Integral Holiday Movies to Warm the Heart and Stir the Soul (and the Evolutionary Impulse)

This  holiday season finds the world still reeling from the pandemic amidst major polarization and conflict between ideological perspectives. The limits on our social interactions have amplified the psycho-dynamic separation and tensions of the growing ideological divide distancing us from each other mentally, emotionally and sometimes even spiritually. Many of us are seeking new ways to celebrate the holidays that honor and respond to the present moment.

I myself have been feeling a need to find solace in the holiday season spirit while also wanting to keep a clear head about the world situation. How can we combine the holiday light with a dive into the shadows of the great challenges ahead? One way I found is by watching integrally-informed holiday movies that attempt to both warm the heart and stir the soul, or -- from the integral perspective -- stir the evolutionary impulse within us by working with our shadow material. 

Below are a few classic and newer Christmas-oriented films that can help us do just that. What connects these works is their integration of an evolutionary perspective into their cinematic realities. Their characters face challenges and have to find ways to grow and evolve through them, all the while learning deep lessons on facing their shadowy fears, healing their buried wounds and pushing through the barriers of their comfort zones. Of course they all have happy endings, but these happy endings are earned by a revelation of the heart and mind, and not solely by the resolution of a conflict. This holiday season, we can watch these with an awareness of their potential use as a form of media-assisted shadow work and bring our attention to these underlying dynamics and reflect on similar patterns in our own lives.

Christmas Classics

This year I discovered that two of the most highly regarded holiday classics of all time are integrally-informed: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and the quintessential Santa movie Miracle on 34th Street (1947). 

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

This Frank Capra Christmas classic is an early stage integral work that maps how the main character George Bailey (James Stewart) evolves from egocentric to Kosmocentric circles of care and concern. The film shows us how we can evolve through various stages while also holding onto earlier stage drives and projections. In George's case he holds onto his childhood egoic dream of being a world explorer who does great things, all the while not realizing that he was already doing great things as he developed throughout his life. The film’s beautiful journey teaches us that it is often the little things we do in life that end up having the biggest impact in the long run. The film is also told directly from the Kosmocentric witness perspective, that of the angels watching over George beyond the dimension of the world of form (Currently available on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes and YouTube).

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

The quintessential Christmas movie, this classic is perhaps the most magical Santa Claus movie ever and yet it shows no magic directly. The miracles Santa brings are miracles of consciousness. He is operating at a higher and more integral level than everyone else and is able to see how they are trapped in their worldviews and constructs. He gently (and sometimes not so gently) awakens them to higher dimensions of being and becoming. He is also very human in many ways, sometimes losing his faith that he can save Christmas, which only adds great depth to the wonderful performance by Edmund Gwenn. Although we end with a hint this man may indeed be Santa Claus, we are left with only a sense of standing at the edge of a great Kosmic mystery (Currently available on Amazon Prime, Disney+, Google Play, iTunes and YouTube).

During the last couple of years I uncovered two more recent integrally-informed holiday works, both TV movies: Dear Santa (2011) from Lifetime and 12 Dates of Christmas (2011) from Freeform. 

12 Dates of Christmas (2011 TV Movie)

A sweet and sappy Christmas movie that uses the integrally-informed evolutionary time loop formula from Groundhog Day with a Christmas spin and a female main character. 12 Dates is a cute little movie filled with holiday spirit, light on the outside with deep evolutionary patterns on the inside as the main character grows, heals and evolves through several stages of development (Currently available on Amazon Prime, Disney+, Freeform, Hulu and iTunes).

Dear Santa (2011 TV Movie)

Another sweet and sappy Christmas movie that follows a female character through her evolution during one holiday season. Our main character is swept into a period of accelerated development when a little girl's letter to Santa appears to magically find its way into her hands. The letter sends her on an emotional journey that helps her evolve from an egocentric spoiled and ditzy rich girl to a more mature woman whose circle of care and concern has expanded to include all of humanity (Currently available on Amazon Prime, iTunes and YouTube).

Extending my search beyond individual movies, I have been researching the entire genre of holiday movies, in particular Hallmark Movies, and mapping their structures of consciousness patterns to see why these genres are so successful across religious, cultural and political boundaries. 

Hallmark Movie Genre

Holiday movies in general owe their roots in many ways to the two integral holiday classics we examined above, It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. The Hallmark movie genre includes the holiday movie genre but also other types of family-friendly works. These include its classic Hallmark Hall of Fame for its highest quality more literary works. They also include its Hallmark Channel original movies, which cycle through seasons of celebration and romance with a yearly slate of movies focusing on Christmas, Hanukkah, Valentines Day, Easter, Passover, wedding season, and special seasonal love stories for winter, spring, summer and fall. Hallmark also has a mystery channel which adds the “solving a mystery” twist to their genre patterns. This genre is so successful it is being copied by other channels and services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Lifetime, Freeform and UP TV. All told, hundreds of these movies have been produced over the years, and in recent years around 30 to 40 are released each year.

What I have learned from analyzing all these works is that the Hallmark movie genre in particular is in many ways integrative. It seeks to integrate traditional, modern and postmodern worldviews and values. It works to transcend the polarities we see in the world around us right now. 

The Hallmark holiday movie universe, for instance, is a world where political ideologies are mostly transcended, showing us a world in which conservative, traditional, liberal and progressive values can co-exist and actually support each other. So rural and small town America becomes the symbol of family and traditions that ground us. The city is where we go to find our dreams, search for ourselves and learn valuable life lessons. But in the end we can only truly find our true selves and live our dreams when we return home after all our seeking and find everything we were seeking inside ourselves...with the help of family and friends and sometimes even otherworldly forces. Sometimes these stories even transcend the rural/city divide by having a story take place solely in one environment but represent the traditional-progressive integration values within subcultural patterns. 

