Founder’s Forum

FOUNDER’S WELCOME

Welcome to the International Consortium for Academic and Societal Transformation!

The idea for ICAST gradually coalesced during my many years of experience as musician, music professor, author/scholar, consciousness explorer and change visionary.

Much of that time was spent at the University of Michigan, to which I will be forever indebted for the latitude I was provided to dream, explore and cross boundaries in the classroom, through my research, and at concert halls and symposia across the globe.

As my work evolved, I became increasingly interested not only in its ramifications for the world around us, but for how we approach the issue of change itself.

At a moment in human history when the need has never been more urgent for thinking that broaches the farthest reaches of the human imagination, I am deeply concerned that much academic and societal discourse remains confined to a notably limited imaginative scope.

My hope is that ICAST’s vision of an arts-driven revolution in creativity/consciousness, particularly given the jazz/Vedanta nexus that gives it further shape, will fundamentally expand the horizons that define both everyday educational practice and academic change visioning.

On one account is the age-old nonduality thesis—where individual consciousness is understood as inseparable from the cosmic wholeness, and consciousness is deemed primary in the broader scheme of creation—that shakes materialist ideology, and thus the prevailing academic worldview, to its core.

Less familiar, yet equally provocative, is a corresponding view of creativity, and particularly its improvisatory core, as—similar to consciousness—straddling human and cosmic dimensions.

Here is where ICAST may make key contributions.

The final chapter in my book Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness is called, somewhat playfully in hopes of counterbalancing the sometimes dense prose of the book, “Planet Earth Takes a Solo.”

In order to navigate the many challenges to the survival of civilization as we know it, the 8-billion-plus-member improvising ensemble called Humanity will need to function with the inventiveness, agility, spiritual interconnectedness and ecstatic joy of a jazz quartet in peak performance.

Inspired by the Vedantic principle of lila, or universal creative play, I elaborate on the passage with the view of human beings as, to invoke one of my favorite phrases, “co-evolutionary participants in the cosmic improvisatory unfolding.”

In a single stroke, prevailing notions of creativity, its role within and beyond the arts, and its inextricable link to consciousness, soul and universal wholeness open up to dramatically new vistas.

The bar is also raised in terms of what size questions guide reform discourse and where we look for answers.

A potentially significant example involves the collective consciousness principle, central among ICAST’s 20 pillars of inquiry and action.

The idea that all of humanity, life and creation are inextricably linked within an overarching field of consciousness has a long history in traditions across the globe and has been gaining traction in recent years.[1]

Jazz musicians’ reports of profound episodes of merging between performers and listeners in an overarching unity, and meditators’ similar experiences of oneness with each other and a sense of cosmic interconnectedness may be direct manifestations of the collective consciousness premise.

A promising body of studies, moreover, that suggest large group meditation gatherings may generate a transformative impact in the urban vicinity (i.e. decreased violence, accidents and illness) if not beyond takes this thinking an important step further—from mere speculation to practical application.

If there is even a modicum of validity in the idea, its applications and findings, we may be talking about one of the most extraordinary discoveries—or more aptly, rediscoveries—of our lifetime.

The scope of questions expands apace.

Might, as some have surmised, the field consciousness principle be further harnessed to mitigate terrorism, military conflict and possibly even ecological crises?

If so, how does it work?

What might future interventions look like that, while likely including some form of collective silent meditation, may also incorporate other modalities designed around specific challenges (i.e. climate change, culture wars, unbridled technological development) amid the world’s array of daunting polycrises?

Imagine peace deliberations, political exchanges, ecological interventions, economic policies, inter-religious and other dialogues that transpire against this backdrop of dynamic interconnectedness at the nexus where individual soul, soul of humanity and cosmic soul unite.

Imagine what university curricula and research programs, as well as community outreach, might look like that were designed around the expanded creativity/consciousness premise.

Given the likelihood that any such interventions will involve the intersection of ancient wisdom and leading-edge innovations in consciousness research, entirely new kinds of transdisciplinary and transcultural deliberations will be needed in which conventional boundaries—beginning with those that separate spirituality, art and science—will necessarily fall to the wayside.

Now; I realize there is no dearth of critique within ICAST commentary of the inadequacy of the materialist worldview, which is arguably the unofficial code of the academy.

However, I believe this is a story that has only begun to be told.

It is problematic enough that materialism and its various strands are philosophically incoherent, disconnected from most people’s experiences and convictions about the nature of reality.

Or that the ideology—perhaps most ironically (yet tellingly)— flies in the face of a growing body of scientific evidence which, while largely ignored if not suppressed in the academy, issues fatal challenges to the physicalist proposition.[2]

I believe, moreover, it is important to identify a further casualty—which is that the materialist narrative directly confines our very imaginative scope to a tiny fraction of what is possible and thus constrains where we will look for sustainable, let alone evolutionary pathways forward in a world at the precipice of global catastrophe yet brimming with capacities for planetary flourishing.

The time is long overdue to recognize the arts, and particularly improvised musical art, approached in conjunction with the improvisation/consciousness/cosmos nexus in full view, as an important boundary-breaking yet galvanizing catalyst for this expanded program of future imaging.

