Horizons of Heart

By Shi Hoo Jham

Transitioning into a 21st century life:

Some call it an awakening; others a singularity. However, this transitional time in which we find ourselves has been a long time in the making. Despite knowing some pieces of the future tools like A.I., Blockchain, or Universal Basic Income we are still left without a clear image of how these will ultimately affect us in this coming stage of development. From popular cultural predictions, current cultural turmoil, and much of our collective history it would seem we are headed for darker times. From an understanding of our Horizons of Heart however, it would seem we are headed for the most beautiful time that has existed in the human memory.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” - Father John Culkin

Following from what Culkin stated of Marshall McLuhan’s work in the above quote, the tool of language is an influential one. The language we use impacts how we see and interact with the world as well as how the world then impacts us and how we see ourselves going forward. In other words, not only may different people have different languages, though the development and evolution of that language helps to shape evolving worldviews. Therefore, to be able to see a clearer image of what awaits us beyond the crest of this coming developmental wave we must share an equally developed language. That language is Integral Theory by Ken Wilber.

Horizons of Heart presents a pragmatic, positive, and shareable vision of a world evolving through this transitional period. It first summarizes the new language tool of Integral Theory. This tool is then used as a shared foundation for communicating an environment of systems, a set of tools, cultural beliefs, and personal perspectives which all aid in creating the world around us. Sharing these will help us to define the change we wish to see in the world and with that comes our collective responsibility to be that change as Gandhi suggested. What will come to pass from the crashing of this transitional wave upon our shores is greatly dependent upon our ability to communicate a shareable perspective towards more truthfully, justly, truly, and effectively creating a greater existence for the greatest number of people. What will come to pass is dependent upon the Horizons of Heart we inhabit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shi Hoo Jham
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463850121

Shi Hoo Jham

Seeking to do my part to make this experience an increasingly loving and more interesting one.

Book preview

Together we can change the world. This is not meant as some metaphor or pie in the sky utopian pipe dream. This is an idea that is much more than individual ego, it goes beyond the belongingness of tribal team groupings, it overshadows mere achievements of self and teams, and transcends the expressive acceptance of loving embrace. This is an idea which enfolds it all in harmonic resonance such that we may all collectively join in the largest global transformation for the benefit of all humanity. We are quickly approaching a level of sophistication within technology, our social systems, our cultures, and our own understanding of ourselves which will continue to increase our ability to impact the world around us and to do so in a collectively engaged way. This book presents a realistically achievable vision for a new first world standard such that current first world countries and many of the ways they do things will become clearly second rate. More than this, it is a sharable vision which if engaged with can provide an opportunity for all participating to leapfrog their way past many of the roadblocks keeping them from greater progress. This book was written to layout a truly grand vision of which all the details will not fully fit into one book. It is an attempt to give the most succinct overview to kick start engagement into a shareable vision to be refined for a truly greater future. A future which enables greater freedom, flexibility, adaptability, stability, compassion, love, and creativity for both the individual and the collective. A future which brings us all collectively closer to World Peace than ever before. Though, maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The journey to creating this book started in an average family, in an average neighbourhood, in an average city, within an average country. Or so was my perception growing up. Some of these perceptions start to change as more information about the world comes into focus. Everything is always normative until it’s not and the way we perceive things plays a big role in how we define our lives. How things are and how we perceive them to be are inseparably intertwined parts of existence. This can be very helpful at times, though very limiting at others. As this book wishes to discuss ideas which could be applied to all our lives it can be somewhat limiting or biasing, for or against the ideas themselves, if the author and their ego is made to take center stage. As such, we will be staying as much as possible to the ideas at hand rather than the messenger delivering them.

To you dear reader, it’s good this book found you, or more correctly you found each other. If this has been a choice rather than an obligation, the information contained within will be of greatest value. If this is the case it means that you are someone seeking to improve your understanding of not only the world around though also of yourself, your place in the world, other people, tools, social systems, and cultures which this world offers. You are someone who seeks a greater existence than what is present or has come before. You may define yourself as spiritual though not religious and seek real world application to the sometimes flowy, intangible, or unpractical spirituality of new aged philosophy or traditional religion. You are someone who inherently feels that there must be solutions to some of the biggest problems in the world which somehow never seem to be solved, or even seem to get worse. You may even be someone trying to fix much of what is broken in our world, and yet are left seeking greater solutions. Furthermore, this hopefully means that you are admitting to yourself that you don’t have all the answers and are willing to keep an open mind to new information which you may find additive to your current understandings of the world.