In this cinematic universe most of the stories are love stories, and they tend to focus on a strong female lead. Both men and women (and more recently of different races, faiths and gender identities) are seen as being able to have it all once they realize that the achievement of worldly goals is not truly valuable unless it is human centered and human grounded. 

(Hallmark movies are available online on Hallmark Now streaming service with a 7 day free trial)

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Whether we just watch the classics or dive deep into the feel-good movie ocean, with these movies we have the potential to lift our hearts and spirits while reflecting our own inner and outer challenges. We can consciously use these works as a mirror for our own challenges, and as a way of facing and working through that which has wounded us and been buried in the shadows of the unconscious. We can even get a taste of a possible future where the cultural divide no longer exists, a place of “peace on earth and goodwill to all.”

And if you wish to go deeper into media-assisted shadow work 

during this holiday season, 

join us on Sunday December 20th at 12 noon PST 

for our FREE virtual discussion on 

Shadow Work in the Mediasphere - Xmas Edition 

as part of our monthly Media Shaman Studio series.

Shadow Work in the Mediasphere - Xmas Edition!

This December finds us in a very strange liminal moment amidst the ongoing inflection point surrounding the US presidential election. That the election process remains unresolved is just one of the major challenges and tensions between polarized political, ideological and cultural fields, both locally and globally. Meanwhile, the holiday season is upon us and the traditional patterns of connection and celebration are in flux because of the global pandemic. 

After so many months of social isolation and heightened cultural polarization, the holiday season has the potential to create many more stresses and traumatic experiences than what is normally experienced during this time. For many of us the past four years have already been very traumatizing, and much of the world has shared a collective trauma around the pandemic for most of the past year. These traumas can be seen as our individual and collective shadows, because they get buried in the darkness of our unconscious and then profoundly affect our behavior as individuals, groups, cultures and societies. 

This process can be likened to the way the tides beneath the surface of the ocean can remain unseen but nevertheless affect the entire oceanic environment in profoundly powerful ways.

Many of us feel called to work with not only our own personal traumas, but also those of the culture and society as well. Media has a critical role to play in helping us to process these traumas because media acts as a mirror for our consciousness. Our individual and collective shadows are reflected in the shadows of the cinema, the shadows of the internet, and the shadows of the entire mediasphere. All of these combined make up the collective shadow of our collective self.

The mediasphere is deeply intertwined with this whole process as our source of collective information and expression. Through all our various media streams we receive, share and create information between each other, within and between our reality bubbles. Every new tweet, post, video and podcast has the potential to trigger new awarenesses -- or reinforce old biases. They can affirm our constructs of self, others and the world -- or challenge them. Overall, they reflect our individual and collective shadows, all at breakneck pace across multiple domains of our everyday existence. 

Old norms are collapsing all around us, as polarization separates us from each other and distorts our perceptions. For many of us the world has become unstable and our sense of security and safety has been profoundly undermined.

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For this month's Media Shaman Studio we will be exploring how we can use media to work with both our own personal shadow and the collective shadow, and how to understand and address the collective shadow that’s reflected in the mediasphere. This will include how to discern our individual and collective shadow material using individual media works and the collective mediasphere as mirrors for discernment. We will also explore some media-assisted shadow work practices in the creation, reception and sharing of media processes. Finally, we will try to identify various types of media content that can help us at this moment in our lives. 

And, of course, for this holiday season we will be exploring how Christmas films can often put shadow work into the frame of a modern fairy tale, which enables them to tackle difficult themes with a certain detachment and a sense of optimism and hope.

Be sure to join us for our live discussion on Sunday December 20th at 12pm PT

Media Shaman Studio is a monthly in-depth public lecture and discussion series on the relationship between consciousness and media with host and facilitator, Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D and Jonathan Steigman. This series is offered for free and is open to all members of the Conscious Good Creators Network, the general public, and participants in our Media Shaman courses.

The Calling of the US Election Inflection Point

At this moment a major shift is happening in the collective field as we are entering what many are saying will be a major liminal inflection point phase of the Great Transition we are in. This particular inflection point is oriented around the US election and the potential for it to destabilize the US and the world even more.

An inflection point is a major liminal field transition point. Think of those major moments of transformation for the caterpillar as it evolves toward becoming a butterfly. That moment when the caterpillar's body starts to dissolve is an inflection point, as is that moment when its body is completely dissolved, and another inflection point occurs when its new butterfly body structure starts to emerge.

Each inflection point can be traumatic to various degrees. In our situation we are potentially looking at a major flood of disinformation and polarization, along with possible major disruptions and crises extending into any and all dimensions of our everyday reality.

A key is to understand that all this disruption may be required for us to make the shift in consciousness this major inflection point is calling us toward.

So how do we learn the lessons from this grand collective exposure therapy challenge, while limiting the collateral damage and the degree of human suffering? 

First, we need to hold the bigger picture and ask, What are the lessons? We need to be prepared to face our own individual and collective shadows, learn the lessons and share that learning with others. 

We need to take care of ourselves and each other, and expand our circle of care and concern beyond my family, my faith tradition, my community, my political party, my race, my country...to that which is beyond. 

We need to let go of all our past ways of being and becoming, to open ourselves to thinking the unthinkable and finding a new way unlike the past.

We need to find a new way of making sense of the world as individuals, and also establish sensemaking networks to help us use collective intelligence to make sense of what is happening and how to respond in this accelerated and complex reality we are moving through. 

We also have to become more conscious of how we consume, share and create media, and attempt to transcend the extreme polarization fields and reality bubbles that have taken over the mediasphere. 

And most of all we need to wake up to the truth of who and what we are beyond polarization, and re-member that each of us is merely a wave in the great molecular and quantum ocean of beingness, and have compassion for those who are lost and afraid of waking up to this truth.

