It's so inspiring to see that our work here at
What Is Enlightenment? is beginning to influence and
affect individuals and groups on a truly global scale. My senior
editors are slowly but surely becoming thought leaders in their
own right as a result of the work that we are all doing here
together. Last week, Jessica Roemischer, author of the widely
influential piece on Spiral Dynamics, returned from a trip to an
international conference on peace and reconciliation in Bali,
where she was a featured lecturer and also got an exclusive
interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu (to be featured in our
next issue). Craig Hamilton has become an authority on the
emerging field of collective intelligence since writing his
groundbreaking piece in our May-July 2004 issue and has since
been invited near and far to lecture on the subject. Almost
daily, we hear from different circles about the profound effect
his article has had. Carter Phipps, the author of the seminal
feature piece, “Is God a Pacifist?” has since
moderated panels in Boston and London with world-renowned
experts on conflict resolution. And our collective minds were
blown when we received a very warm letter of thanks from a Major
Michael Ridgway for sending a box of magazines with Carter's
article to the Sunni Triangle. (“I'd like to let you know
that the box of WIE magazines sent to the desert here
in Iraq was a monstrous hit—folks loved the article, 'Is
God a Pacifist?' The box of magazines went like condoms at a
homecoming . . .”) Through her extensive research,
Elizabeth Debold, while writing the feature piece for the issue
you're holding in your hands, met the conveners of the Whole
Systems Change Summit—an international group of
leading-edge business consultants and evolutionary
thinkers—and inspired them to hold their most recent
meeting at our headquarters here in western Massachusetts. She
is also directing the new WIE section of the Masters
Program in Conscious Evolution at The Graduate Institute. And
after a recent lecture I gave in New York, I found myself
surrounded by a United Nations staffer, the president of an NGO
affiliated with the UN, and a presidential candidate for the
Ivory Coast, who invited me to speak to representatives of
different tribes there about the evolution of consciousness!
The main reason we took the plunge from a semiannual to a
quarterly publication was because we wanted to look more deeply
into the relationship between enlightenment and the evolution of
culture and, even more importantly, to see if we could help to
influence the way people think about spirituality, politics,
business, science, art, health, and just about anything else we
can come up with in this “mediated”
twenty-first-century world. Faster than we ever could have imagined, that
is actually beginning to happen, and I know I can speak for all of us
here when I say that it feels like we've just begun!