Dear Reader,

On October 8, I will resume my duties as the Executive Editor of the Spirit’s Next Move weblog at Center for World Spirituality. In this role, I have the great fortune to be collaborating with Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, Sally Kempton, Mariana Caplan, Vidyuddeva, and many other contributors to the weblog. My blog posts here at Awake, Alive & Aware (joe-perez.com) will be minimal.

Marc Gafni, Director and Scholar-in-Residence of the Center for World Spirituality, will helm the publication as Editor-in-Chief. His dynamic and enthusiastic style, married with the heart of a lover, the mind of a scholar, and the spirit of a mystic, will provide constant leadership. Our aim is to present a daily glimpse into the workings of spirit in the world’s evolution today. We are not merely linking to information, but linking the context of contemporary thought and news to the perspectives emerging from today’s Integral World Spirituality movement. One of our first features is an extended series of recorded dialogues between Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber on the Next Chapter of Integral Spirituality. Don’t miss it!

And so in the months ahead, I anticipate posting less frequently on Awake, Alive & Aware. Instead I’ll be focusing again on Spirit’s Next Move as well as daily postings to Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, sometime soon I will be launching my first e-mail newsletter — tentatively entitled Awaking into YOU!.

In today’s world of information overload and daily status updates, why start another newsletter? Basically because after nearly five years of not publishing books (while I developed my Lingua-U of subtle energy, theory of poetics, and poetry), I’ve lost touch with many of you. I’m entering a new phase of my writing career and will soon start to publish the first book of a series of at least 10 books over the next decade. This “New Chapter of Joe Perez” means it’s more important than ever that I’ll be traveling and generally publishing more often and in more places than ever before. I would appreciate the chance to be able to keep in touch to let you know what’s happening. Sign up for my newsletter at the top right box on the joe-perez.com  homepage.

We live in a world in which at least 15 million children die of hunger every year, we face a global climate and energy crisis, human rights are in tatters in many dozens of countries, and we must combat other increasingly dire worldcentric challenges with what fragmented and selfish consciousness is to be found in tribalistic and ethnocentric cultures too often distorted by fundamentalism in both religious and secular flavors. Our time demands action. Action demands having the self-knowledge of firstly recognizing our interdependence on each other, and secondly seeing our collective interdependence on the forces of evolution. We require the faith to believe that the evolutionary impulse is in fact God, the Spirit of Love alive in our midst, until such faith finds a home in the knowledge of Self as All-That-Is. In other words, until we attain the True Self realization taught by Eastern masters for thousands of years and the Unique Self realization taught by hidden (esoteric) Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic mystics for centuries.

Today the Center for World Spirituality is providing thought leadership and community building in order to bring these two enlightenment traditions together, East and West, under the label of World Spirituality based on Integral principles. The labels aren’t so important in the end. Building hope is important. Transmitting Self-knowledge is important. Creating bold solutions together is important. Make room for We-space to emerge, letting the Unique We evolve us as one despite all the forces of chaos and malice that pull us apart. We are doing our work with the help of literally thousands of people from every continent on Earth, with special hubs in San Francisco, New York, and the Netherlands. I know that if you follow the bloggers I’ll be featuring on the Spirit’s Next Move blog, you will be as impressed as I am with the depth, distinction, and delightful-ness of the writing.

In conclusion, whether you are a longtime reader or just discovering my blogs and poetry, your readership is valued. You know where to find me in the months ahead: Spirit’s Next Move, Joe Perez on Facebook, and @JoePerezLive. I’ll be right here.

Love & Light,

Joe

P.S.: Thanks for the wonderful feedback on my recent excerpts from The English Kabbalah: Poems at the Edge of Language, a book of poetry that will see publication next year. How encouraging it is to see signs which in my mind confirm that poetry can yet be a powerful medium of mystical expression, transmission, and transformation in our time. You can expect to see even more excerpts from the book in 2013.

Today the new Spirit’s Next Move blog, still in a “beta testing” mode, moves closer to its official launch. It’s my first group blog in many years, and one that I have a great deal of enthusiasm about. Not only because it suits the next step in my development, but because I think it’s what the world is calling for at this moment in time.