Just as you must admit you don’t have all the answers, this book does not either. By the nature of one person’s limited perspective this book will inherently be sometimes limited itself. This does not mean that all the ideas should be tossed. The goal for this book is not to be perfect nor to be a complete solution to all the world’s problems though to present a coherent idea of how to realistically move in that direction. To create a shared perspective so that we may all align our effort effectively towards grander goals. At minimum to provide an optimistic alternative to the clear lack which hits all of us sometimes.

The hope of this book is to inspire engagement with a comprehensive and achievable vision for a greater future. One where incentivization is more aligned with the developing will of the people such that an engaged populace will create the most desirable, balanced, caring, and developmentally progressed places to live. This will lead us all towards a greater world yet unseen within the human memory. It is precisely because of this novelty the future holds that we will not be able to use our memory as much as we will be required to use our creativity and imagination to help us see into the future. The value of our memory helps us to see where we were and how we got here. The value of creativity allows us to see where we want to go. Where our intellect helps us to create the path to get there. An integration of these is what will best help humanity towards greatness, as surely it is exactly what has worked for us all thus far.

Realistically, this will not happen overnight however the goal is to start or more accurately continue although to expedite the process of improvement to help ourselves, society, and culture step beyond iterative growth to find greater. This must start from the individual, yes, you. The ‘I’ that is reading this. We all must take charge of the parts of our life that lay with us individually. That which is the responsibility of ‘I’ is no one else’s. This vision however cannot be completed by a singular person or even a single group or corporation. It is a vision that does require an engaged populace. It must start from a committed I and then work outward to include more people and aspects of life. It is a vision which all people will be able to share, and the value of a shared vision cannot be understated.

A shared vision is what truly brings together monumental works and accomplishments. This is what creates an amazing band that continuously belts out successful music. It is what has made many companies lastingly successful. It is what has sent humanity into space and what has led to big steps in eliminating extreme poverty in the world. The idea of a shared vision aides in cooperation and lasting motivation towards one goal which can continuously be worked on by some mind somewhere. It’s what allows us to more greatly go beyond what went before.

But what do we mean by greater? Especially greater as opposed to better. Well, let’s look at better as an iterative process which makes horizontal improvements. Where greater is actually moving into a new league of novelty, sometimes thought of as vertically integrated improvements.

An example of this transition from better to greater was when Steve Jobs brought us a greater product with a smartphone which became the standard over the now old flip phones. Flip phones, at the time, were products which were getting iteratively better with updated hardware and smaller form factors. Some even claimed the label of smart phone by extending functionality to email. Jobs however, then brought us a new way to interact with information and expanded capability greatly by vertically integrating many computer functions and music player functions into a phone with a touch capable screen. Jobs presented it in 2007 [1] as a combination of a communicator, an iPod, and a phone all in one. All this integration together truly set this invention head and shoulders above the existing technology at the time. It was such a change that Steve Jobs, when announcing the iPhone, had a fifty-minute tutorial to simply show the public how to swipe, tap, scroll, pinch and zoom. Today, when those functions are so second nature to many of us, it seems silly to spend fifty minutes to explain it. However, this is the nature of greater change. Something that even though looks like an existing paradigm fundamentally changes some aspects of it such that the new greater paradigm comes into being.

If we briefly think about how we as a society have explained the physical world around us we can see the need for updated language. The leading edge of vocabulary in physics today is quantum physics where an atom looks like a central point with fields of potential encompassing it. It brings new terms like superposition and entanglement while making us think about the ability of one thing to act as two different things at the same time. The language and the insights from it are an update from a more simplistic classical mechanics where the model of the atom was a positive center with orbiting electrons much like the planets around the Sun. Which itself was an update from the yet more simplistic ancient Greek view of indivisible marble-like atoms. Each step forward produced different ways to see the world and different ideas to experiment with. Each view was adequate for its time and helped to move towards the more refined language of the next step. Each step produced more accurate maps and understanding of the world and with this understanding greater tools, techniques, and systems were able to be created in turn helping influence the development towards the next step. Each step being limited by the ability of the people interpreting it as a direct result of the language, tools, and perspectives they had available to them. In this way, we can see that a valuable tool to enable movement forward into new domains of understanding is a language which provides greater insights, new perspectives, and is able to explain the existing state of things while also acting as a bridge towards understanding the next step of development. Integral Theory is that language and is the linguistic bridge we will use to peak at the coming step of development. In the same way Steve Jobs brought us a greater product with a smartphone, there is a coming greater way in which to organize life, society, and ourselves to create a new standard of living unforeseen by the masses. This new greater society will be the next wave of progress launching new ways of living while setting a new first world standard and all while solving many of the problems our current situation has in spades.

