Bring heightened awareness and an expanded capacity for pleasure into every aspect of your daily life.

Mark A. Michaels and Patricia Johnson are a devoted married couple who have been teaching traditional and contemporary approaches to Tantric sexual practices together since 1999.

Michaels and Johnson are multi-award-winning authors of The Essence of Tantric Sexuality, Tantra for Erotic Empowerment: The Key to Enriching Your Sexual Life, and, most recently, Great Sex Made Simple: Tantric Tips to Deepen Intimacy and Heighten Pleasure, which just won the 2013 Gold Medal from Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Sexuality/Relationships category.

They’ve also produced instructional DVDs and a meditation CD set: all of these and more can be found on their website tantrapm.com

Michaels is a lawyer, playwright and translator. He translated and adapted Goldoni’s The Mistress of the Inn for the Roundabout Theatre Company, and co-wrote The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Debate, which premiered at New York’s Primary Stages. Johnson is a retired professional operatic soprano who toured as a performer throughout the United States, Europe, and South America.

Join some of the West’s great adepts of Jhana, Concentration Meditation Practice. Jhana is an extraordinary human potential of the mind with deep and lasting rewards of peace, freedom, clarity, agility . . . and mastery. However, Jhana is especially exquisite in its preparatory role in the life of a meditator, bringing about capacities and factors of mind that prepare us for insight knowledge; direct, unshakeable experiential knowledge of the nature of reality.

Our jhana teachers and guides are, in order of their photographs, above:

Shaila Catherine, who has been practicing meditation since 1980, with more than eight years of accumulated silent retreat experience. She has taught since 1996 in the USA, and internationally. Shaila has dedicated several years to studying with masters in India, Nepal and Thailand. Shaila Catherine has practiced under the guidance of Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw since 2006. She is author of Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity and Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana. Shaila Catherine founded Insight Meditation South Bay, a Buddhist meditation center in Silicon Valley (www.imsb.org). Click here for Shaila’s schedule of retreats.

Leigh Brasington, a former computer programmer and now teacher of Jhana retreats, is currently at work on his first book, the working title of which is The Buddha’s Jhanas. Click here for Leigh’s resume and find all his resources and his retreat schedule at his website leighb.com

Dr. Judson Brewer, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and Medical Director of the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic, is a board-certified psychiatrist who has been investigating the neural underpinnings of Mindfulness Training and its clinical efficacy for disorders such as addictions. Dr. Brewer received his AB from Princeton University and MD/PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. After training in mindfulness meditation during medical and graduate school, he shifted his focus from animal models of stress, to the elucidation of neurobiological mechanisms underlying the interface between stress, mindfulness and the addictive process.

Tina Rasmussen, PhD, learned to meditate in 1976, at the age of 13. In 2003, she completed a year-long silent solo retreat. In 2005 she was ordained as a Theravadan Buddhist nun by Ven. Pa Auk Sayadaw of Burma who later authorized her to teach. Tina is the co-author of Practicing the Jhanas (with Stephen Snyder). She has worked as a professional coach and OD consultant for more than 25 years. She completed her Ph.D. in 1995, and has authored several published books on humanistic business practices.

Stephen Snyder, JD, began practicing Buddhist meditation in 1976, and has had a daily meditation practice since. He practiced for 20 years with several Western Zen masters, participating in more than 50 retreats and receiving several ordinations. In 2005, he completed a retreat with Ven. Pa Auk Sayadaw of Burma, who later authorized him to teach. Stephen is the co-author of the book Practicing the Jhanas (with Tina Rasmussen). Stephen has been a practicing lawyer and mediator since 1987.

Tina and Stephen are a married couple, and offer teaching and retreats to students worldwide. For more information about them, please visit their website at www.JhanasAdvice.com.

“The cream of human intelligence is maybe our best chance of responding to this [global] crisis.” ~ Ken Rose

The Living Hero show is pleased to present an interview with fellow progressive radio host, Ken Rose, originator of the What Now show, based in Occidental, California. What Now presents “extended interviews with accomplished thinkers, writers, artists, farmers and scientists addressing the global crisis.”

What Now airs on 107.3 KOWS-FM and streams at www.kows.fm Mondays, 11 am – 2 pm. Extensive show archives are available at pantedmonkey.org.

Photo credit: Metroactive

Solastalgia is homesickness when you haven’t gone anywhere; it happens when your home environment or habitat changes drastically and you lose your beloved familiar place called home. All over the world human beings and other creatures are suffering from solastalgia. This show is about the nature of care and the care of nature, about how sensitivity, aesthetics, emotions, mental health, societal health and activism come together in the understandings of these aesthetic philosophers who have the big picture in mind while staying in touch with their own deep humanity and interconnectedness with all of life. Enjoy this holistic exploration!

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Angela Manno is an internationally exhibited visionary artist who has been exploring the pattern that connects personal and planetary healing for over 30 years. Her award-winning art in a variety of ancient and contemporary media emphasizes the beauty and integrity of the human, natural and spiritual world. Her work is in private collections throughout Europe, the Americas and the Middle East and in the permanent fine art collections of NASA and the Smithsonian Institution.

