The Evolutionary Challenge in Western Culture: An Archetypal, Existential, Ecological Perspective

Abstract: There is an explosive, revolutionary, deconstructive theme in the 20th century that has enacted an existential crisis in Western culture’s sense of identity and reality. Drawing on the spiritual emergence model, it can be shown that coming to the edge of destruction, as we have, calls forth the deepest possible potential for spiritual and psychological renewal at an individual, community and cultural level. We now live within a consumerist global community that is struggling with issues of social justice, economic equality and the survival of indigenous culture, driving the planetary ecosystem into an apocalyptic crisis, perpetuated by the 'enemy making' dualities of linear, reductionist, power driven, rational empiricist Western culture. Archetypal activism presents a possibility for political action that draws on the archetypal and existential depth models, highlighting egalitarian, reciprocal cooperation and reflective intentionality. If we look forward in our cosmology toward renewal and reconnection, we have to look beyond the core principle of a regulatory, transcendental divine that saves and protects to an existential and ecological divine that mediates participation. This involves a need to come to terms with complex diversity and the dark, mysterious intensity of our own unknown depths. Richard Tarnas speaks of kairos and dynamical systems theory of deep sensitivity to subtle input at a systemic bifurcation point, where the system is about to go to a new level of existential organization. It would seem that we are in just such an intense period of change in Western culture, and also globally. "We live in a networked world" says the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The theme of the networked periphery influencing the centre is in the process of being enacted. The network of global interconnections in the archetypal, humanistic, existential, transpersonal and related depth traditions that emerged from the 1960's is a complex, systemic manifestation calling for, and enacting, transformational cultural change.

Now is the time. This is the place. We are the people. Let’s do it.

Jim McNamara, ND Programs Director, Living Institute; President, Human Horizons Foundation. He has been practicing since 1973 doing individual, couples, group and intensive retreat work. He is currently working as a practitioner providing holistic life coaching and existential-integrative spiritual counselling. His background includes psychodynamic psychotherapy, gestalt, primal and bioenergetics, as well as Jungian, archetypal, existential and transpersonal psychology, holistic healing and naturopathy, Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism, shamanistic work and Western mysticism. He is the founder of the Holistic Experiential Process Method (HEP), having trained and certified 12 practitioners since the 1990’s. He was Academic Dean of the Ontario (now Canadian) College of Naturopathic Medicine in the beginning of its 4 year full time program in the early 80’s, designing the first two versions of the curriculum. He is the founder and editor of the Archetypal Review of Culture, an on line magazine and journal.

Introduction

There is an explosive, revolutionary, deconstructive theme in the 20th century that has enacted an existential crisis in Western culture's sense of identity and reality. Drawing on the existential and spiritual emergence models, it can be shown that coming to the edge of destruction, as we have, calls forth the deepest possible potential for spiritual and psychological renewal at an individual, community and cultural level. We are now entering an archetypally situated, and cosmically framed, period of revolutionary evolution comparable to the 1960's and to the early Romantic period of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. Western culture is struggling with having emerged from the twentieth century, the century that exploded, with a relativized, fragemented, self-critical identity. We now live within a global community that is struggling with issues of social justice, economic equality and the survival of indigenous, local culture. Western culture's 20th century industrial capitalism began, and, now, 21st century consumer capitalism continues, the process of driving the planetary ecosystem into an apocalyptic crisis. Themes of egalitarian, reciprocal cooperation emerge from the humanistic, psychodynamic, existential, archetypal and transpersonal traditions that offer possibilities for facilitating a successful transition through this explosive, evolutionary crisis in the culture.

The 2002 Pacifica Graduate Institute "The World Behind the World – Reflection, Reconciliations and Renewal" conference asked "What, at this juncture in time and place is life asking of us?  Who, from our deepest sources calls us to respond?  How do we embody the wisdom of our individual psyches, our collective imagination, our cultural mythologies, our living planet?...Where is our lifeline, our myth, the larger meaning for our time?" At the conference the theme of 'archetypal activism' emerged – how to be politically and culturally active in this time from an archetypal point of view.  Archetypal activism presents a possibility for political action that draws on the archetypal, existential and psychodynamic models of human nature, individuality and culture.

