherence; for your delightand enjoyment, inspiration and empowerment, all smallthings to make a great life.

8 ∑ 8

S P A N D A J O U R N A L V I , 2 /2 0 1 5 ∞ CREATIVITY & COLLECTIVE ENLIGHTENMENT ∞ VII

T A N T R A A P P L E

** *

Looking forward to awake at dawnaroused in each other arms,

face to face:your breast on my chest

teasing our tongues in a dance.The breeze of your skin in my soulchallenging the rhythmic pulsation.Imbued by waves of delight,you in me : ∞ : me in you.

¿Who witnessed the ecstaticcoming of the royal pair,

if not We?

*

L A D A M E À L A L I C O R N E ∞ à m o n s e u l d è s i r ~ d e t a i l

dr charles T. Tart pioneered thefield of consciousness studiesdecades ago, with his classicbest-selling anthology alteredStates of consciousness, inprint for more than twentyyears and considered as one of

the one hundred most influen-tial psychology books of the twen-

tieth century. he initiated severalimportant lines of research in parapsy-

chology, including teaching reliable eSP functioning and the firstmodern laboratory studies of out-of-body experiences. alteredStates of consciousness (1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies(1975), became widely used texts that were instrumental inallowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.Tart studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts instituteof Technology before electing to become a psychologist. hereceived his doctoral degree in psychology from the University ofnorth carolina at chapel hill in 1963, and then received post-doctoral training in hypnosis research with Professor ernest r.hilgard at Stanford University. he is currently a core FacultyMember at the institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and aSenior research Fellow of the institute of noetic Sciences, aswell as Professor emeritus of Psychology at the davis campusof the University of california, where he served for 28 years.he was the first holder of the Bigelow chair of conscious-ness Studies at the University of nevada in Las Vegas andhas served as a Visiting Professor in east-West Psychology atthe california institute of integral Studies, as an instructorin Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the Universityof Virginia, and a consultant on government fundedparapsychological research at the Stanford research insti-tute (now known as Sri international).as well as a laboratory researcher, Professor Tart hasbeen a student of the Japanese martial art of aikido (inwhich he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdji-eff ’s work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological andspiritual growth disciplines. his primary goal is tobuild bridges between the scientific and spiritual com-munities and to help bring about a refinement andintegration of Western and eastern approaches forknowing the world and for personal and social growth.home page & archives: www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/.

oTh “crEaTiviTy” aND “ENlighTENMENT” arE

probably impossible to adequately define,transcending ordinary rational thoughtas they do, but we can still usefully talkand write about them, – hopefully inways that help us manifest them, rather

than diversions from what’s important. a com-mon way people talk about what enlightenmentconsists of is that it’s about transcending duality.i’ve been struggling with what that non-dualityidea/accomplishment means for half a century,and submit the following little essay as perhapshelping to clarify…in 1972 i published what was probably my mostcreative contribution to the expansion of knowl-edge, an essay proposing the creation of state-spe-cific sciences. The article has been reprinted inmany places1. Stripping it down to the barestessentials, if you ask what the essence of scienceis, it’s a set of procedures for (1) better observationof what happens in reality and (2) for creating,testing, and refining theories, explanations, as towhy things happen the way we observed them to.what is usually left out in thinking about science,though, is that the process of essential science isdone by human beings, done by creatures with char-acteristics, both innate and acquired, that can makethem more sensitive to some kinds of things, less sen-sitive or blind other kinds of things, able to reasonand see clearly about some kinds of relationships, butnot about others.Besides characteristics inherent to all human beings,each of us has been socialized into a particular cultureand so is biased to observe and think about things inaccordance with the values of that culture. Starting in the1960s, though, many people in our western culture expe-rienced drastic, temporary alterations in the ways theirminds functioned, surprising, stimulating, and sometimesfrightening new ways of perceiving and understanding.Psychedelic drugs were a primary factor in this for many.when you look at the way the mind can change its func-tioning in these various altered states of consciousness(aScs), you realize that the “ordinary” or “normal” statefor any particular culture, including ours, has manysemi-arbitrary, sensitizing and biasing characteristics. Sodoing science (or knowledge acquisition in general) inone’s ordinary state of consciousness is doing it with, asit were, a specialized instrument.By analogy, it would be as if all astronomy were donethrough telescopes whose lenses were made from akind of glass that was inherently red tinted. Thosetelescopes would be more sensitive to certain kinds oflight, less sensitive to others. There’s nothing wrongwith the observations and theories based on them,

S P A N D A J O U R N A L V I , 2 /2 0 1 5 ∞ CREATIVITY & COLLECTIVE ENLIGHTENMENT

C H A R L E S T A R T

e n l i g h t e n m e n t a n d c r e a t i v i t y :grappling with the angel/devil of «non-duality»

B

made with the red-biased telescopes, of course, butit’s false and misleading to assume that they give us acomplete picture. So what i basically proposed is thatwe develop detailed knowledge of various aSc’s, thestrengths and weaknesses of each of those, and thenpractice science within each of those. That would give

us a variety of “instruments,” and so give us addition-al ways of observing and thinking.as one outcome of my recently posting an essay2 onthe aSc (induced by pain) origins of my proposal tocreate state specific sciences, my friend and col-league, russell Targ, physicist and leading parapsy-chologist, sent me some very stimulating com-ments. Targ is not only one of the pioneers of theremote viewing technique, which was profitablyused by uS government intelligence agencies fordecades before public knowledge of it ignitedpolitical reactions that ended the programs, butalso a student of Buddhism and other non-dualspiritual paths. The core of his comments had todo with whether my proposal for state-specificsciences amounted to advocating for “non-duali-ty” as called for in various spiritual disciplines.Non-duality is a big deal in spiritual seeking cir-cles in the west today, such a big deal that youcould call it a buzzword. Put “non-duality” inthe title of something and it immediately lookslike the highest kind of spiritual material, deserv-ing special attention. But i’ve never felt i intellec-tually understood what non-duality is really allabout, much less experientially understanding it.Sometimes when i don’t understand something iwrite about it, in the hope that trying to writeclearly will organize and clarify my own thoughts,and i’ve done that occasionally with non-duality.This is one more attempt to grapple with non-duality. has it made me clearer? well i think i’m

somewhat clearer on what i don’t know, and that’sprobably progress. i present it here for whateverstimulation value it has, and hope someday i willwrite something based on a real understanding ofit. whatever i don’t understand, i do know thatthe people who write and talk about it say non-duality is very important!

here – with his permission – are excerpts frommy correspondence with russell Targ, with hiswords in � italic preceded by a manicule.Dear russ,you’ve put that word “non-duality” in my mind withyour email of the 6th, and while i usually try not toconfuse myself by thinking about it, i’ve decided tograpple with it some here in the hope that this mightclarify things for me, and if i put this as an essay onmy blog or publish it, perhaps clarify things for some-one else. i would value your response, of course, but ifthis is more than you wanted i understand! :-)

G R A P P L I N G W I T H T H E A N G E L / D E V I L

O F “ N O N - D U A L I T Y ”

for the reader who understands something of this, thetitle, evoking the dualistic image of a grappler and some-thing to be grappled with, may make you think the fol-lowing will be a sophisticated discussion of non-duali-ty, or perhaps immediately demonstrate that this writerdoesn’t have a clue as to what non-duality is about. idon’t know which it is. hopefully it will be useful instimulating thought.

D U A L I T Y A N D N O N - D U A L I T Y :

�i am emphasizing the importance of experience tointernalizing non-dual teachings. So, i felt it was abig coincidence for me, to immediately come upon

C A H R L E S T A R T ∞ ENLIGHTENMENT AND CREATIVITY ∞ 2

figurE 1 ~ Wrestlers.

your e-mail on state specific consciousness, which itake to be the same thing.ah, you challenge me nicely russ! when you say“[…] take to be the same thing,” my rational mind isused to dealing with that sort of comparison or equa-tion, but, as you point out later in your email, i don’tthink our ordinary rational mind can ever satisfactori-ly define or understand what we mean by non-dualteachings. My ordinary mind has certainly tried it overand over again for decades and not gotten anywhere!To start, i’ve never been sure exactly what “duality”means in the context of non-duality. in some contexts, the meaning is obvious. if i’m meet-ing someone for the first time, for example, and besideswhat i hear from them and say to them i’m constantlydesperately thinking and worrying about “am i makinga good impression? will i be liked? am i making a foolof myself?” i’m certainly in a highly dualistic state ofmind, evaluating most, if not all of my perceptions ofthe moment in relation to how it reflects on me and myhopes and fears. while there are certainly many occasions in life whenyou do need to be concerned with what kind ofimpression you’re making on people, as it has conse-quences for the relationship and your life, to havethis kind of duality happen compulsively much ofthe time can certainly be a source of useless suffer-ing. if someone says to me “look to the north,there’s some really beautiful cloud formationsthere,” and i look to the north and to see andenjoy those beautiful cloud formations, i’m fairlywell cantered in ordinary reality and functioningwell. if i don’t really perceive those clouds verywell and am caught up in my worries about theimpression i’m making, it’s totally useless suffer-ing. i’m missing something beautiful, and rein-forcing my habit of worrying about what kindof impression i’m making.So far i’ve been talking about what we might callin conventional western terms neurotic dualism,and it’s quite understandable. we think it’s gen-erally helpful and intelligent to pay some atten-tion to how you are presenting yourself in vari-ous situations, but neurotic or downright crazyto be stuck in that.

M Y S T I C A L E X P E R I E N C E

O F U N I T Y A N D F L O W :

on the other hand, i have read numerousreports of “mystical experiences,” at the otherend of the spectrum from neurotic dualism,where people report that they felt at one with theuniverse, and that this feeling of unity was quitewonderful. Not having had that experience myself,

i doubt that i understand it very well, even thoughit sounds very desirable. i also suspect there maybe a variety of experiences that are all described as“non-dual,” but may be significantly different.Extraordinary experiences are rare for most of us,and we aren’t trained in a good vocabulary fordescribing them or discriminating one fromanother when they occur.in between these two ends of the spectrum, neu-rotic duality to mystical oneness, i think we’veall had lots of experiences that, in retrospect, wemight describe as at least somewhat non-dual,because all of our conscious experience for awhile was involved with our perceptions of thesituation we were in and whatever actions wetook that were, hopefully, appropriate to the sit-uation. i think this is Mihaly csikszentmihalyi’s(1975) flow experience that started gettingdescribed in psychology a few decades ago, andi’m sure we’ve all experienced such flow occa-sionally. at the times it’s happened to me, i don’tparticularly notice it as any special kind of experi-ence, i’m involved in what i’m doing, i’m usuallydoing it reasonably well, that’s nice, but it’s no bigdeal. This is a kind of experience i’ve noticed thatwhen it’s happening is not generally perceived asanything special, but in retrospect may be consid-ered special in contrast to one’s usual experiences. i can imagine a person having more and more flowexperiences, and that would be very rewarding. iscontinuous flow experiences what is meant by“enlightenment?” of course that word enlightenmentis used in a variety of ways, but i suspect this may be apart of what is meant at times. My understanding falters, though, when what we’retalking about seems to jump from qualities of experi-ence to ultimate statements about the absolute nature ofreality. i know people who have had mystical unityexperiences certainly think that’s the way reality reallyis, but what that conviction means for those of us whohaven’t had it, i don’t know.when Tibetan Buddhists, e.g., go on and on about non-duality being a, if not the, major quality of enlighten-ment and ultimate reality, the dharmakaya, i find itvaguely inspiring, but it doesn’t really make sense to me.Sometimes when they stop talking so grandly about,say, the absolutely pristine and wonderful nature of rigpaand also casually mention enlightenment or experienc-ing the nature of mind is all quite “ordinary,” i thinkthey mean something like a flow state – which indeed,at least in my limited experience, is no big deal at allat the time that you’re in it. although sometimes ithink they’re using “ordinary” in a prescriptive, ratherthan a descriptive manner, you’re supposed to devel-op in a way so you’ll always be in that kind of state.


Except of course you shouldn’t be striving for any-thing, as any kind of striving is inherently dualisticand prevents that non-dual state from happening…and intellectual honesty for me when i think aboutthat is to say “huh?”Thinking about duality from an ordinary perspective,the practically useful working perspective that thephysical world has a reality independent of our beliefsabout it, duality is essential for life. if a friend says“let’s eat!” it’s important that i instantly discriminatethat my arm, even though it’s made of meat, is me, andit would be very unpleasant and dangerous to take abite of it, whereas the sandwich on the table is not me,and it’s fine to eat it.

D E L I B E R A T E , C O N S C I O U S D U A L I T Y

A S S P I R I T U A L P R A C T I C E ?

along another line, thinking about duality and non-duality from a spiritual perspective i’m moderatelyfamiliar with, g. i. gurdjieff ’s Fourth Way teachings3,the primary way of psychological and spiritual growth ifeel i understand in that system is to deliberately splityour awareness into several aspects, you could call it adualistic or multiple-istic. Typically you intentionallykeep about 10% of your moment-to-moment aware-ness on body sensation, such as from your arms andlegs, about 40 or 50% on what you’re seeing, and therest on what you’re hearing. in my experience, thisproduces a useful form of what we could call dual-ism, in that there is a clear distinction betweenself/inside and world/outside, and consequentlymore accurate perception of sensory input, pri-marily vision and hearing and its distinctivenessfrom internal reactions. i believe this mainlycomes about through this deliberate split chan-nelling of attentiveness and the maintainedintention involved: monitoring something likearm and leg sensation keeps some consciousnessgrounded in immediate body sensation and,since body sensation exists in the here-and-now,grounds at least part of one’s experience in thehere-and-now. although there is no consciousemphasis on striving for the this outcome, thismakes you, in my experience, more sensitive tofleeting feelings and emotions that might other-wise be missed, and so more accurate in yourengagement with the world, as you’re less likelyto be carried off by emotional reactions that ifyou weren’t doing this practice.russell Targ continues: Padmasambhava, in theeighth century is teaching the non-dual view thatmind is spaciousness, just as there is no separationbetween waves and the ocean. Mind as spaciousness iswhat he means by naked awareness, in his great medi-tation guide book.

while i have a lot of conceptual trouble with “non-dual,” i’m much happier thinking about and usingthe word “spaciousness.” Spaciousness (and, moreusually, my lack of it) is something i have directexperience of. My ordinary mind is not spacious.Perceptions of the outside world or my bodykeep coming in, each generates one or moreinternal reactions, and seems to be no apparentgap between these internal reactions, so myconscious experience seems continuous, buthardly spacious. internal reactions and reac-tions (cognitive and/or emotive) to reactionstend to crowd out clear perception of the outerworld and my own internal processes, using upall my capacity for awareness. i remember in the 1970s i repeatedly took a classon basic meditation from lama Tarthang Tulkuat the Nyingma institute4 in Berkeley. he occa-sionally used the phrase “the gap between

thoughts.” i thought that was a fascinating concept! Butit was only a concept for me, there were certainly nogaps between any of my thoughts! Back then when try-ing to learn various basic forms of concentrative andinsight meditation, i thought one had to learn to createquiet spaces between thoughts, something indeed advo-cated in many meditation instructions, and i was so badat it that i eventually gave up even attempting to medi-tate. i decided meditation required some kind of specialtalent that some people had for creating a quiet mind, atalent that clearly i didn’t have. it was only years laterafter instructions from meditation teacher Shinzenyoung5, who i think is one of the best meditationteachers in the world, that i actually found vipassanameditation to be a pleasant and useful activity, andnow i practice it regularly. and while i don’t make abig deal of it, i do occasionally observe gaps betweenthoughts. it’s possible, and spacious.


figurE 2 ~ yin-yang.

Q U A L I T I E S

O F

S P A C I O U S N E S S

returning to the idea of spaciousness, though, i distin-guish at least two qualities of spaciousness in my ownexperience. one is the obvious one of less activethoughts, or even apparently quiet temporal gapsbetween distinct thoughts. Not unconsciousness, as i’mstill aware that i exist in a quiet way, and i may be receiv-ing sensory input, but there are noticeable drops in theintensity of my internal processes, sometimes such that iwould even call my mind momentarily silent. The second quality of spaciousness deals with the way iexperience what i might call the “stickiness” of thoughts.My ordinary experience is that one thought automati-cally generates other thoughts, reactions to sensationsgenerate even more thoughts or emotions, the process iscontinuous and seems like it will never end. But some-times when i’m experiencing some spaciousness, thequieter periods between ordinary thoughts and percep-tions are not empty, there may be other thoughts orperceptions that come and go, but they don’t auto-matically grab my awareness and force further reac-tions the way they normally do. They are just lesssticky, they flow through my mind without stimulat-ing other thoughts that stick to them... Perhaps theyare what the Tibetans call self-liberated…

N A K E D A W A R E N E S S ,F I N D I N G M I N D

Targ continues from Padmasambhava: Mind asspaciousness is what he means by naked awareness,in his great meditation guide book. if i take “naked awareness” to be the basic natureof mind to experience things, potentially any-thing, this line of thought gets interesting. Thereis a meditation exercised used in Tibetan Bud-dhism where the student is asked to try to findtheir own mind. i have tried it occasionally, and,as the texts state, i can’t find any thing in partic-ular, any distinct form of experience that i couldcall my centre of awareness, my identity! if mymind is in its usual active state i can certainlyfind content of mind in any instant, and thatcontent, as i noted above, is normally apparentlycontinuous even if i’m not particularly aware thati’m experiencing content at the moment. whentrying a task, though, i like to succeed, so some-times i suddenly look for my mind when mymind is relatively quiet and i still can’t find any-thing, that is i can’t find any thing in particular thati would say this is mind6. yet i am quietly aware

that i’m aware, but this awareness is, while kind ofobvious and not at all special when i practice it,not at all like the kind of awareness of mental con-tent, of specific things, either specific things per-ceived through the senses or generated internally.There is a spacious quality to this kind of empti-ness of mind. in my limited experience i would-n’t say there’s any specific quality to it, like ordi-nary things or thoughts or emotions have, andyet it’s there. The table to my right as i writethis, for example, has a specific size and loca-tion, my looking for something to illustrate hasintentional qualities, there’s a slight feeling ofsatisfaction that this is a good illustration ofwhat i’m trying to say. Sometimes when i wonder about the value ofmeditative training that lets you experience spa-ciousness more often, i find myself creating ananalogy that it’s like a button early personalcomputers all had on the front panel labelledreset. Those early computers often locked upbecause too many programmes were runningsimultaneously and conflicted with each other forlimited resources. Pushing the button cleared outall running programs from memory, so you werereset back to zero, back to the full spaciousness ofyour computer’s capacity. This is certainly parallel with what happens in ordi-nary life. So often we have several things on ourmind at once, they get into recursive loops that aresticky and drawing more and more of our mentalresources, looping around on themselves. attempts toquiet things down and focus too often create morereactions, and were stuck in these noisy loops. To beable, when you have some skill, that i think developsfrom gaining some proficiency at concentrative orvipassana meditation, to “back up” to the spaciousnessthe constitutes the basic nature of mind may let thosesticky loops die down, may reset your mind so you cannow focus in a more useful and desirable way. So, yes,your “Mind as spaciousness is what he means by nakedawareness, in his great meditation guide book.” Makessome sense to me, although i’m sure there’s far morebeing referred to by Padmasambhava7 than what i’vewritten about here.Targ notes the connection between my essay on thedevelopment of the state-specific sciences proposal andnon-dual teachings, which stimulated him to write me[…] the importance of experience to internalizing non-dual teachings. So, i felt it was a big coincidence for me,to immediately come upon your e-mail on state specificconsciousness, which i take to be the same thing.


N O N - D U A L I S M A N D

S T A T E - S P E C I F I C S C I E N C E S :

coming more specifically now to the question ofhow much my proposal for the establishment ofstate specific sciences8 is advocating the importanceof internalizing non-dualteachings, yes and no, noand yes, it is and it isn’t.i’ve said i don’t think muchof my understanding ofnon-duality now, and wheni proposed developing statespecific sciences severaldecades ago, my under-standing was even less.what i basically did in myproposal was review thebasic procedure of essentialscience, scientific inquiry foracquiring and refiningknowledge. (1) observewhat you’re interested incarefully, always try toimprove the quality of yourobservation. (2) Devise theo-ries that make sense of yourobservations, use sensiblelogic in them so your ideashang together. (3) Don’t stop with the satisfaction offeeling that intellectually you understand things,but work the logic of your theory to make predic-tions about things you haven’t yet observed and goout and test those predictions. if they come true,great, keep developing your theory. (4) if theydon’t modify your theory, or come up with a newone altogether. and (5) meanwhile, since yourmind may have all sorts of peculiar quirks youhave no idea exist, keep sharing all these stepswith peers who can check your observationscheck your thinking, check your predictions.That way we as scientists, knowledge seekers, gofrom poor observations and fuzzy ideas aboutwhy things happened to more clear and preciseobservations and understandings that makemore sense of them. which in most cases willallow us to then apply our understandings forhuman benefit. a basic point of my proposal, though, brieflysketched at the beginning of this essay, was thatscience is normally practiced in “normal” con-sciousness, but we now know that there are manyarbitrary, culturally constructed aspects of cultur-ally normal consciousness that sensitize us in someways and blind and bias us in other ways. we alsoknow that there exist altered states of consciousness

(aScs) in which perception and thinking seem towork quite differently, so if we could apply basicscientific method in a variety of aScs, we wouldget a much wider range of understandings. i didn’tsay too much more about this potential outcome

in the original proposal,because i knew most of myreaders would be biasedtoward a materialistic viewthat only what is physical isreal, or is amenable to sci-entific inquiry. So if theywould want to think i wastalking primarily about aScobservations of physicalphenomena fine, but myproposal deliberately left itquite open to take internalexperiences as primarythings you observed, experi-mented with, and theorizedabout. Thus all sorts of sys-tems of yoga, meditationsystems, and the like couldbecome “inner sciences,”rather than simply religiousbeliefs or, as i argued in theproposal, not remain statespecific technologies but

become specific state specific sciences. So yes to Targ’squestion, systems which led people to experiencenon-dual consciousness could have its practitionerspractice essential science and lead to all sorts of othernew knowledge. Beyond this “yes,” i could argue that the proposal forstate-specific sciences is actually wider than any particu-lar spiritual path in some respects, unless we assumethat the “enlightenment” which can result from a spiri-tual path constitutes a permanent state where everythingworth knowing is known so no more acquisition, refine-ment and application of knowledge is need… But itwould take us too far afield now to start down that path.okay, there are many interesting places we could go,but i’m sure this essay is already overly long. goodthinking!

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11 Tart, 1972; 1973a; 1973b; 1974; 1975a; 1975b; 1980; 1998; 2000a;2000b; 2008b, <http://bit.ly/1ovl9z5>.

2 <http://bit.ly/1jdd7f6>.3 Tart, 1986; 1994; 2001.4 http://www.nyingmainstitute.com/5 http://www.shinzen.org/6 in some ways i am intellectually convinced, though, that if

i could mentally “spin around” fast enough i would catch some-thing that might be my mind, but i can never do it.


Picture: John Bamberger, Fluorescent Waterfall.

7 amusement note: my Dragon Dictate programme on hearing“Padmasambhava” typed in “pod my some Baba.” :-) Pretty goodtry Dragon!

8 <http://bit.ly/1jdd7f6>.

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R E F E R E N C E S

cSikSzENTMihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond Boredom and anxiety:experiencing Flow in Work and Play (San francisco: Jossey-Bass).

TarT, c. (1972). “States of consciousness and state-specific sci-ences”, Science, 176: 1203-1210.

—— (1973). (reprint) “States of consciousness and state-specificsciences”, Forum for correspondence and contact, 6: 6-14.

—— (1974). (reprint) “States of consciousness and state-specif-ic sciences”, in B. Ekstrand & l. Bourne (eds.), Principlesand Meanings of Psychology: readings (New york: DrydenPress): 320-329.

—— (1975a). (reprint) “States of consciousness and state-spe-cific sciences”, Xerox individual Publications.

—— (1975b). “Science, states of consciousness, and spiritualexperiences: The need for state-specific sciences”, in c.Tart (ed.), Transpersonal Psychologies (New york: harper& row): 11-58.

—— (1980). (reprint) “States of consciousness and state-spe-cific sciences”, in r. walsh & f. vaughan (eds.), Beyondego: Transpersonal dimensions in Psychology (los angeles:Tarcher): 200-212.

—— (1986). Waking Up: overcoming the obstacles tohuman Potential (Boston: New Science library); cur-rently in print through www.iuniverse.com.

—— (1994). Living the Mindful Life (Boston: Shambhala).—— (1998). “investigating altered states of conscious-

ness on their own terms: a proposal for the creationof state-specific sciences”, ciencia e cultura, Journalof the Brazilian association for the advancement ofScience, 50(2/3): 103-116.

—— (2000). “Prelude to investigating altered states ofconsciousness on their own terms: a proposal forthe creation of state-specific sciences”, interna-tional Journal of Parapsychology, 11(1): 3-5.

—— (2001). Mind Science: Meditation Training for Prac-tical People (Novato, california: wisdom Editions).

—— (2008a). “accessing state-specific transpersonalknowledge: inducing altered states”, Journal ofTranspersonal Psychology, 40(2): 137-154.

—— (2008b). “altered states of consciousness and thespiritual traditions: The proposal for the creationof state-specific sciences”, in k. r. rao, Paranjpe,a. c. & Dalal, a. k. (ed.), handbook of indian Psy-chology (New Delhi: cambridge uP india): 577-607.

—— & harman, w. (1975). comments on state-specif-ic sciences.

—— (1973). “untitled response to comments on propos-al for state-specific sciences”, Science, 180:1006-1007.

—— (2000). “investigating altered states of conscious-ness on their own terms: State-specific sciences”, inM. velmans (ed.), investigating Phenomenal con-sciousness (amsterdam: Benjamins): 255-278.

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C A H R L E S T A R T | ENLIGHNTENMENT AND CREATIVITY | 8

L A D A M E À L A L I C O R N E ∞ h e a r i n g

rosa Zubizarreta is a practition-er, teacher, and author in thefield of dialogue and emergentprocess. her professionalbackground includes organi-zation development, educa-tion reform, and clinical social

work. in addition to her prac-tice as a collaboration consultant,

she is working toward a Phd inhuman and organizational Systems.

We have an instinct for democracy because we have an instinctfor wholeness; we get wholeness only through reciprocal

relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations.democracy is really neither extending nor including merely,

but creating wholes ~ Mary P. follETT1.only when we are thoroughly aware of the limited scope of

every point of view are we on the road to the sought-forcomprehension of the whole ~ karl MaNNhEiM2.

oW MiGhT We Be creaTiVe, ToGeTher? hoW

might we elicit greater collective wisdom,in support of our collective transition to asustainable future? from a hyper-indi-vidualistic perspective, such questionsmight not even make sense. Just as the“invisible hand” of the market place issupposed to aggregate millions of

individual transactions to generate the best out-come for all, so, too, we might posit that thesum aggregate of our individual votes is the bestthat democracy might accomplish. we mighteven assume that “self-organization”, the new“invisible hand”, will weave together all of ourindividual actions for transformation intosomething more cohesive, without the need forany more explicit collective effort. yet i am working here from a different set ofassumptions – that consciousness does notbecome more conscious, unconsciously; thatthe self-organization of living systems, dependson the presence of a supportive context; andthat as humans, we have a deep well of resourcesthat we can draw upon from our evolutionarypast, as we move into creating our shared future.i will begin by expanding a bit on this last one. from an indigenous perspective, our inheritanceas human beings includes hundreds of thousands

of years of valuable evolutionary experience.Before the emergence of “civilization” and itshierarchical forms of organization, we ashumans lived in primarily hunter-gatherer cul-tures, where we developed not only a vast bodyof knowledge about our local ecosystems, butalso the skills and practices of creating sustain-able communities with one another. we neednot look far to see the potential value of thiskind of knowledge for our world today; as iwrite this essay, the blogosphere is buzzingabout indaba, a South african form of consen-sus building that was influential during the cli-mate Talks in Paris. These powerful indigenous formats for conflicttransformation and group alignment often involvesmall, face-to-face groups. Despite MargaretMead’s oft-quoted words, “Never doubt that asmall group of thoughtful, committed citizens canchange the world; indeed, it is the only thing thatever has” it may not be immediately obvious howthe work of small groups, without any formalauthority or great wealth, could serve to influence thelarger systems in which we live. Thus, this is one ofthe questions i will be exploring here: What might bethe potential of certain kinds of small-group experience, toinfluence our huge complex societies?after exploring the potential of small groups to influ-ence large systems, we will also be looking at: What ispossible within a small, highly diverse group? and howmight our sense of what is possible, be influenced, by theassumptions that we bring to our work?To illustrate these explorations, i will be referring tosome actual experiments, focusing particularly on workthat has taken place within the last ten years in the stateof vorarlberg, austria. using an innovative approach toparticipatory public policy making, their office offuture-related issues (ofri) has been working with anempathy-based small group process, to generate usefulpublic policy inputs from microcosm groups that areintentionally diverse3. initial reports indicate that this process has repeatedlyresulted in powerful experiences of collective insightfor participants, as well as useful input for the spon-soring public agencies4. yet at the same time, theseexperiences have also led observers to puzzle about“how this approach works”5. That puzzlement, in

R O S A Z U B I Z A R R E T A

pa rt i c i pato ry p o l i c y m i c r o c o s m s :


d i v e r s i t y a n d e m p a t h y a s g e n e r a t o r s o f c r e a t i v e w h o l n e s s

H

turn, has led to the realization that a larger contextneeds to be offered, to support a broader under-standing of this work. and thus i will be starting with our understandingof the dialectic itself. This entails a third set of ques-tions: What are our underlying theories of how wearrive at knowledge? What are the underlying epistemo-logical approaches through which we view the world,including our political life along with specific instancespublic participation? and how do these underlyingassumptions structure our experience, making some thingspossible while precluding others?

