Category: Life

On Life-Value Onto-Axiology, Neuroscience and the Self

This blog article was initially composed in July 2016 and completed in August 2016. It was not posted then as I sensed that doing so would have been premature. Given the recent spate of local, regional and international events, I sense the time is now right and ripe to bring Prof John McMurtry’s life’s work to a more general audience in a less sterile and more engaging conversational format based on email communications between myself and Prof McMurtry.

Hopefully, this missive would help open up avenues for a better understanding of the human condition, the challenges we face in understanding the brain, consciousness, the self, the mind, all of our social constructs, and would serve as the foundation for follow-up posts that would attempt to build a fully-life coherent account of our past blunders and hubris, and how we can better learn from the errors of our past, to help to consciously and coherently create a more socially-shared and participatory-prosperous future based on peace and harmony for people and planet.

Read More

Watch “Jeffrey Sachs | Keynote 1 | Subjective well-being over the life course” on YouTube

Jeff Sachs delivers one of the keynote addresses on “Economics for the Common Good” at the conference “Subjective well-being over the life course: Evidence and policy implications” held at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 12-13 December 2016.

The conference was organised by OECD, CEPREMAP, What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and the CEP.

Jeff Sachs is an American economist and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor. He is known as one of the world’s leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty.

Why should governments care about people’s wellbeing? How would policy change if raising wellbeing was the objective?

Supported by the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, this event was a landmark conference reporting the first results from a collaboration between the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance, the CEPREMAP Wellbeing Observatory at the Paris School of Economics, the OECD, and an international consortium of researchers.

Read More

Cultural Transformation: Building a Partnership World by Raine Eisler from KOSMOS

Reproduced from http://rianeeisler.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/KosmosJournal-SS2014-Eisler.pdf   Cultural Transformation: Building a Partnership World by Riane Eisler Can we build a world where our great potentials for consciousness, caring and creativity are realized? What would this more equitable, less violent world look like? How can we build it? These questions animated my research over the past four decades. They arose… Read More

“Imago Integralis: The Aesthetics of Integral Life” by Alexander Schieffer from kosmosjournal.org

Reproduced from http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/imago-integralis-the-aesthetics-of-integral-life/ Imago Integralis: The Aesthetics of Integral Life By Alexander Schieffer I. Longing for the Integral Life This article introduces a new integral perspective on life and provides clues of what it might mean to live life as a contribution to the cultural renewal, aesthetic unfolding, and holistic development of self and society, community… Read More

It’s NOT the economy, but human and community development, stupid!

There is an unholy alliance between our money system, business management practices and our politics. I have come to this conclusion recently based on the happenings here at home and in the wider global arena.

All three, based on credit creation, vocational management, and public policy creation and implementation, respectively, revolve around a monoculture of ideas that reinforce each other in self-serving ways. They manufacture dysfunctional disorderly behaviours at all levels from the individual up to our institutions, be they local, regional or international. These initial public goods and services have been captured by private-money vested interests, and are manipulated for self-serving wants out of greed and fear of scarcity, not out of love for human and community development and self-sufficiency.

Read More

Integral Worlds Theory Deconstructed and Applied to a Deeper and Wider Understanding of the Life-Grounded Self Via Illustrations

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent signifying our preparation for the symbolic “re-birth” of the founder of our Catholic faith – Jesus Christ. My family was honoured to be given the privilege to light the first candle to signify Jesus’ light coming into this world. And it was yesterday that the significance of my… Read More

The Trans4m Movement – Integral Worlds Theory: Articulating a “Whole” (New) Perspective

Trans4m is a local-global movement driving integral transformation processes to address today’s burning issues by actualising positive impact via new integral thinking and action.

Integral Worlds is a pioneering approach for the holistic development of individuals, organisations, communities and societies. It serves to address imbalances – within an individual, organisation, community and or society, but also within specific fields, such as economics, enterprise, or human development. Over the past decades it has been gradually applied to a large number of knowledge fields: from economics to management, from development to education – with its applications, in theory and in practice, ever expanding. The Integral Worlds approach is simultaneously transcultural, encompassing the wisdom of the south, east, north and west; transdisciplinary, spanning the natural and social science and the humanities; transpersonal, straddling individual and community, organisation and society; and transformational, evolved out of original and particular local grounds towards integral global effect. Integral Worlds serves as the core knowledge base for the Trans4m movement. Read More

The way forward – Integral Healing!!!

http://www.trans-4-m.com Please find attached inspirational information on integral development which holds the keys to the future of shared prosperous peaceful partnerships among people and planet. Also please find links to the books that explains the philosophies involved and which connect all the dots into an integral whole. Integral Healing by Rev. Fr. Anselm Adodo OSB… Read More

Coming Out of the Shadows into the Light

Three articles got me thinking as of late about the deep wounds we have suffered as a people and how this must have had some severe consequences on our deep collective psyche. They were: Why America’s Existential Crisis is Good for the World, Atlantic freedoms – Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the Age of Revolution, and President-Elect Trump: A Gift? If you have not had a chance to read them, I urge you to do so as they provide some food for thought and some clues of long-term repressed emotions that may have been plaguing us up to this day.

These in turn call for a form of collective cultural psychotherapy to bring to light the shadows that are responsible for our dysfunctional disorderly behaviours. This is not going to be easy for you the reader and is going to cause much anguish and pain, but if we are going to see the light, and this we must, we must first shine the spotlight on the repressed shadows of our individual and collective unconscious so as to bring them to consciousness so that they can be engaged, corrected and rehabilitated with as much sensitivity and love as we can. Although I have been dropping hints over the years in my blog articles that the cause of much of our disorderly dysfunction is our capitalistic cancerous monetary system, I hope to provide the evidence for once and for all to show how this system acts as the DNA of our societies and programmes us and our institutions to act in ways that undermine our individual and collective best interests.

The individual that connected the dots for me and confirmed my suspicions was Professor Bernard Lietear. His unpublished manuscript The Mystery of Money – Emotional Meaning and Operation of a Taboo, his interview with Yes! Magazine Beyond Greed and Scarcity, and his published book coauthored with Stephen Belgin New Money for a New World helped convince me that I was on the right path of understanding.

Read More