Toward Integral Economic DemocracyLearning and Leading Innovation in Second-Tier Distributed Networks

Brian McConnellgroup epignosis (an urban ecolab)Roanoke, VA

Abstract: Clare Graves, four decades ago, heralded the forthcoming of a "momentous leap" in humankind's evolutionary development. With significant advances over the last thirty years in testing and assessment, not only have his findings proven valid, but current interpretations suggest the potentiality of higher-order learning related to "mental complexity". This paper subsequently explores prospects that by better attending to the conscious processes by which we derive meaning, an ontogenic emergence of co-creative awareness might serve to inform remarkably new modes of thought and system design across multiple disciplines including learning, leadership, economics, and governance.

Key Terms: co-creation, contemplative, economic democracy, ecosystem, food web, holarchy, holon, integral psychology, marginal cost, meditative, mindfulness, New World Order, political economy

Ecosystems, the Emerging Future, and Capitalism's Decline

"The key conclusion is that nature does not select for maximum efficiency, but for a balance between the two opposing poles of efficiency and resilience. Because both are indispensable for long-term sustainability and health, the healthiest flow systems are those that are closest to an

optimal balance between these two opposing pulls. Conversely, an excess of either attribute leads to systemic instability. Too much efficiency leads to brittleness and too much resilience leads to

stagnation: the former is caused by too little diversity and connectivity and the latter by too much diversity and connectivity" [emphasis added] (Lietaer 6).

Perhaps one of the more useful ways of conceptualizing the political economy's overall working at this point, is as a phenomenally complex ecological food web in which the dominant species (homo sapiens) is insistently engaging in behavior threatening not only the quality and sustenance of its own existence, but that of the planet's ecosphere as well. Yet, somewhat oddly, and extending the analogy a bit further, this larger overall picture doesn't necessarily have its inception in human experience, but rather—biomass. At least this was the lens adopted by a group of researchers in directing and coordinating their efforts towards better understanding "how" (or "why") certain ecosystems proved more vibrant, robust, or sustainable than others (see Fig. 1).

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This troop of scientists, including Robert Ulanowicz and Bernard Lietaer after conducting painstaking studies, published a paper in 2008 disclosing their results in tracking the amount of carbon transfer (e.g. "throughput") distributed via a network's respective paths (Ulanowicz 30). Interestingly though, and while calculating an ecosystem's carbon throughput may sound an unwieldy task, conceptualizing that same system's overall working as a function of its systemic design proves to be remarkably straightforward.

For example, and as the numeric values in Figure 1 reflect, the respective units of carbon merely proceed along different paths as it passes through the food network. Naturally enough too, the give and take of this distributed flow occurs across a progressive gradation of holons (def. - "something that is simultaneously a whole and a part") in an inter-relational progression from atoms to molecules to cells to detritus to prawns to large fish to alligators and so on; with the respective holons undergoing transfiguration in a sequential process of ever-greater organizational complexity at each succeeding stage of development in the ecosystem's holarchy (Holon, Wikipedia).

Figure 1. Pathways of Carbon Transfer (Ulanowicz 30)

Consequently then, and in contrasting the two ecosystems depicted above, the system to the left (System 1) can be said to exemplify resilience as its network reflects both greater diversity (e.g. turtles + fish + snakes) and connectivity (e.g. an open system with three interrelated nodes), than the system to its right (System 2) comprised of fish and a single node only—essentially a closed system. For this reason then too, as an operating system, System 2 proves far more susceptible to dysfunctional pathology or failure due to the greater likelihood of disruption of its single strong-stream (e.g. efficient) path, than does System 1 (Lietaer 16).

In the near aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-08 then, and as a former Belgium central banker himself, Lietaer expressed a well qualified assertion lamenting humanity's struggle to "create sustainable economies" and the resulting implications for global society:

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"As stated earlier, nature has over billions of years selected the conditions under whichcomplex ecosystems are sustainable, otherwise they wouldn’t exist today. In contrast,

humanity still struggles with the issue of how to create sustainable economies. We knowthat the theoretical framework applies to both natural and man-made complex systems.

Has the time not come to learn in this domain from nature?" [emphasis added] (Ibid., 12).