F R O M A R G U M E N T A S B A T T L E T O

C O L L A B O R A T I V E C O - C R E A T I O N

one of the limitations of current approaches to democ-racy consists in its basic mode of discourse, which wemight characterize as organized by the metaphor of“argument-as-battle”6. while the political realm mightpresent an extreme case, this dominator mode of dis-course is embedded within our larger culture, includingmany of our societal knowledge generating systems; itis also embedded within all of us who have beensocialized, to one degree or another, by these systems.Thus, all of us who seek to create new forms of rela-tionship and a society based on partnership7, woulddo well to question the underlying epistemologicalassumptions of dominator forms of discourse – inparticular, the assumption that finding truth is bestserved by engaging in grown-up versions of “king-of-the-hill”, the childhood game whose objectiveis to knock others down in a race to the top. unfortunately, our unexamined assumptions endup shaping our behaviour, which in turn ends upinfluencing the “facts” we encounter. on a prac-tical level, research in brain psychology showshow the possibility of creative and complexthinking are shut down when humans are trig-gered into fight-flight-freeze mode, and howeasily that shift can happen in a social context,especially as a result of threats to status such aspotential loss of face8. Thus, discourses struc-tured in a win-lose format tend to draw outdefensive kinds of human behaviours, and soconfirm pessimistic appraisals of human nature.yet in different contexts, different experiencesare possible. a recent gem in this area is Briskin,Erickson, ott and callanan’s exploration of col-lective wisdom, where they reflect on the sup-portive conditions that allow small groups ofhighly diverse humans are to engage with theirdifferences in a creative manner9. Some of us havebeen discovering that this can take place in waysthat are much more effective than previously

thought possible. in earlier writings, i have oftenused the phrase “maximizing creative tension whileminimizing interpersonal anxiety” as a way tosummarize a detailed overview of how empathy-based group facilitation can support this kind ofcollaborative sense-making process10. contrary toconventional wisdom, it is possible for criticalthinking and creative thinking to co-exist, andfor the individual and the collective to not belocked in a zero-sum game. More on that willfollow in a later section. But first, what is therelevance of this? even if a small group is able toengage their differences both openly and creatively,how might this effectively influence larger systems?

M I C R O C O S M S I N F L U E N C I N G

M A C R O C O S M S

within the realm of politics, the evolutionaryimpulse to work creatively with differences iscurrently manifesting in the form of significantdemocratic experiments. Some of these experi-ments involve small “microcosm” groups thatreflect the broader diversity present within thelarger whole. Two relatively well-known instancesare Maclean’s “canadian experiment”11 and Southafrica’s Mont fleur scenarios12. in both situations,a pending social crisis inspired a particular kind ofsocial experiment. in each case, a microcosm of thelarger society was brought together for a brief peri-od of time, and supported with high-quality facilita-tion – highly-skilled negotiation in the former, andscenario-planning in the latter.in both cases, the group arrived at an outcome thatwas holotropic, in the sense that it was orientedtoward the well-being of the larger whole. in theMaclean’s case, the group outcome pointed toward thepotential of mutual respect, appreciation, and under-standing among anglophones and francophones13; inthe Mont fleur scenarios, the group agreed on a set offour possible scenarios for the future of their country,along with a shared understanding of the risks involvedin the three less-preferred scenarios14. also in each case, the outcomes of the work of thehighly diverse small group was publicized widely viapopular media, thus influencing public consciousness.also, in each case it turned out that a looming socialcrisis was averted, undoubtedly as a result of multiplefactors. it is unlikely that we could determine thedegree of causality involved in either instance, sincewe are looking at the realms of appreciation andinfluence rather than of control15. Still, both experi-ments are iconic examples of how the work of asmall, diverse group can help shift the zeitgeist ofthe larger social mileu.

R O S A Z U B I Z A R R E T A ∞ PARTICIPATORY PUBLIC POLICY MICROCOSM ∞ 10

These two instances are also illustrations of new formof leadership, conversational leadership16. In bothcases, the designers of the process were helping to shiftthe context, the field in which innumerable conversa-tions are taking place, by creating conditions for col-lective intelligence to emerge17. I have created the following equations as a metaphori-cal description of the underlying dynamics of thesetwo experiments: (microcosm of larger society) • (supportive facilitation)= holotropic outcome; (holotropic outcome) • (widespread storysharing) =societal learning. While both of the Canadian and South African instancesmerit further study, what I will be turning to now is aseries of participatory public policy efforts in Vorarlberg,an Austrian state which has hosted 35+ ad-hoc CivicCouncils date. Each of these experiments also involves adiverse and well-facilitated microcosm, whose outcomeshave then shared been more broadly with a larger pub-lic18. Yet instead of being used on a one-time basis toaddress a looming crisis, this model is being used inAustria in an ongoing manner, to generate high-qualityinput to a participatory public policy process.

T H E V O R A R L B E R G M O D E L

O V E R V I E W

Supported by Vorarlberg’s Office for Future-Relat-ed Issues (OFRI), each time a Civic Council is con-vened to address a particular policy issue, a differ-ent group of randomly-selected citizens is chosen.Both anecdotal reports as well as an initial evalua-tion indicate that these different randomly-select-ed microcosms repeatedly elicit systemic insightsand collective wisdom from participants, inaddition to arriving at strong convergences ontheir public policy recommendations19. Anotheroutcome often reported, is the positive impacton the relationship between citizens and publicadministrators / public officials20. The facilitation format used in the Vorarlbergmodel is not based on negotiation expertise, asin the Canadian Experiment, nor scenario-planning methodologies, as in the Mont Fleurdialogues. Instead, the Civic Councils are sup-ported with Dynamic Facilitation, a non-linear,empathy-based methodology created by US con-sultant Jim Rough, originally designed to “evokecreativity of both head and heart”21. In a latersection, I will be quoting extensively from anarticle by two Council facilitators, describing theflavour of the work they do as well as the experi-ences reported by participants.

After the initial work of the Council is completed,subsequent Civic Cafés are hosted as publicforums where the Civic Council shares the storyof how it arrived at its outcomes. These CivicCafés are structured using World Café method-ology, to support a wider public conversationwith regard to the ad-hoc Council’s outcomes22.This conversational format excels at supportinga large group to explore common concerns andissues, via numerous small group conversa-tions23; in this particular application, it hasshown itself to be very useful for helping agroup digest, metabolize, and respond in a cre-ative manner, to a set of creative inputs.Also during the Civic Café, the third step inthe Vorarlberg model is initiated. This consistsa Responder Group, comprised of a mixture ofgovernment administrators, one or two formermembers of the just-concluded Civic Council,and a few citizen volunteers from the largerCivic Café. This group is tasked with meetingmonthly, in order to track the input from theCivic Council and the Civic Café, as it makes itsway through the bureaucracy of the local govern-ment. The Responder Group gathers informationabout the administrative response to this input,including what new initiatives are being created inresponse to the Civic Council’s recommendations,and then reports back to the larger communitywithin six months’ time24.

S Y S T E M I C L E A R N I N G S

Given the role of local municipalities, regions, andstate offices in sponsoring these Councils, the pres-ence of institutional good faith / responsiveness hasbeen found to be key for positive outcomes. One diffi-culty encountered thus far could be regarded as a side-effect of any model that has experienced some success:others may hear about this and seek to replicate themodel, without necessarily being willing to make all ofthe necessary investments. In this case, a key part of theinvestment includes a commitment to implement atleast some of the Council’s recommendations25.Clearly, there is no requirement that a governing bodyagree to implementing any or all of the Council’s rec-ommendations; that would be like signing a blankcheck. However, it is necessary for the sponsoring pub-lic agency to make a good-faith effort to implement atleast some of the Council’s recommendations, as wellas to communicate their reasoning for those recom-mendations they are choosing to decline, in order forthe project to generate greater societal trust. Other-wise, it is likely to reap negative consequencesinstead, in the form of further cynicism and disillu-sionment with government.


another challenge has been the difficulty somepotential sponsors encounter, while contemplatingthe possibility of engaging in this methodology.Most officials need to stay on the safe side, and thestakes of engaging in an experimental process can behigh; engaging in something that is perceived as amistake or a failure could be damaging politically. allof this makes it more challenging for potential spon-sors, to agree to engage in an open-ended process26.Thus, some of ofri’s learnings include the need forbuilding relationships with applicants and offeringthem small-scale experiences of the process first, as wellas for vetting applicants carefully and being highlyselective about the invitations they choose to accept27. from all of this, it becomes clear that with the vorarl-berg instance, our earlier equations are insufficient:(microcosm of larger society) • (supportive facilitation)= holotropic outcome;(holotropic outcome) • (widespread storysharing) =societal learning. instead, given that these experiments have been spon-sored by a various municipalities, regional districts, andstate offices, there has been an implicit expectation cre-ated that the sponsoring entity would respond in someway, to the outcomes of the civic council. Thus, anew, modified set of equations could be written asfollows:(microcosm of larger society) • (supportive facilita-tion) = holotropic outcome; (holotropic outcome) • (widespread storysharing)• (responsiveness of sponsoring agency) = societallearning + stronger trust between citizens andgovernment.Thus, we can see that if the responsiveness of thesponsoring agency cannot be metaphorically rep-resented by a positive number, the initialholotropic outcome of the small group will not,by itself, result in a positive societal outcome –no matter how positive it may have been.however, in the majority of cases throughoutvorarlberg and its neighbouring regions, itseems that the sponsoring bodies have generallybeen responsive, and thus strongly positive out-comes have come about. we have anecdotal evi-dence of notable examples include a recentaward-wining civic council on the refugee cri-sis28, as well as a set of councils regarding therepurposing of the site of a former concentrationcamp29. an evaluation conducted before thesetwo more recent examples showed positive find-ings as well30. Still, it would be helpful to havemore research on the outcomes this innovativeprocess, as well as on the systemic conditions thatpermit a powerful small-group process to exert apositive influence upon the larger social system.

S H I F T I N G A S S U M P T I O N S

A B O U T G R O U P D Y N A M I C S

as we have seen in the previous section, having aprocess that can reliable evoke collective wisdomamong a diverse group of citizens is insufficientin and of itself. additional elements are neededfor the outcomes of the small group to have asignificant impact on the larger whole. Some-times, a powerful mechanism for story-sharingmay be all that is needed; yet in situationswhere the process has been sponsored by agovernmental agency, the agency’s responsive-ness to the outcomes is key.yet the ability to consistently arrive at high-quality outcomes within a small, diverse group,even though insufficient on its own, is clearly avaluable resource. it is also something that cur-rent models of group dynamics do not deempossible within a limited amount of time. inother words, from within a certain paradigm,what we have been experiencing “cannot exist.” what people have experienced regularly in vorarl-berg as part of the civic councils (and elsewherewith other models) does not follow Tuckman’scycle of “forming, storming, norming, and per-forming”, a highly popular model that is only infre-quently questioned31. This leads us to the followinginquiry: how is it possible to consistently arrive atauthentic, powerful results within a relatively brief time,within small groups that are intentionally divergent? Much of our knowledge about small groups in thebehavioural sciences has been derived from T-groupsand Tavistock group relations work. from my ownexperiences in both modalities (not as a facilitator, butas a participant), i can vouch for the valuable personallearning that can ensue from engaging in these formats.yet the reified nature of both traditions tends toobscure a basic fact: both of these formats have beenintentionally designed to create primary anxiety in a group,and then have the group wrestle their way, with minimalassistance, through that initial anxiety. in Tavistockgroups, that anxiety is generated in part through flat-face affect on the part of facilitators. while T-groups donot use flat-face affect, the intentional refusal on thepart of facilitators to offer the group much explicitguidance or structure, has been designed to create asomewhat attenuated yet basically similar effect. however, such design features are not inevitable. forinstance, Juanita Brown has written about how par-ticipants’ experience in world café formats does notfollow the conventional model of the ‘stages of dia-logue’. in one way, the explanation for this is obvi-ous; these new formats do not assume that initialstate of anxiety to be inevitable, and thus were not


designed to create it32. These days, there are a growingnumber of different group formats suitable for a vari-ety of different purposes, in which simple yet effectivestructures offer enough support and create enough sta-bility in the field to allow effective self-organization toemerge with a minimum of initial dysfunction33.in the Dynamic facilitation process used in vorarl-berg’s civic councils, participants also do not experi-ence a protracted initial stage marked by conflict. how-ever, this facilitation approach is different than otherdialogic models, such as open Space Technology andworld café, where a strong container is created by theuse of a simple yet powerful structure. instead, inDynamic facilitation the strong container is created by ahighly active yet non-directive facilitation approach,where empathic reflections allow the facilitator to “takeall sides”. This creates a temporary “greenhouse” or “cre-ativity incubator” where strong differences can surface,yet where each participant experiences sufficient sup-port to remain in creative learning mode — rather thanbeing thrown into defensive attitudes resulting fromfight/flight/freeze triggers34. This process of active and empathic multipartiality isalso a feature of Dialogue Mapping, a computer-assist-ed process that bears some significant similarities withDynamic facilitation35. Some authors have describedDialogue Mapping as offering an empathic winni-cotian “holding environment”36 for participants.This analogy may help us to see that multipartialityis not at all the same thing as “impartiality”, eventhough neither of the two are “partial”. from myperspective, the mainstream version of “facilitatorimpartiality” is very well-intentioned, yet it baseda limited, transactional view of human communi-cation that does not sufficiently consider the rela-tional needs of human beings.

W H A T A C T I V E , M U L T I P A R T I A L

F A C I L I T A T I O N C A N L O O K

L I K E I N P R A C T I C E

in the following paragraphs, two austrian facil-itators describe their stance as they engage intheir work, as well as the effects that thisapproach has on group participants: “right from the start of a Dynamic facilitationsession, it is necessary to be consciously attend-ing to the creation of an appreciative and openconversational culture. Part of our job as facilita-tors is to set this tone and to safeguard it. To dothis, we need to be listening well to the verbalmessages we are hearing, we need to be makingthose meanings visible on paper, and we need to bepreventing other verbal messages from devaluingwhat has already been said. This requires us to begin

with a more ‘bilateral’ facilitation style: as facilita-tors, we spend more time than is customary witheach person, drawing them out through the use offollow-up questions.”“it is only after we have ‘emptied’ participants ofall of their pre-made opinions, positions, andconcerns about others’ positions, that it is gen-erally possible to think about something new.(Jim rough calls this process ‘purging’.) Duringthis bilateral conversation with a participant,other participants usually realize very quicklythat they themselves will later be receiving thesame kind of attention that this person is nowreceiving. That observation usually increasesthe attention and mindfulness of all.”“what participants do particularly well withinthe context of a Dynamic facilitation session,while hearing the plentiful reflections beingoffered back to the one who is speaking, is to lis-ten attentively and to take seriously that personand their contributions. clearly, in our societywe feel a great lack of – or to put it another way, agreat longing for – being perceived as personswith our own thoughts, concerns and proposedsolutions.”37

The above paragraphs describe how facilitators applytheir empathic attention to create a kind of ‘emotion-al safety net’ that offers participants the freedom toengage in a self-initiated updating of their own con-ceptual models, as they begin to encounter one anoth-er’s different perspectives. Many facilitators trained inthis approach have remarked on the similarities they seebetween what happens in the room with Dynamicfacilitation, and the conceptual model of the u-theory38,which also describes a kind of “emptying out” that isneeded before what is new can begin to emerge.The next set of paragraphs describe how this processembodies the alternative epistemological approach wementioned at the beginning of this article, the shift from“argument as battle” to “collaborative co-creation”:“a significant characteristic of Dynamic facilitation isthat we use a structured moderation process to breakthrough entrenched discussion patterns. in this work,participants usually perceive it as beneficial that weforeground a joint, co-creative development process,instead of a battle of wills between one set of argumentsagainst another set of arguments. Dynamic facilitationthus stands in stark contrast to standard patterns ofdiscussion which are often about winning or losing. Bymeans of active and appreciative listening, along withthe invitation to repeatedly empathize with otherpoints of view, we are able to initiate a solution-ori-ented culture of conversation.” “innovation-hampering phrases such as ‘That willnever work,’ or ‘we’ve never done it that way


before,’ are welcome in the Dynamic facilitationprocesses as concerns, yet they are never allowed tostand alone without a follow-up prompt (‘can yousay more about what it is that you are fearing?’)along with a further question (such as, ‘great! So inthat case, what would your solution be?’) The dynamicsof a Dynamic facilitation process could be describedusing the metaphor of a ping-pong game as follows: inthis way of playing, the goal is not to force your oppo-nent to make a mistake, by returning the ball with astricky a spin as possible; instead, the goal is to worktogether to keep the ball in play.”“verbal messages are not simply left standing, but areinstead either reflected back or summarized, as literally aspossible. in response to abstract statements, facilitatorsoffer follow-up questions (e.g. ‘what do you mean by ... ?’)The additional clarification of rationales or further con-cretization of what has already been spoken, usually leadsto a better mutual understanding among all participants,and thus to a reduction of the kind of resistance that canquickly arise whenever allegations are allowed to standwithout further explanation. By means of invitations toexpand one’s reasoning and the genuineness of the fol-low-up questions, it soon becomes evident to all thatwe are shifting away from a conversational pattern ofmere assertions or demands, to a more innovative andconstructive dimension of conversation.”39

The above description can be read as an illustrationof multipartiality in action. By “taking the side” ofeach participant, supporting them in explicatingtheir meaning, facilitators draw out each partici-pant’s contribution to the larger whole. The lasttwo paragraphs quoted below illustrate some ofthe creativity-generating aspects of this approach: “one possibility for achieving more depth on asubject is the so-called ‘decision-makers’ ques-tion’. it goes as follows: ‘Suppose you had animportant decision-making position (e.g.mayor, school director, president, etc.) andeverything were possible; that is to say, you hadall the necessary means at your disposal. whatwould you do in this situation? how would youproceed?’ This question offers a participant theopportunity to immediately imagine themselvesin a powerful position, which usually triggers anintense process of reflection. at such moments,it is important to offer some ‘sacred time’ so theparticipant can sit quietly with this question.” “The answers are often surprising, and in manycases focus on finding a solution to the problemthrough communication. one example: ‘i wouldsit down immediately with the relevant experts orcitizens, so that together we can get a better pic-ture of the situation, and hear their solutions.’often participants’ answers also offer very concrete

steps to address the problem. This demonstrateshow frequently people have valuable thoughts onissues. yet without these kind of processes, theywould not have the opportunity to share theircomments nor contribute their insights. Partici-pants are usually surprised by how much creativ-ity and knowledge is evident in the outcomesthey develop.”40

Now that we have “zoomed in” for a closerlook at the creative facilitation process usedwithin civic councils, the first stage of thevorarlberg model, we will close by “zoomingback out” again, to review the larger systemicimplications that are made possible by theseparticipatory public policy microcosms.

S Y S T E M I C L E V E R A G E :S H I F T I N G O U R

A P P R E C I A T I V E S E T P O I N T S

in all of the examples described earlier – the“canadian Experiment”, the Mont fleur Dia-logues, and ofri’s thirty-five plus instances to dateof the “vorarlberg model” – there is societal learn-ing that ensues from the widespread story-sharingof the work of the microcosm group. we canunderstand that societal learning as a shift withinour shared appreciative systems. as delineated by vickers, our ‘appreciative systems’include both our prevailing socially-constructedunderstandings of ‘how the world is’, as well as oursocially-constructed understandings of ‘how we wantour world to be’. Drawing from cybernetic models,vickers emphasizes that, at any given point in time,our society’s appreciative systems are ‘set’ at a particular‘setpoint’. he also highlighted the systemic leverageinherent in learning how to consciously and ethicallyinfluence these “appreciative setpoints”41.a similar point is made by Meadows, in her commentson the high leverage of being able to shift the mindsetor paradigm out of which a present system arises42.while neither vickers nor Meadows were optimisticabout finding ethical and effective ways to shift societalmindsets, both of them pointed toward this as a neces-sary direction to explore, in order to meet the socialchallenges we are facing. in her description of the high leverage of shifting para-digms, Meadows makes a telling comment that, “Sys-tems folks would say you change paradigms by model-ling a system on a computer, which takes you outsidethe system and forces you to see it whole. we say thatbecause our own paradigms have been changed thatway.”43 yet what if computer modelling is not theonly, and in some cases not even the best, way tohelp people change their paradigms? we have heard


again and again, how bringing together a diversegroup of people, in a context where they are able tolisten deeply to one another’s perspectives, helpthem all to begin to have a deeper sense of the largerwhole to which they belong. what if, by sharing thestory of this small group’s discoveries with a largerwhole, we can in turn, help that whole begin to shiftits own perspectives?Now, to take it to another level: what if the most high-leverage shift we might make, is a meta-shift? That is,beyond any particular shift in perspectives, a shift in our“know-how” that allowed us to shift our collective per-spectives in a constructive way, in an on-going and itera-tive manner. Mary catherine Bateson seems to be point-ing us in this direction, in her evocative book describingthe epic small-group gathering convened by her father,gregory Bateson, to explore the challenge of humanity’sapparent inability to “see systems”. in her afterword tothe 1991 edition, she writes: “over and over again atBurg wartenstein we implied the need for a unified andwidely shared vision, a vision that would be persuasiveboth intellectually and emotionally, to provide the con-text for action. But today i wonder whether such anepistemological unification could come about andwhether it would not be a denial of the adaptive valueof diversity. it was not clear whether new patterns ofthought would look more like science or more likereligion, or, as i increasingly believe, like a new pat-tern of inherently diverse information exchange anddecision making, a new mode of conversationstoward we were feeling our way when we met.”44.

S U M M A R Y A N D C L O S I N G

T H O U G H T S

whether we are looking at the ongoing work ofthe vorarlberg model, or at one-time instancessuch as the “canadian Experiment” and theMont fleur dialogues, there is a basic assump-tion at work. in an earlier work, i havedescribed that assumption as follows: “[…] allof these various processes share the same radicalassumption: With some support, a diverse group ofordinary people can work together to engage con-structively with their differences, in the service ofthe larger common good. we know that a well-designed, randomly-selected poll can provide uswith useful information about the current stateof opinion of the larger whole. in a similar man-ner, a well-designed, randomly-selected council[or a microcosm that is intentionally created toreflect the diversity of the larger system] can pro-vide us with useful information about the com-mon ground we might discover, if we all had theopportunity to engage with one another in depth aspart of the larger whole.”45

My intention here has been to illustrate how, oncethis collective wisdom is generated among amicrocosm group, it can be leveraged throughlarge-scale story-sharing to influence the “appre-ciative set-point” of a larger system. alternatively,the work of the small group can influence a localregion by serving as a useful input into a widerparticipatory public policy process; in this way,it influences the local appreciative set-point,while also potentially resulting in some con-crete policy objectives.i have also explored how different assumptionsabout small group dynamics lead to differentsmall group designs, and thus to different out-comes. given the potential we have seen forsmall groups to influence larger systems, itwould seem that advances in small group workcould be relevant for practical large-scale systemschange. This may be especially true of formatsthat help small, diverse groups access both cre-ative and critical thinking, while remaining in anopen-minded learning mode46. in closing, we might consider that while allforms of creativity are valuable, these creativemicrocosms with larger systemic implications,could be particularly useful for the challenges weare facing today. These kinds of transformationalsmall group dynamics could have a significant roleto play in our great Turning47 toward a sustainableand thriving planetary culture.

8

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1 follett 1918, The new State: 157.2 Mannheim 1936, ideology and Utopia: 105.3 Trattnig & haderlap 2014, dynamic Facilitation – a Method for

culture change.4 hellrigl & lederer 2014, Wisdom councils in the Public Sector.5 Personal conversation with Manfred hellrigl.6 lakoff & Johnson 1980, Metaphors We Live By.7 Eisler 1987, The chalice and the Blade.8 rock 2008, ScarF: a brain-based model.9 Briskin, Erickson, ott, & callanan, 2009, The Power of collec-

tive Wisdom.10 zubizarreta 2014, From conflict to creative collaboration: 19.11 atlee 2003, The Tao of democracy: 130-143.12 kahane n.d., Mont Fleur Scenarios: 1-5.13 atlee n.d., canadian adversaries Take a Break to dream.14 kahane n.d., Mont Fleur Scenarios.15 Smith 2009, The creative Power.16 hurley & Brown 2009, conversational Leadership.17 atlee 2012, empowering Public Wisdom.18 The parallel between the Mont fleur Dialogues described

above, and the wisdom council / civic council model to bedescribed next, was first pointed out by Matthias zur Bonsen.


19 Helllrigl & Lederer 2014, Op. Cit.; see also Strele, Lüdeman,& Nanz 2012, Wisdom Councils in Austria.

20 Trattnig & Haderlap, Op. Cit.21 Rough 2002, Society’s Breakthrough: 131-132. 22 Hellrigl & Lederer, Op. Cit.23 Brown & Isaacs 2005, The World Café: Shaping Our Futures24 Hellrigl & Lederer, Op. Cit.25 Ibidem.26 Personal communication with Martin Rausch.27 Personal communication with Martin Rausch and Michael Lederer.28 State of Vorarlberg 2015, Civic Council Report.29 Institut für Konfliktforschung 2016, The Region of Conscious-

ness; also Ruprechtsberger 2013, Hope Blossoms Amidst the Nazi Ruins.30 Strele, Lüdeman, & Nanz 2012, Wisdom Councils in Austria.31 White, McMillen, & Baker 2001, Challenging Traditional Mod-

els: 48-49.32 Brown 2001, The World Café – Living Knowledge: 65-79.33 Holman, Devine, & Cady 2007, The Change Handbook; see

also Holman 2010, Engaging Emergence for an exploration of princi-ples underlying many of these formats.

34 Zubizarreta 2013, Co-Creative Dialogue.35 Zubizarreta 2006, Practical Dialogue.36 Culmsee & Awati 2012, Toward A Holding Environment.37 Trattnig & Haderlap, Op. Cit.38 Scharmer 2009, Theory U.39 Trattnig & Haderlap, Op. Cit.40 Ibidem.41 Vickers 1968, Value Systems and Social Process: 164-168.42 Meadows 1999, Leverage Points: 17-18.43 Ibidem: 1844 Bateson 1991, Our Own Metaphor: 314.45 Zubizarreta 2003, Deepening Democracy.46 While we have been focusing here on the participatory

public policy realm, there are other examples of this same for-mat being utilized to “help a whole system learn” within organi-zational settings, that point to the robustness and flexibility ofthis approach. See zur Bonsen 2014, Wisdom Council.

47 Macy 2014, The Great Turning.

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L A D A M E À L A L I C O R N E ∞ s i g h t

Gerard J. Puccio is departmentchair and Professor at theinternational center forStudies in creativity, SUny-Buffalo State, new york( h t t p : / / c r e a t i v i t y. b u f -falostate.edu/). as a creativity

scholar he has written morethan sixty articles, chapters and

books. he is a recipient of the Pres-ident’s Medal for Scholarship and cre-

ativity and was selected by the Teaching company as one ofamerica’s great lecturers. email: [email protected].

