Unlimited Love:Self-Transcendence and Personal- Social Transformation
A participatory learning approach to the future of human well-being
Background Reading
Asset Based Development
Jan Updike
Jan Updike
Rural Development Lessons
Jan Updike
Modern Philanthropy
Jan Updike
Gentle Action in Middlesborough: A Pari Center success story.
Gentle Action(c):Surviving Chaos and Change
F. David Peat
Additional Background Reading
I. Appetizers and introductions: a pleasure and of value for all of us to read (easily read in an evening)
Seven Life lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change, John Briggs and F. David Peat, Harper Collins, 1999
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exuprery, Harcourt Bruce, 1943 [please reflect upon section XX "encounter with the fox - consequence of 'taming'"]
II. The meal to sustain the journey: consider being familiar with at least one of these more scholarly works.
The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience, Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg, Fortress Press, 1999.
[Reports neurological basis and mechanisms of the mystical state of non-ordinary consciousness and the neurological pattern of comparative religion, as well as, the evolutionary function of religion .. also maps the basic functions of the brain focusing on structures most relevant to human experience, emotion, and cognition .. explains a neurological understanding of myth making and ritual and liturgy, meditation, near-death experience, and elements of theology]
Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software, Steven Johnson, Touchstone, 2001
[An eye-opening journey through emergence theory and its applications … one of Village Voices' 25 favorite books of the year: It explains why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts, and why communities self-organize and emerge, and adapt like organisms rather than like a machine - being designed, operationalized, and engineered and reengineered]
Expanding Humanity's Vision of God: New Thoughts on Science and Religion, Robert Herrmann, Editor, Templeton Foundation Press, 2001
[Lectures regarding how the discoveries of science have changed our understanding of our world and our place in the universe.. suggests a more comprehensive, more exploratory, and more humble theology as a result of thee scientific discoveries .. some essays focus on contemporary science and consider questions raised by biologists, our evolutionary past, by quantum physics and cosmologists .. a proposed synthesis of science with Judaism and Eastern philosophies is included]
The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, Mark C. Taylor, University of Chicago Press, 2001
["Classical science, with its preferences for reduction to a few controlling factors of causality, was triumphantly successful for relatively simple systems like planetary motion and the periodic table of elements (Newtonian physics). But irreducibly complex systems - that is, most of the interesting phenomena of biology, human society, and history - cannot be so explained. We need new philosophies and new explanatory models, and these must come from a union of the humanities and the sciences, as traditionally defined." Steven Jay Gould This book offers a new perspective on styles of questioning and answering needed to adapt (survive and flourish) to the complexities of modern life and technology .. the analysis of our current cultural conditions ranges from computer-mediated architecture of Frank Gehry to higher educations uneasy encounter with distance learning and that our reality is being 'one-among-the-whole' of a global learning organism]
The Self after Postmodernity, Calvin O. Schrag, Yale University Press, 1997
[Sketches a new portrait of the human self by way of a critical engagement with the proponents of Postmodernity, experimenting with an innovative vocabulary so as to describe self-understanding and self-formation in its discursive, action-oriented, communal, and transcending dynamics]
The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference, Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown & Co., 2002
[How to start and maintain an epidemic of anything maybe even unlimited love]
III. Suggestions for expanding the food supply for the journey: additional depth analytic thoughts certainly not for everyone.
Interface Culture: How new technology transforms the way we create and communicate, Steven Johnson,
Common Fire: Leading lives of commitment in a complex world, L.A. Parks Daloz, C Keen, J Keen, S. Parks Daloz, Beacon Press, 1996
The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, Robert Kegan, Harvard University Press, 1982
Learning as Transformation, Mezirow and Associates, Jossey-Bass, 2000
Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding, Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell, TCU Press, 1984.