The Big Picture of the NOW

Here, by popular request, is Mark Allan Kaplan, media psychologist and founder and Executive Director of the Integral Cinema Project, explaining why "All problems are problems of consciousness" as he unpacks the current global situation: how we got here, why it's unprecedented in world history, and why media in all its evolving forms may be the best and most powerful tool to awaken us into a new paradigm of being.

If you want to take a deeper dive, Mark will be teaching "Transformative Media Creation and Reception" for Campus-Coevolve.org starting in early October, 2019. (I am a Contributing Faculty Member.) To find out more, please visit: https://campus-coevolve.org/course/transformative-media/

You can also join us for our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month discussion group hosted by the Conscious Good Creators Network and stay tuned for our Conscious Media-making certificate program, also at Conscious Good. To find out more about these offerings visit: https://conscious-good.mn.co/

Inside “What the Bleep Do We Know” - A Special Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Experience for June 2019

Our Conscious Movie-of-the-Month exploration for June 2019 is What the Bleep Do We Know (2004). This month we have a special treat for all us conscious media creators and fans, one of the filmmakers who worked on the film, our very own Betsy Chasse, will be joining us in our exploration along with some potential surprise guests from the production team, sharing some of their behind the scenes experiences and perspectives on the film with us both online during the month and in our virtual chat at the end of the month (date and time to be announced).

You are invited to watch What the Bleep Do We Know on your own and feel free to share your thoughts, reflections, musings and questions about the film in our group’s online discussion forum.

We chose What the Bleep Do We Know because it is considered by many to be a landmark work in the conscious media movement, being one of the very first movies about consciousness to penetrate the mass market. It was also groundbreaking in terms of visually capturing patterns of consciousness itself and creating what is now called the hybrid documentary style, integrating interviews with both compelling narrative and powerful visual storytelling.

This film was also created during the transition between analogue and digital filmmaking and was one of the first films to tap into the cultural creative field of consciousness. Because of this the film was traversing two major evolutionary convergence streams, technological and cultural, and is a great example of a work that was in synchronicity with the zeitgeist edge of the evolution of consciousness. We are blessed to have the opportunity to hear from the filmmakers themselves about what it was like to create a work at this leading edge, and while What the Bleep Do We Know is not an integral film, all of this makes it is a fascinating case study from an integral-evolutionary perspective.

Please join your hosts Trina Wyatt and Mark Allan Kaplan and our very special guests in this very special conscious movie adventure…

Healers in the Hood: Reflections on the Passing of John Singleton, "Selma" and the New Consciousness in African American Cinema

John Singleton at the Premiere of “Selma” (2014)

As part of the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club hosted by Conscious Good Creators Network, we are viewing the film Selma (2014) as our monthly selection. I was struck by the news of African American filmmaker John Singleton (1968–2019) passing away just a few days before we started. I noticed some synchronicities or resonances between our choice of film and the life, work and passing of Singleton. Selma is the work of African American filmmaker Ava DuVernay who is part of a whole new movement and consciousness within African American cinema that most likely would not exist without Singleton’s groundbreaking work.

Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay pays tribute to John Singleton Twitter (2019) 

The history of African American cinema has been profoundly affected by the history of African Americans and their struggle against great individual, cultural, social and systemic injustices and challenges. The evolutionary journey of African American media artists and their works is like a creative mirror on our collective journey as a country. Because of this great injustice gap, the evolution of African American cinema is the story of many creative, cultural and social groundbreakers fighting against a system that was and still is in many ways rigged against people of color.

Every generation has had courageous individuals who sought to break some of these barriers and open the doors to those generations to come. John Singleton was one of the brave creative souls who raised and deepened the cinematic consciousness of African American cinema by unpacking the overt and covert effects of living within the shadows of racism. His breakout film Boyz n the Hood (1991), made when he was just 23, depicted the everyday lives and realities of African Americans, going deeply personal to tap into the universal.

Since his passing many African American film scholars, critics, historians and commentators have written about Singleton’s various contributions to African American cinema and American cinema in general, including: What Hollywood Owes to John Singleton, his Influence on African American Cinema, and how he Changed Black Culture on Film Forever.

My colleague Jonathan Steigman and I created a video podcast series called New Black Cinema for White People in which we take a deep dive into the new generation of masterful young filmmakers standing on the shoulders of John Singleton and other trailblazing African American media artists. One of the groundbreaking elements of the works by this new generation is their use of both subtle and extremely overt complex communication to pierce the veil of structural white supremacy. From broad satire to quiet drama, from big budget pop culture films to low budget independent works, these filmmakers are working at the top of their game and creating cinematic works designed to raise the consciousness of American culture and society to the hidden dimensions of racism and structural white supremacy. By exploring the personal and collective costs of the hidden dimensions of racism, these creators seek a way to transcend and heal them with love and compassion for all sides.

