After 9/11 – Paths to Peace

What meanings, lessons, and vision for the future can we uncover from the terror, lost lives, and rubble of 9/11? The shocks of 9/11 still reverberate within and around us. Who cannot feel them? I lived in New York for many years and love this city for its rich diversity of peoples, its energy, creativity, and fly-in-the face honesty. My youngest daughter was born near ground…

Contemplation and Global Change

In 1969, horrified by the war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia, I left graduate school in search of a way of living on the planet that didn't require us to kill each other. I was deeply confused by what I perceived to be the utter disconnection between my own values and behavior and those of the people who were planning, funding and fighting that war. In an unstructured search that was…

Embracing Spiritual Economics

In every era of human history humanity has faced a unique challenge. Not long ago, the challenge was to reconcile science and religion. And, as we all know, that reconciliation process was not problem free; e.g., in fact, many people died because they argued that the Earth was round! Today, the major challenge in front of us is the reconciliation between the material and non-material…

Global Activism: Individual and Collective

Compassion is a spontaneous movement of wholeness. It is not a studied decision to help the poor, to be kind to the unfortunate. Compassion has a tremendous momentum that naturally, choicelessly moves us to worthy action. It cannot be cultivated. It is simply there when the wholeness of life becomes a fact that is truly lived...Compassion requires a plunge to the depths of life where oneness is a…

Global Governance and Global Reality

A broad range of significant institutions have an increasing power over and impact on the lives of each of us in this global era. The power to effect change continues to shift in important ways from the public to the private sphere. There is a slow shift away from the State as the dominant actor in world politics toward a more complex structure in which states, regional federations, networks…

Global Spirituality and Global Consciousness

Global Spirituality What is spirituality? The answers are as diverse as the individuals we ask. Spirituality can refer to living a life of service, living an ethical life, having a transcendent experience or an altered state of consciousness, faith in and growth of relationship with a higher source, or even a belief and trust in nature and science. It can refer to the basic moral intuition…

Integral Approaches That Transform Us And The World

A living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. The names and forms which men have given it mean very little; they are the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal. Carl Jung Our sense of space and time…

International Law in a Unipolar World

Should the US seek a permission slip before it wages war? Vice President Dick Cheney received thunderous applause when he declared to the Republican National Convention “George W. Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the American people.” This bold assertion echoed the language used by President Bush in his 2004 State of the Union Address to underscore an ethos of…

Introduction to an Integral Approach

The reality of historic events forces a complex challenge on humanity: how to move towards a global future that integrates our various worldviews, without affecting or destroying all living species, including ourselves. We suggest that the following four areas of concern are the interdependent elements of an unfolding organic whole necessary for shaping such a future. Global Reality and Global…

Living at the Intersection of Travel and Citizen Diplomacy

By Daniel Noll Revealing the hidden soft diplomacy of inter-connected international travelers.  When my wife and I decided to take a mid-career break and travel around the world, we immediately recognized our role as citizen diplomats—for the United States and the West.  After launching a website and connecting with a growing international community, we sensed a gap. …