The very real prospect of an Emerging Planetary Wisdom Culture is an antidote to the rampant fear, cynicism, and despair of our age. If we only seek to run away from the collapse of civilization that we fear, we will scatter our efforts, running in all directions, like an anthill that has been stamped upon. If humanity is to survive this period of planetary crises, we need a collective positive image of a future that works for all, allowing us to work as a whole to form goals and strategies that build a positive future—not stupidly fallling into resource wars, ecological collapse, plagues, famines, and population collapse. So we need to work with the positive trends of our era to create a future that is not only sustainable but wise and beautiful.

The Emerging Planetary Wisdom Culture is actually appearing now as a new layer beyond national and ethnic cultures. As our modern materialistic way of life falls apart, it opens space for a new civilization to emerge. As we track the trends, we see a powerful movement toward a clean, green economy and the restoration of nature. As a wave of change moves through the culture, large populations now agree that a wise culture means taking care of all the children, not just the privileged. Practical Wisdom expands the taken for granted context of daily action, and of organizational strategies for longer time horizons, wider concerns, more conscious and more ethical ways of operating. It means caring for our inner lives, how we work together in organizations, and also for the long term future of humanity and the the planet. And how we express the truth of that caring and share that truth with one another is going to be crucial to building an authentic wisdom culture.

The Cultural Creatives are the carrier population for the emerging wisdom culture. Paul Ray has been researching their values, lifestyles and beliefs for 25 years. Across the planet, they are innovators for the culture, not so much in technologies as in beliefs, worldviews, values and ways of life. They are the opinion leaders, and the participants in all the new social movements of the past 60 years who have time and again shaped others’ views, practices and adoptions of these new ways. Their Green values and lifestyles and their values of inner development both psychological and spiritual are the key to the emerging new culture. New Cultural Creatives surveys in Europe, Japan and the US all show the same trends.

Gracefully ripening into a Wise Elder does not mean taking on one more identity once you turn a certain age. Ripening Time means entering a relationship you have been growing into over a long time—a relationship with your community, with future generations as well as those of the past, and with yourself. We are interested in exploring what happens to those who grow wise in this way, and what wise elders can bring and are already bringing to the emerging wisdom culture. We are seeing how authentic maturity entails a shift from the perspective of middle age. Your love begins to extend, not just to your own children and grandchildren, but to all children, including those not yet born. Paradoxically, this shift brings you powerfully into the present moment. Your caring forms a bridge arcing from those who have gone before us to the generations to come. It can bring a deep reflection into one’s destiny and sense of purpose in this life.

The reach of Feminine Wisdom into the emerging culture has not yet been fathomed, let alone mapped. This is because in the conventional wisdom of modernist culture, we take even the most genuine expressions of the feminine and hear them through the filters of our old structures. What kind of holding environments can give birth to women’s wisdom? What forms of expression will these ways of knowing take? What combinations of beauty, wisdom and compassion, of creativity and celebration, will come together, giving us new forms of learning, community, architecture, music, business and finance, and communication? Sherry’s research and ongoing inquiry into these questions are described in this section.

This part of the website is about the appearance of Cultural Creatives as the leading edge of new developments in American culture, one that is also happening in European and Japanese life. In our book, The Cultural Creatives, we described the research up to 1999, told personal stories of Cultural Creatives, and traced their historical path of development as being due to the effects of massive new information about the world and of the new social movements, both since the 1950s.

Ten years later, we can see that it shows a major development in our civilization: An important new subculture is emerging in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and they are carriers of a whole new way of life. In the book, and on this website, we say to Cultural Creatives: "You are not alone. You have lots of company on ways to making a better future." That’s important because most of them believe they are pretty much alone. Our hope is that once they know they’re not alone, they’ll be more willing to speak out about the creative new ventures they’re already involved in. They need to speak the joy, juiciness and richness of creating new solutions that can take us toward the kind of world we long for. Maybe they’ll share their ideas and visions of the future, and they’ll create new places and occasions to meet each other. This is already happening.

The Cultural Creatives care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self actualization, spirituality and self-expression. Contrary to media stereotypes about being either for personal development or activism, they are both inner-directed and socially concerned: they’re activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more than other Americans.

However, because they’ve been so invisible in American life, Cultural Creatives themselves are astonished to find out how many share both their values and their way of life. Once they realize their numbers, their impact on American life promises to be enormous, shaping a new agenda for the twenty-first century. Their problem is that most of them never see the face of their subculture in the mainstream media, and that when they go to work, they have to check their values at the door. So, they rationally conclude, "It's just me and a few of my friends."

Cultural Creatives need to be contrasted to Traditionals and Moderns (please see the chart in the artwork above), because Cultural Creatives often describe themselves as ‘bridge people’ between the other two contending cultures who are busy having a culture war. They are trying to make a cultural synthesis, and also transcend the others.

Americans who see themselves as ‘Traditional’ actually favor a 19th century worldview and values, nothing more ancient than that, and they are largely in reaction against the culture of today’s world, usually from a rural, small town or religiously conservative stance. This includes a large proportion of working class and elderly people. In the US context, this nostalgia for a small town past and strong churches is based on a mythic image of an America that never existed in history. Since about 1950, Traditionals seem to have shrunk from roughly 50% of the US adults to roughly 25%, but even those have split into traditional conservatives (15%) and greens with strong traditional leanings (10%). Despite all the triumphalist rhetoric of the Religious Right in the US, their base population is dying off, and not being replaced by a younger generation. Their hatred partly reflects their fear of being on the losing side of history. This, of course, casts doubt on many of their preachers' and far-right politicians' claims.

Most recent Hispanic migrants to the US are also quite traditional, reflecting Latin American rural culture, but are typically not surveyed because of their poor English and lack of acculturation to American ways; yet they are there in the background, clouding all our survey estimates.

‘Moderns’ tend to see the world through a filter of personal success and financial gain, with an acceptance of ‘things as they are’ in big cities, big organizations, the latest technologies, mass media, and a ‘modern’ life rewarded by material consumption. Moderns cover the gamut from politically progressive to conservative. It’s important that despite all the claims of American media, corporations and governments, there seems never to have been a time when the population was more than half Moderns! The official culture of the US has two kinds of dissenters from Modern values: Traditionals as the cultural laggards, and Cultural Creatives as the cultural vanguard. From the 1950s to 2000 it appears that Moderns were just about half the US adult population. Since about 1950, Moderns continued to recruit the more ambitious, successful Traditionals, but after the 1960s Moderns started losing many of their own children to the Cultural Creatives. Now as Cultural Creatives continue to draw people, Moderns are down to about 40% of US adults. The 20th century was the Moderns’ century, but now that culture is breaking down as it fails to solve the problems that its past successes left unsolved in their wake, especially the global climate crisis and ecological devastation that has accompanied it.

About 10% of the US is now ‘In Transition’ to being Cultural Creatives—largely under the threat of the growing climate crisis—accepting values they once rejected, yet still clinging to traditional values. They are heavily working class men who are splitting off from the Traditional culture. Compared to surveys 10-15 years ago, there is a “hole” in the Traditionals’ numbers, values and demographics by their departure. The US has a history of working class conservatism about social and religious values, combined with participation in the modern economy. They have now taken on green values, and a desire for green-collar jobs in new clean-green industries to replace their vanishing jobs in manufacturing. The deep recession started much earlier for them, over 2005 to 2007, and that was the last straw that broke the camel’s back in resisting change. Suddenly they switched in the 2008 election from supporting militaristic social and religious conservatives in politics to supporting Obama’s practical action for green economic development to get out of the recession. They are cross-pressured politically, wanting to hold both traditional values and post-modern views. They are probably lost to the Republican party for a generation. This is precisely what one might expect in a time of rapid cultural change.

