Quantum Activism for a Quantum Psychology For Transforming Yourself and the World
By Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

There is a danger in what is happening with materialist science, especially with psychology and sociology that surreptitiously is killing the individualistic human spirit that has made the West, especially America, but few people notice it.  Materialist psychology is objective; for materialists it is best if everybody were just the average Joe or Jane because prediction and control would be so simple then.  The alternative psychologies, especially depth psychology, humanistic psychology, and positive psychology promote and uphold the individual through the emphasis of the creative pursuit of the timeless archetypes.  The average approach in any garb, be it cognitive/behavioral science or Ken Wilber’s type of integral psychology, that tries to undermine the age-old archetypes is ultimately the biggest threat to human individuality, to the human dream of success in the pursuit of meaning. 

As James Hillman said, “[Ordinary] activism looks to the facts, psychological activism inquires into essences.”  Depth psychologists already talk about archetypal activism.  If we don’t save the absolute archetypes of timeless truth, we get Fox news.  Quantum psychology has an even more general suggestion: quantum activism. The motto of quantum activism is to change yourself to excel in your individuality (Carl Jung called this process individuation) and simultaneously help the society to become a collection of heterogeneous human individuals, not homogeneous machines!

In quantum psychology we recognize the full import of what the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers first hinted: to become a person, we need to be the proud creative producer of a new idea that is my idea.  Until that happens, face it: we are just repeating and analyzing other people’s ideas and opinions.  To become a quantum society we have to change the essence of society from conditioning to creativity; we have to help others in the society to be creative persons.

  What if somebody has neurosis so severe that creativity is impossible, the rigor of the creative process is unbearable.  If you desire to be a quantum psychotherapist, you have to lend to such a person your creative acumen.  If not you, who will?  Remember the cognitive/behavioral therapists will always try to adapt their clients to the established cultural complex.

  How to do it?  Quantum physics has given us two ideas with which to move from “I” to “we” consciousness.  The first idea is nonlocality.  When I am influencing somebody through local means, local communication, I try to homogenize the person with me—simple human nature.  When I communicate with someone with nonverbal and nonlocal consciousness, I empower him or her with the creative power of downward causation of a nonlocal consciousness that connect us all.

    Have you noticed how in the current culture, locality has taken over as our means of communication?  Locality gives us a sense of connectedness—that part is good.  But the tendency to homogenize is the problem.  We should use the local to connect, but use the connection to trigger and explore our nonlocal consciousness so all of us can prosper individually.

For the therapist, what works better is establish a tangled hierarchical connection with the client and investigate the archetype of wholeness together.  If that sounds intriguing, it is not that hard, you will see when you try.

    Ken Wilber gave us the idea of a four-quadrant consciousness that introduced the idea of “we”-psychology. Unfortunately, Wilber meant the cultural we, the local homogeneous we.  Quantum psychology is much more ambitious, much more in tune with the creative purpose of the evolution of consciousness.

    The poet John Keats wrote:

    See the world as a

    Vale for soul-making.

If you do, he wrote to a friend, you will see the purpose of the world.  The soul is our archetypal body, the body that we cannot manifest yet except through mental creativity.  So long as we are creative, and helping others to be creative, we are okay, we are into soul-making.

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Dr Amit Goswami is on the advisory board of The Awareness Party

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·        NB: The Tenets of Quantum Physics

Non-Locality

We are all interconnected – even without signals, and experimental evidence is proving our inherent unity.

Tangled Hierarchy

In our brain, we become one with the neuronal images of an external object because of a tangled-hierarchy, a circularity. The observer is the observed.

Discontinuity

The discovery of something new of value in thought is a quantum leap of Aha! insight.

 

     

 

Religion, Science, and Spirit: A Sacred Story for Our Time 

Is it possible that the human future turns on our embrace of a new sacred story that gives us a reason to care and with which a majority of people may already align, yet has neither institutional support nor a place in the public conversation?

by our advisory board member the distinguished  David Korten  Published in YES magazine Jan 17, 2013

 

“For people, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value,” Thomas Berry wrote in The Dream of the Earth. “The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.”

We live at such a moment. Humanity’s current behavior threatens Earth’s capacity to support life and relegates more than a billion people to lives of destitution. This self-destructive behavior and our seeming inability to change have deep roots in the stories by which we understand the nature and meaning of our existence. The challenge before us is to create a new civilization based on a cosmology—a story of the origin, nature, and purpose of creation—that reflects the fullness of our current human knowledge; a story to guide us to mature relationships with one another and a living Earth.

Three Cosmologies

Three distinct cosmologies have each had their influence in shaping the Western worldview. Two are familiar. The third—and most relevant to the task at hand—has ancient roots, and may in one form or another be the most widely held. It has virtually no public presence.

The cosmos is created and ruled by a Distant Patriarch. This is the cosmology most commonly associated with the institutions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It views creation as the work of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. From his home in a separate, sacred dimension called Heaven, He observes and judges our obedience to His commandments handed down to us through sacred texts and interpreted by His anointed religious authorities.

This cosmology focuses attention on our individual relationship with a personal but distant God, as expressed in Michelangelo’s famous rendering of a God portrayed in the image of man. By implication, our human relationships with one another and with nature are secondary to this primary relationship. Although some adherents believe that we have an obligation to care for God’s creation in this life and to show compassion to our fellow human beings, in many interpretations of the Distant Patriarch story, life on Earth is but a way station on the path to paradise. Nature exists for our temporary human use and comfort. Those who demonstrate their closeness to God by their pious religious observance and special knowledge of His intention properly exercise authority over the rest of us.

The cosmos is a Grand Machine.This is the cosmology commonly associated with science. It is the standard story of Newtonian physics, evolutionary biology, and the institutions of secular academia. In this cosmology only the material is real. The formation and function of the cosmos and the evolution of life are consequences of a combination of physical mechanism and random chance. Life is an accidental outcome of material complexity and has no larger meaning or purpose. Consciousness and free will are illusions.

By this reckoning, the cosmos is much like a mechanical clock-works gradually running down as its spring unwinds. Building on the mechanistic determinism of classical physics, classical biology holds that life evolves through a combination of chance genetic mutation and a competitive struggle by which the fitter survive and flourish as the weaker perish.

According to the Grand Machine cosmology, a brutal competition for survival, territory, and reproductive advantage is the basic law of nature, and these same instincts define our human nature. Indeed, as economists of a social Darwinist perspective assure us, our competitive instinct is the primary and essential driver of human prosperity and progress. The defining debate turns on the question of whether this instinct best serves society when free from government interference or when guided by public regulation and incentives.

The cosmos is a manifestation of Integral Spirit. This cosmology has ancient roots and a significant modern following, but lacks institutional support and public visibility. By its reckoning, all of creation is the expression of an integral spiritual intelligence engaged in a sacred journey to discover and actualize its possibilities through an ongoing process of becoming. Our world and the material universe of our experience are more than God’s creation—they are God made flesh. God is in the world and the world is in God, yet they are not identical. Although the spirit is imminent, it is also transcendent, a concept religious scholars refer to as panentheism.

We come to know the nature, purpose, and intention of this divine force through both our inner experience and our observation of its physical manifestation. All beings, stars, planets, humans, animals, plants, rocks, and rivers are expressions of this divine force—each with its place and function in the journey of the whole.

Contrary to prevailing theories of social Darwinism, the Integral Spirit cosmology recognizes that life is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise.

Indigenous wisdom keepers speak of the creator’s original instructions to humans to get along with one another and nature. Brain scientists tell us the human brain evolved to reward cooperation, service, and compassion—suggesting that the creative processes of evolution have programmed these original instructions into our brains and DNA.

Extreme individualism, greed, and violence are pathological and signs of physical, developmental, cultural, and/or institutional system failure. Caring relationships are the foundation of healthy families and communities. The Golden Rule common to all major faiths is a better guide to appropriate moral behavior than mechanistic rules are.

The Integral Spirit cosmology postulates that we humans participate in and contribute to the divine journey. We can apply our distinctive capacities for reflective consciousness and choice either to advance creation’s evolutionary thrust toward ever more creative possibility, or to disrupt it. Together, our individual choices determine our collective fate and shape the course of the journey far beyond our time.

We find threads of this story in the traditional wisdom teachings of indigenous peoples and the mystical traditions of all faiths, including the Abrahamic faiths. In his expression of his Jewish faith, Jesus taught, “The Kingdom is within.” Muhammad taught, “Wherever you turn, there is the Face of Allah.”

