Welcome to Healing From Within. I am your host Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit Answers for Healing and Infinite Love which shares stories that illuminate the reality of life in all aspects and ways to utilize healing energies, intuition, and our higher selves to create a healthy prosperous life for ourselves and others and am delighted to welcome Daniel Pinchbeck author of How Soon Is Now? who will show us how the ecological crisis we are experiencing now can provide an opportunity for a rapid evolution of human society on all levels.
As listeners of the show over time have come to expect, my guests and I share intimate stories and insights in the hopes of once again remembering who we are as spiritual beings having a physical life with the hopes of balancing the best of our connections to each other and our physical world, to create health, prosperity, balance, compassion, love and a unified humanity and world.
In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” Daniel Pinchbeck who is also the author of Breathing Open The Head and Notes From The Edge Times and other books, covers everything from energy and agriculture, politics, media and ideology, in order to understand the nature of the soul and the future of our current world.
Thinking back to his childhood Daniel remembers the many creative talented people who his parents as artists living in New York City were associated with and lived in a very open liberal mindset and creative artistic community of ideas social philosophy and gifted people.
That brings us to the world of today which is much different than the thoughts and expectations of that time in Daniel’s life. Many of us are busy trying to understand how our world has gotten to be on the brink of an ecological mega crisis and how we must begin to think of ways to change what is obvious to so many at this challenging time in our national and world history. This is not fantasy but true.
Postmodern civilization is already a pseudo—utopia. Over the last few centuries we have constructed an artificial paradise of consumer good—the society of the spectacle—for those with the resources to enjoy it. Unfortunately this artificial paradise is built on excessive waste and ecological destruction. It has created misery for those on the margins, the victims of famines, wars and genocides. By addressing its flaws we can realize the next manifestation of our genius as a species and perhaps achieve in comparison a true utopia. I don’t think a dieback of the human population is inevitable, perhaps, I refuse to believe it. But the longer we wait to re-launch our societal operating system, the more difficult it will be to avert planetary catastrophe. We have already waited too long.
In his book Daniel tells us of the philosopher Ken Wilber and his model called spiral dynamics which Sheryl found most interesting. The philosopher Ken Wilber tracks the evolution of consciousness through a model called spiral dynamics. According to his analysis the leading edge of consciousness since the 1960’s has been the post modern worldview characterized by terms like diversity, inclusion, pluralism, but also moving towards individualism and relativism. The post modern worldview rejects hierarchies and absolutes, and believes in equal rights for all. Unfortunately the negative pole of this worldview leads to the belief that there is no privileged position and no independent truth.
When all truth is seen as entirely subjective and contextually contingent there is no reason to believe anything at all…Sheryl says “This could be a problem.” Taken to extremes, the postmodern worldview collapses into narcissism and nihilism. The extreme right identified the flaw in this worldview. They weaponized its extreme relativism—which Wilber calls “a perspectival madness—to ...
