Musings

Today we launched our newest project—Great Transition Stories! This has been a labor of love over the past year as we—mostly Duane Elgin, Jeff Vander Clute, and me—have worked to gather the large, overarching stories of change that give hope and guidance for a thriving future. Our collaborative team has grown in recent months to include Anne Stadler, Will Keepin and Cynthia Brix, Sheri Herndon, Peter Russell, Scott Carlin, Bruce Lipton, and others. This is an exciting moment.

Special note: Duane will be presenting this project at the GATE (Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment) Conference in Los Angeles on Saturday, February ^4th. The conference is being live-streamed and will feature stories of a positive future and includes: Eckhart Tolle, Jim Carrey, Marianne Williamson, Jean Houston, Louie Anderson, Edward James Olmos, and many other transformational luminaries who support transformational entertainment and media. The live events begin at 9:00 AM, Saturday, February 4th and continue into the evening. Both events can be accessed through the following link: http://www.livestream.com/gatelive.

This project, like so many others, has had a long journey to come to fruition. For me, it started many years ago when I became increasingly aware that our major systems of food, water, energy, government, and money are approaching crisis points wherein they would begin to break down. In the fall of 2007, I gathered with a small group of people from the Tipping Point Network to address strategies for co-creating a positive, life-affirming future for Humanity. One of our exercises was to do a blind poll of how much time we felt there was between then and when the systems collapse would show up. Most of our answers fell in the 2-10 years range. (We were off by a year with money—the system collapsed one year later in the Fall of 2008.)

We began to brainstorm with each other what it would take to survive and thrive in the Great Transition we would find ourselves in. Working with a theory of change developed by Berkana Institute used by communities around the world, and synchronistically appearing today in a blog on the Great Transition by Joe Brewer, we came up with four strategies:

1) Help stabilize and slow down the destruction of the old system.
2) Support and nurture new, emerging systems.
3) Find and train the Bridge Builders in conscious leadership.
4) Change the story: Name and amplify the New Paradigm emerging.

Berkana’s Theory of Change

I became particularly intrigued by and called to attend the last strategy: Change the Story. This has been the primary focus of New Stories and why I joined the board. For years I had done extensive research on the Rapture and the archetype of the Apocalypse, so dominant within several of the world’s spiritual traditions. I simply could not understand how a model that says some of us are the good guys and will go up to heaven while the rest of the people and planet burn could be a very functional form of change. It did not bode well for Earth or most humans. Even the New Age version of the story in the Celestine Prophesy, while not necessitating the destruction of the earth, is still in the same pattern of the good guys ascend (in this case, the ones with the higher vibrations) and the rest will be left behind to suffer.

I began to see how insidious our unconscious thought pattern is of trying to get out of here, as if here—Earth–is such a bad place or we—Humans–are also bad and need to be redeemed. It’s a powerful story, running in the background that expresses itself in many ways, from wanting God, Allah, the White Brotherhood, or aliens to rescue us, to hoping to be the chosen ones who get relieved of embodiment on Earth. This story inherently rejects embodiment, matter, Earth, and Life. I knew there had to be a better story and went in search of it.

I connected with Duane Elgin in one of his seminars on the Living Universe and, finding a soul brother, began to collaborate with him on discovering stories based on different underlying assumptions such as:

Earth and the Universe are alive and thus sacred.
Life itself is an astonishing miracle.
It is a rare and precious privilege to be embodied.
There is no planet we could get to with our current propulsion systems within 180,000 light years – the time-span of time homo sapiens on the planet.

So this is it. You and I are it. We are it. Our planet is it. We have come to a point in our own evolution where we are conscious of evolution itself, and we now have enough power to choose our own destiny with what we know. What will our story be? Working with Jeff Vander Clute, web wizard extraordinaire, Duane and I began to explore not only the stories themselves but also how to present them in a form consistent with the principles of emergence and collaboration. We went through several iterations—Evolutionary Voices, Emergence Speaks—before adopting the wiki format, which gives the opportunity to grow the stories as we grow in our understanding.

There are better stories of how change happens, what really works in evolution, and who we can be as Humanity. These stories are right in front of us, in the processes of how Life has unfolded, in what we have discovered about the evolution of the Cosmos, and in what we have learned about our own physical, psychological, social and spiritual development. We know what health is and what supports it in our own bodies. What supports the health of Humanity? How do we take responsibility for the future of our species?