The Integral Spirit cosmology is consistent with the findings of quantum physics, which reveals that the apparent solidity of matter is an illusion and at the deepest level of understanding only relationships are real. I find that Integral Spirit is the underlying cosmology of a reassuring number of religious leaders and devout members of many faiths, including a great many Catholic nuns, as well as most people who define themselves as spiritual, but not necessarily religious.

Why Creation Stories Matter

Our creation stories have powerful implications for our understanding of our place in the cosmos and thereby shape our most foundational values, our politics, and the distribution of power in society.

The Distant Patriarch story characterizes our earthly existence as a separation from the divine goodness and grace of heaven. Our experience in this life becomes a test of faith, a burden to be endured and ultimately left behind in an eventual ascent of the righteous to reside with the creator in paradise. This cosmology reduces the purpose of life in the present to a fear-based quest to earn credits toward a divine judgment that will determine whether our fate after death will be to join the saved or the damned. It is a perfect setup for the manipulation and exploitation of believers by demagogues.

The Grand Machine story strips our existence of meaning and purpose. In so doing, it supports consumerism and an ethic of individual material gratification as a distraction from the terrifying loneliness and despair of an otherwise meaningless existence. By characterizing life as inherently competitive, it provides a pseudo-scientific justification for social Darwinism, colonial imperialism, racial domination, and the unrestrained competition of market fundamentalism. It neglects the far greater role of cooperation and synergy on which all living systems—and human society, civilization, and culture—depend.

Though sharply at odds regarding the presence or absence of a spiritual intelligence, both the Distant Patriarch and Grand Machine cosmologies affirm the self-destructive individualism and separation that lead us to behave in ways that threaten Earth’s biosphere and our future as a species.

The Integral Spirit story, by contrast, infuses all we behold in this life and beyond with profound meaning. All of creation is a sacred and ultimately unified expression of an eternal and intimately present divine will. All beings are interconnected and our fates are inextricably intertwined. As participants in and contributors to the ongoing process of creation, we each bear a sacred responsibility. Our lives take on profound meaning and purpose in relationship and service to the sacred whole.

This cosmology has the elements of the needed story for our time. It remains, however, largely a private story without the institutional sponsors that give the Distant Patriarch and Grand Machine cosmologies authority and public presence. The absence of institutional sponsorship helps to secure its authenticity, but the absence of public visibility limits its influence as a guide to rethinking and restructuring our human relationships with one another and nature.

Largely invisible in the public forum, it is not included in public opinion polls, leaving us with little idea of how widespread its acceptance actually is. Consequently, those of us who align with its foundational insights have no way to assess whether we are just cultural outliers or members of what may quite possibly be a cultural majority. Intimidated by our isolation, we may be reluctant to share the truth in our hearts, thus limiting our ability to share and deepen our insights and to join with others to fulfill the responsibilities to which the insights of this story call us.

Six Blind Men Describe an Elephant

Reflecting on the relationship between these three seemingly mutually exclusive cosmologies brings to mind the story of the six blind men describing an elephant. The first feels its side and proclaims, “An elephant is like a wall.” The second gropes its tusk and counters, “No, it is like a spear.” The third feels the trunk and says, “Truly it is like a snake.” The fourth feels a leg and insists, “An elephant is like a tree.” The fifth feels its ear and pronounces it to be “Like a fan.” The sixth grasps the tail and says “Nonsense, an elephant is like a rope.”

We understand and relate to our world largely through our basic senses. The spiritual dimension, however, lies beyond our limited direct sensory experience. When we seek to describe it, like the blind men groping the elephant, we turn to familiar imagery. This story is a warning that any interpretation of the infinite is likely to capture only a part of a much larger reality.

The Politics of Story Power

The mystics among the prophets, sages, and wisdom keepers of all times and traditions have discerned a spiritual order and unity in creation they could make intelligible to their followers only through metaphor. Consequently, they sought to communicate their mystical insights through easily understood stories and familiar images. Not surprisingly, the intended messages have been subject to omission and distortion as they pass from generation to generation.

Generally, for early indigenous peoples the deeper truth of creation as the expression of an integral spiritual consciousness translated into stories of an enchanted world inhabited by spirits of diverse motives and magical abilities. Matrilineal societies tended toward feminine imagery and worshiped images of the Goddess. More gender-balanced societies worshiped both a Sky Father and an Earth Mother.

With time, human societies developed large-scale institutional structures that supported powerful political and religious rulers with a considerable interest in shaping stories of divine power to serve their political interests. Stories and images of gods and goddesses as larger-than-life versions of their earthly rulers served them better than stories and images of an enchanted world of spirit beings.

The Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were each built on the foundation of a deep and profound sense of the integral spiritual unity and order of creation. Each emerged within male-dominated societies in which patriarchs were familiar figures and symbols. They naturally looked to the patriarch as their symbol for an all-knowing, all-powerful spiritual consciousness. 

It was also natural that these societies placed their religious institutions in the care of men—who in turn found that it best served their political interests to favor the distant Sky Father over the imminent Earth Mother and to dismiss goddess worship as primitive and pagan. The priestly class further strengthened its power and authority by affirming sacred ancient texts interpreted by religious scholars as the sole authority on the will of God.

Eventually, the keepers of the faith conveniently forgot that the image of the Distant Patriarch was only a metaphor for the unity and order of the Integral Spirit from which all being manifests.

Separation of the material and spiritual worlds, rejection of the feminine, and a reliance on ancient texts as the primary (if not sole) source of human knowledge and moral authority, in denial of the data of the senses, became a serious barrier to the advancement of human knowledge and understanding. As the world divided into a multitude of institutionalized religious sects and subsects, the underlying stories of  the spiritual unity of creation gave way to often violent competition for market share based on “My God is the real God” product differentiation.

Newtonian science emerged as a counter to religion’s rejection of the experience of the senses in favor of explanations of events based on stories of the magical powers of mythic figures, and to the barrier this rejection posed to human advancement. To secure its integrity and authority, science embraced disciplined observation of how matter interacts with matter as its primary—even exclusive—source of knowledge and learning. This brought a new rigor to the search for order in the cosmos and lifted human understanding and technological possibility to previously unimagined levels.

Much as the priestly classes of institutionalized Western religions conveniently forgot that the patriarch was a metaphor, however, the gatekeepers of science eventually forgot that the denial of agency and free will that imposed a useful and beneficial discipline on scientific inquiry within the context of 17th-century belief systems was a choice—not a scientific finding.

A scientific culture that ignored or denied spiritual consciousness brought with it an implicit denial of life’s capacity for conscious self-direction. This in turn limited our ability to comprehend and embrace the richness, potential, and responsibilities of our nature as conscious, intelligent, self-directing participants in Earth’s interconnected, ever-evolving, ever-learning web of life.

That the reductionist story underlying most scientific inquiry to this day describes only one element of a larger reality does not invalidate the truth or utility of its contributions. It is essential, however, that we recognize how the myopia of classical scientific reductionism suppresses our sense of wonder, agency, responsibility to and for one another and living Earth, and our ability to actualize a democratic vision of the authentic popular sovereignty of self-governing peoples and an equitable distribution of power.

Integral Spirit as a Liberating Synthesis

Our future as a species depends on bringing to the fore of human consciousness a story that invites us to consider the whole of the elephant, and to relate to it in ways appropriate to both its nature and ours. The Integral Spirit story provides a core narrative.

In its contemporary expression, the cosmology of the Integral Spirit draws from the many ways of human knowing. It embraces and melds insights from the frontiers of scientific observation, the world’s major religions, and the experience of indigenous peoples and mystics extending back to ancient times. In acknowledging both intelligent agency and material mechanism, it recognizes that agency plays out in an ordered living cosmos within a framework of rules, and it clearly distinguishes between free will and license. It affirms our human nature as spiritual beings with an epic calling to advance a sacred purpose, and it frames a vision of possibility to guide us to a viable future consistent with the divine will as revealed in our most comprehensive understanding of the cosmic unfolding.

Contemporary Western culture presses us to choose between the institutions of religion and science as our primary source for understanding our human nature, purpose, and possibilities. In their current institutionalized forms, Western religion and science are both relics of an imperial past. Both define themselves by stories that support the prevailing systems of human domination of one another, other species, and Earth. Each resolutely defends its claim to being society’s ultimate and final intellectual and moral authority and clings to its own self-limiting cosmology as the only valid story.

Despite their imperial legacy, the Distant Patriarch and Grand Machine cosmologies are both the product of efforts to discern and describe critical elements of the larger story of the Integral Spirit. That larger story has been with us in various forms since the beginning of human consciousness.