 

 

 

State of the Mediasphere - November 2020

Featured Topic: The State of the Mediasphere - November 2020

Virtual Discussion date: Sunday, November 15th, 2020 at 12 p.m. PT

The mediasphere is the collective ecology of the world's media. The mediasphere includes social and streaming media along with all dimensions of the Internet including the Dark, Deep and Surface web. It also encompasses interactive and immersive media like video games and VR, as well as more traditional media such as newspapers, journals, television, movies, radio, books, novels, advertising, press releases and publicity.

Join us this month for a special Media Shaman Studio series event with an exploration of the state of the mediasphere during this major transformative moment in human history. With the US election and various other similar challenge points happening at this time across the globe, the world is facing many great unknowns all at once. 

Instead of featuring a movie or series for us to review for the month we are asking you to try to observe the mediasphere during this month and see if you can get a sense of what is happening locally and non-locally. Go outside your reality bubbles and try to get as many perspectives as possible of events as they unfold around you. If you are taking our Media Shaman Toolkit mini-course, use the sensemaking techniques we talk about there. Be aware of any stories, events, media expressions or general observations that call to you for further exploration. You are invited to share these at the bottom of this posting in the comment area and/or bring them into our live discussion on Sunday November 15th at 12pm PT.

In the live discussion we will share a perception practice to aid your ability to “read” the mediasphere zeitgeist, along with additional tools and maps to help us make sense of what is happening in the mediasphere. We will discuss how to seek the biggest picture we can and how to discern what the calling is for us in relationship to what is unfolding around us.

We will also be exploring how we can face our individual and collective shadow material that is being reflected in the mediasphere without getting caught in polarization or getting overwhelmed by the darkness we see. We will also explore how to help shepherd us through the Great Transition we are going through by helping to seek a new future unlike the past while also trying to help limit the collateral damage and suffering as the systems of the past necessarily collapse around us.

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Media Shaman Studio is a monthly in-depth public lecture and discussion series on the relationship between consciousness and media with host and facilitator, Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D and Jonathan Steigman. This series is offered for free and is open to all members of the Conscious Good Creators Network, the general public, and participants in our Media Shaman courses. 

 

Surfing the Inflection Point

As we approach election day here in the United States I would like to take a moment to express my deep gratitude to all of you for supporting our work in your own way and to perhaps offer some ways we can use media to help ourselves, those we love and all of humanity through these challenging times.

First, I want to thank everyone who is contributing to my Medicine for Mark GoFundMe campaign, helping to keep me stable until we find a cure. My medicine is helping and I am able to do more than I could before. I still struggle every day to function in many ways but I have a lot of help from family and friends and community services agencies. In the meantime I am doing everything within my power to continue my work and help as many people as possible to navigate the media war on our consciousness, which is part of the great transition we are going through. 

Secondly, I also want to thank all my long time supporters, contributors, co-researchers and co-learners for all that you have done to support and contribute to my work through the Integral Cinema Project.

Media Shaman Offerings

Finally I wish to thank the Transformative Media course participants who helped me awaken to the Media Shaman framing of this whole process. This awakening is not just about my framing of this work. It also includes a deeply personal re-awakening of my own Media Shaman journey which started many years ago when one of my teachers, Barbara Myerhoff, basically told me that I was a Media Shaman...that my stuttering was considered a calling to heal myself and others through media. With this reframing of the work into the Media Shaman framework, that original transformative framing from Dr. Myerhoff flowered inside my being and bore more fruit for my own journey of transformation. 

So you may be wondering what is a media shaman? Media shamans works toward using media to help heal and evolve themselves, others and the world. They transform their own perceptual field into an object in their awareness and an evolutionary accelerator, and help others do the same. The Media Shaman sees the bigger picture and uses media as an individual and collective healing and evolutionary intervention coming from these higher perspectives, attempting to address problems at the level of cause rather than the level of effect. 

Here are our new reframed Media Shaman offerings:

• Media Shaman Toolkit - A 3-part video course to improve your ability to make sense of the world, learn how to use the transformative potential of media, and help yourself and others evolve into the grounded consciousness we need right now (Available now; see video below)
• Media Shaman MasterClass - Our 15 week Transformative Media Creation and Reception Course on using, designing and creating media for the transformation of self, other and world (Course starting in mid-November; see video below). The MasterClass includes a Certificate of Completion and entrance into our ongoing Media Shaman Community of Practice.
• Media Shaman Studio - A free monthly online and live discussion exploration of consciousness and media (formally the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month group) 

Research Breakthrough: Using Media to Accelerate the Evolution of Individual and Collective Consciousness

Together we have made many great discoveries along the way and I want to share with you the biggest one we have come across so far. This discovery happened through our Transformative Media Creation and Reception course at Campus Co-Evolve (the Media Shaman MasterClass), with amazing contributions from all the participants of both cohorts so far and the Campus Co-Evolve team and its founder George Pór. What we discovered together is a way to accelerate the evolution of our individual and collective consciousness using media. This breakthrough is important because all major problems in the world are the product of an unprecedented gap between our technologies and our capacities to use them in a healthy way. This is a gap between the stages of development of our technologies and the stages of development of our individual, cultural and societal consciousness. So the key is for us to accelerate the evolution of our individual and collective consciousness to catch up to our technologies and keep pace with them going forward. And according to our research, the key to this acceleration of the evolution of consciousness is for as many of us as possible to become active observers of our own perceptual field using the very technologies we are trying to catch up with.