This is what we’re exploring with the Great Transition Stories: how we hold what is happening to us that allows us to participate in our future in new, life-affirming ways. The Great Transition Stories wiki is a place to gather the growing data on what we know about what works, where stories are emerging that are in alignment with our own and our planet’s processes, and who is pioneering positive change on the ground. It is a collaboration that is growing. We hope you’ll join us.

What’s your immediate response when you hear the words “Future Center”?

I first heard them a few months ago from Bob Stilger who had been working in Japan as a witness and host and facilitator for the cultural transformation underway in the aftermath of the disasters in 3/11. See his blogs about his journey. See my previous blog about him.

Several possible images flickered through my mind about what a Future Center would be and how it might function and why it is emerging now. Nothing I could fantasize came close to the very exciting and fascinating reality that’s unfolding as I write. A Future Center is not the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon or the Battlestar Galactica. It is not a place in the future with unfamiliar or weird costumes, gadgets and behaviors. It is not science fiction.

A Future Center is here now, wherever people choose to stand and work together in Circle to co-create their future. The Future is where what we are experiencing now as the rapidly changing conditions of our lives meets all of the skill, knowledge and wisdom gathered over our lifetimes, directed by our intention and where we put our attention. A Future Center is conscious evolution in action, choosing our destiny in relationship with the planet we inhabit.

Many people are experiencing new conditions for their lives—financial loss, homelessness, the after effects of tornadoes, fires and floods. Yet in few places have the destructive forces of both Man and Nature been so concentrated as in the 3/11 triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan. Perhaps that is why Future Centers are emerging in Japan. As a wise Japanese Elder said: “Perhaps this happened to us because we could respond.”

And responding they are. When systems collapse so dramatically, new ingenuity is called forth. How can the ingenuity that sees new possibilities, new kinds of relationships, new points of view be gathered and disseminated? This is the purpose of a Future Center.

It starts as a place of listening to what is happening around you. If people who are alert and watchful come together like scouts for a wagon train and share what they have seen in their forays forward, a vision begins to emerge of the larger surroundings, the larger pattern. What are people needing, what’s feeding them, where are the healers, what songs are coming forth, where are love and community blooming? What factors contribute to that happening? What new possibilities become visible as we listen to each other?

A Future Center isn’t a thing as much as it is a process of witnessing, a collecting of multiple perceptions, a gathering of ideas that are working and then choosing to do something together that serves the community. What’s key in the Future Center isn’t the physical walls or where it’s located. It is the set of principles of how to be with each other in a creative life-affirming way that forms the structure which holds a Future Center together.

Many of us have not been taught the skills to function well in the kind of community interchange that goes to deeper levels of trust and acceptance, truth and vulnerability, wherein lie the possibility of creating something new and beautiful. Future Centers are training centers for the kinds of skills that enable us to heal our communities no matter what disaster befalls us. Japan is pioneering a way to listen, to respect, to have compassion for and to act together in a way that supports wholeness, that brings out the best of the collective creative human soul/mind/spirit. Simply put, a Future Center is a really good way to help a group of people discover what they want to do collectively and collaboratively.

As Bob Stilger says: “It’s not any complicated technology.  It doesn’t require huge dollars to be able to do. It’s noticing what’s actually going on and then working with emergence within the system. People come together asking “What can we do around this particular issue?  What can we do with our community to make it better? What we can do with this particular opportunity?” Part of what the Future Center movement does is build awareness of a very flexible yet very powerful reflection-action methodology for people to listen to each other and figure out together what they want to do.

“It is not difficult, but does require hosts of the dialogue and a core team that is designing the whole dialogue process.  It’s important to articulate the principles and the processes and the methodologies that make it possible for work that we naturally know how to do as human beings to become more powerful, more effective and have greater impact.”

In the Future Centers that Bob is helping to establish in Japan, there are a few basic principles:

First: Name the phenomenon that’s already beginning to happen and invite more of it.