If we look forward in our culture toward renewal and reconnection, we have to look beyond the core principle of a regulatory, transcendental divine that saves and protects to an existential divine that mediates participation. Rather than saving by lifting us above and protecting us through transcendental regulation, the existential divine invites us into a self-arising, self-organizing, self-regenerating world, where relationship is the basis of protection and authenticity is the saving grace. The existential divine implies an emergent relationship with our own nature, including coming to terms with 'otherness' rather than trying to control or eliminate otherness, whether as unconscious adversity or simply as the 'alien' other. This involves a need to come to terms with complex diversity and the dark, mysterious intensity of our own unknown depths. It also means eschewing the enemy making dualities of the psychopathic, linear, reductionist, power driven, outcome oriented ego ideal of our rational empiricist culture. The existential divine could also be attributed as the ecological divine. This implies an emergent relationship with (rather than control over) nature, both as the wild ground from which we arise, and in which we have our life. The form of social organization for the existential-ecological tradition is an egalitarian confederacy of locally focused, communally organized network of small groups, rather than a religious, legalistic, hierarchical, authoritarian, centralized, bureaucratic mode.

Richard Tarnas speaks of kairos, Malcolm Gladwell of the 'tipping point', and dynamical systems theory of deep sensitivity to subtle input at a systemic bifurcation point, where the system is about to go to a new level of existential organization. It would seem, from many perspectives and on many levels, that we are in just such an intense period of change in Western culture, and, through various translations, also globally. "We live in a networked world" says the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in the Jan/Feb, 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. This publication of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations speaks from the knowledge base of the US power elite, the centre. President Barack Obama, the community organizer who speaks with psychological reflection and approaches problem solving from a relational perspective, is a highly visible, centrally situated manifestation of this. The theme of the networked periphery influencing the centre is also in the process of being enacted. The network of global interconnections in the archetypal, humanistic, existential, transpersonal and related depth traditions that emerged from the 1960's is a complex, systemic manifestation calling for, and enacting, transformational cultural change. What used to be peripheral and counterculture is becoming an influential network of interconnected points of awareness and action. The Canadian Humanistic and Transpersonal Association (CHTA) has begun the creation of a directory of these and related programs, currently listing 150. Visit www.chata.ca and follow the 'Web Resources' link to 'Collegial Contacts in the Humanistic, Existential, Somatic, Transpersonal and Related Fields' to explore these extensive, networked global connections.

Now is the time. This is the place. We are the people. Let's do it.

Archetypal Activism

From April 12 – 14, 2002, Pacifica Graduate Institute presented a conference entitled "The World Behind the World – Reflection, Reconciliation and Renewal" as a response to 9/11 and subsequent events, including the War on Terrorism.  The conference presented an archetypal/mythological and psychodynamic perspective on the situation.  The brochure for the conference presented the theme in this way.  "The events of our recent past, still unfolding, have brought us all-individually and collectively-to a solemn turning point.  What, at this juncture in time and place is life asking of us?  Who, from our deepest sources calls us to respond?  How do we embody the wisdom of our individual psyches, our collective imagination, our cultural mythologies, our living planet?  From the wells of our soul's deepest desires we yearn to heal our Selves, each Other, and the world.  Where is our lifeline, our myth, the larger meaning for our time?"

At the conference the theme of "archetypal activism" emerged – how to be politically and culturally active in this time from an archetypal point of view.  Archetypal activism presents a possibility for political action that draws on the archetypal, existential and psychodynamic models of human nature, individuality and culture. The following is an elaboration of material from the conference.

Archetypal Political Distinctions

At the conference, Robert Romanyshyn pointed out a basic contradiction between the archetypal and activist themes.  Archetypal implies metaphoric attunement, resonance, reverie, receptivity, reflection, understanding, depth, non-linearity, holism, dialectic complexity, tentativeness, a play of dark and light.  Activism is a term used in the field of politics, such as 'political activism'.  Politics tends to be strongly solution oriented, definitive, linear, reductionist, forward looking, somewhat unreflective, leader oriented, authority based, legalistic.  It idealizes bright, well lit places.  It is sound bytes and slogans.  The KISS directive (Keep It Simple Stupid) rules.  James Carville's "It's the Economy Stupid" got Clinton elected.  Politics sees the world in black and white, good guy/bad guy terms.  In "The War on Terrorism", fighting "the Axis of Evil", "we will hunt them down and burn them out".  What is precisely missing is that complex archetypal reflective quality.  Even in the counterculture, which is critical of mainstream politics, activist politics are still political, focalizing around polarization, protest, incidents, causes, idealism, bite size chunks.  This linear action orientation is apparently antithetical to the archetypal reflective way of being.  How we could make this polarity dialectic is a fundamental theme we must explore.

