In this IONS-sponsored workshop Andrew Harvey will convey his understanding of our contemporary world crisis, including five kinds of service that together constitute Sacred Activism.

Sacred Activism is the fusion of profound mystical knowledge with thoughtful focused radical action to support life, preserve the environment, ensure human rights, protect animal species and transform political, economic and cultural systems that engender war and ensure the continuation of widespread world poverty.

Additionally, Andrew will share his profound understanding of holistic sacred practices that Sacred Activists will need to embody in order to become strong, calm, courageous, and wise enough to act compassionately and creatively in even the most extreme and difficult situations. The workshop will consist of his ground-breaking film, lectures, and experiential activities.

Register online!

For additional retreat information, questions and assistance please contact the IONS Retreat Center Event Manager, Ken Pryor, at 707-779-8275 or kpryor@noetic.org.

The Men's Wearhouse

The Men's Wearhouse is a men's clothing retailer that now has 600+ stores across the U.S. and Canada. Since opening its doors more than 30 years ago, The Men's Wearhouse mission has been to maximize sales, provide value to customers, and deliver top-quality customer service while still having fun and maintaining its values. It is their commitment to high ethical standards and quality relationships that makes it a successful business and one of the best companies to work for. Trust and respect are the cornerstones of The Men's Wearhouse philosophy.

George Zimmer is the founder and CEO of The Men's Wearhouse. He opened his first Men's Wearhouse store in 1973 in Houston, Texas, and is famous for appearing in many of his company's television commercials, usually closing with the company slogan: "You're going to like the way you look. I guarantee it."

George is known for his cutting-edge style of corporate management, and is a Board Member of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Read George's article, "Building Community Through Shared Values, Goals & Experiences."

Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine

Editors: Marilyn Schlitz, Tina Amorok, Marc Micozzi

Consciousness and Healing is a collection of 47 essays on integral medicine, consciousness, and healing that integrates mainstream medical knowledge with recent developments in the emerging areas of frontier sciences and insights from alternative healing perspectives. It promotes a model of healing in which personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and belief systems are viewed as fundamental points of connection between body, mind, spirit, society, and nature. Integral medicine embraces the recognition that human beings possess emotional, spiritual, and relational dimensions that are essential in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and the cultivation of wellness.

There is no other book on the market that pulls together so many leaders in this field and presents material on healing and integral medicine from such an interdisciplinary and scientific perspective.

More information at
www.noetic.org

Byron Belitsos / Here in the afterglow of the Institute's release of The 2007 Shift Report, and given my role as this month's guest editor, it only seems right to highlight a few of the salient features in this special document. Among these, we'll take a closer look at the Positive Psychology movement and the emerging science of happiness.

First enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the "pursuit of happiness" has remained an American trademark right up to the recent release of the movie The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. Oddly, it is times of high danger like ours that tend to bring forth obsessive concerns for individual happiness, along with idiosyncratic methods for achieving it. Witness the current popularity of The Secret, a true cultural phenomenon that is to be treated in the next issue of Shift magazine. Some of us remember that in the midst of the turmoil of the Vietnam War era, millions of buttons with smiley faces on them were sold (one estimate says 50 million). I think this was more than a triviality. And now, amidst an even more profound worldview breakdown 40 years later, as diagnosed in the opening pages of The Shift Report, most of us want to hear more about how we can get smiling again—but this time as a reflection of an authentic rather than a compensatory happiness.

Accordingly, I will amplify below the Report's coverage of the frontier science of happiness—including links to practical tests for measuring your own happiness levels. These are followed by recommendations for research (and entertainment) in light of The 2007 Shift Report's findings, including a customized list of helpful links in a key domain of the emerging world view shift: the meeting of science and spirit. Next, don't miss my top ten list of the most important implications of The 2007 Shift Report. What are your top ten? (Please send them to shift@noetic.org.) And finally, don't forget to consider attending or listening in on some of the upcoming events for IONS members, emblazoned throughout this edition of iShift.

Aristotle, you'll remember, identified the classical virtues that lead to happiness. Buddha proclaimed the Four Noble Truths as the ideal way to happiness. Jesus preached that happiness springs from faith in the goodness of God. And in the last decade, even greater progress has been made through the academic movement for Positive Psychology that has created an empirical science of happiness. The findings of today's pioneering scientific researchers into happiness—which figure prominently in the The 2007 Shift Report—strongly echo the world's wisdom traditions, as Professor Jonathan Haidt shows in The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2006).

For a quick start in measuring your own degree of happiness, take this seven-question test developed by "happiness scientist" Ed Deiner at the University of Illinois. It appears on the BBC's Web site as part of its in-depth series on the subject, aired in 2006, entitled The Happiness Formula.

Abundant data noted in The 2007 Shift Report show that authentic happiness (and not just health) is the result of virtuous actions that demonstrate love, altruism, forgiveness, and cooperation. And happiness is not only scientifically measurable; the research also reveals that it is scalable according to our desires. Want to settle for a pleasant life in the suburbs? Pursue momentary pleasures and deal forthrightly with pessimistic thoughts. Want to live "the good life," as Plato would put it? The data shows that virtuous actions will gratify you in a deeper and more lasting way—inducing a "flow state"—especially when these wise activities engage your natural gifts or innate strengths. (Positive Psychology has identified 24 such "signature strengths.") And if you want no less than ultimate self-actualization—full enlightenment? Studies show that those who deploy their signature strengths in wholehearted devotion to some purposeful mission greater than themselves will attain the highest happiness. These findings are summarized in the now classic book Authentic Happiness (Free Press, 2003) by the father of the Positive Psychology movement, Martin Seligman. You can precisely measure your current happiness level, determine your signature strengths, or find out your proneness to depression—and much more—by taking Seligman's advanced questionnaires at his Web site.

Positive emotions are a key component of happiness. Consistently feeling good is thought to activate the so-called Law of Attraction in our favor—according to popular sources such as The Secret. Positive feelings, however, are correlated with, but are not always the cause of, our happiness, says the new research: Maintaining positive emotion requires the support of wise and virtuous action in the world—or what theists call doing the divine will. And while our feelings of happiness change from day to day, each of us has a stable midpoint (or "set point") of these variations—our own unique happiness homeostasis. Our set point is in part genetically determined, but we can move toward the upper end of our homeostatic setting not only through the aid of the science of happiness but also by living in a society that produces happiness through its institutions.

Research cited by Seligman and others clearly shows that individual happiness is unsustainable unless strong institutions are there to support virtuous action in families, workplaces, schools, places of worship, and other group settings. That's why in some quarters the measure of "Gross National Happiness" is far more important than Gross National Product. This appealing term was coined by the king of Bhutan, the Buddhist Himalayan mountain kingdom that has been rated eighth in the world in happiness. In the same study, carried out at the University of Leicester, Bhutan and nations including Denmark, Sweden, and Canada stand well above countries with a greater per capita GNP, such as the United States, which was rated 23rd in happiness. Learn about the Happiness Map of the World, just one measure among several, at this link.

But the science of "collective happiness" still has a long way to go. We suggest that you contrast the latter research findings with the results of the massive World Values Survey, operated out of the University of Michigan. To the surprise of many, Nigeria came out on top with the highest percentage of happy people, followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. Stay away from Russia, Armenia, and Romania, which had the fewest. The United States came in 15th in this prestigious survey.