Second: Start with the basic understandings for community building that have evolved out of Berkana Institute and other groups working with community based organizations in different parts of the world.

a) Every system is filled with leaders
b) The knowledge and the wisdom we need are already present.
c) We have enough resources to begin.
d) We just need to have a sense of direction and then begin taking steps.

Third: Choose and work with a core set of dialogue methodologies: Circle, World Café, Open Space Technology, Pro-Action Café, Non-violent Communication, and others as ways to host a deeper interaction among people.

Fourth: Be aware of the seven steps which naturally lead to collaborative action:

a) Build relationships
b) Identify Needs
c) Gather Data
d) Generate Ideas
e) Converge around what we want to do
f) Prototype solutions out of that convergence
g) Communicate results.

Much more detailed resources can be found by going to Bob’s Blog and reading his eight page summary of a 30,000 foot overview of Future Centers.  Deeper resources include a 43-page guide to Future Centers that elaborates the principles, processes and the methodologies being used right now in Japan to initiate the Future Centers movement.

Bob Stilger

Sometimes an event happens that disturbs the whole system so profoundly that, like a gunshot wound in a key organ, the life of the body is threatened. And, if you survive it, you’ll never be the same. Japan is like that, having been hit by a perfect storm of multiple synchronous systems collapse at once brought on by both natural and human disasters.

Japan gives us a preview of things to come. Whatever we are going through, who or whatever we think is causing it, the planetary disruptions are more powerful and closer together than normal. We are in the Shift, the Great Turning, the time right before the migration. We all feel it, like the build-up of energy before something big happens. We’re not in our ordinary “weather” at any level–physically, psychically, culturally or spiritually.

How are the people of Japan weathering these changes? How to they cope and find their way through? What old beliefs are dying in their culture, what values are emerging that will define a new national character?

And how does an individual from afar, a sacred outsider who is also soul-linked to the culture, come to help? What does help look like in situations of upheaval and chaos and rapid change where the way ahead is not some linear line but emerging like lava from a volcano?

Once described as someone who can “listen people into their greatness” and “one who walks the interstitial spaces,” Bob Stilger shows up as one whose love and appreciation of the Japanese culture is obvious and who understands enough of the culture to speak from that background. He brings with him his skill and wisdom from a forty year relationship with Japan – which began when he was a student at Waseda University in Tokyo – and ten years of working with resilient communities around the world to bear witness on what is emerging now, day by day, as Japan copes with its cascading disasters. It will survive, but not as what it was. What is it becoming? What can it become if it is welcomed with love and presence?

Sometimes we have the rare opportunity to witness a birthing as it is happening and can even help midwife it. A child, a kitten, a project. A culture. These entries are Bob’s witnessing and participating at the source of cultural transformation. I call them Postcards from the Edge.

Read Bob’s notes here.

Today my husband asked me: Are you optimistic?

The question came out of our ongoing dialogue about new stories, where they’re emerging and whether they will make a difference.  He was asking me if I was optimistic that humanity could make enough of a shift in our collective consciousness to effect a positive, life-giving change for the future where we could not only survive but thrive and come into greater equity among people and right relationship with the earth.

I had to pause and tune into deeper feeling to come up with an answer.  It was one of those questions where the word wasn’t quite right but gave me a starting place from which to discern what I really felt.

I couldn’t find optimism–not to describe the multiplicity of thoughts and sensations I experienced.  What I became aware of first was a deep ache in my heart for all of the pain being experienced right now in the world created from systems put in place from earlier stages of our development based on old ideas that are no longer true.

Poverty, famine, inequality aren’t about individuals and dependent upon whether someone works hard or not.  Poverty and injustice are institutionalized through systems that no longer work, based on beliefs we no longer hold if we thought about them.  It’s easy to look from the outside at slavery or the caste system or communism and see systems that we don’t think are fair or just or humane. But it’s much more difficult to see the entrenched systems in our own country that create and foster similar levels of inequality and injustice.

My deep heart ache is feeling the daunting task of transforming any of these systems into wholeness where they could work for the benefit of all, motivated by love and an understanding that we are all in this together.  There is no away.  There is no other. As Pogo said, we have seen the enemy and he is us.  Sometimes I am simply overwhelmed by the enormity of greed and hate-mongering I see proliferating in my beloved country as if we are being taken over by a rabid Ku Klux Klan posing as CEO’s and newscasters.  Sometimes I feel hopeless and impotent in the face of just how crazy and short-sighted we’ve become.