ICAST has been created for those who both realize that the taboo of academic mystical squeamishness is a façade that has long outlasted any usefulness it may have had, and revel in an entirely new scope of inquiry, and practice, that redefine what it means to be an educated individual in the 21^st century.

As I wrote in a letter to Presidents Joe Biden (USA), Vladimir Putin (Russia), and Xi Jopling (China), the challenges of today’s world call for a new, historically significant leadership profile that sets its sights on nothing short of changing the trends of time.

May we look deeply into our hearts and souls, ignite the flame that dissolves reigning attachments to the status quo, and seize this moment to embark on what could be the most extraordinary and exciting leadership journey of our lifetimes.

The world is waiting.

[1] Christian mystic Teillhard de Chardin’s Noosphere, psychologist C.J. Jung’s Collective Unconscious, biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fields, philosopher/cosmologist Arabella Thaïs’ One Cosmic Mind and Tony Nadar’s Ocean of Consciousness are a few examples in the West, with an infinitude of parallels in Eastern traditions.

[2] Which (materialist explanation) for many academics remains a foregone conclusion; all that is needed—so the thinking goes—are a few remaining details that will seal the materialist story of consciousness as the final authority. This notion that incontrovertible proof for a physicalist account of consciousness is right around the corner is sometimes called “promissory materialism.” The growing volume of psi research might readily warrant a contravening “promissory post-materialism,” with one caveat—the compelling argument that the alternative vision promised has arguably already been delivered.

The Structure of Musical Revolutions

Changing the Narrative on Change Itself

Ed Sarath

Invited essay for World Futures journal, publication date TBA.

INTRODUCTION

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1] has had an important impact on change discourse that extends far beyond the sciences. Inspired by that landmark treatise, this essay examines change through a musical lens with hopes of unearthing further insights that might be applicable across disciplines.

My focus is on college/university-level music studies due to both the longstanding intransigence of that field in the face of its longstanding, and growing disconnect from contemporary socio-musical realities coupled with the broader ramifications for arts-driven change that extend from that predicament.[2]

Colleagues outside of music are often startled to learn of the extent to which interpretive performance and studies of the European canon, centuries and a continent removed from our time and place (speaking as a US citizen), continue to occupy the cultural and curricular center of music schools at the expense of the creative processes by which the canon came into being in the first place; this is not to mention the same creativity that is central to contemporary musical navigation and understanding.[3]

Invoking principles of an emergent, consciousness-based worldview called Integral Theory, I argue that a transformed model of music studies, redesigned atop integral principles, has the potential to not only revolutionalize how musicians and music teachers are prepared, but to also catalyze an explosion in creativity and consciousness/spirituality that reverberates across the educational spectrum and is transmitted to society at large.

Black American Music, while conspicuously marginalized in both conventional music studies practice and even change deliberations, is a particularly rich embodiment of IT’s creativity/consciousness foundations—thus the epistemological diversity principle that is key to paradigmatic change—and thereby factors prominently in the analysis.

The integral BAM lens upholds both key diagnostic and evolutionary functions that are key to breaking free from the inertia of stasis, or superficial embellishment thereof, and realizing genuine, paradigmatic revolution.

Perhaps ironically in field that, at least one might think, might be an unmatched embodiment of paradigmatic change, music studies in the academy may arguably exemplify the opposite orientation.

However, diagnostic penetration to the roots of prevailing limitations combined with expanded future visioning may render change-aversion in the field a gateway to rewriting the narrative on change itself.

Here a highly instructive parallel between improvisation in music studies and meditation in the overall academy comes into focus as a potential starting point:

Just as improvisation was once central to, but disappeared from and is now approached as anomalous, within the very Eurocanonic tradition to which music studies has always paid homage; meditation and other modalities for transcending ordinary cognitive functioning was once central to the ancient philosophical lineages whose systems of logic, reason and critical analysis are regarded as central to academic rigor and achievement.

I characterize these as twin epistemological metacrises–one in the arts, the second in education at large–upon which the academy is built, and to which even progressives are largely oblivious in terms of the threats they pose to not only educational integrity but the future of humanity.

Indeed, if the restructuring of music studies atop the creative roots of both the Eurocanonic heritage, and more significantly the global landscape, remain elusive; one can only imagine the challenges inherent in the restructuring of the academy at large atop the contemplative roots of the intellectual tradition to which it pays homage yet remains similarly oblivious. [4] .

To navigate this juncture will require conversance with both the discipline-specific and overarching (academy at large) change principles involved as well as, as Kuhn elucidates in the sciences, fluency with the mechanics of change itself.

(TBC; complete essay available upon request)

[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1960).

[2] Objections to this assessment are sometimes voiced that point to the addition of coursework in areas such as popular music, music technology, global traditions (either via ethnomusicological lectures or so-called “world music” studies) and jazz in recent years and in some cases (jazz/ethno) decades. However, the fact that these areas continued relegated to the curricular (particularly core level) and cultural fringes not only supports the assessment but may even betray deeper levels of normative entrenchment—perhaps akin to Kuhn notion of “normal science”— by which superficial modifications masquerade as genuine, structural change.