It is readily evident why the Integral Spirit cosmology has lacked sponsorship and support from the imperial institutions that have defined the dominant human societies for the past 5,000 years. It evokes a radical vision of democratic possibility and presents a fundamental challenge to their legitimacy.

It is for this very reason that it is the story and the vision we now need to guide our way to a future in which we humans learn to live in balanced and mutual prosperous relationship with one another and nature.

Distributed Intelligence and Life’s Capacity to Self-Organize

We now know a great deal more than we have in the past about the creative capacity of the processes through which Integral Spirit manifests. We still have much to learn from and contribute to these processes, but to do so we must acknowledge and celebrate them.

We know, for example, that at every level, the cosmos has an amazing capacity to self-organize toward greater complexity and potential.

The theory of distributed cognition or intelligence suggests that multiple minds have capabilities inherently greater than does a single mind. Many interlinked personal computers have more power than a single super computer. It seems that creation learned early on to apply this principle on a grand scale in the design of the endless fractal structures of its self-organizing systems long before the arrival of humans. It is a key to the creativity and resilience of the cosmos.

Earth’s biosphere, the exquisitely complex, resilient, and continuously evolving layer of Earth life, demonstrates on a grand scale the creative potentials of the distributed intelligence of many trillions of individual choice-making living organisms, self-organizing to optimize the capture, organization, and sharing of Earth’s energy, water, and nutrients to bring Earth to life. Acting in concert, they continuously regenerate Earth’s soils, rivers, aquifers, fisheries, forests, and grasslands while maintaining Earth’s climatic balance and the composition of Earth’s atmosphere to serve the needs of Earth’s widely varied life forms.

When we see all being as a manifestation of spirit, we might think of all of the biosphere’s complex choice-making processes as occurring within the mind of God. In the ultimate sense, perhaps it does. Such a formulation, however, can obscure and diminish our appreciation of the true wonder and structure of the biosphere as a self-organizing living system.

The human body is an even more intimate example of the creative power of distributed intelligence. My body, which hosts my personal consciousness, is but one of the many trillions of organisms that together form Earth’s biosphere. It is in turn comprised of tens of trillions of individual living cells, each a decision-making entity in its own right with the ability to manage and maintain its own health and integrity under changing and often stressful circumstances.

Simultaneously, each cell faithfully discharges its responsibility to serve the demanding needs of my entire body on which its own health and integrity (and mine) depend. Together, these cells maintain the body’s health and integrity even under conditions of extreme stress and deprivation to create a capacity for extraordinary feats of physical grace and intellectual acuity far beyond the capability of the individual cell. Resources are shared based on need, not greed.

We are also learning that trillions of non-human micro-organisms inhabit our skin, genital areas, mouth, and intestines with essential roles in supporting and regulating our bodily functions as members of a high-functioning living community

The body’s individual decision-making resource-sharing cells and microbes are more than interdependent. Each is integral to a larger whole of which no part or sub-system can exist on its own. Together they fight off a vast variety of viruses, cancer cells, and harmful bacteria and create regulatory mechanisms internal to the whole that work to assure that no part asserts dominance over the others or monopolizes the body’s stores of energy, nutrients, and water for its exclusive use. All the while, they adapt to changing temperatures and energy needs and variations in the body’s food and water intake, heal damaged tissues, and collect and provide the sensory data to our conscious mind essential to our conscious choice making.

Another of the many impressive expressions of the body’s capacity to self-organize is the process by which its cells continuously renew with no loss of body integrity. The cells lining the human stomach have a turnover of only five days. Red blood cells are replaced every 120 days or so. The surface of the skin recycles every two weeks.

Most of this cellular and molecular activity occurs far below the level of our personal awareness. So long as we provide the essentials of nutrition, hydration, rest, and exercise, our bodies’ cells fulfill their responsibilities to maintain our healthy function without specific instruction from our conscious mind.

Cells can and do go rogue, with terrible consequences. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and leukemia are examples. Within limits, the body has mechanisms to eliminate such threats. If those mechanisms fail, the body dies and the rogue cells die with it.

So how do our cells decide, individually and collectively, what to do‌? Is there some form of conscious intelligence involved at the cellular level‌? The Grand Machine story says no; the processes are mechanical. The Distant Patriarch story does not address the question beyond the fatalistic suggestion that whatever happens is God’s will. The Integral Spirit story says yes—the capacity for conscious choice is a defining quality of life and indeed of all being.

Is the consciousness underlying the choices of an individual cell a form of consciousness that would be in any way familiar to the human mind‌? Probably not, but we may never know, because with the exception of mystics who have developed a capacity to bridge the barrier between themselves and the meta-consciousness, we have no recognized means to experience a consciousness other than our own, and least of all the consciousness of a single cell. What seems evident is that intelligent choice-making is a hallmark of living organisms at all levels.

One critical insight from recent findings in biology is that most of the body’s self-organization occurs at the cellular level through intercellular communication and choice-making independent of direct intervention or direction from the brain and central nervous system.

Similarly, although the biosphere self-organizes on a global scale and is subject to external influences from other celestial bodies, the locus of agency is everywhere local. The dynamic consequences of local choice-making play out through the biosphere’s fractal structure and create global dynamics that in turn shape local choice-making with no evident central authority.

The separation or differentiation of consciousness is essential to creation’s incredible capacity for creative innovation, yet we see in our human experience how the illusion of separation can lead us to relate to one another and nature in deeply destructive ways. Buddhism teaches that this illusion of separation is the cause of humanity’s self-inflicted suffering. To become fully functioning as individuals and societies, we must achieve a maturity of self-awareness that allows us to hold in mind the reality of oneness and at the same time honor the illusion of separation by accepting responsibility for our individual actions.

Conscious Choices

Exactly how it all works may forever remain a mystery beyond our human understanding. Based on what we do know, however, our bodies, the biosphere, and the cosmos all express as fractal structures that self-organize from the bottom up rather than from the top down—exactly the opposite of what the Distant Patriarch story suggests. And contrary to the foundational assumption of the Grand Machine story, the evidence of our daily experience, reports of mystics, and some interpretations of quantum physics suggest that intelligence—and presumably some form of consciousness—is the organizing principle of our bodies, Earth’s biosphere, and the cosmos.

When we see all of creation as a manifestation of God, of spirit made flesh, we may recognize ourselves as physical expressions of God, but not in the sense of Michelangelo’s famous painting. We may also recognize that within the scale of the cosmos, we are far from being creation’s only expression of conscious intelligence. To the contrary, we are only a tiny element of an expression so grand as to be beyond our perception and comprehension.

So what is our individual human relationship to the grand expression of Integral Spirit‌? This is pure conjecture on my part, but I believe there may be clues in the relationship between the individual cells of our body and our conscious mind. I know my body’s individual cells exist, but only because science tells me so. I may care deeply about their good health, yet I cannot discern the condition or function of any individual cell—let alone consciously intervene to save an errant cell from the consequences of its bad choices.

Given that my body’s cells number in the trillions, the possibility that I might have such ability defies imagination. Imagine the distraction if our minds attempted to track details of the life of each individual cell in our bodies. It is for good reason our minds are highly selective in the information to which they attune.

It seems similarly unimaginable that the living Earth is conscious of my individual existence or behavior as a human cell in its larger body. If we scale this logic to the cosmic level, it would suggest that the living cosmos is unlikely to be conscious even of the Living Earth as one of the countless celestial entities that comprise it.

There is no necessary contradiction here with the reports down through the ages from spiritual mystics who experience the melding of their human consciousness with an undifferentiated consciousness that transcends all of material reality. If all creation is a manifestation of undifferentiated Integral Spirit, then the system of distributed intelligence discernible in a living, evolving cosmos is derivative of the undifferentiated meta-consciousness.

Perhaps the individual human consciousness, with proper training and discipline, has the capacity to penetrate the illusion of separation to experience a temporary reunification with the undifferentiated spirit. Perhaps we all have the ability through meditation and prayer to tap into the wisdom of the higher levels of consciousness from which we manifest, and thereby tap into and experience the beauty of its creative wisdom in a very personal way.

It does not, however, follow that the undifferentiated meta-consciousness has the intention, desire, or capacity to attune to us individually, to intervene in our individual or collective human lives, or to change the operant rules of the self-organizing processes of the differentiated consciousness that shape the unfolding of the cosmos or its individual elements. This is not to suggest that the cosmos is indifferent to our existence. It may care deeply with the love that some believe to be the binding force of the universe.

