The Leadership of the Center
There are different groups of individuals who provide leadership or vision for the organization in different capacities.
Each organization [Center for World Philosophy & Religion, Office for the Future, and Foundation for Conscious Evolution] has a distinct legal board, which makes its decisions. All the decisions are made collectively by the appropriate board and board leadership. The listing below includes present and former board members, research fellows, faculty, and officers of the organization.
We have intentionally not broken them out by designation, as all of these people contribute equally needed value to the overall missions of these distinct organizations.
We are in the process of changing the name of The Center for Integral Wisdom to Center for World Philosophy and Religion.
The Center is a 501C3.
Our Activist Think Tank
The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is an Activist Think Tank.
It is a group of people who think about the structure of the way things work and how we can make it better.
We are engaging the deep structural issues that affect how society works, how love flows, how compassion unfolds, the way politics unfolds, the way economics are structured.
We are inspiring action.
We are engaged in medicine, secondary school education, business, psychology, the recovery movement, and more…
The vision of the Center is a world united in and through diversity by a New Story of Value that dignifies humanity and welcomes us home to the Universe. We imagine a world that keeps the sacred covenant between generations guided by a memory of the future. Our hope is that our writings and teachings will serve to catalyze a now necessary reweaving of the human story. We call this New Story CosmoErotic Humanism.
CosmoErotic Humanism is a world philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. Much like Romanticism or Existentialism, CosmoErotic Humanism is not merely a theory but a movement that changes the very mood of Reality. It is an invitation to participate in evolving the source code of consciousness and culture towards a cosmocentric ethos for a planetary civilization.
CosmoErotic Humanism addresses three core questions: Who? Where? What?
- Who am I? Who are we? [Narrative of identity]
- Where are we? [Universe Story]
- What is there to do? What do we want? What is our deepest heart’s desire—both personally and collectively? [Eros and ethos]
This movement is a strong, fluid, and emergent response to the meta-crisis, fundamentally understanding that existential and catastrophic risks are not just rooted in flawed infrastructure (technological and other systems), social structure (law, education, politics), but primarily in failed superstructure—specifically the collapse of an implicit, shared worldview, what we call a shared Story of Value rooted in evolving First Principles and First Values as a context for our diversity.
The core of CosmoErotic Humanism is therefore a new Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values that integrates the validated insights of the interior and exterior sciences—across premodern, modern, and postmodern thought—ultimately recasting cosmic evolution as a Story of Value, in which our stories are understood to be chapter and verse in the larger narrative arc of Reality—the CosmoErotic Evolutionary Love Story of the Intimate Universe.
These evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value are grounded in a comprehensive set of meta-theories, encompassing psychology (and a theory of self), epistemology, scientific metaphysics, education, ethics, theology, mysticism, sexuality, Eros, and ethos.
CosmoErotic Humanism offers some of the first words on the possible emergence of world philosophies and world religions adequate to our time of civilizational crisis and transformation—rooted in a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity, weaving humanity into a shared story of inherent yet evolving Cosmic Value.
A core set of frameworks guide this work, including:
- Integral Theory (Wilber)
- Unique Self Theory (Gafni)
- meta-psychology (Stein, Gafni)
- educational theory, developmental theory, and metrics (Stein)
- classical sciences (Bloom)
- anthro-ontological value theory (Gafni, Stein, Wilber),
- metaphysics of Eros (Gafni, Kincaid, Stein)
- and Conscious Evolution (Hubbard, Gafni)
- among others.
From these emerge a New Story of Value rooted in First Principles of Cosmos.
It is our mission to offer this New Story into the world during this critical junction of history. The Center is dedicated to the creation of an integral planetary culture, capable of guiding humanity through the current evolutionary crisis. The publication of the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism in the coming decades serves this mission by advancing an integral worldview that is truly inclusive of premodern, modern, and postmodern truths.
The Founders of the Center
The Center was founded in 2011 under its first name, The Center for World Spirituality by Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Sally Kempton – later joined by Lori Galperin. Later, the name was changed to The Center for Integral Wisdom. Currently, we are in the process of changing the name again to Center for World Philosophy and Religion.
Dr. Marc Gafni serves as its President. Together with co-president Dr. Zak Stein, they are co-leading a team of thinkers, articulating a new vision of meaning for the world.
Previous Chairs of the Board of Advisors of the Center include Barbara Marx Hubbard, Lori Galperin, John P. Mackey, Kate Maloney, Adam Bellow, Shareef Malnik, and Gabrielle Anwar. Our current chair is Carrie Kish.
More about Each of the Founders:
Ken Wilber is a leading voice in Integral Wisdom and the author of more than 25 books which have explored the frontiers of enlightened living in the 21st century. He is also the most widely translated academic writer in America, with some 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages. His works have been the most influential in defining Integral Theory, which is an emerging discourse striving for the coherent organization, coordination, and harmonization of all of the relevant practices, methodologies, and experiences available to human beings. His latest work is The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions, which is provocative examination of how the great religious traditions can remain relevant in modern times by incorporating scientific truths learned about human nature over the last century. Ken Wilber is–next to Marc Gafni–the initiating Thought Leader and Co-Founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom. He has served as the Leading Voice on the Wisdom Council of the Center and has helped to shape the emerging Activist Think Tank.
Sally Kempton is one of the great teachers of meditation, who developed a system called Awakened Heart Meditation. One of her books is Meditation for the Love of It, about which her publisher, Tami Simon, said, it was the best meditation book she ever read. A more recent book, Awakening Shakti, carries the deep lineage energies of her main tradition, Kashmir Shaivism. Sally has been a central key co-conspirator to animate the Eros of this vision.
Lori Galperin is one of the leading trauma therapists in the world. Together with her colleague Mark Schwartz, she has done deep work in the field of sex therapy, eating disorders, and other areas. They have taught about 75,000 therapists and started a trauma clinic. Mark and Lori are masters of several interdisciplinary areas that they have integrated. Lori has been the Co-Chair of the Board of Advisors. She is also joining with Marc and others in writing about the new field of Unique Self Recovery.
Explore the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism
The core mission of the Center for World Philosophy & Religion is the research, articulation, and writing of the Great Library, a collection of books and media projects to function as a strange attractor toward our memory of the future.
The Great Library is made up of two kinds of books, Foundational books and Impact books. The synergistic introduction of these books into public culture is aimed directly at catalyzing a crucial, pivotal evolution of today’s consciousness and culture. At this phase-shift inflection in human history, without this conscious ’evolving the source code’ of consciousness and culture, humanity will likely not survive the existential risks now threatening our civilization.
The Great Library is an expression of our mission at the Center to evolve the source code of culture and to participate in the evolution of love.
Through writing and publishing, we create what we are calling the Great Library, a body of work written as our response to the question: What do we need to give “our children” so they can prosper and grow into their highest potential—even though we don’t know what kind of challenges they will face in their lives?
That Great Library provides us with a shared language, a framework, or a context, from which we can co-create together a world that works for everyone. To have shared values, a shared framework, or what we call shared memetic structures is one of these conditions.
Our Partners
Our Events Are Our Dharma Labs
At the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, we are mainly focused on writing the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. Our Events are a place where these new source-code-changing First Values and First Principles get clarified by being spoken into our shared Evolutionary We-Space. That is one way how we each participate in the creation of this New Story of Value.
Our partners participate with our think tank in evolving a global ethics for a global civilization. Together, they are gathered under the umbrella of the Office for the Future.
Last but not least, our events foster our Live Community by offering a beautiful and caring environment for us to meet, study together, celebrate, and practice. As one participant put it, they give us “a taste of an enlightened society.”