By Sam Palomino, sam@the-manifest.org


In last issue's feature (see "Weeds, Wagons, Clothes, and Cans: Volunteering in a Selfish Town”) we were a tad harsh and unfair on the real-world accomplishments of the "integral" movement, at least that centered in Boulder CO. As one out-of-town reader put it, "what the integral movement, or any movement for that matter, has to do first is cognitively educate, then lay infrastructure, then influence those in power. Then, and only then, does real change start to happen." So, in the interest of balance, we decided to tease out what this "real change" in the future might actually look like. While these may be wild, impractical, or wholly impossible predictions, they all got our blood boiling.

[For those just joining the story, the "integral" movement is just one of many expressions of a generalized global movement towards more complexity, consciousness, and compassion beyond the limitations of corporate domination, nationalism, imperialism, religious holy wars, tribal conflicts etc. If this dumb little planet is going to save its ass, this broad, diverse movement (which could include everything from the Green Party to the Global Justice movement to the Internet revolution) contends, it will have to wake up to some sort of global consciousness. "Integral", for its part, is a version of this impulse centered around the academic writings of East-meets-West philosophers like Jurgen Habermas, and Michael Murphy.]




1. The NEST Community
Take spiral-shaped Indian community Auroville, mix in some Findhorn, Arcosanti, and Swedish upstarts Matrix Integral, and you've got something like Switzerland’s NEST (New Earth Systematized Transformatron), 2009's compellingly advanced intentional community. Not only a physical space incorporating self-sustaining edible gardens, hydrogen fuel cells, and a brownwater waste system, unlike most "communes" of its kind, it features an award-winning business model: it doubles as a reality TV show, where NEST's more charismatic members interact in real time using the latest in environmentally-friendly and personal growth-oriented products and services. Think Big Brother meets Friends as sponsored by Horizon Organics and Dharma Crafts and you're halfway there. The 2009 Fall Season starts off with NEST co-founder Marcopolis Greenstem failing to clean the composting toilet due to excessive meditating in the middle of a terrorist attack, whereupon a general meeting called to discuss Greenstem devolves into a paintball fight with guns named after Great Sufis of the 20th century. Wicked.



2. The Contemplative Alcoholism Movement
While many believe it started on the pages of this very e-zine (see “The Beer Mystic Manifesto”), the "beer mystic" movement had been, um, brewing since the 1995 publication of Bart Plantegna's fiction offering Confessions of a Beer Mystic (A Novel of Beer and Light). Yet it won't be until 2009 that the Beer Mystic canon is established in the form of The Hoppey Finish of Enlightenment, a mammoth 1200-page anthology of mystical booze-related writings dating back to the Annunaki era. Concurrent to this will be the establishment of the first Beer Zendo in Cambridge, MA, wherein brave drinkers and contemplatives alike converge for nightly 3-hour beer binges conducted with full awareness of each sip. Battling stiff protests from both the religious 12-steppers at Alcoholics Anonymous and the materialist reductionists of Rational Recovery, Contemplative Alcoholism will attempt a union of what the two booze recovery specialists specialize in: skillful acceptance (RR) and placing it all in a more meaningful context (AA) while transcending them both with a deeper, tantric practice (by way of notorious Tibetan drunkard lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) by which the sin, separation, and darkness of Drink itself is transmuted into the Blood and Body of the Entire People of a Suffering Earth. Who says every last can of PBR should be dumped into the ocean and the Pabst Brewing Company burned to the ground?



3. The Black Death Nihilist Cluster of Sector 7-G
No massive movement for human betterment is without its critics, cynics, and downright assholes, and this one is no different. With a nod to 20th-century uber-ironists The Simpsons (Homer Simpson worked in Sector 7G at the Power plant), the Black Death Nihilist Cluster revels in the existential malaise of aperspectival madness and cultural relativism. Inspired by the Neoists, Feral Faun, and Superbad.com, this group of Acid Hackers, Hydro-Masochists, and Petitioners for a Sequel to Fight Club will organize global "flash mobs of pointlessness" and seek to drive up membership and sign Mutual Suicide Pacts with everyone else who Believes in Nothing and Wants to Be Left the Fuck Alone. The secret, of course, is that these people aren't nihilists at all, but an PARODY of nihilists, which they reveal once you reach Arbitrary Membership Level Ten, where "The Great and Last and Final Stupid Truth" is revealed to you in a Fruit-Rollup inscribed using a low-power laser beam. At that point, your G.G. Allin tattoo is surgically removed and you are forced to study the Complete Works of Jerry Falwell at knifepoint.