Consider also that as manifestations of the Integral Spirit, we are instruments of its agency. We might therefore think of the voice that replies in the course of meditation or prayer to those who succeed in penetrating the ego’s illusion of separation as at once the voice of our authentic self and the voice of God. Similarly, when we pray for divine intervention to save us from the consequences of our individual and collective choices, we in effect appeal to ourselves as agents of the Integral Spirit.

Step to Adult Responsibility

The important point is that, right or wrong, our choice of creation stories has real world consequences. If we choose to believe our fate lies with purely mechanistic forces beyond our control in denial of our own agency and responsibility, we then resign ourselves to the outcome of forces beyond our control. If we assume that a parental overseer—whether it be God, the market, a new technology, or compassionate space aliens—will save us from our foolish behavior, we likewise absolve ourselves of responsibility for our actions as we await divine intervention.

If we accept, however, that we are conscious, intelligent agents in a conscious, intelligent, self-organizing cosmos, it becomes evident that our future is in our hands and the well-being of all of Earth’s children depends on our acceptance of adult responsibility for our individual and collective choices and their consequences.

Recall the Buddhist teaching that the illusion of separation is the source of human suffering. As manifestations of the spirit, we humans are instruments by which the spirit (God) expresses its agency in the material world. Thus, our appeals to God for salvation from our suffering are in effect appeals to ourselves.

The earlier assertion that evolution has hard-wired cooperation, service, and compassion into the healthy human brain does not negate our capacity for free will. Free will and the illusion of separation are both essential to our human potential to contribute to the creativity, adaptability, and resilience of a living Earth and thereby to the whole of creation. If we lose sight, however, of the interdependence behind the illusion, the sense of separation can become so terrifying as to overwhelm our predisposition for cooperation and lead to us to use our free will in deeply self-destructive ways. Free will conveys creative responsibility, not self-centered license.

Whether specific details of our chosen story are right or wrong is less important than whether its overarching narrative awakens us spiritually; inspires cooperative, mutually beneficial relationships; supports a way of living that recognizes the wonder, beauty, goodness, ultimate meaning and value of life; and puts us on a path to a viable future. Most important at this moment in the human experience is that our chosen story calls us to accept adult responsibility for the consequences of our choices for ourselves, one another, and a living Earth.

Consequently, on purely pragmatic grounds, the Integral Spirit story in its many variations is the obvious choice. If wrong, we lose nothing. A clockwork cosmos could care less. A loving parent God will be pleased with our progress toward mature adulthood. If right, we avoid self-extinction, our lives take on profound meaning, and we unleash yet unrealized capacities for creative expression.

Transition to an Ecozoic Era

The foundational insights of the Integral Spirit cosmology hold the conceptual key to our collective passage to what cosmologist Brian Swimme and eco-theologian Thomas Berry call the Ecozoic Era, the fourth in the succession of life eras identified as the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic. In The Universe Story, they note that our passage to this new era depends on a fundamental shift in the human relationship to Earth grounded in four foundational insights:

1. “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” (p. 243)

2. “The Earth is so integral in the unity of its functioning that every aspect of the Earth is affected by what happens to any component member of the community. Because of its organic quality, Earth cannot survive in fragments….The integral functioning of the planet must be preserved.” (p. 243)

3.  “Earth is a one-time endowment….Although the Earth is resilient and has extensive powers of renewal, it also has a finite and nonrenewable aspect…Once a species is extinguished we know of no power in heaven or on Earth that can bring about a revival.” (pp. 246-7)

4. “[O]ur human economy is derivative from the Earth economy. To glory in a rising Gross Domestic Product with an irreversibly declining Earth Product is an economic absurdity.” (p. 256). [See inset: “The Integral Spirit and a New Economy”]

As Berry elaborates in an earlier lecture:

“Earth is primary and humans are derivative….The Earth economy can survive the loss of its human component, but there is no way the human economy can survive and prosper apart from the Earth economy….There is no such thing as a human community in any manner separate from the Earth community. The human community and the natural world will go into the future as a single integral community or we will both experience disaster on the way. However differentiated in its modes of expression, there is only one Earth community—one economic order, one health system, one moral order, one world of the sacred.” [Thomas Berry, “The Ecozoic Era”]

Failing to recognize the fundamental truth of our dependence on the generative systems of Earth’s biosphere, we humans act as a reckless, predatory invasive species, the equivalent of cancer cells systematically destroying Earth’s living body. In an act of collective insanity, we have created a global civilization that depends on a non-sustainable fossil fuel subsidy to work in direct defiance and opposition to the natural structure and forces of the biosphere. This leads to the systematic disruption and depletion of the biosphere’s generative systems and thereby Earth’s capacity to support life.

If there is to be a human future, we must fundamentally reshape our cultures and institutions to work in creative partnership with the structure and dynamics of the biosphere. Is it consistent with our nature to do so‌? It depends on the story.

The Distant Patriarch story is ambiguous, with many contrasting versions from which to choose. The Great Machine story says no; it is our inherent nature to be individualist, competitive, greedy, and violent. The Integral Spirit story and the narrative emerging from a deeper and more contemporary understanding of evolution articulated by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and others say yes; humans evolved to cooperate, share, and serve.

A Story for Our Time

The turning we humans must navigate to a viable future depends on a profound awakening to our nature as spiritual beings and our responsibility as participants in creation’s epic journey of self-discovery. This awakening will be partly experiential—a joyful reunion with our true nature. It will be partly intellectual—a larger and more nuanced understanding of the nature and purpose of creation and our human role in its continued unfolding.

To accelerate this awakening and actualize its possibilities we need an open and self-critical public conversation about the foundational stories by which we understand our human nature and purpose. That conversation must go far beyond an unproductive debate between doctrinaire Distant Patriarch creationists and doctrinaire Grand Machine social Darwinist evolutionists. Fortunately, the conversation is already underway in a rapidly growing number of forums sponsored by influential organizations including Contemplative Alliance, Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University, Pachamama Alliance,Temple of Understanding, Wall Street Trinity Institute, and others.

These conversations call us to reflect on what we truly believe and to examine contrasting cosmologies from the perspective of historical experience, the insights of history’s greatest teachers, the frontiers of science, and implications for the path ahead. The process is best served by a sense of humility and recognition that for all our scientific advances, we remain far from a full understanding of the deep mysteries of the cosmos.

The Integral Spirit cosmology appears to offer many of the elements of the story we seek. Yet even with its ancient roots and its affirmation and enrichment by recent breakthroughs in science, it too remains a partially developed story and we are limited to speculating on many of its elements.

That we humans seem naturally drawn to unsolved mysteries may be a key to discovering and fulfilling our place of service to the whole.

We know not where the journey leads, nor whether a final destination is even a meaningful concept. The attraction is the inherent thrill of participating in a grand creative endeavor for which participation is its own reward.

Dr. David Korten is the author of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, president of the Living Economies Forum, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a member of the Club of Rome. He earned MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He blogs for YES! Magazine.

by Lisa Er

Yes we are all still here – as I always thought we would be!

We have begun a new cycle of time according to the Mayan Calendar and other calendars created by ancient people who knew more about the intricacies of nature than we in the twenty-first century know.

Everything runs in cycles even though we are too unaware to notice them most of the time.

In New Zealand even the seasons are less noticeable than in many other parts of the world.

 

This new cycle of time is a time for growth – just as a seed when it enters the ground begins to grow.

Right now we are planting those seeds, those values and ideas into the ground, that will grow and blossom over time.

Those seeds that we plant now are vitally important. If we plant deadly nightshade, then poison is what we get. If we plant a rose then the blossom will be fragrant and beautiful.

John Lennon gave us the clue: Imagine!

 

It is time to visualise what we want for our future and then actively plant those seeds.

Those protesting against America’s gun laws are doing just that. They know that it will not be easy to get rid of guns in the US but they are standing up for a long term future with fewer guns.

The gun lobby says that what is needed is armed guards at every school in the country. There’s your short term solution, perhaps, but we must not engage in short term solutions.

That is what has been a major trouble in the world as government representatives seek to include their personal future, or corporate interest in their choice of policies.

 

To visualise the world that we want we need to forget all the steps required to get there.

To plant that seed we need to be wedded to a society that chooses respect for nature and our environment; that respects all life; that levels the huge inequalities in society and does not value any one person above another.

Once that vision is firmly planted then the rain and sun and nourishment from the soil are added, and those are the methods in which to achieve a good harvest.