When I’ve been involved in collaborative blogging endeavors in the past, they always seemed to blow up or fizzle out after a while. Partly this is because frankly my blogging style is pretty direct and prolific, and there’s the risk that other contributors will feel crowded out or that I will feel constricted if I have to keep to a pace that doesn’t suit me.

Spirit’s Next Move shows no signs that this is going to be a problem. Serving as Executive Editor with Marc Gafni as Editor-in-Chief, we are designing a collaborative arrangement that will allow both of us to pursue our aligned visions as freely as we desire while supporting the other’s vision. Our backgrounds complement each other, each bringing different comfort areas and a willingness to blog outside of our zones of familiarity.

Moreover, we have from the outset involved other key supporters and voices within the Center for World Spirituality in holding and strengthening the container we wish to create. Already Chahat Corten, Sally Kempton, Dr. Mariana Caplan, and Kathleen Brownback have contributed posts to the new blog… and that’s one power-house line up of brilliant talent. I am looking forward to publishing more of their writings on the blog and original content as well. And we have barely even begun to approach a few other individuals to join the blogging team as regular contributors.

Why is Spirit’s Next Move important? Just take a look at what we are doing and learn for yourself. I hope you’ll see a bunch of smart, good writers who are deeply engaged in spiritual practice, richly bestowed with wisdom from years of searching and practicing in a huge variety of disciplines, and a group who share a common knowledge system of World Spirituality based on Integral Spirituality (AQAL) principles.

That’s what I see, in any case, and why I’m looking forward to knocking our readers’ socks off, month after month. It’s going to take a while to get fully ramped up. There’s a lot of painstaking detail work that needs to be done to get the Center for World Spirituality’s various websites and multimedia assets properly organized and accessible so they’re easy to find and utilize. There’s a lot of work in terms of getting a new blogging team working together cohesively.

But the payoff, if we are successful, will be a beacon of light on the Frontier of 21st Century Spirituality. Our vision is world transformatioinal: we believe there is a global opportunity and necessity for the emergence of a worldcentric approach to spirituality grounded in the best wisdom of pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity. And if it’s not clear exactly what that means, then you can look to this blog and the many books and other projects coming down the road from CWS to make the picture clearer.

Sadly, I am signing off Awake, Aware & Alive less than a year after the blog’s launch. I’m just going on indefinite sabbatical, not demolishing the territory. I loved the experience of writing this blog over these past months, enjoying experimenting with new styles of writing and ways of thinking about the Integral enterprise and human existence. Rather than re-post my Spirit’s Next Move blog posts here, I’m going to selectively post them to my Facebook page and only update this blog on very special occasions.

And I love each and every reader who has helped my growth over this period of time. I would say, “I’ll miss you!” except that I am confident many of you will join me over at Spirit’s Next Move.

Dear Reader,

I’m excited to announce that I am joining the Center for World Spirituality team in the role of Director of Communications and Scholar-in-Residence. Furthermore, once our work is underway I expect to take on the responsibility of Editor-in-Chief for a new blog devoted to World Spirituality based on Integral principles.

With these developments in mind, I intend to re-calibrate Awake, Alive & Aware so it aligns with my new responsibilities. There are four areas of particular significance:

1. Posts on Awake, Aware & Alive represent my own views and are not necessarily reflective of my employer or any other organization with which I am affiliated. “The buck stops with me.”
2. Posts which apply broadly to an audience with an interest in World Spirituality or Integral philosophy will generally be posted instead to the CWS blog and Facebook Page. In these posts, I will take care to speak from a world-centric self as best as I embody it, allowing my own views to harmonize with those of a broader spiritual movement.
3. Events such as my workshops and private classes will be posted at least on my own blog and may also be cross-posted on CWS-related blogs.
4. My E-mail newsletter with exclusive information about my work and upcoming events will be sent specifically to individuals who have requested to be included (see the “Subscribe to my newsletter:” link at right).

Meanwhile, as and after these changes take effect, you may be seeing fewer posts than my usual amount. The process of experimentation goes on, with Awake, Alive & Aware devoted to embodying my own individual Unique Self perspective on the world … and my blogs elsewhere exploring my efforts to cultivate a “We Space” of Unique Selves highly engaged with contemporary affairs, news events, and the world’s wisdom and spiritual traditions.

Thank you for your continued support along the journey!

Many blessings and much love,

Joe

P.S.: You can read my updated biographical profile if you’re curious.