The Promised Land Project: Defining an Evolution of Consciousness

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Defining an Evolution of Consciousness

For our democratic society to meet its challenges, and avoid ever deeper levels of human conflict and environmental catastrophe, it may be that we’ll have to undergo an evolution of consciousness. I imagine this would be a kind of bottom up spiritual movement to overcome the entrenched narrow interests in the political sphere and engender the political will to enable action on behalf of the collective good.

In his 2008 book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, James Gustave Speth, a dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, provides a synthesis of some of the leading voices in the field articulating why this may be a necessary course of action. Speth, who spent much of his career in government circles and courts of law, states that top down incremental change is failing to address the crisis at hand and calls for a new consciousness toward culturally transformative change.

Breaking down this lofty notion of “a new consciousness”, as I understand it, is essentially about imagining one’s self less as an individual entity and more as a member of a collective. But the question is to what extent does a culture enable or impair the individual to feel it, or inspire it, on a certain level. The Promised Land Project attempts to achieve this end through the restoration of a collective sense of progress.