I N T R O D U C T I O N :L I F E I N T H E 2 1 S T C E N T U R Y

oME Say ThE worlD iS MoviNg faSTEr ThaN

ever before, that change is moving at anaccelerated rate. and there is some data tosupport this observation. The early stonetools, such as the handaxe, lasted almost amillion years before they were replaced byimproved tools. Today technologicalproducts go through fundamental

redesign every six to twelve months. in the last twothousand years, there were approximately 30 lifealtering technical and social inventions. roughly25 of these have come in the last 200 years alone1.Buckmister fuller2 famoulsy observed that theaccumulated knowledge in the world doubledduring the 20th century at an estimated rate ofevery 25 years. in the early 21st century an iBMstudy indicated that knowledge was doublingevery 11 hours3. it would appear the pace ofchange, especially as it is driven by technologicaladvances, will not slow down any time soon. arecent oxford university study predicated thatacceleration in automation is likely to eliminatemore than 40% of jobs in the next decade or so4.More specifically, that computers will replace thehumans who carry out these jobs. it would seemchange has become the new norm. if indeed we live in a time of rampant change,the question is are individuals prepared with theskills and mindset to evolve as quickly as the envi-ronment is changing? it would seem that like notime in human history has creativity been a more

important individual, organizational and soci-etal capability. To be sure, creativity has alwaysbeen a feature of our species. in fact, it was ourability to apply our imaginations to solve prob-lems that has allowed us to spread out fromafrica into all regions of our planet. comparedto other species the human body is pretty frailand limited. what we have been endowed withis a brain that allows us to generate ideas that canbe used to creatively solve problems. where earlyhumans used their creativity to solve the practicalproblems of survival, the modern human hasbeen able to leverage the power of imagination tocreate a rich array of products. as Morriss-kay5

argued, “[…] without these survival-enhancingfunctional origins, it is unlikely that we would havethe neural equipment to create art.” in fact, anthro-pologists indicate that about 50,000 years ago human’sgift of imagination led to a creative explosion. atime during which human creativity broadend intocomplex art forms, clothes, purpose built struc-tures, jewlery, burial rituals, muscial instrumentsand much more. creativity has enabled humans to survive. and ourcapacity to create is at the heart of the increased rate ofchange we now experience. Talbot6 defined creativity asthe ability to make a change that sticks (for a while).The more we create, the faster our environment changes.The faster our environment changes the more quickly weneed to create and adapt through a flexible mindset – atrait of creative people. Perhaps like no other species, ourcompetitive advantage – creativity – has both allowed usto survive in the face of environmental challenges and hasserved to change the very environments we live and workin. we both benefit and suffer from our creativity – themore we use our creativity the more we need it to survive.in the modern world, the element of Talbot’s definitionof creativity that has been impacted most is the statement“for a while.” creativity has a destructive quality to it.what we create replaces or displaces a previous idea orpractice. Therefore, the shelf-life for a creative idea hasbecome much shorter. Just as creativity was a crucialsurvival skill for early humans, it would seem that it is acrucial survival skill for individuals, organizations, andsocieties in the 21st century. The difference is fortoday’s humans obsolescence is not some distant pos-sibility but a near term reality.

G E R A R D J . P U C C I O

d e m o c r a t i z i n g c r e a t i v i t y :


how creative thinKing contributes toindividual, organizational and societal success

S

The year 1950 is commonly cited as the birth ofsystematic research into the construct of creativity.This was the year J. P. guilford delivered his land-mark inaugural address, simply entitled ‘creativity’,to the american Psychological association. in hisaddress, guilford highlighted the paucity of researchin this fundamental area of human functioning. hesupported his assertion by citing the fact that of the121,000 studies indexed in the Psychological abstracts forthe preceding 23 years, there were only 186 studies asso-ciated with creativity. however, for a variety of reasons,such as the post-war increase in scientific inventions,the launching of the space age, the advent of a morehumanistic approach in the field of psychology, andguilford’s call to action, the study of creativity blos-somed during the 1950’s. Today there are more than a dozen refereed journalsspecifically dedicated to the study of creativity that fea-ture hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies eachyear. There are thousands of books on creativity thatapproach the topic from a variety of disciplines, such asbusiness, education, psychology, economics, personaldevelopment, etc. There are annual conferences on thetopic of creativity. and there are a handful of under-graduate and graduate programs that teach studentshow to be more effective creative thinkers and prob-lem solvers. indeed our own Master’s degree in cre-ativity at Buffalo State has been around since themid-1970’s7. That said, despite the growth in inter-est in creativity most people have never experi-enced a formal introduction to this area of study,and a vast majority have not had the opportunitythrough their formal education to devote time todevelop their creative-thinking skills. The purpose of this paper is to explore the valueof creativity. This paper summarizes the reasonswhy men and women in education, business,government and other fields are interested inunderstanding, nurturing, and predicting cre-ative performance. few comprehensive reviewson this subject exist; most writers in the fieldof creativity appear to assume that the readerknows why the study of creativity is an impor-tant endeavour. as a result many writers in thefield make ambiguous or general references towhy the study of creativity is important andthen quickly begin to describe their own studyor theory. This approach fails to provide new-comers to the field of creativity with a sufficientunderstanding of the basic foundation to thisemerging discipline. Therefore, this paper pro-vides a summary of some of the more commonlycited reasons for the study of creativity. To becandid, it is hoped that these points will raiseawareness of the crucial role creativity plays inindividual, organizational and societal success and

as a consequence compel more people to activelydevelop their own and others’ creativity.

W H Y C R E A T I V I T Y

I S I M P O R T A N T

1 ~ DEVELOP HUMAN POTENTIAL BEYOND IQ

one of the most commonly cited reasons for theinvestigation of creativity has been the desire todiscover an area of human ability, beyond iQ,that would be useful in predicting performance.a number of researchers have concluded thatintelligence is a broad and complex concept thatis not adequately explained by iQ alone. Taylorsuccinctly summed up iQ’s inability to embodyall of intelligence when he stated: iQ measures only small fish and has failed tocatch and hold onto the truly big fish that theword “intelligence” signifies to most people.The general public has been misled and stillreadily believes that iQ is the “total intelligence”that encompasses all the dimensions of themind, including all creative factors (and possiblyall other dimensions not yet discovered and mea-sured in the total mind-power)8.Since there have been some reservations about iQ’sability to predict performance, especially creativeperformance, researchers have sought to go beyondthis construct for predicting human ability. in 1950guilford stated that, “probably, some of the factorsmost crucial to creative performance have not yet beendiscovered in any type of test. in other words, we mustlook well beyond the boundaries of the iQ if we are tofathom the domain of creativity”9. guilford further criti-cized iQ enthusiasts when he argued that, “Many believethat creative talent is to be accounted for in terms of highintelligence or iQ. This conception is not only inadequatebut has been largely responsible for the lack of progress inthe understanding of creative people”10.Since 1950 numerous researchers have examined the rela-tionship between measures of general intelligence andcreativity. in their review of these studies, Barron andharrington11 concluded that the relationships betweencreative achievement and measured intelligence rangefrom insignificant to small significant positive correla-tions. wallach and kogan, who conducted one of themost elaborate studies on the relationship between gen-eral intelligence and creativity measures, asserted thatindividual differences in creativity are largely indepen-dent of the domain of general intelligence12. in anexamination of lay persons’ implicit theories of intelli-gence, creativity, and wisdom, Sternberg13 foundsome degree of overlap among the constructs, howev-er they were not considered to be synonymousterms. creativity proved to be the most distinct ofthe three constructs.

G E R A R D J . P U C C I O ∞ DEMOCRATIZING CREATIVITY ∞ 20

if iQ is not a strong predictor of creative achieve-ment then what ability is most associated with realcreative output? iQ is closely associated with reason-ing skills; an ability to find the correct answers. Thistype of thought tends to be linear, critical and logical.By contrast, studies of creativity have revealed a differ-ent way of thinking called divergent thinking. Thisrefers to a form of thinking that is expansive; it is theability to generate many, varied and original alterna-tives. research has shown that divergent thinking isthree times stronger at predicting adult creative achieve-ment than iQ14. Those who are proficient divergentthinkers are much more likely to become inventors, writ-ers, university presidents, artists and entrepreneurs.while divergent thinking is a significant predictor of cre-ative achievement it is a skill often overlooked in formaleducational practices. 2 ~ E S S E N T I A L WORK P L AC E S K I L L

another reason often cited as support for the increasedinterest in creativity is the growing competition in busi-ness and industry. The technological developments ofthis century are a tribute to human ingenuity and cre-ativity; however, it is these same technologies that havegiven rise to global competition. Technological devel-opments in such areas as communication and trans-portation continue to draw the vast regions of theworld closer together. organizations no longer com-pete solely with other companies within their imme-diate region, but with competitors from around theworld. Therefore, in order for today’s organizationsto remain competitive it is imperative that theyincorporate creativity and innovation into all busi-ness functions. creativity has become a centralissue in the survival of a corporation. accordingto geis, “No longer is creativity seen as emanat-ing from the fringe of corporate society. generat-ing new ideas and bringing them to market isnow seen as a (if not the) central task of corpo-rate management”15.The rapid amount of change and growth thathas occurred since the industrial revolution hasbrought much prosperity and wealth to a greatnumber of industrial organizations. however, asthis growth continues industries, particularlyolder organizations, are experiencing a tremen-dous amount of pressure to continually improveon old systems and products. as van gundynoted, “organizational growth and survival canbe tied directly to an organization’s ability to pro-duce (or adopt) and implement new services,products and processes”16. indeed, creativity is notsimply a luxury for organizations. as some econo-mists now refer to the present era as the age ofinnovation, creativity is now an essential compe-tence for organizations. Even though more than

88% of corporations in the united States have someform of the word “innovation” in their mission,vision or values, innovation does not occur unlessorganizations adopt practices that promote andencourage employee creativity. The research is clear,innovation promotes organizational success andemployee creativity promotes innovation. given the fact that we work in an age of innova-tion, creativity is now widely recognized as a cru-cial workplace skill. in fact, since 1990 there havebeen more than a dozen published reports ofessential workplace skills that include creativity.for example, a 2015 Bloomberg/Businessweeksurvey of hiring managers found that creativeproblem solving was among the top five mostdesirable skills. when asked what skills are mostdifficult to find among new job applicants, sadly,creative problem solving was cited as numbertwo (strategic thinking was the most difficult skillto find among job applicants)17. Equally discon-certing, a study of human resource managersplaced creativity among the top 14 applied skillsidentified as essential in today’s workplace; howev-er, creativity was the skill these hr managers feltleast prepared to develop should they hire someonewho lacked this skill18. This represents a perfectstorm. That is, while creativity and creativity-relatedskills are now considered crucial for professional suc-cess, they are difficult to find among those aspiring tojoin today’s workforce. Moreover, when an employeeis deficient in this skill organizations are not wellposed to develop it. a creativity deficiency represents aserious limitation for both individual and organization-al success.3 ~ E F F E C T I V E U S E O F HUMAN R E SOURC E S

one way for organizations to become more creativeand innovative is to recognize, fertilize, and capitalizeon the creative talents found within the organization.Bharadwaj and Menon19 found, for example, that thoseorganizations that promoted creativity, by allowing forindividual creative practices or by adopting organiza-tional practices that promoted creativity in a systematicmanner, were judged to be significantly more innova-tive. while both forms of creativity practices were asso-ciated with innovation, these researchers found that cre-ative practices adopted across the organization weremore effective at uplifting an organization’s creativity.for example, organizations that actively used a creativeproblem-solving methodology were rated by theiremployees as being much more innovative. as Bharad-waj and Menon concluded, when organizationalmembers are trained in creativity there is a net posi-tive effect on their problem-skills skills which leadsto more innovative solutions to ongoing organiza-tional problems and challenges.


creative contributions can, and should, be madefrom all levels of an organization; however, organi-zations must first establish an environment thatexplicitly nurtures and rewards creative efforts. asEkvall20 has demonstrated, individuals who work inenvironments that support such factors as playful-ness, idea support, trust, debate, risk taking, humour,and freedom, are typically more creatively productivethan those who work in negative environments. Evenmore basic, amabile and kramer21 found that work-places that promoted a positive mood among employ-ees were much more likely to see higher levels of indi-vidual creativity and organizational innovation. creativity is a human resource. a resource that exists inall organizations, small and large, private and public.organizations must endeavor to utilize this resource,wherever it exists, by developing the creative-thinkingskills of their employees and by forming work environ-ments that allow creative thinking to flourish. Themost important resource in any organization is its peo-ple; therefore for organizations to thrive in today’seconomy it is imperative for them to nurture the cre-ative potential of their human resources. organiza-tions are not creative, it is the individuals inside oforganizations who create. wise organizations recog-nize that their growth and survival depends on thecreative-thinking skills of their members. 4 ~ C ONT R I BU T E S TO E F F E C T I V E L E AD E R SH I P

creativity is an essential skill for any person who isinvolved in some leadership role. leadership is dis-tinguished from management principally due tocreativity skills. as Bennis and Nanus stated,“Managers are people who do things right andleaders are people who do the right things”22.leaders actively search for new problems; theycan be considered problem finders. They areespecially effective in handling novel challengesthat require solutions outside of the routine ortraditional strategies. They possess tremendousvision, and are capable of inspiring others withtheir vision. in short, it is the application ofcreativity skills that distinguishes a managerwho maintains the status quo, from a leaderwho supplies a new direction or vision. More specifically, numerous authors agree thatcreativity is now considered a core leadershipcompetence. leaders are responsible for guidingteams, organizations, and societies towards impor-tant goals. along the way they often face challengesthat impede progress. This is what Mumford andhis colleagues referred to as complex problems.complex problems are ill-defined, novel andambiguous; as such they require creative thinking toresolve. Therefore, it has been found that today’s lead-ers need to be effective creative problem solvers.

indeed, divergent thinking, a creative problem-solvingability, described earlier, has been shown to be thestrongest predictor of leadership success when com-pared to intelligence and personality traits23. contemporary theories of leadership, especiallythose associated with transformational leader-ship, embrace the need for leaders to be creativeand to actively promote the creative potential oftheir followers. Transformational leaders recog-nize that they do not have all the answers andsolutions to problems; therefore, they activelysolicit the creative thinking of others. Transfor-mational leaders know that success relies ontapping into the best thinking of all organiza-tional members. as noted in the previous sec-tion, organizational success relies on the cre-ative talents of all organizational members.Transformational leaders know that to trans-form an organization they must facilitate thetransformation of all members constituents,helping them to reach their creative potential. in an era defined by change we look for leaderswho can lead change. creative thinking is aprocess that promotes new thinking and thereforeresults in change. given this we have argued else-where for a new form of leadership, called creativeleadership24. These are leaders who deliberately usetheir imagination to guide their constituents in anew direction and who use their creative problem-solving skills to successfully address any issue thatstands between them and their desired future.5 ~ D I S COV E R N EW AND B E T T E R WAY S TO SO LV E

P RO B L EM S

our world faces a diverse array of problems thatrequire more and more creative solutions. This chal-lenge was described by ackoff and vergara:

“The accelerating rate of change is accompanied by a cor-responding rate of obsolescence. an increasing number ofproblems have few or no precedents; hence there is adecreasing number of opportunities to solve them effec-tively in familiar ways. The greater the need for new waysof doing things, the greater the need for creativity”25.

To tackle world-wide challenges, such as pollution, star-vation, terrorism, poverty and the threat of nuclear war,more energy must be devoted to training in creativethinking and problem-solving skills. guilford believed,“if by any approach we could lift the population’s prob-lem-solving skills by a small amount on the average,the summative effect would be incalculable”26. futurebusinessmen, scientists, educators, politicians, andothers who will be involved in both professional andskilled positions will not only need to possess theknowledge associated with their specific field, butthey will also need creative-thinking skills to solveproblems in new ways. This necessary combination


of skills will enable individuals to produce novel anduseful solutions to challenges that appear to have noimmediate solution. knowledge about a particulardomain is sufficient to solve problems that are straightforward; however, creative-thinking skills are requiredto solve more complex and open-ended problems. at a personal level it is difficult to escape the complexi-ties of life. To quote guilford again, “To live is to haveproblems, to solve problems creatively is to grow”27.creative thinking and creative problem solving aren’tsimply important for professional success, but are neces-sary in one’s personal life as well. individuals who donot possess creative-thinking skills are at risk, those whodo are resilient. in a fast changing world, with chal-lenges around nearly every corner, creative thinking andcreative problem solving become the foundation toeffective coping skills. 6 . D E V E LO PM ENT O F SOC I E T Y

another reason offered as support for the importanceof creativity is its role in the preservation and growthof society. as Toynbee so aptly put it, “To give a fairchance to potential creativity is a matter of life anddeath for any society”28. as with organizations, cre-ativity is a central factor in a society’s ability to con-tinue to adapt to an ever-changing environment.Beyond the issue of survival, or the preservation of asociety, Toynbee pointed out that if a nation active-ly seeks to nurture creativity it will play a part inmaking history; however, nations that ignore thecreative potential of their people run the risk ofbeing surpassed by other nations.from an economic standpoint creativity is closelyaligned with entrepreneurship and many govern-ments now recognize that entrepreneurs serve asan engine to a vibrant economy. looking at thecharacteristics of entrepreneurs reads like theresults of the personality research into creativeindividuals; they are opportunity seekers, opento change, flexible, unafraid of failure, fluentidea generators, curious, and intuitive29. it is thiscreativity personality that makes it hard forentrepreneurs to reside within established orga-nizations. indeed, it is this constant passion tofind new opportunities that often compelsentrepreneurs to leave their own start-up organi-zations once they mature30. like artists andmusicians, entrepreneurs are serial creators. asociety that promotes creativity is much morelikely to reap the economic benefits of suchentrepreneurially minded individuals.7 . BU I L D S ON A L L D I S C I P L I N E S

a unique feature of creativity is the fact that it is notconfined to one particular discipline. creativity canbe found in the sciences as well as the arts. creativity-relevant skills are essential to all fields and all forms of

human endeavour. it is creative effort that drives thedevelopment of new knowledge. and, specifically, itis the most creative participants in a field that providethe greatest contributions to their respective field ordomain. without creative thinking an individual iscondemned to stay within the knowledge base as itis given, whereas a creative mind is more likely tochallenge paradigms and to build new knowledge.further evidence for the interdisciplinary nature ofcreativity can be witnessed in the diverse back-grounds represented by the researchers who studythis concept, as well as those interested in teachingcreativity to others. creativity researchers andeducators, for example, from such backgrounds aschemistry, engineering, psychology, sociology,education, philosophy, computer science, busi-ness, and economics. 8 ~ N ATU R A L HUMAN PH ENOMENON

creativity is like any other ability, everyonepossesses it, but to varying levels and degrees.This belief has provided much motivation forresearchers and practitioners in the field of cre-ativity. if creativity were considered to be a raretalent, possessed by only a few highly gifted indi-viduals, then the knowledge gained from creativi-ty research would be relevant and applicable onlyto these rare few. however, it is the knowledgethat everyone is creative that impels creativityresearchers and educators to continue to investigatethis topic, and to disseminate knowledge so othersmay live more creative and productive lives.while everyone is creative, what research has shown isthat individuals will vary in terms of their style of cre-ativity. kirton, for example, talks about adaptive (cre-ate through improvement) and innovative (create bydoing things differently) styles of creativity. and Pucciohas discovered that individuals express different degreesof preference for the four fundamental areas of the cre-ative process, called clarifiers, ideators, Developers andimplementers31. The identification of such creativitystyles helps people to embrace their own creativity, aswell as to respect different approaches of others.9 ~ IMPORTANT ASPECT OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH

creative behavior is a necessary aspect of a mentallyhealthy life. individuals who are able to incorporate cre-ativity into their lives can enjoy the experience of discov-ering, developing and utilizing their many talents. con-versely, individuals who find their creativity suppressed,for one reason or another, may experience frustration inattempting to maximize their abilities. rogers32 assertedthat the primary motivation behind creativity is toenable oneself to fully actualize one’s potential. fur-thermore, skills relevant to creativity may also be use-ful in coping with life’s challenges. as isaksen has sosuccinctly stated, “releasing creativity is healthy”33.


Beyond psychological well-being, recent research inthe medical profession indicates that creative think-ing has physical health benefits as well. it has beenreported that those who are curious are more likelyto experience the following benefits: longer lifeexpectancy; reduced rates of dementia; more fulfillinglives; greater satisfaction in personal relationships;greater ability to form new friendships; and higherlevels of happiness. These findings underscore theinterplay between an active creative mind and goodphysical health34.10 ~ E NH ANC E L E A RN I NG P ROC E S S .

finally, the nature of learning requires the use of skillsassociated with creativity. Several scholars have arguedthat educational programs must provide instruction thatexplicitly encourages students to develop their creative-thinking skills. This encouragement will foster studentswho are more flexible in their thinking, and whobecome actively engaged in the material they are study-ing. The benefits of this form of instruction are applic-able well beyond the school years.in the age of innovation an educational experiencethat includes a focus on creativity and creative think-ing is much more likely to prepare young people fora fast changing world. a world in which they arelikely to adopt and drive change. To that point, onestudy suggested that millennials, those bornbetween 1977 and 1997, are likely to change jobs 15to 20 times over their careers35. creative individualsare in a much stronger position to flex and adaptto changing conditions and environments. if wewere preparing students to join an industrialeconomy, where they are expected to be disci-plined rule followers who are not expected touse their imaginations, then an educationdevoid of creativity would be acceptable. This issimply no longer the case.at the beginning of the 21st century the revision toBenjamin Bloom’s well-known taxonomy ofthinking clearly reflects the kind of thinking nec-essary in an age of innovation36. Bloom’s taxono-my was devised as a means to rank cognitive skillsfrom lower to higher order thinking. The originaltaxonomy ranked the thinking skills in the follow-ing order (from low to high): knowledge, com-prehension, application, analysis, Synthesis, andEvaluation. in 2002 this taxonomy of thinking wasrevised as follows (from low to high): remember-ing, understanding, applying, analyzing, Evaluat-ing, and creating. This taxonomy of thinking iswidely used by educators to design learning objectivesfor lessons, courses and educational programs. whilecritical thinking is often universally recognized for itsimportance among educators, the revised taxonomy

now challenges educators to facilitate the highest levelof human thought – creating. To be sure, criticalthinking is a valuable skill. People need to be effectiveat analyzing and spotting flaws; however, this form ofthinking mainly requires an individual to be reactive.creativity builds on critical thinking. creatingrequires an individual to be proactive, to fill a void,to produce something that did not exist before.Shouldn’t educational efforts assist students toachieve the highest level of human thinking. asnoted earlier, life in the 21st century, especially pro-fessional success, requires students to be effectivecreative thinkers. any educational experience, inany discipline, that does not require students toapply creative thinking fails in preparing studentsto be 21st century thinkers.

T H E T I M E F O R C R E A T I V E

E D U C A T I O N H A S C O M E

Education bears the expectations of society.Educators and educational leaders are asked toprovide a transformational experience that liftsstudents out of poverty, opens minds to diversi-ty, and prepares young people to become con-tributing members of a civilized society. like noother time in history has creative thinking beenmore important, and not for just the elite in soci-ety, but by all members of society. it is increasinglyin demand at work, from blue collar jobs to thosewho sit around the board room, creative thinkinghas become the golden key to success and longevityin the workplace. During the recovery from the greatrecession, when salaries had become stagnant formany, it was those who exhibited superior problemsolving and creativity skills who experienced anincrease in wages. and with advancements in technol-ogy, which is predicted to result in the automation ofmany jobs, it is social skills and imagination that ren-der jobs and workers future proof. Thinking morebroadly, creative thinking is a life skill, buildingresiliency and facilitating well-being in the face of life’sopportunities and challenges. with more than 60 years of empirical research the oldmisconceptions of creativity can be laid to rest. creativi-ty is not a rare gift possessed by a few geniuses. rather,creativity is an ability that all humans possess. in fact, ameta-analytical study of creativity programs resulted ina bold and unequivocal conclusion – creativity train-ing works37. in particular, the analysis of training pro-grams revealed that the most successful programswere based on cognitive models. That is approachesthat taught participants strategies based on forms ofthinking that are embedded in the creative process.creative Problem Solving (cPS), cited as one of the


most effective training models, teaches individualshow to effectively balance divergent thinking, theexploration of many varied and original options, withconvergent thinking, a focus on selecting, evaluatingand developing the most promising options. More-over, recent advancements in cPS by Puccio38 and hiscolleagues have resulted in the articulation of a range ofthinking skills that undergird creative thinking and aredeveloped through the deliberate practice of this cogni-tively-based model. The cognitive skills promotedthrough cPS training include: diagnostic thinking,visionary thinking, strategic thinking, ideational think-ing, evaluative thinking, contextual thinking and tacticalthinking. for nearly 50 years cPS has been taught withgreat effect to both undergraduate and graduate studentsat Buffalo State. given the demand for creative thinking,and the many benefits of developing increased capacitiesfor creative problem solving among individuals, teamsand organizations, it would seem that the time has cometo make more concerted efforts to involve all members ofsociety in the creative education movement. if leaders inall sectors, education, government, not-for-profit, forprofit and religious, nurtured the creative minds of theirrespective constituents only one’s imagination couldlimit the foreseeable benefits associated with thedemocratization of creative potential.

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R E F E R E N C E S

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8 ∑ 8


Mónica edwards-Schachter is aresearcher, consultant andwriter, passionate on learning,creativity and innovation.She holds a Phd in Scienceeducation with a pioneer dis-sertation on grand challenges

and sustainability and a Phdon innovation studies (aBd) and

has written more than one hundredpublications on these issues.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

rEaTiviTy aND iNNovaTioN arE coNSiDErED

critical to address the multi-dimensionalchanges of the 21st century (political, eco-nomic, social, cultural and institutional)and the grand challenges we are facing inour planet. The European union dubbed2009 The European year of creativityand innovation highlighting their role at

both personal and organizational levels (Ec, 2008;Sawyer, 2011). one priority of the horizon 2020programme is how to accelerate social and col-laborative innovation involving cross-sector par-ticipation of businesses, government and civilsociety to enable social change towards moreinclusive and sustainable societies (Ec, 2010). on other hand, the relevance of creativity isalso evidenced in the rise of the so-called cre-ative and cultural sector involving the spread-ing of a mixture of activities, usually mediatedby information and communications Tech-nology (icT), linked to design, technologicaldevelopments, artistic, entertainment, architec-ture and films, but also food, gardening,tourism, among others (cunningham, 2002).creativity appears at the core of a social trans-formative force pushing co-creation in servicessector and the creative economy (howkins,2002; Pratt & Jeffcutt, 2009). creativity seems tobe present in the power of the ‘crowd’ to solveproblems (howe, 2008) but also in the new sce-narios of the knowmad society, the movement ofnomadic knowledge workers (Moravec, 2008,2013) and the growth of the precarious activism or‘creative activism’ (gill & Pratt, 2008).

creativity is considered as expression of ancientcivilizations through forms such as literature,art or music, with a progressive shift in theattention paid to scientific and technologicalbreakthroughs, particularly in contemporarysociety (Simonton, 2004). from a general andtimeless perspective, creativity is considered asan inherent human capacity to address thecomplexity in which we live: ‘creative humanaction is universal’ (Burns et al., 2015: 181).otherwise terms like genius, invention and tal-ent are usually associated with creativity todescribe the highest levels of human perfor-mance. These ideas are not new. closest todescribing what the modern age views as creativetalent, greeks invoked the concept of an externalcreative ‘daemon’ where romans considered cre-ativity to name ‘genius’, linked to the sacred orthe divine. however, the idea of ‘collective’ and‘social’ creativity and the relationship between cre-ativity and innovation is far to be evident andremain elusive even ignored by research. Being cre-ativity a blasphemous notion in the Middle age, ithas been largely considered an uninteresting term forcenturies (Sawyer, 2011; godin, 2014). it was not untilthe beginning of the Twentieth century that theword became to be progressively used naming the actof creation of new products, in the sense of the infini-tive to create, i.e., ‘to produce something’ related tothe ‘power to create’ or ‘human creation capacity’. infact, interrelationships between creativity and innova-tion as key terms in debates about the knowledge econ-omy are recent (Pratt & Jeffcutt, 2009). creativity andinnovation are usually treated as independently, beingthe act of creation often analyzed and interpreted as theresult of an individual action not linked with innova-tion as a socio-cultural process. godin (2014: 5) main-tains that creativity is more postulated as ‘a word, amere word, at best a metaphor’ that studied, in partic-ular by science, technology and innovation fields,where acquired a ‘mythic’ use and value. how does creativity defined as a collective phenome-non? how can creativity be characterized as part of alearning process in knowledge society? what does cre-ativity mean in the context of social innovation? Thispaper attempts to answer these questions, presentingan overall view of the main theoretical elements and

M Ó N I C A E D W A R D S - S C H A C H T E R

on the interrelationships between creativity,l e a r n i n g a n d s o c i a l i n n o v a t i o n


H

debates on the role of individual and collective cre-ativity as socio-cultural practice and how they relateto learning processes and the emergence of socialinnovation.