4. The Japanese Ken Wilber
Move over "Einstein of Consciousness", in 2009 there will be a new hip knowledge machine on the scene, one Takenobu Igarashi, son of the great graphic designer of the same name, who will take Integral Methodological Pluralism to a whole new level with the help of genetic enhancements, ultra-fast internet access, and a severed brain which allows him to read and process two books at once (one for each eye). And no "theory and practice of everything" would be complete without pushing the frontiers of what is acceptable: what KW did to help bring Eastern mysticism into serious academic and scientific discussion, Igarashi will do for the studies of exobiology (aliens, dude, aliens) and parapolitics. And, as the Japanese are wont to do, he will take it to all new ridiculous extremes, so much so that his massive 3000-page magnum opus Holarchical Development of the Cluster God Spark-Lifter will be adapted to become the world's first #1 game show where Japanese families of four battle each other by break dancing through the well-stocked libraries of Pacific Rim Central University in search of the lost texts not incorporated by Igarashis's massive, 3-dimensional theory. And don't even ASK about the footnotes....



5. Self-Help Sci-Fi
Spiritual teachers, Self-help experts and science fiction visionaries will collaborate on 2009's answer to Harlan Ellison's legendary Dangerous Visions sci-fi anthology of the 1960s. Yet where old-school sci-fi "merely" entertained, titillated, depressed, or freaked people out, Self-Help Sci-Fi experiments with and employs genuine techniques of actually transforming the reader's life for the better and providing, dare we say it, hope for the future. Combining centering mantras with interstellar space travel, personality assessment tests with nanotechnology porn, and sentence completion exercises with 8-legged fourth-dimensional carbon surfers, SHSF will come to dominate a large sector of the entertainment market. Books, DVDs, Play Station 3 games, VR headset immersion trainers, and peer-to-peer role playing collaboration technologies will all be employed, and Sci-Fi biggies like Star Wars, Star Trek, the Philip K. Dick Estate and a reborn Wild Palms miniseries will tap everyone from Big Mind guru Genpo Roshi, English "wisdom teacher" Michal Levin, Southwestern rock-n-roll contemplative heartthrob Lee Lozowick, and bad-ass boddhi-babe the Venerable Khandro Rinpoche to launch a multimedia assault on The Forces of Dull, Compromised Flatland Today.



6. The ITP-Pod
Apple's hottest music appliance will enter the personal development market in 2009 with the ITP-Pod, a personal organizer with vast resources of knowledge on all the latest human change technologies. ITP stands for "integrative transcendent practice," and the Pod will beep when it's time to meditate/pray/breath a lot, tell you when you should drink more water, alert you to political and institutional obligations, track your speech patterns to encourage more skillful communication, and feed all of this to a Buddy List Guru, an online "general practitioner" of balanced growth who will monitor your progress and will be available 24 hours a day. But the co-evolutionary fun doesn’t stop there, for the ITP-Pod hard drive will also control the animated tattoos covering the user's body to form infinite combinations of animated pigment cells to dance, throb, and hustle across the skin of hipster and Hispanic alike. Rip, mix, burn, evolve.



7. Network Action Teams (NATs)
Imagine if Japanese superhero Voltron wasn’t a giant robot composed of 5+ individual robots, but a distributed network of 7 people, one on each continent, and each with radically different core competencies (i.e. one member is a fully-realized Christian contemplative, another is an Open Source pro, a third excels at permaculture, a fourth is a conflict negotiator, a fifth a journalist, another is an artist, etc.). In 2009, over two dozen such teams will exist, competing and collaborating to solve the world's every mounting systematic problem. And much the way less-than-athletic competitive ventures like poker or car racing are covered by ESPN today, the World NATs Federation will have a global media presence, with logos and merchandise for each team, fan clubs, stat nuts, and even bookies profiting from the Competition to Save the World. The Fluffy Guns of Courage, for instance, will make a fortune selling recycled stuffed animal mascots, the proceeds of which will go into their explorations with the impact of hyperdimensional physics on the climate of the planet. Audiences worldwide will remain glued to their Palm-Viewers as the Fluffy Guns battle the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Sages (whose purple sunglasses will make them more famous than the cloned Elvis of 2008) and the Yellow Fever Wishnauts to capture the Hard Science Redemption Trophy as they erect competing pyramid-shaped Tesla devices at key geological meridians around the planet, just in the nick of time to prevent a 200-mile-wide iceberg from drowning Scotland in a sea of ice cubes and polar poo.



8. World Cops (a.k.a. "Dharma Goons")
Meatheads aren't going away, ever. So we may as well build a better meathead. "World Cop" meatheads will be drawn from all nations, given counseling on how to not be ass-holes, and will be employed in the service of sustaining the planet as a whole by preventing other, less compassionate meatheads from beating up their neighbors in the name of Captured Oil or Denied Reproductive Rights. The World Cops motto --" keep it inside"-- basically states that all earth citizens are free to believe whatever they want or hate whoever they will inside their own minds, but the moment their interiors try to lay some claim in the exterior world-- the minute Bob the Nazi Fetishist decides to burn down the house of Lenny Goldman the Barbara Streisand Karaoke archivist-- is the minute the World Cops paratroop in and detain Bob the Nazi with the latest in non-lethal, environmentally-friendly neutralizers. The World Cops belong to no single nation, and most are drawn from the ranks of the Global Justice movement, who have experience in decentralized nonviolent resistance to thugs and bullies with less-than-global interests in mind.