[3] In no way is this dismiss or devalue interpretive performance per se, but rather to call for its reintegration within a creativity-based, contemporaneous and globally-meditated format. In so doing, Eurocanonic engagement takes its next evolutionary strides, a central theme in my books Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness (SUNY 2012), Black Music Matters (Rowman and Littlefield), 2018) and most recently Music Studies and its Moment of Truth (Routledge, 2023).

[4] See Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? and Philosophy as a Way of Life.

Who Owns Consciousness Studies(?)

Ed Sarath

Overview

It is difficult to imagine an area of inquiry that more dramatically defies existing academic research categories than consciousness. While neuroscience, psychology, quantum physics and philosophy-of-mind are among the fields that have been at the forefront of the conversation in recent years, there is growing consensus that the academy is no closer to understanding consciousness than it was decades ago. This is in no way to perpetuate the notably problematic, and rarely interrogated assumption that, when all is said and done, higher education researchers will ultimately deliver the most definitive account of consciousness available, particularly in light of the extraordinarily intricate models of consciousness found in wisdom traditions across the globe. Rather, the primary aim is to expand the horizons of academic inquiry into the topic in hopes of bridging it with ancient and less-represented contemporary approaches, both within and beyond conventional college and university research sites.

I further argue that the arts, often marginalized in any such deliberations, have important contributions to make that, in fact, may yield important breakthroughs. Even more precisely, I propose that within the arts, jazz may be a deceptively fertile source of insights. Central is the combination of jazz’s improvisatory core and, inspired the idiom’s long legacy of improvisers/contemplatives, its relationship with meditation and related consciousness-based practice and study. Alice Coltrane, anointed as Turiyasanghitanda, looms large in this context as an embodiment of the jazz/Vedanta connection. The combination of direct transcendent experience invoked both in the silence of meditation as well as within the turbulence of improvisation, along with a cartography of higher stage creativity/consciousness development yields a robust epistemological/phenomenological lens into consciousness that may significantly raise the bar when it comes to nature-of-mind inquiry and debates. The time is long overdue for the largely uninterrogated privileging of third-person theoretical or empirical approaches, all of which have their place, to open up to an expanded range of inquiry in which second-person creativity and first-person transcendence and related development are on equal footing.

I begin with a brief overview of my background as musician (improviser, composer), pedagogue, long-time practitioner in a Vedantic lineage, and integral theorist (author/scholar) who publishes on the improvisation/creativity/consciousness relationship.

I then juxtapose two research models—one consciousness-based, the second creativity-based—in which direct experience not only underpins theoretical inquiry, but actually expands the scope of that inquiry. Just as musicological inquiry into the improvisation process is significantly limited, and even prone to confusion, when not grounded in actual improvisatory experience/expertise; the same holds for consciousness research that is not grounded in some form of meditation practice that takes awareness to consciousness in its most foundational form. I situate from this standpoint what is referred to as “pure consciousness,” along the consciousness line, in parallel with free improvisation along the creativity line to illustrate this point. Both processes serve as research anchors that give rise to significantly expanded investigative scopes along creativity and consciousness lines.

A look at the progression of higher stage development through a Vedantic lens, for which integralists identify cross-cultural parallels, gives further shape to the argument. Turiyatit, Bhagavad and Brahmi are characterized by increasingly unified experience that is coherent with the view of consciousness as, in sharp contrast to both reductionist and emergentist/epiphenomenalist ends of the materialist spectrum, primary in the broader scheme of creation. The point is not that alignment between direct subjective experience and theoretical interpretation of that experience constitutes irrefutable support for post-materialist (or more aptly, pre-materialist) perspectives, but that conventional approaches exhibit little of this epistemological correlation. Indeed, I do not believe it is an excessive stretch to equate the materialist stranglehold, even if it has largely abandoned its reductionist orientation, that has long prevailed in the academy with the narrow epistemic confines of conventional research programs.

I conclude with a new set of criteria for what constitutes both the profile of the consciousness researcher and the terrain of consciousness studies programs. Central to these criteria are not only the above coupling of direct first-person experience with theoretical investigation, but also the foregrounding of real-world ramifications that extend from the different models in question. At a moment in human history when an expanded view of the human being and human creative/spiritual potential has never been more urgently needed in education and society, approaches that either explicitly or implicitly privilege materialism—which reify conventional socio-academic norms—with minimal critique of default assumptions may warrant even further critique. Expansion of the range of voices, without conflating peripheral inclusion with actual centering of the voices, may—in a single stroke—not only bring us closer to understanding consciousness, but lay new groundwork for transformative education.

(TBC; complete essay available on request)

HEALING A NATION DIVIDED:

Jazz, Consciousness and Integral Transformative Dynamics

Proposal for a Carnegie Foundation grant

Ed Sarath, University of Michigan

Healing a Nation Divided (HAND) presents a new and expanded framework for understanding and addressing the socio-cultural polarization that riddles much of our nation and world.

Drawing upon principles from jazz, its robust creative and spiritual foundations and an emergent worldview called Integral Theory, the HAND framework both deepens diagnosis of the polarization crisis—or more aptly, polycrisis—and also provides an engaging program of interventions that can be implemented in communities, institutions, industry and government.[1]

As the US approaches a particularly contentious presidential election, the urgency for healing the divide increases dramatically and, regardless of the election’s results, may likely grow in the months, if not years that follow. However, little headway will be made in the healing process without deep grasp of the broad, multi-dimensional nature of the polarization phenomenon. As explained below, the largely unexamined role of the academy in both exacerbating cultural division, as well as potentially unifying the split, factor prominently in the HAND account.