The archetypal/political polarity extends through a number of different cultural parameters.  In terms of ways of understanding, archetypal prefers seeing symbolic connection through pattern and metaphor, drawing on history as depth illumination.  Politics prefers factual reasons that provide cause and effect information, through which blame can be attributed, guilt determined, punishment meted out and solutions found.  In the archetypal model, taking responsibility means showing understanding – it is self affirming and evolutionary.  In politics taking responsibility means either self aggrandizing and glorifying or resignation in disgrace.  In politics, emotions are stereotyped as position statements justifying action whereas, in an archetypal context, emotions are subjectively compelling.  Politics clings to hope, while archetypalists live with doubt and faith.  Politics values definitive action based on reasons, carried out with will power and determination, in which the actors original (usually simplistic) position does not change, but is tenaciously maintained until "he" (sic) prevails.  Archetypalists value tentative action arising from non linear metaphoric thinking, feeling, intuition and complex, changing motivation holding the tension of opposites through dialectic attunment.  Politics values achievement, success, triumph, attainment based on an idealistic platform.  Archetypalists struggle with principles that are characteristic, rather than simplistic direct bases for action – principles of beauty, destiny, participation and connection, respect for failure and loss, holism, surrender, emergent self definition, context driven action.  Politics is a legalistic mode of operation whereas archetypalists prefer justice as a principle.  While politics promotes legalistic factual finding of guilt and consequent punishment, archetypalists prefer truth and reconciliation that encourages forgiveness.

Archetypalists understand and accept mistaken repetition rather than strive for decisive victory, so that the full details of unrecognized, forgotten identity emerge.  Archetypalists understand how repetitious mistakes fully unfold and elaborate depth so that what is not mistaken can be seen, the gifts in the wound realized and the more robust health in the disease manifest.  Politicians who wish to remember the past as the basis for creating a perfect future may be creating other problems – such as iatrogenic diseases (from medicine's fascistic desire to control and eliminate disease and to protect against death) and the ecological crisis (from the culture's desire to have an easy, secure world full of cheap fast food and consumerist recreational entertainment, with a nature that is contained and controlled).  Archetypalist remembrance of the past takes us into the depths of understanding failure with forgiveness and provides a tendency to include the weak, the diseased, the malformed, the complainant – the alien other as the basis of an evolved, integrated, emergent, more complete sense of self.

These distinctions, of course, are not absolute.  They provide an analytic and descriptive way to look at polarities.  As archetypal activists we are called to be synthetic (i.e. dialectical) in order to facilitate bringing together the fragmented polarities of the culture in such a way that the existential tension of opposites is maintained while the opposites interact mutually, engaging without definitive dominance.  In this way polarities may reflectively energize and activate each other, reflecting through distinction.

Archetypal Activity in the World

What then is an archetypal activity in the world?  We must first recognize that the archetype itself is phenomenal – it is in the world, even as it points beyond itself to the world behind the world.  What action might we say constellates around archetypal presence in the world?

Deep action, complex action, dialectic action, receptive action, action that affirms polarity and brings polarities into relationship, metaphoric action (action whose genesis is based in metaphoric understanding and whose activity reveals the metaphoric nature of life).  In Michael Meade's words archetypal action would speak the unspeakable and mourn openly – not simply as a means of returning to where we were before or as a genesis of vengeful retaliation. Archetypal activism would encourage the acceptance of the breaking in of tragedy, of the collapse into terror at the conflict within the culture, rather than simply enacting a War on Terrorism, out there, as a means of managing this inner conflict.  Lionel Corbett focuses also on this deep ambivalence within American culture.  Meade goes so far as to suggest America must look for evil within, and in its own actions, as also does Corbett.

Archetypal activism would find ways to bring acceptance of the profoundly changing identity of American (really Western) culture and recognize that "the centre cannot hold" and that to hysterically and rigidly attempt to shore it up by acting out will constellate only more extreme and unmanageable fragmentation and hinder a necessary evolution.  Corbett suggests something is dying in North American culture even as the new struggles to be born.  Grof's perinatal images echoed this.  It seems that the archetypal experience of birth/rebirth is inherently attended by experiences of dying, violence, brutal penetration, crushing, torture, imprisonment, poison and that, to accomplish emergence into a new world, we must accept this.

Meade and Corbett both speak of loss of innocence, specifically of the necessary and inevitable loss of innocence in a young, idealistic and self idealizing culture.  Meade points out that the word noxious is the etymological core of innocent i.e. innocence is dialectically noxious.

