Thursday, Feb 26, 2009

Evolutionary Enlightenment and Key Mahayana Buddhist Teachings: Part 1, The Bodhisattva Vow

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On this week's webcast, Elizabeth Debold and Jeff Carreira launch a three-part series exploring parallels between certain key concepts of Mahayana Buddhism and updated evolutionary forms of these concepts in the teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment. The Mahayana Buddhist tradition deemphasizes the liberation, or enlightenment, of the individual, instead giving greater weight to the individual's cultivation of their own desire to assist in the liberation of all other sentient beings. Taking on this sacred mission of universal liberation is what it means to take the bodhisattva vow. They explore how Andrew Cohen's Evolutionary Enlightenment teaching provides a new way to understand the bodhisattva vow by placing it in an evolutionary context.

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Thursday, Feb 19, 2009

Ken Wilber's Latest Thinking on Holons (Part 4)

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In this webcast Elizabeth Debold and Jeff Carreira were joined by Tom Huston, an associate editor of EnlightenNext magazine. Tom shared Ken Wilbur's most recent thinking about the holonic structure of reality and the principles of evolution. As Elizabeth mentioned on the first call in this series, Ken has further refined and expanded his theory. In fact you could say that, in true evolutionary fashion, his new approach to evolutionary theory transcends and includes what he had developed before. Tom Huston will explain these newer aspects of the theory as presented in Ken's recent book, Integral Spirituality, and also as elaborated in the unpublished sequel to Sex, Ecology, Spirituality that can be found on the web.

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Thursday, Feb 12, 2009

Ken Wilber's Twenty Tenets of Evolution: Part 3

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Elizabeth Debold and Carter Phipps continue the exploration of Ken Wilber's Twenty Tenets of Evolution. Wilber first presented the Twenty Tenets in his magnum opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and also in A Brief History of Everything. He synthesized these tenets from both evolutionary science and dynamic systems theory—discovering how these principles of evolution operate in relation to matter, life, and mind—and also how they describe patterns found in cosmic evolution from the big bang all the way to the development of human consciousness and culture.

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Thursday, Feb 05, 2009

Ken Wilber's Twenty Tenets of Evolution: Part 2

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Last week, we explored the first four tenets of Ken Wilber’s Twenty Tenets of Evolution, and their relationship to Evolutionary Enlightenment. In our call this week, we will discuss the next set of tenets and develop our understanding of the evolutionary nature of reality.

Wilber presents and discusses the Twenty Tenets in his magnum opus, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and also in A Brief History of Everything. The tenets describe reality—both interior and exterior—as composed entirely of “holons”—entities that are always wholes, and always part of a larger whole. In tenets that we will discuss this week, we’ll explore how this holonic structure enables vertical evolution.

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