Envisioning Transformation

Living in greater harmony with the Earth calls us to heal our unbalanced relations with each other.



By governing ourselves in the spirit and form of a meaningful
participatory democracy, through creating a politics that will value
the contribution and needs of everyone, which truly respects our
fundamental equality in decision-making, we shall witness the healing
of social and economic imbalance as we learn to live with the reality
of our interconnectedness on this planet.



And as we confront the seemingly enormous challenges that we face as
human beings struggling to live here with integrity, we might meet
others with the intention of exploring the possibilities for healing
the wounds of our widespread political disempowerment, the general
disengagement from meaningful decision-making, which leaves us, it
seems, collectively unable to alter our present course and live in
balance with the planet, according to mutually shared needs.



The real work of social and political transformation involves
envisioning with the heart, and the heart is the path we follow to
create enduring and important change.



By opening up at the heart of our interconnectedness, we hold together
the space for the possibility of meaningful social action to emerge.
Unlike activism focused primarily on outward action, the crucial inner
work of embracing resistance to moving towards wholeness is what
enables the emergence of healing social transformation.



In our turning towards healing the world, we come to heal ourselves,
and by healing ourselves we create more possibility for healing in our
world.



It is in the heart—at the heart of our connection with others—where all genuine social movement truly begins.

Re: Envisioning Transformation

This is a beautiful vision, John. I love how one kind of wholeness flows into another,

Peace,

Nicole

Re: Envisioning Transformation

Thank you, Nicole.  Yes, wholeness in oneself is the same as wholeness with everything else at the same time.  And I am not truly at peace, until others are at peace as well.

May we all find peace!
John.

Re: Envisioning Transformation

There's a beautiful poem by Ruth Gendler here:

Peace PrayerTeach us to love the beauty of the small finely fringed green leaves and the giant eared large leaves of the rain forest Teach us to tend the tiny flames at the fingers of our leaf-shaped palms and the hearts' fires and the stars' fires May we stand next to each other in the bright light of peaceWash our eyes with tears of understanding Rinse our vision so we see each other as beautiful as wildflowers, as mysterious as messengers from the stars May we taste the honey of peace…

Re: Envisioning Transformation

That is very nice, but how are going to collectively create the real conditions for peace?  If I wish I can try separate myself and struggle to achieve something that looks like personal peace, yet I don't think that this would be genuine peace, as others are still in conflict.  This individual peace would have no integrity with the whole.

Re: Envisioning Transformation

John, how do you think we should go about it?

Re: Envisioning Transformation

I like what you write John and, yes, “living in harmony with the earth calls us to heal our unbalanced relations with each other.” Perfectly stated!

For me, this is a no-brainer. Yet, you'll find that the individual paradigm clearly supersedes any all paradigms of collective engagement (even here in Gaia) and, in fact, most individual spiritual paradigms advocate solitary spiritual pursuits as superior to collective engagement in discovering truth, as if truth makes itself available to separate individual minds as opposed to the whole. These 'paths' teach that you must seek truth first “within” the self and then extend or transfer that outward to others and the world. Problem is such inner solitary seeking actually constricts and impedes expansion. Ahhh, but try to go against this centuries old current and resistance is fierce and you'll go up against centuries of axial age teachings that simply have no bearing on a postmodern world careening toward mutal destruction.

I like your “opening the heart” metaphor since i get what you're saying. Yet, I sense the problem may be that we are over-burdened with too many spiritual metaphors and this fails to grab and sustain the attention-deficit postmodern mind that demands action-steps and formulae for which to experience what the metaphor signifies.

The micro is the macro and everything that occurs in our little corners of the universe is a reflection of the same occurrences happening in the macro-world. The same cruelty and violence in our tiny relationship enclaves is available for witness in the larger world.

Seek to deeply engage your corner of the world to attain a degree of Deep Spirit or deep level of mutual understanding that quickly annhilates the experience of strangers, since even those who profess abiding love for one another are essentially abject strangers. But who wants to do that? Good grief, they don't even teach relationship 101 in high school, so how do we expect children to become caring adults nurturing the planet and each other, when all they teach is self-absorption and selfishness? Ha!

The problem is not that we do not understand one another. The problem is that we fear swimming in the depths of such deep understanding. Thus we remain surface strangers forever giving 'lip-service' to “oneness” while essentially ignoring one another to go off on our separate “hero's journey” of solitary spiritual paths. We fear the depth such an intimate engagement would demand and so we become victim to small-talk and social norms which perpetuates us all as surface strangers.

Therefore, the planet is doomed because our relationships are forever doomed to repeat the past. Yet, the general consensus holds that such depth of intimacy is simply too exhausting and fails to recognize that such depth between ourselves is what we long for and can liberate us from our strangeness and mutual alienation in fear of self-exposure.

It is not deeper seeking within the self that need occur, but deeper seeking within each other. That was both the Christ and Buddha message, which has been completely co-opted by the individual ego agenda.

Ooops! A bit long. Oh well…just saying…
mikeS

Re: Envisioning Transformation

Mike, excellent post, thank you.

I would like to think that we can learn to engage more deeply, but maybe I'm am just being too optimistic?

What do you all think?

