Stephen Dinan: Sacred America
Stephen Dinan is the founder and CEO of The Shift Network and a member of the Transformational Leadership Council and Evolutionary Leaders.
An Interview with Stephen Dinan: Sacred America, Sacred World
by Sandie Sedgbeer
A graduate of Stanford University and the California Institute of Integral Studies, Stephen Dinan helped create and direct the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory & Research, and former director of membership and marketing at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, he was the driving force behind the Shift in Action program and the One Minute Shift media series.
His political awakening came in 2003, when after 9/11, he felt “heart-rendering dismay with the state of our country.” Realizing he had to take more personal responsibility, he began to see his passions in other areas, such as spirituality and business, could “not find their full and final expression until the political system passed laws and policies that supported a more peaceful, sustainable, & prosperous world.”
A social entrepreneur and leading voice in the transpartisan movement, Stephen Dinan has been a featured speaker at the World Cultural Forum in China, the Alliance for a New Humanity in Costa Rica, Renovemos Mexico in Mexico City, and the University of Cuenca in Ecuador, as well as many US conferences, events, radio programs, and online summits.
Full Audio Interview of Stephen Dinan on What Is Going OM with Sandie Sedgbeer
To listen to the full audio interview with Stephen Dinan, click the player below.
Interview with Stephen Dinan
Sandie Sedgbear: You’ve been writing Sacred America, Sacred World for 10 years. Is the timing of its publication coincidence, or was there some galvanizing factor pushing you to get it finished and released right now?
Stephen Dinan: I intuited that 2016 is a pivotal moment for America and for the larger world. I really see us in a critical decade. This is when the collective crises have reached a crescendo point, and we need to choose fully and passionately a positive future and to let go of a lot of what has been not working in the world.
Because the American elections are so pivotal for the future of the planet, I felt it was important to get a voice of what I hope is higher consciousness and spiritual depth and a more unifying vision to come out in the midst of what is going to be probably one of the ugliest political seasons we’ve experienced.
I chose July 5th as the publication date, partially because it’s about the next evolution of America. July 4th is our Independence Day, so July 5th is all about what do we do next, where do we evolve further, how do we go beyond independence into interdependence and a deeper level of collaboration, not only with each other in America but with the larger world.
Sandie Sedgbeer: When you first established that date, was the picture looking somewhere different, or is it proceeding just as you thought it might?
Stephen Dinan: I had established the date before it was clear how the primary seasons were going to shake out, but I haven’t been surprised, actually. The Trump versus Hillary setup—Trump, in many ways, is an exaggerated version of many of the aspects of America that we’re mostly outgrowing. And part of the trick is not to necessarily fear and fight and hate that which 
we’re outgrowing but to understand it and the values underneath and what it may be expressing. In many ways, Trump is an exaggerated version of the hyper-masculine: he’s the ultimate alpha male and going to solve problems by deal making, intimidation and force. And that is an exaggerated version of what I think of as an imbalance in the American psyche. We were founded on a Revolutionary War, and in retrospect, I believe that we didn’t need to have a violent separation from England. If we had been a bit more patient as a country, there would have been a way to individuate without a violent separation.
The reasons that’re important is that it is templated into the American psychology that violence and revolutionary fire and force are required for growth. And so, that has largely led America to be overly masculine in both how we are internally—we have high rates of crime and violence—as well as very aggressive in our foreign policy.
And because of that imbalance, we need to come back to rehonoring the feminine and coming into a place of wholeness and deep, sacred respect. When we have masculine and feminine working together in an optimized way, that’s what creates new life. It creates families.
It creates companies. It creates a country. Part of why I put the Lady Liberty on the cover of Sacred America is that this restoration and celebration of the feminine is very essential, not just on a rights level or even an income level but really as a culture to celebrate the feminine as equally as the masculine.
And so, we have this almost exaggerated version right now of the hyper—the ultimate alpha male, billionaire chest thumping, tough guy, and then we have potentially our first woman president. And they’re embodying this culture clash. Personally, I believe that Hillary’s going to win.
But it’s not just important to do whatever it takes to win; it’s more about shifting the tenor of the conversation. Because I recognize that in a truly sacred world, we really see and honor the value of every living thing. That means every political party and position, as well. And we can begin to see those conservative value systems need to be honored in the next evolution of America. Sometimes, we think that to create the new, we need a revolution, we need to violently overthrow the old. But that tends to create discord and a civil war quality versus what can we understand and respect and bless about people who have different political positions. What common ground is there that we can work together on evolving to the next level?
When I was younger, I used to think of people who were more conservative as the opposition, that we had to somehow triumph over them to make societal progress. What I’ve come to see in the last decade is that society evolves step by step, and you need something that holds society together, the glue that keeps the fabric of a culture intact.
Sandie Sedgbeer: We’ve talked about the fact that no single person has all of the answers and that we need to look at the best of what each side offers rather than rejecting it just because we don’t like the party. Do you envision some kind of coalition government or a different kind of party forming all together?
Stephen Dinan: I don’t necessarily think the binary party system in the United States is wrong or is going to go away. What I think we need to do is reduce our attachment to the particular polarity we’re in and start to understand the other side and the worldview underneath it as well as the people that party represents.
In the book, I say that what we really need is a more enlightened wing of each party, a transpartisan wing that is about creating this higher common ground. I named that as evolutionary Republicans and evolutionary democrats. We’re no longer revolutionaries trying in a fiery, violent way to overthrow the opposition; we’re evolutionaries working in a more collaborative and synergistic way to evolve the new.
So, evolutionary Republicans would have their own candidates and their own predisposition, as would the evolutionary Democrats and the idea would be to influence the evolution of each political party from the inside so that you’re eventually running more and more conscious candidates. I also explore how we could create an evolutionary political leadership training that would help prepare people at an earlier stage of their maturation to become the kind of conscious transpartisan candidates who can shift the world. Not necessarily by being neutral or independent or creating a third party, but by simply being a more conscious and full expression of the natural predisposition of that party.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Sacred America explores four ways that America can transcend these divisions to fulfill its higher mission. But you’re not just talking about just America’s higher mission because every country has a higher mission.