 

So please spend the Christmas break with a positive vision for the future in your hearts and minds.

Quantum physics will confirm that the energy of how we do that will impact on what we create.

 

So with much warmth and blessings to you all, I wish you a loving Christmas and a brilliant new year.

Namaste

Lisa Er

The Great Shift from ‘Empire’ to ‘Earth Community’ Consciousness
by Sally Mabelle

An old Cherokee told his grandson, “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, and ego. The other wolf is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.” The boy thought about it, and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old man quietly replied, “The one you feed.”

One wolf’s name is ‘Empire’ and the other wolf’s name is ‘Earth Community.’ Overfeeding the wolf ‘Empire’ and starving the wolf ‘Earth Community’ has brought us to a critical point in history….Coral reefs are dying, rainforests are disappearing, and our polar caps are melting. Our financial system is failing and social unrest and instability is rampant around the world.

Neal Donald Walsch, author of the ‘Conversations with God’ book series, poses a question in his essay ‘The Overhaul of Humanity’: How is it possible for 7 billion human beings to all desire the same thing (peace,security, prosperity, opportunity, happiness, and love) and yet be unable to collectively produce it… even after trying for thousands of years? If this question produces no immediate answer, we move to an unavoidable conclusion: There is something we do not fully understand about life, the understanding of which would change everything.

It is my belief that we can find the key to this understanding about life by examining the stories that are shaping our lives.

When we are young and impressionable, we are told stories about the world and how it works. Being so open, we naturally believe these stories to be true. It’s these stories that are told by our parents, teachers, governments the media and so on, that impact on how we form our values and principles and subsequently our behaviour.

Young people gobble up stories as a spiritual food. Some foods feed the wolf ‘Empire’ and other foods feed the wolf ‘Earth Community’. It seems we’ve been feeding the wrong wolf. If we have been feeding the wrong wolf, how do we start feeding the other wolf before it dies of starvation?

One man who is feeding ‘Earth Community’ with new stories and solutions is David Korten. (nb David Korten is on the advisory board of The Awareness Party)

David Korten, Founder and President of the People-Centred Development Forum, is an author, activist, and former Harvard Business School professor. He left Harvard when he realised that what he was being asked to teach about economics was unsustainable and unhealthy.

Dr. Korten refers to the age we’re living in now as ‘the great turning’ (a phrase he adopted from Dr. Joanna Macy). We’re in the midst of a great turning from what Korten calls ‘empire’ consciousness to ‘earth community’ consciousness. One of the keys to making this shift is in telling stories which paint a new picture of how the world works.

Empire’ stories propagate a model of society which has prevailed for some 5,000 years. Empire feeds off stories which encourage increasing consumption and control of Earth’s precious resources. It feeds off stories that “success” means being “better than” others. Empire organizes itself by principles of elite domination and competition to appropriate the resources of society for exclusive benefit of the few.

‘Earth Community’ stories paint a different picture. They envision a model of society which organizes itself by principles of partnership and shares resources equitably to grow the potential of the whole.

Let’s look at some examples of stories from an empire perspective and then from an earth community perspective. These stories come from the story matrix on David Korten’s website and are listed here with his permission:

Empire Story:Obedience to God the father, creator, and ruler of all is the path to salvation and eternal bliss in the afterlife. Earth Community Version: The image of God as human partriarch is an invention of Empire. All of Creation is the manifestation of an integral universal intelligence. We are all interconnected.

Empire Story: It is our right and responsibility as humans to populate, subdue, and dominate the Earth. Earth Community Version: It is our responsibility as humans to honor the living Earth as sacred and to live in balanced, respectful, and creative partnership with all beings that comprise Earth’s web of life.

Empire Story: Money is the measure of wealth and those who make money are society’s wealth creators. Earth Community Version: Most money exists only as numbers stored on computer hard drives. Wall Street’s ideal is to grow these numbers through financial games that produce nothing of real value, which is a form of theft.

Empire Story: Unregulated markets assure the optimal use of resources and maximize the well-being of all. Earth Community Version: Markets without appropriate rules are an invitation to the unscrupulous to engage in unethical behavior that violates basic market principles.

Empire Story: We all do best when we each focus on maximizing our personal financial interests. Earth Community Version: Humans survive and thrive only in community. We all do best when we each contribute to the well being of the whole.

Empire Story: The sole purpose and responsibility of business to maximize profit. Earth Community Version: The proper purpose and responsibility of business is to serve the community. Profit is a means, not an end.

Let’s look into a specific, timely example…The Olympics. The Olympics are a wonderful sporting event that celebrates excellence in sport and unites nations in friendship. Is this an Empire story or an Earth Community story? Let’s take a closer look. Writing in The Telegraph, its London editor Andrew GiIligan suggests that this is an Empire story. He writes:

“Billions of pounds are taken from poor and middle-income taxpayers to build temples to a corporate and sporting elite. Grassroots sport is stripped of money to fund the most rarefied sports imaginable. The police and the state are turned into the enforcement arm of Coca-Cola. The main sponsors of the Olympics – the taxpaying people of Britain – are largely excluded from the event they paid for. Not just the Games sites themselves, but many other parts of their own city, are sealed off from them. Some Londoners are evicted from their homes and their houses destroyed; to make room for the games. Others find overnight and without warning that their homes are to be converted into military missile sites to protect against potential terrorism at the games. Protestors against any of this are arrested and detained on the flimsiest of pretexts. Almost every promise ever made by the organisers – from the budget to the ‘greenest games ever,’ from the number of jobs that will be created to the number of new houses that will be built – turns out to be false.”

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics thousands of people were made homeless and entire areas starved of water for the duration of the Games so that the Olympic areas could look ‘fresh and green” England is one of the unhealthiest country’s in Europe, yet one of the biggest fast food giants in the world, MacDonalds, is the main sponsor for the London Olympic Games.

Reporting for The Guardian, Crime Correspondent Sandra Laville noted that “one former London 2012 commissioner of the ‘Olympics Sustainability Watchdog group’, Meredith Alexander, quit her role earlier this year over the awarding of a 7m pound Olympic sponsorship deal to Dow Chemical. Dow owns Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), responsible for the 1984 gas disaster in Bhopal, India, which killed 25,000 people.”

And what happens to people that challenge the Empire Story? The former commissioner was behind a small theatre performance protest designed to highlight the problems of corporate sponsorship of the Games. The Police arrested six of the performers on suspicion of criminal damage for…’spilling custard.’

While we were watching the Beijing Olympics, 61 year old Chinese Activist, Ji Sizun, took advantage of a promise made by the Chinese Government to the international community. The promise was that during the games people or protesters who wanted to express their personal opinions could do so in line with common practice in other countries. The Government even established three official protest zones in Beijing where groups and individuals would be free to peacefully demonstrate without fear of official reprisals.

According to Phelim Kine reporting for foreignpolicy.com, on the day of the opening ceremony, Ji entered a police station in Beijing’s Xicheng district to file his application to protest peacefully. But as a veteran activist, Ji took precautions. He contacted several foreign correspondents and asked them to wait outside the station while he entered to pick up his permit.

About 90 minutes after Ji entered the police station, those reporters watched aghast as several men escorted him out of the building into an unmarked car. That was the last time anyone heard from him for five months. Later, Ji was sentenced to a three-year prison term.

The Associated Press reported that eight years after the 2004 Athens Games, many of the Olympic venues Greece built at great expense remain abandoned or rarely used. They are the focus of great public anger as the country struggles through a fifth year of recession and nearly three years of a debt crisis that has seen a surge in poverty and unemployment.

The Olympics ran for 17 days this year. During each of those days an estimated 50,000 people died of starvation or waterborne diseases. 85% of those were children. This is one person every 2 seconds. At the closing ceremony the deathlist over those 17 days had reached 850,000 people. I wonder what the 14.4 billion dollars that London spent on the games could have done for those people?

What choice would you have made if the call went out to humanity for a vote. Spend the money on a 2-week sporting event or save 850,000 lives, mostly children.

What we have been told, and sold about the Olympics is an Empire Story.

Some people think that ‘it’s more complicated than that’ -14.4 billion would not put a dent in the world hunger issue. This, sadly, is an Empire story which leads people to justify the continuing elitism and lack of bold action.

There is a place for the Olympic Games – but in an Earth Community, those games are not held until everyone is fed.

Empire’s ultimate instrument of control is cultural power – the ability to control the defining stories of the public culture. Who controls the media, controls the stories. Whoever controls the stories controls the culture and and behaviour of people. World media is dominated by a handful of corporations. The result is a cultural trance. This trance numbs us out to our essential impulse to connect with each other and leads us to believe we need to compete to survive.