Here the possibility for higher education to forge new evolutionary pathways comes into view, with consciousness—at the heart of addressing polarization—a key next academic frontier. Were the nation’s colleges and universities to dig deep into the interior dimensions of the clashing worldviews that fuel overlying division, new groundwork might be established for revolutionary new pedagogical and research models as well as engaging other pressing issues—including ecosustainability, mental health, peace studies, and AI—in today’s world.

Central to the HAND vision’s consciousness foundations, moreover, is a significantly expanded view of the arts, with jazz and its expanded and integrative epistemological foundations as a galvanizing force across the arts, humanities and sciences.

In short, the HAND initiative invites inquiry into the overall change imperative that is arguably unique to the present moment in history.

Part I of the proposal identifies core theoretical issues, Part II presents an applied framework.

PART I: Theoretical framework

Integral Theory provides a uniquely broad framework for diagnosis and healing of cultural polarization. The IT lens traces the polycrisis[2] from the innermost dimensions of consciousness—the soul level, where human beings most profoundly connect with themselves, one another and the natural world—on up through a wide range of socio-cultural-educational engagement. with corresponding tensions, that extend from this core, noetic level.[3]

Two competing noetic ideologies, or extremisms—one religion-based, the other science-driven—take hold deep in the system and propel division throughout. Religious extremism is well-recognized. Scientific extremism, however, is not only less familiar, but even when identified is often rejected as an epistemic/ideological impossibility given how deeply entrenched the materialist worldview has become in academic culture.[4]

Integral Theory’s three primary epistemologies (spirituality, art and science, or 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd person approaches illuminate:

The materialist academy is predicated on science/spirituality polarization, with the first privileged, the second categorically excluded, with the arts marginalized in the overall educational quest. The post-materialist paradigm, glimpses of which are scarce yet slowly beginning to appear in educational reform circles, is predicated on spirituality/art/science (and thus 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd person) co-evolutionary synthesis.

Integral Theory also illuminates how competing, science-driven and religion-based extremisms (not to be conflated with integral, co-evolutionary approaches to science and religion/spirituality) fuel each other and the overarching polarization syndrome. To frame this in the most general terms: The more the mainstream academy, either explicitly (via materialist ideology) or implicitly (via corresponding pedagogical/research ambivalence or neglect), denies the existence of soul, the more that individuals and communities outside the academy with fundamentalist religious inclinations cling to their own dogmas amid growing suspicions about the overall academic enterprise. This results in self-perpetuating conflict between the sides. In its most dramatic forms, extraordinary fables, such as the Earth is 6,000 years old in a universe that was created not long before that, and that humans lived among dinosaurs, are matched by chilling scientific materialist claims such as Francis Crick’s famous assertion—“you are nothing but a pack of neurons.”[5]

The point is not that the academic majority accepts the materialist worldview that nonetheless dominates higher education, and thus renders college and university campuses a primary locus for liberalism. In fact, if there is even a modicum of validity in the Astin’s landmark study, the opposite appears to be clearly the case.[6] Nor do a majority of the conservative population, or even the majority of religious practitioners within it, accept the fundamentalist sentiments that have nonetheless gained traction in the emergent conservative movement. Rather, two parallel collective pathologies have engulfed, or perhaps more aptly, hijacked, contemporary political discourse, providing an insidious example of how the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts[7]

Competing hijackings, however, do not cancel each other out, but rather inflame the overarching divisiveness that is perpetuated as much in higher education as society at large. And as this polarization trickles up from the level of noetic/anoetic ideology (referring to both science and religious extremisms) throughout the various strata of socio-cultural-political exchange, overarching convictions about good vs evil, or better vs worse worldviews and human beings, increasingly gain traction and perpetuate further conflict and dialogic lapse. Misinformation that reflects varying scales of imaginative abandon proliferates, such as claims that immigrants are stealing and eating pets in Ohio, or gender-altering surgery is happening in middle-school band rooms. This proliferation occurs, however, not necessarily because the majority of individuals that resonate with its overarching political/ideological motivations actually agree with what is stated, but rather because enough of this majority opts to look away and not disrupt the bigger story—that of saving the nation, if not humanity—that they believe must be told.

Foreign adversaries and other power laden influencers prey upon the various types of good-vs evil narratives through media, hi-tech and other forms of manipulation that spread fear, confusion and contempt.

It is but a small step for the same conservative majority to overlook the calls to violence that, albeit uttered by a minority of individuals, directly extend from the misinformation campaign. Hence, our current predicament.

In efforts to understand and address the predicament, it is important to recognize not only Integral Theory’s expanded diagnostic scope (ranging from noetic/anoetic ideology to varied real-world manifestation), but also its nuance. Here IT’s capacities to pinpoint flashpoint zones where competing ideologies, much like the kind of tinderbox foliage that is particularly conducive to rapid forest fire expansion, are particularly noteworthy. From this standpoint, abortion may be both a primary flashpoint issue and also a potentially robust site for healing discourse.