Ava DuVernay is one of this movement’s leaders, helping and mentoring others the way Singleton did. DuVernay and this group of the new wave in African American cinema are operating at an integral or near-integral structure of consciousness, integrating all the gifts from the previous generations of activists and artists. One of these gifts is the integration of Singleton’s collective through the personal stories approach with a higher, deeper and more expansive “big picture” perspective producing more complex and multi-layered storytelling.

In Selma, DuVernay unpacks the personal, interpersonal, cultural and social dimensions of Martin Luther King’s racial and social justice consciousness raising effort during the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches in 1965. So we have a film about the consciousness raising efforts of Dr. King and others on the individual and collective front lines, made by a filmmaker who herself seeks to raise consciousness even further around these issues through her works. In this, DuVernay and her cohort in this new generation are standing on the shoulders of those who came before them, including Singleton, and pushing the dialogue ever forward.

And so, this month, we take this moment to mourn and honor the passing of one of these groundbreakers as we explore one of the cinematic works that has sprung from the creative garden he helped seed.

References

• What Hollywood Owes to John Singleton https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/04/john-singleton-appreciation-boyz-n-the-hood
• John Singleton’s Influence on African American Cinema https://www.tvovermind.com/john-singletons-influence-on-african-american-cinema/
• John Singleton Changed Black Culture on Film Forever https://www.laweekly.com/arts/john-singleton-changed-black-culture-on-film-forever-10150468
• New Black Cinema for White People (Podcast Series) https://vimeo.com/album/5379791

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*Special thanks to Jonathan Steigman for his editorial assistance in creating this article and for his contributions to the research into this new movement in African American Cinema.

Conscious Movie-of-the-Month (May 2019)

The Conscious Movie-of-the-Month for May 2019 is Selma (2014).

You are invited to watch Selma on your own and feel free to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

At the end of the month, on Wednesday May 29th at 7:00pm Pacific Time we will have a video conference call where I will share my reflections on the movie from a conscious, integral and transpersonal perspective and you will have the opportunity to share more of your personal reflections and ask any questions.

If you have not already joined our free Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Group/Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a free membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

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In an effort to be "conscious" of diversity as we embark on our second conscious movie exploration, we are feeling called for us to explore Selma by African American woman filmmaker Ava DuVernay, an amazing work that cinematically explores Martin Luther King's effort to elevate American collective consciousness. Selma includes one of the best montages of awakening collective awareness ever created, and directly addresses Dr King's conscious effort to affect the evolution of consciousness on the individual and collective levels.

DuVernay is a pioneer in feminine approaches to cinematic expression, as well as developing a synergy of masculine and feminine approaches, and this film offers a great representation of her contribution to this dimension of the evolution of cinematic consciousness.

Selma is also a major work from the new consciousness-raising efforts of a group of young and talented African American filmmakers that DuVernay is part of as well as being a leader for this new movement in African American Cinema.

This film is also an important work for us conscious media creators to study during these profoundly challenging times, for it gives us a glimpse of the consciousness it takes to raise collective consciousness through media and direct-action combined. And for all us media consumers it can help us viscerally connect to the process of media expression from real life events through the lens of media and into our own conscious fields.

I will be sharing more on the film during the month here online and on our video conference call on the 29th and invite you to join the conversation.

Thank you for continuing to join us on this adventure...time to get our revolutionary spirits awakened, pop us some popcorn and dive into this cinematic blueprint for elevating consciousness on a grand scale...

"The Matrix" and the Evolution of Consciousness

Or, taking the Red Pill and waking up to the coming of Winter: Reflections on meta-perspectival storytelling, The Matrix, Game of Thrones and our current global situation

According to my research into the potential co-evolution of the moving image, consciousness, culture and society, The Matrix (1999) helped to introduce a higher form of cinematic consciousness* into mainstream pop culture. The foundation of this higher form of cinematic consciousness could be called meta-perspectival storytelling.

Meta-perspectival storytelling refers to stories that unfold through both major and minor shifts in perspective that often reveal whole new ways of understanding and experiencing the storyworld unfolding before us. Think of the red-blue pill moment in The Matrix, or the self-as-ghost revelation at the end of The Sixth Sense (1999), the shifting realities of a television series like Lost (2004) or the progressive, reality-shaking awakening of characters to the true coming threat of winter in Game of Thrones (2011). All of these works use meta-perspectival storytelling to drive their stories and characters to greater levels of understanding and capacities.