For these reasons though, Lietaer further concludes, "(t)he urgent message for economics from nature is that the monoculture of national currencies, justified on the basis of market efficiency, generates structural instability in our global financial system" [emphasis added] (Ibid., 2).

More recently, but along these same lines, publication of Thomas Pikkety's, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has afforded unprecedented evidence of just how imbalanced the respective flows of "income and wealth" have actuality become (Lloyd). Thus, the author's work is said to prove "irrefutably and clearly, what we've all suspected for some time now—the rich ARE getting richer compared to everyone else" (Foroohar). Understandably then, and within this context, there have been calls to innovate "new structures and technologies that enable groups to move from their habitual thinking and practices to co-create an eco-centered economy" (Scharmer).

Figure 2. Income Inequality in the United States, 1910-2010 (Piketty, 24)

Disturbingly, but from a purview of world history, these patterns of income inequality in the United States, particularly in reflecting the waning health of civil society's democratic values over the last hundred years (see Fig. 2), signal a troubling course for global humanity's immediate future. Consequently, where this current disproportion has begun to exceed that peaking with the

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Great Depression in 1929, it seems likely that in their own way hot spots like Syria, Ferguson Missouri, the Ukraine, and Middle East together, reflect degrees of geopolitical unrest and socioeconomic volatility of a scale not experienced since the onset of World War I (1914-1918).

“[T]he protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world" quote from Christopher Clark's,

The Sleepwalkers (Shribman).

Or at least this is the inference posed by a prominent academic at MIT. In recounting his most notable impressions following attendance of the World Economic Forum earlier this year in Davos, Switzerland, Otto Scharmer shared his insights in reference to Christopher Clark's publication of The Sleepwalkers. Citing the fact that because European leaders involved in analyzing "the larger situation" of events just prior to 1914 did so "from a narrow, shortsighted, self-interested perspective that didn't anticipate the long term consequences of their individual decisions for the whole system", the outcome resulted in "World War I, the Versailles Treaty, the rise of Hitler, World War II" and, "the Cold War" (Scharmer, Davos).

Similarly, but just prior to publication of the English version of Piketty's tome, and alluding to the way in which "grand cosmological narratives" (Rifkin 58) enlisted to legitimize a particular economic paradigm over time, seem to eventually lose their dominating sway over the masses' imagination, Jeremy Rifkin has propounded a passing of the "capitalist era" explaining: (Ibid., 1).

"Ironically, capitalism's decline is not coming at the hands of hostile forces. There are no hordes at the front gates ready to tear down the wall of the capitalist edifice. Quite the contrary. What's undermining the capitalist system is the dramatic success of the very operating assumptions that govern it. At the heart of capitalism there lies a contradiction in the driving mechanism that has propelled it ever upward to commanding heights, but now is speeding it to its death" [emphasis

added] (Ibid., 2).

Also, and with an insightful grasp for Western economic history reflected throughout his The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Rifkin reveals an "inherent contradiction" underlying the very foundation of "capitalist theory and practice" (Ibid., 7). He thus chronicles how the "shift from a purely market-exchange economy" of "the late medieval era to a capitalist economy by the mid-nineteenth century" had left craftsmen virtually "stripped of their tools . . . and turned into free laborers", able to reclaim "only a portion of (the) labor they expended in the form of a wage" [emphasis added] (Ibid., 61).

Yet, and despite (or perhaps, because of) capitalism's devaluation of human productive input in this respect, "competitors" engage in a "race to introduce new, more productive technologies that will lower their production costs and the price of their products and services to lure in buyers. The race continues to pick up momentum until it approaches the finish line, where the optimum

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efficiency is reached and productivity peaks. That finish line is where the marginal cost of producing each additional unit is nearly zero. When that finish line is crossed, goods and services become nearly free, profits dry up, the exchange of property in markets shuts down, and the capitalist system dies" [emphasis added] (Ibid., 70).

Along similar lines perhaps (but as an aside), income inequality in the United States was near a century low (see Fig. 2) at the point that Richard M. Nixon in something called the Nixon Shock (of 1971), suspended the Bretton Woods System by canceling "direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold" (Nixon, Wikipedia). Coincidentally enough though, and following Nixon's resignation in 1974, Alan Greenspan with Ayn Rand at his side, became Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers that same year under President Gerald Ford.

