Daniel Schmachtenberger on the Inability to Accept Unnecessary Suffering and the Unprecedented Universe

Daniel Schmachtenberger is the Founder of the Emergence Project and has recently come on board with the Center for Integral Wisdom as a scholar.

At the CIW board meeting in March 2015 in Texas, Daniel gave a fantastic talk about his outrageous dream: that one day, the sentence “We live in a world of outrageous pain” is no longer true.

Listen to his talk below and join him in his outrageous dream.

Here are some key points he makes during the talk:

• The universe is unprecedented; every emergence of evolution is unprecedented.
• Our stakeholders are all sentient beings now and forever.
• We need to become conscious agents for symbiosis, organization, synergy, and the advance of novelty and uniqueness.
• Trying to solve a problem – without recognizing how it is interconnected with all the other problems – externalizes harm to something else that matters.
• What would I be without the rest of the universe?
• Daniel’s Unique Gift: His inability to accept unnecessary suffering
• Daniel’s outrageous dream: One day the sentence “We live in a world of outrageous pain” is no longer true.
• We live in a world of outrageous pain – not because of duality, but because of collective insanity.
• Evolution does a kind of iterative evolution and then discrete jumps. These jumps happen both when they can and when they have to.
• When the kind of consciousness that can externalize harm has the technology representing an existential risk for all of us, that consciousness has to shift.
• Earth is a tiny spaceship floating through space.
• How do we trigger the emergence of a self-organizing, effectively self-governing, self-evolving global civilization so that we are not solving problems that we are still structurally causing, inducing and incentivizing?
• How can we make obsolete the basis of all of our problems by not conditioning harm-causing, dysfunctional human behavior in the first place?
• We can translate all our global problems to groups of humans doing particular activities that are causing them, and we can look at what conditioned these patterns of behavior in those people.
• There are determinants of behavior in all quadrants (internal/external, individual/collective).
• We need to optimize for all life, for all things that matter, simultaneously; as not in conflict with each other but rather, symbiotic with each other.
• Reconciling paradox is part of an Integral consciousness. How do we get from either/or to both/and?
• All of it matters, and all the things that matter are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually supportive to each other.
• When we value the scarcity of things we artificially manufacture the scarcity of things.
• How can we condition omni-considerate, integrally developed behavior in everybody, intrinsically, as a basis for self-governance?
• Nothing less than that is adequate to what we want to do. So, that’s our task.

Marc Gafni then frames this conversation in relation to the Center. While CIW invests major efforts in reweaving the narrative of existence–which is mainly about interiors–Daniel and the Emergence Project emphasize the systemic, structural questions–thus mainly exteriors. Long mutual conversations resulted in the choice at CIW to bring those two perspectives and projects together in synergy.

Listen to Daniel here (with introduction by Marc Gafni):

Daniel Schmachtenberger’s background in systems science, human behavior, and activism brought him to focus on the global systems that interconnect and drive our major global challenges.

He has spent much of the last decade studying the etiology, scope, magnitude, timelines, and inter-connectedness of major issues; inventorying global resources and solutions; doing detailed comparative analysis of economic and comparative analysis of economic and governance systems; and developing comprehensive systems solutions, adequate to the issues and realistically achievable.

Daniel has expertise as a social scientist, a social engineer and an evolutionary philosopher and strategist. His aim is to develop an integrated set of technologies and processes capable of organizing and supporting a distributed and continually updating comprehensive critical path management system for humanity’s total evolution. He is working to re-purpose and synthesize relevant state-of-the-art systems for information management, complexity processing, mathematical forecasting, and other data science tools into an integrated set of functions capable of global resource allocation planning and strategy. His aim is the shortest path to a fundamentally redesigned world-system that makes possible and supports the highest quality of life, for all life, now and ongoingly. Specifically, his focus is on the development of new systems of economics and governance that intrinsically incentivize life-enhancing behaviors at all levels of agency, supporting distributed and spontaneous problem solving and conscious participation in our global evolution.