The Daily Evolver

In this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit, Dr. Keith reveals what he’s learned in over forty years as a psychotherapist about cultivating integral love relationships, what the shift to a 2nd tier “love operating system” looks and feels like, and how you go about teaching couples to love completely.    Everything is relationship. Only a small sliver of our brains has to...

This week Jeff looks at Interstellar, the new movie from Christopher Nolan that explores love as a force in the kosmos akin to the force of gravity. Bringing love to Earth, Jeff comments on the spirit of the holiday season, and how we may be able to create a more generous and meaningful experience.

This week Jeff looks at the process by which historically oppressed people, such as women, racial minorities and gays gain full acceptance in the culture. It’s not just a matter of changing laws, but hearts and minds. This process starts in modernity and becomes one of the main projects of post-modernity. What is the integral view?

In this week’s podcast, recorded on election night in the U.S., we explore some thoughts on the big Republican gains in Congress and what might be next. Also, Jeff responds to Joe Corbett, a critic who published an essay making the case that Jeff, Ken WIlber and the integral community in general lack an appreciation for social justice.

With all the attention on the war and pestilence within trailing-edge cultures around the world, it’s easy to miss what is happening on the leading edge, as developed cultures move deeper into post-modernity (green altitude). This week’s Daily Evolver Live tours a few stories that show how we are creating a more safe, peaceful, reliable, fair and sensitive world.

This week Jeff takes a look at the Ebola crisis and how an integral view can help us relate and respond. He explores the function of fear and a time honored way that it can be transmuted into real helpfulness. The second half of the podcast is a conversation with Steve McIntosh, who is bringing an integral sensibility to the problem of political polarization in America, through his foundation the...

This week Jeff shares some evolutionary insights and encounters he had on his few weeks of hiatus. He starts with a personal story of his own development regarding communion with animals. He also examines a common sticking point for liberals, exemplified by a widely noted public argument between Bill Maher, Sam Harris and Ben Affleck regarding Islamic violence and Islamophobia.

Human beings are memory machines, for better or for worse. There is an autobiographical narrative that is alive inside all of us, and just as individual memories seem to create me, memories in the morphogenetic field create the collective culture of my family, my society. Most people are familiar with the effects that major trauma like car accidents, sexual abuse and so on, can have on a person. B...

Ken Wilber is my hero. I mean that quite literally because Ken rescued me from a life of confusion, fear and frustration as I tried to make sense of our crazy, mixed up world. Ken’s insights organized life on Planet Earth from a disjointed mess into an elegant whole.

In a week that has featured an appalling display of the trailing edge of consciousness development -- the ISIS beheadings -- Jeff starts by highlighting a new, more encouraging emergent that is arising on humanity’s leading edge. It’s called being nice. Also, a good week for the Obama Doctrine?

In the vision of a future economy the motto is to think globally and act locally. Eco-localization refers to local production and consumption imbued with an awareness of how one’s actions may impact other communities. This includes global trade between local economies (hence the word “glocalization”), which means you don't import things that can be made locally but you may still share culture and...

This week Jeff looks at a new model of autocratic modernity that is gaining traction particularly among developing countries with weak histories of democracy, such as Russia and China. With the economically and politically stumbling West no longer held up an the inevitable example, we can see the appeal -- and even some of the intelligence -- behind this rising brand of development without liberal...

The many crises of the world, most prominently the war in Israel and Gaza, evoke important questions for those of us who are not directly involved. What can we do about the suffering? What are we supposed to feel and think? How are we to relate and respond? This week Jeff explores aspects of the interior spaces of integral consciousness, especially those we experience in the face of suffering. But...

The two global hot spots this week are, once again, Ukraine, where Russian separatists have shot down a passenger jet from Amsterdam, killing 300 people, and Israel/Gaza, where longstanding tensions have flared into a new intifada. What do these conflicts have in common and how can integral consciousness help us understand them more deeply?

The struggle between the Muslim and Western worlds is not only a clash of civilizations, but also a clash of development. I had a good conversation on this subject with Dr. Aftab Omer, a sociologist, psychologist and integralist who was raised in Pakistan, India and Turkey, and who has lived in the US for much of his life.

Sex evolves like everything else, so what's next? This week Jeff looks at the amazing, creative, pervasive phenomena of sex and how it's evolving in all four quadrants. What are the roots of our sexuality, where are we now and what is emerging? He starts with a shout out to his favorite new art form and inspiration for this week’s topic: reality TV.

In this week’s call Jeff explores the issue of cultural identity from an evolutionary point of view. He uses the examples of the World Cup and the story told about Brazil by the international media leading up to it, as well as the continuing drama in Ukraine to illuminate how, even in our globalized world, culture has a unique power to move events. His special guest is Ukrainian integralist Oleg L...

This week Jeff focuses on the situation in Iraq, where the jihadi group ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham) has taken over the Sunni area of the country. Their aim is to install a medieval caliphate throughout the Middle East (“we know no borders,” they say). What does integral theory tell us about these fighters and how to deal with their threat to the country America misguidedly attempted t...

I met Graham back in the nineties when he ran a web design firm in Seattle. He’s always been on the emerging edge of culture and technology and is one of those people that has an integral mind whether or not they ever use the vocabulary or reference the maps. He has a developmental view and doesn’t see modernity as the enemy, necessarily, but as the foundation upon which a thriving postmoder...

Lying is a subtle violence that we perpetrate against ourselves and others, and almost all psychotherapy is concerning where people lie to themselves about themselves. As we develop more self-awareness and transparency, lies become less tempting because they become less useful and actually just plain uninteresting.

Our left hemisphere learns new routines, but it is our right hemisphere where the habits are hardwired — and it changes slowly. The brain evolved to not give up habits that it has associated with a satisfactory life. We are what we repeatedly do. —Aristotle I learn the coolest stuff listening to The Shrink & The Pundit sessions. For example, as you repeat a certain action it activates a...

This week Jeff took a look at the emergence of some radical new Green ideas in the economic conversation, with an advanced peek at the influential new book “Capital in the 21st Century”, by Thomas Piketty. He also addressed the cultural issues of climate change and a striking new way of dealing with it: give up.

This week Jeff takes a look at new research that reveals how worldview overrides evidence in determining one’s political perspective. He also explores the conservative view of the Russian/Ukraine situation by critiquing an essay by Robert D. Kaplan, Geopolitics and the New World Order in which Kaplan argues that “in geopolitics, the past never dies and there is no modern world.”

If it was just the genes talking we’d have serial marriages lasting on average four or five years, and we’d cheat on each other every chance we got.  ~Dr. Keith Witt Apparently we’re kind of clueless about intimate attachment in general. According to Dr. Keith we aggrandize romantic love, we’re afraid of sexual lust and we have no idea about long-term attachment. We mix them all up, basically. Nin...

THE DAILY EVOLVER LIVE EPISODE 88 This week I focused on a topic that is always front and center in the culture wars: the role of the public sector and the private sector in our lives, and the tension between the two. One story that captures this tension in the U.S. is the Supreme Court hearing of the complaint by Hobby Lobby, a chain of retail stores, seeking an exemption from having to provide “...