Famously though, and following his tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006, "(i)n Congressional testimony on October 23, 2008" and referring "to his free-market ideology, Greenspan conceded: "I have found a flaw" (Alan Greenspan, Wikipedia). Thus, it's similarly unsettling that over this same period which Said Dawlabani in MEMEnomics terms the only money matters (Orange) era, Joseph Schumpter's creative destruction was so routinely enlisted as "the primary justification for the disappearance of the manufacturing base in the United States" (Dawlabani, 22). More recently however, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen has similarly appropriated the term; disruptive innovation, to describe a form of "innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology" [emphasis added] (Disruptive, Wikipedia).

Consequently, and to avert inferring a misimpression though, Rifkin fully expects that "(a)n increasingly streamlined and savvy capitalist system will continue to soldier on at the edges of the new economy, finding sufficient vulnerabilities to exploit, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the new economic era, but it will no longer reign" [emphasis added] (Ibid., 2).

Blind Spots, AQAL, Constructive Development, and Levels of Consciousness

"The blind spot of our time is that we take mainstream economic thought for granted, as if it were a natural law. But in reality, all so-called economic laws begin to melt and morph into something

else the moment you begin to change the most important variable: the quality of awareness of the participants in a system" (Scharmer and Kaufer, 15).

Furthermore, and in a chapter entitled, "Human Nature Through a Capitalist Lens", Rifkin lends corroboration to Scharmer's view of "mainstream economic thought" (see above quote) in noting (Ibid.), "(t)he First and Second Industrial Revolutions brought with them an all-encompassing

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world view that legitimized the economic system by suggesting that its workings are a reflection of the way nature itself is organized and, therefore, unimpeachable" (Rifkin 57). At the same time though, it's within this contextual setting that the authors' assertions in their "Introduction" to Leading from the Emerging Future have their greatest impact, for it's here they pronounce; "(w)e have entered an Age of Disruption" in which "the possibility of profound personal, societal, and global renewal has never been more real" [emphasis added] (Scharmer and Kaufer, 1).

Figure 3. Kegan's Five Stages of Development (Pruyn)

Consequently too, it's this exploration of what Scharmer and Kaufer "believe to be a blind spot in global discourse today", and learning "how to respond to the current waves of disruptive change from a deep place that connects us to the emerging future", that best defines their book's underlying focus (Ibid., 3). Similarly then, but specifically in the field of integral or consciousness studies, Robert Kegan's work at Harvard's Graduate School of Education over recent decades has established him as a principal contributor to our understanding of this learning process.

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The above figure then (see Fig. 3) is presented here with the hope and intent of conveying a comprehensive overview of Kegan's perspective as it's emerged primarily through The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads. It's also important to note though just how significant "the subject-object relationship" is to Kegan's schema "wherein "object" refers to thoughts, beliefs, and relationships that consciousness can hold and observe, while "subject" refers to the meaning-making structure of the mind that holds the mental objects" [emphasis added] (Silverstein, iv).

Figure 4. The Four Quadrants (Wilber, What is Integral 5)

Similarly also, Ken Wilber's inception of the AQAL ("All Quadrant All Levels") model owes much

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to a comparable appreciation for Whitehead's view of the subject-object relationship as evinced by Wilber in noting how "the present moment then adds its own moment of creative novelty or emergence—it feels something entirely new—and thus it also transcends the past to some degree". As Wilber subsequently enjoins his readers though, "this is a four-quadrant affair, all the way down—a view we also call quadratic" (see Fig. 4). "That is, each holon or actual occasion has subjective (I), intersubjective (we), objective (it), and interobjective dimensions (its)—the four quadrants" (Wilber, 9).

"The term “constructive-developmental” was first suggested by Kegan (1980) to refer to a stream of work in psychology that focuses on the development of meaning and meaning-making processes

across the lifespan. The theory is “constructive” in the sense that it deals with a person's construals, constructions, and interpretations of an experience, that is, the meaning a person

makes of an experience. It is “developmental” in the sense that it is concerned with howthose construals, constructions, and interpretations of an experience grow more complex over

time. Constructive-developmental theory thus takes as its subject the growth and elaboration of a person's ways of understanding the self and the world" [emphasis added] (McCauley 635).