Angela’s teaching, writing and activism aim at cultivating a benign human relationship with the planet. Her courses blend cosmology with instruction in applying the creative process to this critical work. Her articles on art, non-violent direct action and ecological consciousness have appeared in The Ecozoic Reader, Befriending Creation and Friends Journal. Visit her websites: School of Living Arts and her fine art site AngelaManno.com

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Glenn Albrecht is a researcher, professor and director of the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

He is a transdisciplinary philosopher with both theoretical and applied interests in the relationship between ecosystem and human health. He has pioneered the research domain of ‘psychoterratic’ or earth related mental health conditions with the concept of ’solastalgia’ or the lived experience of negative environmental change. He also has publications in the field of animal ethics including the ethics of relocating endangered species in the face of climate change pressures.

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Suzi Gablik is an artist, writer, and teacher. She studied with Robert Motherwell, lived with the Magritte family, and hung out with Jasper Johns. In 1966, Suzi Gablik had a one-woman show of her collage paintings exhibited and catalogued in New York. She later brought a prodigious and caring voice to art criticism, as a respected reviewer of art in London for Art in America, and authored her engaging trilogy of scholarly writings on art and culture Has Modernism Failed?, The Reenchantment of Art, and Progress in Art. She also wrote Magritte, Conversations Before the End of Time, and her memoir Living the Magical Life. Currently, Suzi Gablik hosts a blog featuring her latest cultural and political essays at virgilspeaks.blogspot.com

“It’s so wonderful and beautiful to feel light inside and not heaviness.” — Jim Merkel

Jim Merkel is an American author, volunteer, and engineer who moved from involvement in the military industry to pioneering in simplicity. His book, Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth offers a path to a deeply sustainable way of living respectful of all life. His work helped Dartmouth College earn high grades on the Sustainability Report Card issued by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. Jim founded the Global Living Project, teaches at Unity College, writes, lectures and consults with campuses and municipalities on sustainability initiatives. His loves include gathering wild edibles, being in the wilds, playing bass and digging potatoes. Visit Jim Merkel’s website

This show presents “Living Within Means,” an essay and live presentation by Jari Chevalier with short clips from interviews with Morris Berman and from Scott Baum in the first half hour, followed by a live phone conversation with special guests Jim Stoner and Doug Cohen.

From Living Within Means: “Composition is a language of sensitivity and subtlety, a vehicle that takes us down into our inner world where we truly live; it is a code of nuances, translated between artist and audience.

And we are not fully alive inside without this activation of our capacity to communicate in the codes of metaphor. These capacities are so terribly undervalued and stunted in the population at large now. Our human pattern-seeing, pattern-sensing, pattern-generating capacities have been ritually suppressed in the compulsory school system and in our workplaces in industrial society.

This is tragic, as “living within” becomes more and more suppressed and suffocated at the very time that we have so much emotion and deep concern about what is going on in our world to metabolize and communicate.” Features music by Thievery Corporation.

CLICK FOR INFO About Professor Jim Stoner, Chair of Global Sustainability, Graduate School of Management, Fordham University

About Douglas Cohen, from The Solutions Journal

Aired on WGDR-WGDH radio on 2.9.13.

Image: Soaring Bird by Sara Cole

©2013 Jari Chevalier

Minds are malleable, sensitive and responsive to influence, pressures, shaping and conditioning by family, educational inputs, life stressors, advertising and media messaging, repetitious uses of language, and intensive social expectations and atmospheres.

This Living Hero show features numerous experts from the 2012 film Four Horsemen, plus the larger-than-life figures of George Lakoff and Jeremy Rifkin; and an extended interview on memes, otherwise known as value structures, cognitive maps, mindsets and worldviews, with consultant and educator, Don Beck.

Dr. Beck explains the Spiral Dynamics theory that says newly emerging human mindsets reach beyond egalitarian views to holistic, integrative and comprehensive understandings that “transcend and include” all past forms of knowing and can thus discriminate among them to find the wisest, most workable approaches in any given situation, depending on all factors and people involved, accurately reading the mindsets of the people in conflict and collaboration, and facilitating peace.

Under the intense global pressures of plutocracy and toxicity and as more people become literate about worldviews and the ways that minds are shaped, more perceptive, holistic and integrative mindsets are emerging.

Features music by Brian Eno and John Cale, Leonard Cohen, Laurie Anderson, Stephanie’s ID and more . . .

For more information and to watch The Four Horsemen film, visit http://buy.fourhorsemenfilm.com/

To watch the full talk “The Empathic Civilization” by Jeremy Rifkin visit The Ross Institute for Advanced Study and Innovation in Education’s You Tube Channel and The Ross Institute for Advanced Study and Innovation in Education.

Find out more about the work of George Lakoff and about George Lakoff’s DVD How Democrats and Progressives Can Win.

And visit Spiral Dynamics and Don Beck.

