Dear readers,
Please join me tonight at 9:30 pm ET / 6:30 pm PT for a conversation with professor Sean Kelly, author of Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation. This talk is hosted by the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. Here’s our Zoom link. Hope to see you.
We are living in end times. With climate chaos, an accelerating mass extinction, and signs of civilizational collapse, the Earth community is being drawn into a planetary near-death experience (NDE). These end times, however, also mark the threshold of new planetary identity in the making. Drawing on an impressive range of scholarship from such fields as Big history, comparative religion, transpersonal psychology, and integral philosophies, Sean Kelly reveals the features of this new identity and invites us consciously to participate in its making. Guided by the ideal of Gaia as “concrete universal,” Kelly offers compelling insights on the nature of an emerging world spirituality that some describe as a second Axial Age; on the elements of a complex-integral ethics for the Planetary Era; and on the role of the death/rebirth archetype for understanding the charged field of contemporary climate activism. His newest book culminates with an inspiring meditation on the possibility, in these end times, of a third way beyond both hope and despair. In contrast to the restrictive anthropocentrism and technocentrism of mainstream discourse around the Anthropocene, Kelly speaks instead of the Gaianthropocene as our new geological epoch. It is an epoch where, even and especially as we face the fires of planetary initiation, we can awaken to our deeper nature as living members of Gaia, the living Earth in and through whom we have our being.
Becoming Gaia is an Integral Imprint publication. Sean and I will be exploring some of the major themes of his book, what he means by the Gaianthropocene, and how to live well in times like these.
Coming up soon on Mutations…
Continued panel conversations on innovating integral scholarship and practice
The next book club: Always Coming Home by Ursula K LeGuin
Sneak peeks at the upcoming Mutations anthology (Patrons only)
Thanks all, and see some of you on tonight’s PCC talk.
Warmly
Jeremy