So what is the secret here? The secret is that if we train ourselves to continually observe our own perceptual field as an object in our experience, then our perceptual field becomes a developmental accelerator itself. This appears to occur when we use a unique educational process we discovered that trains us to be aware of how media communicates with us and affects us, how consciousness is embedded in our media, and how that embedding affects our own consciousness and perceptual field. This unique educational process is what we are calling media-assisted consciousness training and integrates the following approaches:

• Media metatheory theory and practice, or praxis;
• Individual embodied learning projects combined with collective intelligence research and support teamwork;
• Individual and collective perception practices;
• Media-mirroring techniques, which entails the use of media creation and reception processes as both a mirror for our own consciousness and a learning tool to transform our perceptual field into an object of our experience (Based on the work of Edgar Morin); 
• 3-brain neuroplasticity training to help participants restructure their own neural pathways and reprogram their minds to constantly observe their own perceptual field. 

For more on this breakthrough check out the talk we did with some of the course participants for the Up Convergence Conference and to experience it yourself take the Media Shaman MasterClass in Transformative Media Creation and Reception starting mid-November.

This Moment...

And in this moment, as the world holds its breath, no one can be sure what the world will look like on November 4th. We are in a potentially major liminal inflection point moment, as we discussed in our last update. One of the things we can do is to be one with the uncertainty, entering a liminal space in our own beingness, and move through the moment with full awareness and presence, letting go of what was and opening to what might be...and do our best to Surf the Inflection Point. And if you want some tools to help you navigate through these challenging times, both our Media Shaman Toolkit and the MasterClass are designed to help.

In deep gratitude to you all...Stay well, Stay Safe, Stay Awake.

Mark

Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.
Founder and Executive Director
Integral Cinema Project

Media Shaman Toolkit Preview and Panel Discussion (Video Replay)

WATCH THE VIDEO REPLAY

Betsy Chasse assembles an expert panel on how to make sense and develop media literacy in a Post-Truth Age. The discussion makes the case for all filmmakers and content developers to awaken as Media Shamans, to use media to heal and uplift the individual and the collective. 

She is joined by: Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.  is an independent award-winning filmmaker and the pre-eminent theorist and practitioner of the application of evolutionary metatheories to moving image media. Mark is also the founder and executive director of the Integral Cinema Project.

Jonathan Steigman is a Bay Area activist, filmmaker, magician, communication consultant and independent researcher. Jonathan is also the Director of Communications at the Integral Cinema Project.

Anahita Parseghian is a visionary, strategist, entrepreneur, organizer, somatic trauma therapist, and plant medicine expert. Some of her recent creations include Project OneVoice, Sanity Sanctuary, and Plant Remedy. 

Mark DeNicola is a social media strategist that since 2010 has helped clients meet and exceed their online goals, including helping a number of films hit the #1 spot on the US iTunes documentary sales chart.

Interested in becoming a media shaman?

Learn more about the 3 part video course

"The Social Dilemma" and the War on Consciousness (Media Shaman Studio)

Welcome to the new Media Shaman Studio (formally Conscious Movie-of-the-Month)

Featured Topic: Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) and the war on consciousness.

Virtual Discussion Date: Sunday, October 18th, 2020 at 12 p.m. PT

There is a war on our consciousness. The main battlefield is the social media sphere. Our screens are the frontlines. The targets are our hearts and minds. There is no single enemy. Our freedom and democracy itself are at stake. The war is bleeding into our relationships and onto our streets. Many military historians and strategists believe we are in the middle of World War III. They speak of a new form of war called Nonlinear Warfare. This approach integrates advanced propaganda and social programming techniques with the weaponization of social media platforms, big data and A.I.. This form of warfare has been open-sourced, and nation states, corporate states, political parties and movements, splinter groups, subcultural groups and more are using it to vie for control and power by creating chaos, confusion and polarization in all dimensions of civilization. The other great World Wars included some nations, but not all. This war is covering the entire planet. Every human being in the world is a combatant. Is this the war to end all wars? Is there something more going on? Is this all part of the great transition in consciousness we are called to make during this Age of Transformation?

Join us this month as we begin our new Media Shaman Studio series with an exploration of this war on consciousness and it’s transformative potentials using Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) as our leaping off point. This profoundly resonant documentary delves deeply into how the utopian dreams of those who helped create social media platforms have been shattered by its weaponization against the very ideals they were working toward.

If you have not seen The Social Dilemma you can stream it on Netflix. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the film in the comments section below.. 

And of course join us on October 18th at 12 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film, the war on consciousness it addresses, and how this all speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in the new emergent consciousness this war is calling us toward.

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Media Shaman Studio is a monthly in-depth public lecture and discussion series on the relationship between consciousness and media with hosts and facilitators, Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D and Jonathan Steigman. This series is offered for free and is open to all members of the Conscious Good Creators Network, the general public, and participants in our Media Shaman courses. 

If you have not already joined our FREE Media Shaman Studio group, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

Watch the video replay of this event HERE.

September 2020 Conscious Media-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Media-of-the-Month is Rebel Wisdom's video podcast series on the War on Sensemaking (2019-2020). 

Virtual Discussion date: Sunday, September 20th, 2020 at 12 p.m. PT 

Why is our information ecology so broken, and what would it take to fix it at scale?

During the pandemic we will be focusing on conscious media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the challenges around us.

Beginning this month a major shift is happening in the collective field as we are entering what many are saying will be a major inflection point phase of the Great Transition we are in. This particular inflection point is oriented around the US election and the potential for it to destabilize the US and the world even more. An inflection point is a major liminal field transition point. Think of those major moments of transformation for the caterpillar as it evolves toward becoming a butterfly. That moment when its body starts to dissolve is an inflection point, as is that moment when its body is completely dissolved, and another inflection point occurs when its new body structure starts to emerge.