Real Evidence

Lots of books and websites make claims about social transformation. This description is based on analyzing immense amounts of survey research, over 100,000 people surveyed over 22 years, about 500 focus groups, 60 depth interviews. Yes, the social transformation is occurring, and no, it's not much like you see in the mainstream media. We'll say why in the interviews below.

Cultural Creatives are a population identified using survey research to measure and classify their values, worldviews and lifestyles. In national surveys in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, they are now about 35% of each country's population, plus or minus 2%.

A steadily growing population:

•  In 1995, Cultural Creatives were 23.6% of the US adult population, or 44 million adults.
•  In 1999, Cultural Creatives were 26% of US adult population, or 50 million adults.
•  In 2008, Cultural Creatives were 34.9% of US adult population, or 80 million adults
•  [US Adults 18+ years in 2008 = approximately 230 million]
•  175% growth in 13 years is a little over a 3% per year constant annual population growth rate.
•  However we have to factor in that the US adult population is growing too. So, the Cultural Creatives’ share of US population went from 23.6% to 33.6%. That is a 42.4% increase in share—about a 2.5% annual growth rate as an increasing share of the US population.

The major influence on their growth has been that new values and worldviews grew out of their involvement in all the new social movements, from civil rights, to women’s, to social justice, to environmental, to concerns for hunger and third world peoples, to new spiritualities and psychotherapies, to bio-foods, and finally to ecology and the growing climate crisis of the planet. The other major influence on their growth has been the growing information saturation of the world since the 1950s. In fact the Cultural Creatives are simply the best informed people. They take in more of every kind of information through all the media, and are more discriminating about it as a result. Many successfully blend their personal experience with new views about how the world works, and why—their new values and commitments have rather organically grown out of their synthesis of all the information. By contrast, Traditionals tend to fend off new information that Cultural Creatives absorb, while Moderns leave media information quite fragmented and undigested that Cultural Creatives are determined to make sense of. Cultural Creatives are also mainstays of middle class support for the arts and good causes in America, for they are America’s practical idealists.

Their most important values include: ecological sustainability and concern for the planet (not just environmentalism); liking what is foreign and exotic in other cultures; what are often called ‘women’s issues’ by politicians and the media (i.e., concern about the condition of women and children both at home and around the world, concern for better health care and education, desire to rebuild neighborhoods and community, desire to improve caring relationships and family life); social conscience, a demand for authenticity in social life and a guarded social optimism; and giving importance to altruism, self-actualization and spirituality as a single complex of values.

The values research reported here covers a period from 1986 to 2008. This kind of survey works well because values are excellent predictors of what people actually want to do with their lives, what their lifestyle is and what they want to buy, what good causes they support, how they vote, and what messages to them are most believable. What we found very early on was that the values that predict well do not depend on personal psychology, but rather that they differ by three subcultures: Traditional, Modern and Trans-Modern. The latter are the Cultural Creative population, and this was the first research to show that ecology values and spiritual-psychological values made a difference to people’s lifestyles, and to their stance as voters. Because they are cultural, the values we measured are slow to change, unlike attitudes and opinions, and the business cycle has very little effect on them (though it affects people's ability to pay for what they want).

The survey data is designed for analysis into five dimensions, for clustering people into similar profiles of values, worldviews and lifestyle: Two key dimensions of values are more important to Cultural Creatives than to others: 1) having green and socially responsible values, and 2) personal development values, including spirituality and new lifestyles. The other two values dimensions are more important to the rest of the population: 3) a combination of personal success and financial materialism, and 4) a combination of social and religious conservatism. These four dimensions are independent of each other, so every person can be on the positive or negative ends of each different dimension. The fifth dimension is social class, or socio-economic status. Social class is important not only for people’s ability to live well or not, but their ability to take in information about a changing world; it shapes friendship networks that affect how they form their worldview; and it strongly affects their life chances and the risks they are exposed to.

Cultural Creatives cover a very wide range of social class positions from working class to the elite. They may be middle class on average, but the range is so wide that it is almost meaningless to describe them in terms of occupation, education or income. The key identifiers are values, worldview and lifestyle, not demographics. People with identical values can be of very different social classes, and people of the same social class can live in totally different cultural worlds.
 

Not a U Tube video, but moving pix:

http://www.kindredcommunity.com/2013/09/are-you-a-cultural-creative-take-the-quiz/

+ good long interview:

http://www.kindredcommunity.com/2013/09/same-planet-different-worlds-how-cultural-creatives-are-bringing-forward-the-practical-wisdom-of-conscious-living/

We are at the cusp of a new era, the planetary phase of civilization. As traditional geographic and cultural boundaries erode, people and places entwine across one global system with one shared destiny. In the intangible space of human consciousness, this expanding nexus of connectivity enlarges our awareness and identities. The global arena is emerging as a supranational layer of social evolution, political struggle, and contending forms of consciousness. The planetary phase is transforming both the earth and we who live on it.

From the perspective of systems theory, the defining feature of the planetary phase is that the causal dynamics operating at global scales increasingly influence the dynamics of subsystems. Heretofore, the world could be reasonably approximated as a set of separate entities – independent states, autonomous ecosystems, and distinct cultures – subject to external interactions. Such disaggregation into quasi-independent parts is becoming less useful: the global system is irreducible both ontologically and epistemologically. The system and its components shape one another in a complex and reciprocal dialectic that changes the planet and its parts. In this dynamic of planetary transition, the catchphrase “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” takes on fresh meaning: the emerging global system cannot be reduced to its components. The global social-ecological system is something new on the face of the earth.

Paul Raskin, “Planetary Praxis: On Rhyming Hope and History” In Kellert and Speth, (eds.) The Coming Transformation, p. 115

I argue that we are now in a period of history that can best be described as an era of a cascade of planetary crises. Most connect to the climate crisis, which is already here. Today’s collection of crises is worse than anyone predicted: food and drinking water crises; droughts, floods and extreme weather; rising sea levels, drowning most seaports and coastal areas; peak oil; melting arctic permafrost, releasing huge amounts of methane and accelerating climate change; massive climate refugee problems; a very unstable global financial system; religious terrorism and ethnic conflicts worsening; and likely climate-caused wars from all the above.

In a dynamic systems model of our situation, a fork in our historical road results: we can fall into a death spiral, or we can rebound to a higher level than the pit of the crises, and quite possibly to a higher level than before the crises. If that’s all that was going on, it’s still dangerous. But when we add that we’re going into a planetary integration process such as Paul Raskin describes, the human system gets more complex. We’ll have a bunch of new dimensions emerging that describe potential paths our planetary system can take. This creates both dangers and opportunities as our emerging system wanders far from equilibrium. Still, it’s innovation that creates new system dimensions and new strategic opportunities. If the opportunities are fulfilled, we’re in for a glorious transition.

All of humanity is confronted with major strategic choices, and to seize the unique opportunities of our time, we have to act together on all of them at once. Our centuries-old nation states are no longer adequate to deal with what is emerging in our time. We’ve outgrown them, and you can easily see that by looking at the Internet, or at the impotence of nations facing multinational corporations, global financial markets, and global commodities markets, or at Asian countries leasing the agricultural land in Africa to feed hungry populations in Asia (never mind the Africans) and even at planetary social movements, especially of the youth population.