On the first account: Prevailing dialogue is constrained, and thus polarized, by—on one hand—the entirely reasonable view that reproductive decisions are best relegated to the pregnant woman, not the government, and—on the other hand—the not unreasonable contrasting g view that a human life is being taken.

The liberal academy, oblivious to its inherited epistemic dysfunction, is hard-pressed to fathom how anyone—particularly those arguing for a limited role of government in personal life—could possibly deny anyone else this choice. The conservative perspective is equally challenged to see how anyone could prioritize a personal human decision above the divine choice, as it were, of a higher power.

However, were the same academy to convene informed conversation around topics such as soul, spirituality, mysticism and deep cross-cultural noetic principles, including those pertaining to pregnancy termination; important groundwork might be established for fundamentally new kinds of conversation on this quintessentially divisive topic. If nothing else, noetic discourse might significantly begin to dispel above-noted suspicions among religious conservatives who presume that vast majority of academics are devoid of spiritual proclivities whatsoever. In more robust form, noetic discourse could actually establish a basis for illuminating the complexities surrounding pregnancy continuation or termination, and the possibility that in some circumstances, termination might be the most spiritually grounded decision. Any such exchange is almost impossible in an academic culture—which again, runs counter to the majority of its participants—that not only leaves little space for, but arguably discourages, soul-based, spiritual discourse.

The emergent, integral conversation could also lay groundwork for more productive conversation on proximal contentious issues, such as sexual orientation, gender identity and church-state boundaries, all of which are also spiritually charged. This might be followed by more productive discourse on issues such as social justice/racial justice, immigration and ecosustainability, among which racial justice and environmental justice, at the very least, could be readily framed as spiritual imperatives. Unfortunately, these represent further realms where prevailing academic materialist extremism—if indirectly—undermines important areas of socio-educational reform. Further inroads from integral discourse might made to conversation around topics less spiritually connected—such as economy, healthcare, retirement benefits and foreign policy— but nonetheless divisive due to, at least in part, underlying ideological tensions.

Finally; Integral Theory’s expanded epistemological scope—predicated on spirituality/art/science co-evolutionary synthesis (as opposed to science/spirituality division (noetic exclusion)—foregrounds the arts as integral/noetic delivery system within the HAND vision.

Predictably, the IT model calls for an expanded vision of the arts than that which typically prevails. With epistemic expanse and integration as guiding precepts, Black American Music and its corresponding syncretic aesthetic, with jazz prominent amid the BAM pantheon, assume a central role in the account. A range of essential principles come into focus, for which space permits only the briefest reference.

Jazz’s creativity/consciousness foundations exemplify IT epistemic diversity. Moreover, improvisation, along the creativity line, and meditation, along the consciousness line, may be viewed “meta-epistemologies”—meaning, core modalities that support wide-ranging and integrative engagement.[8] The jazz-inspired, improvisation-across-fields movement that has impacted fields as diverse as architecture, business, engineering, law, medicine, and sports—to name a few—can thus be extended from its creative performative thrust to also include contemplative, noetic foundations.[9]

It is also important to emphasize that the integral jazz paradigm does not exclude other forms of music and art-making but rather galvanizes them atop broader epistemic foundations to catalyze arts-driven transformation. A strong argument may be made, as just one line of support for this assessment, that the Eurocanonic (“classical music”) engagement that has long been the epistemic center in music studies will take its next evolutionary strides atop jazz/BAM foundations[10]

This same epistemic core promotes transcendence of divisive language and labelling practices. Terms such as “liberal” and ”conservative” may be construed in radically different ways from integral/noetic perspectives as opposed to prevailing academic and societal perspectives. The same holds for science and spirituality (and/or religion)—which, as noted, for many academics are fundamentally incompatible educational realms. Indeed, even the word jazz, contested and often rejected by jazz icons throughout the idiom’s history due to its constricting impact compared to the boundary-crossing trajectories of its practitioners, has not been immune to critique—thereby offering a rich lens to guide the broader linguistic healing.

Healing a Nation Divided thus not only provides a wide-angled lens for addressing polarization as among the most significant, and alarming polycrises in the history of our nation and world, but also a framework for new kinds of inquiry into the nature of paradigmatic change itself. The extent to which both facets of change discourse, particularly given the central role of consciousness/spirituality, challenge the mainstream academy cannot be overstated in importance. However, embrace of such challenges is a defining feature of historically significant change leadership, the need for which has never been more urgent. If aspects of the post-materialist, noetic turn shake the academy to its core, the aftermath of November 5^th, 2024 may have even greater disruptive impact.[11]

The Carnegie Foundation has provided higher education a unique opportunity to redirect the critical gaze back onto itself and catalyze what might be among the most far-reaching revolutions in the long legacy of academic practice. [12]

May we seize this opportunity.

PART II: Practical interventions

The central aim of the Healing a Nation Divided proposal is for funding to create a prototype for operationalizing the above principles in both academic and community populations. The prototype comprises the following categories.

