President's Message

Thirty-five years later: What is IONS and where is it heading?

A message from IONS President, James O'Dea

We live at a time of high transition. The emergence of a peaceful, healthy, sustainable and interdependent global civilization is critical. The disconnect between our innate wisdom and the external global conditions grows from the lack of integration between the realities of spiritual and cultural achievement on the one hand, and scientific and technological achievement on the other. To harness the vast resources of our human potential and creativity we must fully appreciate the nature and capacities of consciousness and find a bridge between our most advanced scientific understandings and our most luminous spiritual awareness.

Fortunately, an unprecedented dialogue between scientific knowledge and spiritual ways of knowing is gaining ground, moving from peripheral and esoteric conversations into the mainstream. Since its inception IONS has fostered and deepened this essential exchange, knowing that in its fullness the dialogue between science and spirituality will serve profound and lasting transformation for individuals, as well as helping positively shape the evolution of a more integrated human consciousness.

Our primary resource in addressing the foreboding challenges that face humanity at this time is the understanding that transforming the condition of the world demands the transformation of our inner lives—the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs that inhibit the emergence of fresh insight, creativity and wisdom. The dynamic relationship between inner and outer, between consciousness and evolutionary progress is the basis of a conversation out of which science and spirituality can now mutually inform our collective understanding. And in so doing, together they will help guide the human enterprise through its most critical evolutionary challenges. IONS has dedicated itself to this work precisely because it understands and appreciates its vital nature.

Through its mission—to advance the science of consciousness and human experience in service to individual and collective transformation—IONS has set its work in the center of this historic shift towards a worldview reliably informed by both scientific and spiritual insight.

As we have engaged our mission—-through a variety of research, educational and membership programs—we have faced two contrasting challenges. First, we have met with pervasive skepticism and entrenched beliefs in academia, the scientific community, key opinion leaders and pundits of the media. This significant resistance comes from an influential community embedded in a scientific materialist perspective which categorically places subjective spiritual experience as outside the world of rational, objective science. All the while, over our thirty-five years as an Institute there has been an explosion of popular interest in the interface of mind and matter, mind and body, psycho-spiritual experiences and the creative and causal powers of consciousness. However, much highly speculative material gets represented as having scientific validity when it does not: this second challenge might be classified as enthusiasm that spills over into unreliable and ungrounded New Age fervor. Despite these challenges, IONS has earned recognition for shedding a discerning light at the interface of science and spirituality, consistently avoiding both cynicism and fads.

To be effective at providing knowledge and information that has been rigorously examined, we find that we must straddle the domains of science and spirituality at sufficient depth and with sufficient competency to really be of service. Our competencies and skills—in providing reliable insight into the frontier conversations between science and spirituality—are based on the following:

• Research. Since our inception we have conducted and sponsored research on consciousness and healing, human capacities and emerging worldviews. While we have not dedicated ourselves solely as a research institute, having a strategic engagement in doing frontier work has demonstrated our expertise and credibility as more than reporters or dabblers in the field. We have attracted scientists who do the work and who understand from first-hand experience what is happening in the field.
  
  
• Publishing voice of discernment. We have developed media and communications capacities through seminal books, a thoughtful magazine, CDs, DVDs, online archives, and an expanding Internet presence. As communicators of high-quality new paradigm and evolutionary thinking, and of scientific research across a broad spectrum of disciplines related to consciousness, culture and transformation, we have demonstrated expertise in helping people discern where real progress is happening.
  
  
• Inspiring Collective transformation. We have inspired tens of thousands to meet and discuss topics relating to our publications, as well as community groups who interface with a broad cross-section of new paradigm organizations and evolutionary initiatives as part of a broader movement of social transformation. Our members and active groups have trusted IONS to be a reliable guide in the transformation of their own perceptions and beliefs. We recognize this as a sacred trust. Many people are hungry for applications, practices and the relevance of theoretical material.
  
  
• Experiential education with measurable results. Over the years, we have convened multiple educational conferences, professional colloquia, public lectures, seminars and workshops, that offer people in-depth experiences relating to consciousness and healing, human capacities, mind-matter research, psi, and psychological and spiritual transformation. IONS is an outstanding convener of people at all levels of engagement. We provide context in which to experience our work—not just read about it. We translate and make assessable complex ideas and research.

