Integral Mindfulness, Wisdom Society, and Collective Sentience:

an exploration into the next stage of human consciousness

Abstracts of my paper for the Mindfulness & Compassion conference in San Francisco, 3-7 June

This contribution to the “Mindfulness & Compassion” conference is focused on where the moral compass of integral mindfulness points. Being integrally mindful is about taking mindfulness off the meditation cushion and infusing all dimensions of our life with it; not only the life of you and me, but also of collective entities, such as organizations, networks, nations.

If wisdom is “a discerning mental factor that clearly comprehends the causes, conditions, effects, and implications of experiential process, content, behavior…” as Ron Purser suggests (Purser, 2014) then cultivating it at collective scales is a vital condition to our species’ evolution to the next level of consciousness. That is a requisite for passing our evolutionary test to a planetary society guided by collective wisdom. Only then we will be capable to meet our intertwining global crises caused by the pathological aspect of the previous stages of consciousness and their corresponding social structures.

Collective sentience builds on the Buddhist concept of sentience (characterized by matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness) and turns it into an attribute of groups and collective entities at any scale. Humanity will become sentient when it develops collective sensing and meaning-making organs, collective intelligence and consciousness, which make it capable to care for the well-being and evolution of the species itself, its habitat, both the whole each part of it. All for the Whole, the Whole for all.