Each inflection point can be traumatic to various degrees. In our situation we are potentially looking at a major flood of disinformation and polarization on social media. As the major propaganda networks go to war in the approach up to the election the potential exists for a constitutional crisis, or even a major accelerated collapse of American democracy. Some other countries are going through parallel inflection points in their collective fields as well, and whatever happens in the U.S. or these other countries during this time can have a major impact on our entire global collective field. There is a war to control our consciousness and oftentimes we do not even realize we are being manipulated.

To help us through these heightened challenges we are facing we will this month be exploring Rebel Wisdom's groundbreaking video podcast series on Sensemaking, which is designed to help us upgrade our sensemaking capacities to better navigate the media war that has been going on and is escalating every second. We will be specifically focusing on just the first installment in the series, the War on Sensemaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger, a major cutting edge systems thinker. In this opening installment Daniel unpacks for us the deconstruction of all our old sensemaking systems and sources of information, and how this is part of a major transformation in how humanity makes sense of things and shares information.

Be warned this is very deep and heady stuff, but our understanding is necessary if we want to make this upgrade...because if we don't the human species may not survive. Daniel purposely pushes us to think outside of our previous capacities to help entrain our brains to be able to navigate the emerging new realities we are facing. This is the kind of shift Albert Einstein was alluding to when he said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

So we invite you to buckle in, take a dive deep and attempt to process what Daniel is talking about. Do not worry if you don't get everything; just trying to follow him will start laying down new neural pathways in your brain to help you make the sensemaking transition. And next month we will be offering a workshop to help you incorporate all this into your daily experience.

If you have not seen War on Sensemaking you can stream it from our special playlist we created for the whole series (it is the first video in the series). Of course you are invited to watch as much of the series as you feel drawn to. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the series in the comments section below. And please feel free to ask any theoretical questions you have as well.

And of course join us on September 20th at 12 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the series and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in this new emergent consciousness.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

Watch the video replay of this event HERE.

August 2020 Conscious Media-of-the-Month

 

This month’s Conscious Media-of-the-Month is Netflix's short film series Homemade (2020). 

Virtual Discussion date: August 15th, 2020 at 1 p.m. PT 

During the pandemic we will be focusing on media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the challenges around us. This month we will be exploring the brand new Netflix short film series Homemade, a bunch of shorts made by a crop of talented international filmmakers making films in and about quarantine and creating a mosaic experience of the pandemic across the globe. Truly beautiful, profound and deeply resonant and inspiring...and operating at the frothy edge of a new form of conscious media. 

If you have not seen Homemade you can stream it on Netflix. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. And of course join us on August 15th at 1 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in this new emergent consciousness.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

July 2020 Conscious Media-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Media-of-the-Month is Amazon's animated streaming series Undone (2019). 

Virtual Discussion date: July 18, 2020 at 1 p.m. PT 

During the pandemic we will be focusing on media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the challenges around us. 

This month we will be exploring Amazon's online streaming series Undone, an amazingly beautiful exploration of the line between madness and enlightenment and the indigenous magic worldview and the modern and postmodern worldviews. This little hybrid animated gem uses multi-layered complex storytelling to take us on a cinematic trip into multiple dimensions of being and becoming and consciousness...and most resonant to the now...it explores the "Undoing" of our reality and that liminal space created by that undoing. 

 If you have not seen Undone you can stream it on Amazon. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. And of course join us on July 18th at 1 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in this new emergent consciousness.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

Watch the video replay of this event HERE.

June 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017).

Virtual Discussion date: June 20, 2020 at 1 p.m. PT

During the pandemic we will be focusing on media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the challenges around us.

This month we will be exploring Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017), a beautifully simple yet complex integral film that unpacks all the elements around the creation of Winnie the Pooh, and its effects on multiple dimensions of human life and experience. It is the story of an artist trying to elevate the consciousness of all of humanity through his art and how the creative process that unfolded for himself, his loved ones, his country and people all around the world helped to transform them all.

As the story unfolds, Goodbye Christopher Robin examines both the inner psychological aspects and the behavioral aspects of this great creative endeavor, and puts it in the context of the culture and the social systems. So we see how the society is emotionally repressive, how WW I affected the protagonist, how the class (caste) system interacts with the son's upbringing and emotional development, and much more. A key point is that the film is unpacking a Big Picture view and trying to find a higher truth. It's not just a pure Pluralistic film in which everyone's viewpoint is identically valid. It honors that everyone believes their own viewpoint (and inhabits it) but the audience (and some of the characters) can see a larger overview picture by the end.

This work has the potential to give us a deeper understanding of the personal, sociological, psychological and cultural forces at work in the Winnie the Pooh phenomenon and its creation. It also gives us a glimpse of the co-evolutionary process surrounding the impact of a work of art on the individual and the collective and vise versa, including its potential impact on the individual and collective experience of great human challenges like war and the evolution of a culture facing these great challenges.

In times of great challenge, like back then and here and now today, in our moment in time, the artists are called to be midwives of humanity's soul. And this film captures this calling with subtlety and grace.

If you have not seen Goodbye Christopher Robin you can stream it on most of the major streaming services. You can also rent it for free at most public libraries. We recommend watching the film at least twice, the second time with the intention of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. And of course join us on June 20th at 1 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in this new emergent consciousness.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

May 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Cloud Atlas (2012).

Virtual Discussion date: May 23, 2020 at 1 p.m. PT

During the pandemic we will be focusing on media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the challenges around us.

This month we will be exploring Cloud Atlas (2012), another groundbreaking evolutionary cinematic work by long-time Integral filmmakers the Wachowskis, whose Integral conscious cinema classic The Matrix Trilogy was our first Conscious Movie-of-Month selection exactly one year ago.

