The Liminal Learning Portal

In the current era of increasing planetary interconnectedness, ecological theories and practices are called to become more inclusive, complex, and comprehensive. The diverse contributions to this book offer a range of integral approaches to ecology that cross the boundaries of the humanities and sciences and help us understand and respond to today’s ecological challenges. The contributors provide detailed analyses of assorted integral ecologies, drawing on such founding figures and precursors as Thomas Berry, Leonardo Boff, Holmes Rolston III, Ken Wilber, and Edgar Morin. Also included is research across the social sciences, biophysical sciences, and humanities discussing multiple worldviews and perspectives related to integral ecologies. The Variety of Integral Ecologies is both an accessible guide and an advanced supplement to the growing research for a more comprehensive understanding of ecological issues and the development of a peaceful, just, and sustainable planetary civilization.

Based on over twenty years of research and spiritual practice, Essential Spirituality a groundbreaking and life-changing book.

In his decades of study, Dr. Roger Walsh has discovered that each of the great spiritual traditions has both a common goal and seven common practices to reach that goal: recognizing the sacred and divine that exist both within and around us. Filled with stories, exercises, meditations, myths, prayers, and practical advice, Essential Spirituality shows how you can integrate these seven principles into one truly rewarding way of life in which kindness, love, joy, peace, vision, wisdom, and generosity become an ever-growing part of everything you do.

Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture.

The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it.

The concept of  ‘domicide’ or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie.

Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology

Beyond the Basin achieves what has rarely been attempted before – to reconcile the ineffable ego-dissolving experience of psychedelic drugs with written language, all the while maintaining the pace and structure of a more traditional novel.

Recasting current problems as emergent opportunities, Terry Patten offers creative responses, practices, and conscious conversations for tackling the profound inner and outer work we must do to build an integral future. In practical and personal terms, he discusses how we can all become active agents of a transformation of human civilization and why that is necessary to our continued survival. Patten’s narrative focuses on two aspects of existence–our dynamic but fractured and threatened world, and our underlying wholeness and unity. Only by honoring both of these realities simultaneously can we make sustainable changes in ourselves, our communities, our body politic, and our planetary life-support system.

 A New Republic of the Heart provides a comprehensive understanding and inspiring vision for “being the change” in a way that can address the most intractable problems of our time. Patten shows how we can come together in our communities for conversations that matter and describes new communities, enterprises, and forms of dialogue that integrate both inner personal growth work with outer awareness, activism, and service.

The Evolving Self focuses upon the most basic and universal of psychological problems―the individual’s effort to make sense of experience, to make meaning of life. According to Robert Kegan, meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and continues to evolve through a series of stages encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The Evolving Self describes this process of evolution in rich and human detail, concentrating especially on the internal experience of growth and transition, its costs and disruptions as well as its triumphs.

At the heart of our meaning-making activity, the book suggests, is the drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other. Using Piagetian theory in a creative new way to make sense of how we make sense of ourselves, Kegan shows that each meaning-making stage is a new solution to the lifelong tension between the universal human yearning to be connected, attached, and included, on the one hand, and to be distinct, independent, and autonomous on the other. The Evolving Self is the story of our continuing negotiation of this tension. It is a book that is theoretically daring enough to propose a reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex and clinically concerned enough to suggest a variety of fresh new ways to treat those psychological complaints that commonly arise in the course of development.

Kegan is an irrepressible storyteller, an impassioned opponent of the health-and-illness approach to psychological distress, and a sturdy builder of psychological theory. His is an original and distinctive new voice in the growing discussion of human development across the life span.

Our world is currently undergoing major transformations, from climate change and politics to agriculture and economics. The world we have known is disappearing and a new world is being born. The subjects taught in schools and universities today are becoming irrelevant at faster and faster rates. Not only are we facing complex challenges of unprecedented size and scope, we’re also facing a learning and capacity deficit that threatens the future of civilization.

Education in a Time Between Worlds seeks to reframe this historical moment as an opportunity to create a global society of educational abundance. Educational systems must be transformed beyond recognition if humanity is to survive the planetary crises currently underway. Human development and learning must be understood as the Earth’s most valuable resources, with human potential serving as the open frontier into which energy and hope can begin to flow.

The expansive essays within this book cover a diverse array of topics, including social justice, the neuroscience of learning, deschooling, educational technology, standardized testing, the future of spirituality, basic income guarantees, and integral meta-theory. As an invitation to re-vision the future of schools, technology, and society, Education in a Time Between Worlds replaces apathy and despair with agency, transformation, and hope.