Many people appear paralyzed with fear by the dangers before us, or in flat out denial. Yet in our era in history, powerful trends are now occurring worldwide that point upward. Some of them, like new technologies, are already being applied to the climate crisis. It’s just that some of the richest vested interests–the fossil fuels industries of oil, coal and gas–hate and fear the newest emerging solar, wind and geothermal power industries. But a process of planetary integration is also powerfully under way, creating a new era, the planetary phase of civilization. It’s just that a boatload of nationalists, militarists, and career politicians hate and fear that too.

Two key strategic questions of our era are:
• How can we aid a ‘next’ civilization emerging rather than suffer a collapse?
• What helps a rebound from our cascade of crises to a higher level civilization?

We now can see a bright new answer emerging from the gloom: It works if we see it as an emerging planetary civilization and a planetary wisdom culture. Basically, we need to work our way back, back-casting from a positive vision of the future, and work our way forward from our present trends. And some branches of those two trees of possibility will meet in the middle, to form the core of how our strategy unfolds over time. That will allow humanity to develop a shared, collective macro-strategy with thousands of facets in it, and room for diverse explorations and experimentation on what works. We can link rigorous realism from a shared systems perspective to on-the-ground shared information about what does turn out to work.

But no, it won’t work if we look at our crises through hundreds of disconnected lenses on macro-developments, and conflicting national interests—each crisis seen as a silo independent from the rest, laid out by specialized experts in business, government, the media or academe. Nor does it work if we keep seeing it as somebody else’s problem, one that has nothing to do with us, in an uncaring response. Our youth already know it. It’s time our experts and leaders did too.

So we need to see our whole planetary climate crisis as ours, and one of many things we all share in. We’re all in the same boat. Planet Earth has a common destiny, and it can be a very good one, or a terrible one. That means we must have a common macro-vision and a common strategy. It is at once ecological, meteorological, agricultural, industrial, financial, political, military, social, and economic. All our unfolding crises are intertwined and shared, and so must be our solutions.

And no, it doesn’t work if we’re in denial about the horrible seriousness of the planetary climate crisis, or in the grip of the foolish conspiracy theories about world government or a world empire. No one can afford the collective idiocies and far-out fantasies of the radical right. And neither can any of our children and grandchildren. We must protect future generations.

[To continue reading this, click here]

(NOTE TO THE READER: That is how this page ended. No link attached to the 'here'. If anyone can forward me the remaining portion I will gladly post it. This has always been a Team effort. Thank you. (Clinton Callahan clinton at nextculture dot org)

Wisdom is both perceiving and understanding reality in effective ways, and then acting both benevolently and beneficently, to both will and manifest the Good. Confident in itself, it can afford to be generous. The latest brain science says paradoxically that wisdom draws more from integrating what we know, especially our know-how, or our prescriptive knowledge, as we age, even though many of our mental abilities and descriptive knowledge seem to be declining as we age! Prescriptive knowledge is more about solving problems, how things ought to be, and our best course of action, and less about how things are, independent of us as observers of the world.

Wisdom is at the high end of a range that extends through conventionality at the middle, to folly at the bottom. It is not an abstract logical category formed by a bright line of distinction. Rather, wisdom refers to degrees of difference that separate wise thought and action from the merely conventional, just as there are degrees of difference that separate conventional thought and action from what is foolish. Just as we perceive red, yellow, green and blue as qualitative differences along the spectrum of visible light, differing by degrees measured in Angstroms, we also can perceive qualitative differences among those three categories along a spectrum of degrees of excellence in capabilities and performance, in consciousness, thought and action. The wise do it well, the middle mass of people muddle along, fools do it badly. I’m creating a values measure of this range of excellence, and we can see a bell-shaped curve similar to IQ for the whole population, or even a bell-shaped curve among group cultures. It looks like this: [Please see the graph above titled Bell Curve of Conventionality.]

Practical wisdom (phronesis) perceives and understands practical realities, especially social, business and political ones, and acts skillfully from that. Starting with the ancient Greeks, practical wisdom has been considered to be an excellent level of consciousness, thought and action. Practical wisdom is not about mere routinely skillful, well-trained behavior, but complex, intentional action. Wise action is goal-forming, goal-oriented, and purpose-guided. It’s all about context: what surrounds the problem in front of us. Wise action is based on an expansion of the surrounding context of individual and group viewpoints beyond the routine confines of everyday conventional behaviors. We see longer time horizons, more aspects of the situation, more different ways of knowing, and take more viewpoints into account. That means we notice the dangers and failure points, and we know how to avoid them. And we notice the opportunities and what’s valuable about them, and we know how to move toward them.

In order to consciously engage in skillful practical action, practical wisdom’s uniqueness is that it requires us first to consciously take a larger, wider, deeper, more socially informed perspective, with a longer time horizon, and multiple perspectives, in both perception and cognition. Interestingly, it is both context-dependent and so general as to be universal, such that we need to both perceive and understand local truths, fully and without bias, but also go beyond them, deeper, longer in time, etc. This theory says that practical wisdom works because it is the expansion of any particular local context in a very large variety of ways, the sum of which is conscious action that is not only wiser, but a more intelligent and creative departure from everyday routines, and conventional consciousness and actions.

By contrast, conventional everyday social life shows us a huge amount of evidence that perspectives more narrow, biased and ignorant than conventionality produce folly, just as relying only on short term perspectives does, and it is generally recognized that shallow perspectives are almost synonymous with folly. So to conventionality, folly is condemned and wisdom is valued.

We’re not going to talk about Spiritual wisdom (Sophia). It perceives and understands spiritual realities, to act deeply from that, especially for personal and spiritual development. However, most claims to Sophia wisdom are special pleading for particular religions. So, I’m not going to try to sort out millennia of claims, counter-claims, theologies, ideologies, and idiocies. I’ll just concentrate here on practical wisdom.

Good Judgment: Practical wisdom theory adds the qualification that good judgment is required for us to take each wise step. Yet this judgment is not theoretical, but often uses both intuitive and pre-conscious processes, called tacit knowing. That means it is often nonverbal and directly perceived. It’s especially about recognizing what is there to be perceived in the complex pattern before us, and then it is often able to match complex actions to that pattern, and call up summary judgments about what may make matters either go well or badly. It’s called ‘tacit’ because if you ask somebody how they knew that, the answer is very often, “I just knew.” The matching of perception, patterns and actions happens outside the view of conscious thought.

Organizations and professions both cultivate highly specialized technical cultures of their kind of good judgment, often in groups, to make sense of professional work routines. Practical wisdom expands the range of patterns that they recognize, and has a large and ever growing set of socially, politically and technically skillful interventions to intelligently deal with what is recognized. As Aristotle pointed out, good judgment, which is about ‘knowing how’ more than ‘knowing that,’ is not at all reducible to logical rules or factual knowledge, and countless observers ever since have repeatedly verified that it is integrative, whole brain judgment drawing from well-digested experience, not abstract or specialist knowledge.

Modern academics who use the logics of the 18th century Enlightenment paradigm often can’t get past this, because they manipulate factual knowledge with logic, so they look the other way, ignoring practical wisdom as a problem too difficult (for them) to deal with, and this is a major reason they have neglected it in the twentieth century.

[* Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience and Narrative, Cambridge University Press, 2006]

Smart Rules of Thumb, Strategies and Procedural Knowledge are central to practical wisdom. This is ‘knowing how’ more than ‘knowing that’ and it is often a kind of tacit knowing, which even when it is wise, is often below conscious control. Developing a sophisticated understanding of heuristic problem solving in cognitive science is one of the crucial new developments of scientific and technological versions of practical wisdom, especially as practiced in the case studies of most professions.