A central motif of 9/11 is the collapse of the twin towers.  Meade points out that the falling towers are a terrible, tragic lifting of the veil between the worlds, profoundly revealing the world behind the world.  The fact that this revelation constellates as a terrifying 'end of the world' event, rather than an inner experience of evolutionary terror, reflects the hard core rigidity of military industrial consumerist globalization and the cultural imperialism of the good guy world saviour Logos.  Because of the loss of the mediating institutions of the mesocosm in this revelation, we stand raw against the macrocosm.  Surely the second coming is at hand.

As Jung and Edinger point out, in Western culture (specifically, perhaps, North American culture), a humanization of God is taking place (has been especially so since the Renaissance, according to Tarnas) with an accompanying reification of the human capacity to create (e.g. the self created human and genetic engineering) and destroy (e.g. the atomic bomb and planetary ecological crisis).  This is portentous, but dangerous and explosive.  We have expected the end of the world momentarily since World War II – the slow apocalypse is upon us, in Meade's words.

Chris Downing spoke of the uncanny – the unfamiliar in its frightening aspect of the return of something terrible that has been forgotten.  This alien other is the very axis of evil, almost by definition.  The uncanny is therefore threatening.  But also promising, in that, in Lacan's terms, it brings a return of the Real – the radically excluded original ground of being that we have forgotten in order to become who and what we are, in our world of everyday being and action.  A coming home.  A homecoming, however, that is also a death threat.  In fact, a terrible attack on our accomplished, successful sense of self.  This is of course precisely the homecoming that Homeland Defense is supposed to defend against, psychologically.

We may reflect on the possibility that as activists, archetypalists are terrorists – not in the manner of blowing up people and buildings but in the manner of radically and terribly undermining and deconstructing the cultural ego.  Returning us, in Meade's words, to ground zero as a grounding in zero, with the concomitant grief, sadness, despair, shame, guilt and terror.  According to Corbett the archetypal evolutionary task is to contain these emotions and not act out in narcissistic, infantile, fragmented and fragmenting rage.  To contain the borderline tendency to moralistic vengeance and, instead, take the hit and collapse inward rather than acting outward.

Downing suggests that instead of asking "Why me?" we might ask, "Why not me?"  This might enable us to reclaim the most profoundly unfamiliarly familiar, that which we are able to repress most of the time in order to be able to go on – the awareness of death, the precariousness of life, the mystery of being and non being.

Henrieka de Vries quotes her World War II Resistance mother who explained why she risked her family's safety to hide a Jewish woman in Holland.  "Either we are all safe or not one of us is safe".  She also quoted Margaret Meade:  "You can no longer save your family, you tribe, your nation.  You can only save the world ".

She suggests a way to understand the events of 9/11 is through a critique of the patriarchal social structure in which terrorism would seem to be inevitable in a world based on male sibling rivalry and treachery (Cain/Abel, Jacob/Esau), and father dominance (of sons, of women and of the other).  She suggests however, that fundamentalists everywhere, East and West, want to reinstall the absolute dominance of the military industrial clerical father.  In a world at war, in the midst of profound explosive economic and cultural change, the military industrial clerical father and his heroic sons "save the day".  Archetypally then, could we say that this father/son team are actually content to be in charge again?  They, of course, are saddened and outraged at the tragic loss of life, the "unprovoked" attack.  But now they have a mission and it is clear – at least to them.  It is the age old war between "good" and "evil", and they are the good guys – on both sides.

I would like to suggest that it is precisely the war between good and evil that is the issue, not evil per se.  What alternative is there to war on evil?  A psychological perspective can suggest a self questioning that deliteralizes the view of evil and questions the location of evil in "the other", in the enemy.

For now the enemy is no longer the enemy.  The enemy now is enmity – non-relational, absolute, annihilating conflict on a global scale.  The enemy now is the war itself.  As the twentieth century has so brutally demonstrated we can no longer afford this dualistic Titanic global battle between "good" and "evil".  In what John Ralston Saul calls the Second Hundred Years War around 100 million people have died in the twentieth century (Voltaire's Bastards – The Tyranny of Reason in the West).  This war between good and evil threatens to destroy the biosphere – life as we know it on this planet.  A new approach of reconciliation and integration, while maintaining dialectic differentiation, is called for.