Nicole

Re: Envisioning Transformation

John, I wondered if you'd seen this article by Carolyn Baker that we are discussing over in the Fully Engaged pod - I would invite your thoughts and the thoughts of others, either here or there: When Facing Reality is Not “Negative Thinking,” by Carolyn Baker


I found these questions from the survey she did would be an excellent start for a meaningful discussion - a few of the answers are below - do any of them resonate for you, dear readers?


What we are acting toward?


 What main outcome might we be looking forward to?


What do we relish leaving behind, as collapse begins or as it will be intensified?


What do we not want to leave behind unresolved; 


or, what needs to be done before it's too late to accomplish it?





 Here are a few responses:•·       


 I look forward to the world breaking up “into small colonies of the saved” (Robert Bly). 




 I look forward to a simpler, less neurotic life for me and my children.  I would like to think that my children, while their chances of survival may be lower, their chances of happiness will be higher. •·        




The central change I would like to see is abandonment of the addictive, frenzied, exploitative American way of life in favor of a tribal, cooperative, relaxed way of life that puts responsibility toward other species and the Earth, as well as other human beings, first.•·        




An authentic life that is centered around people and not things. Revival of things spiritual and not material.•·       




 Learning how to live with each other and within the larger community of our bioregions and ecosystems in a way that is intimate, honest, humble, and humanly and ecologically sustainable.  That includes restoring viable community life, economic and ecological relationships and systems - living systems.

 

Re: Envisioning Transformation

Thanks, Nicole.  Those are thought-provoking questions.

As we gradually awaken to the power that has been asleep within us, we will come to see the possibility for our collectively creating the world that we want: we will see how realizing the power of love within oneself can also be manifest in our relations with others.  The vision of the possibility of living peacefully together exists within the heart, and when two or more people come together they can create the space for imagining this possibility.  We can do this right here.

I enjoyed your perspective, Mike, and thought what you had to say was most interesting.  We are so habitualized to individual pursuits and individual creation, and this fits very well into a social organization where we are largely alienated from one another.  Resolving conflict and creating peace would seem to involve a process of social reorganization, where we learn to work with one another, rather than against one another.  Our inherited political structures seem to prevent our ability and development as people struggling to live together in ways which foster mutual respect and interdependence.

But, for me, envisioning such transformation definitely involves an important component of inner work: namely, meeting our resistance, in the form of emotions and beliefs, that emerge with the prospect of our living in harmony with one another.  The possibility of social transformation, leading to widespread social co-operation and harmony, exists only in seed form, and is not yet a living reality.  And the possibility of changing the way that we do politics is not an option that will probably ever be offered to us through the current system–we actually have to realize, to create that possibility.  And before we create it, we are going to encounter our own resistance, as well as the resistance of others.

But engaging with others is the criticial part of the awakening process.  If we are going to find peace on this Earth, then we are going to do it together.  Awakening happens in the heart, the place where we experience love, but also the place that is our interconnection with others: we are connected through the heart. 

Awareness is the medium of social transformation and it evolves as quietly as our embracing ourselves, or our reaching out to another.  Anything that effects the awareness of our interconnectedness will be involved by the heart in its yearning for wholeness.

The peaceful revolution begins within, and the real steps taken are the ones where we find awareness deepening and our perspective shifting.  Engagement with others creates the possibility for healing social change, but the process is only possible when we are fully engaged in our own healing work, as well.  Balance in all things.

John.

Re: Envisioning Transformation

But engaging with others is the criticial part of the awakening process.  If we are going to find peace on this Earth, then we are going to do it together.  Awakening happens in the heart, the place where we experience love, but also the place that is our interconnection with others: we are connected through the heart. 


Well said, John!

Peace,

Nicole

Re: Envisioning Transformation

Living in greater harmony with the Earth calls us to heal our unbalanced relations with each other.



Transpersonal study is basically the study of one’s self in our world. I call it our God-self. If one looks at himself as the religions of Abraham teach, externally, God in a place called Heaven, God granting the faithful a land that follows a particular faith, you know what we’ve got: Holy Wars.

If one looks at himself as an insignificant speck in the vast ocean of space, existing for a tiny moment in time, this being his external self, it's difficult to think of Abraham's God, when Earth was the center of the universe. 

If one focuses on his internal self, boundless and eternal, he makes a distinction.
We’re moving away from the external God. I see another dimension. It doesn’t matter as much what is going on externally as what is going on internally.

After the fact that I made the discovery and transformation, I learned the scientific explanation in my study of quantum physics, the study of the very small. If you want to know how something works, you take it apart and examine the pieces. I make the connection of the microcosmic world with the macrocosmic world because first came the egg, my transformation.  Most of the world doesn't make the connection.

To most physicists, there is no connection with the microcosmic and the macrocosmic because the microcosmic doesn’t behave in a familiar way, nor can it be proven in the conventional way. If you only know that it works, like me, that isn’t good enough. You’ve got to have a smoking gun. Why? Juries send people to prison on circumstantial evidence.

Re: Envisioning Transformation

To most physicists, there is no connection with the microcosmic and the macrocosmic because the microcosmic doesn’t behave in a familiar way, nor can it be proven in the conventional way.


Do you have a source for this, inlink? Because I've never heard a physicist present this position.


Thanks,


Nicole