Similarly, to Jobs giving a fifty-minute presentation to show people basic functionalities and introduce basic terms, we need to take time to ensure we speak the same language. This will allow us to then share the same perspective and be able to take that shared perspective through a trajectory in time to really see where we collectively could be headed. Thus, this book starts with a greeting to the ‘I’ of the reader with a positioning towards accepting new information from the author. This allows a ‘We’ to be created between ‘I’ reading this and the author. ‘We’ can then entertain an introduction to a shared language and perspective which ‘We’ will need to progress towards greater understanding and achievements. This shared language is Integral Theory by Ken Wilber. This is the most developed language which creates the best maps for a shared perspective in the 21st century. Much of the information in the ‘Philosophy and Shareable Language’ part of this book is not of the author’s creation, it is however, the author’s best summarization of some of Ken Wilber’s rather extensive work. After the first section where we walk through a shared language we will attempt to create a shared perspective and then use this shared Integral map and apply it going forward. The application of this Integral map in the subsequent sections of this book are the author’s creation and vision of where we are now and how we could likely progress. After this ‘We’ space of understanding and language is created the book continues into a more objective understanding of how to use the map. ‘We’ can now start defining how ‘It’ works. How ‘We’ can look at the world around us and see the correlations to our new map. Only after this can the ‘I’ reading this be joined in a ‘We’ which can perceive an ‘It’ in the same way. This then allows the book to progress into the ‘Its’ of systems in which ‘We’ exist and how they can be redefined for a greater future. Lastly, this book will wrap up the complexities of it all in a few fictional characters living in this future world to have a peek at what our lives could be if organized more greatly.

It should be mentioned that Integral Theory is not easy to simply pick-up. It is complex. As much as this book will seek to explain Integral and provide some examples the best examples for learning will be self-created ones. That is to say, try to apply it to your own life. This book is purposely not very long to help encourage you the reader to take your time and to even go back through it several times to try to understand, practice, and apply this map to aspects of your life. Even if you truly want to change your perspectives it cannot happen overnight. It takes time to see different perspectives even before you work to feel comfortable inhabiting them. Not all changes to perspective are good or helpful so the time it takes to change helps to ensure stability and growth of an individual and their life.

To summarize the book, our heart from a very young age is not actually able to love anyone but ourselves. Mentally, in developmental psychology and the development of cognition this is also shown to be the case. We all, nearing eight billion of us humans, start as egocentric by nature. In other words, the horizon which is cast by our heart is only big enough to encompass ourselves. Upon growing up in a healthy manner, our hearts expand their horizon. When we learn about our cultural rules and roles and understand our family, our heart extends that horizon to include them in an unquestioned ethno-centric, tribal family. This expansion is still and always inclusive of what came before. Beyond that as we hit into teenage hood, our healthy heart extends to include those people beyond the tribal family into accepting people of other tribes so long as socially it is productive and beneficial. This is also exemplified by nation state level tribalism which transcends and includes separate family tribes in a next level expanse. Into early adulthood, if our heart still seeks healthy growth, we find that our next inclusive horizon stretches not only to my nation and its people, though to all nations and all people. As we continue this expansion of the horizons of our heart they are always transcending and including what came before. Transcend to the next stage whilst including all that came before in nested rings of expanse (to put it in 2D).

It has been said that the world would be much better off if we simply had one world religion to follow. What this book expresses is that we already do have one unifying religion which we all follow. The religion’s name is Love. Although depending on the horizon of heart that people occupy we get the very real fracturing of societies and cultures along with the problems that we see in the world today.

As Einstein put it, ‘no problem can be solved from the