TAGS: “value memes” “cognitive maps” “Four Horsemen” “George Lakoff” “Don Beck” “Spiral Dynamics” “frames of mind” “human development” “corporate media” “financial crisis” “predatory capitalism” “Ayn Rand” “mind control” “Gillian Tett” “progressive education” “depression rates” “Michael Hudson” “Clare Graves” “value systems” “models of good and evil” “human nature” “corporate media” “banking elite” “International Monetary Fund” Orwellian media “value systems” “Jeremy Rifkin” “Empathic Civilization” holistic integral

Profound messages on parenting for peace with engaging and inspiring stories told by Arun Gandhi, the 5th grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, excerpted from his talk “Lessons From My Grandfather” with musical interludes in the first half-hour and practical evolutionary parenting guidelines of Parenting for Peace author Marcy Axness, PhD. Music from the Until the End of the World film soundtrack, from Bobby McFerrin’s Beyond Words, DJ Spooky, and from the Brooklyn-based trio, Archie Pelago.

Show produced by Living Hero Radio Show and Podcast producer, Jari Chevalier.

Segment One :: first half-hour: Features stories from Arun Gandhi’s talk “Lessons from My Grandfather,” with musical interludes.

Segment Two :: second half-hour: Features a long excerpt from the 2008 Living Hero interview with Marcy Axness, PhD, with musical interludes.

Segment Three :: third half-hour: Completes the interview excerpt with Marcy Axness, PhD and offers commentary by Jari Chevalier and music by the Brooklyn-based trio, Archie Pelago.

MUSIC CREDITS:

Segment One :: first half-hour Special: Terry Riley. “In C” Bang On a Can, Cantaloupe Music, 2011. 45:30 Bobby McFerrin. “Pat & Joe” Beyond Words, Blue Note, 2002. 02:11 Graham Revell. “Finale” Until the End of the World, Warner Bros, 1991. 0:58 Bobby McFerrin. “Monks/The Shepherd” Beyond Words, Blue Note, 2002. 02:48 Graham Revell. “Love Theme” Until the End of the World, Warner Bros, 1991. 0:45 Bobby McFerrin. “A Piece, a Chord” Beyond Words, Blue Note, 2002. 03:46 Dj Rekha Presents: Sunil Sehgal. “Fakir (DJ Spooky Vocal Remix),” Fakir, E1 Music, 2009. 04:57 DJ Spooky. “Measure By Measure” The Secret Song, Thirsty Ear, 2009. 03:41

Segment Two :: Second half-hour: Archie Pelago. “In the Room” Forthcoming release . . .

Segment Three :: Third half-hour: Archie Pelago. “Archie Pelago Live Mix For Mary Anne Hobbs” Self-produced, 2012. 25:38

TAGS: Mahatma Gandhi, Arun Gandhi speech, parenting tips, parenting guidelines, early childhood development, radio, podcast, audio, commentary, Marcy Axness, interview, Archie Pelago, child abuse, exemplary parenting, Parenting for Peace, “Lessons from My Grandfather”, social change, social justice, attunement, prenatal care, pregnancy, birth, self-discipline, “anger management,” skip ultrasound, parental education, child care, infancy, nursing, stories

Listen as experts speak about how psychedelic plants found in rainforests are being used in the treatment of addiction in, Trips Beyond Addiction, featuring the voices and stories of ex-addicts, researchers and treatment providers sharing their experiences and fascinations with these medicines. Show produced by Living Hero Radio Show and Podcast producer, Jari Chevalier.

With Dimitri Mobengo Mugianis, Bovenga Na Muduma, Clare S. Wilkins, Brad Burge, Tom Kingsley Brown, Susan Thesenga, Bruce K. Alexander . . . and other important voices active in the field of healing with these native medicines.

Trips Beyond Addiction first aired as the first half hour of the inaugural Living Hero Radio show on WGDR-WGDH fm in North-Central Vermont on January 12, 2013. The complete 90-minute show is available for streaming here and on Soundcloud (search: WGDR Living Hero 01.12.13).

Trips Beyond Addiction has a score of tunes by Jari Chevalier, riffed on and performed by Cosmo D from the band Archie Pelago.

Also with music by The Cinematic Orchestra. The Living Hero station ID music bed is from the start of Terry Riley’s In C. And musician Bovenga Na Muduma played the sample of the native Bwiti instrument the Mugongo.

INTRODUCTION: Ayahuasca and Iboga are rainforest hallucinogens. They are traditional sacraments used in the tribal cultures of the Amazon and of Central West Africa, respectively, and in the past, these tribal medicines were taken by many members of the traditional societies of the regions where they naturally grow.

Now, these same compounds, sometimes referred to as entheogens for their power to evoke “mystical experiences,” spiritual awakenings, powerful self-confrontation and aroused conscience, are being investigated scientifically to gain understanding of their extraordinary power and efficacy in treating addiction in contemporary Western society.