But next to it, riding on it like oil on top of vinegar, is this equally deep joy in being alive.  Every moment I can breathe clean air, look up to the mountains, feel the sun on my back or soothing rain on my face, I am ecstatic.  I love my life, every single part of it.  I love my marriage, I love where I live, I love my community, I love what I get to do in life, I love being a pioneer on the edge of evolution.  I think being embodied is the most sacred and precious opportunity we’ve been given.

Do I know where it will go, whether we will make it or how we will end?  Will we die of plagues, or earth upheavals, or starvation, or fiery purgings from a vindictive God?  I don’t know. Will the voices of hate and scorn, willful ignorance and sheer stupidity be the final accounting of the human race and what it can become?  I don’t know.  Some days it just doesn’t look good with people raking in millions by fomenting hate for entertainment’s sake.  It certainly says something about how many people get off on lies and hate and how seduced we are by the vigilante consciousness that thinks scapegoating and genocide will solve the complex issues of our times.  I do get discouraged.

So I don’t know if I am optimistic.  A friend said in answer to the same question:  “I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful.”  I don’t know whether I am even hopeful about anything changing externally in a way I might experience in this lifetime.  I am not projecting an image onto the future that it will be what I can imagine it could be or otherwise I will be disappointed and become despondent.  I know that no matter what I do, the outcome will be what it is, not in my control.

On the other hand, I believe that what I do does make a difference, even if I don’t see it in my lifetime.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Over and over again, throughout human history, the forces of love and tolerance and wisdom eventually prevail over hate, bigotry, and ignorance.  While it is difficult to be optimistic in the face of so much human depravity, nonetheless I feel deep joy in an inner calling to speak out, to share my vision, to call others to their best and most whole capacity.

I am committed to honoring the gift of my incarnation and speaking out of the radiance of my own knowing.  What I know is that we are radiant, amazing beings who are marvels and miracles of creation, more complex than we can possibly fathom and only at the beginning of exploring the range of our gifts.  I see the possibility of a world that thrives for everyone, that honors the miracles of diversity that we are and brings all voices to the table.  I have come to understand the importance of developing ourselves as individuals as well as collaborating with others to co-create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts, more beautiful and inspirational and magical than we can imagine.

I feel that the hope of the future, our own evolutionary leap as humans, will come through cooperation, collaboration, compassion, and learning to communicate across differences to hear that in many cases we are all describing grapes, each in our own language.  My researches tell me that evolution moves towards greater complexity and cooperation, that we are on the brink of an evolutionary leap to a new way of seeing ourselves in relationship to each other and our world no less significant than the incarnation of Buddha, Christ or Mohammed.

I may not see the outcome of this evolutionary leap in my lifetime, but I can add my voice to its possibility.  I can bring my education and experience and skill in personal transformation to bear in envisioning the collective transformation that could be.  Love and understanding and deep listening heal.  Honor and trust and respect work.  There is room for right relationship between spouses and families, peoples and countries, bioregions and the earth.  We don’t have to drive each other to extinction.  Even if we can, we don’t have to.  We can wake up and choose a different option.  We can make a stand for humanity’s greatness rather than its smallness.

So I don’t know if I am optimistic, but I am deeply fulfilled in raising my voice in harmony with others who are voting with their feet and hearts and hands and words to realize the possibility of wholeness.  Some people will remember who they are and what is possible.

I recently saw James Cameron’s new film Avatar in I-MAX 3-D. It’s an intense experience, if for nothing else than being on an alien planet during a war for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Beyond luxuriating in the fantastical images, I came away with a lot of questions, uppermost being: Is Avatar telling a new story?

I am one who stands in the questions of: What is a new story? Is a new story possible? How would we recognize it? How would we tell it? In part I do this as a reaction to the preponderance of apocalyptic stories, which are present not only in the weekly tabloids and evening news but also in almost all of the worlds religions. Is there any other way we can go through the transition that seems so obviously needed besides destroying ourselves?

Avatar presents the idea, not fully revealed until late in the film, that the humans destroyed their green planet and that that are about to repeat that story on this new planet, intriguingly called Pandora, for the same reason they destroyed the first one, mining for energy sources to sustain human life divorced from earth.