D E F I N I N G I N D I V I D U A L A N D

C O L L E C T I V E C R E A T I V I T Y

People’s ideas about creativity are always influenced bytheir society and their historical time. opposite to themost current public perceptions, conceptions of cre-ativity have dramatically changed over time and com-mon arguments associated with creativity, such as ‘orig-inality’ and ‘novelty’ did not become widely accepteduntil the late renaissance. in words of Sawyer (2011: 15)the ‘modern conception of the artist –a unique andinspired individual who expresses and communicateshis or her unique vision through the art work’ […] ‘isno more than 200 years old’. he affirms that concep-tions of creativity stir over the centuries between twobroad avenues: rationalism and romanticism. ratio-nalism considers that creativity is generated by con-scious, deliberating, intelligent and rational mind,while romanticism keeps that creativity bubbles upfrom an irrational unconscious, and that rationaldeliberation interferes with the creative process. Todate debates remain and creativity is viewed in dif-ferent ways in a diversity of academic fields anddisciplines, like psychology, philosophy, economy,sociology, management, anthropology, linguistics,and innovation studies, among others. The academic literature on the nature of creativityranges over at least the past six decades; arguablystarting from guilford’s seminal 1950 presenta-tion in the american Psychological associationand experienced a boom between 1950 and 1975with a flood of research, publications and cours-es. in his conference guilford introduced cre-ativity as an instrument of work related with thecapabilities of the mind and the higher facultiesof individuals, emphasizing the significance ofcreative talent for industry, science, arts andeducation. his theory involves creativity as sen-sitivity to problems and problem-solving, asdivergent thinking and ability to generate mul-tiple ideas and generation of new patterns, use-ful knowledge transformation or use functionsof objects in new ways (guilford, 1968). opposite to the concept of convergent thinking(usually attributed to the ‘left side’ of the brain)he highlights that divergent thinking is the mainingredient of creativity, with a set of specificcharacteristics. They are: fluency (the ability toproduce great number of ideas or problem solu-tions), flexibility (the ability to simultaneously

propose a variety of approaches to a specific prob-lem), originality (the ability to produce new, orig-inal ideas), elaboration (the ability to systematizeand organize the details of an idea in a head andcarry it out). De Bono (1994) also picks up guil-ford’s conception of the more or less creativeindividual behaviour, characterized for the useof lateral or divergent thinking as a particulartype of thinking that enables to solve problemsthrough unconventional and illogical methods,with intuition and imagination. The idea that creative thinking depends on theactivity, primarily or exclusively, of the rightbrain is surely the most popular theory on theneural basis of creativity in the wider public.however, an ample review realized by Dietrichand kanso (2010: 822) reveals that ‘creativethinking does not appear to critically depend onany single mental process or brain region’, con-cluding that there is no research basis to suggestthat either the right hemisphere is responsible forcreativity or that so-called ‘right-brained’ individ-uals are more creative. in the last decades it isbecoming apparent that there may be severalkinds of creativity, where theoretical approachesnot only are numerous but vary according to thenotion of intelligence and the emphasis on someaspects, components and ‘dimensions’ of the cre-ative phenomenon. Numerous authors agree in a ‘4Papproach’ to creativity, considering four interrelateddimensions (Mackinnon, 1970; Brown, 1989; isaksenet al., 1993; Simonton, 2003): a) the creative person(who creates); b) process (the process of creation); c)creative product; and, d) the ‘press/environment (thesituation in which the creative act takes place).Brinck (1997) distinguishes three different perspectivesof creativity: the individual, the environment and thedomain of knowledge. at the individual level he ques-tions is whether there are genetic determinants or genet-ic causes – personality traits – explaining the presence ofcreative features in individuals. The second point ariseson the environment or ‘atmosphere’ that can influencethe creative process and, lastly, which fields of knowl-edge are best to develop or enhance creativity. for gard-ner (2011) if a person is creative problem solver regularly,develops products or defines new issues in a field in away that is considered the beginning (and even isrejected), but ultimately is accepted. contemporaryresearch identifies creativity with the production ofnovel and useful ideas in any domain (amabile, 1996).gardner (2011) and csikszentmihalyi (2014) extendcreative capacity to all people in any sphere of life.Despite Mumford (2003: 110) suggested that in thelast decades ‘we seem to have reached a generalagreement that creativity involves the production

M Ó N I C A E DW A R D S - S C H A C H T E R ∞ ON THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CREATIVITY ∞ 28

of novel, useful products’ (Mumford, 2003: 110),beyond this general commonality, authors havediverged dramatically in their definitions, existingover a hundred different versions in the literature.while a focus on the nature of the creative personconsiders more general traits and intellectual habits,such as openness, levels of ideation, autonomy, exper-tise and exploratory behaviour, focus on environmenttakes into account the best circumstances in whichcreativity flourishes, including degrees of autonomyand access to resources. a basic requirement to see a product as ‘creative’ is that itmust produce effective surprise in the consumer or audi-ence (Bruner, 1962). however, amabile (1983) considersthat a product is viewed as creative to the extent that isboth a novel response and an appropriate, useful or valu-able response to an open-ended task with the conditionof being observedand accepted ascreative on a con-sensus of experts.in the decade ofthe 80 it begins toconsider the rele-vance of the socio-cultural environ-ment to creativity,being a mainexponent thec o m p o n e n t i a lmodel of amabile(1983), integratingdifferent elementsand processes.other broaderapproach to cre-ativity has beendeveloped by csik-szentmihalyi (1988, 1999, 2014), who focuses on asystemic perspective. he argues that creativity isa system that comprises a dynamic interactionbetween the creator surrounded by an environ-ment consisting of a field and a domain. where-as the field represents a part of society, andtherefore human beings, the domain represents apart of the individual’s and the field’s culture. itis a symbolic system containing informationsuch as ideas, physical objects, behaviors, styles,values and symbols. individuals create somethingnovel and original, and such novelty must beaccepted or socially validated by the evaluatingfield in order to be included in the domain. Thedomain serves as a frame of reference to both cre-ators and evaluators (figurE 1).

linked with the person-environment and problem-solving issues, isaksen et al. (1993) developed an eco-logical approach focusing on a systemic approach,particularly related to organizational innovation.Puccio and cabra (2010) combine persons, process-es, and leadership in an ‘environment’ or field toproduce changes and innovations. a review per-formed by runco (2004) in the past 20 years underthe headings of 4Ps model shows a growing inter-est and interdisciplinary efforts in scientific cre-ativity research to explain the interrelationshipsbetween these four dimensions. Systemic per-spectives have been summarized by chen &kaufmann (2008) with distinctive approaches tocreativity, namely the evolutionary approach, thecross-disciplinary science approach, the socialsystem approach and the social network

approach. inter-esting studies arecurrently explor-ing creativity inrelation to con-cepts and modelsof multiple intelli-gences, emotionaland social intelli-gence (Sternberg,1984, 2015; Bar-onet al., 2004; gole-man, 2006; gard-ner, 2011). Stern-berg (1984) main-tains that creativi-ty is one of thethree componentsof the triarchicview of intelli-gence together

with analytical and practical abilities. The social dimension denotes a ‘distributed’ nature ofsocial creativity, which is determined by different shap-ing forces: the individual, the mix of interactions amongindividuals (the distinctive interests, skills, competencesand knowledge that compose specific social groups andcommunities) and the interactions between them andtheir social and technical environment at large (csik-szentmihalyi, 1999). collective creativity can be definedas creative processes leading to creative products thatare the results of interaction between two or morepeople, being impossible to trace the source of newideas to an individual (chaharbaghi & cripps, 2007;Bissola & imperatori, 2011). instead, creative activityemerges from the collaboration and contribution of


figurE 1. The csikszentmihalyi’s triangle of creativity.

many individuals, thereby blurring the contributionof specific individuals in creating ideas.one argument to consider collective creativity isbased on koestler’s idea of creativity as a process ofbi-sociation that brings together and combines previ-ously unrelated ideas (koestler, 1964). he contrastsbisociation with association, saying that associationrefers to previously established connections amongideas but that bi-sociation involves making entirelynew connections among ideas. Based on this, Sanders(2001) maintains that collective creativity occurs whenbisociation is shared by two or more people in a collab-orative process. other related notion is collective intel-ligence, defined by lévy (2010: 71) as ‘the capacity ofhuman collectives to engage in intellectual cooperationin order to create, innovate and invent’.

C U R R E N T T R E N D S

I N C R E A T I V I T Y R E S E A R C H

while most psychologists continue focusing on mentalprocess to study creativity, research in recent years hasbeen more and more informed by systems and socio-cultural perspectives, showing the influence of eco-nomic, political, and social events to explain why,when, and where creativity emerge (Perry-Smith,2006; csikszentmihalyi, 2014; Burns et al., 2015). Quite recent research has shown a consensusregarding some erroneous ideas and is openingnew avenues to understand the core cognitive,motivational, emotional and neural basis of cre-ativity and how human brain evolved to sustainand promote creative thinking (kounios & Bee-man, 2009; Baas et al., 2015). creativity is increas-ingly acknowledged as both capacity in individu-als and social groups, i.e. social and collectivecreativity. in words of Baas et al. (2015) ‘creativityis at the roots of extraordinary achievements inthe arts and sciences, and enables both individ-uals and their groups to adapt flexibly to chang-ing circumstances, to manage complex socialrelations’, being a key driver of human evolu-tion and survival. from a sociological and evo-lutionary perspective of creativity Burns et al.(2015) maintain that creativity and innovationare universal human activities, essential toadaptation and sustainability. in their words,creativity and innovation studies ‘should sys-tematically take into account the sociability,resources and powers of potential and participat-ing agents, the institutional arrangements andcultural formations which make up, for instance,the context of invention and creativity as well asthe context of acceptance and institutionalization’(197). Management research is paying growing

attention to the organizational aspects of creativeactivities and processes (Drazin et al., 1999; Perry-Smith, 2006; chen & kaufmann, 2008; Bissola &imperatori, 2011).collective creativity is being explored regardingthe notion of collective intelligence, defined as thecapacity to mobilize and coordinate the knowl-edge, competences and skills possessed by largegroups of individuals and combine them into agreater whole (lévy, 2010; woolley et al., 2010).collective creativity and social aspects of creativ-ity have become of increasing interest in man-agement research, being a component thatenhances the ability of organizations to improvetheir performance and retain their competitiveadvantage. florida argued that ‘we now have aneconomy powered by human creativity’ (florida,2002: 5-6) and that human creativity is ‘the defin-ing feature of economic life’ (21). from the eco-nomic perspective, howkins (2002) and florida(2002) have studied the emergence of creativecommunities and the contribution of the ‘cre-ative class’ to urban and regional development.one of the major expected impacts of creativity isin the educational field, considering that in thisage of accelerating change, complexity and chaos,creativity is the instrument to lead change andenable to future generations develop new ways ofthinking (Sawyer, 2006; Scribner et al., 2007). cre-ativity is increasingly considered a competence relat-ed to innovation and entrepreneurship that can beacquired and developed by any person and need to beencouraged, harnessed, and articulated within organi-zations (aspelin, 2015; Edwards-Schachter et al., 2015).

C R E A T I V I T Y I N T H E C O N T E X T

O F S O C I A L I N N O V A T I O N

in terms of innovation, the close relationship betweencreativity and the traditional socio-economic theory ofinnovation was present at the beginning of the centuryby Joseph Schumpeter xx as ‘an essential fact of capital-ism’. his theory of ‘Process of creative Destruction’describes the ways by which the old ideas and ways ofdoing things are destroyed and replaced by new roads,being the central protagonist the innovative entrepre-neurs. They are individuals who are known for theirvitality and ambition to create businesses and projects,generating both economic and social values that cat-alyze technological and social changes within soci-eties. amabile (1996) also states that entrepreneurshipis typically defined in terms of innovation, involvingprocesses of continuous re-combination of knowl-edge whereby inventions are put into practice,transforming creative ideas into valuable products,services and organizational models.


Even though innovation typically involves creativi-ty, is not identical to it. any innovation starts withthe generation of creative ideas while innovationmeans the previous selection of such ideas and theirsuccessful implementation with a subsequent eco-nomic and/or social (and also cultural) value genera-tion in the market and the society (Edwards-Schachter et al., 2015). Despite there is not a consensus on the definition ofSocial innovation (Si), a distinctive characteristic is thatSi involves a collective creative ‘spirit’ oriented to trans-form social practices under the aspiration of a moresustainable world. a recent analysis of 254 definitions ofSi provided during six decades show the co-existence oftwo complementary perspectives on Si: ~ a transformative view with focus on social practicesand social and/or technological change at long time, and ~ an instrumental, practical or normative perspective,emerged from practitioner and policy contributions,where Si is a blurred label of social practices that accom-panies solutions to problem-solving through the devel-opment of ‘new or improved products’, ‘new services’‘new organization method’ and/or mixed ‘pure’ socialinventions, such as a ‘law, norm, rule’ or also institu-tional and political innovations (Edwards-Schachter& wallace, 2015). in both cases, the role of activists and social entre-preneurs but especially cross-sector collective cre-ativity are seen as source of Si regarding the genera-tion of new products, services, new organizations,new models and rules that meet social needs andcreate new social relationships (Murray et al.,2010). The principal argument for the mobiliza-tion of collective creativity is that in today’srapidly changing environments, the complexityof societal problems requires solutions thatcombine knowledge, efforts and abilities of peo-ple with diverse perspectives. Most discussiontoday focus on how catalyze collective creativityand Si to cope with grand challenges and go‘from vision to action’, leading the change inour own lives. This message has been presentfor long decades, in books such as The Limits toGrowth (Meadows et al., 1972) and Social inno-vation for development (heden & king, 1984).and such capacity to combine the ideas, knowl-edge and resources possessed by disparate groupsin order to create Si is being observed across theworld in a multitude of maker movements, socialventures and societal experiments involving pri-vate, public and civil society, named as living-labs,change labs, knowledge hubs and co-workingspaces (Edwards-Schachter et al., 2012). collectivecreativity from the perspective of Si is conceived as

action-oriented to social cohesion, meeting socialactivism. it comprises people creativity and collectiveaction, identifying core values of social justice andthe rupture of the social order in terms of transfor-mations to social practices, organizations and insti-tutions (Moulaert et al., 2005; richards, 2010). The development of modern information andcommunication technologies has led to a renewedinterest in the phenomenon of collective intelli-gence at the basis of collective creativity. a gener-al assumption is that icT platforms facilitate themobilization and coordination of the knowledge,skills and creativity possessed by large groups ofindividuals, to combine them into a greaterwhole. in this respect, creativity is intrinsic to thenotion of ‘interactive learning’ embedded insocial interactions and social practices – in strictusensu, social and cultural practices (reckwitz,2002). learning enables that individuals andsocial groups acquire and develop the ‘agency’capacity, i.e., deliberate choice to act as socialagent or change-maker, transforming society andcontributing to technological, social and culturalchange. ideation and learning as potential sourcesof innovation occur in social practices mediated bylearning that could not be isolated from purposes,values and power interactions and socio-cultural andinstitutional contexts.The advent of collective intelligence has added thepower of the crowd in solving many problems, andsometimes this means that work can be delegated tothe ‘crowd’ as a set of individuals assembled to performa task, i.e., crowdsourcing (howe, 2008). Some experi-ments enable multi-actor collaboration strengtheningand improving the creative process that underpins Si andother are limited to ease networked collaborative resolu-tion of problems not necessarily oriented to Si. accordingly, it is necessary to understand what collec-tive intelligence means, the synergies between collectiveintelligence and social creativity and at what extent theuse of digital platforms enables Sis.

C O N C L U S I O N

Most perceptions of creativity are still anchored in theimage of the individual and the genius, like the rodin’ssculpture The Thinker. however, much human cre-ativity arises from activities that take place in a socialcontext in which interactions with other people;always emerge through interactions between a per-son’s thoughts and learning in a socio-cultural con-text. current approaches to creativity attempt toexplore its nature from a systemic perspective, focus-ing on the interrelated dimensions involving eco-logical, evolutionary and sociological views around:


~ The creative ‘subject’: most of these investigationsseek to discover what characterizes the individual ascreator (the creative mind, creative personality, cre-ative potential, ‘insights’, etc.) and what kind of peo-ple can carry out creative activities. Beyond the tradi-tional psychological perspectives, there is a growinginterest in exploring links between creativity and intel-ligence from both individual and collective perspec-tives. other point is the need to differentiate or delimi-tate that are the competences and skills to strengthencreativity in individuals, groups and organizations, howcreativity relates to innovation and entrepreneurshipand how creativity can be taught and learned.~ The creative process: concerned with studying thephases and stages through which individuals andgroups create and experience creativity. Most of thedesign models and problem solving methodologieshave similar points: a) Meeting and definition of aproblem, b) accuracy of the problem, c) generatingideas and solutions and, d) critical review and evalua-tion of the solutions. ~ The creative product: these investigations attemptto establish what criteria determine the character ofcreative in a product or service, considering the con-crete/tangible and more intangible aspects. ~ The ‘press’ context/environment: from the considera-tion of the situational context that may influence howcreativity is perceived and how creative processes areplaced (micro level) to creativity as part of the con-struction of the social realm (meso and macro levels,i.e., the research conducted by florida on territorial-ized properties according to the presence of a cre-ative ‘class’ and current analysis on creative workersand creative knowmads). The big challenge tofuture creativity research is not only to open newways to understand what human intelligence andcollective creativity means but how to improveprocesses in which individual and social (collec-tive) creativity can be integrated and mutuallyreinforced. The future and survival of cominggenerations greatly depends on our creativecapacity and the transformative potential of Si toovercome world’s most pressing social and eco-logical challenges, supporting the ongoing socio-technical transition towards sustainability.

8

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8 ∑ 8


Louise Sundararajan was bornin yunnan, china, and grewup in Taiwan. She receivedher Ba in english Literaturefrom Tunghai University,Taiwan, her Ph.d. in historyof religions from harvard

University, and her ed.d. incounseling Psycholog y from

Boston University. She is founderand chair of the Task Force on indige-

nous Psychology, which is joined by near two hundred researchersfrom around the globe. She served as past president of The inter-national Society for the Study of human ideas on Ultimate real-ity and Meaning, and also past president of the Society forhumanistic Psychology (division 32 of the american Psychologi-cal association - aPa). She is recipient of the abraham Maslowaward for 2014, from division 32 of aPa. She is a Fellow of theamerican Psychological association, and also a member of theBoard of directors for the international Society for research onemotions. She serves on the editorial boards of The human-istic Psychologist, and Journal of humanistic Psychology.She is associate editor for Journal of Theoretical andPhilosophical Psychology and has published extensively ontopics related to culture and emotions. her recent book isunderstanding Emotion in chinese culture: Thinkingthrough Psychology (2015, Springer).

C R O S S - C U L T U R A L

P S Y C H O L O G Y A N D T H E L O N G

S H A D O W S O F O R I E N T A L I S M

hErE iS a wiDE SPrEaD caNarD ThaT

asians are not very creative. The title ofan article in Time (Schuman, 2013)reads: “china makes everything. whycan’t it create anything?” (36). it is notdifficult to expose the historical myopiain the media. Needham (1986) wrote:francis Bacon had selected three inven-

tions, paper and printing, gunpowder, and themagnetic compass, which had done more, hethought, than any religious conviction, or anyastrological influence, or any conqueror’s achieve-ments, to transform completely the modern worldand mark it off from antiquity and the Middleages. he regarded the origins of these inventions as“obscure and inglorious” and he died without everknowing that all of them were chinese (6).

it is much more difficult, however, to dispelmisperceptions when cross-cultural psychologybolsters its stereotypical view of asian creativitywith robust empirical data (e.g. gardner, 1996;Bond, 1991; Ng, 2001; hannas, 2003). havingaddressed the issue elsewhere (Sundararajan &rainer, 2015), i only wish to point out here thatsweeping generalizations and misrepresenta-tions in cross-cultural psychology not only per-petuate stereotypes, but also render inaccessiblevaluable data on creativity masked by the stereo-types. This problem has its roots in orientalism.

O R I E N T A L I S M

orientalism is defined by Edward Said (1978) as“a system of knowledge about the orient, anaccepted grid for filtering through the orient intowestern consciousness” (6). one legacy of orien-talism is the persistent East and west comparison,which abounds in cross-cultural psychology: Throughout the exchange between Europeans andtheir “others” that began systematically half a millen-nium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is thatthere is an “us” and a “them,” each quite settled, clear,unassailably self-evident. (Said, 1993: xxv). Through this comparison, the orient “has helped todefine Europe (or the west) as its contrasting image,idea, personality, experience” (Said, 1978: 1-2). com-parison for contrast can lead to a biased representationof the other. a case in point is the “finding” that asiansdo not have the type of creativity, privileged in thewest, known as “revolutionary creativity.”according to gardner (1996), revolutionary creativity ischaracterized by the creative individual making a radi-cal break with the domain, in his own words, “the kindof creativity they represent is what i call revolutionarycreativity because their creative breakthroughs pro-duced very sharp breaks with the domain in whichthey worked” (143). he goes on to say that: “ourwestern European culture is based on revolutionaryideas. certainly in other cultures – for example,china – revolutionary creativity is not even known.it is only in the political realm, and not until veryrecently, that individual chinese are singled out ashighly creative individuals. Their breakthroughs areevolutionary, not revolutionary. (143).

L O U I S E S U N D A R A R A J A N

i n d i g e n i z i n g c r e a t i v i t y :


a creative solution to orientalism incross-cultural psychology

T

Gardener is by no means alone. The long shadowsof Orientalism in academia can be summed up suc-cinctly by Goody’s (1996) observations: “[…] socio-logical and historical enquiry in Europe has had as acontinuing pre-occupation with the problem of theUniqueness of the West, the search for factors thatcan be held responsible for its achievements in themodern world and in particular the emergence ofindustrial capitalism. The search has led to a devalua-tion of the East and consequently a mistaken self-understanding of the West.” (10).

N E G L E C T O F G E N U I N E

C U L T U R E I N T H E E A S T

In passing through the grid of Orientalism to reach theconsciousness of the West, the East gets its genuine cul-ture screened out. Genuine culture may be understoodas an inventory of the cultural resources for autonomyand vitality. In the words of Sapir (1956/1924): “a gen-uine culture is one that gives its bearers a sense ofinner satisfaction, a feeling of spiritual mastery” (420).Sapir further defines (genuine) culture as “an out-growth of the collective spiritual effort of man” (403),emphasis added). The key term here is “effort.” Sapiremphasizes the “spiritual primacy of the individualsoul” (424), which must learn to reconcile its ownstrivings with the spiritual life of the community,such that “if not embrace the whole spiritual lifeof its group, at least catch enough of its rays toburst into light and flame” (424). For psychological research, genuine culture may beoperationally defined as ideals and aspirations thatapply across contexts, and that inspire continuousstriving for excellence. Applying this yardstick ofgenuine culture to an analysis of the items in theIndividualism-Collectivism scale (Singelis, Trian-dis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand, 1995) – a measure mostwidely used in cross cultural psychology –reveals some interesting observations.Four out of sixteen (25%) items of Individualism(Singelis, et al.: 255) meet the criteria of genuineculture as operationally defined above: “I am aunique individual”; “I enjoy being unique anddifferent from others in many ways”; “Winningis everything”; “It is important that I do my jobbetter than others.” By contrast, none of the items under Collec-tivism meets these criteria, due to the fact thatthey are all context specific, such as “I usually sac-rifice my self-interest for the benefit of my group”(256). Furthermore, empirical evidence is accumu-lating that these collectivistic values of compromiseand self-effacement are not necessarily personalaspirations, so much as externally driven concerns

to take socially wise action, and to avoid sociallyunwise behaviour (Yamagishi, 2011). Sapir (1956/1924)refers to practices that are based on “an automaticperpetuation of standardized values” (418) as “exter-nal” or spurious culture (412), in contrast to theinternally driven genuine culture.This brief examination of the Individualism-Col-lectivism scale (Singelis, et al., 1995) reveals aslippage across the West and East divide fromlife to data, from ideals and strivings characteris-tic of a genuine culture to beliefs and practicesthat are confined to one (social) dimensiononly, and that pertain to social compliancerather than personal strivings. Hook (2005) haspointed out a recurring slippage between “theideals, the norms of the valorised Western cul-ture, and those of the dominated culture, whichcomes to be the demoted other of all of thesevalues” (481), emphasis in original). For Asians,one of the ramifications of being identified withdemoted values is to “accept some miniature ver-sion of yourself as a doctrine [such as collec-tivism] to be passed out on a course syllabus”(Said, 1993: 334). Absence of genuine culture in theWestern representation of the other has far reach-ing consequences. Biko has addressed in depth thesystematic marginalization of the cultural resourcesthrough which the black psyche had traditionallyattained “autonomy and vitality” (cited in Hook,2005: 489). A continuation of this theme is the senseof alienation experienced by Yang (1997) who refers tothe Westernized research process that fails to ade-quately reflect the Chinese cultural values and ways ofthinking as an imposed “soulless psychology” (65). What are the living values, in the collectivistic societies,of a genuine culture that give the bearers a sense of vital-ity, inner satisfaction, and spiritual mastery across allcontexts? Do collectives have any internally driven striv-ings that endeavor to “burst into light and flame” (Sapir,1956/1924: 424) when ignited by some cultural values? Theanswer to these questions is a resounding yes. To accessgenuine culture in non-Western traditions, we need toheed the advice of Fiske (2002): “We [Western psycholo-gy] must transcend our ethnocentric framework and notjust study how other cultures differ from the UnitedStates but explore what they are intrinsically” (87). Thistakes us to indigenous psychology.I N D I G E N I Z I N G C R E A T I V I T Y

As an international movement for more than threedecades (see Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006; see alsoonline resources Indigenous Psychology Task Force1),indigenous psychology calls attention to the impor-tance of local context in scientific investigations ofhuman behavior (Sundararajan, 2015), and to the

L O U I S E S U N D A R A R A J A N ∞ INDINEGIZING CREATIVITY ∞ 36

problems generated by rampant exportation ofWestern psychologies to other parts of the world.The lesson of indigenous psychology for our purpos-es is to factor in cultural traditions in our investiga-tions of creativity (Sundararajan & Rainer, 2015). Inthe following paragraphs, I adumbrate the Chinesetraditional views of creativity to argue that revolution-ary creativity exists in cultures outside the West, exceptthat the narrative is different.