Cloud Atlas, which was co-directed with Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), is another one of the Wachowskis’ grand cinematic experiments, this time in the form of an extremely complex century's-spanning evolutionary journey. The film explores the complex interweaving of many interconnected souls as they journey through multiple lifetimes, cycling through spiraling patterns of evolution and de-evolution. Amazingly this 2012 film is deeply resonant with these challenging times in the way its cinematic style hauntingly represents the shift in consciousness we are being called to make in this moment in human history. This shift moves us toward an increased capacity for complex multi-generational evolutionary perspective-taking and collective intelligence-based consciousness. Watching this film in many ways gives us a visceral cinematic experience that can potentially help train us in this emergent form of consciousness.

If you have not seen Cloud Atlas you can stream it on most of the major streaming services. We recommend watching the film at least twice, the second time with the intention of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. And of course join us on May 23rd at 1 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history. As part of our virtual discussion we will be sharing a perception practice specifically designed to use this film for training us in this new emergent consciousness.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

"Interstellar" Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Virtual Discussion (Video)

Here is the video recording of our April 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Live Discussion of the film Interstellar (2014) and its resonance with our current real world challenges.

We had a wonderful session! Big thanks to everyone for making this a deep and profound mindwalk into Interstellar and into our current challenges!

Here are some links for things mentioned in the session:

• Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman (the first integral film)
• Toward an Integral Cinema - an academic article exploring the film and her work as the first integral filmmaker
• Big Picture of the NOW - for a deeper dive into the evolutionary crisis we are facing.

And don't forget to check our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Virtual Discussion Archive for video recordings of all our previous CMoM Virtual Discussions.

April 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Interstellar (2014).

Virtual Discussion date: April 18, 2020 at 1 p.m. PT

During the pandemic we will be focusing on specific media that can help us during this crisis by lifting our spirits and helping us gain deeper and more expansive understandings of the challenges around us.

This month we will be exploring Interstellar (2014), another groundbreaking evolutionary cinematic work by integral filmmaker Christopher Nolan, which is eerily prescient to these times while inspiring with its exploration of how to use the power of love to transcend great obstacles.

A civilization on the edge of collapse. Our species is facing possible extinction. A parent faced with the challenge of saving the future for his family and the whole human race. In the face of this great challenge people all around them respond from fear and denial…but some respond with love and courage. Which way will win? Will humanity survive and thrive or will we bury our heads in the sand until there is nothing left?

Years ahead of its time, this integrally-informed science fiction epic attempts to answer this question. It incorporates the capturing of the real physics of outer space while simultaneously concretizing the non-physical dimension of love as a cosmic level force of existence, on the scale of gravity and centrifugal force.

If you have not seen Interstellar you can stream it on most of the major streaming services. We recommend watching the film at least twice, the second time with the intention of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before. You are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. And then of course join us on April 18th at 1 p.m. PST for our virtual discussion of the film and how it speaks to us at this moment in human history.

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If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

Transformative Media Course (Spring 2020)

Announcing our next 13 week online course in 

Transformative Media Creation and Reception: 

Designing and Creating Transformative Media Experiences for Self, Other and World 

with Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.

Starting Soon

This is a course for aspiring and accomplished change makers who want to learn how to use media to extend and deepen their efforts to create transformation in self, other and world. It will illuminate the comprehensive toolkit for designing media to catalyze healing, personal growth and the evolution of consciousness on an individual and collective level.

Together, we will learn about the co-evolutionary relationship between moving-image-based communication mediums, consciousness, media, culture and society, and how these mediums can be used as a driving force for individual and collective healing, growth, and revolutionary and evolutionary change and transformation. We will also be exploring how to consciously create and receive moving image works as a transformative practice for self, other and world through the development of both individual and group projects. No previous media-making experience required.

For more information and to sign up for this course visit: 

https://campus-coevolve.org/transformative-media/

Campus Co-Evolve: https://campus-coevolve.org/
Admissions: https://campus-coevolve.org/admissions/

March 2020 Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This month’s Conscious Movie-of-the-Month is Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time (2018).

Virtual Discussion date: March 21, 2020 at 1 pm (PT)

Join us this month as we explore the feature film A Wrinkle in Time, a beautiful, rich and groundbreaking integrally-informed cinematic work that uses an advanced experimental form of storytelling that attempts to integrate and find a synergy between the masculine/agency and feminine/communion patterns of the Hero's and Heroine's Journey.

This is the second film by director Ava DuVernay that we have explored as one of our Movie-of-the-Month selections, the first one being her feature film Selma (2014). DuVernay is at the vanguard of the new conscious media movement in African American Cinema, and in many ways she is leading the way while also acting as a midwife for a whole new generation of deep feeling and thinking integrative African American conscious media makers.

With this multilayered cinematic work, DuVernay attempts to create this synergy between the masculine and feminine styles of communication through the integration of both agency- and communion-centered camerawork, production design and editing. This is combined with a weaving together of an overarching traditional masculine and action-oriented linear story structure with a more feminine and communion-oriented non-linear story telling approach with multi-layered story streams and spiraling evolutionary arcs of both its characters and its story and the structures of consciousness in and around them.

Regrettably this great and noble cinematic experiment falters at the end with a small yet fatal flaw in the story and character lines of development at a peak transition moment. Because of this and the advanced experimental nature of the work, many critics and audience members had trouble deeply connecting with the film. That said, this is still a great cinematic experiment worth seeing and studying.

As always, you are invited to watch A Wrinkle in Time on your own and then join us for our virtual discussion on March 21st at 1pm Pacific Time. If you have not seen the film you can stream it online on most of the main streaming services or get a free rental from your local library. We recommend watching the film at least twice, the second time with the intention of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before. As always, you are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

Find out more about our free virtual discussion coming up on March 21st HERE.