Creation of documentation and a corresponding website that delineates theoretical premises (expanding upon the above introductionary commentary). Publication of a collected volume of essays (not part of the current proposal) may follow.
Design of a town-hall style event that can be held within local communities, institutions, governmental levels. Concerted effort will be made to ensure representation from ideologically diverse constituencies. The event will incorporate interactive performance (creativity), contemplative silence and related practice (consciousness), discussion (A) of its ramifications for human interconnectedness and (B) for its impact on difficult dialogues (e.g. abortion, church state boundaries, racial justice, ecological justice, politics, etc). A panel of guest speakers will draw from local (or regional/national) arts communities, social justice activists, visible sports and popular culture figures, spiritual/religious leadership, environmental activists, governmental officials and educationalists (academic, public school levels) among others who exhibit strong commitment to healing cultural division.[13]
Corresponding educational innovation, including coursework that engages directly with pertinent issues. Bridging the academy and community is essential to the HAND framework.
Facilitator training program.

[1] Integral Theory is a consciousness-based worldview that is informed by a wide array of philosophical, psychological, scientific, artistic, spiritual and cultural perspectives. See Ken Wilber, largely regarded as the primary exponent of contemporary integral thought, “Introduction to Integral Theory,” Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, vol 1.1, 2001. Ed Sarath’s books Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness (SUNY/Albany, 2012) and Black Music Matters (Roman and Littlefield 2018) are the first to apply integral principles to music and arts-drive socio-educational transformation.

[2] The term polycrisis, while more commonly invoked in ecosustainability circles, directly applies to cultural polarization. Just as climate change cannot be grasped or addressed apart from its broader socio-cultural-economic-racial-educational-spiritual/religious and other factors, neither can prevailing political/ideological divides. Ed Sarath underscored this point in his talk, “Improvisatory Ecologies,” at the inaugural symposium of the National Sustainability Society at the University of Washington in Sept, 2024.

[3] The term “noetic” denotes deep, soul-based knowing and has a long history in philosophical, spirituality, consciousness traditions. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell founded the Institute for the Noetic Sciences in 1970s inspired by a mystical experience invoked on his famous moon expedition.

[4] Materialism views consciousness, and thus the human being, as either reducible to, or epiphenomenal to a physical substrate. Notions such as soul, spirit, human and cosmic interconnectedness—intrinsic to wisdom traditions across the globe that date back millennia—are rejected as superstition. Post-materialism, by contrast, draws on both ancient wisdom and leading-edge empirical research that views consciousness/human nature as physically transcendent (while also embodied), nonlocal and intersubjective, and inextricably linked within an infinitely diverse yet unified cosmic wholeness

[5] While academic consciousness inquiry gravitates toward nonreductionist models within the overarching materialist orientation, the fact that Crick’s statement, or some version thereof (e.g. as might be uttered by a Richard Dawkins, Stephen Weinberg, Dan Dennett or Susan Blackmore) could be made with nary a batted eye speaks volumes about the academy’s uninterrogated anoetic extremist bias.

[6] Helen and Alexander Astin, Spirituality in Higher Education, UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, 2004. The study first surveyed students, finding large percentage harbored strong spiritual perspectives and strong frustration of limited space for expression in the academy, and then surveyed faculty, only to find the same sentiments.

[7] An important distinction between the academy’s position vis a vis polarization compared to todays’ parallel ecosustainability polycrisis may be highly instructive in support of the current analysis. Whereas sustainability coursework, departments and initiatives abound on college and university campuses, higher education is notably devoid of the same attention and resources when it comes to polarization equally dire threat to socio-cultural sustainability.

[8] See Ed Sarath, “The Structure of Musical Revolutions” for more commentary on the meta-epistemology principle.( https://icast.jazzcosmos.com, find essay within Founder’s Forum.)

[9] Jazz’s improvisatory foundations are well-known. with increasing attention to the central role of improvisation in wide-ranging (if not all) fields. Less familiar is the long legacy of jazz improvisers who complemented their creative excursions with significant engagement in meditation and related practices and studies of consciousness, and the ramifications thereof for the jazz-inspired transformative discourse. The BFA in Jazz and Contemplative Studies degree at the University of Michigan and cross-campus U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies are predicated on this dual-pronged epistemological/meta-epistemological template (that eludes recognition)

[10] The fact that improvisation was once central in the European tradition warrants emphasis aa a key connecting, and co-evolutionary thread between Afro(BAM) and Euro musical lineages. This is a central theme in Ed Sarath’s above-noted books Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness and Black Music Matters as well as Music Studies and its Moment of Truth (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022).

[11] The HAND initiative is thus aligned with International Consortium for Academic and Societal Transformation (ICAST) and both its 13^th pillar—Healing Political and Ideological Divide— and 20^th pillar—Changing the Narrative on Change Itself. See https://icast.jazzcosmos.com. A proposal is in progress for a Michigan Center for Academic and Societal Transformation (MCAST) to be established at the University of Michigan as the US hub ICAST’s global network.

[13] Conversation has begun with the UM Detroit Center surrounding possible collaboration around the HAND project and also ICAST, with Detroit as a possible inaugural site for the HAND town hall events. Communications are being pursued with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as well as Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown in establishing Detroit and Cleveland as sister cities for initial iterations of the HAND initiative.

Black Music Matters

Among the ironies of the recent wave of Black Lives Matter discourse is the extent to which it stops short of recognizing the importance of Black music in the racial justice imperative. Indeed, Black music has been at the heart of the civil rights movement since its inception. The fact that these patterns of evasion are as dramatic within music studies progressivism as overarching anti-racism conversations underscores the depth of racist entrenchment. When, however, we flip the activist switch from ethnology to epistemology, powerful principles emerge that fundamentally rewrite the narrative.

