Hi everyone, I am launching a new initiative called The Civic Enlightenment Project https://civicenlightenment.org/ This grew out of my prior initiative (The Enlightened Worldview Project). More than just a rebrand, our new name and approach reflects a deliberate shift to emphasize the vital civic nature of our mission, which encompasses both meaningful political engagement and holistic community development. This project’s mission is to develop protocols for collaboration across civil society hubs and to create and foster meta-hubs in multiple cities and regions. We also want to help new civil society hubs get created. These might, for example, be hubs for civic engagement and democracy promotion, current events sensemaking and participatory journalism, cognitive and emotional inner development, arts and culture, etc. We want to start by developing a network of local and regional community leaders and we’re planning on setting up a process for mutually supporting each other and building on each other’s knowledge and experience. This is an initiative of Nick Hedlund’s Eudaimonia Institute, operating autonomously. We want to invite you to join our network. Please reach out to me if you have any interest.
Greetings Brandon.
An excerpt from a dialogue between Yogananda and Ramana Maharshi in 1935
Yogananda] asked : How is the spiritual uplift of the people to be effected? What are the instructions to be given them?
Maharshi: They differ according to the temperaments of the individuals and the spiritual ripeness of their minds. There cannot be any instruction en masse.
I always find myself perplexed when I come across new pitches for a collective effort, as they never, ever seem to last for long, and it always comes back to Wilber’s Upper Left Quadrant as the CPU (central processing unit).
Granted, Maharshi’s is/was just one man’s perspective. And who knows? Maybe, the times being what they are, collective effort will get traction, but my gut tells me things are moving along right on schedule, as we tear each other and the world apart, and find impetus for individual growth within this volatile collective context.
Hi Brandon, congrats on the initiative. Would love to learn more about how you’re doing this and whom you’re engaging with. I noted that IAM, MetaIntegral, and others are promoting similar initiatives to spread integrative worldviews at, hopefully, speed and scale. Will be good to learn from each other and see where some of these activities can be synergized. I’m in Sean Esbjorn-Hargens’s Varieties of Integral course where this is a theme of common interest. I’m involved in several leadership development initiatives in Asia and around the world that have a similar approach. Best wishes.
On the arts and culture front, let me call out Cosmos Cooperative. This is an artists co-op with in-house magazine & publishing imprint. It was founded ten years ago by Marco Morelli and is going from strength to strength. Marco is integral to Integral, being one of the four co-authors of Integral Life Practice, along with Terry Patten, Adam Leonard and Ken Wilber himself.