A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don’t change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren’t enough: even when it’s literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive.

Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations?

In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs–along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations–combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.

This persuasive and practical book, filled with hands-on diagnostics and compelling case studies, delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

Transformational Weight Loss describes an alternative to the treadmill of self-denial, self-control, and dieting. It begins with the insight that if trying hard didn’t work, trying harder is doing more of what doesn’t work. There are very few guidelines about what to eat and not to eat in this book. Instead, it presents a whole new way of eating, a new way of seeing food, exercise, and the body. Revolutionary, it also strikes a deep chord of common sense. Among thousands of diet and nutrition books on the market today, this book is a profoundly new voice, especially for anyone ready to transform the condition of obesity and all the mental, emotional, and spiritual conditions that go along with it.

Why is the gap so great between our hopes, our intentions, even our decisions-and what we are actually able to bring about? Even when we are able to make important changes-in our own lives or the groups we lead at work-why are the changes are so frequently short-lived and we are soon back to business as usual? What can we do to transform this troubling reality?

In this intensely practical book, Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey take us on a carefully guided journey designed to help us answer these very questions. And not just generally, or in the abstract. They help each of us arrive at our own particular answers that can solve the puzzling gap between what we intend and what we are able to accomplish. How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work provides you with the tools to create a powerful new build-it-yourself mental technology.

Bildung is moral and emotional maturity. Bildung is also to have the education and knowledge necessary to thrive in your society; bildung is to be deeply embedded in culture and community while having the autonomy to carve your own path in life. Bildung is always personal and unique.Bildung is a German word that has no word in English. Beginning in the 1770s, German philosophers explored bildung as a secular form of inner development and it became popular among the bourgeoisie.In Denmark, a pastor realized in the 1830s that the peasants needed bildung too, and he envisioned a new kind of school: the folk-high-school. In 1851, a Danish teacher, Christen Kold, figured out how to teach in such a way that young farmhands learned to think for themselves: he told them moving stories and let them ask questions. Once he had their attention, he could teach them new farming techniques, science, philosophy, history, religion, literature, art, economic theory, and political science. Norway, Sweden and Finland copied the folk-high-school concept in the 1860s and by 1900, a critical mass of youngsters in the Nordic countries had upgraded their skills and their thinking, and the Nordics had gone from being among the poorest countries in Europe to being among the richest. This development and the bildung that carried it also meant that the Nordics made the transition from agricultural feudal societies to modern, democratic, industrialized nation-states peacefully.As we are facing new challenges from digitization, globalization, a pandemic and environmental changes we need bildung for the 21st century and the book concludes by exploring what that might look like.

In Nordic Ideology, the anticipated sequel to The Listening Society, the great philosopher Hanzi Freinacht strikes again from his refuge in the Alps—now with a yet bolder mission: to write social and political theory as a page-turner.

This book can be read independently of the first one and it outlines a path to a metamodern society, emerging from the Nordic countries—one that emerges from, but ultimately cancels and outcompetes modern society as we know it, while saving the world-system from collapse. How can this be achieved?

Here, things get real.

Not only do you get an overview of how society develops—what is higher freedom, deeper equality, a more intricate order of self-organization?—you get an actual plan-of-action for how to transform all of society and the people in it; indeed, even a strategy for how to organize and take charge of political development.

Loved and despised, Hanzi leaves few readers untouched. No issue is too controversial, no source of knowledge taboo; while committed to deep democracy and freedom, Hanzi does not shy away from learning from the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. And indeed, the power of his vision, and the six new forms of metamodern politics introduced in the book, compels readers to act—to actualize the vision, or to stop the metamodernists at any cost.

Serious meets fun, as sincerity meets irony, as politics meets poetry in this magisterial work of a unique and dangerous rebel scholar.

Everything Is Workable uses mindfulness to work with and resolve the inevitable interpersonal conflicts that arise in all areas of life.

Conflict is going to be part of your life—as long as you have relationships, hold down a job, or have dry cleaning to be picked up. Bracing yourself against it won’t make it go away, but if you approach it consciously, you can navigate it in a way that not only honors everyone involved but makes it a source of deep insight as well. Seasoned mediator Diane Hamilton provides the skill set you need to engage conflict with wisdom and compassion, and even—sometimes—to be grateful for it. She teaches how to:

• Cultivate the mirror-like quality of attention as your base
• Identify the three personal conflict styles and determine which one you fall into
• Recognize the three fundamental perspectives in any conflict situation and learn to inhabit each of them
• Turn conflicts in families, at work, and in every kind of interpersonal relationship into win-win situations

American politics are badly broken. Yet to solve the seemingly intractable problem of hyperpolarization, we need to look beyond the gridlocked politics of Washington D.C. In Developmental Politics, Steve McIntosh shows how this growing rift in the fabric of American society is a cultural problem that requires a cultural solution. He offers a pragmatic yet inspiring approach to our national political dilemma through a new politics of culture―one that goes right to the heart of this entrenched, complex issue. McIntosh presents a variety of innovative methods through which citizens and political leaders from across the political spectrum can reach agreement and achieve consensus.

