Quick: “masculine”–take ten seconds and say the words that come to mind that describe masculine. Next, do the same with “feminine.” That was the first exercise that my friend and colleague Cindy Wigglesworth and I asked participants to do in the breakout session that we led at the Integral Leadership in Action conference (October 15-18). [...]
A Glimpse of Nonduality
July 11th, 2009 by Elizabeth Debold· 77 Comments · Consciousness, Evolutionaries, Spirituality, Uncategorized, meditation
We are in the throes of completing the next issue of EnlightenNext. (Doesn’t it seem like you just got the last one??) I’m currently editing an interview that we did with the spiritual teacher, Aliya Haeri, a Western convert to Sufism, which is Islam’s mystical side.
Recently, Haeri was interviewed by Chris Parish and Kyrsten Perry, from [...]
Women, Courage & Dignity
June 21st, 2009 by Elizabeth Debold· 12 Comments · Culture, Gender, News, Politics
I was just sitting down to write a memorial for Jacqueline Péry D’Alincourt (1919-2009), whose courage during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II was beyond measure, when I read Carter Phipp’s most recent blog post that contained a quote from a young Iranian woman on the eve of the June 20 protests against the election of [...]
Tags:Ahmadinejad·autonomy·choice·courage·dignity·freedom·Holocaust denial·Iran·Iran election protests·Jacqueline Péry D'Alincourt·Jews·Legion of Honor·Nazis·Neda·Ravensbruck·Sisters in Resistance·Sophie's Choice·women
What Do Women Want? Again…
June 1st, 2009 by Elizabeth Debold· 13 Comments · Cultural Evolution, Culture, Gender, Uncategorized
Sorry about using that tired question ”what do women want?” to start off this post. Freud asked it–likening women’s consicousness to a dark continent both unexplored and presumably unknowable–and every exasperated male writer and far too many marketers have used it since. But the question is popping up again. In a recent New York Times op-ed column entitled [...]
Tags:freedom·Freud·happiness·Ross Douthat·selling virginity·sexual freedom·women·women's liberation·women's movement
Will Androids Ever Feel Real? The Turing Test and Cultural Autism
May 25th, 2009 by Elizabeth Debold· 4 Comments · Atheism, Consciousness, Culture, Materialism, Philosophy, Pop Culture, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Technology, Uncategorized
Have you ever heard of the Turing test? Years ago, I encountered it in Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter’s 1981 book The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. It’s bugged me ever since. Put forth by Alan Turing in a 1950 paper on computing and intelligence, Turing proposed a simple and apparently straightforward way to assess whether [...]
Tags:Alan Turing·androids·autism·cognition·computers·Daniel Dennett·Douglas Hofstadter·intelligence·John Searle·Mike King·new atheists·postsecularism·Turing test
Divine Feminine Alert No. 1
May 16th, 2009 by Elizabeth Debold· 5 Comments · Culture, Divine Feminine, Gender
I’ve decided to create an ongoing series of posts to challenge one of the most popular beliefs of our era: that women have a profoundly different value set than men, and that embracing these particularly feminine values will change the world. Men, and masculine thinking, have dominated the world and made a mess, so now women, and the feminine, [...]
What Is Spirituality?
May 9th, 2009 by Elizabeth Debold· 6 Comments · Consciousness, Culture, Integral Philosophy, Materialism, Religion, Spirituality
Today Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber did their first audio internet-based seminar—bringing the much loved Guru and Pandit dialogues from EnlightenNext magazine live into homes around the world. (There were over 600 who signed up for the seminar, hailing from all over the globe—including New Zealand, Dubai, India, and China.) These two pioneering thinkers worked [...]
Tags:Consciousness·Eros·Ground of Being·Guru and Pandit·Integral·liberals·Materialism·Nonduality·postmodernity·Spirit·transrational
Vimala Thakar: Liberation Beyond Gender
May 5th, 2009 by Elizabeth Debold· 6 Comments · Consciousness, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Spirituality
Why don’t we know more about Vimala Thakar? I’ve just written a memoriam for our next issue about Vimala, a fiercely independent enlightened sage who pioneered a truly integrated form of inner and outer transformation, and the more I think about who she was and what she stands for, the more strange it becomes that [...]
Tags:divine feminine·enlightenment·J. Krishnamurti·Nonduality·Souls in Transition·spiritual revolution·Vimala Thakar·women's liberation
Andrew Cohen, Editor in Chief
Carter Phipps, Executive Editor
Elizabeth Debold, Senior Editor
Ross Robertson, Senior Assoc. Editor
Tom Huston, Senior Assoc. Editor
Joel Pitney, Associate Editor
Megan Cater, Assistant Editor