Pattern recognition: ‘Pattern recognition’ is a theory and a technology from cognitive science that we moderns can add to the Greek discussion of wisdom, for it points to the immense value of having systematic training in perception of the relevant features of situations. It includes poking, prodding and asking sequences of questions in order to make a mental model of what’s going on, some of which is seen, some is sensed by other means including instruments, and some of it is unseen, but inferred.

The paradigm case is physicians being trained to diagnose illnesses. Here as in many pattern recognition issues, the point is to recognize what type of problem you face, and represent that problem in such a way that it is soluble, by matching the pattern to a type of action. By having large diagnostic manuals with diagnostic categories, physicians rapidly move from a structured description to a structured treatment approach. Specialist physicians have emerged who make extra discriminations, or who know all the exceptions to the basic patterns that are detected, and what to do if the treatment doesn’t work. Difficult illnesses are those which don’t fit the diagnostic categories, or for which medicine has yet to come up with treatments.

Aristotle claimed that practical wisdom cannot be taught, and if we look at classes in academic subjects designed to pass on generic knowledge, that seems reasonable. But the modern professional world does better than that. An immense amount of time is spent on applied case studies in business and professional schools to pass on each profession’s particular pattern recognition and diagnostic skills as used for particular cases. The point is that the cases belong to recognizable types that require typical actions, and cases are to develop grad students’ judgments to be able to match the profession’s preferred techniques to those patterns. This differs from medieval apprenticing in that many parts of the pattern-to-be-recognized and the action-to-be-taken are based on scientific research (even if many other parts are still just based in the practitioners 'art').

Then the student gets a chance to start practicing in the field under the watchful eye of a more expert practitioner. It’s a jumped-up apprenticing process that requires hours and hours of detailed work practice that catches all the myriad exceptions, and elaborates the pattern at a much finer grain. Then it is matched to the details of working technique with all the hassles built in. The medical student’s residency is the most formalized, but every profession has its own version of this.

Think of law, medicine, engineering, architecture, business schools, and laboratory sciences. Each has a body of actual practice that is in many ways more sophisticated than its own theories, but the skill is not primarily intellectual. Top practitioners in each field have their own ‘art’ which is a combination of perception and hands-on technique, still learned from master to apprentice, and the cultures of a few leading institutions are seriously more sophisticated and often more successful than all the rest. The lawyer trained at Harvard, and then the top law firms, learns how to change and manipulate unfavorable laws, while the one from a state college learns only to obey. Lab scientists know that most fundamental discoveries come from just half a dozen labs in each field, because the craft of what is passed on in those labs is not the same as the science itself. Their unfolding culture of best practice and best inventions outpaces other labs.

Architects, engineers and financiers must steep themselves in the doing of their craft operations for a number of years after college before they ‘see into’ the typical patterns of what the practicing professionals really recognize and act upon. We call it ‘getting experience.’ This is worth looking into in our study of practical wisdom here, for it is very clear that practical wisdom also recognizes patterns and matches them to successful action, albeit a much wider range of both. It focuses less on success, however, than on preventing harm and doing good. By contrast, folly distinguishes itself by failing at both. It’s careless of harm and ignores the good.

What’s the difference between very expert, but conventional, professional practice and practical wisdom? It’s found in the breadth and depth of what practical wisdom can address about life issues. Outside of their specialized professional practice, many geeky professionals are capable of incredible cluelessness and folly in everyday life, for which their professional expertise has not prepared them. In fact, their intensive training may have narrowed their abilities to deal with life. Our culture’s stereotype of geeky folly is usually young scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians, and there’s some truth in it.

However, the critical issue for many generalist professionals is that they need to get some life experience and broaden their minds. Then they are often ones who see parallels between the pattern recognition skills of their profession and ways of dealing with other life problems. That pattern recognition, heuristic problem solving, and strategizing really can be generalized, if they are led to broaden their personalities beyond sensing and thinking, to feel, and intuit more deeply. They simply need to learn a bigger variety of experiential patterns in other areas of life to take their training to a much wider context. By systematically broadening their exposure to life and then inquiring into and integrating their experiences, then some can use that to acquire practical wisdom. And by midlife, many do. The geek who stays narrow rarely does.

In order to successfully engage in wise action, our pattern recognition must often see, and feel, more deeply into aspects of that perceived pattern to intuit causal factors, and processes that are not visible. Then we must look more widely, and with a longer time horizon. Our first gestalt impression of a whole situation is necessarily limited because of our limited information input capability. Every human being and every group has definite limits on the speed and amounts of information they can get and process. We usually need to select and focus in on some of the most relevant details, in what Etzioni* calls ‘mixed scanning’: If we’re skilled observers we first scan the wider situation to see what is available to be seen, then we drill deeper to explore the most relevant, interesting, or important aspects, then come back up and do it a few times more to elaborate what we found earlier. Alternating wide and narrow views, we avoid tunnel vision: a narrow focus on local or immediate concerns.

Mixed scanning was first seen in research on policy analysts dealing with complex, ambiguous problems. But today this process turns out to be how skilled users of the Internet do searches on a topic. You may have done it yourself. It is consistent with the idea that practical wisdom expands the context of action by taking more aspects into account, so over time it can raise the level of other people's everyday conventional behaviors. And this is one way that the wise help cultures evolve.

[*Amitai Etzioni, “Mixed-Scanning: A ‘Third’ Approach to Decision-Making” Public Administration Review, vol. 27, No. 5 (Dec. 1967) pp. 385-392, and “Mixed Scanning Revisited” Public Administration Review, (Jan.-Feb., 1986) pp. 8-14.]

Good judgment starts this way, preconsciously selecting which details are probably worth focusing on. It brings past learning and experience into the process: ‘If this pattern is X, then these Y details will be important.’ This comes both from lived experience and from the study of history or other subject matter that have together led to bringing some information diagnostics to the process. Emotive aspects will color that memory: We remember emotionally intense experiences better than dull ones, but if they're too intense we distort them. This largely preconscious processing can serve concerns ranging from intensely practical to intensely theoretical. It is usually preparing to do something next: from getting more information, to coordination with other actors in the situation, to taking action, all in support of our intentions and goals. I’ll elaborate this below.

Mental Simulation: Once a pattern has been recognized, it needs to be matched to some possible actions that are most likely to be appropriate to that type of situation. If there is one best action that is obviously appropriate, we simply go ahead with it. That’s likely to be a matter of routine skill, not a matter calling for practical wisdom. However, the situation may have some critical differences from a typical pattern, so we may need to create a more innovative response.

What mental simulation does is let us rehearse in our minds, step by step, a process that might be followed to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Talking it over with colleagues to collectively visualize what may be done, and catch likely problems, is often the best way to do this, as in business, military and political strategizing. But sometimes time pressures prevent that. We have to imagine the situation as it is, the actions we might take, the results that those actions would produce, and how things would look at the end of the process. When we have some expertise at such imagining, we notice things that might not work in this particular situation, and have to see what could correct that, or be willing to go on to think up another set of things to do, or new strategies and tactics. This all draws on expertise.

