“This most essential change, the one from which all other changes spring, is a change in your worldview and your perception of what’s possible.  Transforming your consciousness may be the most important thing you can do for yourself and the world,” writes Dr. Schlitz in Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life.

  In part two, Lisa talks with Marilyn Schlitz, PhD, president of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, IONS, about what 40 years of consciousness research has to say about how we change.  This column appeared in the September 2011 issue of Pathways to Family Wellness magazine. These two columns were presented as a part of IONS' Worldview Literacy Project's facilitator training on their Earthrise campus in August 2011.  See photos of the Worldview Literacy Project week here. 

Read part two of this column, which features an interview with Marilyn Schlitz, PhD, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONS, in the fall issue of Pathways to Family Wellness magazine.  These two columns were presented as a part of IONS' Worldview Literacy Project's facilitator training on their Earthrise campus in August 2011.  See photos of the Worldview Literacy Project week here. Listen to Cassandra Vieten, PhD, IONS' research director, talk about World View Literacy in a video at the bottom of this page.

1970 marked the first year America celebrated Earth Day, as well as the publication of my favorite children’s book, The Wump World, by the beloved writer and illustrator Bill Peet. I discovered The Wump World in a mountain of books my mother helped my little brother and me haul home from our local library—our preferred source of entertainment in the very early ‘70s! After my first read, I searched anxiously for The Wump World every time we visited the library, looking forward to sitting for the umpteenth time with the story of the “Pollutians,” who invaded the pristine, green world of the furry, doe-eyed “Wumps,” with their ideas of industrial progress. In the simple, colored-pencil illustrations, the hapless Wumps retreated into underground caves until the Pollutians finally declared to their leader that they could not live on such a polluted planet anymore; they were sick from their lifestyles and had to find another planet.

In more than a decade of conscious-living conferences and retreats with parents and practitioners around the country, I’ve witnessed repeatedly that when it is time to put into practice all that we’ve acknowledged is true—to embrace the wisdom we’ve carried in our hearts all along—there’s one burning question on everyone’s mind: In a practical, day to day way, how can we create wellness in our families when our dominant culture conspires at every turn to undermine our efforts? From seminal thinkers like Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, to practicing physicians like Larry Palevsky, M.D., of the Holistic Pediatric Association, the answer, in a nutshell, is always this: Get connected.