Hi everyone, I just thought I’d share with you an announcement I just received in my inbox: the 2020 Integral European Conference is happening in Hungary. I attended the last one. Good people there. In the absence of a big event, stateside, I’m heartened by global conferences popping up all over the world (just this year we had the smaller European re-gathering in Vienna, the African conference, and the Hispanoamerica integral conference).
Check out their announcement here:
As an aside, are there any plans for a stateside conference that we know of? Maybe @corey-devos would know. A few of us might organize smaller symposiums in the Pacific NW / Southeastern USA (I’m in St. Pete, FL at the moment), but since MetaIntegral discontinued its conferences I’ve been wondering about it.
In terms of the stateside conferences/symposiums, I’m thinking we can bill it as a kind of “grassroots” Integral gathering where anyone can show up and give a little presentation on what kind of creative Integral projects you are doing or anything you want to share with the community; a live TedX of sorts that could also incorporate elements of a retreat and generally just hanging out and having fun (a live integral party). It would be free and open to everyone, or everyone could chip in and contribute a little towards renting a house or something. Or we could even do it “burning man” style where we could all camp out somewhere or something more adventurous like that, lol.
@MarianMcCain Hi Marian, I thought about your reply last night and some stuff came up for me: I read recently in Noah Levine’s Refuge Recovery about intention and karmic fruit: “…if we accidentally kill an insect by walking down the street, there is no negative karma created because it was not our intention to kill. But when we volitionally kill insects because we are afraid of them or because we hate them, we commit an intentional act, which bears a negative karmic act. This is an important distinction: karmic results come from our positive or negative intentions, not from the actions themselves.”
What if these 700 people were to gather and created a chain of event that set in motion long-term sustainable climate change (hypothetical, of course)?
I also had a reaction to the word “deplorable”. The same word was used by Hilary Clinton when describing folks who are voting for Trump.
From a 9/9 LGBT fundraiser:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables . (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.”
I think it was a misstep by not recognizing the Great Chain of Being (there are are folks that hold these views). There are people using air travel for summer vacations and business trips-environmentally speaking it may be deplorable too but can a person separate the people from the act?
@MarianMcCain, this is as you know a very complicated question… Navigating the ethics of sustainability might be straightforward in some respects (don’t travel, don’t drive much, don’t jetset and take holidays on cruises, etc.) but on another level, arguably, what we need to be focusing on is deep adaptation. I’m not sure how much longer we can afford international conferences as the planetary crisis intensifies and we are forced to scale back out of the sheer collapse of our industrial culture… This may not be even a possibility in the near future. So, in a sense, and with all of that in mind, I am tentatively encouraged to continue to travel and organize with people who are oriented towards the long-term questions of a sustainable planetary civilization. Hell, even a post-civilizational culture. This integral tribe is one of those communities, and one of those efforts.
I’m also moved by the work of Jem Bendell and the #deepadaptationmovement featuring Joanna Macy and others…