It is commonly noted that foolish actors often don’t do mental simulations at all, or else don’t notice where things can go wrong. That’s the kind of cluelessness that produces folly. But folly is also produced by greater complexity than untrained people can handle, either alone or in groups, and it may be complicated by self-interest. As muckraker Upton Sinclair put it about the corrupt dealings of big corporations and political machines in his day, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
 

Table 1. Recognizing Practical Wisdom, Conventionality and Folly—an Overview

Manifestation* is a particular kind of practical action: bringing a perceived possibility into form. As such, it is not even always good, for a warlord could inwardly see how a battle unfolds, then do it. But the manifestation we will work with is spiritual in its origins. Nor is creative manifestation* magical in its process of ‘bringing something through from higher planes into physical reality.’ Rather, it is spiritually skillful, then practically skillful. Through such a process, our inner vision of the possible is first compelling, and then shows the particular way that a new project, or strategic action, can manifest. This material on creative manifestation is for creative people who have something innovative to bring into the world, something serving your higher purpose in life, and preferably, benefiting humanity and the planet.

Creative manifestation differs from ordinary manifestation when it envisions something that may not have existed before, so bringing it through is an act of creation as well as an act of manifestation. It carries a crucial additional meaning of being a superior solution that meets a real Need and is not just a novelty, or a self-serving action. It says that receiving Guidance* comes first. Choosing to act on that, you must have a well-formed Intention* to create. Taking the approach shown here gives you a useful combination of techniques synthesizing several cultural traditions for an effective process of manifesting guidance into physical reality. It also uses archetypal psychology and archetypal images to aid your creative work. It isn’t simple, but neither are you, and neither is your new reality. ‘Simple’ won’t work.

You can expect that once you have developed an initial sense of this process, then the Logos* of your Project—the energy, rationale, flow and content of what your Higher Self* wants to have manifested—may continue without needing to do daily spiritual practices of the Mandalas* shown here. However, you should plan to renew that inner contact at least once a week; and during some times in your creative process, it will work best to do the spiritual practices described here as a daily practice. Creative Manifestation comes in many phases, so the process you follow will shift over time. This manual will describe the process, and how some of its phases vary according to kinds of manifestation you are doing.

The first and foremost aspect of this set of practices is that it’s an active and very practical extension of meditation practices for guidance, and that it is designed to energize and focus your efforts. The first mandala shown has a long discussion of how to make guidance work. If you are an experienced meditator, you may soon be surprised to feel pushed by your inner guidance for ‘getting on with the manifestation,’ but this does not mean you should hurry, only that you need to work more diligently to take in the Logos—the words, image and rationale for what you are doing—and give more time to it.

Creative Manifestation

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” Michelangelo Buonarotti

Creative manifestation is always about going beyond the conventional boundaries in the manner of Practical Wisdom. And that requires setting our aim high enough to be worthy of our High Purpose—but not so high as to be unachievable in the longer run. ‘Aiming high’ often means having a good strategy, doing a project in stages, and using Green Tara’s magnetizing manifestation to recruit lots of help both in manifesting the project and in spreading it where it needs to go.

Creative Manifestation is the process of bringing a vision, inspiration, design, or a big creative idea through from the realm of the Imaginal into the everyday physical and social world. Poets, artists and musicians draw from this all the time to produce their works. Another form of this lies in the invention of new information-based software and electronic devices. In these times, we are going to see that capability can be extended to allow practically any strong intention based in higher consciousness to be manifested in physical, psychological and social reality, i.e., in the everyday world.

The ‘Imaginal’ is not at all what is called ‘imaginary’ i.e., unreal and illusionary. Rather it is a realm of images, forming visions of real entities, possibilities, or inventions, seen through the organ of perception known as creative imagination, or active imagination. It envisions, or ‘sees’ inwardly a whole realm of existence, ontologically real, that is intermediate between the physical world of the senses and the abstract world of mathematics and ideal Platonic forms. That realm is called the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. It seems to carry most of the archetypal forms and entities of our collective past: gods and goddesses, angels and dragons, visionary landscapes, a host of strange things from our shamanic, archaic and mythic past. It may also carry new designs destined for our more spiritual future. Working with it in a transformational vein we can do soul-making. But it also can help us re-make the Earth, and indeed in our time of a cascade of crises, we will really need to do so…

Almost anyone can experience glimpses of the imaginal world in transitional states between sleeping and waking, and once they train perception, can return to it again and again, extending dreams and interacting with archetypes. Meditators train themselves to visualize such forms in many spiritual traditions, and are often shocked to find that they can and do reproduce very precisely the same vision of the same being and/or the same place that other people had in other times and places far removed from them. So: It not only seems real, it is real. Meditators from the same tradition are able to recognize and comment on one another’s imaginal visions, especially if they have artistic ability and can precisely draw what they saw in their inner eye. [See ‘Creative Manifestation from the Imaginal World’ below]

Creative Manifestation is a real process of creation, not something fanciful or ideological. There’s little or no wishful thinking or passive daydreaming in this. It is not the lazy person’s approach, for it is often hard work. But it is creative, and it does produce novelty in the world, and every worthwhile invention has done some version of manifestation from idea to reality. The point to the guidance from the Creative Manifestation Project is to help you do it—often with others—without stumbling or folly. The term ‘with others’ may surprise you, for a common myth of conventional culture is that real manifestation is the product of lone dreamers, or lone genius inventors. And some esoteric teachers will talk about your need to keep it all private and secret. These are both mistakes.

Often from the very first stage, Creative Manifestation is an intensely social process of both creative and practical work, often involving many people, from the most visionary to the most practical. Indeed, a few will be generalists who hold the whole process in mind. But some will be specialists who can cope with only one or two parts of the process, such as ‘holding the dream,’ or ‘making the design,’ or ‘making the plan,’ or ‘making the strategy,’ or ‘raising the money,’ or ‘finding investors,’ or ‘doing the legal work,’ or ‘managing the workers,’ or ‘doing the production work,’ or ‘selling the result to the everyday world.’ Yet, all are needed now, and this manifestation toolkit expects their contribution.

A second stage of creative manifestation is often needed for your new creation, to make many copies of it, so that many people are ‘magnetized’ to it: hearing about it, feeling drawn to it, and drawn to pass it on to others. That second stage of manifestation adds meaning and depth to our physical, social and cultural worlds by spreading many manifestations far and wide, by many different means. The Tibetan Buddhist goddess Tara is essential to this stage.

A third stage of manifestation is where the new creation draws others into dealing with manifestation from the imaginal world, so that their own process of real manifestation is triggered in a creative process that amplifies itself and grows in new ways quite unpredictable to our egoic minds.

In reality, our planet is in such danger that what we need now is ALL of who we are, and can be, and ALL of what that offers. For reality is a full spectrum from the world of spirit, to the Imaginal of vision and intuition, to the physical world of concrete things and practical action. Nothing less will do for real, successful manifestation than a full spectrum of reality. The whole process must be honored.

Creative Manifestation focuses primarily on bringing something new into the world that your Higher Self sees as valuable to objective reality, which is far higher and wider than conventional reality. That almost always means that it is intensely meaningful, and probably will change your life. Our first sense of it often comes to us seemingly unbidden, though if we reflect on it, we can see that we were open and available to it. But our ego does not get to control the timing, the circumstances, or the content of the vision, the insight or the guidance. Manifestation does not pander to our deficiency needs.

Creative manifestation often starts with an inner vision, a crucial insight into the nature of reality, or guidance that comes from higher awareness, and it is “made real” in the physical world by creative action that draws capability and power from Spirit*. It is not a magical process of something just popping into existence without our efforts, but something that takes effort, and time—sometimes a lot of both. If you actually do nothing and are content with wishful thinking, then nothing results.

