** The Bush victory in November was followed by victories of other bad guys and I'm still holding my breath to see if there will be a dawn. So in the dark night of institutional ignorance that surrounds my little world these days, it's good to hear that things aren't that way everywhere. The Wired Web site carries an adapted excerpt from Daniel H. Pink's new book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. It points to the emergence of spirituality and its colorful sidekick, art, into daily life.

Pink argues that throughout history progress has been lifting onerous burdens from humanity in order to allow the songbird of spiritual consciousness to more easily take flight. Those burdens have been anything that can be reduced to a set of rules. Automation has taken on that task in order that intuition and other ways of knowing can come to the forefront.

Virginia Postrel's "The Substance of Style" makes note of the widespread acceptance of aesthetics as a "solid" value in today's world.

As a proponent of spiritual healing, I see these as harbingers of an age where goodness will dominate human life and problems will be solved not with technology but with love.

Revenge of the right Brain

As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.