C R E A T I V I T Y , A N A R R A T I V E

O F T W O A C C O U N T S

It is not that the Chinese did not get so far as theGreeks; they simply advanced in a different direction.(Jean-Pierre Vernant, cited in Bollas, 2013: 8-9).Before we start, some preliminary understanding of theChinese notions of creativity is in order. In contrast toGreece and many other cultures, Chinese history doesnot have many creation myths to boast of. This has atleast two ramifications for Chinese creativity: One, noneed for heroic narratives of creativity; and two, noneed for causal accounts of creativity. First, the Chinese conceive of creativity as a continu-ous process, modelled on the eternal return, with nobeginning and no end, of nature (Niu & Sternberg,2002). On this view, creativity is an organic and holis-tic process – “Either everything shares in creativity,or there is no creativity” (Ames & Hall, 2003: 17).This stands in sharp contrast to the Western notionof creativity, which is a discontinuous process witha before and an after, a process modelled on God’screation out of nothing. Second, since nature is self-generating, creativitydoes not require a causal account. In the words ofDavid Hall (Hall, 1978): “A self-creative event isthe efficient cause of itself ” (277). Nature thusembodies the principle of self-reflexivity. Oneimportant ramification of self-reflexivity is thecollapse of the dichotomy between the creatorand the created product (Sundararajan & Averill,2007). The self-reflexivity principle posits that theproduct of creativity is the creative individualhim- or her-self. Thus instead of patents or othermeasures of product in the West, the measure ofcreativity in China has consistently been self-transformation (Hsu, 1966) of the creative indi-vidual him – or her-self.Because of these factors, revolutionary creativityin China is devoid of the rugged individualismthat plagues its counterpart in the West (Sun-dararajan, 2015).C R E A T I O N V E R S U S D I S C O V E R Y

Weisberg (2006) makes a distinction between twoaccounts of creativity – artistic creation versus scientificdiscovery. The difference between these two

accounts lies in the degree of subjectivity in theprocess of creativity – the scientist does not bringobjects into being like God, or like the artist whorepeats the divine creation on a lesser scale; rather,scientists discover objects, such as DNA, that arealready there. Weisberg (2006) claims that “it is notabsurd to say that Watson and Crick created thedouble helix, although it seems less acceptable tosay that Picasso discovered Guernica” (p. 57). Notso in the Chinese tradition, where discovery isthe primary paradigm for artistic creativity.In a Taoist story from the Chuang-tzu, thewoodcarver Khing, known for his excellentbell-stand, attributed his art to the elaboratepreparations he went through, known as fast-ing of the mind: “After fasting for three days, Idid not presume to think of any congratula-tion, reward, rank, or emolument […] Afterfasting five days, I did not presume to think ofthe condemnation or commendation (which itwould produce), or of the skill or want of skill(which it might display). At the end of the sevendays, I had forgotten all about myself; – my fourlimbs and my whole person […] Then I wentinto the forest, and looked at the natural forms ofthe trees. When I saw one of a perfect form, thenthe figure of the bell-stand rose up to my view,and I applied my hand to the work.” (Legge, 1959:462)Two inter-related themes emerge here: one is thatcreativity has to do with self-transcendence; the otherthat creativity is a discovery rendered possible by theego-less mind. This forms a sharp contrast with thecreation narrative of the West which celebrates the cre-ative individual as the hero, one who goes against theprevailing tastes and prejudices of the field, and eventu-ally conquers the field by taking the domain intouncharted waters, making major breakthroughs in thefield (Sternberg, 2006). Historical studies of art and literature record many greatbreakthroughs in China and Japan throughout the ages(Murray, 2003). In traditional China, the crowd defyingresistance against conventions has been considered oneof the defining features of a creative personality. Butdirect confrontation is rare in a tradition where harmonyholds sway. According to the harmony model, creativeaction requires going both with and against the flow, asin crossing a river diagonally rather than either strug-gling against the current or letting oneself go (Sabelli,2005). The result is a long history of eremitism (Averill& Sundararajan, 2014), in which the crowd defyinggenius tends to become a hermit by going away frominstead of going against the crowd. Furthermore, a farmore radical form of rejecting conventions exists in


China and India, namely self-transcendence. Withself-transcendence, the frame of reference for noveltyhas shifted from being dualistic to reflexive – theobstacle to new insights and breakthroughs is nolonger ignorance in the domain of knowledge, butthat in oneself. Otherwise put, the last frontier to con-quer so far as ready-made conventions go, is not theworld so much as the self. I N F O R M A T I O N V E R S U S C O N S C I O U S N E S S

Cognition in certain cultures is focused on conscious-ness itself, and in others it is focused on the objects ofconsciousness, such as knowledge and information.The creation narrative privileges the acquisition andconstruction of knowledge; the discovery narrativefocuses on consciousness itself such that it privilegesself- transformation and self-transcendence. The formerforegrounds the individualistic role of the creator, whilethe latter the relational nature of consciousness as co-creator with Nature. As Horan (2007) points out, “Inthese [Asian] traditions, creativity is a spontaneousmanifestation of man’s deeper awareness of his indivis-ibility from nature” (179). In these cultures, creativityof the individual lies in participation of the cosmicprocess of the eternal return. So much for a brief introduction to revolutionarycreativity in China and other Asian traditions. Butwhat is the relevance of culture and tradition to thecontemporary scene, the globalizing era?

C U L T U R E A N D S C I E N C E

The great mathematician Ramanujan claimed thathis theorems were dictated by the goddess Namagiriin his dreams. As Rao (1987) points out rightly, wewould not have Ramanujan if he did not believe inthis. Likewise the Japanese physicist HidekiYukawa (1973), the Nobel laureate, argues that cre-ativity is inextricably cultural: “Plato explainedlearning or the acquisition of knowledge in thislife, as a process of recollection. […] To us, thescientists in the middle of the twentieth century,it could be the recollection of ancient Greece,and also, in my own case, the recollection ofancient China.” (Yukawa, 1973: 109).Thus while scientific equations may be universal,the scientist’s journey to discovery is inevitablypersonal, and deeply cultural. To nurture creativeindividuals, we need to understand their culturalneeds. But before we take a look at the culturalneeds of the creative individuals, we need tounderstand one thing about the creative mind,namely that the mind is a promiscuous thing whenit comes to creativity.

M E E T I N G O F C U L T U R E S

Heisenberg (1958) suggests that the potential foradvances in science lies in the meeting of cul-tures, when different lines of thought with “rootsin quite different parts of human culture, in dif-ferent times or different cultural environmentsor different religious traditions […] actuallymeet, that is, if they are at least so much relatedto each other that a real interaction can takeplace, then one may hope that new and inter-esting developments may follow.” (187). While cultures may clash at the internationallevel, they can meet more readily at the personaland interpersonally levels. This is especially truewith creative individuals. This hypothesis is sup-ported by findings that immigrants and ethnicminority group members who integrate bothheritage and host cultures tend to show high cre-ativity (Simonton, 1999). In fact, the highly cre-ative individuals tend to go out of their way tomeet cultures outside the pale of their own.

C U L T U R E W I T H O U T B O R D E R S

Cultures have roots in their social and historicalcontexts, but their impact on creativity tends tocross borders. Creative individuals are particularlysensitive to this border-crossing impact of culture. Acase in point is the Chinese hermits. Take for instancethe famous traveller and geographer Xú Xiákè (1587-1641), who dedicated his life to explorations of theChinese landscape. From age twenty-two till his death,he spent over thirty years exploring the mountains andstreams all over China. He left behind extensive recordof his travels, but for which many beautiful mountainsin China would have remained unknown to this day.Whether the hermits physically wander or not, theirminds are engaged in perpetual border-crossing, a phe-nomenon known in the West as the frontier spirit. Oneconsequence of the frontier spirit is that highly creativeindividuals tend to be open to influences from other cul-tures. Steve Jobs is a prime example. In modern physics,Einstein and Schrödinger were both deeply influencedby philosophy (Goonatilake, 2000). Einstein had beenreading the philosophers David Hume and Ernst Machjust before he wrote his paper on special relativity.Schrödinger was influenced by Schopenhauer andVedantism […] the list goes on. Consistent with the critique of Orientalism, Dewey(1951) has rejected the crude East versus West “culturalblock universes” approach to culture. Sapir (1956/1924)further points out why national and geographicalboundaries do not actually carve culture at the joint:“Our national-political units are too small for peace,too large for safety. They are too small for the


intelligent solution of the large problems in thesphere of direct ends; they are too large for the fruit-ful enrichment of the remote ends, for culture.” (428).Today more than ever, the cultural block universes ofcross-cultural psychology need to be replaced by thevision of octavio Paz (1995: 86) who sings of not only afusion of flavours, but a fusion of times as well as suc-cession of epochs, a superimposition of peoples, reli-gions, institutions and languages. Paz describes not onlya plurality but also of conglomeration and juxtapositionof doctrines, gods, rites, cosmologies, and sects. what isneeded for creativity in the globalizing era is a new nar-rative which can validate the freedom of the creativemind to transform or reject its own culture, to belong tomultiple cultures, and to “transcend the restraints ofimperial or national or provincial limits” (Said, 1993: 335).Such a narrative can be developed along the lines of gen-uine culture, defined by Sapir (1956/1924) as a manifesta-tion of life that has no borders, and an embodiment ofthe human spirit that is inherently free: “[…] those […]of us who take their culture neither as knowledge nor asmanner, but as life, will ask of the past not so much“what?” and “when?” and “where?” as “how?” and theaccent of their “how” will be modulated in accordancewith the needs of the spirit of each, a spirit that is freeto glorify, to transform, and to reject. (423).or, to put it more simply, as Shweder (1991) hasdone, is “to be the student and beneficiary of alltraditions, and the slave to none” (68). This newnarrative has direct implications for culture andcreativity. The creative individual in the globaliz-ing era can no longer be adequately described byfirst order creativity in which the local cultureholds sway. what is more appropriate for con-temporary creativity is what ken gergen refersto as “second order creativity” in which “culturalhybridization, the inter-mixing of assumptionsand practices” is the norm (personal communi-cation, 2 feb. 2014).

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garDNEr, h. (1996). “The creators’ patterns”, inM. a. Boden (ed.). dimensions of creativity(cambridge, Massachusetts: MiT Press).

gooNaTilakE, S. (25 May 2000). “Millenniumessay: Many paths to enlightenment: Modernphysics bears the imprint of western and asianphilosophies”, nature, 405: 399.

gooDy, J. (1996). The east in the west (New york:cambridge uP).

hall, D. l. (1978). “Process and anarchy – a Taoistvision of creativity”, Philosophy east and West, 28:271-285.

haNNaS, w. c. (2003). The writing on the wall: howasian orthography curbs creativity (Philadelphia,Pennsylvania: university of Pennsylvania Press).

hEiSENBErg, w. (1958). Physics and philosophy; the revo-lution in modern science (New your: harper).

hook, D. (2005). “a critical psychology of the postcolo-nial”, Theory & Psychology, 15: 475-503.

horaN, r. (2007). “The relationship between creativityand intelligence: a combined yogic-scientificapproach”, creativity research Journal, 19: 179-202.

hSu, f. g. (1976). The spirit of chinese art (in chinese)(Taipei: xue Sheng).

kiM, u., yaNg, k. S., & hwaNg, k. k. (eds.). (2006).indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people incontext (New york: Springer).

lEggE, J. (1959). “The writings of chuang-Tzu”, in J. legge,Trans., The texts of Taoism (New york: The Julian Press):175-672.

Murray, c. (2003). human accomplishment: The pursuit ofexcellence in the arts and sciences, 800 Bc to 1950 (Newyork: harpercollins).

NEEDhaM, J. (1986). “introduction”, in r. Temple. Thegenius of china (New york: Simon & Schuster): 1-8.

Ng, a. k. (2001). Why asians are less creative than Westerners?(Singapore: Prentice-hall, Pearson Education asia).

Niu, w., & STErNBErg, r. J. (2002). “contemporary studieson the concept of creativity: The East and the west”,Journal of creative Behavior, 36: 269-288.

Paz, o., (1995). in light of india (trans. E. weinberger)(New york: harcourt).

rao, c. r. (1987, Dec. 30). Uncertainty, randomness andcreation of new knowledge. ramanujan Memorial Lecture,cSir News, 37: 255-260.


SaBElli, h. (2005). Bios: a study of creation (Singapore:world Scientific).

SaiD, E. w. (1978). orientalism (New york: Pantheon).—— (1993). culture and imperialism (New york: knopf ).SaPir, E. (1956). “culture, genuine and spurious”, in D. g.

Mandelbaum (ed.), E. Sapir: culture, language andpersonality (Berkeley, ca: university of california Press

(original work published 1924): 78-119).SchuMaN, M. (2013, Nov. 18). china makes everything.

why can’t it create anything?, Time: 36-41.ShwEDEr, r. a. (1991). Thinking Through culture (cam-

bridge, Ma.: harvard uP).SiMoNToN, D. k. (1999). origins of genius: darwinian per-

spective on creativity (oxford, uk: oxford uP).SiNgEliS, T. M., TriaNDiS, h. c., Bhawuk, D. P. S., &

gElfaND, M. J. (1995). “horizontal and vertical dimen-sions of individualism and collectivism: a theoretical andmeasurement refinement”, cross-cultural research, 29:240-275.

STErNBErg, r. J. (2006). “The nature of creativity”, creativityresearch Journal, 18: 87-98.

SuNDararaJaN, l. (2015). Understanding emotion in chineseculture: Thinking through psychology (New york: SpringerSBM).

—— & avErill, J. r. (2007). “creativity in the everyday:culture, self, and emotions”, in r. richards (ed.), every-day creativity and new views of human nature (washing-ton, Dc: american Psychological association): 195-220.

—— & raiNa, M. k. (2015). “revolutionary creativity,East and west: a critique from indigenous psycholo-gy”, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology,35: 3-19.

wEiSBErg, r. w. (2006). creativity/Understandinginnovation in problem solving, science, invention,and the arts (New york: wiley).

yaMagiShi, T. (2011). “Micro-macro dynamics of thecultural construction of reality”, in M. J. gelfand,c-y. chiu, and y-y. hong (eds.), advances in cul-ture and psychology (New york: oxford uP): vol.1: 251-308.

yaNg, k. (1997). “indigenizing westernized chinesepsychology”, in M. h. Bond (ed.), Working atthe interface of culture: twenty lives in social sci-ence (london: routledge): 62-76.

yukawa, h. (1973). creativity and intuition (J.Bester, Tr.) (Tokyo: kodansha international).

8 ∑ 8


Stanislav Panin is Assistant Pro-fessor at the Department of Phi-losophy of D. Mendeleev Uni-versity of Chemical Technologyof Russia, Moscow. He is aboard member of the Associa-tion for the Study of Esoteri-

cism and Mysticism (ASEM), anon-profit organization that works

to develop academic study of esoteri-cism in Russia and other post-Soviet

countries. He specializes in the history of Western esotericism in thelate 19th and 20th century. Email: [email protected] .

I N T R O D U C T I O N

rOM THE 19TH CEnTury OnWArdS THE IdEA Of

evolution has been playing an importantrole in Western culture. Charles darwinsuccessfully propagated it in the academiaand today scholars discuss about “the evo-lutionary paradigm” in the sciences as theidea of evolution is nowadays related notonly to biological evolution, but also to

social evolution, regarded as a part of a more gener-al process of evolution of the entire nature.The darwinian notion of evolution was not possi-ble without a proper philosophical backgroundprovided by German classic philosophy, includ-ing the works of Shelling, Hegel and Schopen-hauer. Hegel’s dialectics as well as Shelling’sNaturphilosophie popularized the idea of develop-ment as an internal quality of the universe itself.As well documented, Hegel’s works wereinspired by esoteric sources1, and the idea ofevolution was popular not only in the academia,but also among the different esoteric circles ofthat time. The prominent figures who focusedon the idea of evolution and were involved intoesoteric circles of the late nineteenth and thebeginning of twentieth century, were HelenaBlavatsky (1831-1891), Carl du Prel (1839-1899) andKonstantin Tsiolkovskii (1875-1935). In their works,the idea of evolution in biological sense developedinto the idea of collective transformation ofhumankind that will lead to a new state of being.Blavatsky and her fellow theosophists called thisfuture state of humanity “the sixth race,” whereas for

Tsiolkovskii it was a luchistoe chelovechestvo, aradiant humanity.Although the terms were different, the conceptitself was common in many senses, and theidea of enlightenment played a crucial role init. Throughout the history of Western culture,the term “enlightenment” had different mean-ings, among which three concepts of enlight-enment were especially influential: the Augus-tinian notion of enlightenment; the notiondeveloped by the Enlightenment movement inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; andthe Western acquired notion derived from theEastern religious and philosophical doctrines.

V A R I E T I E S O F N O T I O N S

O F E N L I G H T E N M E N T

Augustine developed the concept of divine illumi-nation (Latin illumino, literally to bring light) thatbecame central to Christian philosophy and mysti-cism. By definition, divine illumination is a doctrineaccording to which, in order to gain the truthfulness,humans require divine assistance in their cognitiveactivities. In other words, Augustine maintains thatthe only way to access truth is through God’s directintervention with the light of knowledge.This Augustinian notion of enlightenment as a divineparticipation in the process of cognition became awidespread philosophical approach in the Middle Ages.However, Augustine did not conceive it himself and,moreover, it was not even Christian in its origins. Theauthor who influenced many aspects of Augustine’s phi-losophy was Plato, and the theory of knowledge was notan exception. Parallels to the theory of divine illumina-tion can be found in Plato’s doctrine of knowledge asrecollection of the truth that implies direct perceptionof pure ideas, as well as in the talks of his teacherSocrates in which he told about the spiritual voice ofthe daimon that guided him in life2. On the otherhand, Aristotle, who was a student of Plato, provideone more parallel to Augustine’s ideas, as he coined aconcept of “active intellect” as an inner (“formal” inAristotle’s own terms) part of human intellect and asource of all knowledge that he compared with light.While Aristotle’s “active intellect” had obviousdivine nature, Cicero wrote about lumen naturale

S T A N I S L A V P A N I N


n o t i o n s o f e v o l u t i o n a n d e n l i g h t e n m e n ti n t h e l at e n i n e t e e n t h a n d e a r ly t w e n t i e t h

c e n t u ry e s ot e r i c l i t e r at u r e

F

(natural light) or lumen naturalis rationis (light ofnatural reason)3, a much more mundane concept. Inmedieval philosophy these two notions of enlighten-ment coexists, and Thomas Aquinas in concludinghis Summa Theologica that “[…] the light of naturalreason […] is nothing else than an imprint on us ofthe divine light.”4

However, not all philosophers agreed with Aquinas’sunderstanding of correlation between natural anddivine light. Moreover, the most common modernnotion of enlightenment, which emerged in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries and provided the periodwith its name – the Age of Enlightenment, was quiteopposite to those of Aquinas and Augustine. Authors ofthat time were often very critical about both church andreligion and looked for a way to “replace theism withthe light of reason5.” Therefore, the “light of natural rea-son” was praised at that time, while divine light wasexpelled from this new concept of enlightenment.Although many authors of the period insisted on secu-lar understanding of enlightenment and concentratedon scientific exploration of the nature, f. yates hasshown that their ideas have roots in such Western eso-teric currents, such as rosicrucianism. yates describesrosicrucianism as a movement that belongs to aperiod in the history of ideas “intermediate betweenthe renaissance and so-called scientific revolutionof the seventeenth century6.” People involved in therosicrucian movement were sure that through thescientific study of the nature they could betterunderstand God and his plan about the creation.They combined Hermeticism and ChristianKabala developed during the renaissance withmedieval alchemy and rationalistic philosophyproviding a philosophical background for manyseekers of that time. On the other hand, in eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries, European thinkers adopted anew concept of enlightenment from Eastern reli-gions, particularly from Buddhism, Hinduismand Taoism, where enlightenment “involves arelease from endless cycles of existence.”7 TheEastern notion of enlightenment as a spiritualinsight resulting in liberation from mundaneworld influenced a number of Western philoso-phers, especially in the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries.Active cultural contacts with Eastern culturestook place in Europe as early as the seventeenthcentury, mostly through Catholic missionaries.In the seventeenth century, these contacts weremainly with China; the Confucius SinarumPhilosophus, a compendium of Confucian texts,appeared in Paris in 16788.

Throughout the Age of Enlightenment, China wasobject of constant interest among Western thinkers.Christian missionaries tended to draw near Chinesephilosophy like medieval philosophers approachedthose of Ancient Greece. They describe them as“Christians before Christ,” trying to draw a corre-lations between Chinese and Christian thought.As J.J. Clarke mentions, “one of the conse-quences of this was that they tended to portraythe Chinese as a morally and politically sophisti-cated people, governed by wise and educatedrulers who had established basic philosophicalprinciples concerning morality and society onthe basis of universal human reason9”, a portraitquite popular among philosophers of theEnlightenment. Leibniz, Voltaire, Adam Smithand many other thinkers of that period, shownsympathy to Chinese educational system, totheir state governance and ethics.In the nineteenth century, the interests of West-ern intellectuals moved towards at the time yetlittle known India, a very mysterious place, inharmony with critics of too rationalistic approachto the universe antagonized by romantic Move-ment. Authors of that time often used references toIndian culture, as Arthur Schopenhauer, who wasexplicitly influenced by Buddhist and Hinduism.Authors of that time concentrated on Indian religionand mysticism. With Schopenhauer, the Easternnotion of enlightenment was transformed in Westernphilosophy, joining with more rationalistic notion ofphilosophical enlightenment through the means ofhuman reason. nevertheless, Schopenhauer’s under-standing of enlightenment incorporated both a ratio-nalistic philosophical approach and a spiritual one, as“St. francis of Assisi and Jesus emerge […] as Schopen-hauer’s prototypes for the most enlightened lifestyle, asdo the ascetics from every religious tradition.”10

Therefore, authors of the nineteenth century chose Indiato name it as a source of esoteric wisdom. However, theywere not exclusively focusing on the Indian notion ofenlightenment, rather they merged all three notions ofenlightenment into one whole. They were not only inter-ested in Eastern philosophy, but also thought aboutthemselves as successors of the seventeenth century rosi-crucian and Ancient Greek philosophers.

E S O T E R I C D R E A M S O F

C O L L E C T I V E E N L I G H T E N M E N T

A N D E V O L U T I O N

Although the three notions of enlightenment seemsto be incompatible at the first glance, authors of eso-teric literature of the nineteenth century looked forways to bring them together. It was not too a com-

S T A N I S L A V P A N I N ∞ NOTIONS OF EVOLUTION AND ENLIGHTENMENT ∞ 42

plex problem, as all of these notions had alreadysomething in common. Principally their sources insome esoteric and mystical currents. It was only nat-ural that people belonged to such movements in thenineteenth century were aware of this link.Helen Blavatsky, one of the most prominent esotericauthors of that time and creator of Theosophical Soci-ety, provides a great example of this. At the core of herwork there is the doctrine she named “Budhism,”“Ancient Wisdom-religion,” or “Theosophy,” based onthe idea of collective enlightenment. It might be notedthat “Budhism” is written with single letter d as in thevery beginning of her opus magnum she explains thatthere is “the difference between ‘Buddhism’ – the reli-gious system of ethics preached by the Lord Gautama,and named after his title Buddha, ‘the Enlightened’ –and Budha, ‘Wisdom,’ or knowledge (Vidya), the facultyof cognizing, from the Sanskrit root Budh, to know.”11

Therefore, Blavatsky’s “Budhism” was not a historicalIndian religion, rather “the inheritance of all thenations, the world over.”12

According to Blavatsky, humankind is involved into thecontinuous process of evolution of the whole universe,which developed through several stages, named “races”in Theosophical terms. nowadays, humankind is mov-ing from the fifth to sixth race. The key to this trans-formation is concerned with human enlightenment bymeans of “reawakening” through divine wisdom.That idea, according to Blavatsky, existed in almostall historical religions in their esoteric side, forinstance, in the Antiquity in the forms of Hermes orMercury: “Mercury is Budh, Wisdom, Enlighten-ment, or ‘reawakening’ into the divine Science.”13

On the other hand, Blavatsky was sure that alsoenlightenment in a more mundane sense is veryimportant, the subtitle of her book was “theSynthesis of Science, religion, and Philosophy.”It’s worth mentioning that Blavatsky’s co-founder of the Theosophical Society, HenryOlcott, created in India the Panchama freeSchools Society (nowadays known as OlcottEducation Society), an educational branch ofthe Theosophical Society aimed to provide afree education in secondary school for under-privileged Indians. Both Olcott and Blavatskywere sincere in their attempts to support educa-tional initiatives and to use academic knowledgeto enhance the “Secret doctrine.”However, at the same time Blavatsky maintainedthat the academia itself needed to be “enlightened”by esoteric knowledge, as the academia was wrongwhen it confused materialism, which is a philo-sophical position, with the science. According toher, Theosophy can offer another, better and deeperworldview for scientific research that provides it with

a spiritual background and help compensate negativeconsequences of a materialistic approach to natureand society.Similar ideas are found in the works of Germanphilosopher Carl du Prel, a contemporary ofBlavatsky. for du Prel, the most important ques-tion of religion and philosophy was the issueabout the human’s place in the universe. If weunderstand this place, we can understand ourprimary goals and the future path of evolution.All philosophical and religious systems leaded usto better understanding this problem. “It cannotbe denied, – writes du Prel – that the result ofthe changing of that systems was that now weunderstand more clearly if not the answer to thequestion, at least the question itself”.14

A pivotal point in understanding our place inthe universe ia, according to du Prel, to be ableto feel ourselves not only a body, not only mater-ial beings, but also a soul, which du Prel calls the“transcendental subject.” This idea of realizationof one’s true spiritual nature seems to be very sim-ilar to the religious idea of enlightenment in theEastern sense of the world, although for du Prel itshould be a result of philosophic and scientificinquiry rather than of religious experience.However, this was not enough for du Prel and hefurther speculated about the place of the Earth andof humankind on a higer cosmological scale. “fromthe point of view of astronomy, the universe is theunity bind with the force of gravitation. yet shouldwe really understand the cosmic unity in mechanisticmanner only, should all celestial object in fact exist inatomistic disunity? If the most powerful phenomenonof nature is not matter, but the spirit in all its varietiesand forms, if nature is obviously simply attached to thespirit, it is difficult to assume that the connection ismerely a connection of material masses of celestialobjects. The spirit is a useless appendage to the cosmicorder if it cannot reach the unity”.15

Therefore, the future evolution of the humankind isclosely related to the development into the cosmos withthe goal of unifying all intellectual beings that may liveon other planets into universal spiritual unity. In otherwords, the evolution should lead the humankindtowards to the unity both within itself and with allother types of intelligent beings in the universe. nospirit, according to du Prel, can evolve solely. Instead,evolution is a process that implies collective enlighten-ment of all people about their true nature.It is worth mentioning that the idea of the humankindfuture cosmic expansion has parallels in the early twen-tieth century russian philosophy, mostly, in the cos-mism movement represented by Konstantin Tsi-olkovskii, a school teacher from Kaluga, russia,


famous for his works on space travels that anticipatedfarther development of the field, and for which rea-son he was praised as the “grandfather” of the Sovietspace programme, even though for he himself his tech-nical ideas were only a part of his “cosmic philosophy.”Of note is that in early twentieth century Kaluga wasthe second important centre of Theosophical movementin russia after Saint Petersburg16. Like the Theosophists,Tsiolkovskii was sure that humankind dwells in the con-tinuous process of development. “The human beingshave completed a great path from ‘lifeless’ matter to theircurrent half-animal state. Will they stop on that path?Even if they will, it will not occur now, as we see how sci-ence, technology, everyday life environment, and socialhumankind organization are developing.”17

As Tsiolkovskii was a panpsychist, he was sure that everyatom of matter – he used the term “atom” in its strictlyphysical sense – has consciousness. However, conscious-ness is asleep in atoms until it becomes a part of anintelligent being, like humans. Every atom throughoutthe time of its existence is a part of an intelligentbeings many times. Atoms want to be happy, and it isour moral duty to provide them with a possibility toachieve this happiness. To do so, people should devel-op themselves to the stage when they overcome ill-nesses, wars, hunger, crimes and other unwantedaspects of human existence. On their way to thisstate, humans will transform into new, perfectbeings that will be able to live directly in the cos-mos and will need no food, but will gain energydirectly from solar light. Tsiolkovskii called thesebeings a “radiant humanity”, in russian luchistoechelovechestvo, literally, humans consisting oflight. In this case, the term “enlightenment”acquires a very literal meaning, because for Tsi-olkovskii light is not a metaphor, but an actualsubstance of the future humans.It is significant to recognize a number of similarideas in the works of these three authors:Blavatsky, although born in the russian Empire,travelled the world throughout her life and livedin the uSA and India for a long period of time;du Prel worked in Germany; and Tsiolkovskii inrussia. nevertheless, they demonstrated theirdevotion to common ideas, which supports thethought that their works reflected Western cul-ture common aspirations.

C O N C L U S I O N

different notions of enlightenment presented inWestern culture had common roots in mysticaland magical currents of antiquity and ancient East.Although some authors tried to separate spiritualand mundane notions of enlightenment, this com-mon background seems to be highly influential.

repeatedly it brought these different meanings onenlightenment together, and their linkage wasexplicit in seventeenth century rosicrucianism justas well as in the esoteric literature of the nineteenthand early twentieth century.This is not just a coincidence, rather an internaldemand of Western culture. If there is any con-structive lesson here, it is, in the first place, thatthe future humankind progress will not be pos-sible without the recognition that the develop-ment of our knowledge and our control overthe nature has literally no meaning without ourcultural and spiritual development. That devel-opment should lead us to a deeper understand-ing of our responsibility to nature, to our plan-et and to future generations. At the same time,we can reverse the statement and say that spiri-tual enlightenment should go hand-to-handwith development of our knowledge of nature,with implementing of the rational and criticalapproach, which is a great achievement of West-ern philosophy and science.