Creative manifestation depends on spiritual and practical insight into what is actually possible, plus creative problem-solving and invention, plus repeatedly touching back into guidance over time to keep correcting your course of action. It requires skillful means, concerted effort, various kinds of cooperative efforts, working toward goals and so on. You must do those things for it to work.

Yes, creative manifestation really does have unusual, out-of-the-ordinary aspects as described here. They include deepening your insight into what may be created and how to do it. They also include improving your ability to represent your insight about what’s possible to other people. It has the capability of drawing others into your process, making their responses more positive, because of your insights, purposes, efforts and newfound charisma. High purpose is often contagious, and a great deal of manifestation depends on that positive contagion. And lots of amazing synchronicities occur. Spirit is alive and well in this world, yet it has its own reality. That reality is neither pre-modern plus magical, nor modern materialism. We shall see what it is as we go. It does require you to cultivate and use non-ordinary states of consciousness, and to be willing to be personally changed by the process.

What may be hardest for your ego is that it must give up control over the process. You are often required to allow manifestation to happen on its own timing, in its own way, by actors and forces that surprise you. This can set off all sorts of alarm bells and suspicions. The ego often desires to confound spirituality and magic, flip-flopping between two contradictory propositions: a) if it accepts magic, then that lets ego stay on top, or b) if it can reject everything about this as woo-woo stuff, then it can remain conventional and safe. With spirituality seen as clearly superior to magic, and to ego, then ego must learn to be the good servant of higher purposes, and most especially so in Creative Manifestation. This is no more negotiable than the law of gravity: you must be willing to do it that way.

The fact is that this is a very particular form of skillful means, and first you need to learn that skill. Then once you’ve mastered the skill, you can feel free to be playful with it, and to invent your own new themes and variations on the skillful means of Creative Manifestation. You may even manifest new ways to do manifestation!

Concepts Essential to Successful Manifestation

Creative Manifestation is a poorly understood subject in the secular modern world and it draws on a large array of interrelated concepts you may not be familiar with. So I’m going to give those first in a set of model sentences, and then explain exactly what each idea means and contributes to the process.

It often will take a relatively skillful practice of Guidance Meditation* to get all the details of What is the Need*, what High Purpose* it serves, how to fill out the Vision* of the Possible*, how to Display Your Vision* to others, how to Bring the Project Through* into physical reality, and How long it takes*. At that point you’ll be in the flow of it all.

The stances you must take at various stages of manifestation are you first need to be Receptive* in the act of taking in the Guidance, then Work with Energies*, to be Active* in your Masterful* practice of Manifestation,*then Allow* the universe to manifest through you.

*These are all defined in the next few pages, and you can also refer to them in the Glossary at the end.

There’s more on the Theory at the end. For now, let’s unpack that paragraph and see what it means:

Manifestation is a process of bringing an idea, vision or possibility from the Imaginal World into physical or social reality in the physical world of material objects and human actions. The Imaginal Realm is an ontologically real domain of existence that is intermediate between the physical world and the world of spirit. Things that are manifested are most often envisioned in that domain first, and are brought into the physical world by the processes of manifestation. Creative Manifestation differs from ordinary manifestation in that it has envisioned something that may not have existed before, so that bringing it through is an act of creation as well as an act of manifestation. It carries a crucial additional meaning of being a superior solution that meets a real Need and is not just a novelty, or a self-serving action.

You will need to develop some skill at doing a meditation practice for guidance: In this context, it’s a special form of meditation with the objective of receiving guidance, usually from your Higher Self, symbolized in the artwork above as The Sun Absolute, but also possibly from other entities, such as angels, or Green Tara. Guidance means suggested directions to proceed in, things to try, stances or attitudes to adopt, or insights about yourself, usually coming from spiritual realms, and/or your Higher Self. It is often responses to questions, and can range from very general to highly specific. It should tell you things you didn’t know.

There are quite a few specialized Gestures of Consciousness in the various Manifestation Practices beyond Guidance and Green Tara. Every meditation practice has elements of the body, mind and spirit in it, and supposing that it is only spirit is untrue, and self-defeating. Manifestation practices are extensions of your own body image, and start with literal bodily gestures, because of the nature of bringing creations through from the Imaginal realms into physical reality, however that may work in your project. It appears that most spiritual practices are elaborations in the subtle realm upon phenomena of the brain that are in some ways quite mundane—physical gestures of the body, body images. But this also calls for refined perceptions and pattern recognition capabilities, all designed to quiet conventional egoic thought, so that you can access more subtle perceptual, emotional and intellectual capabilities. Like most of the repertoire of spiritual skills, the human population varies enormously in its native talent for this, and that talent has essentially a zero correlation with intelligence and cognitive capabilities. But it’s trainable, such that even spiritual dullards can get up to mediocrity with considerable practice and effort.

Now, an important side point for doubters and the suspicious: Meditation practices and gestures of consciousness are psycho-technologies. They work, and work well, like many craft skills, so they take a fair amount of personal discipline to practice and learn—you’ll need to practice them for at least a month. No particular belief is required on your part, and they’re especially not part of any exoteric religious belief or doctrine. The spiritual practices are laid out in as non-doctrinal and cross-cultural a way as I can manage. This is skills training, for a specific kind of purpose: creative manifestation. You don’t get to be a spiritual master, nor get inducted into any belief system, nor belong to any organization—or cult.

Oddly enough, these gestures of consciousness seem trainable in ways that are very similar to how craft skills are trainable, or art skills, music or dance are trainable. There’s a buildup of skill with practice and that’s why they’re called practices. Surprise! Yes, talent matters, but no, most people can do them. Though they work with subtle energies, they’re patterned on body-mind controls. It is crucial that creative manifestation is working with body-mind energies: both your body and attention are essential.

In creative manifestation practices, you are training your body-mind to work with a slightly different form of consciousness than is true for most prayers and meditation. There is nothing of escaping from this world into other domains of reality, and you need to be ‘in your body.’ You will extend the change process from those gestures as conscious elaborations of them, to work on your creation, on the world, and not least, on you yourself. Remember, you are bringing creations from those other domains to enrich this physical world, and are growing-up yourself with it. That’s the real change of creation.

Both you and the world will be improved by this process, and your mandala of The Sun Absolute (see mine above), symbol of your Higher Self, will serve as the guarantor of that. Connection to the Higher Self is essential to Creative Manifestation. Many spiritual and wisdom traditions describe the Higher Self as your True Self, or the linkage between your everyday egoic self (plus your subconscious mind) and ultimate reality, God. You are a ‘proper subset’ of It, in the sense that all of you is in It. It is you, and you are a small part of It—and It is far more than you. That means It connects you directly to spiritual realms and to the ground of being. This tells you of course that you must enlarge your self-identification—who you think you are. First you need a connection to It, then over time you gain a deep trust in It, and then gain knowledge of It. It is a source of vastly superior, higher-than-rational intelligence for you and your soul.

Creative Manifestation will do more than just create a result in the physical world external to you, for it is a process that can change and develop your capacities to greater wholeness. Your ego may want merely to get a manifestation result, but all of you needs to long for more. The mandala and symbolism of The Sun Absolute is in aid of that process.

For the Creative Manifestation process, you’ll want to get clear on:

1) What the Need is, which is the gap between the situation before you, and what developments are actually possible. This is usually a direct perception from a larger awareness than everyday mind, often involving recognition of some kind of pattern for which action ‘ought’ to be taken. It envisions that a certain kind of process needs to happen, or that the gap needs to be closed, or a certain goal ought to be fulfilled. And often you’ll want to know the Need of the Time as well: This is the Need as seen in terms of this time in human history, i.e., a really big ‘ought’ covering a large portion of a country, or of all of humanity, for a time period lasting generations. Seeing into it often requires a knowledge of human history, and a visionary or prophetic capability.