McIntosh’s proposals for overcoming hyperpolarization are founded on an emerging form of “cultural intelligence” that directly addresses the conflicting values underlying our poisoned politics. This new way of seeing leads to an inclusive vision of social progress―a new American Dream―that can help revive our collective sense of common cause and thereby restore the functionality of our democracy. Developmental Politics provides the fresh thinking we need to transcend America’s contemporary political impasse.

With his first groundbreaking book Soul Prints, Dr. Marc Gafni taught readers how to tread a lifelong path of meaning by realizing their Unique Selves. Now, in The Mystery of Love, the profound philosopher and beloved spiritual teacher invites readers to the next step on the journey, addressing with passion, wisdom, and genuine humility the all-important issues of love, creativity, and our erotic connection to the universe. 

The integral worldview represents the next crucial step in the development of our civilization. Through its enlarged understanding of the evolution of consciousness and culture, the emerging perspective known as integral consciousness provides realistic and pragmatic solutions to our growing global problems, both environmental and political. As McIntosh convincingly demonstrates, the integral worldview’s transformational potential provides a way to literally become the change we want to see in the world. This is really two books in one: the first half serves as an accessible and highly readable introduction to the power of integral consciousness, with the second half making a variety of original contributions to the integral perspective and breaking new ground in the application of integral philosophy to politics and spirituality. Moreover, McIntosh provides a much-needed contextualization and critique of the integral worldview’s leading author, Ken Wilber, which helps make integral philosophy relevant to a larger audience.

Action inquiry is a fresh approach to learning leadership in the midst of action. This highly accessible process takes each of us beyond muddling through daily dilemmas to exercising transforming power at key moments and more timely action in general. Bill Torbert and Associates lead you through more and more sophisticated “action-logics”—strategies for analyzing the world and reacting to it—until you are able to practice action inquiry continually. Speaking to everyone from new managers to CEOs to world leaders, real-life stories of leadership and organizational transformations show how action inquiry increases personal integrity, relational mutuality, company profitability, and long-term organizational and environmental sustainability.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times.

Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike.

That’s why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21^st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design.

Named after the now-iconic “doughnut” image that Raworth first drew to depict a sweet spot of human prosperity (an image that appealed to the Occupy Movement, the United Nations, eco-activists, and business leaders alike), Doughnut Economics offers a radically new compass for guiding global development, government policy, and corporate strategy, and sets new standards for what economic success looks like.

Raworth handpicks the best emergent ideas―from ecological, behavioral, feminist, and institutional economics to complexity thinking and Earth-systems science―to address this question: How can we turn economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, into economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow?

Simple, playful, and eloquent, Doughnut Economics offers game-changing analysis and inspiration for a new generation of economic thinkers.

This is a collection of essays, reflections and poems by Nora Bateson, the noted research designer, film-maker, writer and lecturer. She is the daughter of Gregory Bateson and president of the International Bateson Institute (IBI). Building on Gregory Bateson’s famous book Towards an Ecology of Mind and her own film on the subject, Nora Bateson here updates our thinking on systems and ecosystems, applying her own insights and those of her team at IBI to education, organisations, complexity, academia, and the way that society organizes itself. She also introduces the term symmathesy to describe the contextual mutual learning through interaction that takes place in living entities at larger or smaller scales. While she retains her father’s rigorous attention to definition, observation and academic precision, she also moves well beyond that frame of reference to incorporate more embodied ways of knowing and understanding. These are reflected in her essays and poems on food, Christmas, love, honesty, environmentalism and leadership. [Subject: Systems thinking, education, social anthropology, environmentalism, Bateson, symmathesy]

The world is entering a new technological, social and global age and it is our ability to create meaning which will decide whether we face a bright future or a tragic decline.

We are living in an unsustainable state of cultural tension. Stress and depression are becoming more common, we are destroying our environment and while the rich become richer, inequality has spread both domestically and globally. The world’s entire democratic system is strained and the only ‘meaningful’ story left is our role as consumers. We flee to and are trapped by the gilded illusion of happiness that is dictated to us by consumerism.