This means moving from a dynamic of mechanistic, linear, controlling, idealistic duality to one of complex, emergent, pragmatic, dialectic aliveness.  This means moving from a formalized, politicized, legalistic model of social relations to one of personal responsibility, freedom, negotiation and mediation.  This means moving from politics and religion to psychology and spirituality.  This means moving from ruthless competitiveness to cooperative competitiveness, from a politics of divide and conquer to a politics of differentiated inclusion and empowerment and from a model of striving for victory at all costs to one of accepting failure and mistakes as part of an evolution in which we share the gold.  This means moving from a culture of moralistic conformity and oppression to one of liberation and freedom, from a culture of reductionist mechanism to one of holistic aliveness and from a culture of idealism and excellence to one of pragmatism and muddling through.  This means moving from a military industrial, skill oriented educational model to a more individualistic, humanistic one oriented toward consciousness and creativity.  This means moving from "living lives of quiet desperation", adaptation and "getting by" to lives of existential intensity on the cutting edge, where creativity, resourcefulness, innovation and the Bodhisattva motif of "doing what needs to be done" prevail.

Another fertile area for the application of archetypal activism is in the field of organizational development. Since the early '90's in this field there has been the beginning of a fundamental change in values.  Various traditions, disciplines, ideas and practices come together in what has been called 'integral culture'(by Paul H. Ray and others).  In general, this involves the traditions of:  chaos theory; dialectic polarity management; paradoxical thinking; trans competition; holism; dynamic web models; quantum uncertainty models; non-linearity, co-dependent arising and emergent self organization models; change convergence and "hyperchange" models; authenticity, responsibility, connectivity and the search for meaning; "servant leaders".  These are all elements of an emerging step toward new forms of organization in business and government particularly, but also culture in general.  Integral culture could also be termed archetypal culture. There are many individuals and organizations already working in this field with books, journals and magazine articles being published.

An Existential-Ecological Perspective

Western culture is struggling with having emerged from the twentieth century, the century that exploded, with a relativized, fragemented, self-critical identity. This is an identity crisis which the psychopathic, unreflective part of the mainstream culture has responded to with materialistic consumerism and a militaristic neoconservative power drive (both fuelling a global ecological crisis in sustainability), moralistic political correctness and an apocalyptic fundamentalist religious zeal. We now live within a global community that is struggling with issues of social justice, economic equality and the survival of indigenous, local culture. Yet, in the emergent post imperialist model for the regulation of order in the global community, peaceful, self-interested cooperation is becoming a theme, as exemplified, for example, in the European Union. The election of US President Barack Obama also enacts a psychological, relational, egalitarian, multicultural theme. Respect for the multiple meanings of individual human life is becoming integrated into the multicultural model of social relations. These themes of egalitarian, reciprocal cooperation are related to the humanistic, psychodynamic, existential and transpersonal traditions that offer possibilities for facilitating a successful transition through this explosive, evolutionary crisis in the culture.

These themes have undergone a parallel emergence in the corporate world, where business negotiations in a progressive, pragmatic environment include not just a competitive striving for dominance, but also the recognition that the inclusion of mutuality and co-operation, as well as acknowledgement of unconscious psychodynamic factors, brings more effectiveness and productivity. In the general area of conflict resolution this psychodynamic theme also shows itself.  Not just striving to defeat 'the enemy' in a militaristic drive for victory over the other, but recognition of mutual self interest and egalitarian co-operation as being fundamentally more realistic and productive. In this way, resources can be directly allocated to problem solving rather than the more immediate and limited goal of achieving dominance, and only then being able to 'fix' things because you are now in charge. The psychodynamic model also highlights the need for addressing contradictory tensions between positivistic social and organizational intentions and the more obstructionist, defensive, emotional unconscious factors that come into play when people try to cooperate.

If we look forward in our own culture toward renewal and reconnection, we have to look beyond the core principle of a transcendental divine that saves and protects to an existential divine that mediates participation. Rather than saving by lifting us above and protecting us through transcendental regulation, the existential divine invites us into a self-arising, self-organizing, self-regenerating world, where relationship is the basis of protection and authenticity is the saving grace. Dogmatic religion as a social institution and a militaristic drive for security does not serve this model. Psychology does, in its psychodynamic, existential, humanistic, transpersonal and archetypal forms. I will refer to this theme as the existential-humanistic tradition.

The fragmentary remnant of the transcendental divine model is consumerism - everyone a little king or queen, the centre of their own universe, ostensibly able to have whatever they want, whenever they want and however they want. This is driving our culture into a mad frenzy, where the watchwords are 'more' and 'faster', fuelling a fatalistic and nihilistic culture of shallow, narcissistic self satisfaction and self aggrandizement. In an idealistic, success driven culture, hypocrisy is inevitable - lip service must be paid to ideals while secret pragmaticist do 'whatever is necessary', spinning the tawdry possibilities of greed and power as the grand achievement of high ideals.

