Designing the Future Together

This Editorial precedes Volume 16, Issue 2 of Kosmos. Scroll down to access featured content.

A recent question really got me thinking. Since 2001, Kosmos’ integral, evolutionary approach has informed, inspired, and engaged personal, institutional, and global transformation. How has the direction changed during those 16 years?

As I contemplated this question, I realized that our long-term vision has not changed over all these years. What has changed is how different aspects of the vision come and go into awareness. Readers over the years may have a slightly different take on what these changes are. I offer my list for your reflection and look forward to hearing yours.

Kosmos Journal Volume 16 Issue 2

The Power of Wetiko: Looking in the Mirror to Solve the Global Crisis

By Martin Kirk

Given that we have invited people from all over the world to ‘see wetiko’—because by seeing it, we gain power over it—it is only fair that we do the same ourselves. So this is how I personally see wetiko and why I find it so enlightening and powerful.

The Predicament of Knowledge: A Challenge for Culture Design

By Joe Brewer

I call it Culture Design and have written about it elsewhere.13 Its central tenet is that culture can be thought of as a complex adaptive system that flows and changes through the mechanisms of cultural evolution. Understand these fields of knowledge and it becomes possible to birth a science of intentional social change that gets applied to the hard problems of the world.

Open Group Practice: Eight Social Selves

By Bonnitta Roy

Through co-operative inquiry, observation, and collective reflection, we began to track patterns of social behavior that seemed to follow a typology. This eventually led to the naming of eight ‘indigenous social selves’ that masquerade around as human beings in conventionally structured environments. The eight social selves are derived from alternative coping mechanisms at three levels of being: an inner core primary psychological schema, an outer social processing temperament, and an interpretive ideology.

Unheard Invitations: Piercing the Veil Between Species

By Susan Eirich

What we do not attend to cannot reach us. If we don’t know to listen, we cannot hear. But the animals are calling us. It doesn’t matter what animal it is or where we are. Any of us can experience this. It is our heritage and it is inherent in the nature of Life if only we realize the possibility and open ourselves up to it. When you go into nature, tune in more deeply. Life is calling to life.

Can We Harness Conflict?

By Mark Gerzon

Instead of differences making us curious, they make us afraid. Instead of transforming challenges into opportunities, we turn them into problems. Instead of opening our hearts, we close them. Love gives way to fear, and fear breeds separateness, dehumanization of the other, and, in the most extreme cases, violence.

The Power of Three | Awakening New Energy in Group Work

A person living today in a modern city or a suburb can be surrounded by others yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. According to neuroscientists, the effects of social isolation are as real as thirst, hunger, or pain. We are, in essence, social animals in need [...]