We see a very classic set up. A dominator culture, in this case represented by the Corporation, attacks another culture for its land and resources and is prepared to annihilate everything in its way—people, culture, all sentient beings as well as all living plants.

This story seems endemic to human history. From the Huns, to the Persians, to the Romans, to the Hebrews, to the Christians, to the Muslims, to the Europeans–the dominator culture wins through superior weapons and subjugates the culture it has conquered. Almost all indigenous cultures succumbed to the pogroms of the European colonial era, except the Maori in New Zealand, who themselves had conquered an earlier more pacifist people. We in the Americas continued the trajectory and exterminated many of our own indigenous peoples for land, minerals, and other resources.

This story has “won” over and over again. Those who conquer carry a whole set of assumptions about why that happens. We’re better/smarter/more worthy/entitled. We need the ore/land/food/people for our survival/ego/pride. It is our “manifest destiny” to move out and flourish for our God. Who cares about who we kill, what we take along the way. They are not worthy, less than us, have no soul. They do no count. We do not need them. They are dispensable. They are things, have no soul or intelligence. They are inferior.

This is clearly the mindset or point of view of the Sky Beings, as they are called by the indigenous Na’vi. Within the space ship is a range of voices from curious and compassionate to utterly ruthless, but they all come from the same basic point of view. They are outside viewers and they want something. They are aliens to Pandora and Pandora to them.

Pandora for its part exaggerates the world view of a living universe, an it’s-all-alive, it’s-all-connected, it’s-all-relations point a view. The visuals of its livingness are intense; everything is larger than (our) life. It responds to touch, to footsteps, to sound. Some would even say it glows. It operates on a clan model of relationship and a sacred relationship to life.

I suppose one could say, and probably has, that this is a New Age point of view. It’s also more and more the point of view of new science. It’s the point of view of Rick Tarnas in Cosmos and Psyche. It’s probably the point of view of anyone who does think the earth is alive, we are all connected and we are related to everything. It is the point of view of anyone working to “save the planet” or working towards sustainable relationship of humans to the planet, anyone who understands or experiences humans as evolution becoming conscious of itself.

As the viewer, we get to look from the outside of our current situation and witness the war of worldviews. We can almost take each worldview in a different hand and weigh them. What are the advantages of the first one? The second one?

In Avatar, the Bioneers viewpoint wins and our hero crosses over from his old point of view to the new one. The aliens are sent back to their mechanistic world and the Na’vi go on with their idyllic if transformed life, as they have now incorporated the warrior nature of their attackers.

Is this a new story? Being fully committed to actualizing a new paradigm in consciousness where we recognize that it is all alive and we are all connected, I cheered at the win. Being a long time therapist and spiritual teacher, I reveled in the lush depiction of a soul-based world and championed Cameron’s ability to bring such a vivid world to the screen. I just plain loved it.

But I also left disquieted. The underdog side won in an age-old battle of points of view. But did we move out of the battle itself, the polarity of opposites. How does this encounter integrate into a next level that also recognizes all that has come out of the earlier point of view?

This is where I see us now. More and more people are getting that the universe is alive and growing and becoming conscious of itself, in part though us. The energetic healing ceremony in the Soul Grove is a real experience. Consciousness in plants is real. Non-local consciousness is real. We are beginning to understand that we are all connected and that anything we do to someone else actually does impact us.

But what does this mean when it comes up against the destructive power of what we have achieved since the scientific revolution. What do we do with the machines we’ve created and the modern world that arose out oft of “I think therefore I am”?

I can feel the joy that Jake feels when he is able to permanently relocate his now transformed consciousness into a new body that is extra strong and healthy and mobile. But I think our task will be to bring that transformed consciousness into our own bodies in our current world and create the integration here.

That would be a new story.

It doesn’t seem to matter what it is—changing schools, starting a company, moving, writing—fear is always at the beginning. I am not going to make it, do it, write it. It will be too big for me, I won’t be able to meet the challenge. I am inadequate to the task.