We may look at the existential-humanistic tradition in Western culture and see it as an evolutionary tendency that relativizes dogmatic, monotheistic religion and undermines the prevailing dualism of neo-Victorian moralism and rampant consumerism in liberal, democratic capitalism. Dogmatic religion as a social institution has become inadequate as a way of understanding human nature and as an inspirational vehicle for how to live. The existential-humanistic alternative involves a move away from idealized goals that one works towards with resolute commitment through skill and means, toward a model of surrender into what is being called forth at the level of individual humanness, in a cultural and natural context. This surrender facilitates the evolutionary drive to manifest our full potential, what Jung calls the process of individuation. While this involves stepping beyond the limitations of received enculturation, it also calls for a return to altruistic cultural involvement and contribution. What Paul H. Ray calls 'integral culture'.

Dogmatic religion, for many, has become inadequate also as a container for aspirations towards wholeness, participation, genuine community, and a meaningful cosmology that isn't simplistic. The mechanistic cosmology of classical science, with its linear cause and effect phenomenology, provides certainty and predictability, to some extent. This is the basis of its technological success. But it doesn't meet the richness of actual human experience, which it reduces to biology and behaviour. Although quantum physics and dynamical systems theory provide more complex and co-creative models, the scientific tradition remains a limited, albeit magnificent, achievement in human understanding of humanity, nature and cosmos.

The existential divine implies an emergent relationship with our own nature, including coming to terms with 'otherness' rather than trying to control or eliminate otherness, whether as unconscious adversity or simply as the 'alien' other. This involves a need to come to terms with complex diversity and the dark, mysterious intensity of our own unknown depths. This move has been marked politically and socially by the change from the militaristic, monotheistic, imperialistic, divine right of kings model of social-organization to the current neo-liberal, capitalist democracy. There has not, however, been a concomitant evolution in the religious cosmological model of human nature. We have begun to pass over, instead, into the existential, psychodynamic and transpersonal psychological and spiritual model, although this has not yet received a wide spread integration and socio-political formulation. There are many institutions engaged in this endeavour – to bring these psychological and spiritual perspectives to bear on the cultural evolution that is taking place in an unnecessarily dangerous and unconscious manner in Western culture.

The existential divine could also be attributed as the ecological divine. This implies an emergent relationship with (rather than control over) nature, both as the wild ground from which we arise, and in which we have our life. The Living Institute teaches an archetypal phenomenology of a re-enchanted postmodern cosmos that is, simultaneously, radically deconstructed and tentatively re-constructed, revealing the world as a co-creative, personified, existential project of inner/outer reconciliation.  This includes a focus on Thomas Berry's geocentric ecotheology, Emerson's 'community of subjects' and an experiential, process oriented psychological and philosophical approach to a study of cosmology. In this, the cosmos is seen as a sacred Great Work of unfolding self organization, in which humans carry a particular role as co-creative, self conscious earth stewards. James Lovelock, in his book, The Gaia Hypothesis, proposes a scientific formulation of the earth as a self regulating sentient entity, which this program takes up. This tradition also draws on the teleological purposefulness implications of the biocosmic, creation theology model, without subscribing to literalistic creationist fundamentalism.

The form of social organization for the existential-ecological tradition is an egalitarian confederacy of locally focused, communally organized network of small groups, rather than a religious, legalistic, hierarchical, authoritarian, centralized, bureaucratic mode. The Obama campaign's self organizing, egalitarian nature provides an example of this at the macropolitical level of social organization that is dramatically illustrative, given its widely publicized contribution to the sweeping success of the campaign, and including its impact on the perceived style of governing in the Obama presidency. In the existential-ecological tradition, 'truth and reconciliation' is a psychological  model for justice that promises to complexify the powerful, yet fundamentality dualistic, model of 'determination of guilt and consequent punishment' characteristic of the militaristic secularization of  monotheistic morality in the legal system. There is a significant focus on embodied experience in the existential-ecological tradition rather than a prohibitive, regulatory fear of the body with the concomitant priorizing of spiritual and mental phenomenon at the expense of the body that is characteristic of the transcendental divine. There is no 'sin' or 'evil' in the existential-ecological tradition. Rather there is a concern for holism and reconciliation to otherness, and an appreciation of the evolutionary function of adversity and alterity. The model is one of education and healing – providing complex care for restoring the wholeness of the subject, both individually and communally.