Figure 5. Levels of Consciousness (Levels of Consciousness)

It's similarly important to mention however that within Kegan's Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) this series of subject-object relationships is seen as unfolding over "six meaning-making structures he calls orders of consciousness, with four transitional sub-stages between each major level" (see Figs. 3 & 5). Consequently also, "(m)ost adults are in one of the three top orders of consciousness or are in transitions between them. These three are termed Socialized mind, Self-Authoring mind, and Self-Transforming mind, with each successive order

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representing a more complex meaning-making structure (Kegan, 2009)" (Silverstein, 2).

Interestingly too, while Kegan's work owes its origin to Jean Piaget's (e.g. cognitive development) own efforts (McCauley 635), within this same context (see Fig. 5) there are a number of others including Sri Aurobindo (e.g. integral yoga), Clare Graves (e.g. Spiral Dynamics), Jane Loevinger (e.g. stages of ego-development), Jean Gebser (e.g. structures of consciousness), and James Fowler (e.g. stages of faith development) whose vantage points have likewise informed an understanding of what Ken Wilber terms "structure-stages" [emphasis added] (Wilber, What is Integral 36).

In fact, and especially in respect to Robert Kegan's approach, Susanne Cook-Greuter's work in integral psychology (Cook-Greuter) and her translation of Loevinger's stages of ego-development (Cook-Greuter, Ego Development) enlisting the Washington University Sentence Completion Test has lent itself to development of the Leadership Maturity Framework (LMF). This theory is subsequently "supported by an assessment tool, the SCTi-MAP, which measures an individual's developmental level" and is "currently the most rigorously validated, reliable and advanced assessment tool to assess adult leadership developmental levels" [emphasis added] (Metcalf 2).

A "Momentous Leap", MEMEnomics, Functional Democracy, and Distributed Networks

Figure 6. Levels of Existence (Graves, Futurist Table)

In the Spring of 1974 The Futurist published an article written by Psychology professor and theorist Clare W. Graves entitled, "Human Nature Prepares for a Momentous Leap". It proffered "that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer higher-order systems as man's existential systems change" (Graves).

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Also, and in relation to the subject-object dynamic discussed thus far, Graves further described these systems as having at their core a double-helix of interacting forces alternating between a focus on life conditions arising in the "external world, and attempts to change it, and (a) focus upon the inner world, and attempts to come to peace with it" (emphasis added) (Ibid.). Likewise, "Graves (1970, 1973, 1974) also noted that between the values systems there was an orientation to either individual or collective values in alternation. Systems 1, 3, 5 and 7 (see Fig. 6) are seen as having an individual orientation and Systems 2, 4, 6, and 8 as being values oriented towards the collective" [emphasis added] (Varey 19).

Figure 7. Phases of Memenomic Cycle (Dawlabani, Obama Presidency)

Therefore, and while The Futurist article served to acknowledge historical patterns in which, from Graves' observance anyway, the majority of humankind had "been confined to the lower levels of existence where they were motivated by needs shared with other animals"; for the first time, it appeared Western man was "ready to move up to a higher level of existence, a distinctly human level." Consequently, but at the point which Graves envisioned this actually happening, a "dramatic transformation of human institutions" was also thought likely to occur [emphasis added] (Graves).

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Earlier this year Said Dawlabani, author of MEMEnomics published an article featured in Leader to Leader entitled, "Value Systems and the Future of Leadership" in which Graves' prognostication was again revisited. Consequently, and viewed in this context, life conditions appear to be appropriating a transcending of the "subsistence ethic, which is identified by the lower six levels (first-tier values)", (see Figs. 5 & 6) in favor of embracing a "magnificence of existence ethic, identified by the top two levels (second-tier values)" [emphasis added] (Dawlabani, Leader to Leader 8).

Figure 8. Stratified Democracy (Maalouf)

Likewise, and within this same value systems framework, Don Beck has also been a primary influence in conceiving the Spiral Dynamics model and its relation to vMEMEs. Consequently, Dawlabani's depiction of the way in which five MEMEnomic cycles (see Fig. 7) have arisen and subsequently decline over the last century and a half is especially significant. Also, and while this understanding recognizes multiple (memetic) value systems both arising and simultaneously existing over time, Elza Maalouf (Said's co-creative partner and wife) has recently published

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Emerge! The Rise of Functional Democracy and the Future of the Middle East in which she illustrates how the populace of any geopolitical locale both embodies, and subsequently reflects, a mix of vMEMEs specific to its own collective cultural experience (see Fig. 8).