Central is the fact that Black music, and particularly jazz within the Black music pantheon, is among the most epistemologically expansive and integrative knowledge systems in all of the academy.

We gained a preview of this point above in the twin epistemic pillars of improvisation and meditation. Atop these anchors, a vast epistemological circuitry can be built that spawns ramifications for not only music and the arts, but expanded approaches to the humanities and sciences as well. Jazz’s long legacy of improvisers/contemplatives thus needs to be recognized as not only a historical curiosity, but a powerful and highly instructive example of how creative vitality (improvisation) organically opens up to consciousness/spiritual vitality, thus yielding a potent site for educational/societal revolution. In this context, jazz’s connection with Vedanta looms large, providing a basis for understanding the primordial, cosmic roots of improvisatory and meditation practices and thus the transformative impact of collective approaches within each realm.

At the heart of the Black Music Matters pillar is the jazz/Vedanta nexus. Within jazz’s long legacy of improvisers/contemplatives, Alice Coltrane—Swami Turiyasanghitanda—is a primary embodiment of this particular creativity/consciousness synergy.

In celebrating this connection, ICAST neither aims to privilege jazz among the world’s musical traditions nor Vedanta among the world’s spiritual traditions. Rather, the aim is to identify within this particular form of creativity/consciousness nexus principles that are core to the broader ICAST vision. Every artistic genre and contemplative lineage has important contributions to make, with pivotal principles at times more evident in some sites than others. In jazz’s relationship with Vedanta, we gain a basis for taking our understanding of improvisation and meditation to the cosmic level.

Here we return to the nonduality thesis mentioned earlier (See Pillar #1). If human consciousness is to universal consciousness as the wave is to the ocean (there is ultimately no separation), then the same holds for human creativity and its improvisatory foundations. Human beings are co-evolutionary participants in the cosmic improvisatory unfolding (see Ed Sarath, Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness). The Vedantic principle of lila, or play of creation, enables elaboration on this point.

In the same way, the pure consciousness experience that is central to Vedantic meditation practice (and other systems) represents not only deep personal connection with the soul, but in fact can be understood as alignment between individual consciousness and the cosmic source of all Being.

If, then, it was only natural for jazz musicians to gravitate toward nondual traditions and related practices, particularly fruitful insights are gained from the idiom’s encounter with Vedanta. These, in turn, do not overshadow or diminish in importance the excursions of jazz musicians into other spiritual lineages; if anything, it provides a basis for further celebration thereof.

Just as jazz provides a musical reminder to practitioners in the European classical tradition of the improvisatory roots of that great lineage, the jazz/Vedanta connection provides an even more far-reaching reminder of the primordial origins of the creativity/consciousness relationship.

Also noteworthy is that Vedanta has been seen as a lens through which practitioners in diverse spiritual traditions have found inspiration and guidance for deepening their connections. Phillip Goldberg’s book, American Veda, for example reminds us of the profound influence Vedanta had on America’s founding fathers as well the transcendentalist movement. Rather than replacing their Christian (in most cases) roots, the effect was to help deepen those roots and reveal them as key to a universal awareness.

Further principles

The following principles give further shape to the significance of the jazz/Vedanta nexus:

Nonduality The term advaita translates as “not two”: Reality is neither divisible into subjective and objective or individual and universal dimensions. All of existence is unified, with an eternal field of consciousness as its source. When performers, listeners and environment merge into a unified wholeness in peak jazz (and other kinds of collective performance), they contact this eternal field. The same holds in large group spiritual practice, with meditation possibly an intensified collective consciousness vehicle.

Vedanta is particularly explicit on how the pure consciousness experience invoked in meditation, where awareness is aware of nothing but awareness itself, is where self-referral individual consciousness aligns with the self-referral consciousness of cosmic intelligence itself. This underlies the ICAST notion of meditation as a primordial epistemology along the consciousness line.

The Vedantic notion of lila, or cosmic play of creation, lays groundwork for a parallel ICAST notion of improvisation as a primordial epistemology along the creativity line. If, in other words, human consciousness is inextricably linked to the consciousness at the core of cosmic existence, it logically follows that human creativity is inextricably linked to the creativity of the cosmos and that human beings, via their creativity/consciousness, are dynamic participants in cosmic evolution. It is but a small step to infer in the lila principle that this creativity is improvisatory in nature, and therefore that human beings are co-evolutionary participants in the cosmic improvisatory unfolding.

Here a yet more precise account is possible whereby lila is viewed through both structural and processual lenses, with music a direct embodiment of both. Take, for example, the central idea of Brahman—the cosmic source of existence—reverberating within itself (process) and generating primordial frequencies (structures) that are the building blocks of all manifest creation, with musical sounds the most direct manifestation of transcendent cosmic creativity. This is the basis for Time Theory in Indian music, predicated on the alignment of the intervallic structure of ragas with the prominent frequencies in the daily cycle; performance of morning ragas in the morning, for example, optimally enlivens the transformative impact of the particular raga. While parallels with the idea of music as cosmic in origin exist across cultures, where Vedanta may be instructive—and even this eludes commentary on Time Theory—is that raga performance is improvisatory.