Advertisers have become masters of the art of cultural manipulation, creating an individualistic culture of material excess that now threatens human survival.

What is the cultural story of human nature that we’ve been told which blocks the Great Turning from Empire to Earth Community Consciousness? It’s a story that promotes fear because fear makes populations more vulnerable to manipulation.

Here’s the Empire Story of human nature:

Because it is our nature to be fearful, violent, greedy, and individualistic our wellbeing depends on a system of hierarchy to impose order and channel our destructive impulses to constructive ends. There is no alternative. Indeed, although it may bring pain and hardship to the losers, it is in fact all for the good, because the brutal competition of war and the unrelenting pursuit of individual profit builds character, drives innovation, and leads to greatness. It has been the key to human success since the beginning of time and ultimately works to the benefit of everyone.

What is the contrasting story of human nature that has the power to shift our world culture and transform our society? This is a story that promotes love because love is our true nature and when we are feeling love, we are more connected to ourselves and each other and so less vulnerable to manipulation.

Here’s the Earth Community story of human nature:

We humans have a natural capacity and desire to be loving, peaceful, generous, and cooperative. Despite our wondrous cultural differences, at the core of our being the majority want a world of healthy happy children, families, and communities living in peace and cooperation in a vibrant natural environment.

We have scientific proof that cooperativeness is inherent in human nature: In 2006 scientist Felix Warneken at The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antrhopolgy, conducted a study on the Human impulse to care in 18-month old babies :

The babies watched him struggle with ordinary tasks such as hanging towels – over and over he would ‘accidentally’ drop clothes pins and each of the 24 babies offered him help with in seconds.

If he deliberately threw pins on the floor, they didn’t help,but if he looked like he needed help, the babies toddled over quickly, grabbed the pin and eagerly handed it to him. Warneken purposely did not thank the babies to test if their motivation was altruistic OR motivated by expectation of praise. It turns out, they were simply responding to a stranger’s need for help.

In 2002, neuroscientists at Emory University in Atlanta used a new technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) , to look at what happens in people’s brains when they choose to act out of greed OR to act out of mutual benefit.

What they found made the brain light up in its pleasure centres most noticeably was when people chose cooperative and win-win strategies over winning for themselves only.

We’re wired for reciprocity and mutual caring more than selfishness IF we feel we have the choice. Otherwise, under stress or artificial scarcity conditions, we may not act naturally.

As Lynne McTaggart, a best-selling author, researcher and lecturer says, “What’s required now is a major change of story about who we are. We need to reframe the Darwinian idea that in order for someone to win – someone else has to lose”.

According to Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Souls series, instead of celebrating ‘go-getters’, we need to start celebrating ‘go-givers’. Scientific evidence shows that we are a choice-making species and that emotionally and morally mature humans are naturally cooperative, compassionate, and peace loving. It is our nature to create and live in caring, cooperative community. Those who seek meaning and identity in a brutal competition for wealth, dominating power, and material excess reveal the disabilities of an immature human consciousness.

It is no accident that the pleasure centers of the human brain are wired to reward us with happiness when we engage in acts of loving service to the community of life. It is our nature.

So what can we do to start turning our stories and our world around?

What other strategies can we use to translate our positive visions into powerful stories capable of shaping a new culture?

One man who is telling new stories is Dr. Sharif Abdullah, Professor of conflict resolution at Portland State University and a societal transformationist.

Abdullah is the author of three books:

Seven Seeds for a New Society, The Power of One- Authentic Leadership in Turbulent Times and the award-winning‘Creating a World that works for All’.

Abdullah says “While it is easy to blame multi-national corporations, power-mad politicians, racial/ethnic elites, gender politics and other factors, the bottom line is that “WE”, ordinary people, create this world by:

Our actions

Our inactions

Our acquiescence to the bad leadership of others.

One NZ organisation which is leading the way in telling new stories is The Awareness Party.  The Awareness Party is a political movement for social transformation based on 7 founding principles:

1. Oneness of all life, one people on one planet

2. Awareness of the earth as a ‘self-regulated’ living being

3. Kindness in thoughts, words, and actions

4. Compassion for all living things in all situations

5. Self-responsibility for everything we do, say, and experience

6. Balance in all areas of society and the environment

7. Community collaboration and operating in groups as the way for humanity to move forward.

One New Zealand publication telling new stories is Happyzine, an ezine with the purpose of inspiring positive social and environmental change by spreading good news. Happyzine is ‘solutions journalism’ showing that for every perceived obstacle, there are countless ways of moving through, around, or over it. It provides a forum for flexible, positively expectant thinkers to express their world-views about each other, our society, our environment and our ideas.

Another publication spreading new stories was created by the ‘Positive Futures Network’ – YES! magazine. YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, YES magazine tells stories about real people working for a better world. YES! Magazine empowers people with the vision and tools to create a healthy planet and vibrant communities. They do this by:

Reframing issues and outlining a path forward;

Giving a voice to the people who are making change;

Offering resources to use and pass along

As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world. It’s up to us to envision, to collaborate, and to create the change we want to see in the world. Let’s wake up and start questioning the stories we’re told and that we’re repeating about ourselves.

Going back to the old Cherokee story of the battle between the two wolves…Empire and Earth Community Consciousness I’d like to leave you with this question…Which wolf are you feeding?

Because the wolf you feed, is the wolf that determines the quality of your life…the quality of our community, and the quality of our world.

To listen to a podcast of this article go HERE

I’ve been internalizing a really complicated situation in my head by Lisa Er

NB the above phrase is from a drink drive campaign in New Zealand.

‘I’ve been internalizing a really complicated situation in my head’, regarding sovereignty!

The Syrian rebels are asking for help and countries from outside are sending them weapons. The West and al Qaeda both want to help force a regime change for different reasons and so will fight alongside each other.
The international community reached an agreement in Geneva in June calling for a transitional government in Syria to bring an end to ongoing and bloody conflict in the country.
Russia does not support the Syrian Government but supports this agreement.
“Washington and Ankara are reviewing all possible measures to help rebels overthrow the embattled Assad government, including the implementation of a no-fly zone, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on August 12”.
We know what happened to Libya after the no fly zone was established!
Turkey, of course, is completely comfortable with the opportunity to give the Kurds a hard time. They have been doing it secretly anyway over many years.

Is this war in Syria any business of countries outside Syria? Would it even be a civil war if the West had minded its own business? Yes I know we are shown shots of poor Syrian civilians pleading for help from other countries – but is the help they need, this violent help? More weapons and more soldiers on the ground will win this – I think not.
This sort of unofficial interference is in breach of sovereign law, the law of Syria; just as Britain is in danger of breaching sovereign law if they storm the Ecuadorian embassy to get Assange out.

Russia is standing firm against military intervention so now there will be attempts to discredit them though publicity such as the bad press around the Pussy Riots. Were it not for the Syrian standoff, we would probably never have heard anything about this. News comes to us when it suits the agenda of the west.

Humanitarian agencies are not always clean and free from corruption either. Amnesty International has fallen for the Pussy Riots and is selling ‘Free Pussy Riot’ t-shirts, and yet they let Australian Shapelle Corby rot in a Thai jail when there is much evidence showing that she should not be there. I am not supporting the suppression of the Russian girls’ freedom of speech here – just decrying how we came to hear of it.
Bradley Manning is one of the world’s foremost political prisoners and has been imprisoned for two years without trial. Perhaps Russia could point the finger at the US!

Care2 petition site is asking the Iranian government not to reduce the age of marriage for girls to age 9. It looks like they took the information off an anti Muslim web site. The official age of marriage for a girl in Iran, according to Wikipedia, is 16. Yes, often  villages have local customs but I see the timing of this petition as one of many  forerunners to the US and Israel attacking Iran; preparing people to think of the Iranian government as very inappropriate.
I have always been amazed at the West’s demand that Iran be open with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) as to their nuclear programme when Israel has also refused to reveal their nuclear weapons arsenal!

Suddenly, in the grab for oil and power, sovereignty and international law seems to be something that can be manipulated by those with the most weapons. We are now still in the position where humans were in the middle ages: the bigger the army the bigger the bully the bigger land grab, and the elite make the money. A country’s sovereignty can now only be defended by force it seems. Diplomatic solutions are not what the West wants. The once prized morality has flown out of the window, and that wonderful man, Kofi Annan, has resigned.