Musical Works in Trips Beyond Addiction Title Artist Album Label Year All Things, The Cinematic Orchestra, Man with a Movie Camera, Ninja Tune, 2003 Needle and the Damage Done, Indra, In Between, Self-produced, 2012 Trips Beyond Addiction, Jari Chevalier ~ Improvisations and Performance by Cosmo D (unpublished/self-produced), 2013 Reel Life, The Cinematic Orchestra, Man with a Movie Camera, Ninja Tune, 2003 Dawn, The Cinematic Orchestra, Man with a Movie Camera, Ninja Tune, 2003

TAGS: ayahuasca iboga addiction psychedelics hallucinogens MAPS entheogens “Dimitri Mobengo Mujianis” “Clare Wilkins” “Bovenga Na Muduma” podcast “transcending dependence” “Brad Burge” “psychedelic research studies” sobriety healing “overcoming addiction” conscience “personal growth” wisdom “rainforest medicines” “shamanic medicines” “opiate addiction” “opiate withdrawal” “get off opiates” “spiritual transcendence” “pain medication dependence” “prescription opiate dependency” heroin oxycontin “drug addiction”

PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Fisher

Hello Living Hero People!

In contemporary life, people who effectively take a creative and unconventional path, who find ways to resist that which is destructive, unwholesome or lacking in integrity are to be considered heroic and visionary!

Artists, researchers, activists, authors, wisdom figures ~ with musical accompaniment and interludes ~

May we enjoy moving from a toxic, alienated and fragmented culture to one of holistic integrity and social cohesion.

Join The Living Hero Radio Show and Podcast Facebook page to comment on and contribute to our shows!

@LivingHeroPod on Twitter!

See you there! Share ~

For the greater good, Jari Chevalier

Are you experienced? Sharing this personal essay about tripping as a teenager, which came out in Reality Sandwich this week. Bring back any memories for you? Thoughts? I wish to engage in dialogue with people about transcendent personal experiences. I find people are shy to speak of such things. But please do speak of them anyway! Read it here http://www.realitysandwich.com/codes_my_kin

Comment here or on the Reality Sandwich site.

Hankering for a whole new world? Well, Dr. Marcy Axness’ Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers is your ticket: it highlights all that’s amiss in how we currently raise children in America and models an emerging holistic worldview in which human beings can blossom into confident, benevolent people.

Dr. Axness reminds us that “we are the soil in which our children grow.” Are we spiritually developed and psychologically mature enough to provide the conditions that truly nourish our babies and children?

Discussing every aspect of parenting from how biological life unfolds to how teenagers can be respectfully supported in their pressures, challenges and growth, Axness’ brilliant synthesis makes it clear that parenting must be front and center in any successful movement for widespread social wellness. By “taking responsibility for how we invite in, welcome and incarnate our next generation” we engage in social action, and put ourselves in charge of change.

This witty, poetic, fact-loaded and wise book reveals and exposes all the ways people are currently damaging youth, specifically in contemporary Western-style society. It also suggests just how swiftly and comprehensively mothers and fathers who are parenting for peace can revolutionize our world through a conscious, concerted approach.

You’ll also understand the details of why we must revise the way we carry, birth, and engage with children at every stage of their development and, to do so, how we must swim against strong social currents that have deliberately undermined the holistic health of children to make for good workers and consumers, to ensure social stability for a corporate state.

Dr. Axness’ deep, comprehensive and effective questioning of contemporary medical, educational, and ideological social mores and establishments calls upon parents to turn the tide.

Axness acknowledges that parenting for peace is the most important and challenging job of your life; “this ideal of parenting for a generation of peacemakers is so demanding, so sophisticated, and demands such a level of maturity, we are culturally only now barely up to the task.”

And yet, in many ways, this daunting and demanding task calls upon us merely to be more loving, aware, easeful and natural. Axness teaches us how to gauge ourselves in the midst of our greatest challenges. At the end of each chapter, there are age-specific tips for embodying and practicing the central principles of her teaching: presence, awareness, rhythm, example, nurturance, trust, and simplicity (P.A.R.E.N.T.S.).

By the end of this paradigm-busting book, you will know that every opportunity to bring physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual security and well-being to a child is a powerful action in service to the living world.

Listen to our interview with Marcy (September 2008) here.

She also appears in our special program Where’s the Imagination?

©2012 Jari Chevalier

Paperback: 443 pages Publisher: Sentient Publications (January 30, 2012) ISBN-10: 1591811767

Narcissists and Sociopaths live to dominate and thrill to win. They can excel marvelously anywhere ruthlessness is rewarding.

And recent research brings us new understanding of just what these serious emotional disabilities are; what causes them, how prevalent they are, and how studying them helps us to draw the connections between psyche and society.

Join host/producer Jari Chevalier as she talks with experts Dr. Nina W. Brown, Dr. Linda Martinez-Lewi, social worker Lisa Charlebois, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Gabor Maté, MD, Dr. Sandy Hotchkiss, Dr. Scott Baum, and Dr, Martha Stout. Narration includes in-depth research and synthesis of the work of these and many other researchers and healers.

Learn just how and why narcissists and sociopaths might be a bigger part of your life than you imagine. We focus on the many factors of unreality inherent in these personality structures and how they spin unreality into the world.

Four thousand people attended the largest annual conference of left and progressive intellectuals in the world over the weekend of March 18-20, 2011. It was the 7th annual Left Forum, at Pace University in lower Manhattan. A thousand speakers, 300 workshops, panels and dialogues on international politics, class war, social justice issues, corporate abuse of power and the ravages of financial deregulation attracted academics, anti-capitalists, socialists, artists, journalists, activists and anarchists to forge bonds of solidarity for social change. They had their choice of up to 45 panel discussions per seven program periods, plus two stellar plenary presentations covering the conference theme “Towards a Politics of Solidarity”.