2) And alongside that sense of the Need should be your own sense of Purpose, or even High Purpose. Purpose is the object of a conscious intention, the reason things are done or projects undertaken. It often envisions a future state of affairs in a definite context or situation and may respond to a Need (see above). Real purposes lead to goal formation and taking actions. High Purpose is your life purpose, or spiritual purpose, serving as a major expression of value and meaning in life. It is often engaged by a major project whose success is a focus of great symbolic and practical value.

3) Then you’ll want to fill out your Vision of the Possible. You may have gotten some initial sense of it in seeing the Need, but a lot of details and features of that future state need to be brought forth and clarified. A Vision is an inner image seen in terms of Creative Imagination, sometimes in the Imaginal World. It may range from something dreamlike to something quite technical and realistic. But a Vision of the Possible is a vision or image of a possible future state of whatever system (person, group, organization, territory, country, the planet) you focus on when you first see the Need (see above). This needs to be framed in terms of real possibilities at a future date, not fantasies or wishful thinking. The more it includes the actual processes of getting there, and the processes that make it work, the better.

4) Reasonably soon in the Creative Manifestation process you need to consider how to Display Your Vision to others, and Guidance from your Sun and from Green Tara will be very helpful. Display a Vision refers to the fact that in many forms of manifestation it is not enough to have a Vision of the Possible, for it is necessary to find a way to display the whole system of it to others through stories, visionary language, new designs and pictures. That’s because many others must cooperate and often actively collaborate in bringing the Vision through into physical reality.

5) As you work with the Creative Manifestation process, and especially as you bring others into the process, you must consider how to Bring the Project Through into physical reality. Bringing a Project Through refers to the stage when a manifestation process has visualized something new and desirable in the Imaginal World. Then it should be seen as ‘already real,’ so it is treated by expert manifestors as something to ‘bring through’ unchanged in its essential qualities from the other world into the physical world. This can be making initial drawings and models, it can be telling the story of what you intend in creative ways, it can be making and trying out prototype versions of your creation, etc. Once in the physical world, further manifestation may need to adapt it to ‘facts in the situation’ including ways of framing it, packaging it, popularizing it, or advertising it to suit many people.

6) As you consider the resources of time, money, materials and people you need, two crucial features of the manifestation project are How long a project takes, and the Support you need. The real time taken by a manifestation project is often much longer than its official start to finish. It usually starts much earlier with your early guidance and visioning, and it often has a much longer life. You must plan for it. Heed the voice of experience with new projects: Make your best optimistic guess and then multiply it by three.

All that is just to get you started, and into the flow of creative manifestation, and as that unfolds every Creative Manifestation process starts to become unique. From the use of the Flowering of the Absolute onward, how your project unfolds, and which other mandalas you need will depend on what’s going on.

Let’s look at the stances you must take at various stages of manifestation:

a) You first need to be Receptive* in the act of taking in the guidance. The receptive stance is ‘letting go, letting be’ in the sense of ‘patiently waiting to see how any particular process unfolds naturally, and trusting the process without trying to actively control it.’ Your guidance meditation has to become highly sensitive to the nuances of what you are getting. Do poke and prod at it to get it all as fully as possible.

b) Then manifestation will go much better if you Work with Energies, including Chi Gung. The energies referred to here are subtle energies and bodily energies, not the physical energies of non-living things or fuels. The oriental names for them are prana and chi. Western materialism usually discounts these energies as unreal and fantasies, but to do creative manifestation you must be able to sense them, and to do it well, you need to be able to work with them. Chi Gung is a Chinese practice for mobilizing and intensifying the life energies (Chi) of your body-mind. How to do it is described in a later section. It is more often directed at personal health issues, but will work to aid manifestation processes in general. The point is that often in everyday life we fall into low-energy patterns, which are inadequate to the Need.

c) You’ll do this to be able to be Active in your Masterful practice of Manifestation. Active vs. Receptive is a distinction first made in the I Ching 4,000 years ago. In the present era it is more than complementary qualities: Yang and Yin, male and female. It can be a stance toward life or situations, a fundamental quality of objects and of human character, and general spiritual principles. The active stance is one of ‘leaning forward, ready to act energetically, with some degree of control over processes.’ Receptive is described above, as letting things unfold by themselves, and taking in information.

d) As manifestation successfully unfolds then you’ll need to Allow the universe to manifest through you. Allowing is letting be, letting go of control over a process, allowing matters to unfold an their own dynamic and pace, trusting in the process of some part of the universe. Before this can happen with success, it is normal that a lot of preparation, coordination and set-up work will have already been done.

5) Finally, and for many people, most important, manifestation is impossible without Love (which is not romantic love, but Big Love). You must love the Purpose of the manifestation, and its potential outcome, and you must also love, and be playful with, the process of it. Real manifestation is a joyful process. (See the discussion in the Love of the Absolute.) Many women will want to take on these practices right after learning the Green Tara practices. Many men may emphasize Skill first, but also need to pick up Love.

Be very clear that the stances you take cannot be merely something satisfying to your ego or responding to fear. Ego is your everyday mind, which is socially conditioned and habitual, concerned to keep you safe by restricting activities to familiar routines and satisfactions. It is often selfish, greedy, and power-oriented, with little ability to love, and prone to indulge in negative emotions such as anger and hatred. It is also biased toward short time horizons, easy rewards, and narrow concerns. Ego projects its disowned and inferior parts on disliked others rather than own up to deficiencies and negative traits.

Creative manifestation needs to be what your Higher Self wants, for its sense of High Purpose must lead the process. Guidance-based manifestation is very different from magical thinking, or performing magical rituals. In the 20th century, a lot has been said, written and claimed about ‘manifesting abundance’ that amounts to magical thinking. Magical thinking is immature thinking, especially believing that matters can occur because we merely wish for them to occur, without a physical, social, intellectual or spiritual causal process. ‘Magical’ is not the same as spiritual, for it is the work of an egoic psyche, whether traditional or modern, for it often talks of ‘attracting’ something our ego wants, usually from a sense of lack, something missing in our life, by greedy, status-and-power-hungry motives trying to fill a painful psychological hole, or by an attempt to compensate for some felt sense of inferiority. Whatever brings it up, none of that will produce a true manifestation—except in your fantasy life.

‘Abundance’ comes after you change, not before. And no, just changing your mind on some topic is not enough. You must act in positive ways, and must change, and both that action and that personal change need to come from your Higher Self, not from your ego’s striving to feel real—which it can’t.

No laws of nature are violated by creative manifestation, for it takes personal energy, using good information, materials being skillfully brought into form, and often caring collaboration among many people. Manifestation based on guidance operates from a spirit of service, is mature and is based on some mastery of spiritual forms and inner work. It is explicitly not greedy, selfish, power-oriented and ego-serving. That is, the impulse comes to you as a big idea and vision from a particular realm of existence, the Imaginal Realm, as defined above. Its Purpose must be to serve the larger good, not just for your own benefit. Still, part of manifestation is getting support for projects, also based on guidance, and that normally includes support for you, so you can expect support from the universe for worthwhile efforts. Along the way, the nurturing of hard-working, creative and altruistic contributors to those higher goals is a vital purpose of manifestation. And this process will smooth the way toward true manifestation.

