Louis G. Herman, Ph.D – The Ecology of Consciousness

Prof. Louis Herman is a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii West Oahu, author of “Future Primal: How our Wilderness Origins Show Us the Way Forward,” and founder and director of The Institute for a New Political Cosmology. His work and worldview are informed by early imprinting with Southern African wilderness; schooling under apartheid in the aftermath of the Holocaust; and his recovery of his Jewish indigeneity in Israel living on Kibbutz and serving in the infantry. He received a Cambridge education in the natural sciences and the history and philosophy of science. His work integrates the wisdom of wilderness-based indigenous societies and emerging evolutionary science into a new political cosmology with the truth quest at its center. He has spent the last two decades developing curriculum and pedagogy based on this work.

Honolulu Hawaii
USA

Website: http://futureprimalbook.com/index.html

Social Media: https://twitter.com/policosmology
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Workshop(s)

Workshop 1: Repairing the Ecology of Consciousness: Is Cosmology More Important than Technology?

There is a rapidly growing consensus that we need a radical change in global politics over the next decade if we are to avoid a catastrophe.  Yet society seems paralyzed by a toxic combination of fascism, fundamentalism and fatalistic denial. The most pressing problems we face are no longer technological but matters of values, culture and consciousness. The great work of our time is to rapidly create an open-ended consensus about our shared predicament—a truth based politics—a new political cosmology.
 
How on earth can we help accelerate such an immense transformation?
 
This workshop proposes the primal truth quest as a cultural catalyst to help heal the ruling pathology of consciousness.
 
Professor Louis Herman has been on a journey from the wilderness of South Africa to Cambridge University, an Israeli Kibbutz and finally Hawaii, developing a vision for “rewilding” consciousness and healing politics. During the last 25 years he has been based at the indigenous-oriented University of Hawaii West Oahu, collaborating with his students, refining the vision into a paradigm for collective transformation. This was published in 2013 as Future Primal: How Our Wilderness Origins Show Us the Way Forward.
 
The dominant culture does not think of the human psyche as part of the Earth’s ecology. Therein lies the source of the deformation of consciousness driving us to catastrophe. This workshop places the creative, truth-seeking human emphatically within the great cosmic story. It tells of the human consciousness unfolding over 200,000 years to create a realm of imagination, creativity and freedom with all its attendant horrors and glories. This workshop offers a narrative informed by evolutionary cosmology, indigenous wisdom, the history of world civilizations and the
philosophy of consciousness. This new story illuminates truth-seeking as the defining behavior of the human and the pre-condition of our flourishing on earth. 
 
Louis and colleague, Georgia Thompson, will demonstrate a set of practices—the primal truth quest—rooted in the evolutionary origins of consciousness in a wilderness ecology. The cultivation of the truth quest has been marginalized by the rise of civilization, culminating in the
deformations of industrial modernity. Nevertheless, the truth quest resurfaces throughout history in times of crisis, transformation and creativity. This new story helps us ‘re-wild’ the human mind and brings the truth quest to a higher level of self-illumination. In doing so the new
cosmology suggests that giving truth-seeking centrality in our lives today could constitute that intentional leap in the evolution of consciousness many hope for. Such a revolution in culture and values would help create the synergistic relationship between our politics and the biosphere
we so urgently need.