Internationally known presenters such as Richard Wolff, Stanley Aronowitz, Cornel West, Laura Flanders, Barbara Ehrenreich, Francis Fox Piven, Benjamin Barber, John Nichols and The Yes Men, keen-sighted and eloquent in their analyses and reportage of problems, activists working for change, graced the conference mainstage.

So why were only a few presentations really strong on inspiration and insight for how to foster growing unity among progressives, how to build consensus on outlook and method to bring unity of action to fruition?

For the most part, I heard the need for solidarity answered with a call for solidarity, a need for a new paradigm with a call for a new paradigm. In the face of mounting world catastrophes and collapses, this is just a little like singing, “100 bottles of beer on the wall” together.

I suspect even right-wing spies who no doubt sat among us were underwhelmed by such tautologies. What could they report back that the leftists were planning to do? Top secret: They say they’re going to get together and take down power systems, make demands for multiracial, multicultural harmonious living, end top-down ersatz democracy, rid societies of oppression and exploitation, create equal opportunity and abundance for all . . . .

But there we all were, “together” at the conference, and if there were any coherent plans for how this vast harmonious concert of united humanity is to subsume current power structures and create a better world, I didn’t catch wind of them. Maybe I just went to the wrong rooms.

Because, in fact, I witnessed several quite bristly moments of disharmony, one among panelists on stage and one among audience members, the latter threatened physical aggression, with me shouting “stop!”

And throughout the weekend, there was more accord on explicating societal ills and defining authoritarian power structures than on fresh orientations or practical strategies for building a just and fair society.

Also, to my chagrin, I did not hear discussed what is actually the most significant divide among progressives, the rift between secular atheists and spiritually-oriented progressives. The latter were tellingly under-represented in the Left Forum programming. It appears the two groups do not break bread together, nor smoke the peace pipe around the same campfires.

And, of course, there are those progressives who wouldn’t be caught dead or alive at either the Left Forum or at a gathering of, say, the Institute of Noetic Scientists, whose conference attracts the “conscious evolutionary” progressives.

And so the palpable spiritual desertification of our culture, if we could even be said to have a culture at all here in the US, was not considered a key part of the discussion of political, economic or social problems at either of the two Left Forums I’ve attended (2010 and 2011).

But I wonder if spiritual poverty and spiritual heartbreak is of central and essential relevance to our movement and to the urgent global problems so eloquently elucidated and enumerated at the Left Forum.

There were only a couple of classroom panels focusing on spiritual topics. One featured three Christian ministers speaking to a relatively small audience about the radical nature of their congregational work. Another panel, which I did not attend, featured Gary Null, et. al., who may have approached some of the issues I am pointing to here.

The very fact that the spiritual left and the academic left do not, for the most part, speak to each other in public (and that this fact was not deliberately brought forth in the widely attended plenary talks at this year’s Left Forum) speaks volumes about just how intractable a problem achieving solidarity really is among progressives.

How can we speak about solidarity or lack thereof without coming to grips with this glaring dissonance? Not only was this, our biggest rift, left unaddressed as a central topic in any panels I attended, I heard no direct conversation about any of the perennial divisions among progressives—all the little fractures and slices of worldview from Marxists to progressive democrats, to Green Anarchists—and so, where could be the insightful analyses of what human needs give rise to strong ideological identifications and encampments or how such divisions might be transcended? And without such understanding, how are we to begin to approach a more global vision for connecting with those who are not the least bit progressive at this time?

Instead, the need for solidarity was addressed through kudos for Egyptian and Wisconsin demonstrators, through applauding these truly heroic examples and models of solidarity for social justice and regime change, but at a time when neither of these groups have lasting victory to show for their efforts, the kind of social progress that can deal with human greed, aggression, power, supremacy . . . .

There were accolades and strong applause for the solidarity represented by pizza orders called in to feed Madison, WI demonstrators, from unknown ideological comrades watching Madison protests via internet and TV around the US and the world.

Yes! hot pizza pies are significant and meaningful gestures of solidarity, and yet eerily disappointed was I that radicals at the Left Forum did not dig up and chew on the roots of what lasting solidarity really is, the metaphysical elements of brotherhood and sisterhood and what gives rise to them beyond the common enemy, those intangibles that provide persistent courage and energy to power through and prevail in the face of destructive forces that oppose the best in us.

In my experience of the conference only Cornel West went there and so it thrilled me when he said, in speaking of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan: “We actually love those brothers and sisters. And isn’t it something that to believe that is to be radical.” That’s it; that’s right! He actually used the L-word, the seemingly forbidden word that represents a force that knows no bounds or divisions and no obstacles, a force more powerful than all the evils in our way. Bravo, Cornel West! The audience exploded with applause for him.

Why not speak of this in depth and more often? Why the separation of intellect and soul? Can’t we get over this?

Is it because this is what gets you good and killed if you start talking about it as an unmediated birthright (Lennon, MLK, Jesus . . .) and start speaking of its lack as the root cause of social injustice?