What Creative Manifestation is good for

There are a number of major paths of manifestation that these practices are good for. Such a ‘path’ is a time-bound sequence of manifestation activities, usually going through several stages where different kinds of activities are needed for success. The metaphor of taking a path implies of course that there are other paths of action that you could have taken, with different results.

• Creative manifestation projects in the arts, writing, performance, science, technology and entrepreneurship are the foremost kinds of manifestation, but not the only ones.
• Visionary social and environmental projects that involve new social forms, new technologies and new ways of dealing with planetary problems are today at the the head of the list of the Need of Our Time, especially those that can help with the looming climate crisis.
• Developing resources and support for an ongoing manifestation project—and for yourself!—are vital functions of a good manifestation practice, so long as greed and selfishness are kept out of the way. This includes capacity building in the people in your project, as well as in yourself, especially developing an ability to manage matters and handle complexity.
• Both psychological and spiritual development in yourself and in others, especially when they are combined with healing, capacity-building or teaching, are all vital functions of manifestation. So long as they serve higher purposes, these developmental processes are always a good thing, at not only the personal level, but also small group, organizational, societal, and planetary levels. Note: normally you must balance the inner and the outer.
• Conflict resolution and peace-making are also developmental, in that they lead to maturation and impulse control, and they serve higher purposes by limiting damage and destruction. The basic approach is to manifest harmony, and aid the positive purposes of all involved, but also to remove obstacles to peace-making as in the point following:
• Removal of obstacles to human and ecological progress is important developmental work if such obstacles come from blind, foolish or criminal enterprises that hinder or damage larger purposes. A good test for the validity of the removal of obstacles is whether it is vindictive and revengeful, or if it ends obstruction, then takes matters into healing, reconciliation, more authenticity and autonomy. But also restoration, as in restoring democracy from dictatorship, or ecosystems from industrial damage.

The upliftment of humanity is the all-encompassing Purpose of the most successful creative manifestation projects, where humanity is defined as not-separate from Nature. The restoration of the planetary ecology, and the building of a good planetary civilization may well be a primary purpose in this, and many smaller, shorter term purposes and projects flow into it. A planetary civilization is an emerging world-wide planetary integration encompassing the whole planet, that can serve as a ‘nest of support’ for many diverse human cultures, a support for restoring Nature, and the empowering of civil society institutions. That is in contrast to present-day exploitive forms of globalization that operate merely to integrate commercial, financial, and politico-military domination.

Projects of creative manifestation are examples of practical wisdom, which works to expand the goals, purpose and background context of practical action. Wisdom is both perceiving and understanding reality in effective ways, and then acting both benevolently and beneficently, to both will and manifest the Good. From the ancient Greeks onward, practical wisdom has rightly been considered to be an excellent level of consciousness, thought and action. Practical wisdom (phronesis) perceives and understands practical realities, especially social, business and political ones, and acts skillfully from that. It is more skillful than conventional, habitual actions, and both are more skillful than folly. Aristotle’s practitioner of practical wisdom not only knows the Good, for individuals and community, but wants to achieve it.

Identifying ‘expansion of context’ with practical wisdom means you take on more mature and insightful stances, with larger purposes and larger consciousness, wider and more encompassing horizons, the bigger picture and the longer view in time, deeper and more spiritual understandings, using many ways of knowing, more perceptive and discriminating observations, authenticity in relationships, and more just, humane judgments. Growing into wisdom is a good project for you to take on in manifestation. Moreover it can be applied to groups, small and large. It’s important that you know a key aspect: No one becomes wise alone. You become wise by working in relationship to others.

One early sign that lets you know High Purposes are coming into your life is repeated dreams reflecting symbols and purposes of a positive creative project, another is repeated ideas and themes that arise in meditations, and of course when an inner sense tells you that you are in a new phase of your life, often after a life-changing experience. Perhaps the most telling sign is when you start feeling concerns for all the children of the future, for the whole of humanity, or for the whole ecology of the planet. Or you can simply keep declaring to your guidance in meditation that you are available for some High Purpose, and it is sure to come up with something significant for you to manifest.

I once asked my guidance why I kept getting suggestions for big projects from guidance, undoubtedly with an elevated sense of pride. The deflating response was, “Oh, it’s not that you are so good. It’s that you are willing!” Yes, you have to be willing to allow your Higher Self to manifest things through you.

Paul H. Ray, Ph.D. is Director of the Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture at Wisdom University (www.wisdomuniversity.org) He is co-author of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World.

He designed and analyzed the original survey research that identified the Cultural Creatives for 20 years. In business, government and academe, he has headed research on over 100 major research and consulting projects, and written reports on them all. Sponsors and clients include many government agencies and large corporations.

His current research, and writing, includes values surveys, and theoretical and practical work on the design of a wisdom civilization, “The Emerging Planetary Wisdom Culture” and “The Practical Wisdom Paradigm.” He works with NGOs, with new political groups and governments, and with green and socially responsible businesses. One of his more interesting new projects is the Creative Manifestation Project, which helps artists, writers, entrepreneurs and activists

He has a BA in Anthropology from Yale University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, then Chief of Policy Research on Energy Conservation in the Canadian government, then Executive Vice President of American LIVES, Inc.

Sherry Ruth Anderson, PhD. was educated at Goucher College and the University of Toronto, where she was an associate professor and head of psychological research at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. She is the author of numerous articles in psychology and co-author of the The Feminine Face of God, and The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World.

Sherry started delving into the matter of growing old by the time she turned fifty. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Atlantic City, New Jersey, she was a curious kid, staggering home from the library with towers of books in her arms. Wanting to discover other worlds.

By thirty-five, working as a research psychologist and raising a family in Toronto, she was looking not so much for escape but for penetrating questions. In her forties, settled in Northern California, she was writing about questions that wouldn't go away. First, there was the best selling The Feminine Face of God: The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women (Bantam, 1991), with Patricia Hopkins, and then category best seller The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World (Harmony/Random House, 2000), with Paul H. Ray.

Her latest book, also with questions at the core, is Ripening Time: Inside Stories for Aging with Grace (Changemakers Books, 2013). And there's a short film A Woman's Descent to the Sacred available through YouTube.

Since 2000, Sherry has also been a teacher of inner work that is, as you might have guessed, devoted to asking deep questions (the Diamond Approach to Spiritual Development).

Online Inquiry Groups and Retreats for 2013 in ALASKA

with Sherry Ruth Anderson

Have you ever wondered if there is a way to find the deep current of your life... and a way to follow it?

Have you noticed that you can turn towards your experience with such care, such lively interest, that the essence of what you are reveals itself?

And have you discovered that this revelation, this unfolding, is not just a sometime thing, but is continuous and reliable

—once you learn to open to the soul-level questions of your life?

If you have touched into such intimacy with the truth of your life and want to go farther, or if you long to do this, you are invited to participate in “A Year of Looking Deeply,” in 2013. We will have online teaching and inquiry groups about every two months, and two retreats: “Five Flavors of Inquiry and the Practice of Presence,” May 15-19 in Anchorage (non-residential) and “Love and Courage,” September 10-15 in Halibut Cove (at the Stillpoint Retreat Center).

The online groups begin in September 2012 for those who would like to get started with the inquiry process. You do not need to participate in the online groups to attend the retreats and each retreat will be free-standing, not depending on the prior retreat. We are finalizing the details now about costs and inquiry group online dates, but do let us know if you are interested. You can write to Sherry directly at sherrygreywolf@gmail.com.

Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D., is a speaker, a best selling author and teaches The Diamond Approach to Inner Development in North America and Europe. She was a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Medical School and a senior research scientist at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry.

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