From offering discerning insight in this broad arena of consciousness, science and spirit for thirty-five years, IONS has a prodigious network of leaders in the fields of medicine, science, psychology, parapsychology, education, transformative learning and social change. IONS has sustained and grown its reputation as an Institute which is endorsed by brilliant, creative and innovative leaders—and some of the brightest minds and most important spiritual leaders alive on the planet. In 2004, IONS launched a state of the art Internet program to attract a new generation of members and supporters. Our Shift in Action site has opened us to new ways of interacting with our members and the potential for scaling up to reach large Internet audiences. In recent years we have also expanded our partnerships with like-minded organizations who appreciate IONS' leadership role.

In a year of symbolic significance, at the commencement of the millennium, IONS bought a 200-acre property which, by 2007, became its fully-owned permanent home. In that brief period it has created a successful retreat and learning center for a range of transformational programs as well as IONS seminars. Now we find a new and compelling significance as keepers of a beautiful land-based home in the hills of Northern California.

THE VISION GOING FORWARD

Where IONS sees its defining edge in the next decade is to integrate research and experiential work and by so doing enhance both the field of knowledge and the quality and depth of transformative educational process required to lead us to embodied wisdom.

We see the IONS campus as a key asset in this regard: it provides us with a vibrant context for reflecting this embodied wisdom; it gives us a place where we can demonstrate a 21st century integral consciousness with deep relational sensitivity and maturity; it is a charged and resonant field where leading transformational teachers do their work and where cutting edge scientific research is studied and conducted. In other words, our campus will increasingly reflect the reality of the emerging worldviews that we research, write books about and which serve as the basis for our transformative educational programs.

Our research will focus on consciousness and healing, on rigorous evaluation of a range of transformational programs and practices, and on states of consciousness and their relationship to cosmology and maps of reality. Our educational programs will translate and build on the research to offer transformational blended learning opportunities, curricula on worldview literacy, teleseminars, workshops and conferences.

Our retreat and learning center will become a transformational hub attracting a range of spiritual leaders, scientists and new paradigm thinkers for leading-edge dialogue, and offering a collaboration of the best programs in the space along with IONS' own signature programs. It will be recognized as what the Fetzer Institute describes as a key "acupressure point for transformation." Together with high quality research and its own permaculture program, ecological practices, healthy and conscious living environment-it will demonstrate the manifestation of an evolutionary consciousness.

By strengthening its core IONS will represent the reality it has explored for thirty-five years while continuing to bridge science and wisdom. IONS will continue to harvest the substance of its explorations and translate it to its members, community groups and philanthropic supporters to inform and inspire. We envision increasing online availability of our magazine content, strengthening our exceptional research archives, and supplementing our research with online programming linked to our core vision and mission.

We have begun to investigate how to take our online membership platform, Shift In Action, to the next level. We envision the program hatching into a much larger venture to serve the burgeoning interest of the general public. Shift in Action in collaboration with a for-profit venture will scale up to reach large audiences and connect with organizations as a portal in the consciousness space. This will allow IONS to focus on its core mission while serving the emergence of the global consciousness movement. Revenues from the hatched SIA will also support IONS research work and the transformation of its campus.

As previously noted, the tension for IONS between opening mainstream science to the new paradigm of coherent dialogue about the nature of consciousness and the extent of human capacities, while avoiding the excessive claims of those carried away by unbounded exuberance—-remains a real one. In fact, transforming the discourse with hard scientific evidence while also demonstrating the profound changes that can be brought as a result of worldview shift is the heart of IONS' mission.

We intend to prevent our work from becoming diluted, stretched too thin, or decreasing in rigor. We also intend to prevent our work from becoming a collection of media sound-bites, speculative conversations or, on the other extreme, so technical and esoteric that we are speaking only to other academic researchers. Currently there are an increasing number of voices providing information through mass media, offering sophisticated social networking technologies, facilitating transformational experiences and courses, and receiving funds to do leading edge scientific research. But IONS has created, over thirty-five years, a foundation for integrating scientific exploration, evaluating applications in transformative practice, and has become a respected elder as a thought leader in the field of emerging worldviews. When people ask what is the relevance of frontier exploration, IONS is not only able to answer the question, but to demonstrate it and that is what makes us unique.

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