An old friend I haven’t seen for years has started a video blog where he and a partner are doing a collaborative discussion of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, by Charles Eisenstein.
I watched their Introductory video and read the first four (short) chapters of the book. They invited participants to comment on their personal reactions to the material. Here’s the comment I submitted to the web page:
I’ve been stuck in my blog because I have defined the theme as inquiring into “what is the shift in the global planetary consciousness that will be necessary for the self-healing of the earth?” I had developed a table some years ago of various answers found in books I had been drawn to read.I read the first 4 chapters of “More Beautiful World” yesterday. The shift from the Separation story to the Interbeing or Reunion story is a perfect fit, and in fact an underpinning, for the contrast that has been forming up.
Reading C.G. Jung’s Red Book and using it as a tool for digging deeper in my life, thought, and various practices.
Imentioned Jung at the end of the last post, but that was more than three months ago. I have since been drawn in by the vortex of his Liber Novus (The Red Book). The gigantic facsimile edition has graced our home for almost five years, ever since I read this tantalizing pre-publication article in The New York Times. (Two paragraphs rendered unreadable in this version are here.) I was able to read a little of the book, but I eventually found the size and weight too unwieldy to handle. Recently I discovered its more conveniently sized companion,The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition,which arrived in the mail last Tuesday, along withReading the Red Bookby Sanford Drob. I have a lot of momentum into reading The Red Book after listening to all of Lance Owens’ lectures and starting to read C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books, which I bought on Owens’ recommendation. It seems I am being called by the Spirit of the Depths to overcome the Spirit of This Time 🙂
Inhis 1990 book of essays The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder says, “Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparentlydoomed, as their habitat–and the old, old habitat of humans–falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down.”
Isowanted to be that lad! Every time I have read that line over the years I took it as a personal challenge.
One of the first things I saw this morning was Joan Halifax’s Facebook update: “So happy to be home here at Upaya. Clear skies, fresh air, sunshine, deep quiet. What a blessing. Today will be aimless”.
Earthling
Human Being
Student of Life
Working my way toward an earthy, humane, non-sectarian, inclusive spirituality
Husband, father, son, brother, friend
Retired high-school teacher librarian
Voracious, omnivorous reader
Lifelong drummer
Music lover
Aspiring writer
Intention to cultivate bodhicitta
I have discovered a pattern to what I am drawn to read beside books about Buddhism, and drawn to write about, beside the stories of my life.
I want to briefly describe the various views of what kind of shift of consciousness is necessary for healing our world, according to some of the global visionaries I have been reading.
Thomas Berry
Lester Brown
Noam Chomsky
John Bellamy Foster
Al Gore
Paul Hawken
David Korten
Joel Kovel
Michael Lerner
Joanna Macy
Bill McKibben
Larry Rasmussen
Nancy Roof
Otto Scharmer
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Immanuel Wallerstein
It is frequently stated that to solve the massive planetary crises we are facing will require a dramatic shift of consciousness. I made a one-year commitment to shed some light on what that might mean. I identified the first step as brainstorming the possible elements involved. Here is the first pass of my Ingredients Brainstorming document mentioned in the previous post. There’s a lot to untangle even to get started.
A little over a dozen of us from various parts of the world just finished an inspiring 6-week online course facilitated by Chris Johnstone and Barbara Ford. Together we read the book “Active Hope” by Joanna Macy and Chris. You can read about the book here and the announcement for the course here.
One thing we did in the course was the following exercise, shown here (with my answers) for the benefit of those of you who weren’t in the course or who haven’t read the book (it’s on page 199):
Identifying your goals and resources
1. If you knew you could not fail, what would you most want to do for the healing of our world?
I came up with a list of five ambitious visions:
I answered
· Start with global warming. Reduce CO2 in the air to a sustainable level
· Make Los Angeles into a Transition Town
· Make The Great Turning the overarching main context for stories in the mass media, replacing Business as Usual and the Great Unraveling
· Overthrow the corporate empire and replace it with a just, humane, and sustainable system
· Help co-create an emerging planetary consciousness capable of decision making to heal the earth
2. What specific goal or project could you realistically aim to achieve in the next twelve months that would contribute to this?
We had to work with just one. Due to health limitations (I cannot speak and can barely walk) I ruled out the first four. A project with any of them would require working with other people in a way that would involve at least some walking and/or talking. The fifth is something I could work on from my computer without leaving the house. I really want to do them all.
4. What resources, internal and external, will you need to acquire? What might you need to learn, develop, or obtain?
5. How might you stop yourself? What obstacles might you throw in the way?
6. How will you overcome these obstacles?
7. What step can you take in the next week, no matter how small, that will move you toward this goal?
These are the highlights of my answers:
* Long-term goal: Help co-create the global planetary consciousness that will be necessary for the self-healing of the earth.
* One-year goal: Write a paper (and possibly a blog of the work in progress) that unpacks this vision of an evolution of consciousness. Explore it deeply and thoroughly enough that publishing it makes a contribution to the healing of the earth.
* One-week commitment: Set up a structure for gathering all the ingredients, strands, and facets of the project.
I am happy to announce that, to fulfill the one-week commitment, I have created a simple Word document called “Ingredients Brainstorming“, and begun to populate it. I obviously have a long way to go. I’ve never been so aware of the vast spaciousness of the empty page. There are so many aspects of this issue that I want to explore. I just need to be patient and try to access a larger view of time.