Cultural Leadership in the Networked Revolution

There is an explosive, revolutionary, deconstructive theme in the 20th century that has enacted an existential crisis in Western culture's sense of identity and reality. Drawing on the existential and spiritual emergence models, it can be shown that coming to the edge of destruction, as we have, calls forth the deepest possible potential for spiritual and psychological renewal at an individual, community and cultural level. As Rick Tarnas spoke of at the Living Institute's Transforming the Modern World conference (April 18 – 20, 2008), and writes about in Cosmos and Psyche, we are now entering an archetypally situated, and cosmically framed, period of revolutionary evolution comparable to the 1960's and to the early Romantic period of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. There is a need to educate people in how to harmonically amplify and constructively engage these explosive change energies, so that it isn't just deconstructive, but, in a complex, dialectic sense, reconstructive. A re-enchantment of the alienated, post-Enlightenment world, as Morris Berman has spoken of in The Re-enchantment of the World, and Charlene Spretnak has echoed in The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World, which develops 'ecological postmodernism' as a re-grounding of the human project in the dynamic processes of the Earth community.

Aftab Omer, founder and president of the Institute of Imaginal Studies (a San Francisco graduate school and research centre that draws on the archetypal psychology tradition, now Meridian University, where he remains as a core faculty), focuses his work in this area on "assisting organizations and learning communities in tapping the creative potential of diversity, conflict, chaos". He has this to say about our current situation in his "The Spacious Center: Leadership and the Creative Transformation of Culture" paper.  (www.meridianuniversity.edu)

The center and periphery of a culture interact differently during steady-state periods and periods of change. During steady-state periods, the center of a culture is conventional—dense with rules, norms, taboos, and consensual notions of the 'truth'—while the periphery is marginalized and remains disenfranchised, disempowered, and often scapegoated. In contrast, during periods of instability and conflict, the periphery is in dynamic interaction with a culture's center. During such times, the center is more responsive to the different and the unknown. By engaging and recognizing differences that were previously denied, suppressed, and trivialized, a culture's web of habits transforms as it responds to the perspectives and practices found at the periphery. The dynamic interaction between a culture's center and its periphery keeps the culture vital and adaptive, providing cultural leaders with opportunities for creative cultural transformation. Cultural leaders choreograph this interaction in ways that are creative and transformative. In this way, cultural leadership is distinct from political and administrative leadership. While political leaders primarily make rules and administrative leaders primarily enforce rules, cultural leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa, find principled and imaginative ways to transgress those rules that inhibit the emergence of cultural sovereignty and creativity. Their actions engender new and unexpected meanings. The recognition and creative transgression of rules and norms is at the heart of cultural leadership. Cultural leadership entails an ability to surrender through creative action to the necessities, meanings, and possibilities inherent in the present moment. Cultural leaders are able to transmute how they are personally affected by the culture into creative action that midwives the future.

In the 20th century, revolutionary, romantic counterculture became a pervasive, defining theme in cultural evolution, focused through areas such as the arts, philosophy, psychology, spirituality. Drawing on culture studies, postmodernism, existential depth psychology, and the archetypal tradition, it can be shown that these initially peripheral, revolutionary countercultures, enacted in a timely, community activist manner, have challenged and rejuvenated the main stream culture of the centre on many levels, including attitudes and social mores (concerning, for example, body, sex, emotion, spirituality, nature, work, civil society), ideology, practical politics and related themes.

Some of these traditions that started as small, underground, elitist, radical, fringe movements evolved into traditions of significant, centralized, cultural influence and leadership.

Specific traditions include:

• depth psychology, the paradigmatic model of success in this sense, with its pervasive and profound cultural and political impact, not only in the mental health field, but also in areas such as child rearing, education, religious studies, anthropology, culture studies, epistemology, and the social service orientation of the welfare state that developed in the 30's;
• the Frankfurt School, with its elaboration into critical theory and culture studies, and its influence on 1960's socio-political activism and late 20th century knowledge traditions, is also a model for complex, successful integration with the mainstream;
• early 20th century Bohemian Paris, with its impact on lifestyle and cultural attitudes through the deconstructive, existential modernism of its art and literature, including Dada, Surrealism, absurdist existentialism  and their late 20th century postmodern descendants, which have infiltrated so much of Western culture's mediated sense of self and reality;
• Ascona's early 20th century communal, revolutionary romanticism, which seeded the place of the Eranos Conference, so important to the cross-cultural, archetypal traditions of Jung, Campbell, Eliade, Corbin, continuing up into the present; 
• the various 1960's counterculture, liberation themes some of which were elaborated into movements, graduate schools and institutions in the 1970's and beyond – including traditions such as feminism, gender activism, civil rights, antiracism, egalitarian multiculturalism, environmentalism, eco-spirituality, creation and liberation theology, Eastern spiritual traditions (such as Buddhism, yoga, meditation), complex holism, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, and the network of archetypal/imaginal institutions and publications.

