A Buddhist Take on “Occupy the Earth”

In his two celebrated works on the 1960s counter-culture — The Making of a Counter-Culture and Where the Wasteland Ends — the late historian Theodore Roszak remarked how the sense of “waiting for something” characterised much of the mood of those times. The popular play Waiting for Godot even seemed to capture that anguished malaise and mood of unfulfilled expectation and anticipation.

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Civics Against Politics: A Pre-Revolutionary Situation?

“They also serve who only stand and wait” — (John Milton, On His Blindness)

It seems to me that there have been an increasing number of articles of late on the democratic deficit, the crisis of politics and the emergence of what is being called “post-democratic society“. Such problems were anticipated decades ago but nothing was done to address them. However, this current crisis of politics may not be such a bad thing in the long run.

Recognising the Integral Era

How will we know when we are finally “inside” the integral era? Or, in Jean Gebser’s terms, how will we recognise when the times are fulfilled? For that is how Gebser put it in the first Preface to The Ever-Present Origin, “either time is fulfilled in us — and that would mean the end and death for our present earth and (its) mankind — or we succeed in fulfilling time: and this means integrality and the present, the realization and the reality of origin and presence.”