In The World We Create, Tomas Björkman takes readers on a journey through history, economics, sociology, developmental psychology and philosophy, to illuminate where we have come from and how we have reached this breaking point. He offers new perspectives on the world we have created and suggests how we can achieve a more meaningful, sustainable world in the future.

“The most important question we must ask ourselves is: Are we being good ancestors?” So said Jonas Salk, who cured polio in 1953. Salk saved millions of lives, but he refused to patent his cure or make any money from it. His radical rethinking of what we owe future generations should be an inspiration to us all, but it has hardly taken hold: Businesses can barely see past the next quarter; politicians can’t see past the next election. Markets spike, then they crash in speculative bubbles. We rarely stop to consider whether we’re being good ancestors . . . but the future depends on it.

In The Good Ancestor, leading public intellectual, philosopher, and bestselling author Roman Krznaric explains six practical ways we can retrain our brains to save our future—such as adopting Deep Time Humility (recognizing our lives as a cosmic eyeblink) and Cathedral Thinking (starting projects that will take more than one lifetime to complete). His aim is to inspire a “time rebellion”—to shift our allegiance from our generation only to all humanity, present and future.

With grand, inclusive theories of psychology such as Freud’s now largely discredited, psychological enquiry is focused more narrowly and empirically. This book aims to change the status quo and offer a new, redefining and unified theory of psychology.

From a review by Herb Gintis, Santa Fe Institute and Central European University:

“Like sociology and anthropology, psychology is defined by incompatible competing schools of thought and cannot be considered a mature science, because there is no sense in which each generation of researchers builds upon the core analytical insights of previous generations of researchers… This book is written for clinical and research psychologists, and hence avoids the sort of mathematical model building and axiomatization that is characteristic of mature sciences… Henriques notes that it is almost impossible to define contemporary psychology because many psychologists consider psychology to be a theory of the workings of the mind, while others deny the notion of “mind” altogether, and limit themselves to modelling observed behavior. For this reason, Henriques takes his first goal to be that of “locating” the field ontologically. He argues that there is a Tree of Knowledge with four segments. The first is “Matter,” which is studied by physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy. The second is “Life,” studied by biology. The third is “Mind,” which is the subject matter of psychology, and the fourth, and highest, is “Culture,” studied by the social sciences. “

From a review by Daniel B. Fishman, Professor, Rutgers University

“The field of psychology is known for its paradoxical combination of sweeping scope and impressive micro-theories, on the one hand, and fragmentation and internecine squabbling, on the other. To this state of affairs, any serious effort to provide integration and unity within psychological knowledge and understanding is heartily welcomed. And Henriques’ effort in this regard is not only serious, but one of the most cogent, scholarly, sophisticated, beautifully reasoned, clearly articulated, and accessibly written presentations of a unified theory in psychology that I have seen in my 50 years in the discipline.”

Publisher’s description:
A concise, comprehensive overview of Wilber’s revolutionary thought and its application in today’s world. In A Theory of Everything, Wilber uses clear, nontechnical language to present complex, cutting-edge theories that integrate the realms of body, mind, soul, and spirit. He then demonstrates how these theories and models can be applied to real-world problems in areas such as politics, medicine, business, education, and the environment. Wilber also discusses daily practises that readers take up in order to apply this integrative vision to their own everyday lives.

Underlying the vision behind democracy is the recognition that every individual has dignity, adequacy and worth. This democratic understanding of the worth and standing of the individual lies at the core of what the West calls enlightenment. The Western idea of enlightenment, rooted in the great vision of the Biblical prophets, is generally understood to have entered mainstream consciousness through the political democratic movements of the mid 18th century. Western enlightenment is primarily concerned with the democratization of political power. Classical enlightenment, sometimes called Eastern enlightenment because it was greatly emphasized in the East, is about the individual merging into the greater one. The appearance of a separate self is an illusion, which must be overcome as the individual realizes that one is really not separate at all but part of the one. The goal of Eastern enlightenment is moving beyond the grasping ego and desperately seeking separate self by attaining a state of consciousness in which the illusion of separateness was dissolved in the greater one. This path of classical enlightenment is seen as the path beyond suffering. Unique Self-enlightenment brings the Eastern and Western understandings about enlightenment together, into a higher Integral World Spirituality embrace. Unique Self-enlightenment is based on your commitment to transcend separate self into the one, even as you realize that that essence sees through your unique perspective. Unique Self opens the door to the potential democratization of enlightenment. To awaken to Your Unique Self is to be lived as God, which, in truth, means to be lived as love.