"Our problems today can no longer be solved from a first-tier subsistence toolbox that has been exhausted and corrupted. That system is in decay and the final stages of entropy are at hand. Will

humanity decide to take the momentous leap forward and begin to design from a systemic perspective that is informed by the lessons learned from the subsistence value systems and past

human behavior or would we continue to squander our human potential by providing band-aid solutions and hope for the best?" [emphasis added] (Dawlabani, 172).

Figure 9. The Cores of Values and Ethics (Psychological Model)

Stating simply that "(t)he goal of the memenomics framework is to design for a sustainable economic future through the technology provided to us by the emerging science of value systems" (Ibid., 181), Dawlabani also expresses a well-qualified appreciation of the practical challenges posed by navigating this relational array in innovating, designing, and subsequently enacting

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second-tier distributed systems. Those aspiring to a role in this work are admonished however, that "(i)n designing a Yellow economic platform for the United States, one has to be inclusive of protective Orange values [see Fig. 9] of industries, such as the extraction and oil industries that remain heavily invested in old technology with billions of dollars worth of infrastructure projects all over the globe" (Dawlabani 182). In addition to the foregoing enterprise though, perhaps we should also add the auto industry as well.

Consequently, but to clarify by way of example; in a recent Bloomberg piece entitled "Detroit Fights Innovation -- Again", the blog's editors relate how "(t)he U.S. auto industry" is presently "pushing elected officials to adopt policies that protect it from innovative new entrants to the marketplace." Ironically however, the industry's current threat isn't foreign competitors but "Silicon Valley -- home of Elon Musk and his electric-car company, Tesla" (Detroit Fights). Nevertheless, Michigan has "joined a growing list of states that have acted to restrict the sale of Teslas." As a result though, "Michigan's Republican governor, Rick Snyder, signed a bill banning auto manufacturers from selling directly to consumers, as Tesla's business model requires. Manufacturers must instead go through a middleman: dealerships" (Ibid.).

On a more positive note, yet in the midst of uneasiness surrounding perhaps a growing acknowledgment of capitalism's demise, some rather unique dialogue is arising in exploring the implications and exceptional opportunities surfacing from the wreckage. One such case is a recent interview conducted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv with Gar Alperovitz and David Harvey discussing "Cooperation and Capitalism" (GRITtv). Such conversations are all the more relevant in light of Alperovitz's role as a founding Principal of The Democracy Collaborative and his considerable influence involving the New Economy Coalition and economic democracy. Similarly, the community wealth building strategies outlined in community-wealth.org's recently published "Policies for Community Wealth Building: Leveraging State and Local Resources" are finding innovative application in a number of cities including Richmond, Virginia (Democracy Collaborative).

Economic Democracy, State-Stages of Consciousness, Contemplative Practice, and the U.Lab

"Economic democracy, on the other hand, stands for the empowerment of people to make economic decisions that directly shape their lives and communities through locally-owned, small-scale

private enterprises, worker-owned cooperatives, and publicly-managed utilities. It decentralizes decision-making and gives citizens the right to choose how their local economy should be run"

[emphasis added] (Maheshvarananda 79).

In these ways then, but at this point in humankind's evolutionary journey, Thomas Piketty's fifteen years of research in writing Capital in the Twenty-First Century has revealed a "central

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contradiction" (Piketty 571) that "when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability" (Capital, Wikipedia). Consequently though, and perhaps for a growing number of others like myself, capitalism's inadequacies as an operating system, especially over recent decades, coupled to the likelihood of worsening socioeconomic disparity and injustice if unchanged, poses itself as an intolerably miserable legacy to inflict upon our grandchildren.

