Mirror Flourishing: The New Business North Star
David Cooperrider describes how the Appreciative Inquiry Summit—multi-stakeholder planning with a thousand people in the room—brings out the best in human systems: "What we appreciate appreciates—we become what we study—so let's study the concept of full spectrum flourishing."
“We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We…
New Models and Practices
This Editorial precedes Volume 16, Issue 1 of Kosmos. Scroll down to access featured content.
One cannot merely follow the timetable we have set for our influence on the world, we must also honour and respect the infinitely more complex timetable the world has set for itself. That timetable is the sum of the thousands of independent timetables of an infinite number of natural, historical, and…
The Enlivenment Manifesto: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene
Rambunctious garden: Red plastic bags and a lone poppy turn the untended lot between two Berlin traffic lanes into a contemporary wasteland.
Key Concepts
The current ideology of dead matter, mechanical causality, and the exclusion of experience from descriptions of reality in ecology and economy are responsible for our failure to protect aliveness in our world.
The challenge of the…
Harmony with Nature
Mr. President, Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am grateful to be able to join today’s fifth dialogue of the General Assembly on “Harmony with Nature” to commemorate International Mother Earth Day as I believe that transformation of our relationship to the Earth is among the greatest challenges and responsibilities of our time.
Bozho. Shaapodaske Gizhgokwe…
Collective Presencing: Four Years Later
Four years have passed since the first article on Collective Presencing was published in Kosmos Journal, with three more following in the next issues. At that time, the framework was ready, the outline was clear, it was coherent enough to offer into the world. Since then, the big lines haven’t changed, but my understanding of what the new paradigm is about has deepened enormously. My new book…
Tom Christensen
Tom Christensen is Editor of Innovative Development: Emerging Worldviews & Systems Change and Developmental Innovation: Emerging Worldviews & Individual Learning. A student of human nature and Spiral Dynamics, his other works can be found at www.graves3g.com/
Activists for the Evolution of Life
As I look out my window I see a vision of natural beauty that takes my breath away. There’s a special tree I have watched grow from a little twig to a mass of green foliage quivering in the wind with squirrels running up and down the trunk. A little chipmunk scurries into the woodpile outside my door every now and then and sometimes a little bunny, too. My beloved temple dogs, Sophia and Willy,…
They Sang with a Thousand Tongues: The Poetry of Diversity
Let me tell you a story about how the world began. I promise you the story is not completely untrue.
Yoruba elders say that when the world began, there was only sky and water. The Supreme Being, Olórun, ruled the firmaments, while the Divine Feminine, Olokun, was master of the raging seas. One day, Obatala, a son of Olórun, grew restless and sought to create a world between primal sea and…
Regenerative Economies for a Regenerative Civilization
“There is nothing more difficult to plan, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the creator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli
Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”1
I believe this…
Mystical Anarchism: A Journey to the Borderlands of Freedom
On Beginnings
They say it takes a certain type of personality to be a radical. Questioning of the status quo, anti-authoritarian, angry perhaps, undoubtedly rebellious, critical rather than accepting of what is. Complex analyses and algorithms are deployed to compare shared psychological traits, relationships to authority figures, level of socio-economic privilege, and even birth order. If any…