Other than West’s statements, the general disengagement from the L-word and its meaning as the clarifying, fundamental aspect of life that we must exercise, strengthen and engage in ourselves and each other to full capacity, is the daunting fact that left me bereft, because only by addressing the lack of love amongst progressives and others will we be set to balance and transform our stagnation and galvanize a metaphysics of solidarity. This is how to arrive at a resolute set of actions, with strong and flexible bonds of brotherhood, with loving care and tenderness as our foundation; this is what’s necessary for us to overcome rampant toxicity at every level—all of this was crystalized for me by what was lacking at the conference, an understanding of just why progressives are in their perennial underdog position in the struggle for justice.

Are we embarrassed or afraid to love big, bold and colorful? Are we ashamed to speak of abiding love as the energy of our bonds? Are we all just too depressed, anxious and desiccated inside? Can we wholeheartedly live up to taking care of ourselves and each other? Are we too heartbroken by life experience to let love flow and overspill, to beam love in the direction of the future where we will pioneer into 21st Century and excite all those around us to do the same? Are we paralyzed by the evil we have witnessed and continue to witness every day around us? All I can say is that if love is flowing in our hearts and nervous systems, let it not be confined, disguised, or kept too private now; we need it now more than ever.

I am listening for it, looking for it (the L), and yet I hear rampant cynicism, depression and despair. Love is lively, confident and bright. I appreciated the moment when Joel Kovel said in his presentation that “you need faith if you’re going to transform the world.” This is correct. But what is faith?

Faith is not religion, emotion or belief. Faith is a basic trust in life and the forces of existence, a trust in one’s organic sense of what is real and correct, and a trust in the underlying forces and processes of a universe of implicate law and intelligence, exceeding our feeble comprehension. We have to reawaken our capacities to listen, intuit and trust in life’s true essentials.

Investigative journalism, accurate assessments and indictments, as well as multiple forms of resistance are surely needed, but we also need more time to be quiet, to be outdoors in wild places, to welcome our own changes, to be creative and make mistakes, to refresh ourselves and to get over our pasts, so that we’re not projecting personal rage from offenses of long ago onto current outrageous situations. Because all that makes for is conflagration, not skillful, creative and radical means that can show the way to the unwise.

The super-communicators of this year’s Forum were Cornel West and John Nichols. The old adage that “it’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it,” reasserted itself fully in the delivery of these orators. They activated bonding forces of solidarity, speaking emphatically with grace, rousing emotion, tempered to below the boiling point.

And yetl, did we not still long for gifts of real imagination at this conference? The cutting-edge is dull, getting perennially stuck at a horizon all too familiar, with too many conflicting views and goals, too much in-fighting. What will cut through to a higher order, to overcome dysfunction in our world.

Lip service is often given to the role of artists and creatives, but were there any artists on the Left Forum plenary panels? No!

At the scale of global society, with nearly seven billion people on the planet now, and with enormous challenges and forces in play, why are all these brilliant thinkers not entirely engaged with just how human beings will function, seven billion strong, as the current imperialist and plutocratic structures are disabled and dismantled, as we would like them to be?

The most clearly desirable practical ideas mentioned were worker cooperatives and relocalization, breaking up of multinational conglomerate financial systems, such as the IMF and the World Bank, reregulating investment banks, decentralizing governments into smaller regional entities and a global redistribution of wealth and power.

These are all ideas in common currency on the left. For those of us not invited to the table at progressive think tanks, it would be galvanizing to us to get feasible pictures of how the society we ideologically want would actually work, how things would be different in our daily lives and how those differences would make dangers we now face shrink back and resolve, how the redistribution of wealth and power would actually be achieved.

And if the answer is that nobody really has such things worked out, even in in their own minds, then how smart is it, really, to convene at this time, to have all these people burning all this fossil fuel to come together just to criticize the yellow brick road and the men behind the curtain? Shouldn’t we all be working locally and personally to open up our visionary capacities so we can see the way forward and then get together to share views and arrive at plans?

The word revolution was certainly in the air at the Forum, but it takes a whole lot more than a word to convince significant numbers of people to revolt. Combat revolutions require sacrifices of lives and materials; and history has shown that even successful people’s revolutions can be followed on by regression to old ways.

This is exactly why “the spiritual left” calls for inner revolution, for psychological change, for freedom from addiction, for personal authority and integrity, so that social progress springs from authentic habits of holistic thinking and living, from the resolution of inner conflicts, and freedom from the irritation, discontent and wanting of the immature human spirit.

Everywhere on the Left we are inundated with daunting facts rather than energizing tactics. Facts about the toxicity of what we breathe, drink and eat, stats on the alarming rate of wealth being sucked up the ladder, rallying calls for the redistribution of wealth – So where is the unified, coordinated redistribution-of-wealth strategy? “Tax the rich”? Is this it?

Did anyone at the Left Forum say international general strike? I didn’t hear it. How much personal and moral authority would it take for, say, 25% of people around the world to shut down the global economy and governments and take charge of every aspect of their own lives, as a group, in solidarity? We could do this, just as soon as we are actually ready to handle it.