This form of storytelling has been around for a while in various forms but not until the release of both The Matrix and The Sixth Sense in 1999, did this form penetrate the pop culture cinematic language in a big way. Since then, more and more cinematic works have been using this form of storytelling, creating deeper and more expansive works with layers and layers of perceptual realities that hide and reveal themselves over time, guiding us and the characters to greater levels of understanding and revelation. Meta-perspectival storytelling is born out of a specific stage of development and structure of consciousness, often referred to as Integral Consciousness. The key to this structure of consciousness is the drive to understand all dimensions and perspectives of our reality and integrate them into a meaningful whole, a "big picture" meta-perspective.

I find it beautifully symbolic that this month is the 20th anniversary of The Matrix (1999-2019), the film that helped birth this expansion of cinematic consciousness, and the start of the final season of Game of Thrones (2011-2019), the series that helped to evolve this form of storytelling to new levels of richness, depth and complexity for a global scale audience that more easily and deeply understands, embodies and enjoys this form of consciousness and storytelling.

I also find it rather haunting and inspiring to look at how this evolution of storytelling and viewer consciousness coincides with the ever deepening and expanding deconstruction of so many of our individual and collective mental, emotional and perspectival constructs within and around us. This deconstruction has culminated in the whirlwind of reality bubbles, fake news, propaganda networks and "alternate truth" in which we currently find ourselves. I have to wonder if all these meta-perspectival stories feeding our imaginations these last twenty years are an expression of our collective consciousness preparing us to make some big perspectival transition, helping more and more of us to wake up to the coming of our own global climate change and political, cultural and social regression winter, and to individually and collectively search for the red pill that will wake us all up in time.



*NOTE: Cinematic consciousness as I define it comes from my research into the relationship between the moving image, consciousness, culture and society. This research suggests that human beings project their structures of consciousness into their creative works. This in turn appears to create similar composite structures of consciousness embedded in these works. In a sense these embedded consciousness structures create a kind of cinematic consciousness that lives within the constructed cinematic reality of these moving images. And this cinematic consciousness in turn affects viewer consciousness.

Conscious Movie-of-the-Month - "The Matrix" - Live Call

Announcing the first Conscious Movie-of-the-Month live video call. This month we will be exploring this months movie The Matrix (1999).

At the end of the month, on Thursday April 25th at 7:00pm Pacific Time we will have a video conference call where Integral Cinema Project lead researcher, Mark Allan Kaplan, will share his reflections on the movie from a conscious, integral and transpersonal perspective and you will have the opportunity to share more of your personal reflections and ask any questions.

If you have not already joined our FREE Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club, you can still join us anytime by signing up for a FREE membership at the Conscious Good Creators Network.

If you are already a member, you are invited to watch The Matrix on your own and feel free to share your thoughts, reflections and musings about the movie in our group's online discussion forum.

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From Host Mark Allan Kaplan...

The Matrix seems like a great movie for us to start with because this month is the 20th anniversary of the film's release and because it represents various different forms of what constitutes a conscious movie...

The viewing experience of The Matrix has given many viewers a consciousness raising experience, myself included. I vividly remember the first time I saw the film. I saw it opening week back when it was released in theaters in the Spring of 1999. It just blew me away and gave me a deep and profound altered state of consciousness. When the movie was over and I came out of the theater, everything seemed so much more real...the twinkling stars in the early evening sky, the subtle spring fragrances wafting through the air, the collective dance of the movie goers streaming in and out of the theater, and so much more...and at the same time I was contemplating deep questions about the nature of the reality I was seeing and the life I was living.

The Matrix was also consciously created to affect viewer consciousness. The Wachowski's studied Integral Theory before making the film and were attempting to apply the integral structure of consciousness to the narrative, visual, auditory and time-based expressive elements of the movie in order to elevate viewer consciousness.

The Matrix is also of major historical significance in that it introduced a more complex form of cinematic storytelling into pop movie culture, which has had an influence on collective consciousness by advancing the evolution of cinematic consciousness and helping to catalyze a shift in the co-evolution of cinematic consciousness and viewer consciousness.

Cinematic consciousness as I define it comes from my research into the relationship between the moving image, consciousness, culture and society. This research suggests that human beings project their structures of consciousness into their creative works. This in turn appears to create similar composite structures of consciousness embedded in these works. In a sense these embedded consciousness structures create a kind of cinematic consciousness that lives within the constructed cinematic reality of these moving images. And this cinematic consciousness in turn affects viewer consciousness.