This particular line of thinking seems to go on and on ad infinitum until one day there is a moment—sometimes ritually celebrated, sometimes not—where all of the fear just isn’t enough to stop the forward momentum of just doing it. Invariably, I have found that I do have the ability to do it, I can make it, I do write it. Except when I’m absolutely sure that I have it nailed and then there is usually something of Life’s comeuppance that has me realize I couldn’t have possibly seen what I didn’t know I didn’t know.

I guess in some ways that makes the fear a good companion—can’t get too cocky and arrogant ahead of time. Have to enter humbly with curiosity and presence. Nothing else to do. Take this writing for instance. It’s paragraph three and the words are just coming out as I simply sit in the chair and say go. Now. Or as the swoosh that’s sold a million shoes says: just do it.

What is the feeling at the point of entry when you go through the gate and stand on the other side of the door facing the unknown, like the Pevensie children in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Overwhelm at the vast territory to be explored, reflected upon, written about. How do I take on New Stories in a way that has any link with the passion in my own heart for how desperately I feel we need a new story of who we are, how and why we got here and what we can do about it? How to start with myself in a way that communicates the longing I feel, the possibility I know for us to make just the smallest tweak in how we answer Life’s questions that would rebalance how we are on the planet.

However small the adjustment in our worldview, the consequences are vast in both time and space. We, as individuals in any given country may not be able to see the long-term outcome. It’s difficult to look at the forces moving in our world and not see widespread drought, famine, displacement, death. Maybe “we”–my little body moving around in space and those near (or not near) to me–will die before there is a change. Maybe much of humanity will die. In truth, all of humanity will die eventually, or at least all humans. Maybe humanity continues. Yes, maybe humanity continues, morphing into a form or at least a series of beliefs that we can barely recognize from this point of view.

What might that point of view be? From here it looks like moving to the point of view that the universe is alive, that we are in relationship to forces that are much larger than us. We are not the center of the universe anymore than the earth is the center either of our solar system or our galaxy. We are beings who have been blessed with the faculty of being able to reflect on the amazing complexity and beauty of our world and to recognize that we are in a living universe that it is growing and changing, as are we.

Over the years we, as a collective humanity, have come to recognize that women have souls, that Black people (and every other color) have souls, that dogs and cats have souls. Plants feel and play music and respond to us—our anger, our love, our neglect or attention. Why is it such a stretch to think of the planet as living? Certainly we can look from afar and see the pulsings of rivers into oceans, the clouds moving across the face of the mountains, the ever-changing patterns of weather moving through like the breathing of an enormous being. The Gaia hypothesis is many years old now and quite widespread as a belief system. Why not the universe, might it also have intelligence, intention, a soul?

My favorite bumper sticker is “Evolution Is God’s Intelligent Design.” Why is this not obvious? There is no conflict here. The difference between fundamentalists and evolutionary biologists is semantic. Sort of like the story of the three men and the grapes, all wanting the same thing calling it three different things so they’re fighting. How silly. There is no possibility of looking at the wonder of the unfolding universe and our unfolding capacity to comprehend it and not see intelligence in the design. From the way a flower or an embryo grows to the rhythms of planetary geometry to the exquisite efficiency of the DNA molecule, it’s impossible not to see intelligence, design, pattern, elegance, beauty. In fact we would do well to follow nature’s design and when we do we have a much easier time of it as the burgeoning field of biomimicry reflects.

The question is what is the force behind that intelligence and how do we relate to it? Some see the equivalent of a person, in the form of God, who is doing the designing. Some even think “He” did this in a few thousand years and stopped when he got to us. Whether you call the force “God” or “Life” or “Universal Intelligence” or “Great Spirit” or “Evolutionary Impulse”, something is creating beyond our capacity to fully understand it—try as we might. It might even be that our trying is part of the deeper basic force of creation. We are also learning, growing, changing. We are being shaped and changed and expanded as is our planet and our world. It is bigger than us and it’s not fundamentally about us. We are not the only ones creating, participating in the unfoldment. Many other forces are at play. We can partner with the forces but we cannot subdue, subsume, or subordinate them.

To see humanity as it is now as the pinnacle of evolution with nowhere else to go–just us here mining a dead planet–is quite a narrow point of view and doesn’t take in the whole of creation. It may feel safer and less overwhelming to think that way, but it’s so not the truth. It’s like not believing in rain—it doesn’t matter whether you believe what is true, you still get wet.