Beginning to Brainstorm

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.

For the last few years I have noticed a common theme in what I'm drawn to read: an impending major global culture shift.  I started a list of authors, with columns for the Before and After state as each author viewed it. With all the additional ideas I was coming up with in the brainstorming, the mass of material was becoming too diffuse and complex to write a blog post about. I decided to see what Joanna Macy had written about the consciousness shift specifically, since her book Active Hope initiated this whole project. On her web site, under the heading of "Living Systems" I found a link to an essay called The Holonic Shift.



She says there, "All living systems--be they organic like a cell or human body, or supra-organic like a society or ecosystem--are holons. That means they have a dual nature: As both systems and subsystems, they are wholes in themselves and, simultaneously, integral parts of larger wholes."



She then describes the need for evolving a reflexive consciousness at the next level above the human individual, that is, at the level of the whole social system.



"It would seem that such a holonic shift is necessary for our survival. Since Earth's carrying capacity is limited, and since the ecosystems supporting us are threatened with collapse, we must learn to think together in an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in fragmented and competitive ways. Present modes of collective decision-making, like the ballot-box or consensus circles, are simply too corruptible and too slow for the swift, responsive self-guidance that we as societies need now. In what ways can we help? How can we as individuals promote a holonic shift and take part in it?"



She then suggests an answer to her own question by providing a list of twelve guidelines for how to take part in it.



I looked on the Internet to see if anybody else uses this term "Holonic Shift". There wasn't much. But the one item I did find, an essay called "The Holonic Shift Will Not Be Televised" on a blog called "Wild Serenity" was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. On October 4, 2011 the author, identified as Riyana-Rebecca, was blogging about her experience in the Occupy Movement, then only two weeks old. I felt a shock of recognition at the words, "As my mentor Joanna Macy says, it is time for a new level of human consciousness on this planet: the holonic shift. To Joanna, who for many years studied Living Systems Theory and ecospirituality, the time is ripe for the next evolution of consciousness".



Riyana-Rebecca listed Joanna's guidelines, and went on to describe her view of how the Occupy movement is beautifully aligned with each guideline in turn. I was blown away by the level of insight, sometimes brilliant writing and how many of the pieces of my far-flung puzzle she connected. I read all the other postings on her blog and was impressed enough to subscribe.



I continued gathering books and articles, to feed "ingredients" into the brainstorming list. While reading in Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin, I came across a section (pages 27 and 8) called "A Portrait of the Coming Stage of Human Evolution". This sounded like more of what I was looking for. He begins, "Thomas Berry refers to the great transformations in the evolution of the universe as 'moments of grace'." The footnote took me to an essay entitled "Moments of Grace" in Berry's book The Great Work.

Berry says the moment in which we live is the latest in a long series of extraordinary turning points that also includes the birth of the solar system, the appearance on Earth of the first living cell, and the advent of humans. A major difference is this is the first such moment caused by the actions of a life form capable of conscious reflection on the systemic change--us. Placing our situation in this vast time horizon inspired me to use this perspective as a focal point to try to pull together my thoughts and produce a first update on my work in progress.

This decision seemed to trigger my own "moment of grace".  On the first day of November I received an e-mail from Riyana-Rebecca with the bold headline:

Welcome to the truly free, "Rediscover Your Love of 

Writing" 30-Day Challenge.

kindle your love of writing. 


have a love affair with your own words. 


change the world one verb at a time.

Her timing was perfect, and her offer was generous. The assignment for the first day of the month-long challenge was:
Figure out what your Writer’s Mission is for today, and for the week, and for the month.  Just don’t spend three hours on it when you should be writing.

What I needed to do was immediately apparent. The  Day One goal was to finish and send the e-mail reply about a friend's death that I had been struggling with. The One Week goal was to write and publish the sections for my online bio that I had already sketched, to make up for having written no updates in the 2-1/2 years since retiring. The One Month goal was to use the challenge to finally write and publish the first blog post since I had committed to start brainstorming.

I finished the difficult e-mail on the first day. Energized, I received another moment of grace, this time courtesy of the community of K-12 Teacher Librarians. As I was turning my attention toward writing  the blog, I got an invitation to a Webinar to be held in three days, called

Level Up Your Blog

Taking Your Blog to the Next Level! 

Does your blog need an epic win?

 How to add extra pages, engage guest bloggers, & how to

make your blog your triumphant one stop shop and main web presence.

I love the community of Teacher Librarians. They are the brightest, most compassionate, and most totally under appreciated people I have ever encountered. The Webinar did not disappoint. I was totally inspired and energized by the skills, attitudes, tips, and suggestions.

One tool they suggested using is called Scoop.it. If you have a lot of internet references you want to share, rather than making a boring list of URL links, with very little extra effort you can produce an illustrated magazine of your articles. Here's my Scoop.it! page with some resources I am starting to gather as I explore the shift of consciousness needed to heal our world. In future iterations of this blog post I'll have the Scoop.it! embedded on the page, rather than just a link, as soon as I figure out how to embed it.

So this is the beginning of brainstorming, and an attempt to document some early scratching at the surface of a very difficult global koan.

Going Forth

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 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:

·         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 others 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.

3. What resources, inner and outer, do you have that will help you do this?

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.

To be continued.