But how do unemployed people living on government checks strike? Are they going to refuse to pick up their government checks? Are they really interested in bringing down the government that is the teat they’re attached to for food and drink? And what about employed people or entrepreneurs, up to their eyeballs in debt, kids, cars . . . what would get them to step out of line to bring down the system and build a new world? What do you think? That going to happen if we have no solidarity or plan that encourages these people to drop out of this way of life and stand together?

In which rooms at the conference were they talking about all this?

There were many details given about corporate abuses of power and how Citizens United will effect elections and bring even more corporate power to lawmaking and military authority, more evidence that we are being strangled and poisoned notch by notch, that while we hem, haw, dilly and dally, Fascism is taking hold and tightening its grip.

We were also privy to many specifics and particulars of the escalating environmental devastation of our biosphere and the denial of corporate/governmental power to recognize the urgency and respond. To be environmentally responsible means abandoning a legacy of exploitation and greed with biblical underpinnings, as well as high-stakes investments in growth and expansion of businesses based on extraction, domination and exploitation of natural ecosystems. To be truly environmentally responsible would mean that predatory capitalist system would be finished and the elite standards of living that everyone in the Left Forum audience is used to would be cut way, way back. Ready to rally for that? Just how many people would be put out of work in that scenario? Even if workers were to take over those businesses as coops, how would they run such businesses if they weren’t going to exploit land or other people?

We want to end the wars, close nuclear power plants, stop hydrofracking and tar sands operations, stop offshore drilling. Are you ready to live without fossil fuels? Ever gone hiking and camping? Ever live like a monk or a nun? No? Do these things now and then let’s have a radical conversation.

We were told that Fox News is the most watched television news program and that the Wall Street Journal is the most read newspaper; that the messengers on the Right are ever-so-disciplined, consistent and pervasive in their backward messaging.

But isn’t it also true that Republicans are divided on many issues? We were told that half of Republicans identify as Tea Party supporters and the other half poll more like Democrats on the subject of social programs. So, the truth is that they don’t know what to do either and they don’t agree with each other or stand together on a lot of issues. There are pro-choice, pro gay marriage, fiscal Republicans, for example.

So why were there not concentrated analyses of just what our central messages are and why we are so unclear, undisciplined, inconsistent and ineffectual? Why were we not looking judiciously at ways to create lasting solidarity across platforms, across aisles, across all the blurred and shifting lines of the masses of suffering humanity? Why can’t we think bigger and more holistically than we do?

Artists, spiritual elders, and futurists are the visionary systems thinkers with big-picture capacity, long-range vision, and inner resources of satisfaction, but there were no artists or futurists on the plenary stage. Why not?!

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, prodigious minds of erudition and passion, where was the much-needed attention to remedying ideological territorialism, which so afflicts the movement for justice and for sanity? Are we to remain defined primarily by what we are not, by what we oppose, by our anti-corporate and anti-capitalist rage, slogans and declarations?

Must it be our destiny to be in the role of yelping underdogs, fighting with our softie-hearted kid gloves in a class war that is totally rigged, where nothing can be done without capital and where we are perennially undercapitalized and forced to fight a losing battle, when in fact we are lovers not fighters? Why was there not more talk along these lines?

I say we’ve got to change the game in our own lives and who wants to hear that?! Let us no longer recognize the value of paper currency! Let us be defined by our creative vision and leadership, making obsolete, in both word and deed, the shackles of unwholesome societal projects! Disengage! Pull out! Disobey! Divest yourself of everything you’ve got sunk into the toxic, unreal world. Occupy the land. Leave the cities and get with the land to learn from and work with those who know how to live in harmony with the land.

Laura Flanders said something very important at the conference. She said, “Reality is what we need to grapple with.” This is truly of the essence. And it’s the same reality for progressives, as it is for those on the right. Dissociation from reality is the most pervasive human problem we are called to overcome now, in every social class, at every age, and in every culture and country on Earth.

Our true unity is actually found in our ignorance and weaknesses, in the pain of our confusion, ineptitude, psychological immaturity and disengagement from the Earth, in our not knowing what to do. The energetic network for mass solidarity is actually the shared experience of modernity and industrial civilization and its discontents, its craziness, its falsities, and our shared struggles of being neither here nor there.

Meanwhile everyone is pretending to know more than they do know and to be stubbornly right in that! We are together in our hidden existential pain. We will be strong when we can present a viable structuring of society that gives everyone the time and resources to address their dissociation from reality, to deal with hurt and the possibility of deep healing for future generations, to approach reality afresh, as ones who have learned a great deal since the start of the industrial era, with only perhaps a few elements of it worth keeping. Let us be eclectic about what we have learned; let’s keep gems of wisdom and abolish all our many errors of ways and means.

No one can do this while they are on a rat-wheel “workin’ for the man,” when they are caught up in competition, envy and fear. And “the man” can’t do it either, not when he’s in domination mode, waging war, exploiting underlings, setting policies that don’t serve the universal needs of people, scarring the land and pillaging seas for profit. These are people sadly out of touch.

