Emerging Worldviews

Together, let's inspire more meaningful lives and choices from an increased awareness about the fundamental nature of worldviews

This course introduces the concept of worldview literacy as a pedagogy for examining our beliefs, perceptions, behaviors and biases. Through lectures, experiential practices, readings, online discussions and live chats, we will consider the ways in which worldview literacy can be used to help people transform their behaviors, improve relationships, develop effective communication strategies, and enhance lived experience. We will identify methods for engaging in collaborative dialogues about diverse worldviews and beliefs. We will apply worldview literacy to transpersonal psychology and overview diverse perspectives and research findings.

 The intention is to:

• Transform and calm discomfort around change and cultural complexity
• Build community and authentic connection
• Open up conversations with family, friends, clients, and patients
• Speak unspoken concerns, beliefs and questions and help others to do so
• Offer skillful means when dealing with encounters with people who have differing worldviews and cultural backgrounds
• Deepen understanding of cross-cultural and epistemological views and in turn, one’s own worldviews, beliefs and perspectives

Your course instructor's philosophy of teaching:

• Shared learning community
• Multiple ways of knowing
• Cultural appreciation and competence
• An integral philosophy that includes inner and outer, private and public dimensions
• Appreciation for rigor and discernment, combined with creativity and curiosity
• A transpersonal perspective that embraces transformation and growth
• Radical empiricism that accepts any aspect of human experience as a valid domain for serious inquiry
• Social, cultural, emotional, and spiritual intelligence
• Worldview literacy

Students are encouraged to develop important meta-cognitive capacities. These include:

• Personal reflection
• Cognitive flexibility
• Comfort with unfamiliarity
• Appreciation for diverse perspectives
• Agility in the face of rapidly changing circumstances
• Self-awareness in the context of responses to others
• Capacities for inter-cultural/worldview communication
• Ability to hold multiple points of view simultaneously
• Discernment that relies equally on intellect and intuition
• Shared learning projects
• Ability to resolve conflict
• Pluralism that values open-minded inquiry with a spirit of mutual collaboration and respect