8

——————

1 Magee 2001, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.2 Pasnau 2015, “divine Illumination.”

3 Iannone 2001, Dictionary of World Philosophy: 172.4 Aquinas 2008, Summa Theologica: 2-1, q. 91, a. 2.

5 Iannone 2001, Op. Cit.: 172.6 yates 1978, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment: xi.

7 Iannone 2001, Op. Cit.: 172.8 Clarke 1997, Oriental Enlightenment: 40.

9 Ibidem.10 Wicks 2015, “Arthur Schopenhauer.”

11 Blavatsky 1893, The Secrete Doctrine: 2.12 Ibidem.13 Ibidem: 513.14 du Prel 1885, Die Philosophie der Mystik: 500.15 Ibidem: 510.16 Hagemeister 2012, “Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Occult

roots of Soviet Space Travel”: 143.17 Tsiolkovskii 2011, Put’ k Zvezdam: 97.

8

R E F E R E N C E S

AquInAS, T. (2008). Summa Theologica,<http://tinyurl.com/a6eqw> [retrieved 15 Jan. 2016].

BLAVATSKy, H.P. (1893). The Secret Doctrine, vol 1 (London:The Theosophical Publishing Society).

CLArKE, J.J. (1997). Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounterbetween Asian and Western Thought (new york: rout-ledge).HAGEMEISTEr, M. (2012). “Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the

Occult roots of Soviet Space Travel”, in B. Menzel, M.


Hagemeister, B.G. rOSEnTAL (EdS.) The New Age ofRussia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (München andBerlin: Verlag Otto Sagner).

IAnnOnE, A.P. (2001). Dictionary of World Philosophy(London and new york: routledge).

MAGEE, G.A. (2001). Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition(Ithaca and London: Cornell uP).

PASnAu, r. (2015). “divine Illumination,”<http://tinyurl.com/jmac2kg> [retrieved 15 Jan. 2016].

du PrEL, C. (1885). Die Philosophie der Mystik (Leipzig:Ernst Günters Verlag).

TSIOLKOVSKII, K. (2011). Put’ k Zvezdam [The Way to theStars] (Moscow: Knizhnyi Klub Knigovek; Saint Peters-burg: Severo-Zapad).

WICKS, r. (2015). “Arthur Schopenhauer,”<http://tinyurl.com/gsrhmrs> [retrieved 15 Jan. 2016].

yATES, f.A. (1978). The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Boulder:Shambhala).

8 ∑ 8


L A D A M E À L A L I C O R N E ∞ s m e l l

An interdisciplinary cosmologist andindependent scholar, Paul is inter-

nationally known for the hypothe-sis of an AB (advanced beings)intervention in human develop-ment; his theory of natural spiri-tuality in an evolving, self-learn-

ing universe; and research on thesurvival of a personal soul-genome. His

current books on these topics are Childrenof a Living universe, We’ve never Been Alone; and The SoulGenome. Paul’s academic background (Florida State, Harvardand other institutions); his military, diplomatic, internationalexecutive career; and research on five continents keep his provoca-tive publications grounded in emerging science and crediblehuman experience. For more on his work visit: www.vonward.com.

HIS EdITIOn Of SPANDA quESTIOnS THE BELIEf

that human behaviour is controlled by amaterial brain and organs that produce it.However much we may know about mat-ter, we know very little about conscious-ness. This shortcoming keeps humansfrom reaching our positive potential.Our scientists must turn upside down

their theories of reality. After all, matter is neverfound solid in basic physics experiments.This essay suggests that a new direction in par-ticle physics1 is needed not only for the futureof physics, but also for the future of humanity.The reason will unfold as you read, pointing toa possible, better self-educating species.quantum mechanics have already demonstratedthat everything in our universe that we label assolid and touchable is not penetrable. Whenevery effort we take to find an impenetrable sub-atomic entity, it separates into smaller and small-er pieces. Every shape of any entity is penetrable. Consequently, it is clear that we are dealingwith a universe that is nothing but quantumbits crowded into shapes. furthermore, each bithas two states. So, info-bits must be onlythoughts from an un-tangible source. The word consciousness is as slippery as the wordgod. no two people have the same definition ofeither of these two words. But two disciplines –physics and conscious research – have the same

illusive job. This is one reason that physicistswill find themselves in a discussion about thedefinition of conscious that may also end witha definition of god.British physicist Peter russell has said “Thebiggest hurdle to defining consciousness is theword itself. A noun is inappropriate. Conscious-ness2 does not exist as a thing. It is not a thing tobe knowing, but knowing itself.” Peter’s logic isright, but I use conscious as the state of his thing.Without these new insights, scientists who usethe conventional theory of physics to explain newaspects in biology, psychology, and other areas willfail. Physicists are now being frustrated with theclear evidence that their conscious awareness of aphysical universe did not produce their minds.That is not bad. With the current state of humanityon the precipice of killing our living environmentand ourselves, now is a time for a new paradigm. Weneed one that offers a way to get back the control ofour minds. It must explain why humans continueprojecting their bad behaviours into the future. We need a paradigm that more completely explainswhy humans carry forward their best selves and theirworst selves. The reason humans are in a bad spotnow is that our stronger, worst-past still overshadowsus today. This situation suggests our future requires scien-tific reincarnation research!

N E W P A R A D I G M S

Arnaud delorme of the Institute of noetic Sciencesarticulates two current problems for science: “How canan illusion become conscious? How can the feeling ofbeing here and now magically emerge from inert mat-ter?”3 He and others (including this author) are work-ing on methods to identify the non-locality of consciousand demonstrate its various attributes.Other researchers are also using a new approach inpsychology, to look at behaviour based on systemstheory and holistic methods. Their studies of con-scious emphasize certain areas like dreams, creativityand supernormal experiences that can be used inbuilding a new paradigm.Conversely, conventional researchers are also flusteredby ndEs and data on reincarnation that indicate

P A U L V O N W A R D

c o l l e c t i v e a n d e v o l v i n gh u m a n c o n s c i o u s n e s s


T

human memories survive outside our physical body4.They also fear the evidence supporting theories inseveral areas of linkages between individuals andgroups who, without technologies, communicate andinfluence one another with a distance between them.This evidence includes teleporting signals, voices,messages, images, and descriptions. Another is dis-tance healing, where the senders improve and oftencure common maladies to heal serious illness. The uSgovernment (including the military) developed remoteseeing used by officials and civilians. It teleports detailsabout locations, people, and activities. While less well known, some people are able to predictcertain events that are about to happen. Odds of the mani-festation of their correct projections are quite high. Suchevents are well validated, with clear details confirmed. The race for new insights into the nature of our uni-verse would be more effective if all scientific disciplineswere interested in the nature of memory and con-sciousness in all life forms. new models of reincarna-tion research are essential to replace the current past-life subjective guesses of anyone.

S E L F - E V O L V I N G

V I A R E I N C A R N A T I O N

now I would like to report that a small number ofscientific researchers in the field of reincarnationhave developed methods and data that confirmthe out-of-body integrity of human memories,images, knowledge, skills, habits, and epigenetic(dnA) development. The last means preservingkey physical features through reincarnations ofseveral generations.A good number of reincarnation researchers arenow capable with scientific methods developedby the famed Ian Stevenson and his followers,and others who have added techniques. Theyhave discovered measurable and tangible evi-dence of many new memory links from lifetimeto lifetime. Such data opens some of the mys-teries of the universal realm of consciousness.The challenge now is to integrate the evidenceof theoretical physics with scientific reincarna-tion research. Physicists should open theirskills and data to the reincarnation researchersand vice versa. These groups should share theircategories of objective, credible evidence fromtheir research.E V I D E N C E

Conscious-reincarnation types of evidence describedbelow may be keys to a scientific search for the fron-tier between physics and universal conscious. By sur-veying the boundary between a physical body and its

many types of memory, this area of science may solvethe enigma between physics and consciousness. rein-carnation studies provide a wide variety of physical,mental, and emotional memories that living peoplecarry that have come from the lifetimes from earliergenerations.Earlier this century public media began labellingreincarnations on little or no evidence. Most ofsuch alleged cases are without tangible and veri-fied evidence. However, that does not invalidatethe current rational, modern theories of a mem-ory-based reincarnation.A few researchers have published books thatinclude their methodology, the quality of theirevidence, and a logical base for levels of credi-bility. Below are the types of memory that have beenidentified and validated in very strong cases (nocase in the world can be 100% reliable). Practi-cally everything that is physical and behaviouralin life is data for comparisonwith another person who lived before you. Allaspects of your life may be the result of a memo-ry pool transferred from one or more prior lives. T A L E N T S P A S T

new children who bring unique past-life skills tryto show them as early as possible. The memories ofdeceased musicians, artists, sportspeople, techni-cians, and those in every field of work or play arerooted in current individuals. People who are preco-cious are more likely to be labelled as reincarnated,but each new baby was also here before. P A S T - L I F E M E M O R I E S

Most young children frequently talk about some past-life activities, people, events, and locations. Whentheir behaviours can be linked to a particular deceasedperson, researchers can often identify some similarities.But as with all clues, these memories must be validatedby a third-party professional. They must use objectivemeasures in every case.G E N O T Y P E S

The physical similarities are most often clues to a likelyreincarnation match. They include biometrics andbody types, which involves bone structure. Others arespecial markings on the body, evidence of previouswounds, particular health issues, etc. Similarities ofhands, ears, hair patterns, etc. can be paired by solidmeasurements.C R E A T I O N T Y P E S

The core of each person is what they do with theirlives. We can classify by categories of job or hobby.It is clear which people have chosen when they havefreedom to decide how they devote their creative


energies. Today, they generally stay as close to thepast-life as possible.C O G N I T I O N T Y P E S

We have very good measures to match individuals inmost different time periods. They include levels ofintelligence, data gathering, analysis, problem solving,and decision making.E M O T I O N T Y P E S

Comparable tools can be used to develop emotionalsimilarities. They classify how the past and present per-sonalities react to daily life and its environment, inwork, social or personal situations.S O C I A L T Y P E S

Social types can be matched by the ways one approach-es engagements with varying individuals and groups.Central aspects of the personality is how they behavewith a person, group, or the general public.

P R O M I S I N G R E S U L T S

The above sets of conscious links that reproduce thehuman body and its behaviours are strong evidence ofa millennia-old belief in the process of reincarnation.Such data has long been kept in the realm of mythsand legends. But, scientific methods can now devel-op evidence that a stream of conscious memoriesrun through generations of animals, humans, andmore advanced beings.Several reincarnation researchers now have signifi-cant cases that have a string of several reincarna-tions across multiple generations. Such evidencesupports the hypothesis that individual clustersof memories live through centuries or millennia.Evolution of the memories does happen, butvery slowly. In numerable cases we can tracethese evolutionary changes with data from bio-logical, psychological, and mental evidence.It appears that all of the above types and theiractions are inherent in all living organisms.One might reasonably think that they may alsorange from galaxies, suns, planets, and variedlife-forms. Humans must be somewhere in theevolving arc of life between the most complexto one-cell species.Scores of solid cases broadly examined by metic-ulous researchers clearly point that the above-described similarities in most of the above cate-gories have been found in many previous and cur-rent lifetimes. In developing a biography for theindividual’s life and comparing it with the previouslifetime, the results show that significant attributeshave carried over to the current personality5.This research has developed interesting psychologi-cal and genetic insights, but the established sciences

of physics, chemistry, and biology with their tech-nologies are also necessary. I believe that such ajoint effort will go way beyond today’s science andmetaphysics. It has the potential to turn upsidedown the way we humans see ourselves.Without a multidimensional scientific model of aninherently conscious universe, we humans will notachieve a higher level of universal life and intelli-gence. The reincarnation Experiment6 is anattempt to explore the non-physical realm of sur-viving memories and trans-dimensional con-sciousness. It seeks the key to a higher realm ofconsciousness and to develop overt linkagesbetween life-to-life and dimension-to-dimension.

8

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1 This is the branch of physics that studies the nature ofthe particles that constitute matter (particles with mass) andradiation (massless particles).

2 Conscious is the noun/name of the primal force of for-mation and Consciousness is the adjective.

3 Arnaud delorme. Does Conscious Go Beyond the Brain?IOnS Blog. december 31, 2015. (blog/arnaud-delorme/does-consciousness-go-beyond).

4 ndE stands for near death Experience where an individ-ual’s mind can see and recall the physical body and its environswhile the physical body is not living. In reincarnation livingindividuals have repeated memories of events and knowledgedeveloped in the lives of deceased individuals.

5 Some groups have decided that this principle is somethingEastern religions labelled as karma. The idea of karma is that thesenegative behaviours and their consequences follow the string ofreincarnation thru generations until compensation is completed.Today’s state of the world suggests much karma remains.

6 The reincarnation Experiment <www.reincarnationexperi-ment.org> promotes scientific reincarnation research.

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L A D A M E À L A L I C O R N E ∞ t a s t e

Steve McIntosh is a leader in theintegral philosophy movementand author of the books: ThePresence of the Infinite (Quest2015), Evolution’s Purpose(Select Books 2012) and Inte-gral Consciousness (Paragon

House 2007). In addition to hiswork in spiritual philosophy,

Steve is also co-founder and presi-dent of the integral political think tank,

The Institute for Cultural Evolution, which focuses on the culturalroots of America’s challenges (www.culturalevolution.org). Prior tohis involvement with the integral movement, he had a variety ofother successful careers, including founding the consumer prod-ucts company Now & Zen, working as a corporate executive,and practicing law with one of America’s largest firms. He is anhonours graduate of the University of Virginia Law School andthe University of Southern California Business School. Formore on his work visit: www.stevemcintosh.com

VOLuTIOnAry SPIrITuALITy” rEPrESEnTS A

new family of spiritual views informed bythe growing realization that the scientificand historical story of our origins actuallypresents a profound spiritual teachingabout the purpose of the universe andour place within it. This new kind ofspirituality is emerging as part of the

larger but still relatively obscure integral or evo-lutionary worldview. yet even though the inte-gral worldview itself is only in its infancy, it isevolutionary spirituality’s connection to thislarger and potentially historically significantnew worldview that gives evolutionary spiritual-ity much of its potential to bring about a spiri-tual renaissance in America and beyond. How-ever, while the integral worldview gives evolu-tionary spirituality the power of an enlargedframe of reality, evolutionary spirituality can inturn give the integral worldview a method foraccomplishing its goals. This method can befound through the insight that the evolution ofhuman consciousness and culture is fostered mosteffectively through the experience and creation ofspiritual realities.History reveals that when the quantity and qualityof spiritual experiences are increased in a given

social context, evolution usually results. Simplyput, spiritual experience evolves consciousness.And evolutionary spirituality expands our under-standing of what spiritual experience is and howit works. Therefore, by combining evolutionaryspirituality’s fresh insights about the spiritualexperience of beauty, truth, and goodness withthe observation that such experiences actuallycause consciousness to evolve, we may well beable to discover a new approach to solving someof our most pressing social problems. In thisexcerpt from the final chapter of my book, ThePresence of the Infinite, I explore how this newapproach or method involves raising conscious-ness by increasing the scope of what people areable to value.However, the quest for this promising new methodfor evolving consciousness is only just beginning. Itmay be decades before the integral worldview isable to fully describe or effectively employ such amethod in a way that achieves measurable results.nevertheless, this article begins the search for such amethod by examining both the need and the oppor-tunity that are creating the current conditions for itspotential emergence.

T H E E M E R G E N C E O F A N E W

S T A G E O F C U L T U R E – F R O M

A N T I T H E S I S T O S Y N T H E S I S

The idea of a new worldview or new paradigm hasbecome somewhat hackneyed within progressive dis-course. Some readers may therefore have a sense of newparadigm fatigue, which is understandable given thatproponents of the progressive “cultural creative world-view” have been proclaiming its emergent virtues forclose to fifty years now. This countercultural worldview,referred to in integral parlance as the “green” or “post-modern” worldview is an authentic “new” paradigm –its inclusive, sensitive, and environmentally consciousvalues represent an authentic advance over the moreindividualistic values of modernity, which integralphilosophy identifies as the “modernist worldview.”yet, while postmodernism is more evolved than mod-ernism in many important respects, it is not evolvedenough to serve as a model for the future of our civi-lization. While postmodern culture has attracted

S T E V E M C I N T O S H

toward a method for evolving consciousness


«E

many people in the developed world who are dissat-isfied with modernism, postmodernism has notbeen able to recruit a politically significant numberof modernists to its ranks, as evidenced by its ongo-ing countercultural status.The main reason why the growth of the postmodernworldview remains seemingly stalled at approximately20 percent of the uS population is that contemporarypostmodernism rejects much of what modernism andtraditionalism have achieved. The postmodern world-view thus stands in antithesis to the globalizing cultureof modernism. While this rejection of mainstream cul-ture may be evolutionarily appropriate – while post-modernism’s dialectical move toward antithesis mayhave been the way forward at the time of its originalemergence in the sixties and seventies – the gravity ofits values by themselves is not strong enough to pull therest of the developed world into a more sustainable andcompassionate form of civilization.nevertheless, the increasingly urgent problems we facein the twenty-first century call for further culturalevolution. And these problematic conditions are cre-ating the evolutionary pressure that is providing theenergy for further emergence. In other words, post-modernism’s cultural maturation and consolidationinto a clear position of antithesis with respect to thethesis of our larger society now presages the emer-gence of a synthesis. This synthesis, of course, isrepresented by the integral worldview, which holdsthe promise of a future form of culture that willbe attractive enough to entice politically signifi-cant numbers of people in the developed worldto adopt the more evolved perspectives we needto meet the challenges of our age.The integral worldview is a “post-postmodern”frame of reality that effectively transcends previ-ous worldviews by better appreciating and inte-grating the values of every previous historicallysignificant worldview – including pretradition-al, traditional, modernist, and postmodernworldviews. Although this new integral world-view honors and includes the values of previousworldviews, it avoids value relativism by recog-nizing a vertical dimension of cultural develop-ment through which the more evolved and theless evolved can be clearly distinguished. Thisability to see “which way is up” provides a kindof depth perception that makes cultural evolu-tion easier to recognize and understand.The integral worldview, however, is able to makefirm value judgments without falling into theethnocentrism and chauvinism that characterizedthe cultural assessments of previous generationsbecause it sees how the positive values of eachworldview are working within the larger structureof cultural evolution overall. Through the guidance

of what I describe in The Presence of the Infinite as“the spiritual teachings of evolution,” this emergingworldview is able to recognize a natural scale ofhuman development that provides a new kind ofmoral compass. In short, the integral worldviewilluminates the directions of evolution in con-sciousness and culture through its enlargedunderstanding of goodness, truth, and beauty.A comprehensive description of the emergingintegral worldview is beyond the scope of thisarticle, but I can refer readers to my two previ-ous books, Integral Consciousness and Evolu-tion’s Purpose, which are both largely devotedto the explication of this worldview1. nevertheless, the proposition that a post-post-modern worldview is emerging in our timeserves as the basis for my hope that we can dis-cover a new method for evolving consciousness.If the integral perspective ends up fulfilling itspotential of becoming a historically significantnew stage of culture, then the history of theemergence of previous stages will prove instruc-tive about what we can expect. And among thehistorically significant stages of culture recognizedby integral philosophy, the rise of the modernistworldview during the Enlightenment is the mostrelevant in our search for an evolutionary method2.Although the Enlightenment was brought about bya host of influences, the rise of science was undoubt-edly paramount. Indeed, modern science itself aroseas a result of a new method of investigating the nat-ural world that involved the careful measurement ofempirical evidence using specific principles of reason-ing. While less developed forms of the scientificmethod were employed by the ancient Greeks andMuslims prior to the Enlightenment, this empiricalapproach reached its full potential in the context ofearly European modernism, leading to the Industrialrevolution and eventually to our increasingly globalizedcivilization.The scientific method was not modernism’s only foun-dational method; the advent of the free enterprise sys-tem was also essential to the success of the modernistworldview. But this does not diminish the central sig-nificance of the scientific method in the global ascentof modernism. And it is also worth noting in this con-text that the traditional worldview originally emergedthousands of years ago through the advent of a similar-ly ground-breaking new method that served as a foun-dation for its ascension. This new method was writ-ing, which helped consolidate civilization beyond pre-vious tribal boundaries through written law, history,and scripture.This analysis suggests that if the emergence of theintegral worldview is to achieve a kind of secondEnlightenment, it will need something akin to the

S T E V E M C I N T O S H ∞ TOWARD A METHOD OF EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS ∞ 52

scientific method – a new approach and techniquethat gives it the power to see more deeply into reali-ty and to use these insights to benefit humanity.Indeed, the most significant accomplishment ofmodernism’s scientific method can be seen in itsapplication in medicine. The advent of scientificmedicine has improved the quality of human lifemore than, perhaps, any other single factor in history.

A L M O S T E V E R Y H U M A N

P R O B L E M I S A P R O B L E M

O F C O N S C I O U S N E S S

Practically all human problems (except natural disas-ters) can be understood, at least partially, as problemsof consciousness. for example, among the myriadproblems faced by humanity in the twenty-first centu-ry, the challenges of a changing climate are likely to beamong the most significant. Our warming globe is anemergent condition of modernism, so the key to ame-liorating carbon pollution involves persuading mod-ernists to vote and consume in ways that take thecosts of carbon into account. yet, as of the time ofthis writing there is insufficient political will to tacklethis problem effectively. despite the merits of pro-posed policy solutions (such as a carbon tax) andpotential engineering solutions (such as increasedrenewables and carbon sequestering), America hasyet to respond to the problem in ways that canlead to a permanent solution. This lack of politicalwill is primarily the result of deep levels of dis-agreement among the major segments of Ameri-can society. The disagreements are not reallyabout the right policy solutions; they are moreabout the foundational values by which thesedifferent groups frame reality and define theiridentity, as evidenced by America’s ongoing cul-ture war. Hence, if the consciousness of Ameri-ca’s voters could be raised at the level of values,the conflicts preventing meaningful action onclimate change could be reduced.As another example, consider the problem ofpoverty. Like climate change, poverty is a com-plex problem caused by a variety of factors.But within the developed world where oppor-tunities for upward economic mobility exist,poverty can usually be reduced through educa-tion. Education raises consciousness, and thisprovides a straightforward illustration of howthe problem of poverty in America is, for themost part, a problem of consciousness.In the developing world, however, educationalone cannot solve the problem of poverty becauseeven those who have become educated cannot getahead due to the lack of decent jobs. Poverty in thedeveloping world is still a problem of consciousness,

but the solution requires more than just raising theconsciousness of the impoverished through educa-tion. In this case the solution requires the evolutionof the overall culture from the premodern level tothe modernist level of economic development,which will help create middle-class jobs. And cul-tural evolution of this kind is in fact happeningin places like China, India, and Brazil. yet,despite ongoing progress, the transition from tra-ditional culture into modernist culture (andbeyond) throughout the developing world couldbe accomplished more quickly and less painfullyif we were as effective at raising consciousness aswe are at curing disease. While the scientificmethod has led to tremendous strides in medi-cine, we now need a similarly powerful methodthat can help us make strides in the develop-ment of culture and consciousness. And thisneed for more effective methods of fostering cul-tural evolution is particularly urgent in the caseof the challenges faced by the Islamic world.However, although the worldwide developmentof modernist culture is gradually reducing theproblem of poverty, it is only exacerbating theproblem of climate change. And this illustrateshow the existential problems of each stage of cul-tural evolution call for evolution into the nextemergent stage for their solution. Just as the impov-erished conditions of premodern culture call forevolution toward modernist consciousness, the pol-luted conditions of modernist culture in turn call forevolution toward postmodern consciousness, wherethe political will to combat the problem can be found.This idea that solving existential challenges requiresnew levels of consciousness is well expressed in a popu-lar idea from Albert Einstein: “Problems cannot besolved at the same level of thinking that created them.”3

This insight stresses the need for a new methodologythat can ameliorate humanity’s most pressing problemsby actually evolving consciousness and culture to “high-er levels of awareness.”

U N D E R L Y I N G P R E M I S E S F O R

A N E V O L U T I O N A R Y M E T H O D

While I can sense that the development of a powerfulnew approach to cultivating cultural emergence is pos-sible, and indeed necessary, I have yet to find a step-by-step procedure that can be appropriately comparedto the scientific method. And it may turn out that thesearch for a methodological approach to evolving con-sciousness and culture is misguided. But even if noreliable technique can ultimately be found, advanc-ing our civilization through the cultivation of evolu-tion is certainly a subject worth exploring.Based on what we have considered so far, I can beginto sketch the premises that point to the possibility


of a method. These premises do not constitute arecipe for raising consciousness in themselves, but Ibelieve their articulation can bring us one step closerto the discovery and refinement of a methodological“social medicine” that has the power to solve prob-lems by evolving consciousness. Stated below are eightpremises that can serve as the foundation of thispromising new evolutionary method. These premisesare discussed and elucidated in the following section.Once we have gained a basic grasp of these premises,we will be ready to consider some examples that indi-cate how such a potential method might operate.1 ~ Human consciousness can evolve independentlyfrom biological evolution.2 ~ Human consciousness and culture coevolve as peo-ple try to solve problems and improve conditions.3 ~ Evolutionary emergence in consciousness and cultureoccurs when people adopt more inclusive frames of valueand improve their definition of improvement itself.4 ~ More evolved frames of value – higher-level world-views – attract evolutionary emergence by illuminatingthe intrinsic values that help solve the existential prob-lems that cannot be solved at the level that created them.5 ~ The power of intrinsic values to raise conscious-ness is found in the spiritual energy of goodness,truth, and beauty – the spiritual experience of thesevalues evolves consciousness.6 ~ Works of culture having the most potential toattract evolutionary emergence– works providingthe spiritual experience of intrinsic value—arethose produced with the primary intention ofsharing their creators’ own spiritual experience.7 ~ Spiritually fragrant works with the mostpotential to evolve the consciousness of theiraudience are those that also help self-actualizethe creator of the work and are thus undertakenpartially for their own sake as ends in them-selves. 8 ~ The project of evolving consciousnessthrough services of goodness, teachings of truth,and creations of beauty is facilitated and empow-ered through the use of evolution’s own methodof development – the ongoing dialectical synthe-sis of existential polarities.