What about Indian music?

The question thus arises—why not position Indian music as primary exemplar for the creativity/consciousness (humanity/cosmos) relationship?

Indeed, ICAST celebrates the Indian tradition as among the most robust manifestations of arts-driven nonduality to be found. Jazz, nonetheless serves as primary (not to be conflated with sole) vehicle for this principle for two central reasons.

First has to do with jazz’s Western location and the influence of the Western educational paradigm across the globe. This is in no way to defend the Western model, particularly given its science-spirituality divide, but simply to acknowledge a self-evident reality: If global educational systems are to change, this needs to take hold in sites within Western colleges and universities. Jazz and a Black aesthetics, while marginalized therein, at least has a foothold. Recall two core ICAST change principles: If education is to invoke the epistemological expansion, this needs to be begin in existing sites within the academy that exemplify epistemic scope, depth and integrative capacities. Jazz, given its creativity/consciousness underpinnings, is unique in this way.

A second reason has to do with jazz’s syncretic aesthetic, which is where Afrological traditions may differ from Indological lineages (this is a topic for further discussion). The story of jazz within its relatively short history is a story of cross-cultural synthesis. Indeed, jazz’s interface with Indian music (as well as spirituality) is an important part of this story, with deep structural features of the latter (raga, tala cycles) serving as inspiration for identifying parallels in jazz’s rhythmic (swing, Afro-latin time feels) and modal/tonal pitch dimensions. Still, jazz may well be unmatched in terms of global infusion and unifying capacities. The result is not only the furthering of a transcultural evolutionary thrust, but as noted earlier, jazz-inspired deepening of the various musical tributaries that flow from, and back into the world’s musical ocean.

And where one finds a transcultural aesthetic in the arts, transdisciplinary pedagogical principles that connect even the most disparate educational domains are never far off.

Diagnostic function

The jazz/Vedanta nexus also upholds an all-important diagnostic function in the educational/societal transformation imperative. Here we return to the twin epistemic pillars—improvisation and meditation—and their primordial roots. The disconnect from the meditation/consciousness roots of the Western intellectual tradition that underpins overall education comprises a central epistemic meta-crises that threatens not only education but the survival of humanity. The disconnect in music studies form the improvisatory roots of Western musical practice is an arts-based subset that cannot be underestimated in its impact not only across the arts but all of education. Because jazz is, at once, a site in which both meditation and improvisation epistemologies uniquely intersect, yet the art form has been marginalized—directly reflecting racist denigration of Black cultural/global achievement—racial justice discourse takes on significantly new dimensions. What is typically confined to ethnological injustice, as pathological as it may be, is now more aptly understood as ethno/epistemological injustice.

Language and labelling as academic constructions

A further obstacle to centering the Jazz-Vedanta nexus has to do with unexamined patterns in language and labeling. Due to epistemic meta-crises, the labelling of disciplines reifies surface boundaries and obscures underlying capacities, via epistemic scope, for connections. Hence, erroneous reading of the foregrounding of rich ethno-epistemic sites as privileging self-confining destinations as opposed to self-transcending gateways to wholeness that celebrate all pathways to such. Every artistic genre and cultural region has imipoertant things to offer the unification of the knowledge base. The identification of certain areas as particularly endowed with capacities to unite in no way comprises privileging.

The foundational positioning of Black music in American music studies is thus key to the ICAST revolution. Parallels to the butterfly effect in complex systems circles may be partially instructive in this regard. A butterfly flapping its wings in Des Moines sets in motion tiny squalls that gradually become larger and larger forms of turbulence that culminate in major weather events in Tokyo. However, Black music is no tiny squall—it is already a major global weather event, one whose turbulence results in cultural unification and transformation of historical significance.

An important source

ICAST’s reference to Vedanta is significantly informed, directly and indirectly, by a number of sources. Of central importance is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Apaurashaya Bhasha, commentary on Rig Veda.

See Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Celebrating Perfection in Education, 1997, Maharishi Vedic University Press, Seelisberg, Switzerland

Here we find elaborate commentary on Vedantic wisdom and its mapping of the sequential unfolding of the infinite diversity of cosmic wholeness from unified foundations. Concepts such as higher stages of consciousness development, nonduality between individual consciousness and cosmic intelligence, interplay of rishi, devata and chandas, primordial nature of sound as cosmic frequency, collective consciousness and its transformative impact and other central ICAST principles are clearly laid out.

Further reading:

Floyd, Samuel A. 1995. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans: A History.

Sarath,Ed Black Music Matters, 2028(Rowman and Littlefield)

____, Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness, 2012 (SUNY/Albany)

____Music Studies and its Moment of Truth, 2023) (Routledge)

Joachim Berendt, Nada Brahma: The World is Sound.

Proclamations about the transformative capacities of the arts that fail to acknowledge the epistemological crisis in music are yet another example of empty progressivist rhetoric that only reifies the prevailing paradigm. Indeed, such rhetoric further centers the science/spirituality divide by which the arts are marginalized in the first place.

Related Projects:

Alliance for the Transformation of Musical Academe (ATMA)

International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM)