This is what I'm looking at outside of my 30th Floor hotel window right now:



    And I'm sitting here in awe of my life right now.  I didn't know if I'd ever visit Japan.  Now I'm on my second trip in ten weeks, with more to come.  I get to fly here in Business Class.  I get to have time to walk around and see the city.  I get to experience strange new things.  I get to start to be familiar with the metro system.  Last night I went to the Zojoji Temple to celebrate New Year's Eve.  And I get to do all of that while working with an incredible group of people within my group at Microsoft, amazing people at the Microsoft Japan subsidiary, and of course the very talented people at the customer I'm here to work with.  I get to continue to improve my professional skills, while learning about how to do business in Japan.

    I lead a charmed life right now, and for all the things that I'm up in the air about right now, and all of the things I'm not sure of, I am having some wonderful experiences right now.  Thank God I'm able to appreciate it all as I'm going through it.

    Just reading http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7806430.stm.  Seriously, Slovakia and Slovenia (quick, name one major city in each country... yeah, most people can't) are members of the Eurozone, but Hungary and the Czech Republic aren't.  It just makes me sad that those two nations can't quite get the economic conditions together to join up.  I'll be a lot happier about Hungary when they get that done...

    I'm finishing up my second trip to Japan tomorrow.  Because everything has gone smoothly, I have had the opportunity to do quite a bit more exploring of Tokyo this time than last time, and I've been trying to understand it all and where I think Japanese society is heading.

    (Generalization warning: I'm going to generalize.  I know I'm generalizing.  It's OK, no generals were harmed in the process.)

    My first question is: where would I put the Japanese in terms of their acceptance of modernism vs. post-modernism?  In other words, have the criticisms of post-modern philosophy taken root here in culture in any significant way?  To me, it doesn't seem so... there's still an acceptance and reinforcement of the dominant cultural narrative here, in a way that probably hasn't been around the east and west coast of the United States since 1970 or so.  My naive interpretation of media here, and of behavior here, is that people are expected to play the roles they're supposed to play.  There are certainly some who venture beyond that, but they're few and far-between.

    It's interesting to observe the women here (which, I admit, I find more interesting to observe than the men).  On the surface is what appears to be a higher valuing of feminine energy vs. the United States, particularly as demonstrated in clothing choices.  That whole stereotype of Japanese women in short skirts, stockings, and high boots... yeah, that's not just a stereotype.  It's something of a uniform if you're under 35, it seems.  So if most everyone dresses like that, is it an embracing of one's feminine energy, or is it simply comformity with society's expectations?  I don't usually see radiance, I see a person wearing clothes.

    And the processes around relating in a business, or customer service, sense, are fairly well-structured and regimented.  Everyone is incredibly nice -- seriously, I have absolutely no complaints about any such encounter here -- but it's just the patterns being played out.

    So where is the outrage?  Where are the people doing things differently?  They're not found in the advertising (as far as I can tell).  They're not found in the pop music, if a quick trip through the J-Pop section at Tower Records is any indication.  Again, if I had to place that kind of behavior in America's history, I'd put it just around 1970... as in, there were elements of the culture that were starting to question the norms, but the norms were still very much in place.

    If Japan is 40 years behind us in terms of the adoption of post-modern thinking in popular culture and media, it sure as hell won't take them another 40 to get there.  They'll catch up in the next 20 years or so, because they have a very large neighbor to the West that's going to be doing the same thing, and because technology is going to create truly global media for the first time ever.

    I don't think I'd want to live here, although I could certainly adapt to it quickly enough with just a bit of language skills.  Any nation that loves baseball can't be all that bad of a place to be (Cuba, I'm looking at you... when the Castro brothers finally die-die-die the world will be a much better place for you).  Tokyo is the closest thing to New York that I've seen anywhere... Ginza, Shinjuku, and Shibuya are all incredibly dense and interesting places, with the energy of Manhattan in spots.

    With all of that said, I'm really serious now about learning some Japanese.  I will be coming back here, and not knowing the language is really getting in the way of deeply enjoying my time here.

    I'm so incredibly fortunate to have been here at all, and I'm so grateful to have gotten the chance to see Tokyo in this way, and to have enjoyed my time here so much.  Being here can only be of benefit for me, to expand my perspectives on the world, to gain new business skills, and to break down personal barriers that keep me from relating as fully as I'm capable of.

    Seattle just got a lot less nice today.  In a last-minute shove-it-down-the-people's-throat decision, Seattle is going to undertake it's own version of the Big Dig.

    Initial cost estimate is $4.25B, and it's expected to start construction in 2011, and finish in 2015.  That means that, by Big Dig standards, it will cost $12.75B, and finish in 2027 or so.

    This is so gross that I don't even know what to say about it.  The road that the tunnel is supposed to replace has been estimated to need to be taken down in 2012, so we'll be without a major north-south highway other than I-5 for about 15 years before this is completed.

    Aside from that, the new tunnel completely ignores the needs of the neighborhoods north of downtown (like mine) and will make getting to the airport far more of a nuisance than it is right now.

    This is a horrible, horrible decision, and shows exactly why Gregoire shouldn't have been re-elected.  Dawdling followed by incompetence is not what I'm looking for out of a governor.

    Bobby Womack (who?!?) is in, but Rush isn't.  I'll never go there, ever.  What a fucking joke.

    If you want to know, for sure, what this new administration is about, and you want to start to understand the changes that are going to come in Washington, you need to watch this interview. The most hopeful thing that President Obama has done so far is to choose Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff. There's no one I'd rather see working with him right now.

    Thomas P.M. Barnett's new book will be released in a couple of weeks... get yours as soon as it's out by preordering it today.

    Just saw this poster... thought it was awesome. Wanted to share...

    In one of those wonderful moments where the Universe provides teaching that you need to hear, because you're truly ready to hear it... last night I popped in a DVD from Integral Naked that I hadn't watched yet, and it had this clip on it.

    I'm in the midst of a lot of discussion, with a lot of different people right now, about the balance between actively engaging in terms of Integral development, and sitting back to allow for emergence.  It's just standard agency vs. communion / manifestation vs. awareness stuff.  I'm as surprised as anyone else that I'm personally feeling such urgency about engaging right now.  I think this an important moment in the world... and I'm feeling more confident about my understanding and place in terms of the Integral world.  I'm also feeling incredibly grateful for all of the people all around me who are working to push into the new territory described on this most-brilliant map called Integral.

    Yes, I think I would.  I have an insatiable curiosity about the Universe, and I would love to live long enough to see worlds beyond the Solar System, watch the development of the Integral wave of consciousness, and the one after that, and the one after that.  And if I live long enough, I might see the Cubs win the World Series.  (I so wish I could put "Red Sox" in that sentence, but that ship has sailed, I'm afraid.)

    I have no illusion that an extremely long life is related to becoming happier, although one would hope that centuries of meditation would help to calm down such desires.

    Ultimately, long life means a longer time to serve the world in some capacity, and as long as I still can serve, why not be alive?  Besides, if Ray Kurzweil is correct, we might come a lot closer to this than most people think right now... and I think he's right.

    This is something I've been thinking about for a couple of months now.  I've shared this vision with many people I know, but it's worth writing down, if only to record it for later.

    When you ask most people, "When did the postmodern wave start in America?" the answer you'd get most often is "the late 1960's".  And there's some surface truth to that.  As we see on Mad Men, the early 1960's were just the 1950's with JFK as President, and math and science in the ascendant because of Sputnik and the Cold War.  There were still enormous cultural structures that served to define everyone's role in society.  In the late 1960's, though, a generation of people managed to see through those roles (although only temporarily for most) and began to ask some fundamental questions about them.

    But I think a better answer to pinpointing the true start of the postmodern wave of consciousness (i.e. Spiral Dynamics Green) is the Beat Generation of the early 1950's.  These men and women really kicked it all off.  And yes, I completely understand that they couldn't have existed in a context without the prior work of philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzche, Camus, Sartre, etc. but their work (and the conclusions one could draw from their work) wasn't widespread in the culture at all.

    To me, the Beat Generation really started it all off, by creating an ethos and a body of art (cultural touchstones) that the people who came after them were able to read and be influenced by.

    And, really, how big was Beat culture, anyway?  I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's safe to say that the Beats, back in the early 1950's, pretty much consisted of a small group of people in each city who would get together and look at each other and finally get to say out loud to another human being, "The world is seriously fucked up, isn't it?  I mean, no one gets what's really going on.

    So, doesn't that sound an awful lot like Integral these days?  Just a few people in each city who get together to talk about their new worldview, right?

    And that's why I think that this moment, this year, is crucial in the development of Integral.

    You see, we're the Beat Generation for Integral.  Cool, man.

    We have the opportunity, right now, to actively shape the development of Integral, and to be able to offer its expanded perspective to many more people.  Or we could sit back and see what emerges from it.  But we have the opportunity to do that without being completely drug-addled the way they were in the 1950's, and to do it with a lot more confidence and clarity and purpose and humility than those intrepid explorers who hung out with Kerouac.

    I think we'll look back five years from now and ask ourselves, "Did we do the right things back then?  Did we screw some things up?  Did we do enough?"  When that comes, I want to know that I did enough... that I might have made some less-than-optimal choices on the way, but that I knew Integral well enough to make some good choices about how to organize local groups around it.  That I came up with and supported offerings that helped the community to grow through the levels if they were only ready to participate.

    The Integral wave of consciousness is going to hit very big in about ten years... and we already have a President who clearly is demonstrating some Integral levels of thinking, whether he's read Ken Wilber or not.  Are we going to take a hand in shaping that wave, or are we going to just let it emerge?  Are we willing to own that the future of the movement is quite literally in our own hands, and that we have to step up and lead within it?  Or will we sit back for other people to define that for us?

    I'm choosing more agency than communion right now, and it makes some sense in the context of the historical moment I think we're in.  What about you?