Getting specific on what it means for humanity to thrive as never before
In the recently released talk “A Future for Humanity Beyond the Current Metacrisis,” CCR founder Dr. B. Alan Wallace covers much ground—from diagnosing the root causes of our many global challenges to the specifics of cultivating mental balance in trying times.
But we recognize that with all this detail, it can be easy to lose sight of how this new era of human flourishing might actually look—and imagining this is important in cultivating our intentions (and vice versa). For that reason, in this edition of Work & Wisdom, we’d like to make this vision for our shared future as tangible as possible for you—and all those with whom you share this message!
Dr. Wallace identifies four main areas in which we can experience unprecedented flourishing: social, environmental, psychological, and spiritual. In addition to diving into these areas below, we’ve also shared this portion of the talk as a 14-minute clip on YouTube, which you can view here.
While all types of flourishing mentioned here are closely related, social and environmental flourishing are especially intertwined, which is why Dr. Wallace addresses them together. At the most basic level, these two types of flourishing are rooted in the ethical principles of nonviolence (to do no harm) and benevolence (to be of service). When humans can treat each other with nonviolence and benevolence, the outcome is social flourishing: greater harmony within families, communities, nations, and even between nations. Crucially, social flourishing does not necessitate a global monoculture (as Dr. Wallace says, “Unity without diversity is deadly.”). Instead, social flourishing strikes a harmonious balance between bearing our deep interconnectedness in mind, while celebrating differences in worldview within and across cultures.
Environmental flourishing results from extending the principles of nonviolence and benevolence beyond humans, to all sentient beings with whom we share this planet. Here, Dr. Wallace highlights how this broader view might change economic incentives. Instead of economies that reward the unsustainable consumption of natural resources, this vision of environmental flourishing shifts the economic focus to ensuring that “everybody has enough” without environmental degradation. While humanity has certainly benefitted from the innovations in technology, medicine, and beyond that resulted from the European Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, Dr. Wallace suggests that materially advanced countries still have much to learn from indigenous cultures worldwide, which have lived in harmony with the natural environment for millennia.
Social and environmental flourishing present a new vision for our outer circumstances. But limiting our understanding of well-being to the material dimension alone fails to recognize the vast potential of the human mind. Psychological flourishing is about using our inner resources to cultivate a sense of genuine well-being from within. While psychological flourishing is certainly supported by our material surroundings, it can also be trained when we face adversity, whether that adversity arises from without or from within. As Dr. Wallace says, psychological flourishing is “rooted in mental balance—the opposite of mental imbalances like greed and so forth. And it’s cultivated through practices to achieve a sublime equilibrium in body and mind.” Attentional training is a prime example of how we can all promote psychological flourishing here and now (indeed, this is the training to which our retreatants devote most of their time in meditation at our mind lab in Crestone, Colorado).
The human mind is capable of a great deal, but so often, we may find ourselves on our back foot—simply reacting to what life throws at us. The CCR’s vision of psychological flourishing posits that with consistent training, we can deepen our sense of mental balance in a systematic way, even when challenges arise.
Spiritual flourishing is defined by supreme well-being, which comes from knowing reality as it is. But spiritual flourishing is not simply about gaining an intellectual understanding of how reality works—it is a commitment to fathoming a deeper reality that leads to transformation. It requires that we bring a posture of radical empiricism—an attitude core to the scientific revolution—to our own conscious experience.
To Western science, the origin and nature of consciousness remains a mystery. In this context, scientific inquiry and the pursuit of well-being have been viewed as completely separate endeavors. The CCR’s vision for spiritual flourishing seeks to show that this separation is actually unnecessary—that it is indeed possible to investigate the nature of consciousness through rigorous first-person inquiry, and in that very same process, also discover an unparalleled sense of well-being. In fact, precedent set by the world’s contemplative traditions suggest that a deeper level of well-being (including through ethical conduct and attentional training, as mentioned above) is a prerequisite for embarking on such a rigorous investigation of consciousness.
Especially in the modern world, this new framing can seem inconceivable. We invite you to watch the full talk to hear Dr. Wallace dive into the relationship between consciousness and scientific inquiry, but if you’d like to read further on this topic, you can read about our chapter in the Routledge Handbook for Research Methods in Spirituality and Contemplative Studies, or read our essay, The Nature of Contemplative and Scientific Discoveries.
This vision for a new era of human flourishing isn’t meant to live merely in the abstract. As Dr. Wallace says, each of us will play a part in bringing about this future, both through our individual contemplative practice and through our involvement in our own communities. The CCR is working to provide the world with the tools needed to bring about this new era of human flourishing, specifically through the Sixfold Matrix of Mental Balance—a secular framework designed to bring about balance within individuals and, in effect, throughout the world.
If you’d like to stay involved with our work, there are three things you can do right now:
Thank you for joining us on this mission to bring about a new era of human flourishing!
