By James A. F. Stoner and Richard Peregoy –
Introduction to: Management Perspectives at the Convergence of Eastern Wisdom
and Quantum Science.
This issue of the Journal of Management, Spirituality, and Religion is the first of three special issues that will grapple with what might be called the five greatest challenges our species has ever faced. Those five challenges are:
dealing with climate change and global warming in particular and the many aspects of global unsustainability in general,
avoiding nuclear Armageddon,
becoming the kinds of beings who can live on this planet without destroying it,
producing, distributing, and consuming the goods and services we need to flourish without destroying, and hopefully healing, the planet, and
creating a set of global economic, political, cultural etc. systems that enable all of us to flourish as a species with no one left out (globalmovement.net 2021).
These five challenges can be described as two very immediate “survival challenges” and three also urgent “flourishing challenges” (globalmovement.net, 2021).
The first two: 1. dealing with climate change and the whole package of global unsustainability aspects of the world (Monbiot, 2021) and 2. avoiding nuclear Armageddon (Sherwin, 2020) are ones that could lead to the extinction of our species in a few years or decades or even in a few days in the case of a nuclear holocaust.
The next three challenges require transformations that present bifurcations on the road to wellbeing and flourishing for humanity and all life on earth, now and for future generations.
There are many, many individuals, groups, and organizations grappling with these challenges from multiple different angles and working to create many different approaches to meet those challenges. The three special issues planned for this JMSR series join these efforts in an intentionally broad and potentially all-encompassing way: creating a new language for humanity—a language that will open our eyes, hearts, and minds and inspire bold actions—immediately. This search for a new language for humanity will likely be much like the seeking being pursued by such “transformative technologies“ as the Theory U approach of Otto Scharmer and his MIT Presencing Institute colleagues (MIT Presencing Institute, undated; Scharmer, 2016), Appreciative Inquiry and Business as an Agent of World Benefit pioneered by David Cooperrider and elaborated on by Chris Laszlo and their colleagues at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School (Cooperrider & Selian, 2021) and others … Perhaps even including the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, an almost five-century old “technology” for personal transformation (Wolff, 1996).
Download the PDF to continue reading.
Comments