For these same reasons then, there's real validity to the perspective Dada Maheshvarananda expresses in his After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action for the ways in which capitalism has historically, and quite unconsciously, compounded a great magnitude of global suffering. In this same regard, the author points to a "systemic violence of the global economy" that needlessly "kills nearly 50,000 of the poor every day, through hunger, preventable infectious diseases and AIDS."1 He further discloses how "(t)his genocide goes on even though the planet has enough food and basic necessities for everyone" . Similarly too, because "(t)oday's multinational corporations are so big and powerful" their "structure and practices increase the gap between the rich and the poor, a gap that is dividing humanity" (Maheshvarananda 29).

Figure 10. Major Stages of Meditative States (Wilber, What is Integral 45)

For the main part however; and except for previous references to the subject-object dimensions of consciousness presented thus far, this paper has not addressed how significant the role of contemplative or meditative practice actually is to this overall synopsis concerning human experience. By enlisting the use of Ken Wilber's, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion to help orient ourselves however, perhaps we can hone a greater appreciation for the working of "state-stages" [emphasis added] (Wilber, What is Integral 41).

"Underscoring how important the relationship between science and religion is to our unfolding world, Wilber explains that science "has given us the methods for discovering truth, while religion

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is the force that generates meaning"" (Marriage, Wikipedia).

One of the central impressions conveyed in Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul is; that while the Great Chain of Being can be found "at the center of virtually all major religions" and though, at one time was "humankind's dominant worldview"—how, "with the rise of modernity the West became the first civilization in history" to jettison it (Walsh 124). Thus, and in like terms, he subsequently appropriates the term 'Great Nest of Being' to depict "a series of concentric spheres or circles" as a holarchy reaching from matter to mind to Spirit. Consequently, this three-level scheme also "show(s) up as the hierarchy of earth, human, and heaven" in "even the earliest shamanic traditions", and subsequently reappears with "the Hindu and Buddhist notion of the three great states of being: gross (matter and body), subtle (mind and soul), and causal (spirit)" (Wilber, Marriage 7).

"As for these state-stages, generally moving from gross experience to subtle experience to causal experience to nondual, you can can open virtually any manual of meditation or contemplation, East or West, and you will find a description of meditative or spiritual experiences unfolding in essentially that order, with quite specifically those general characteristics" (see Fig. 10) (Wilber,

What is Integral 42).

Concerning Wilber's perspective as reflected in The Marriage of Sense and Soul pertaining to the "interior domains" (e.g. subjective and intersubjective - Left-hand quadrants) however, and in considering a "scientific method in the broad sense" with the capacity of integrating both Left and Right-hand dimensions, he proposes enlisting what's termed the "three strands of all valid knowing". The first of these; an instrumental injunction, entails "actual practice, an exemplar, a paradigm, an experiment, an ordinance" and is "always of the form "If you want to know this, do this." (Wilber, Marriage 155).

Furthermore, and what's becoming increasingly evident in this Age of Disruption, is an unprecedented emergence and intermingling of human spirit across a multitude of traditional cultural lines including race, religion, ethnicity and sexuality. From Jeremy Rifkin's vantage point though, and in its own way, this creative potential is manifesting itself in a "new economic system" entering "the world stage" triggered by "Zero Marginal Cost" where "(c)ompanies never anticipated . . . a technology revolution that might unleash "extreme productivity" bringing marginal costs to near zero, making information, energy, and many physical goods and services nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market exchanges" (Rifkin, Say goodbye).

"The near zero marginal cost phenomenon has wreaked havoc across the “information goods” industries as millions of proactive consumers — “prosumers” — now produce and share their own music via file sharing services, their own videos on YouTube, their own knowledge on Wikipedia, their own news on social media, and even their own free e-books on the Internet. Zero Marginal Cost brought the music industry to its knees, shook the film industry, forced newspapers and

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magazines out of business, and crippled book publishing" (Ibid.).

Furthermore, but to ground this larger picture in our immediate context, the fact that "6 million students are currently enrolled in free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)" operating "at near zero marginal cost" and being "taught by some of the world's most distinguished professors" [emphasis added] (Ibid.); is presenting itself as a potential game changer of the immediate future.

Figure 11. Theory U: ULab Intro Video (Scharmer, 15.S23x)

At least this is the sentiment expressed by MIT Senior Lecturer Otto Scharmer in a recent article entitled, "U-Lab: Prototyping the 21st-Century University" (Scharmer, U.Lab).

