Our country’s current racial and cultural crises have invoked a dire need to reexamine our understanding of race and reflect on our own blind spots. We invite you to join Aligned Center teacher, Greg Thomas, to delve into our crisis of meaning and the meaning of crisis in his timely new nine-week series, Cultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos.
As a culture we’re coming to understand the value of emotional intelligence in our personal lives and interpersonal relationships. In this class, Greg explores culture as another form of intelligence--a discipline of human values, feelings and behavior that enrich our own lives and that of our fellow citizens (and even our opponents). He identifies three stages of cultural intelligence: cultural literacy, culture-in-action, and personal application via conscious culture.
Emotional intelligence, social intelligence, scientific intelligence and spiritual intelligence provide essential insights into the human experience, and Greg investigates how cultural intelligence may be a final piece of this cosmic puzzle to co-evolve a better, brighter and more coherent future for our families, neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions, nations, and the global community.
Greg suggests that the next stage of human development demands cultural intelligence as a guide, as a vision and story for a heightened quality of life.
Join us for this nine-week series on Wednesday nights from 7-9pm EST beginning on October 14, 2020.
The path to cultural intelligence is paved by our consciousness, which is an embodied cognition. Our bodies house our experience, memories, feelings and our vibratory connection to nature, which is biology incarnate. Culture extends our natural biology, like a prosthetic, through tools and meanings, which are artifacts of consciousness. The evolution of culture and consciousness is a path to 21st century enlightenment.
Culture as an integrated whole has nine basic concepts: philosophical, artistic, educational, psychological, historical, anthropological, sociological, ecological, and biological. A short review of each area will greatly advance our cultural intelligence.
Large-scale symbolic patterns and agreements on values and priorities by groups of people across spans of time are called ‘worldviews’ or ‘codes.’ In the West, Integral Theory suggests that the most prevalent worldviews are Traditional, Modern, Post-Modern. We complete our cultural literacy by feeling into how these worldviews influence most of the conflicts we see today, especially phenomena called the “culture wars.”
Gaining a new paradigm that transcends while including the best aspects of the three prevalent worldviews, will point a way forward and upward.
European civilization has undoubtedly been the most influential in the development of the Modern worldview. The historical legacy of Modernity has been described as both a dignity and a disaster. We’ll pursue why beginning with the Axial Age and continue on through the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, which brought great value to humanity along with colonization, world wars, and democracy vs. totalitarianism.
In this session, we’ll look beyond the frames of worldviews to specific metaphors, attitudes, ideals, theories, and styles that make up American culture. Metaphors such as the collage and the jazz jam session; attitudes such as a tragi-comic sensibility; ideals such as equality; theories such as pragmatism, and the vernacular style of culture that makes the United States a creative dynamo, the most powerful nation on earth. For the sake of humanity, can America become the wisest nation?
The ethnogenetic group called by various names—”Black Americans” is the preferred term of use here—is a special case of culture-in-action. In a predicament in which economic, political, and social freedom wasn’t possible during enslavement due to caste and race, culture became the primary focus of life and development. We’ll pursue the sacred and secular dimensions of this cultural formation as well as the values found in the developmental model of folk-pop-fine art, the primary example of which is the cultural technology called Jazz Music.
Our brain, nervous system and emotions work greatly to add to our storehouse of cultural knowledge. How we feel and think and behave over time becomes mood and disposition, attitude and personality, character and personal culture. Conscious culture uses these understandings to leverage culture for our advantage rather than being used by shadows, systems, and society’s finite games.
Confronting cultural shadows, the traumas passed on via the experiences not only of ourselves as individuals but of our ancestors, is a key practice of Conscious Culture. Healing and integrating wounds can unleash our cultural potential and free us to enable and enact the next phases of human evolution. This is the larger meaning of “transcending race”: moving beyond the limitations of our human species to date.
The essence of the living Cosmos is a unity, a uni-verse of Source, Being, Presence. Being transmutes into Becoming, a rhythmic unfolding of expansion and contraction. The Cosmos births Life, an infinite game. Life manifests in physical form as Biology. Culture extends biology through meaning and tools. Culture, biology, and life derive from and extend to the living Cosmos. Culture extends, elaborates and refines evolution by unfolding the infinite within the finite. Your soul integrates your connection to Source as culture integrates the connection to the Cosmos.
Greg Thomas’ nine-week series, Cultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos, offers crucial insight into the nature of race and culture. Greg makes the intangible tangible by dissecting the underlying cultural issues that contribute to our current crises, as he guides our attention to real and concrete ways to develop cultural intelligence--the final piece of a great cosmic puzzle to co-evolve a better and brighter global community.
(Weekly talks will be recorded for student viewing should a class be missed.)
Greg Thomas is the CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project and has over 25 years of experience as a writer, producer, broadcaster and educator. His work has been featured in The Root, All About Jazz, Salon, London’s Guardian Observer, the Village Voice, Africana, American Legacy, Savoy, New York’s Daily News, as well as the scholarly journal Callaloo. Greg was the Editor-in-Chief of Harlem World magazine from 2003-2006. His work is informed by Integral Theory, the philosophies of authors Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, and draws upon the rich history of the African American experience and Jazz.
"The important leadership skill of cultural intelligence can help heal the growing rift in the fabric of American society. My friend and colleague Greg Thomas is an excellent teacher of this emerging new form of intelligence whose work I endorse."
— Steve McIntosh, author of Developmental Politics, and co- author of Conscious Leadership
"Greg Thomas is truly exceptional in his ability to guide us in the open, exciting territory of cultural intelligence. Whether our differences are in the domain of race, geography, art, or human development, he will open your mind and expand your ability to appreciate, relate, and work more effectively across human cultures."
— Diane Musho Hamilton Roshi, mediator, facilitator, and author of The Zen of You & Me and co-author, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart
"As a research cosmologist who engages with Jazz, Greg Thomas has been a unique source of knowledge and wisdom to me. Greg commands a deep and nuanced understanding of the vast landscape of cultural literacy and makes connections that are awe-inspiring. I am excited to see this course because it will certainly open new ways to be creative in an interconnected cultural and cosmic landscape."
— Stephon Alexander, Professor of Physics, Brown University and author, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe
"In these times of fractious political and ideological polarization fueled by technological manipulation, cultural healing and remediation has never been more crucial or urgent. In his new course, Greg Thomas connects his in-depth understanding of evolutionary and cultural know-how with soul craft. Speaking directly to our hurting hearts and deep collective yearnings to fulfill the unmet promises of Modernity, he shows us how to be cultural improvisers who are creating equitably shared conditions for the emergence of planetary wisdom and flourishing."
— Lisa Norton, Professor of Design Leadership, Parsons School of Design Strategies, The New School
"Greg has the unique ability to weave history, theory and art in a way that provides new insights into culture. He delivered one of the highest-attended workshops at the Rebel Wisdom Festival, as well as a popular talk around race, culture and Black American history. Both as a facilitator and a speaker he embodies a truly integral perspective, keen insight, and infectious warmth."
— Alexander Beiner, co-founder, Rebel Wisdom
The Aligned Center is your home online, and on the banks of the beautiful Hudson River in New York, for classes, community and mentorship in Aligned Living. Visit us at www.thealignedcenter.com to learn more about our classes in Mind-Body Awareness, Work & Wealth Abundance, Heartfelt Community and Knowledge of Systems.
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