Dr. Paul Ray, What made you the Visionary you are Today?

I've been a social researcher for 45 years, and almost from the beginning I branched out from my base in sociology, anthropology and economics to include a field that those academic disciplines didn't know how to think about: ecology and ecological sustainability. I've been concerned about the possible destruction of ecosystems and of major portions of life on earth all that time, and concerned about the role of human cultures, societies and economies in making that happen.

Fairly early on, by the mid-Sixties, I "saw" intuitively, or if you were to speak in spiritual terms, had a revelation, that we need a whole new kind of civilization if we are to be able to turn toward ecologically sustainable practices. So I've been a macro-sociology researcher with a strong bent toward better practical policy research, and toward activism. I was a professor of planning at the University of Michigan, then Chief of Policy Research on Energy Conservation for the Canadian government, and then had my own business as a market researcher focused on what it would take to change values and lifestyles toward sustainability among American households. So I've been in academe, government and business trying to get a handle on what it would take. And my research led to finding that the Cultural Creatives are out there, 50-60 million adults in the US and 80-90 million more in Europe. They are capable of making that change.

I've also been on a spiritual path for over 30 years, and taught meditation as a hobby. So I combined my sense of needing a new civilization with asking what it would take to create and support a change in consciousness for the whole population of the Western world. I seem to have spanned some arc of macro-scale social consciousness and a more inner, meditative way of life for all those 30 years... and rarely have I felt comfortable with that stretch. I'm aware of how thin and poor the supports for spirituality are in the West. One of the distortions of our world that most bothers me is that so many spiritual people have the comfortable delusion that if they just sit on their cushions and meditate, that will be enough. It's not remotely enough. We are all needed now at this time of planetary crisis, especially those of us who are more conscious.

Dr. Paul Ray, What advice would you give our readers about their evolving individual consciousness, and the cultural an planetary consciousness?

I'm an all out advocate for creating a Planetary Wisdom Culture. It is clear to me that this expresses a higher purpose for humanity, and that we must consciously participate in bringing it about. A wise culture will engage in actions that are ecologically sustainable, good for the long run, able to create our own survival after a couple of centuries of ecological folly. A wise culture will also provide cultural support for the development of whole and sane human beings and for their psycho-spiritual development. My contention is that the latter isn’t really possible without the cultural supports for maturation over the whole human life cycle, probably with initiations. Jim Garrison and I are writing a book together on "The Emerging Planetary Wisdom Culture." Our further contention is that humanity is now headed toward planetary integration, and a planetary supersystem. The carrier population for the new development is Cultural Creatives. If they are indeed in every world city, and across most of Europe and North America, and at the core of all the new social and consciousness movements, they are the leading edge of cultural change. The key problem is they are unaware of their own numbers. The media don’t show them their own faces because this conflicts with the Modernist worldview of the media.

By Glennis Walters Smith