All too few of us can approach and stay engaged with reality if we are living within today’s world structures, which are so very damaging to the spirit. This is why monks and nuns are given protection to be reclusive; they are doing the work of inner alignment with reality. More and more of us could disengage from academia and all forms of institutional and establish work and turn inward to contact reality, living very simply and without fanfare. As we do, we need less and less of what the techno-monopoly world has to offer, seeing it as a sorrowful waste of the gift of life. All people might be touched by reality and therein find rest, peace.

Are we willing to lay down our careers, positions and possessions if that’s what needs to be done to reach our most cherished goals?

Imagine if 85% of the world’s population were highly educated and psychospiritually mature. Anarchy might work. It would not be such a chaotic situation. But if 85% of the world’s population is ignorant, dependent and immature, anarchy is completely untenable, because people cannot self-manage and they will not be trustworthy to look after each other and other forms of life.

A favorite slogan of the Situationists during the European social upheavals in 1968 was “Be Realistic. Demand the impossible.”

Reality itself is demanding that we transcend, create, surpass former limits and that is the natural way of the universe anyway, with or without us. What seems “impossible,” out of reach, is so because our psychospiritual development and its conditions are too undeveloped to live up the moral sense or the creative potential that is ours, but which is very intimate. This demand for alignment with intimate reality is knocking inside all of us but the most severely crippled souls, those very people who so often find their way into positions of power. When are we going to answer to the intimate truth instead of to the magnetic psychopaths who dominate and manipulate through ignorance and lies?

The growth humanity needs now has nothing to do with the growth of an economy or the provision of “creature comforts,” nor with rallies and the fall of governments. It is about deepening and strengthening of our capacity to meet reality and be wholeheartedly aligned with it, to be realized people, working with natural law as our law.

Can we imagine that the basis of our entire global culture is to achieve what is generally considered “the state of enlightenment,” but which is simply alignment with reality?

Will the academic left get with this? If so, you might just be out of a job, professors. How would you like to build a cob house with a bunch of us and put in some gardens and greenhouses?

And, will “the spiritual left” please leave off with the UFOs and aliens, crystals and runes, drug trips, crop circles, reptilian humans, astrology, mystery cults, power of attraction workbooks, drum circles, fortune tellers, pagan rites . . . and meet with intellectuals and just folks around the campfire for some practical architecture?

Now, will the evangelists and the rednecks, addicts, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, gangsters, secret agents and casino owners turn away from false doctrines, false flags, guns and poisons? What? No? Will you be ransacking our brand new mud and straw villages? Really?

Don’t you want to admit that the native peoples were the advanced minds, the wisdom figures, and that the Europeans were the neurotic, puerile savages?

Can we get a wee bit smarter and more radical now?

Making our demand Life’s demand, taking this upon ourselves as a species, across all borders, boundaries and divisions, is deeply political in nature and also deeply spiritual: these go together. Once you’re fully involved in reality, you won’t have time anymore for consumer business or celebrities, nor will you harbor a shred of interest in the circus of electoral politics.

Bio-psycho-social-spiritual integration and development, dynamic growth, holistic health and clear mind-sight into and through the old and the present has the potential to bring not only the fractured left together, but humanity as a whole.

The imperative for reality changes the human project entirely. We simply cannot go back to sing Jack and Jill, play musical chairs and Ring around the Rosy now. We simply cannot sing anthems, run marathon rat races or have the fruits of our love and work go to war and waste.

The whole stage-set will be dismantled when we are over the silly stories of this theater! All of us, together, over it, over it now! Dull, ditzy, dusty old stories!

Victor Hugo famously said “Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.” And the time as come, fellow human beings, to acknowledge that when enough of the human race grows up and perceives reality, the seemingly endless cycles of invasion, exploitation and domination of peoples and planet will be obsolete.

There are not enough jails, money or uniformed men to contain, hold back and push down an idea whose time has come.

It is the whole construct of reality that is crumbling and dying around us. Goodbye. Good night. Good luck. Awaken.

©2011 Jari Chevalier

If people who claim they want fundamental change would clear the smoke and mirrors of their own minds and lives and look reality squarely in the eye, would stop buying products that come in packages, which are hyped through advertising (you’re paying for that hype!), would put all their TVs into their cars and drive their cars to their nearest state house or public square, lock them up and walk away, never to return for them; we’d be getting somewhere.

If people would put the energy they put into raging against the machine into ridding themselves of their bad habits of consumption; for example, consuming ridiculous quantities of sugar, which is poison for the human body . . . and would stop buying the next gadget, stop exposing themselves to advertisements, stop consuming all non-durable, disposable, mass-market items, in fact, stop all their self-destructive activities; we’d see marvelous moves in the right direction. In short, if people would give up their own bullshit, we’d have a very different picture before us.

Look, real progress now requires a healthy integration of intellectual, creative, psychological and spiritual progress, not mechanistic, technological progress, fueled by ignorance, narcissism and greed.

When people make it their jobs to break their own addictions and bad habits, and rid themselves of hypocrisy; when they strengthen and mature, when their minds are no longer puerile, we’ll be looking at progress. Because from that kind of personal authority, there is really no end to what can be overcome and achieved in changing the macro level. As J. Krishnamurti said, you are the world.

©2011 Jari Chevalier