D I S C U S S I O N O F

T H E E I G H T P R E M I S E S

Premise 1: Human consciousness can evolve inde-pendently from biological evolution. The fact that a person’s consciousness can evolvein ways that do not depend on the correspondingevolution of the biological brain provides thestarting point for the evolutionary method. Whilethe evolution of consciousness inevitably results inphysical changes in the brain, such neurological

“rewiring” is more like the strengthening of a mus-cle than physiological evolution per se. This can beseen in the fact that human anatomy has remainedrelatively unchanged over the last fifty thousandyears, even while human consciousness hasevolved in dramatic ways over this same time peri-od. While the consciousness of animals generallyevolves in lockstep with the evolution of theirbodies, human consciousness is able to tran-scend biological determinism through its abilityto undergo authentic evolution within the life-time of a single individual. With the emergenceof humanity comes a new kind of freedom tocontinuously envision new and better ways ofliving. And it is this freedom to imagine a moreperfect state of affairs that results in the ongo-ing improvement of the human condition.Again, the development of human conscious-ness and culture is not just analogous to evolu-tion; it is real evolution because it builds on andextends the structure of emergence that can betraced all the way back to the big bang. It is thusin the phenomenon of emergence that we findthe most authentic instances of evolution in theconsciousness of individuals. But to understandthe evolution of consciousness in terms of emer-gence, we need to distinguish between the normalgrowth in awareness that comes from the accumu-lation of knowledge and experience over one’s life-time and the less frequent but more profound eventsof emergence that constitute evolution proper. Whileit may be difficult to draw hard lines between the dif-ferent ways our minds can grow, as I argue in Evolu-tion’s Purpose human consciousness undergoes authen-tic evolution most clearly when it develops in waysthat roughly recapitulate the larger cultural emergencesthat have marked the course of humanity’s historicalevolution. Even though individual development andcultural evolution are not identical, the developingmind does reveal patterns in its unfolding, and thosepatterns resonate with the historical unfolding of culturethat occurs on an evolutionary time scale4.for example, if through religious conversion individualsraised in a tribal setting exchange a pretraditional world-view for a traditional worldview, they are re-enacting aform of evolutionary emergence that first occurred sev-eral thousand years ago. Continuing the example, if as aresult of higher education, individuals raised in a con-servative religious culture exchange their traditionalworldview for a modernist worldview, this too is aform of emergence that represents the authentic evo-lution of consciousness. However, evolving one’sconsciousness by participating in a larger form ofcultural emergence need not be limited to re-enact-ing the already-existing advances of history. As we


are coming to see, a significant new form of cultureis appearing in our own time – one that provides areal opportunity for further evolutionary emergence.Premise 2: Human consciousness and culture coevolve aspeople try to solve problems and improve conditions. Human consciousness does not evolve by itself; it coe-volves with the culture in which it lives. Through thenetwork effect of cultural transmission, when one personhas a conceptual breakthrough or new realization, thisadvance can be shared with others. And as new discover-ies or new skills are adopted within a larger social context,such advances become refined and reinforced and eventu-ally result in the elevation of the average level of overallconsciousness in a given culture. yet the coevolution ofhuman consciousness and culture proceeds by more thanthe simple accumulation of greater knowledge or morelearned skills; the development of civilization alsodepends on the evolution of values. Over the course ofrecorded history, human nature itself has evolved throughthe series of values-based worldview stages identified byintegral philosophy. for example, as a result of the emer-gence of new value systems, the human value of morali-ty has evolved to encompass larger and larger estimatesof the scope of those worthy of moral consideration –from the tribe to the nation to the world and eventual-ly to all sentient beings.This second premise serves as the basis for the focusof the method, which is generally more culturalthan psychological. As discussed below in premise 5and the examples that follow, the basic idea is thatthe spiritual energy and gravity of beauty, truth,and goodness can be harnessed in ways that canreliably cause consciousness to evolve. And theseessential qualities are harnessed and transmittedthrough the cultural works or cultural institu-tions that communicate or demonstrate theseintrinsic values within a given culture. There-fore, because consciousness and culture almostalways coevolve, the evolution of consciousnesscannot be effectively cultivated outside of thecultural context in which it is situated.Premise 3: Evolutionary emergence in conscious-ness and culture occurs when people adopt moreinclusive frames of value and improve their defin-ition of improvement itself. This premise points to the insight that values arethe leading line of development within conscious-ness and culture. Although human consciousnesscan grow and evolve along a wide variety of rela-tively independent cognitive and emotional linesof development, the evolution of values is the mostsignificant factor in the process. This can be seen inthe way consciousness and culture evolve as a resultof both the push of unsatisfactory life conditions and

the pull of values. Values are accordingly defined andanimated by their relation to the real and pressingproblems faced by people as they struggle toimprove their lives.And the reason why the development of values isthe single most important factor in understand-ing the evolution of consciousness and cultureoverall is that it is through the gravity of values –the pull resulting from the intuition that a bet-ter way is possible – that consciousness and cul-ture are drawn toward ever-higher levels of evo-lutionary development. recognizing how thegravity of values pulls evolution forward fromthe inside through its influence on conscious-ness clarifies our understanding of cultural evo-lution by showing where evolution is headedand how we can best align ourselves with itspositive trajectory of growth. This third premisethus goes to the heart of the method’s essentialtechnique, which involves harnessing the gravityof values. Values come alive with the power tomotivate and mobilize people when those valuesappear to offer solutions to the existential prob-lems people care deeply about.The operation of this third premise was initiallyillustrated in the previous section’s examples ofpoverty and climate change. In the case of poverty,we can see that as the prosperous modernist lifestylebecomes increasingly visible in the developingworld, this perceived value contrasts with the pre-vailing conditions of poverty and provides a powerfulstimulus to pursue the upward mobility that eventu-ally results in a modernist society. Similarly, in thecase of climate change, the specter of a warming globethreatening to degrade our natural environment illu-minates the value of sustainability and a lifestyle that ismore conscious of modernism’s environmental impact.And this in turn draws people’s consciousness intopostmodern value frames where material possessionsand personal status are valued less and overall quality oflife is valued more.This process begins to show why values are usually loca-tion specific. Each of humanity’s major worldviews hasarisen along the timeline of history in response to a spe-cific set of problematic life conditions. The values ofeach worldview have thus been specifically tailored toovercome the problems that prevailed during the timein history when that worldview originally emerged. Andmost of these specific problem sets continue to prevailin different parts of the world and different sectors ofsociety. Even though we are all alive here in the pre-sent, not all of us live in “the same time in history.”Working to solve the different problems that contin-ue to plague humanity certainly helps improve theworld. But according to premise 3, the most potent


problems for producing authentic evolution arethose that require the evolutionary emergence ofnew stages of consciousness and culture for theirsolution.Premise 4: More evolved frames of value – higher-levelworldviews – attract evolutionary emergence by illuminat-ing the intrinsic values that help solve the existential prob-lems which cannot be solved at the level that created them. This premise brings us back to the truism that prob-lems cannot be solved at the same level of awarenessthat created them. While this is not true of every prob-lem, it is the case with the existential problems thatrequire evolutionary emergence for their solution. Exis-tential problems provide openings for evolutionaryemergence. These are the pressure points upon whichthe method can operate to nurture cultural evolutionalong its entire spectrum of development. Identifyingthese problems, together with the value solutions towhich they point, can accordingly lead to a method-ological technique for “gardening for emergence.” Theapplication of this technique is illustrated by the exam-ples discussed in the next section. But before gettingto these examples, we need to consider the four addi-tional premises upon which the effectiveness of thisevolutionary method depends.Premise 5: The power of intrinsic values to raise con-sciousness is found in the spiritual energy of goodness,truth, and beauty – the spiritual experience of thesevalues evolves consciousness. This premise is based on a simple proposition:spiritual experience raises consciousness. Whilethis may seem fairly obvious, it is a crucial aspectof the method, so it is worth unpacking a bithere. This fifth premise is derived directly fromthe spiritual teachings of evolution, which helpus recognize that the development of the finiteuniverse overall is essentially a process of spiri-tual growth. It thus follows that if evolution isessentially spiritual growth, then an effectivetechnique for promoting the evolution of con-sciousness can be found in that which deliversauthentic experiences of spirit. And the mostuseful and important kinds of spiritual experi-ence are experiences of goodness, truth, beau-ty, and their value derivatives.Again, these most intrinsic values are forms ofspiritual energy that can be harnessed in theservice of evolution. Through their inherentpower to attract the attention and desire of ourevolutionary impulses, these values provide theenergy that pulls cultural evolution upward, illu-minating the way forward and supplying themotivation necessary to break the inertia of thestatus quo. Examples of the power of beauty,truth, and goodness to stimulate cultural evolution

can be abundantly found in history, such as inThomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet CommonSense, which contributed to the emergence ofmodernism, and Bob dylan’s song The TimesThey Are a-Changin, which helped bring aboutthe emergence of postmodernism. These signifi-cant works of truth and beauty produced cul-tural evolution by providing a kind of spiritualexperience perfectly in tune with the zeitgeistof their time.Premise 6: Works of culture having the mostpotential to attract evolutionary emergence –works providing the spiritual experience ofintrinsic value – are those produced with the pri-mary intention of sharing their creators’ ownspiritual experience. This premise emphasizes the role of intentionin the methodological approach to raising con-sciousness. Through our heart-felt intention toshare the spiritual experience that we ourselveshave already found, our work becomes infusedwith the spiritual quality necessary to reproducethis experience in others. In other words, byfocusing on the essence of the intrinsic value weare endeavouring to communicate or demonstratein our work, we may bear the spiritual fruits thatcan provide spiritual experience for others. Statedyet another way, the spiritual energy of intrinsicvalue is most effectively engaged in a circuit of prac-tice. When our sincere intention is to allow the spiri-tual experience we have received to pass through usinto the experience of our fellows, our work’s poten-tial for raising consciousness is greatly enhanced.This aspect of the evolutionary method is guided byan understanding of the spiritual messages of beauty,truth, and goodness. for example, the pleasure anddelight found in the aesthetic dimension of beautycommunicates the message, “feel loved.” Similarly, inthe intellectual dimension of truth we find assurancethat the universe is intelligible and that the way is openfor us increasingly to discover reality and become morereal in the process. The experience of truth thus subtlycommunicates the message, “Grow.” And finally, in therealm of goodness, and particularly within the moraldomain of value, we may hear the message, “Love oth-ers.” When we endeavor to communicate explicitly orimplicitly these messages to those we wish to serve orteach – when our underlying intention is to sharethese spiritual messages through our work – webecome partners with spirit in the grand adventure ofevolving the universe.Premise 7: Spiritually fragrant works with the mostpotential to evolve the consciousness of their audienceare those that also help self-actualize the creator of thework and are thus undertaken partially for their ownsake as ends in themselves.


This premise concerns the intention to achieve ourown self-actualization through our work. Theunderlying idea is that our creations of beauty,truth, or goodness become most effective at raisingconsciousness when we undertake such work withthe aim of giving our gift and living up to our poten-tial to bear spiritual fruit in our lives. That is, to maxi-mize the consciousness-raising potential of our work,not only must we intend to create spiritual experiencein others (premise 6), we must also undertake suchwork with the intention of creating spiritual growth inourselves. Again, the insights of evolutionary spirituali-ty make clear that the fruits of the spirit we bring intothe world actually serve as the rungs of the ladder ofour own ascent. And when we are motivated to createthese primary values both for the benefit of others andfor our own self-actualization, the evolutionary poten-tial of our work is maximized.Premise 8: The project of evolving consciousness throughservices of goodness, teachings of truth, and creations ofbeauty is facilitated and empowered through the use ofevolution’s own method of development – the ongoingdialectical synthesis of existential polarities. The arguments and explanations that support thisfinal premise are developed throughout The Presenceof the Infinite. In the book I describe how the evolu-tionary practice of dialectical epistemology involvesthe ability to hold two or more opposing perspec-tives at once, recognizing how these opposingpositions tend to mutually cocreate each otherthrough their developmental tension. I also dis-cuss how existential polarities are actually sys-tems of development – localized engines of evo-lution – mirroring the dialectical structure andfunction of the evolving universe as a whole.Then toward the end of the book I explore theapplication of this dialectical method in theattempt to advance a synthesis between theexistential polarity of nondualism and theismthat appears in spiritual experience itself.This final premise thus serves as a kind of cap-stone for these eight methodological premisesby affirming that evolutionary spirituality’smethod for evolving consciousness is essentiallythe same method employed by the evolvinguniverse itself.These, then, are the initial premises that pointto the promise of a new method for evolvingconsciousness and culture. However, our searchfor an evolutionary method is only just begin-ning, and these early premises are bound to beexpanded and refined as the potential for such amethod is explored further.

E X A M P L E S O F E M E R G E N C E I N

C O N S C I O U S N E S S A N D C U L T U R E

Some academics have questioned the idea that sci-entists actually follow a procedural method in theirinvestigations. These critics claim that, in practice,the scientific method is simply a matter of whatev-er scientists do, and that the real method is “any-thing goes.”5 So it may turn out that our searchfor an evolutionary method for evolving con-sciousness and culture will boil down to what-ever successful creators of transformative cul-ture actually do.Indeed, all those who create beauty, truth, orgoodness through their work are adding to thecorpus of human culture and thus advancing itsevolutionary development, even if in small andincremental ways. At the level of individual con-sciousness, anything that elevates our thoughtsby helping us to be more loving, forgiving, wise,or mindful can be said to raise our consciousness.And even the most commonplace expressions ofthese intrinsic values can create spiritual experi-ence under the right circumstances.yet, there is an important difference between theincremental growth of consciousness and cultureand the kind of development that actually extendsthe structure of emergence itself. As discussed inpremise 1 above, human consciousness undergoesauthentic evolution most clearly when it develops inways that roughly recapitulate the larger culturalemergences marking the course of humanity’s histori-cal evolution. In other words, the difference betweenevolutionary emergence and mere incremental growthis that authentic evolution usually involves the movefrom one stage of development to the next higher stage– “a new level of awareness.” Therefore, the best exam-ples of the evolutionary method in action are found inthe specific works of goodness, truth, or beauty thathave helped bring about historically significant newworldviews. In addition to highly influential books orliberating forms of music such as those already cited, wecan also identify a wide variety of other cultural worksthat have been instrumental in the emergence of newlevels of awareness. for instance, emergence-producingworks of culture can be recognized in the creation ofmovements or transformative organizations, such as thecivil rights movement of the 1960s or the founding of theSierra Club in the 1890s. Transformative cultural workscan also include architecture, such as the Parthenon inthe fifth century BC, or St. Peter’s Basilica in VaticanCity during the renaissance. Indeed, hundreds of sim-ilar examples could be cited.These examples, however, also illustrate how the evo-lutionary potential of a given work of culture, whetherit be artistic, political, scientific, philosophical, or


spiritual, usually depends as much on the historicaltiming and cultural readiness for such work as it doeson the talent and motivational intention of the cre-ators. And the fact that the evolutionary potential of agiven work of culture depends largely on the histori-cally situated receptivity of the audience suggests thatsuch works may be drawn into existence by the aspira-tions of collective culture as much as they are created bytheir individual authors or founders. As Virginia Woolfwrote, “Masterpieces are not single and solitary births;they are the outcome of many years’ thinking in com-mon, by the body of people, so that the experience ofthe mass is behind a single voice.”6

But while the emergence-producing masterpieces ofbeauty, truth, and goodness that we find in history mayremain culturally potent for many, most are no longerproducing the kind of fresh emergence for which theyoriginally became famous. nevertheless, beyond specif-ic, historically situated works of transformative culture,there are also larger social institutions that do manageto continuously produce the evolution of conscious-ness and culture in an ongoing way. These forms ofculture serve as “conveyor belts,” as Ken Wilber callsthem, which work continuously across generations toadvance consciousness from one stage to another.The best examples of these consciousness-raisinginstitutions are found in the field of education andin spiritual teaching and practice. for instance, pri-mary education serves to move children up throughthe cognitive and moral stages of developmentidentified by developmental psychologists. Andhigher education, as noted, often results in theemergence of modernist and even postmodernconsciousness in young adults. Similarly, emer-gence into new stages of consciousness is beingcontinuously facilitated worldwide by the formsof culture identified as religious spirituality, sec-ularism, and progressive spirituality. As exam-ples, religious spirituality continues to functionas an effective conveyor belt from pretradition-al to traditional levels of consciousness, as cur-rently seen in sub-Saharan Africa and also ingang and prison cultures. Secularism seems tohelp some people in transcending religiousfundamentalism. And progressive spirituality isplaying a similar role in the contemporaryemergence of consciousness beyond modernisminto the postmodern worldview, and even occa-sionally beyond that.These examples of the ongoing success of spiri-tuality in the work of evolving consciousness bypromoting emergence into higher-level world-views are particularly relevant in our search for amethod because they well illustrate the operationof methodological premise 5: consciousness can be

evolved most reliably and effectively through theprovision of spiritual experience. And the fact thatspirituality in general appears to be one of themost powerful ways of furthering emergence rein-forces my hope that evolutionary spirituality inparticular will come to serve as the primary cata-lyst for the emergence of the next great stage ofhuman history.

8

——————

1 In addition to my previous books, a good introduc-tion to the evolutionary worldview can be found in CarterPhipps,’ Evolutionaries (new york: Harper Perennial,2012). Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything (Boston:Shambhala, 2000) also provides a good, if somewhat dated,introductory overview.

2 As explained in Integral Consciousness (p. 10), thedialectical sequence of worldview emergence orients the val-ues of each successive worldview stage toward an alternativefocus on either the individual (emphasizing the expression ofthe self ) or the community (emphasizing the sacrifice of theself for the sake of the group). Because the emergence of theevolutionary or integral stage of development represents adialectical return to the individualistic, or agentic, side of thedialectical spiral of development, it can be seen as a kind ofhigher harmonic of modernism. This understanding supportsthe idea that the events surrounding the emergence of mod-ernism during the Enlightenment can help us anticipate theemergence of the evolutionary stage. See also Evolution’s Purpose:201-202.

3 This quote appears in many places and in a variety of ver-sions. It is adapted from an interview of Einstein by MichaelAmrine, “The real Problem is in the Hearts of Men” (New YorkTimes Magazine, June 23, 1946).

4 See Evolution’s Purpose, 17-24 (see intro., n. 1). 5 See Paul K. feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anar-

chistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1975). 6 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (new york: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1929): 65.

8 ∑ 8


Pierre Lévy devoted his profes-sional life to the understandingof the cultural and cognitiveimplications of the digitaltechnologies, to promote theirbest social uses and to studythe phenomenon of human

collective intelligence. He intro-duced the collective intelligence

concept in his 1994 book CollectiveIntelligence and has written a dozen of

books on this subject that have been translated in more than 12

languages and are studied in many universities all over the world.Professor Lévy currently teaches at the communication depart-ment of the University of Ottawa (Canada), where he holds aCanada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. Lévy is Fel-low of the Royal Society of Canada and received severalawards and academic distinctions. @plevy on Twitter.

ur COMMunICATIOnS – TrAnSMISSIOn And

reception of data – are based on an increas-ingly complex infrastructure for the auto-matic manipulation of symbols, which Icall the algorithmic medium because itautomates the transformation of data, andnot only their conservation, reproduc-tion and dissemination (as with previ-

ous media). Both our data-centric society andthe algorithmic medium that provides its toolsare still at their tentative beginnings. Although itis still hard to imagine today, a huge space willopen up for the transformation and analysis ofthe deluge of data we produce daily. But ourminds are still fascinated by the Internet’s powerof dissemination of messages, which has almostreached its maximum. In the vanguard of the new algorithmic epis-teme, IEML (or any other system that has thesame properties) will democratize the categoriza-tion and automatic analysis of the ocean of data.The use of IEML1 to categorize data will create atechno-social environment that is even morefavourable for collaborative learning and the dis-tributed production of knowledge. In so doing, itwill contribute to the emergence of the algorithmicmedium of the future and reflect collective intelli-gence in the form of ecosystems of ideas.

This text begins by analyzing the structure andfunctioning of algorithms and shows that themajor stages in the evolution of the new medi-um correspond to the appearance of new sys-tems for encoding and addressing data: theInternet is a universal addressing system forcomputers and the Web, a universal addressingsystem for data. However, the Web, in 2016, hasmany limitations. Levels of digital literacy arestill low. Interoperability and semantic trans-parency are sorely lacking. The majority of itsusers see the Web only as a big multimedialibrary or a means of communication, and payno attention to its capacities for data transforma-tion and analysis. As for those concerned with theprocessing of big data, they are hindered by statis-tical positivism. In providing a universal address-ing system for concepts, IEML takes a decisive steptoward the algorithmic medium of the future. Theecosystems of ideas based on this metalanguage willgive rise to cognitive augmentations that are evenmore powerful than those we already enjoy.

W H A T I S A N A L G O R I T H M ?

To help understand the nature of the new medium andits evolution, let us represent as clearly as possible whatan algorithm is and how it functions. In simplifiedexplanations of programming, the algorithm is oftenreduced to a series of instructions or a “recipe.” But noseries of instructions can play its role without the threefollowing elements: first, an adequate encoding of thedata; second, a well-defined set of reified operators orfunctions that act as black boxes; third, a system of pre-cisely addressed containers capable of recording initialdata, intermediate results and the end result. The rules –or instructions – have no meaning except in relation tothe code, the operators and the memory addresses. I will now detail these aspects of the algorithm and usethat analysis to periodize the evolution of the algorithmicmedium. We will see that the major stages in the growthof this medium are precisely related to the appearance ofnew systems of addressing and encoding, both for the con-tainers of data and for the operators. Based on IEML2,the coming stage of development of the algorithmicmedium will provide simultaneously a new type ofencoding (semantic encoding) and a new system ofvirtual containers (semantic addressing).

P I E R R E L E V Y

i n n o v a t i o n i n c o d i n g


O

E N C O D I N G O F D A T A

for automatic processing, data must first be encod-ed appropriately and uniformly. This involves notonly binary encoding (zero and one), but more spe-cialized types of encoding such as encoding of num-bers (in base two, eight, ten, sixteen, etc.), that ofcharacters used in writing, that of images (pixels), thatof sounds (sampling), and so on.

O P E R A T O R S

We must then imagine a set of tools or specialized micro-machines for carrying out certain tasks on the data. Let uscall these specialized tools “operators.” The operators areprecisely identified, and they act in a determined ormechanical way, always the same way. There obviously hasto be a correspondence or a match between the encodingof the data and the functioning of the operators. The operators were first identified insider computers: theyare the elementary electronic circuits that make upprocessors. But we can consider any processor of data –however complex it is – as a “black box” serving as amacro-operator. Thus the protocol of the Internet, inaddressing the computers in the network, at the sametime set up a universal addressing system for operators.

C O N T A I N E R S

In addition to a code for the data and a set of oper-ators, we have to imagine a storehouse of datawhose basic boxes or “containers” are completelyaddressed: a logical system of recording with asmooth surface for writing, erasing and reading. Itis clear that the encoding of data, the operationsapplied to them and the mode of recording them– and therefore their addressing – must be har-monized to optimize processing. The first addressing system of the containers isinternal to computers, and it is therefore man-aged by the various operating systems (forexample, unIX, Windows, Apple OS, etc.). Butat the beginning of the 1990s, a universaladdressing system for containers was estab-lished above that layer of internal addressing:the urLs of the World Wide Web.

I N S T R U C T I O N S

The fourth and last aspect of an algorithm is anordered set of rules – or a control mechanism –that organizes the recursive circulation of databetween the containers and the operators. Thecirculation is initiated by a data flow that goesfrom containers to the appropriate operators andthen directs the results of the operations to precise-ly addressed containers. A set of tests (if…, then…)determines the choice of containers from which the

data to be processed are drawn, the choice of opera-tors and the choice of containers in which theresults are recorded. The circulation of data endswhen a test has determined that processing iscomplete. At that point, the result of the process-ing – a set of encoded data – is located at a pre-cise address in the system of containers.

T H E G R O W T H O F T H E

N E W M E D I U M

To shape the future development of the algo-rithmic medium, we have to first look at itshistorical evolution.

A U T O M A T I C C A L C U L A T I O N ( 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 7 0 )

from when can we date the advent of the algo-rithmic medium? We might be tempted to giveits date of birth as 1937, since it was in that yearthat Alan Turing (1912-1954) published his famousarticle introducing the concept of the universalmachine, that is, the formal structure of a com-puter. The article represents calculable functions asprograms of the universal machine, that is, essen-tially, algorithms. We could also choose 1945,because in June of that year, John von neumann(1903-1957) published his “first draft of a report onthe EdVAC,” in which he presented the basic archi-tecture of computers: 1) a memory containing dataand programs (the latter encoding algorithms); 2) anarithmetic, logical calculation unit; and 3) a controlunit capable of interpreting the instructions of the pro-grams contained in the memory. Since the seminaltexts of Alan Turing and John von neumann representonly theoretical advances, we could date the new erafrom the construction and actual use of the first com-puters, in the 1950s. It is clear, however, that (in spite ofthe prescience of a few visionaries3) until the end of the1970s, it was still hard to talk about an algorithmic medi-um. One of the main reasons is that the computers atthat time were still big, costly, closed machines whoseinput and output interfaces could only be manipulated byexperts. Although already in its infancy, the algorithmicmedium was not yet socially prevalent. It should be noted that between 1950 and 1980 (beforeInternet connections became the norm), data flows cir-culated mainly between containers and operators withlocal addresses enclosed in a single machine.

T H E I N T E R N E T A N D P E R S O N A L C O M P U T E R S

( 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 9 5 )

A new trend emerged in the 1970s and became domi-nant in the 1980s: the interconnection of computers.The Internet protocol (invented in 1969) won outover its competitors in addressing machines in

P I E R R E L É V Y ∞ INNOVATION IN CODING ∞ 60

telecommunication networks. This was also theperiod when computing became personal. The digi-tal was now seen as a vector of transformation andcommunication of all symbols, not only numbers.The activities of mail, telecommunications, publish-ing, the press, and radio and television broadcastingbegan to converge. At the stage of the Internet and personal computers,data processed by algorithms were always stored in con-tainers with local addresses, but – in addition to thoseaddresses – operators now had universal physical addressesin the global network. Consequently, algorithmic opera-tors could “collaborate,” and the range of types of pro-cessing and applications expanded significantly.

T H E W O R L D W I D E W E B ( 1 9 9 5 - 2 0 2 0 )

It was only with the arrival of the Web, around 1995,however, that the Internet became the medium of mostcommunication – to the point of irreversibly affectingthe functioning of the traditional media and most eco-nomic, political and cultural institutions. The revolution of the Web can be explained essential-ly as the creation of a universal system of physicaladdresses for containers. This system, of course, isurLs. It should be noted that – like the Internet pro-tocol for operators – this universal system is addedto the local addresses of the containers of data, itdoes not eliminate them. Tim Berners-Lee’s inge-nious idea may be described as follows: by invent-ing a universal addressing system for data, hemade possible the shift from a multitude of actualdatabases (each controlled by one computer) to asingle virtual database for all computers. One ofthe main benefits is the possibility of creatinghyperlinks among any of the data of that univer-sal virtual database: “the Web.” from then on, the effective power and the capaci-ty for collaboration – or inter-operation –between algorithms increased and diversifiedenormously, since both operators and containersnow possessed universal addresses. The basic pro-grammable machine became the network itself,as is shown by the spread of cloud computing.The decade 2010-2020 is seeing the beginning ofthe transition to a data-centric society. Indeed,starting with this phase of social utilization ofthe new medium, the majority of interactionsamong people take place through the Internet,whether purely for socialization or for informa-tion, work, research, learning, consumption, polit-ical action, gaming, watches, and so on. At thesame time, algorithms increasingly serve as theinterface for relationships between people, relation-ships among data, and relationships between people

and data. The increase in conflicts around owner-ship and free accessibility of data, and around open-ness and transparency of algorithms, are clear signsof a transition to a data-centric society. However,in spite of their already decisive role, algorithmsare not yet perceived in the collective conscious-ness as the new medium of human communica-tion and thought. People were still fascinated bythe logic of dissemination of previous media. The next stage in the evolution of the algorith-mic medium – the semantic sphere based onIEML – will provide a conceptual addressing sys-tem for data. But before we look at the future,we need to think about the limitations of thecontemporary Web. Indeed, the Web wasinvented to help solve problems in interconnect-ing data that arose around 1990, at a time whenone percent of the world’s population (mainlyAnglophone) was connected. But now in 2014,new problems have arisen involving the difficul-ties of translating and processing data, as well asthe low level of digital literacy. When these prob-lems become too pronounced (probably around2020, when more than half the world’s populationwill be connected), we will be obliged to adopt aconceptual addressing system on top of the layer ofphysical addressing of the WWW.

T H E L I M I T A T I O N S O F

T H E W E B I N 2 0 1 6

T H E I N A D E Q U A C Y O F T H E

L O G I C O F D I S S E M I N A T I O N

from Gutenberg until the middle of the twentiethcentury, the main technical effect of the media wasthe mechanical recording, reproduction and transmis-sion of the symbols of human communication. Exam-ples include printing (newspapers, magazines, books),the recording industry, movies, telephone, radio andtelevision. While there were also technologies for calcu-lation, or automatic transformation of symbols, theautomatic calculators available before computers werenot very powerful and their usefulness was limited. The first computers had little impact on social commu-nication because of their cost, the complexity of usingthem and the small number of owners (essentially bigcorporations, some scientific laboratories and the gov-ernment administrations of rich countries). It was onlybeginning in the 1980s that the development of personalcomputing provided a growing proportion of the pop-ulation with powerful tools for producing messages,whether these were texts, tables of numbers, images ormusic. from then on, the democratization of printersand the development of communication networksamong computers, as well as the increased number


of radio and television networks, gradually under-mined the monopoly on the massive disseminationof messages that had traditionally belonged to pub-lishers, professional journalists and the major televi-sion networks4. This revolution in dissemination accel-erated with the arrival of the World Wide Web in themid-1990s and blossomed into the new kind of globalmultimedia public sphere that prevails now at thebeginning of the twenty-first century. In terms of the structure of social communication, theessential characteristic of the new public sphere is that itpermits anyone to produce messages, to transmit to acommunity without borders and to access messages pro-duced and transmitted by others. This freedom of com-munication is all the more effective since its exercise ispractically free and does not require any prior technicalknowledge. In spite of the limits I will describe below,we have to welcome the new horizon of communicationthat is now offered to us: at the rate at which the num-ber of connections is growing, almost all human beingsin the next generation will be able to disseminate theirmessages to the entire planet for free and effortlessly. It is certain that automatic manipulation – or transfor-mation – of symbols has been practiced since the 1960sand 1970s. I have also already noted that a large pro-portion of personal computing was used to produceinformation and not only to disseminate it. finally,the major corporations of the Web such as Google,Amazon, eBay, Apple, facebook, Twitter and netflixdaily process huge masses of data in veritable “infor-mation factories” that are entirely automated. Inspite of that, the majority of people still see anduse the Internet as a tool for the disseminationand reception of information, in continuity withthe mass media since printing and, later, televi-sion. It is a little as if the Web gave every individ-ual the power of a publishing house, a televisionnetwork and a multimedia postal service in realtime, as well as access to an omnipresent globalmultimedia library. Just as the first printedbooks – incunabula – closely copied the form ofmanuscripts, we still use the Internet to achieveor maximize the power of dissemination of pre-vious media. Everyone can transmit universally.Everyone can receive from anywhere.no doubt we will have to exhaust the technicalpossibilities of automatic dissemination – thepower of the media of the last four centuries –in order to experience and begin to assimilateintellectually and culturally the almost unex-ploited potential of automatic transformation –the power of the media of centuries to come.That is why I am again speaking of the algorithmicmedium: to emphasize digital communication’scapacity for automatic transformation. Of course,

the transformation or processing power of the newmedium can only be actualized on the basis of theirreversible achievement of the previous medium,the universal dissemination or ubiquity of infor-mation. That was nearly fully achieved at thebeginning of the twenty-first century, and com-ing generations will gradually adapt to automaticprocessing of the massive flow of global data,with all its unpredictable cultural consequences.There are at this time three limits to this processof adaptation: users’ literacy, the absence ofsemantic interoperability and the statistical pos-itivism that today governs data analysis.