"While the cost of higher education has skyrocketed, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have emerged as a game changer, opening doors to an unparalleled democratization of higher education. The marginal costs of online learning are basically zero" [emphasis added] (Ibid.).

Consequently, and utilizing a conceptual framework dubbed Theory U (see Fig. 11) that in many ways mirrors that of Wilber's state-stages (see Fig. 10), beginning this January, Scharmer will be instructing a six-week MOOC called U.Lab, using the edX learning platform founded in 2012 by Harvard and MIT. The course is designed to "prototype a new hybrid online/real-world learning environment, with the goal of sparking a global web of interconnected hubs, inspiring initiatives, and grounding learning locally in places where societal challenges are manifest" [emphasis added] (Ibid.).

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Likewise, but in an article entitled, "Collective Mindfulness: The Leader's New Work", Scharmer outlines an overview of the importance of mindfulness to the leadership function in "transforming stakeholder relationships that operate based on transactional ego-system awareness into relationships that operate based on transformative eco-system awareness" (Scharmer, Collective). To better facilitate this process then, the U.Lab represents "a new type of learning environment that is personal, practical, relational, mindful, collective, and transformative", extending an opportunity for learners to "engage in a deep dialogue-based peer coaching session with five fellow Lab participants" each week [emphasis added] (Scharmer, U.Lab).

Figure 12. Five Phases of Surrendering into Witnessing

"Mindful" means that each week you will be introduced to a mindfulness practice that strengthens your capacity to pay attention to your attention and helps you to intentionally shift the inner place

from which you operate" [emphasis added] (Ibid.).

To suggest this form of group work is cutting-edge however, would simply be an understatement. In fact, it's so avant-garde in respect to practice that little in the way of (even) theoretical literature

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has been published to this juncture with the exception of Olen Gunnlaugson and Mary Beth G. Moze's, "A Foundational Practice for Building Collective Intelligence Capacity in Groups" (Gunnlaugson). Working with this process of paying attention to our attention in the collective sense that Scharmer has framed it for the U.Lab then, constitutes a revolutionary experiment in shared consciousness involving witnessing (e.g. turiyatitah - see Fig. 10) and the 'intentional shift' occurring from the "inner place" (Scharmer, U.Lab) of self at the bottom of the "U" in Figure 11.

Likewise then, Gunnlaugson and Moze's paper outlines a five-phase approach (see Fig. 12) for working directly "with inter-subjective field dynamics in groups" to "more effectively discern and engage complex emergent collective-intelligence processes" (Gunnlaugson 105). Consequently, and as an example involving the first step (Phase One) in this process of Surrendering Into Presence the authors inform us:

"Wisdom practices such as awareness-based meditation facilitate surrender from conventional separate-self sense to a more subtle, distributed experience of one’s self as a part of the underlying ground of presence of our original nature. Ongoing meditation practice familiarizes practitioners with this tacit dimension of self and develops the attentional and know-how ability to surrender at will into these deeper states of being. To support an optimal engagement with this phase of the practice, we recommend combining regular meditation with we-space practice" [emphasis added]

(Gunnlaugson 111).

Conclusion

From an evolutionary perspective, while it's yet unclear what the future holds in terms of humanity's unfolding narrative, it's fairly evident at this juncture that doing nothing but remaining subject to the imposition of a New World Order's centralized will, agenda, and authoritarian system of socioeconomic governance, doesn't appear an especially viable option for a global citizenry's well-being.

From a viewpoint of leadership however, the ever-increasing complexity of life conditions in this scenario poses a unique challenge in respect to; as Gar Alperovitz has phrased it, What Then Must We Do? (GRITtv, What Then). Yet, recognizing in this same regard that actualities are necessitating a transformation from ego-system to eco-system economies, Otto Scharmer has co-created a prototype with the U.Lab to facilitate this inter-relational learning process.

The only question is—will a sufficient number of practitioners (e.g. learners, leaders, change agents, etc.) embrace the challenge of this injunction to experiment collectively with their cohorts in together, shaping their emerging future?

Only time will tell . . .

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Notes

1. For an explanation of how this figure of "50,000 deaths" is derived see, "The Three Top Sins of the Universe" at www.starvation.net..

References

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