Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future: Collected Essays

Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future: Collected Essays Thomas Lombardo, Ph. D. Center for Future Consciousness "Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future is a profound, deeply important, and timely book that concerned people and change agents everywhere will want to read." Copthorne Macdonald The Wisdom Page * How will the human mind evolve in the future? * What might be the standards and ideals that guide this evolution? * And what role does ethical development (or evolution) play in this process? The twenty articles collected together in Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future chronicle the development of Dr. Lombardo's ideas on these related questions, and present a holistic vision of the human mind and its evolution in the future. True to its title, three key themes emerge in this collection: wisdom, consciousness, and the future. Numerous essays (for example, "Evolving Future Consciousness through the Pursuit of Virtue" and "The Evolution and Psychology of Future Consciousness") address the nature of future consciousness, a term Dr. Lombardo defines as the complex set of mental capacities all humans possess for imagining, conceptualizing, and approaching the future. Aside from describing the psychological make-up of future consciousness, the author also explains in numerous essays (such as "Developing Constructive and Creative Attitudes about the Future") how to enhance future consciousness. Other essays deal directly with consciousness and the human mind (as in "The Future Evolution of the Ecology of Mind") and address how consciousness might evolve in the future. Hence, this book contains essays on both consciousness of the future and consciousness in the future. Other essays explain how ethics connects with both future consciousness and the future evolution of consciousness. He explores how virtue applies to higher education in "Ethical Character Development and Personal and Academic Excellence." Dr. Lombardo emphasizes one key virtue--wisdom--that provides the center of gravity around which all other character virtues revolve. In "The Wisdom of Future Consciousness," the author argues that wisdom is the highest expression of future consciousness. Further, wisdom is the key ideal that we should model and teach within education. This argument is first developed in "The Pursuit of Wisdom and the Future of Education." Further, Dr. Lombardo sees wisdom as the appropriate ideal toward which we should strive in our individual and collective psychological evolution, a point he articulates in "Wisdom in the 21st Century." In the same article, he shows how wisdom dovetails with ecological and global awareness. The last three essays: "Educating the Wise Cyborg of the Future," "The Ecological Cosmology of Consciousness," and "Creativity, Wisdom, and Our Evolutionary Future," open up a whole set of new vistas, possibilities, and questions in need of further exploration. What is the connection between wisdom and the ever-evolving technological web within which our minds and lives are increasingly immersed? How are we to understand the concept of the "wise cyborg"--a synthesis of human virtue, heightened consciousness, and machines? How do the conditions of the universe support and create the emergence of consciousness and mind? What is creativity and how does human creativity connect with the creative evolutionary process of nature?