You can view the video recordings of all past Conscious Movie-of-the-Month virtual discussions HERE

Integral Cinema 2019 Year in Review

Welcome to 2020! 2019 has been a major transition year for the Integral Cinema Project. We shifted our energy and focus toward meeting the challenges humanity is facing as part of the current global-scale evolutionary crisis (which is the root cause of all our current global-scale challenges like climate change, mass species extinctions, wealth inequality, rising ethno-nationalism and more). Our research on the co-evolution of the moving image, consciousness, technology, culture and society indicates all these crises are the products of the growing gap between the evolution of our technologies and the evolution of our collective consciousness. We seem to lack the collective capacity to use these advanced technologies for healthy, life-sustaining and life-flourishing purposes.

Our research suggests our best shot at limiting the potential suffering related to this major evolutionary transition is by using our advanced technologies to help accelerate the evolution of individual and collective consciousness. Because of the short time we have to heal this gap between our collective consciousness and our technologies before the projected collapse of our current civilizational structures, we are focusing our attention on training as many integral (r)evolutionary change agents to use these advanced media technologies to accelerate the evolution of individual and collective consciousness, open sourcing our data, tools and practices to the world, and developing a global at-scale evolutionary media intervention.

This year the Integral Cinema Project embarked on a number of exciting new ventures...

The Cinevolve Inititive

This year the Integral Cinema Project embarked on a number of exciting new ventures. We have been called to codify what we’ve learned and put it into practice so we can begin to train media makers to understand Integral thinking and incorporate it into their own work. The time for research and theory-building expands to include a new initiative to put our findings out into the world! To this end, we have joined forces with other evolutionary-oriented institutions and organizations including Conscious Good Networks and Campus Co-Evolve, and created The Cinevolve Initiative, a Manhattan Project-style research and enactment initiative to uplift humanity through these challenging times by storifying and gamifying the stages of human development and the evolution of individual and collective consciousness. Operating under the auspices of the Integral Cinema Project, Cinevolve aims to create “proof of concept” content and train others to do so as well.

Conscious Movie-of-the-Month

This year we joined with the Conscious Good Creators Network to bring integral cinema theory and practice to this collective of transformative media makers from around the world through our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month (CMoM) integral movie review and discussion series. The following are the 2019 CMoM virtual discussions:

• The Matrix
• Selma
• What the Bleep Do We Know?
• Avatar
• The Great Hack
• Game of Thrones
• Black Panther
• Inception

Integral Cinema Courses 2019

This year also saw the beginning of our initiative to train as many media-makers in integral cinematic consciousness as possible to help assist humanity in navigating through our current evolutionary crisis/transition.

• Transformative Media Creation and Reception - This year we also joined forces Campus Co-Evolve to create a Transformative Media Creation and Reception course to train evolutionary change agent and activists from around the world to use media in support of their efforts to help humanity evolve.
• Conscious Media-Making 101 - In this introductory course for the Conscious Good Creators Network, Integral Cinema Project founder Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. explores what is conscious media and conscious media-making, what are some of the different potential forms of conscious media-making, and how different states and stages of consciousness effect the media-making process. Mark also explores how these structures of consciousness within us are communicated between us, the works we create and the individuals and collectives that experience our works…and how this knowledge can be used to create deeper and more transformative media experiences for creators and viewers on the individual and collective levels.

Integral Movie and TV List Updates 2019

The following are all the 2019 movies and TV series that tested positive for having integral elements and have been added to our IMDb Integral Movie and TV List.

• High Flying Bird (Netflix, 2019) - Steven Soderbergh's elegantly complex exploration of the personal, interpersonal, cultural, social and historical dimensions of African American basketball behind-the-scenes politics that gives us a beautiful and deeply resonant "big picture" multi-dimensional perspective on the effects of structurally embedded white supremacy. 
• Undone (Amazon Prime, 2019) - Amazingly beautiful exploration of the line between madness and enlightenment and the indigenous magic worldview and the modern and postmodern worldviews. This little hybrid animated gem using complex storytelling to take on cinematic trip into multiple dimensions of being and becoming.  
• The Mandalorian (Disney+, 2019) - The first live-action series of the integrally-informed Star Wars Saga that marks a return to the saga's mythic storytelling roots in a clean and simple story structure. It also grounds us back intp an essential "Force"-oriented story that pulls our heart-strings with the introduction of "Baby Yoda". In many ways this series feels like an attempt to heal some of the fans wounds of the missteps taken in The Last Jedi and Solo and it appears to be doing just that. 
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Disney/Lucasfilm, 2019) - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a masterpiece of integral-archetypal filmmaking completing the integrally-informed Star Wars Saga triple-trilogy journey with a visceral cinematic synergy that beautifully brings together multiple saga-wide storyworld streams to a wondrous crescendo. A must-see for integrally-informed Star Wars fans.

Integral Cinema Publications 2019

The following is a list of all our publications published in 2019:

• Avatar and the Co-Evolution of Consciousness, Culture and Society - An exploration of the Co-Evolutionary relationship of consciousness, cultural worldviews and societal structures and how it is reflected in "Avatar."
• Cinema and the Evolutionary Emotional-Aesthetics of Sri Aurobindo - This is a research report on one of our current research projects exploring the integral-evolutionary theories and approaches of Sri Aurobindo's work.
• Breaking the Wheel: Reflections on Game of Thrones, Selma and the Great Transition - An  exploration of the parallels between the "Game of Thrones" series (2011-2019), our current evolutionary moment and the movie "Selma" (2014).
• Healers in the Hood: Reflections on the Passing of John Singleton, Selma and the New Consciousness in African American Cinema - An exploration of the connections between the passing of African American filmmaker John Singleton, the film "Selma by African American filmmaker Ava DuVernay and the new movement in African American Cinema towards a more complex and comprehensive integral conscious-raising approach to capturing and confronting the continuing challenges faced by African Americans including structural and hidden racism and white supremacy.
• The Matrix and the Evolution of Consciousness - Or, taking the Red Pill and waking up to the coming of Winter: Reflections on meta-perspectival storytelling, The Matrix, Game of Thrones and our current global situation.
• The Pluralistic Worldview of Netflix’s Unbelievable - An examination of the ways the show is solidly Pluralistic, and how it could have been more Integral.

T.E.H.N.C. Podcast - Integral Cinema Sessions 2019

The following are this years integral cinema video podcast sessions between Integral Cinema Project founder Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. and our Director of Communications and the host of the TEHNC Podcast series, Jonathan Steigman.

• New Black Cinema: Roundup - Jonathan and Mark do a roundup of the latest works in the movement we have dubbed "The New Black Cinema." From "Black Panther" to "Black Lightning," from "Blindspotting" to "If Beale Street Could Talk," we discuss the state-of-the-art in New Black Cinema and its integral and near-integral underpinnings. 
• Why the Game of Thrones finale is BRILLIANT! - Jonathan and Mark make the case that the GoT finale managed several extraordinary moves that deepened and anchored the entire series. With the finale, the whole arc and purpose of Game of Thrones became clear. The show is about the transition from the Mythic structure and the end of feudalism...and the rise and fall of an authoritarian demagogue with weapons of mass destruction. 
• The Big Picture of the NOW - Jonathan interviews Mark as he explains why "All problems are problems of consciousness" and unpacks the current global situation: how we got here, why it's unprecedented in world history, and why media in all its evolving forms may be the best and most powerful tool to awaken us into a new paradigm of being.  
• Why The Rise of Skywalker is brilliant! (and why it matters) - Mark and Jonathan make the case that: 1. J.J. Abrams took an impossible task and delivered beyond our expectations in this final installment of the Star Wars trilogies; 2. The Star Wars saga has important resonances throughout our culture and society, beyond almost any other popular work; 3. Critics (and film theorists and scholars) by and large don't know how to read the film, or evolutionary media in general. 

Community Partnerships 

In addition to the above projects we have been doing this last year with our partners, we are working with them in various other ways as well.

• Campus Co-Evolve - We are developing additional transformative media courses and a Transformative Media Community of Practice with Campus Co-Evolve and working with the Campus’s founder, collective intelligence pioneer George Pór, to develop a collective intelligence approach to media-making. 
• Conscious Good - We are developing additional courses and workshops with the Conscious Good Creators Network, we advised them on a research study exploring the connection between consciousness and media, and some of our integral cinema research findings were presented by Conscious Good founder Trina Wyatt at the Visionaries Summit, which was also attended by Integral Cinema Project founder Mark Allan Kaplan and Director of Communications Jonathan Steigman. 
• Transformative Technology Community - This year we became a community partner with the Transformative Technology community of the San Francisco Bay Area, we were on the support team for the TransTech 2019 Conference, and we attended the TransTech Academy incubator for a second year in a row as well.

The Star Wars Saga and the Evolution of Consciousness

It's a Star Wars month for the Integral Cinema Project! Join us as we explore perhaps the most successful consciousness-raising cinematic work of all time, the nine+ theatrical film Star Wars saga, which finally completes its major storyworld arc with the theatrical release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Star Wars is unique in the history of cinema on so many fronts; that one cinematic work could have such a deep and expansive impact on individual and collective consciousness as well as major effects at the cultural and social level is truly mind-blowing. A small sampling of its impacts include:

• The rebirthing of mythology for the modern and postmodern age; 
• The introduction of numerous technological advances in both filmmaking and the movie watching experience, advancing the fields of special effects, animation, sound design, and theatrical projection and sound systems that all increased the capacity for more immersive and consciousness-raising experiences for all cinematic works;
• The introduction of the “hybrid” genre, which integrates multiple cinematic genres into a meaningful whole and which has contributed to the penetration of an integral structure of consciousness into the popular entertainment domain;
• And of course, the introduction of the idea of The Force and the exploration of the very nature of individual/local consciousness and collective/non-local consciousness and their intersection, as well as exploring various evolutionary dynamics of consciousness and its relation to the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions of being and becoming.

The Rise of Skywalker is currently in theaters. We recommend watching the film at least twice, the second time with the intention of seeing any patterns of consciousness you had not seen before.

New Podcast!

You can increase the transformative potential of the second viewing experience by watching our new TEHNC/Integral Cinema Sessions podcast: Why The Rise of Skywalker is brilliant! (and why it matters).

And if you really want to dig in, you may want to check out our previous discussion: Unpacking Star Wars 1-7.

Conscious Movie-of-the-Month discussion is Saturday, January 25th at 1pm PST

For this Conscious Movie-of-the-Month event, we will be discussing the entire Star Wars ennealogy (9-film series). Please join us as we explore the transformative impact of this groundbreaking and historic cinematic work. As always, you are also invited to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum. You can join the Conscious Good Creators Network for free and sign up for the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month discussion at the same time here: https://conscious-good.mn.co/events/star-wars-conscious-movie-of-the-month-virtual-discussion.

If you have not seen any or all of the three major trilogies of the Star Wars saga you can still participate in this exploration by reading the Wikipedia overview of all the films. Serious fans of the work might also want to check out ICP founder Mark Allan Kaplan's two articles, My Cinematic Emancipation and Star Wars and the Tetra-Evolution of American Cinema. If you are really ambitious and want to binge watch some or all of the series in preparation for our CMoM discussion on the 25th you can now stream every major work of the saga (excluding The Rise of Skywalker, which is currently in theaters) on Disney's new online streaming service, Disney+ (a free trial is currently available).

Happy New Year and New Decade to all...and...

May The Force be with us all!