Guided by aliveness

  This week I helped organize a national conference on sustainable development in teacher education (Universities Norway). Teacher educators shared experience and knowledge about how to integrate UNs sustainable development goals into teacher education. One important subject discussed was the need to use as a starting point the personal responsibility of the students and pupils to make changes towards sustainable development in their everyday life, but at the same time not forget the bigger global picture and the need for fundamental structural change. There was also a focus on children and young people as the guides towards a future for the rich and overspending countries where the good life is not connected to increasing wealth. In this perspective its interesting to see this new international initiative, called the inner developmental goals, which are connected to UNs sustainable development goals: https://youtu.be/xsB5ci-rgGg Inner Development Goals Important thinkers like ...

  I recently spent a day in Tivoli in Copenhagen with my family, and it was so much fun. An experience of joy and flow, the whole day was focused on play. Play is presence in the moment, and I noticed an intense quality of presence being there, even standing in line waiting for the next ride was somehow nourishing and magical.  W.B. Yeats said: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” I think this is what may happen through play - our senses grow sharper, and we notice that the cliff is actually a troll who became stone, and the tree is talking to us, and the frog is a prince waiting to be kissed. Our awareness expand and the ability to perceive becomes more inclusive. We leave our habitual patterns of perceiving reality and open up to new possibilities. I imagine the possibilities of transformation are endless when we set out on the journey of expanding our awareness and ability to notice more. When we change our perception we cha...

  Peter Kingsley is a professor in philosophy at Cambridge. His research interest is the presocratic thinkers, first and foremost Empedocles and Parmenides.  Something I love about Kingsley is that he is an acknowledged academic researcher from one of the highest ranked universities in the world, and at the same time he publishes books which are unacceptable in a scientific perspective. They probably have made him an outcast in the academic world. Kingsley is a mystic, and his perspectives are not rational, they represent a break with mainstream consensus culture, or what Kingsley calls ‘the myth of rationality’. His views may be seen as madness, but from Kingsley’s point of view, the mainstream normality is the madness.     His most important book in recent years is Catafalque.   Carl Jung and the end of humanity. It’s a dark book. Kingsley argues that western culture is dead, and because western culture is so dominant in the world, this means the end o...