# Level 5 Research Center/Escaping Discontent

—Paths toward our future
Are we living in the best of times, or is this the worst of times? Optimists and pessimists reasonably disagree on this critical question. As futurists, historians, philosophers, wisdom researchers, theists, mystics, charlatans, and cranks debate the benefits, problems, deficiencies, and values of the present they continue to envision various possibilities for our future world order. Here is a short summary of ideas for addressing the perceived meta-crisis.
Rational Optimistic Enlightenment—We need a fuller embrace and more widespread adoption throughout the world of what already has been shown to work, which are the values and psycho-technologies of the Age of Enlightenment, such as rationality, science, progress, skepticism, liberty, fraternity, equality, and getting away from ignorance, dogmatism, authority, tradition, superstition, and prejudice. Postmodernism and critical theory have little or nothing of value to offer and are only diversions and roadblocks. Perhaps this can be thought of as Enlightenment 1.5. Advocates include Steven Pinker.
Enlightenment 2.0—We need to address the "Enlightenment Gap", which the first enlightenment never solved and which Enlightenment 1.5 doesn’t solve either. This involves embracing enlightenment rationalism and postmodern critique, coming up with a coherent naturalistic ontology and more clear definitions for scientific terms that are taken for granted. This also involves new paradigms and new methodologies that embrace inner development integrated with science. Advocates include Gregg Henriques and Hanzi Freinacht.
Living Wisely—As each of us learns to make better decisions and pursue well-being, the world will become a better place. Each of us can choose to live wisely by increasing our personal responsibility, thinking clearly, understanding the world we live in, creating possibilities for what can be, improving our moral reasoning, and doing good. As we seek real good, a better world will emerge. Advocates include Nicholas Maxwell and Leland Beaumont.
Conscious Evolution—We can become mindful of the dynamics of the fundamental force of evolution and the relation to consciousness and this will awaken our collective capacity to overcome our challenges and create a better future. In socio-political terms, this hasn't been fully developed, despite Wilber claiming to have a "theory of everything" 20 years ago, since some of this is the subject of his forthcoming 3rd book in the Kosmos Trilogy. Advocates include Ken Wilber.
Dark Renaissance—Things will go dark almost inevitably, meaning that society will break down and a new dark age will result. But some of us will be able to create new aesthetic movements to get things through to plant the seeds for an eventual rebirth, and some people are already working on this. Advocates include Alexander Bard.
Techno-Optimistic—Technological advancements will save humanity and will save our planet. Next-generation innovations will heroically avert all calamities. Humanity's best days are ahead because of the power of technology and innovation. Advocates include Elon Musk.
Folk-Bildung 3.0—This involves empowering everybody through bildung to act and take sustainable action where they are. The formal political systems ought to be there; they may not live up to our expectations, but if we want clean water in the pipes, modern medicine, food for 8 billion people, safe transportation, and solid science to back decisions, there also needs to be institutions and political with which to collaborate. Advocates include Lene Rachel Andersen.
Peer to Peer—This involves people cooperatively pooling their resources through commons in a way that is complementary to business and government with the idea that this can create prosperity for all. Advocates include Michel Bauwens.
The Regenerative Renaissance / Bio-Transformation—This involves harnessing nature-based and biological insights and explicitly more feminine embodied intuitions and felt senses to shift our paradigm for modernity, and its discontents, into regenerative business models and systems that temper and transform abstraction, extraction, accumulation, exploitation, and mechanistic thinking with lived experiences, expressions, and practices of interdependence, reciprocity, reverence, caring wholeness and healing. It means engaging in purpose-led systemic transformation and institutional innovation and entrepreneurial processes, where purpose is explicitly a felt experience of love/caring—free from personality patterns and cognitive distortions from developmental challenges—moving into action through constellations of people, data, and things (that have a business model attached). Advocates include Nick Jankel.
Meta-Sensemaking—We really need to greatly improve our sensemaking amid the panoptic bombardment of information and ever-shifting technology. Advocates include Mark Stahlman via Marshall McLuhan.
Ecology of Mind—We can use our understanding of ecology in conjunction with warm data and the nuances and complexities of various aspects of life to help us intuitively make better choices. Advocates include Nora Bateson.
Revolutionary Anti-Capitalistic—We need to overthrow the capitalist bourgeoisie before they destroy the world with their unquenchable greed. Advocates include Doctrinaire Marxists.
Holistic Back-to-Nature—We need to re-discover our indigenous roots and live in harmony with nature, which will involve much less consumption and a dramatic decrease in industrialization. Advocates include Greta Thunberg.
Doomer Defeatist—There is no way to head off disaster so the best you can do is to save yourself and your family and maybe the members of the ethnic group that you identify with. Advocates include Steve Bannon.
Nondual Empiricism—Nondual Empiricism (NE) reintegrates the "Supreme Science" of Eastern Wisdom with Western naturalistic empirical metaphysics on the nature of the Self in relation to the physical world with an emphasis on an awareness-based ontology. The central contribution of nondual empiricism is nonconceptual knowing—experiencing reality by pure awareness, direct sensory experience, observation without interpretation, labeling, conceptualization, or categorization. A further insight is that the “I” that describes the biological you is not the origin of your thoughts; the witnessing “I” is not the biological self. The subject is not the object. Because the witnessing “I” is a thought, it has no material realization and is not capable of action. More specifically, nondual empiricism recognizes that it does not matter if we do or don't act because the "I" that would act is an ontologically emergent, sentient, focused point of awareness that is not separate from the world and cannot change it in an effort of intellectual willpower because does not exist on the level of matter and even basic biology, and in most ways is limited to their constraints.
Although we acknowledge the existence of a crisis—the persistence of the grand challenges, as one manifestation—we cannot rely on a nonmaterial “I” to act. This raises the question “Whose problem is this?”
Fortunately, although the “I” is nonmaterial, each of us does have agency—the ability to act. Nondual empiricism acts to empower the Self to cope with our ego and progress in a manner that resembles the approaches of Living Wisely and Enlightenment 2.0.
This metaphysics is currently being formally developed by Clinical Psychologist and Nondual theorist Nicholas Lattanzio.

## Assignment

* Envision your future.
* Study each of the future concepts described above.
* Choose the approach you believe will be most likely to lead to a better future. If you don't like any of these, create your own.
* Take action to help that scenario unfold.