Part 1: What They Are Teaching Technologies are like “media,” they extend our senses beyond the limits of time, distance, scale, intelligence and life experience. What we’re experiencing today is not merely rapid innovation, but the emergence of technologies of transcendence, those that are not just changing the world. They’re teaching us something radical: that […]
How Our Purpose, Collaboration and Conscious Action can Help Heal a World in Metacrisis Crisis Precedes Transformation Socially, geopolitically and environmentally, humanity is in a state of metacrisis—a compounding of complex, interrelated challenges that seem unresolvable. Most troubling is that the mindset that created them—separation, materialism, domination—remains active. We can vote, protest and pray, but […]
Our collective consciousness created it Left to right: Sven?, Fran Macy, Donald Keys (Moderator), Gehard Elston, Bill Porter In June 1983, under the auspices of the World Good News Network (WGNN), I led a team to Toronto, Canada to video document a week-long event entitled, “The Congress of the Planetary Initiative for the World We […]
Qualities of Love and Consciousness Are Shaping Our Evolutionary Future My common practice for this blog is to select a photograph that will prompt a contemplation. In this instance, due to a period of focused readings in theology and philosophy relative to the future of humanity, there came a moment when I had the distinct […]
The Intersection of Nature and Technology Through the many decades that I’ve been photographing landscapes, utility poles of all kinds, sizes and wires have been a nuisance. Their placement often interfered with rural settings, and in cities the lines tended to be a mess. I don’t like being critical, but when I see these, the […]
Evidence of cosmic order All evolution is a dance of wholes that separate themselves into parts and parts that join into mutually consistent new wholes. We can see it as a repeating, sequentially spiraling pattern: unity to individuation to competition to conflict to negotiation to resolution to cooperation to new levels of unity and so […]
Chapter 14: Pattern (The final in this series) Through repetition, patterns create visual harmony, rhythm and order, all of which can contribute to meaning and create a sense of stability and symmetry which is pleasing to the eye. Patterns are apparent in the energy fields within atoms, the immensity of the cosmos and the way […]
How life moves in sustainable ways From universe to “nanoverse,” one of nature’s most common structural features is “branching.” Networks of all kinds, physical and intellectual, are grounded in a pattern that chemists refer to as “child” (smaller channels) and “parent” (larger) branches. At the human level we see it in living systems—the brain, arteries […]
Introduction This begins a series of posts on the subject of whole systems thinking. After the topic is introduced, I’ll offer a contemplation that relates to the headline photograph and text. Historically, patterns observed in nature were discussed and documented in China five thousand years ago, before they were articulated by Lao Tzu (Gia-fu Feng, […]
Seeing the sacred and profane in the same object One of my long-standing pet peeves has been littering. I even won a speech contest by ranting and raving about it in my high school years. Linda and I were running errands recently and we saw several places strewn with litter. Two years ago when I […]
Contemplative Photography 