T H E P R O B L E M O F D I G I T A L L I T E R A C Y

The first limit of the contemporary algorithmicmedium is related to the skills of social groupsand individuals: the higher their education level(elementary, secondary, university), the betterdeveloped their critical thinking5, the greatertheir mastery of the new tools for manipulationof symbols and the more capable they are ofturning the algorithmic medium to their advan-tage. As access points and mobile devices increasein number, the thorny question of the digitaldivide is less and less related to the availability ofhardware and increasingly concerns problems ofprint literacy, media literacy and education. With-out any particular skills in programming or even inusing digital tools, the power provided by ordinaryreading and writing is greatly increased by the algo-rithmic medium: we gain access to possibilities forexpression, social relationships and information suchas we could not even have dreamed of in the nine-teenth century6 This power will be further increasedwhen, in the schools of the future, traditional literacy,digital literacy and understanding of ecosystems of ideasare integrated. Then, starting at a very young age, chil-dren will be introduced to categorization and evaluationof data, collection and analysis of large masses informa-tion and programming of semantic circuits.

T H E A B S E N C E O F S E M A N T I C

I N T E R O P E R A B I L I T Y

The second limit is semantic, since, while technical con-nection is tending to become universal, the communica-tion of meaning still remains fragmented according tothe boundaries of languages, systems of classification,disciplines and other cultural worlds that are more orless unconnected. The “semantic Web” promoted byTim Berners-Lee since the late 1990s is very useful fortranslating logical relationships among data. But it hasnot fulfilled its promise with regard to the interoper-ability of meaning, in spite of the authority of itspromoter and the contributions of many teams of


engineers. As I showed in the first volume of TheSemantic Sphere7, it is impossible to fully processsemantic problems while remaining within the narrowlimits of logic. Moreover, the essentially statisticalmethods used by Google and the numerous systems ofautomatic translation available provide tools to assistwith translation, but they have not succeeded any betterthan the “semantic Web” in opening up a true space oftranslinguistic communication. Statistics are no moreeffective than logic in automating the processing ofmeaning. Here again, we lack a coding of linguistic mean-ing that would make it truly calculable in all its complexi-ty. It is to meet this need that IEML is automaticallytranslated into natural languages in semantic networks.

S T A T I S T I C A L P O S I T I V I S M

The general public’s access to the power of disseminationof the Web and the flows of digital data that now resultfrom all human activities confront us with the followingproblem: how to transform the torrents of data intorivers of knowledge? The solution to this problem willdetermine the next stage in the evolution of the algo-rithmic medium. Certain enthusiastic observers of thestatistical processing of big data, such as Chris Ander-son, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, were quickto declare that scientific theories – in general! – werenow obsolete8. In this view, we now need only flowsof data and powerful statistical algorithms operatingin the computing centres of the cloud: theories –and therefore the hypotheses they propose and thereflections from which they emerge – belong to abygone stage of the scientific method. It appearsthat numbers speak for themselves. But this obvi-ously involves forgetting that it is necessary,before any calculation, to determine the relevantdata, to know exactly what is being counted andto name – that is, to categorize – the emergingpatterns. In addition, no statistical correlationdirectly provides causal relationships. These arenecessarily hypotheses to explain the correlationsrevealed by statistical calculations. under theguise of revolutionary thought, Chris Andersonand his like are reviving the old positivist,empiricist epistemology that was fashionable inthe nineteenth century, according to which onlyinductive reasoning (that is, reasoning basedsolely on data) is scientific. This positionamounts to repressing or ignoring the theories –and therefore the risky hypotheses based on indi-vidual thought – that are necessarily at work inany process of data analysis and that are expressedin decisions of selection, identification and catego-rization. One cannot undertake statistical process-ing and interpret its results without any theory.Once again, the only choice we have is to leave the

theories implicit or to explicate them. Explicating atheory allows us to put it in perspective, compare itwith other theories, share it, generalize from it,criticize it and improve it9. This is even one of themain components of what is known as criticalthinking, which secondary and university educa-tion is supposed to develop in students. Beyond empirical observation, scientific knowl-edge has always been concerned with the catego-rization and correct description of phenomenaldata, description that is necessarily consistentwith more or less formalized theories. By describ-ing functional relationships between variables,theory offers a conceptual grasp of the phenome-nal world that makes it possible (at least partially)to predict and control it. The data of today corre-spond to what the epistemology of past centuriescalled phenomena. To extend this metaphor, thealgorithms for analyzing flows of data of todaycorrespond to the observation tools of traditionalscience. These algorithms show us patterns, that is,ultimately, images. But the fact that we are capableof using the power of the algorithmic medium toobserve data does not mean we should stop here onthis promising path. We now need to use the calcu-lating power of the Internet to theorize (categorize,model, explain, share, discuss) our observations,without forgetting to make our theorizing available tothe rich collective intelligence. In their 2013 book on big data, Viktor Mayer-Schon-berger and Kenneth Cukier, while emphasizing the dis-tinction between correlation and causality, predictedthat we would take more and more interest in correla-tions and less and less in causality, which put them firm-ly in the empiricist camp. Their book nevertheless pro-vides an excellent argument against statistical positivism.Indeed, they recount the very beautiful story of MatthewMaury, an American naval officer who in the mid-nine-teenth century compiled data from log books in the offi-cial archives to establish reliable maps of winds and cur-rents10. Those maps were constructed from an accumula-tion of empirical data. But with all due respect for Cukierand Mayer-Schonberger, I would point out that such anaccumulation would never have been useful, or even feasi-ble, without the system of geographic coordinates ofmeridians and parallels, which is anything but empiricaland based on data. Similarly, it is only by adopting a sys-tem of semantic coordinates such as IEML that we will beable to organize and share data flows in a useful way. Today, most of the algorithms that manage routing ofrecommendations and searching of data are opaque,since they are protected trade secrets of major corpora-tions of the Web. As for the analytic algorithms, theyare, for the most part, not only opaque but alsobeyond the reach of most Internet users for bothtechnical and economic reasons. However, it is


impossible to produce reliable knowledge usingsecret methods. We must obviously consider the con-temporary state of the algorithmic medium to betransitory. What is more, if we want to solve the problem of theextraction of useful information from the deluge of bigdata, we will not be able to eternally limit ourselves to sta-tistical algorithmsworking on thetype of organiza-tion of digitalmemory that existsin 2016. We willsooner or later, andthe sooner the bet-ter, have to imple-ment an organiza-tion of memorydesigned from thestart for semanticprocessing. We willonly be able toadapt culturally tothe exponentialgrowth of data –and thereforetransform thesedata into reflectedknowledge –through a qualitative change of the algorithmic medi-um, including the adoption of a system of semanticcoordinates such as IEML.

T H E S E M A N T I C S P H E R E

A N D I T S C O N C E P T U A L

A D D R E S S I N G ( 2 0 2 0 - )

It is notoriously difficult to observe or recognizewhat does not yet exist, and even more, theabsence of what does not yet exist. However,what is blocking the development of the algo-rithmic medium – and with it, the advent of anew civilization – is precisely the absence of auniversal, calculable system of semantic meta-data. I would like to point out that the IEMLmetalanguage is the first, and to my knowledge(in 2016) the only, candidate for this new role ofa system of semantic coordinates for data. We already have a universal physical addressingsystem for data (the Web) and a universal physicaladdressing system for operators (the Internet). Inits full deployment phase, the algorithmic mediumwill also include a universal semantic code: IEML.This system of metadata – conceived from the out-set to optimize the calculability of meaning whilemultiplying its differentiation infinitely – will open

the algorithmic medium to semantic interoperabilityand lead to new types of symbolic manipulation.Just as the Web made it possible to go from a greatmany actual databases to one universal virtual data-base (but based on a physical addressing system),IEML will make it possible to go from a universalphysical addressing system to a universal concep-

tual address-ing system.The semanticsphere con-tinues theprocess of vir-tualization ofcontainers toits final con-c l u s i o n ,because itssemantic cir-cuits – whichare generatedby an algebra– act as datacontainers. Itwill be possi-ble to use thesame concep-tual address-ing system inoperations as

varied as communication, translation, exploration,searching and three-dimensional display of semanticrelationships. Today’s data correspond to the phenomena of tradi-tional science, and we need calculable, interoperablemetadata that correspond to scientific theories andmodels. IEML is precisely an algorithmic tool for theo-rization and categorization capable of exploiting thecalculating power of the cloud and providing an indis-pensable complement to the statistical tools for observ-ing patterns. The situation of data analysis before andafter IEML can be compared to that of cartographybefore and after the adoption of a universal system ofgeometric coordinates. The data that will be categorizedin IEML will be able to be processed much more effi-ciently than today, because the categories and thesemantic relationships between categories will thenbecome not only calculable but automatically translat-able from one language to another11. In addition,IEML will permit comparison of the results of theanalysis of the same set of data according to differentcategorization rules (theories!).When this symbolic system for conceptual analysisand synthesis is democratically accessible to everyone,translated automatically into all languages and easilymanipulated by means of a simple tablet, then it will


fIGurE 2 ~ The four interdependent levels of the algorithmic medium..

be possible to navigate the ocean of data, and thealgorithmic medium will be tested directly as a toolfor cognitive augmentation – personal and social –and not only for dissemination. Then a positive feed-back loop between the collective testing and creationof tools will lead to a take-off of the algorithmic intelli-gence of the future. In fIGurE 1, the increasingly powerful levels of automat-ic calculation are represented by rectangles. Each levelis based on the “lower” levels that precede it in order ofhistorical emergence. Each level is therefore influencedby the lower levels. But, conversely, each new level givesthe lower levels an additional socio-technical determina-tion, since it uses them for a new purpose. The addressing systems, which are represented under therectangles, can be considered the successive solutions –influenced by different socio-technical contexts – to theperennial problem of increasing the power of automaticcalculation. An addressing system thus plays the role ofa step on a stairway that lets you go from one level ofcalculation to a higher level. The last addressing system,that of metadata, is supplied by IEML or any other sys-tem of encoding of linguistic meaning that makes thatmeaning calculable, exactly as the system of pixelsmade images manipulable by means of algorithms.

T H E C O G N I T I V E R E V O L U T I O N

O F S E M A N T I C E N C O D I N G

We know that the algorithmic medium is not onlya medium of communication or dissemination ofinformation but also, especially, a ubiquitous envi-ronment for the automatic transformation ofsymbols. We also know that a society’s capacitiesfor analysis, synthesis and prediction are basedultimately on the structure of its memory, and inparticular its system for encoding and organizingdata. As we saw in the previous section, the onlything the algorithmic medium now in construc-tion lacks to become the matrix of a new epis-teme that is more powerful than today’s, whichhas not yet broken its ties to the typographicalera, is a system of semantic metadata that isequal to the calculating power of algorithms.

M E M O R Y , C O M M U N I C A T I O N

A N D I N T U I T I O N

It is now accepted that computers increase ourmemory capacities, in which I include not onlycapacities for recording and recall, but also those foranalysis, synthesis and prediction. The algorithmicmedium also increases our capacities for communica-tion, in particular in terms of the breadth of the net-work of contacts and the reception, transmission and

volume of flows of messages. finally, the new medi-um increases our capacities for intuition, because itincreases our sensory-motor interactions (especiallygestural, tactile, visual and sound interactions) withlarge numbers of people, documents and environ-ments, whether they are real, distant, simulated,fictional or mixed. These augmentations of memo-ry, communication and intuition influence eachother to produce an overall augmentation of ourfield of cognitive activity. Semantic encoding, that is, the system of seman-tic metadata based on IEML, will greatly increasethe field of augmented cognitive activity that Ihave described. It will produce a second level ofcognitive complexity that will enter intodynamic relationship with the one describedabove to give rise to algorithmic intelligence. Aswe will see, semantic coding will generate areflexivity of memory, a new perspectivism ofintellectual intuition and an interoperability ofcommunication.

R E F L E X I V E M E M O R Y

The technical process of objectivation and aug-mentation of human memory began with theinvention of writing and continued up to the devel-opment of the Web. But in speaking of reflexivememory, I go beyond Google and Wikipedia. In thefuture, the structure and evolution of our memoryand the way we use it will become transparent andopen to comparison and critical analysis. Indeed, com-munities will be able to observe – in the form ofecosystems of ideas – the evolution and current state oftheir cognitive activities and apply their capacities foranalysis, synthesis and prediction to the social manage-ment of their knowledge and learning. At the same time,individuals will become capable of managing their per-sonal knowledge and learning in relation to the variouscommunities to which they belong. So much so that thisreflexive memory will enable a new dialectic – a virtuouscircle – of personal and collective knowledge manage-ment. The representation of memory in the form ofecosystems of ideas will allow individuals to make maxi-mum use of the personal growth and cross-pollinationbrought about by their circulation among communities.

P E R S P E C T I V I S T I N T E L L E C T U A L

I N T U I T I O N

Semantic coding will give us a new sensory-motor intu-ition of the perspectivist nature of the information uni-verse. Here we have to distinguish between the concep-tual perspective and the contextual perspective.The conceptual perspective organizes the relation-ships among terms, sentences and texts in IEML so


that each of these semantic units can be processedas a point of view, or a virtual “centre” of theecosystems of ideas, organizing the other unitsaround it according to the types of relationships ithas with them and their distance from it. In IEML, the elementary units of meaning are terms,which are organized in the IEML dictionary in para-digms, that is, in systems of semantic relationshipsamong terms. In the IEML dictionary, each term orga-nizes the other terms of the same paradigm around itaccording to its semantic relationships with them. Thedifferent paradigms of the IEML dictionary are in prin-ciple independent of each other and none has prece-dence over the others a priori. Each of them can, inprinciple, be used to filter or categorize any set of data. The sentences, texts and hypertexts in IEML representpaths between the terms of various paradigms, andthese paths in turn organize the other paths aroundthem according to their relationships and semanticproximity in the ecosystems of ideas. It will be possibleto display this cascade of semantic perspectives andpoints of view using three-dimensional holograms inan immersive interactive mode.Let us now examine the contextual perspective,which places in symmetry not the concepts withinan ecosystem of ideas, but the ecosystems of ideasthemselves, that is, the way in which various com-munities at different times categorize and evaluatedata. It will thus be possible to display and explorethe same set of data interactively according to themeaning and value it has for a large number ofcommunities. reflexive memory, perspectivist intuition, inter-operable and transparent communication togeth-er produce a cognitive augmentation characteris-tic of algorithmic intelligence, an augmentationmore powerful than that of today.

I N T E R O P E R A B L E A N D

T R A N S P A R E N T C O M M U N I C A -T I O N

The interoperability of communication will firstconcern the semantic compatibility of varioustheories, disciplines, universes of practices andcultures that will be able to be translated intoIEML and will thus become not only compara-ble but also capable of exchanging conceptsand operating rules without loss of theiruniqueness. Semantic interoperability will alsocover the automatic translation of IEML con-cepts into natural languages. Thanks to this pivotlanguage, any semantic network in any naturallanguage will be translated automatically into anyother natural language. As a result, through the

IEML code, people will be able to transmit andreceive messages and categorize data in their ownlanguages while communicating with people whouse other languages. Here again, we need tothink about cultural interoperability (communi-cation in spite of differences in conceptual orga-nization) and linguistic interoperability (com-munication in spite of differences in language)together; they will reinforce each other as aresult of semantic coding.

8

——————

1 The IEML project is described in my book TheSemantic Sphere, vol. 1, London: ISTE/Wiley, 2011. IEML isan artificial language that allows the automatic computingof the semantic relationships internal to its texts and of thesemantic relationships between its texts.

2 Or on any other system of semantic encoding withsimilar properties.

3 Such as Joseph Licklider (1915-1990), douglas Engel-bart (1925-2013) and Ted nelson (1937- ).

4 A monopoly that was very often regulated or controlledby governments.

5 Critical thinking here means the capacity to assess thetransparency of an information source, verify its accuracythrough cross-referencing and decode its implicit assumptionsand theories.

6 Castells, Communication Power (Oxford uP, 2009) andother works; Barry Wellman and Lee rainie, Networked: The NewSocial Operating System (MIT Press, 2012); and other works byWellman show clearly that, according to the best empirical studies,and contrary to the myth popularized by anti-technology journal-ists and intellectuals, people who participate in social networks gen-erally have a social capital and a feeling of power over their ownlives that are greater than those of people who do not.

7 The Semantic Sphere, vol. 1 (London: ISTE/Wiley 2011), espe-cially Chapter 8.

8 See Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The data delugeMakes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008.

9 Among the very abundant literature on the subject, see the fol-lowing books by two great epistemologists of the twentieth century:Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1972); Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towardsa Post-Critical Philosophy (university of Chicago Press, 1974; firstpublished in 1964).

10 In Big Data: A Revolution (cited above): 73-77.11 To be more precise, the hypertextual semantic networks will

be able to be translated automatically for all languages in the IEMLmultilingual dictionary.

8 ∑ 8



8

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L A D A M E À L A L I C O R N E ∞ t o u c h

M Ó N I C A E D W A R D S - S C H A C H T E RO N T H E I N T E R R E L A T I O N S H I P S B E T W E E N

C R E A T I V I T Y , L E A R N I N G A N DS O C I A L I N N O V A T I O N

Collective creativity and social innovation are consideredcritical to address the grand challenges we are facing in ourplanet. However, creativity is usually acknowledged andexplained at individual level and creativity or the creationcapacity and innovation are usually treated as independent-ly. How is creativity defined as a collective phenomenon?How can creativity be characterized as part of a learningprocess in knowledge society? What does creativity mean inthe context of social innovation? is paper attempts toanswer these questions, presenting an overall view of themain theoretical elements, debates and research trends onthe role of creativity as a dimension embedded in socio-cul-tural practices and how they relate to learning processesand the emergence of social innovation.K E Y W O R D S ~ Collective creativity, social innovation,learning. ∞ [27-34].

P I E R R E L É V YI N N O V A T I O N I N E N C O D I N G

IEML is an artificial language that allows the automaticcomputing of (a) the semantic relationships internal to itstexts and of (b) the semantic relationships between itstexts. Such an innovation could have a positive impact onthe development of human collective intelligence. Whilewe are currently limited to logical and statistical analytics,semantic coding could allow large scale computing on themeaning of data, provided that these data are categorizedin IEML. Moreover “big data” algorithms are currentlymonopolized by big companies and big governments. Butaccording to the perspective adopted here, the algorith-mic tools of the future will put data-analytics, machinelearning and reflexive collective intelligence in the handsof the majority of Internet users.I will first describe the main components of an algorithm(code, operators, containers, instructions), then I will showthat the growth of the algorithmic medium has beenshaped by innovations in coding and containers addressing.e current limitations of the web (absence of semanticinteroperability and statistical positivism) could be over-come by the invention of a new coding system aimed atmaking the meaning computable. finally I will describe thecognitive gains that can be secured from this innovation.KEYWORDS ~ Artificial language, IEML, sematic relation-ship, data analysis. ∞ [59-66].

S T E V E M C I N T O S HT O W A R D A M E T H O D

F O R E V O L V I N G C O N S C I O U S N E S S

is article is excerpted from book, e Presence of theInfinite: e Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, andGoodness, by Steve McIntosh (quest Books, 2015). earticle explores the potential of a new method for evolv-ing consciousness through spiritual experience. epotential for such a method follows from the insightthat human evolution can be fostered most effectivelythrough the experience and creation of spiritual realities.


e article explores “Eight Premises” which point to thepossibility of a new approach that can solve some ofhumanity’s most pressing social problems by increasingthe scope of what people are able to value.KEYWORDS ~ Evolving consciousness, spiritual practice,creativity, social problems. ∞ [51-58].

S T A N I S L A V P A N I NN O T I O N S O F E V O L U T I O N A N D E N L I G H T E N M E N T

I N T H E L A T E N I N E T E E N T H A N D E A R L YT W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y E S O T E R I C L I T E R A T U R E

from the nineteenth century onwards, the idea of evolu-tion has been playing an important role in Western cul-ture. Charles darwin successfully propagated this idea inthe academia and it is no surprise that today some scholarstalk about “the evolutionary paradigm” in the sciences.However, the idea of evolution was popular not only in theacademia, but also among participants of different esotericcircles of that time. Some of the prominent figures, whofocused on the idea of evolution, were Helena Blavatsky,Carl du Prel and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. In their works,the idea of evolution in biological sense developed into theidea of collective transformation of humankind that willlead to the principally new state of being. Blavatsky andher fellow theosophists called this future state of humanity“the sixth race,” whereas for Tsiolkovsky it was a “radianthumanity”. Although the names were different, the con-cept itself was common in many senses, and the idea ofenlightenment played a crucial role in it.roughout the history of Western culture, the wordenlightenment had different senses. Augustine developedthe concept of divine illumination that is still importantnowadays for Christian philosophy and mysticism. How-ever, in the eighteenth century, a new notion of enlighten-ment emerged that provides the period with its name – theAge of Enlightenment. Although many authors of the peri-od were critical about traditional spirituality and concen-trated on scientific exploration of the nature, f. yates hasshown that their ideas have their roots in such Westernesoteric currents as rosicrucianism. finally, in the nine-teenth century, European thinkers adopted the third con-cept of enlightenment from Eastern religions, particularlyfrom Buddhism and Hinduism. ese concepts of enlight-enment merged in the late nineteenth century esoteric lit-erature and influenced the views on the future develop-ment of humanity provided by the authors of this period.KEYWORDS ~ Evolutionary paradigm, collective trans-formation, esotericism, enlightenment. ∞ [41-45].

G E R A R D J . P U C C I OD E M O C R A T I Z I N G C R E A T I V I T Y : H O W C R E A T I V E

T H I N K I N G C O N T R I B U T E S T O I N D I V I D U A L ,O R G A N I Z A T I O N A L A N D S O C I E T A L S U C C E S S

Creativity has always been a competitive advantage of thehuman species and in the hyper-changing world of the 21st

century creative thinking and problem solving are consid-ered by many to be essential survival skills – professionallyand personally. e purpose of this paper is to outline someof the key benefits associated with applied and deliberate cre-ativity. rough this exploration it is hoped that the reader

will gain a deeper appreciation for the nature of creativity,thereby recognizing the important role creative thinkingplays in his or her life. As a discipline creativity research andeducation has grown dramatically since the pioneering daysof the 1950’s. Today there are more than a dozen journals inthe field and countless books, as well as numerous creativityscholars, educators, and trainers. at said, the scientific andapplied understanding of creativity has not been well indoc-trinated into society’s psyche; misconceptions still abound.It is hoped that this review of the many benefits of creativitywill serve as a call to action, facilitating the reader to bemore aware of and concerned for the development of his orher own innate creative power. KEYWORDS ~ Creative power, applied creativity, educa-tion. ∞ [19-26].

L O U I S E S U N D A R A R A J A NI N D I G E N I Z I N G C R E A T I V I T Y : A C R E A T I V E

S O L U T I O N T O O R I E N T A L I S M I NC R O S S - C U L T U R A L P S Y C H O L O G Y

In its assessment of the creativity of non-western cul-tures, cross-cultural psychology tends to be oblivious oflocal excellence. I examine the contributing factors ofthis blind-sight, with special focus on a form of biased rep-resentation of the other, known as Orientalism. forinstance, as Hook (2005) points out, there is a recurringslippage between “the ideals, the norms of the valorisedWestern culture, and those of the dominated culture,which comes to be the demoted other of all of these values.Indeed, when cross-cultural psychology comes with robustempirical evidence to bolster its claim that the West ismore creative than non-western cultures, it becomes nearimpossible for the latter to refuse to “accept some minia-ture version of yourself as a doctrine to be passed out on acourse syllabus”. As a solution to the long shadows of Ori-entalism in psychology, I propose the approach of indige-nous psychology, which is particularly suited for a study oflocal excellence. for illustration, traditional Chinese formsof creativity will be examined. KEYWORDS ~ Orientalism, indigenous psycology, Chi-nese creativity, the other. ∞ [35-40].

C H A R L E S T A R TE N L I G H T E N M E N T A N D C R E A T I V I T Y :G R A P P L I N G W I T H T H E A N G E L / D E V I L

O F “ N O N - D U A L I T Y ”Important aspects of our lives are referred to with suchimprecise terms as enlightenment, creativity, and non-duality, but what are these actually about? How do weseparate the sense from the nonsense? e author, whose1969 Altered States of Consciousness book helped open sci-ence to the study of consciousness and whose 1975Transpersonal Psychologies book helped establish a field ofpsychology dedicated to discovering and usefully apply-ing what is real about our “spiritual” nature, here wres-tles non-duality, cultural conditioning, state-specific sci-ences, and the like from more than half a century’s per-spective spent working to build constructive bridgesbetween the best of science and the best of spirituality.

A B S T R A C T S : : S U MM A R I E S ∞ CREATIVITY & COLLECTIVE ENLIGHTENMENT ∞ 70

KEYWORDS ~ Enlightenment, duality, non-duality, spir-ituality, cultural conditioning. ∞ [1-7].

P A U L V O N W A R DC O L L E C T I V E A N D E V O L V I N G

H U M A N C O N S C I O U S N E S S

How each individual’s consciousness is not only linkedto other humans and other Earth species, but with non-physical centers of both individuals and group con-sciousness. furthermore, I hope to validate my thesisthat each individual’s consciousness evolves through aseries of lifetimes. ese two phenomena should supportthe concept that consciousness is the foundation of ourliving universe.KEYWORDS ~ Individual and group consciousness, con-scious evolution. ∞ [47-49].

R O S A Z U B I Z A R R E T AP A R T I C I P A T O R Y P U B L I C P O L I C Y M I C R O -

C O S M S : D I V E R S I T Y A N D E M P A T H Y A S G E N -E R A T O R S O F C R E A T I V E W H O L E N E S S

One limitation of the “majority wins” approach todemocracy is its “argument-as-battle” mode of discourse,based on the underlying epistemological assumption thatfinding truth is best served by playing “king-of-the-hill”.is dominator mode of discourse is embedded in ourlarger culture, yet alternatives are beginning to emerge.Within the realm of politics, the evolutionary impulse towork creatively with differences is currently manifestingsignificant democratic experiments whose underlyingdynamics could be described metaphorically with the fol-lowing equations: (microcosm of larger society) • (sup-portive facilitation) = holotropic outcome; (holotropicoutcome) • (widespread storysharing) = societal learning.Two instances are explored briefly, MacLean’s “Canadianexperiment” and South Africa’s Mont fleur scenarios. Athird is explored more fully: Vorarlberg, an Austrian state,has hosted more than 35 ad-hoc Civic Councils for gener-ating high-quality participatory public policy inputs.ese randomly-selected microcosms have repeatedlyevoked collective wisdom, systemic insights, and powerfulconvergences. is work is coordinated by Vorarlberg’sState Office for future-related Issues using dynamicfacilitation, a non-linear, empathy-based methodology forthe Civic Councils, and World Café for the subsequentpublic Civic Cafés. Given the role of local municipalitiesand regions in sponsoring these Councils, institutionalgood faith / responsiveness has been found as key for posi-tive outcomes, modifying slightly the above equations.e wide-spread societal learning from these various col-lective experiments can be understood as generating shiftsin our shared appreciative systems, as delineated by Vick-ers; also as steps toward high-leverage shifts in our sharedparadigms, as described by Meadows.KEYWORDS ~ democracy, supportive facilitation, para-digm shift, Civic Councils, World Café. ∞ [9-17].

8 ∑ 8

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£ 28

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Spanda Journal, VI,2 | Creativity & Collective Enlightenment

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Transcript of Spanda Journal, VI,2 | Creativity & Collective Enlightenment