Re: Who are we?

Description: Kula sees that society is shaped by spiritual, or religious evolution, as well as increasingly new technologies that use the mind to fashion objects that allow use of ever-evolving consciousness.

Question: What forces that have shaped humanity most?

Transcript: Well I mean I think there’s at least two fundamental forces. One is a kind of spiritual evolution, or religious evolution, and this sense that we are both in nature and separate from nature at the same time. Those are two very difficult things to hold together. And a sense that we really can improve our lot; that life isn’t simply an endless cycle. And each religion, especially the _________ religions . . . each of those religions interpreted and taught that insight in different ways. But fundamentally, we’re not simply in an endless, repetitive cycle; but we are in an ongoing spiral; sometimes two steps back and one step forward; a real movement in progress towards ever-greater consciousness and awareness of life itself. I think that’s the one, single, great, propelling force. And the other is that that seems to have been always expressed in increasingly new technologies; increasingly new use of our minds to fashion objects that allow us to use that ever-evolving consciousness. Now sometimes that technology is ahead of our consciousness, so you can . . . you know, you can build the technology that actually kills you. And that’s . . . One of the real features of this moment is we’ve been through three of four major, technological, and psycho spiritual moments of transition. So whether it’s from hunter-gatherer, to agrarian, to industrial, now to we can call this technological, or informational, or we can call this post-industrial. And that goes with a spiritual cycle evolution. And if those two things aren’t together, a lot of people get killed in the mix. And now right now one of the issues that we are in that transition. We have a technology that actually captures the deepest spiritual insights. The deepest spiritual insight is that we are all inter-dependent and connected. That’s the fundamental spiritual insight of every tradition. And because we are interconnected, and because we are interdependent, we have to treat each other in a certain way; because when I treat you, I’m actually just treating myself in a different form. Now that takes a lot of awareness to get to to feel that. That’s why you have spiritual traditions doing their teachings on the wisdom side, and you have a lot of practices to try to make that happen. For the first time in human history we actually have a technology that matches that spiritual insight. That’s what it means to have a global community. That’s what it means to be able to have a global web. People really are interconnected, and I think that’s mind blowing because . . . And for a lot of people for sure it’s mind blowing because for one thing it’s kind of, you know . . . you know kind of talk about it in some kind of highfaluting spiritual way. “Oh we’re all interconnected. We’re all interdependent. A butterfly, you know, in Alaska. And we, you know, in Mexico waves,” that’s very nice. And here you go online and you see the technology and you are. My daughter has pen pals all over the world. She went to Hungary for a summer and she has pen pals . . . She has relationships and IMing people in India. She’s IMing people in Russia. She’s IMing people in Hungary, you know? I mean my parents . . . my father came here in 1938 from Poland. It was the longest . . . He had never traveled more than seven miles in his life, and he was traveling across the ocean. And now my daughter can go “poof” and talk to somebody in India and see what her house looks like. And so that technology, which in a sense concertizes and realizes the deepest spiritual insights, now it realizes it in the material world what this spiritual insight is. It was more than just the material world, but it’s an emotional, and intellectual, and spiritual, and ethical world of meaning that has to match up to that technology.

Question: Religion in America today…

Transcript: We’re in one of the most exciting re-awakenings in religion in our history. Every so often –basically the sociologists dated every 70 to 100 years – there is a religious re-awakening in America. We’re in one of those religious re-awakenings. But because of the incredible fluidity of boundaries; because of the incredible freedom; because of things like the Internet where people can access other people’s cultures, access other people’s practices, access of people’s wisdom – because of that, this awakening is going to usher in either . . . Well it’s going to usher in a lot of things; but one of the things it’s going to usher in is an explosion of new mixtures; an explosion of boundary breaking . . . boundary breaking new mixtures of spiritual practice and wisdom. That is going to unnerve purists, and that’s part of the challenge right now. And mixtures, we know from Chemistry 101 in that first chemistry class that we ever took . . . Even if it was in high school, and if we mixed something and the teacher wanted to show that even if you mixed it in a certain way, it’s gonna explode, you know? Mixtures are combustible. Now it turns out pure things are combustible too. Put two very pure things together and . . . So we’re gonna have to learn how to respect the purity of inherited traditions – those of us who like mixtures. And the purists are gonna have to learn to appreciate that what mixtures do is they actually help keep the purity alive, too by morphing it into new ways. So we’re in one of the great, great moments of religious awakening, and much more interesting than a lot of other countries at the moment because in a place . . . In most of Europe, religion has so died and it has such a bad name that we’re not seeing mixtures; we’re seeing nothing. And in a lot of other parts of the world that are just coming into the modern experience, we’re seeing an explosive, angry reaction to the mixtures. America seems to be situated – to a great extent because of the founding fathers of the country who really had a vision of what the country can be – we’re situated in a place where we can produce very new spiritual wisdom in spiritual ways that take the best from the ancient traditions, let go of some of the worst, but all kind of transcend and include . . . transcend the worst and include the best in a wide variety of ways.

Question: Judaism today…

Transcript: Well Judaism is just a micro version of . . . Judaism is in a state that’s very similar to the state we’re describing of the world. It’s just a mini version. So you have everything happening in Jewish life. You have fundamentalists who wanna kill all Arabs. We have people who wanna give up the state of Israel because in some vision of grand peace and interdependence, no one needs a nation state. And you have everything in between regarding Israel. Then regarding religious and spiritual practice, you have people that are saying Judaism has done its job. It’s time for it to simply unfold back into the world. And it’s basic ideas and messages have already been incorporated, so we don’t have . . . we don’t need to retain Judaism. And then you have other people who are playing with Jewish wisdom and Jewish practice in very creative ways. And so you have every type of expression right now. And that, again, is either a cause for great fear to some people, or great hope. I’m on the hope side of this. The more different expressions; the more we can have people play – and I mean play in a kind of sacred play – the more we can have people in a sacred play fashion play with their traditions, play with their inheritances, the more wisdom, and practice, and insight we’ll have at the table we all need to dine at.

Recorded on: 8/15/07