Technological development, climate change and globalization are challenging the national institutions and modes of governance we created during the industrial era. Our old knowledge and general understanding of the world do not provide sufficient answers anymore. In order to maintain meaningful lives, social calm and liberal democracy, we need to upgrade our meaning-making to match the complexity of the world we are creating. Metamodernity is an alternative to both modernity and postmodernism, a cultural code that presents itself as an opportunity if we work deliberately towards it. Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time. It is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all and thus has the potential to dismantle the fear of losing one’s culture as the economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Metamodernity will thus allow us to be meaning-making at a deeper emotional level and a higher intellectual level compared to today; it will allow us more complex understanding, which may match the complexity of the problems we need to solve. Appropriate meaning-making is the best prevention against the frustrations that generally lead to authoritarian ideologies and societal instability. Using metamodernity as the filter through which we see the world and as a template, we can create, among other things, new and appropriate education, politics and institutions for our societies of the 21st century. A vision such as this may even give hope.

We live in a time of massive institutional failure that manifests in the form of three major divides: the ecological, the social, and the spiritual. Addressing these challenges requires a new consciousness and collective leadership capacity. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways and in so doing discover a revolutionary approach to learning and leadership.

In most large systems today, we collectively create results that no one wants. What keeps us stuck in such patterns of the past? It’s our blind spot, that is, our lack of awareness of the inner place from which our attention and intention originate. By moving through Scharmer’s U process, we consciously access the blind spot and learn to connect to our authentic Self—the deepest source of knowledge and inspiration. Theory U offers a rich diversity of compelling stories, examples, exercises, and practices that allow leaders, organizations, and larger systems to cosense and coshape the future that is wanting to emerge.

In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for—namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone—not just select “high potentials”—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.

The goal of an “integral psychology” is to honor and embrace every legitimate aspect of human consciousness under one roof. This book presents one of the first truly integrative models of consciousness, psychology, and therapy. Drawing on hundreds of sources—Eastern and Western, ancient and modern—Wilber creates a psychological model that includes waves of development, streams of development, states of consciousness, and the self, and follows the course of each from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious. Included in the book are charts correlating over a hundred psychological and spiritual schools from around the world, including Kabbalah, Vedanta, Plotinus, Teresa of Ávila, Aurobindo, Theosophy, and modern theorists such as Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Jane Loevinger, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Erich Neumann, and Jean Gebser. Integral Psychology is Wilber’s most ambitious psychological system to date and is already being called a landmark study in human development.

Publisher’s Description:
In this tour de force of scholarship and vision, Ken Wilber traces the course of evolution from matter to life to mind and describes the common patterns that evolution takes in all three of these domains. From the emergence of mind, he traces the evolution of human consciousness through its major stages of growth and development. He particularly focuses on modernity and postmodernity: what they mean; how they impact gender issues, psychotherapy, ecological concerns, and various liberation movements; and how the modern and postmodern world conceives of Spirit. This second edition features forty pages of new material, new diagrams, and extensively revised notes.

Presence is an intimate look at the development of a new theory about change and learning. In wide-ranging conversations held over a year and a half, organizational learning pioneers Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers explored the nature of transformational change—how it arises, and the fresh possibilities it offers a world dangerously out of balance. The book introduces the idea of “presence”—a concept borrowed from the natural world that the whole is entirely present in any of its parts—to the worlds of business, education, government, and leadership. Too often, the authors found, we remain stuck in old patterns of seeing and acting. By encouraging deeper levels of learning, we create an awareness of the larger whole, leading to actions that can help to shape its evolution and our future.
 
Drawing on the wisdom and experience of 150 scientists, social leaders, and entrepreneurs, including Brian Arthur, Rupert Sheldrake, Buckminster Fuller, Lao Tzu, and Carl Jung, Presence is both revolutionary in its exploration and hopeful in its message. This astonishing and completely original work goes on to define the capabilities that underlie our ability to see, sense, and realize new possibilities—in ourselves, in our institutions and organizations, and in society itself.

Using the designing and building of The Clock of the Long Now as a framework, this is a book about the practical use of long time perspective: how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it in and out of sight. Here are the central questions it inspires: How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? Discipline in thought allows freedom. One needs the space and reliability to predict continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolutions Taking the time to think of the future is more essential now than ever, as culture accelerates beyond its ability to be measured Probable things are vastly outnumbered by countless near-impossible eventualities. Reality is statistically forced to be extraordinary; fiction is not allowed this freedom This is a potent book that combines the chronicling of fantastic technology with equally visionary philosophical inquiry.