These leadership and change themes have been, and continue to be, brought into many programs in graduate schools, growth centres and diverse organizations around the world that derive from or relate to the archetypal, humanistic, existential, somatic, transpersonal and related traditions that emerged from the 1960's. What used to be peripheral and counterculture is becoming an influential network of interconnected points of awareness and action. "We live in a networked world" says the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in the Jan/Feb, 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. This publication of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations speaks from the knowledge base of the US power elite, the centre. The theme of the networked periphery influencing the centre is also in the process of being enacted. The California Institute of Integral Studies (where Rick Tarnas teaches), Naropa University, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center and JFK University are examples of grad schools in the humanistic, transpersonal, existential and somatic depth traditions that have transformative leadership degree programs focusing on cultural evolution, through  areas such as politics, community, social justice, environmentalism, sustainability, organizational development, business, administration, education, clinical issues. Hollyhock Leadership Institute, a successful, non-grad school, Canadian version, is a part of this work, having graduated 3000 trainees and served 200 organizations since 1997, as is Parker Palmer's Center for Courage and Renewal, having trained 160 facilitators in 35 states and 50 cities. Esalen Institute continues to offer programs in this tradition. The Institute for Imaginal Studies (with Aftab Olmer) is also part of this, as is the newly formed Meridian University's Center for Social Healing, based in the archetypal 'imaginal' psychology tradition, "dedicated to research, education, and consultation that engages the schisms and enemy making dynamics of our time". Toronto's Centre for Social Innovation is a "social enterprise, catalyzing social innovation … for social entrepreneurs, in the social mission field", with 100 social mission groups sharing desk space for the purpose of creating "original action in a participatory culture" through "diversity, interconnections, discovery, serendipity". The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, part of the University of Toronto, also has a focus on personal and social transformation, with a holistic creativity theme, in their Transformative Learning Centre, as well as their Adult Education and Community Development Program, and the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning.

There are many others. The Canadian Humanistic and Transpersonal Association (CHTA) has begun the creation of a directory of these and related programs, currently listing 150. Many in turn list others, such as Paul Hawken's WiserEarth website (www.wiserearth.org), which serves people who are concerned with transforming the world  as a community directory and networking forum that maps and connects global non-governmental organizations, businesses, governments and individuals addressing the "central issues of our day (climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights and more)". This is connected to Hawken's, Blessed Unrest, which chronicles and lists in book form the tens of thousands of individuals and organizations around the world addressing these issues. The websites of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (www.ahpweb.org), Association for Transpersonal Psychology (www.atpweb.org) and International Transpersonal Association (www.transpersonalassociation.org) provide similar global linkups. Visit www.chata.ca and follow the 'Web Resources' link to 'Collegial Contacts in the Humanistic, Existential, Somatic, Transpersonal and Related Fields' to explore these extensive networked global connections.

The Living Institute Leadership Program's (LILP) cultural activism focus is on transforming our "culture's web of habits", in Aftab Omer's terms, much in the same way that psychotherapy transforms an individual's complex web of habits. The LILP educates cultural leaders who can function, in a sense, as cultural therapists, focused through particular fields of cultural concern (such as sustainability, multiculturalism, social justice, organizational change), and also, in an archetypal, depth manner, complexly interacting with the cultural ground and zeitgeist.  Richard Tarnas speaks of kairos, Malcolm Gladwell of the 'tipping point', and dynamical systems theory of deep sensitivity to subtle input at a systemic bifurcation point, where the system is about to go to a new level of existential organization. It would seem, from many perspectives and on many levels, that we are in just such an intense period of change in Western culture, and, through various translations, also globally. President Barack Obama, the community organizer who speaks with psychological reflection and approaches problem solving from a relational perspective, is a highly visible, centrally situated manifestation of this. The network of global interconnections in the archetypal, humanistic, existential, transpersonal and related depth traditions is a complex, systemic manifestation of the same thing, calling for, and enacting, transformational cultural change.

Now is the time. This is the place. We are the people. Let's do it.