Seeing the Ox

In his 1990 book of essays The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder says, "Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, 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." 

I so wanted to be that lad! Every time I have read that line over the years I took it as a personal challenge.

Now over twenty years later I am six months into a project of trying to answer almost the same question, restated now as, "What is the shift of consciousness needed to support the Great Turning from our industrial growth society to a sustainable civilization?"

The quote below from David Korten comes pretty close to serving as a summary of my findings to date. He has been working for years to articulate the over-arching "Story" that is struggling to emerge to replace the belief system that has gotten us into this mess. On page 28 of the .pdf of his latest iteration he pauses to summarize what he has been saying:

I now see a world gripped in a values struggle between money and life. Global corporate power aligns with the interests of money. An expanding global people-power movement aligns with the interests of life. Corporate power mobilizes around a well-defined Sacred Money and Markets story with a pervasive public presence in corporate media and a corporate dominated educational system. The people-power movement is far less visible and mobilizes around a wide variety of peace, justice, and sustainability initiatives that lack a recognized and accepted framing story.

Based on the lessons of my life experience I have no doubt that the choice between the well-established Sacred Money and Markets story and some version of the Sacred Life and Earth Community story will determine the human fate. If the Sacred Life and Earth Community story is to prevail, it must gain clear articulation and public presence.

(Korten's quote is in italics above. My comments continue below, in regular type face).

Is it possible that this Sacred Life and Earth Community story might take hold on a mass scale?  In my opinion it is  possible, but it will be a real stretch, challenging the current mass mind's capacity for complexity. It will require a larger view on at least three levels.

1. Space - It requires people to see beyond their current personal horizon, to see the whole earth as an interactive system. This is a great leap of complexity, but the number of people who have made the leap is growing, if not exponentially, at an accelerating rate.

2. Time - It requires seeing the period of the Industrial Revolution as a recent brief, and uniquely destructive, moment in human and earth history. This awareness is also growing.

3. Depth - It requires seeing the foundational beliefs and ideas of our culture as a "story" that can be examined alongside other stories. This is maybe the most difficult leap to make, because we so totally "identify" with the culture that shapes us.  But as our cultural stories disintegrate, and options appear on the horizon, it gets easier to entertain the idea that we have an "operating system" that may need a major upgrade.

It seems to me that each of these levels is attainable for most people, at least momentarily. Putting the 3 together requires additional effort. The resulting view is something like the "shift of consciousness" needed to change our course. It needs to be digested and integrated so it becomes a pervasively assumed mental baseline. This is a very tall order to pull off globally, is theoretically doable, but will probably require an intense mobilization of symbolic resources. And...I see increasing signs that it is happening.

And... after writing all the above I was drawn back to an Internet posting called "The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness", based on the book The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, by Edward Edinger. It's basically about the unification of opposites, so maybe this whole "Sighting of the Ox", based on a clash of worldviews, is just a transitional precursor, in which the New Story makes healthy contact with the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and the life-affirming myth for our time emerges for all to see. One can hope.

Meanwhile, the research project continues.

Sources

1. Gary Snyder. The Practice of the Wild, p. 5

2. David Korten."A New Story for a New Economy”, p. 28

3. David Ratcliff. "The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness"

Day before my 70th birthday

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". 

Aimless sounded just right, a perfect (non)guideline for my day. It's the only day this week I will be without company at home. My todo lists for reading, writing, home bookkeeping, etc. have become so gnarly I can't figure how to start prioritizing. And my 70th birthday tomorrow seems a good enough excuse to take a day off to drift and reflect on life, and on some of the deep inspiration I have found recently online and in print.

One additional blessing for me about Upaya Zen Center is their Dharma Podcasts. Being practically housebound, I consider it something of a miracle that I could listen to all the talks and discussions from very recent retreats taught by world-class Buddhist teachers without leaving my dining room table. i was especially inspired by John Dunne's teachings on Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara (The Way of the Bodhisattva). Dunne is so bright and sharp, and I'm tickled by the quirky speech mannerisms he absorbed from studying with Robert Thurman. His depth of knowledge of the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, and his emphasis on the western scientific and philosophical implications, accelerated my exploration of how these various traditions are converging on a nuanced view of the deepest nature of reality. 

I had read the Bodhicaryavatara a few years ago, but I was baffled by chapter nine, the very technical Wisdom chapter. Dunne's course inspired me to get the Dalai Lama's commentary on chapter nine, a book called Practicing Wisdom. I usually thought of Shantideva as being only about compassion. But Dunne emphasized the wisdom aspect, and especially the message that reality isn't as solid and real as we think. He followed the thread from the early Buddhist ideas of impermanence and non-self through to the Mahayana idea of emptiness, or sunyata.

This had a strong resonance with a cluster of similar ideas I had been recently seeking out in Western science & philosophy. First, the sociology of knowledge and the social construction of reality. Second, 20th century particle physics, in the context of philosophy of science, the inquiry into whether or not science describes reality or can provide any certainty about the way things are. 

I'm supposed to be searching for the shift of consciousness needed to support The Great Turning from the industrial growth society to a sustainable civilization. Instead I'm reading all this seemingly random esoteric philosophy. But I see now that I am being drawn to sources that strongly suggest  Reality isn't as solid and real as we experience it and think it is. That's a prerequisite for being able to change what seems to be an absolutely overwhelming world situation.

Now I have a better sense for why I am reading

Reality Isn't What It Used to Be by Walter Truett Anderson,

Conventional Reality and Social Construction (a blog post by Tom Pepper),

Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy by The Cowherds,

and listening to 

John Searle's Philosophy 138 - Philosophy of Society on iTunes U,

and the Great Courses CD called "Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It" taught by Steven Goldman.

Identity

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

Last night's thought

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

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.