I will be sharing more on the film during the month in our groups online forum and on our video conference call on the 25th. I will also be sharing with the group a Conscious Movie Viewing Practice for members to play with if they feel so moved to do so.

If you are interested in joining me on this adventure...it's time to login, take the Red Pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes...

SIGN UP FOR FREE

Announcing the Conscious Movie-of-the-Month Club

A Monthly Exploration of Consciousness and the Movies

Conscious Good Creators Network presents the Conscious Movie-of-the-onth Club with Integral Cinema Project Founder and Executive Director Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D., for anyone who wants to use media to raise individual and collective consciousness.

About the Club 

Join fellow conscious media creators and media enthusiasts each month for an in-depth look at conscious cinema with host and facilitator Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. Together we will explore how consciousness is expressed in and through the movies, and how we can use movies to help us evolve our consciousness.

As a member of the club you will have access to the club’s online forum and the entire Conscious Good Creators Network. At the beginning of each month we will announce the movie of the month for us all to watch on our own and then explore together in the online discussion forum. On the last Thursday of the month we will have a video conference call where Mark will share his reflections on the movie from a conscious, integral and transpersonal perspective. Participants will also have the opportunity to share personal reflections, questions and musings.

As a member of the club you will also be invited to experiment with some of the conscious media viewing practices Mark has developed over the years. These can help you to deepen and expand the viewing experience and help you develop your own transformative media viewing practice if you so desire.

About the Host/Facilitator 

Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. is an award-winning filmmaker, transdisciplinary artist, media psychologist and researcher, and the founder and executive director of the Integral Cinema Project. As an artist and media-maker Mark has been exploring conscious art and media since childhood, attempting to use these creative mediums to help himself transcend his own communication challenges of being a severe childhood stutterer. He uses his conscious art practices to find his "voice" and use that voice to help raise the consciousness of himself, others and the world. He is considered by many to be one of the pioneers in the conscious and transpersonal media movements and is the world's leading researcher and theorist in the application of Integral Theory to the cinematic arts.

For more on Mark visit: www.markallankaplan.com, and to learn about the Integral Cinema Project visit: www.integralcinema.com.

Details

• Dates/Times: 
• Movie of the month announcement, first of the month, starting April 1, 2019 
• Online discussions, ongoing 
• Video conference calls, 7pm PST, last Thursday of the month, starting April 25, 2019 
• Cost: Free (requires free membership to the network) 
• Host: Conscious Good Creators Network 

About Conscious Good Creators Network 

Conscious Good Creators Network is a community-driven media platform for visual storytellers dedicated to raising consciousness. Conscious Good launched the Creators’ Network as a place where conscious creators and audiences can connect. It’s a place to interact with fellow conscious media tribe members, share resources, ideas and support one another.

SIGN UP FOR THE NETWORK AND THE CLUB

Conscious Media-Making 101

In this introductory course for the Conscious Good Creators Network, Integral Cinema Project founder Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. explores what is conscious media and conscious media-making, what are some of the different potential forms of conscious media-making, and how different states and stages of consciousness effect the media-making process. Mark also explores how these structures of consciousness within us are communicated between us, the works we create and the individuals and collectives that experience our works…and how this knowledge can be used to create deeper and more transformative media experiences for creators and viewers on the individual and collective levels. Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D. is an award-winning filmmaker, transdisciplinary artist and media psychologist and researcher. As an artist and media-maker Mark has been exploring conscious art and media since childhood, attempting to use these creative mediums to help himself transcend his own communication challenges of being a severe childhood stutterer and find his "voice" and use that voice to help raise the consciousness of himself, others and the world. He is considered by many to be one of the pioneers in the conscious and transpersonal media movements and is the world's leading researcher and theorist in the application of Integral Theory to the cinematic arts. www.markallankaplan.com & www. integralcinema.com Conscious Media Creators Network is a community-driven online media platform for visual storytellers dedicated to raising consciousness. Conscious Good launched the Creators’ Network as a place where conscious creators and audiences can connect. It’s a place to interact with fellow conscious media tribe members, share resources, ideas and support one another. Use the following link to join the network: https://conscious-good.mn.co/share/7i... This talk was presented on Sunday February 24, 2019 between 12pm to 1:30pm PST on the Conscious Good Creators Network as part of their "Stream of Consciousness" speaker series.

The complete course video is available at: https://youtu.be/A5P2DmRk23w

The presentation slides are available at: https://www.slideshare.net/markallankaplan/conscious-mediamaking-101

Conscious Media-Making 101 from Mark Allan Kaplan