The other way, the non violent way to do a land grab is though trade. Everyone wants to trade with the big boys – to grow the GDP of their country. After all it keeps the current government in power, and the politicians in jobs, and growth is still the aim in spite of the folly of growth in a finite resource based economy.

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is reducing sovereign rights of the nine countries (including NZ) involved. The TPPA is supposedly HARMonising trade laws so it means that products can move more easily from one country to another. So why do we have to lose local content in our media? Why are intellectual property laws affected? This is a US takeover of our country, our sovereignty – a bloodless coup. All our assets will disappear eventually as we are dependant on oil, and have to trade in order to buy it. Even if it is drilled off our coast it will not fully be ours, and will make profits for some large corporations, just as our mining does.

The complicated situation for me is, why don’t people take notice?
Why isn’t some media picking up on what is happening?
Has everyone become slaves to keeping up with the Jones’ and the material consumer society?
Perhaps the new age philosophy of ‘working on oneself’ has filtered to the edge of mainstream society. That would mean that we all look inward and work on our issues (which everyone has, and it is a good idea to do it), to the exclusion of those in our community who are going without or needing help; and to the exclusion of the will to speak out against injustice and poor future planning. One can’t say one has an open heart if one has one’s eyes closed to the requirements of kindness and compassion.

So wake up world. Question question question. We are moving towards a one world government which in different circumstances could be beautiful, but in the state we are in, leads to the gentry, the even less than 1%, the corporations and the banks owning us. They will own all resources and land, In fact they almost do. We will eventually pay more than we can afford to live. That will keep us all quiet, because those with not enough find it difficult to find the energy to stand up for their rights.
We have so many people in the world who are already in this situation. If we keep the blinkers on, more of this huge inequality of wealth is where we are heading, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
It was our responsibility and we didn’t take the challenge.

So ‘I’ve been internalizing a really complicated situation in my head’, and without a strong group wake up call I see no solution.

.

This was written while waiting to hear Julian Assange speak from the balcony of the Ecuador’s  London embassy – 19/8/2012

Of course the principles of The Awareness Party are a solution, but until we get them out and talked about, and used, there is no long term solution.

Regarding freedom of speech – I have tried to post this on a Google group. However it has been blocked. Clearly too many controversial words in it!

G20 members and Hotel Porters: What do they have in common with travelling to India, Karma, and the Mayan Prophecy? by Kay Urlich

Human beings are designed to adapt and mostly we do, or we don’t survive. However there are times in life when we need a little bang on the head (metaphorically speaking), for some awareness to get through our thoughtlessness, skepticism, laziness, and even as we get older, our stubborn belief in the power of our diminishing physical abilities.

A bang on the head could mean that your husband/wife leaves you – why weren’t you listening? You break your leg falling off your granddaughters skate board at your fiftieth birthday party – didn’t you notice – haven’t you realized that you’re not as young as you used to be?!

Whether we are aware of it or not there is a rise and decline within the structure of everything we do. And, which ever way you look at it if we had just stayed aware of the process we were in, whether it’s a relationship, aging, or travelling to an Ashram in India, we would realize much earlier that we’re heading for places we don’t really want to be – like a divorce court, a hospital emergency room or, a summer vacation in Calcutta.

We live in a world where doing nothing, or taking no notice of what’s going on around you, is also creating something.

For instance, with little awareness or thought about the matter of where I was going on my first flight to India, I wouldn’t have lazily agreed to land in Calcutta.

Landing in Calcutta was a jolt of massive proportions. I was shocked and upset by the poverty and scale of human misery I saw on my drive to the hotel.

Needless to say when I arrived at my hotel I proceeded to read the guide book which said in effect ‘If it’s your first visit to India don’t go straight to Calcutta, go somewhere a little less daunting  to acclimatize your self to the culture.

Too late now, stuff it, seeing things I didn’t want to see!

When I went out of my hotel for the first time I was hit by the sensory overload as I walked through the steaming busy streets filled with diesel buses spewing fumes and toxins into the air. I was inhaling filth, curry and incense, all of which stuck like glue to my lungs as they labored in the sticky, thick humidity.

Most shocking of all was stepping around people; families with little children living in cardboard boxes, along with the sick and the elderly, some of whom were clearly dying where they lay on the side of the road. Had I landed by mistake on an alien planet, or some crazy futuristic, horror movie, surely this wasn’t the same world that I live in, in clean beautiful New Zealand?

Contrary to that, I was both amazed and appalled at the ‘spirit that pervades Calcutta’. When speaking of the distress around me, and the spirit and acceptance of suffering, I heard many times from people like the hotel porter “Oh, don’t worry about them, it is their Karma to suffer and they accept that”

But is it really all about karma, and is karma all there is to it?

India is gaining one of the highest rates of millionaires per capita in the world, and yet a government spokesman said recently that their were only (only?) about ten million children in bonded work (hours approximately 5am to 10pm where they are fed occasionally and sleep on the floor where they work): whereas aid agencies say there are between 50 – 60 million children who are bound from when they are very tiny, into a life of virtual slavery.

The miserable, cruel slavery of little children still plays a big part in the Indian economy.

Some suggest that child labor is necessary to some extent, as child labor takes large proportion of ‘Economically Active’ population in the developing countries. When the state of Andhra Pradesh reduced the number of child laborers by close to 300,000.^[1] simultaneously it also saw the sharp decline in the state revenue, which emphasized the importance of child labor to the Indian economy. Source Wikipedia

I thought that in any society preventing the sale of a child into the labor force at three or four years of age was a no-brainer.

That helping the poor to receive aid, education and assistance with work skills was a no brainer.

That finding a need and helping people attain basic human rights, is a no brainer.

That people in power could change the rules to support the empowerment of women, that when women have equal power it is known to improve the economy of any culture and the welfare of children.

The hotel porter didn’t get that something was missing and that people could help other people. Moreover, that Indian society is missing a few steps in the process of karma and awareness around wealth distribution that has economic activity expecting little children to suffer so much.

But, India and the hotel porter are not alone in this belief, because the G20 member nations don’t get the concept of female equality and fair value either.

A global poll recently released found that of the G20 countries, India is the most dangerous country for girls and women’s rights and Canada (though far from perfect), offers the most protection. Experts, including aid workers, academics, health professionals, journalists, and development experts, were asked to rank the countries on six categories – quality of health, freedom from violence, participation in politics, work place opportunities, access to resources including education, and freedom from trafficking.

In an interview with Forbes, CEO of the Thompson Reuters Foundation and founder of TrustLaw, the group that conducted the survey, Monique Villa, said, “We think it’s a pity that the appalling treatment of women in some of the G20 countries won’t be discussed at the G20 summit in Mexico next week. Countries like Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and India, whose leaders will meet at Los Cabos, have international clout because of their economic potential but women are being left behind. These countries need to realize they can’t develop effectively if they continue to marginalize their female populations.”

And who runs the G20 summit ?  Men – husbands, fathers, brothers and sons.

(Read more about this in MEN: Are they the biggest problem in the world? http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00658MO0K)

If you look at a map of the Structure of Energy fields in relation to child abuse, female infanticide and the spirit of Indian culture, plus the G20 summit, you can see how the lack of value toward female energy fields contributes to a lack of compassion, empathy and empowerment toward women and children, and how this affects a society.

So if your fighting to acknowledge the vulnerable, soft feelings in yourself, (and it’s not only men who are doing this), or ignoring the little woman in your life, starving and slapping vulnerable children, or ignoring the cause of global inequality you need to know that karma is at work and it will come back to bite you.

Mother Teresa saw what was missing and she worked with the dying to change their karmic patterns before their next rebirth.

Mother Teresa didn’t know anything about energy fields, but she knew which energy field traits were missing and causing despair for the people around her.  Mother Teresa set out to make change – to do some nurturing in her world.

The Mayan calendar doesn’t mention energy fields, or a lack of female consciousness of empathy and compassion and the sharing of economic wealth; about how this brings a shift in global consciousness.

The Mayan Calendar is simply showing us that we are shifting from the Earth Male consciousness of self interest, greed and hierarchy, to the Spiritual female consciousness of compassion and empathy which holds our most divine spirit .

Moreover the shift that is coming with the Mayan calendar that tells us the world will end on the 22.12.2012 – this is the old world that we know so well – the one that is greedy and brutal …

…… human beings need a little bang on the head (metaphorically speaking), for some awareness to get through our thoughtlessness, skepticism, laziness, and even as we get older, our stubborn belief in the power of our diminishing physical abilities.

