In February 2014 I successfully defended my PhD dissertation, titled "Toward an Aesthetic Epistemology: Transforming Thinking through Cybernetic Epistemology and Anthroposophy." The following is the abstract and a slideshow presentation that pulls out the crux of my arguments. Abstract The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today’s rapidly changing world...

Introduction Video games are a huge global phenomenon, driving well over $70 billion dollars in sales in 2011—a number that is only rising year by year.  For comparison, global music sales in 2011 was about $16 billion, while global theater tickets was about $33 billion.  This has consequences—largely unexplored—for people that are interested in spiritual...

All epistemologies are observer-dependent; i.e. there is no single epistemology that applies to all possible observers, because every observer is unique in some way.  The necessary inclusion of the observer in any description of the world is a deeply obvious and yet profound principle.  It was neatly expressed in Heinz von Foerster’s article Cybernetics...

"What is the connection between a transformative learning approach and the sense of one's own spirituality? In what way does transformative learning nurture the spirit any more than any other learning style does?" There are many styles of transformative learning. In general, however, one key aspect of transformative learning the explicit recognition that learning...

PDF: Goethean Studies Notebook (40mb) PDF: Higher quality, print version (180mb) This notebook was created as a personal record of the 1999-2000 Goethean Studies program at Rudolf Steiner College. This unique course, conceived of and taught primarily by Dennis Klocek, is still being offered -- it is now called Consciousness Studies. When I took the course,...

By Seth Miller Full PDF Everyone dreams, but few people find sufficient interest in their dreams to move beyond mere curiosity at their strange contents.  Even many who work with dreams as a part of a transformative practice usually concentrate on their content, and only more rarely question their form, ontology, and origins. Exploring these aspects,...

The movie Inception is the best “question reality” movie since the Matrix (ultimately the Matrix is better, in my opinion), and it raises many fascinating questions having to do with the differences between the two primary states of consciousness available to humans today: waking and dreaming. This issue has been around for about as long...

The world has problems; LOTS of them.  But as long as there are people like my friend Nancy, who devote their lives and love to one of the most important and practical callings on the planet, education of our young, I have hope for the future. Let me give you a picture, in her own words,...

I had the good fortune to attend a Coros Institute meditative retreat: The Great Passage with Dennis Klocek on Whidbey Island a few years ago with my mother.  It was an amazing event, full of profound wisdom, practical exercises, and excellent company.  I would highly recommend it, not just for those who are thinking...

A cursory Google search (2009) didn't turn up anything promising in regards to comparing Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo.  Hopefully this will help: Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo: A Beginning Comparison Summary: This longer essay summarizes the basic elements of the spiritual-cosmological worldviews of two of the most important modern, integrative spiritual thinkers: Rudolf Steiner and...

My general impression of this work was that Chaudhuri was writing in a very philosophical style about a topic which is far more than philosophical.  The extent to which he took pains to delineate some various philosophical perspectives so that he could present the viewpoint of the integral yoga surprised me; I'm not sure...