A bang on the head could mean that your husband/wife leaves you – why weren’t you listening? You break your leg falling off your granddaughters skate board at your fiftieth birthday party – why didn’t you notice – you’re not as young as you used to be?!…..

…… oh right, I’m repeating my self again!!

Without conscious change in the physical, we will be preventing real progress in the spiritual; because lack of awareness here is repeating itself on many other levels, where real change in the spiritual world means full realization of our actions in the physical world.

The Mayan Calendar is about the end of patterns, an end of gender inequality, greed and self interest; so we will find the trip we go on – out there – much easier when we have travelled all the preparatory steps in our energy field map, because what you avoid in the physical through thoughtlessness, skepticism, laziness, and even as we get older, our stubborn belief in the power of diminishing physical abilities from your comfort zone you will meet on the way.

As we see with India, to have ‘a great spirit’, one does not necessarily or automatically mean you are supporting the other. Full awareness means staying aware in all moments sensitively, knowing that while you are here in this world you are creating on every level of your being, up or down or going sideways in your energy structure – you are creating endless possibilities within repeating cycles of energy patterns.

It is vital now to stay connected and ride out the change that is rising from all levels of physical consciousness. Change need not be a bang on the head, or a cataclysmic event, it need not be difficult once you have discovered the links that not only create kindness to all things in this world, but will access and hold your most delicate beingness in others.

END

For more books and articles go to: www.kayurlich.com

“I’ve Been Thinking” by Lisa Er

We need a driver’s license, and a dog license so why don’t we have a license to vote?

Think about it! Car registration doesn’t mean that the car or driver is road worthy. A warrant of fitness and a driver’s license are needed, so why then would being registered to vote mean that a person is vote worthy?

Last elections I was speaking with an 18 year old who said that she would vote for John Key because she considered him to be the most handsome. Nothing is taught in schools about the importance of using a vote wisely. Nothing is taught about policies of various parties. It is a huge gap in the education system.

On TV3 the other day they showed pictures of David Shearer around to the public and only one knew his name and that he was leader of the opposition. That is unbelievable. Not that people vote from a picture, but because people are so uninformed. This leads to the mess that we are in today.

The media can be bought and show us a biased point of view under the guise of freedom of the press.

Education systems can be bought. I heard of a large NZ tertiary education provider that was threatened that if they published a certain controversial book, they would lose funding from the corporation that would be under scrutiny by the book.

It is not easy to be a free and fair society.

If we educated our voters, then the elite would not control everything and the masses would not feel disempowered. If the masses chose to be educated that would be a start!

If democracy is to work at all, then voters must know the implication of their vote.  As long as the masses remain ignorant, those with money will stay in power. As long as people knowingly wash their hands of politics, the more they empower the very things that they dislike.

We, as citizens of the planet, owe it to each other to take RESPONSIBILITY for ourselves and one another, and the vehicle with which to do this is the political system. If the political system is distasteful to you then it is up to you to do something to change it.

Signing on line petitions is only a tiny fraction of the answer and yet people think that it makes a significant difference. It doesn’t. There are no successful petition sites in NZ that have initiated change.

Writing letters and submissions are more powerful than an electronic petition as are legal paper petitions. If you don’t feel you have the time, try donating to an organization that is working to challenge or alleviate issues.

However we have a history of governments that don’t listen. Labour didn’t listen when we wanted New Zealand GE Free. Now National isn’t listening to us about the folly of asset sales. How do we fix this? We can’t. The media should have made it clearer to the public that this was a likely outcome of National being re-elected. The public could also have taken the time to familiarize themselves with National‘s policies. Then we wouldn’t be losing our assets now – because National would not be in power.

So should we have a voter’s license? It is worth consideration!

After all – what is the cost of voting in a party with shortsighted policies? New Zealand is about to find out.

New Zealand leading the world you may laugh, what in – rugby, votes for women, declaring ourselves nuclear free? Yes we have done that but we can do much much more if we work together.

Do you ever wonder what will happen when oil becomes less available? The first thing that will happen is that the price of petrol will go up. That will in turn cause rising food costs, since our food comes from all over the world. Now stop and think for a minute. What amazingly crazy people thought that using up a finite resource to transport food and other goods all over the place was a good idea? Why on earth do we need kiwi fruit imported from Italy just so we can eat them out of season!  It is better to eat food in season when it is fresh, and it is nice when the item arrives in season again. New Zealand strawberries, for example, usually hit the shops in October. I always look forward to that!

The first thing we can do is to reduce the amount of imported food brought into this country by only buying NZ grown! But what about the trade deals? If we don’t import things, other countries won’t accept our dairy products. We are talking billions of dollars for the New Zealand economy you might think. Have you ever thought what will happen to our exports when the oil prices do go up further and the NZ dollar stays strong? No one will be able to afford our dairy and will revert to producing their own or importing from somewhere closer to home, where transport costs will be less. Our isolation makes us very vulnerable, but also could allow us to create something new and exciting that will lead not only us forward, but that could be an example for all the world.

We are being led, as a country by people who are only looking at the short term picture; people who don’t see where this country is heading, and for that matter, where the rest of the world is headed. These leaders are only aiming for the next election, or worse still, the next quarterly profit for those large corporations that have pressured governments away from democracy.

Our country has joined the US in the fight for “democracy” in Afghanistan – but even Jo Bloggs in the street knows that there is a bigger and more sinister picture going on. People don’t vote because they can’t see the point. Politics isn’t democracy any more. Democracy gives a voice to the people. Our current system takes the voice from everyone except those with money and status, which is not a democracy at all – yet the allies fight for it!

So what power do WE have to reshape the way things are done in this country?

The Awareness Party is New Zealand’s first “political, non political party”! We are not currently registered as we don’t believe in the system. It has to be changed for our own survival.

We envisage a system where small communities begin working and trading amongst themselves. There are many examples of this starting in New Zealand and around the world where people exchange Green Dollars, barter and swap, and work away from the current greedy banking system. As these ‘level 1’ groups become established, they can liaise with other groups forming larger collectives that work on roads rates and rubbish etc, similar to city councils (with the exception of ‘super cities’). These ‘level 2’ collectives would be also in charge of creating guidelines for the area, and so would have representatives from local businesses ensuring fair representation of business and the people. The representatives would constantly change to ensure there is no corruption. Grocery store owners, for example, would elect one person to represent them on one occasion, and another person the next time, eventually giving everyone a voice.

Moving out from these local groups there would be regional groups –‘ level 3’. New Zealand can be divided into 13 areas each with 13 representatives. In fact it would be best if all community groupings had 13 members, but certainly an uneven number to ensure that the majority view is upheld.

Each of these 13 regional groups would then make up the ‘fourth level’, a national council that would replace the cumbersome governmental system that we have at the moment. There would of course be plenty of assistants for these people and 13 committees that the representative would be taken from.

Governing would be a lot simpler if the Seven Principles of The Awareness Party were upheld because guidance is firmly stated within the principles. Currently everything has become so unnecessarily complicated that most people cannot understand a parliamentary bill and so can’t participate in the submission process.

Democracy would be upheld through a type of binding citizens referenda – we need to refine what is currently offered – so there may be no need for elections. There would be no prime minister. This whole system is about acknowledging the value of every person not just one!

Every person would be required to pull their weight. With fewer foreign imports there would be more jobs here so unless a person is unable to work, retired or looking after children, people will be expected to have a job.

This whole system is about self responsibility, which is one of The Awareness Party’s seven principles. SELF RESPONSIBILITY means you are not a victim! When ‘bad’ things happen they are about life giving you the opportunity to learn. Don’t blame others. Be responsible for both your thoughts and actions.

Our responsibility begins with ourselves. Then it includes our family and our friends and neighbours. Then where does it stop?

So what can you do right now?

Bring at least 5 people to The Awareness Party. We need the $15 membership fee to advertise and get the word out there.

Print information, or our brochure, from the web site and post it out to friends all over the country.

Join a local food collective or co-op, and only buy New Zealand food, and other goods where possible. Grow your own food.

Hop off the consumer bandwagon and give local services as gifts, such as a haircut or a food item.

Become involved in local politics. Go along to your local council meeting and see if becoming involved is an option for you.

Join campaigns such as the GE free movement. Keeping our country free of GE contamination or pesticides. Go HERE to send an e-card to the prime minister.

We can be PEOPLE not sheeple!

Lisa Er

Sue Kedgley describes very eloquently what is wrong with our parliamentary system in the article below:

Time for Parliament to Lift it’s Game