Notebook for
1_5154443775812043351
Joanna Macy
Citation (APA): Macy, J. (2023). 1_5154443775812043351 [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Preface by Joanna Macy
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We can find, in the love that grounds us in the living Earth, clarity, courage and self-respect to free ourselves from bondage to a sick and death-dealing economy.
Chapter 1: To Choose Life
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Consumerism can be seen as institutionalized greed, the military-industrial complex as institutionalized aggression and state- and corporate-controlled media as institutionalized delusion.
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universal errors to which all humans are prone, rather than evil or satanic forces.
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these errors become institutionalized as political, economic and legal agents in their own right, they attain a degree of autonomy extending beyond the control and the conscious choices of any individuals involved.
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work to free ourselves and others
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we can meet our needs without destroying our life-support system.
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Business As Usual
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the story of the Industrial Growth Society.
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there is little need to change the way we live.
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Economic recessions and extreme weather conditions are just temporary difficulties from which we will surely recover, and even profit.
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The Great Unraveling
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It draws attention to the disasters that Business As Usual has caused and continues to create.
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evidence of the ongoing derangement and collapse of biological, ecological, economic and social systems.
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The Great Turning
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the emergence of new and creative human responses that enable the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society.
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joining together to act for the sake of life on Earth.
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Humans are linked, not ranked. Humans and the environment are linked, not ranked.
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it is happening simultaneously in three areas or dimensions that are mutually reinforcing.
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Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings
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Analysis and transformation of the foundations of our common life
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fundamental shift in worldview and values
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We consider anyone acting for a purpose larger than personal gain or advantage to be an activist.
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holding actions because they attempt to hold the line, to buy time for systemic changes to take place.
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repressing dissent, abusing demonstrators and punishing whistle-blowers.
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As the corporate empire is exposed and threatened, the violence of its response becomes more naked and indifferent to public opinion.
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Understanding the dynamics of corporate capitalism, including the structures of law and governance that support it
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Generating structures based on the inherent authority and rights of We the People to govern ourselves and to protect the grounds of our common life
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we can demystify the workings of the Industrial Growth Society.
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we also see its fragility
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how dependent it is on our obedience and on deception, secrecy, surveillance and force.
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• Let’s start defining what we need and banning what we don’t.
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The actions we take— and structures we build— mirror how we relate to Earth and each other.
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cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening.
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we are alive in a living Earth,
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Initiatives to promote understanding and celebration of the Rights of Mother Earth, the Rights of Nature and the Rights of Future Generations
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When we are distracted and fearful and the odds are running against us, it is easy to let the heart and mind go numb.
Chapter 2: The Greatest Danger — The Deadening of Heart and Mind
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To destroy that which we were given in trust: how will we bear it?
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The very danger signals that should rivet our attention, summon up the blood and bond us in collective action, tend to have the opposite effect.
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Apatheia is a Greek word that means, literally, non-suffering.
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To be conscious in our world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril.
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the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part. It is the pain of the world itself, experienced in each of us.
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Our culture conditions us to view pain as dysfunctional.
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We are afraid that if we were to let ourselves fully experience these feelings, we might fall apart, lose control or be mired in pain permanently.
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“I’ll find peace within myself first, then I’ll see what I can do.” Supposing world and self to be essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one in isolation from the other.
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the beauty and terror of our society co-arise with us.
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feelings of anguish and despair for our world appear as a failure of character and competence.
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impassivity is seen as “cool.”
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It is nearly impossible in today’s global economy to feed, clothe and transport ourselves without unintended harm to the natural world and other people’s well-being.
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We have neither patience nor practices for dealing with collective guilt, but we can learn.
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We are reluctant to burden our loved ones; we would shield them from the distress we carry.
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Our distress over the state of the world is seen as stemming from some neurosis, rooted perhaps in early trauma or unresolved issues with a parental figure that we’re projecting on society at large.
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we find it hard to believe that we can suffer on behalf of society itself, or on behalf of other life-forms, and that such suffering is real and valid and healthy.
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the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.
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Our vulnerability to interruption makes it difficult to reflect deeply or sustain meaningful conversation.
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making everything an emergency and an already frenetic civilization even more frenetic.
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Not only is our attention hijacked, but our imagination as well, diminishing our capacity to envision what we might yet create.
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We may fear retribution from the Powers That Be: being fired, blackballed, imprisoned or disappeared.
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Like the child who clings to an abusive parent, we may cling to an image of our leaders as essentially well meaning, even if incompetent.
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fear of risking reputation and public confidence by being seen as crazy as the oft-ridiculed conspiracy theorist.
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Jobless youth, inflamed by the brutality portrayed by the media, act out their hopelessness and sense of betrayal.
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Demagogues direct our frustrations against other groups, blaming those most victimized.
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For the failures of corporate capitalism, we scapegoat each other.
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We try to protect our heart with a defensive armor that closes it to the pain of our world.
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To be afraid to look at and respond to that which threatens all life constitutes a blocking of the muladhara, cutting off primal intelligence and energies essential to survival.
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To be cut off from this root chakra robs us of our birthright to deep ecstatic connections within the web of life.
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Without empathy, our natural capacity to sense and identify with the joy and suffering of others is crippled.
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Instead, we tend to project our repressed fears and anger onto other people.
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Free play of the imagination requires trust in life and courage to walk where there is no path.
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we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.
Chapter 3: The Basic Miracle — Our True Nature and Power
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Supported by postmodern science and ancient spiritual traditions, it brings a fresh understanding of our relationship to the world and of powers within us for its healing. Liberating us from constricted notions of who we are and what we need, it brings us home to our true nature— in league with the stars and trees of our thrumming universe.
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We came to think of ourselves as made of better stuff than the animals and plants and rocks and water around us. Our technologies have amplified disastrously the ecological and social effects of that kind of thinking.
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Fortunately— and paradoxically— our very search for mastery and knowledge through science has brought us to the dawning realization that the world, indeed the universe, seems not to be composed of stuff at all.
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Each time we have grasped what appeared to be a basic building block, it has dissolved into a dance of energy and relationship.
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nature is self-organizing.
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awesomely elegant in their coherence and constancy throughout the observable universe, from sub-organic to biological and ecological systems, and mental and social systems as well.
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Each system, from atom to galaxy, is a whole.
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not reducible to its components.
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Its distinctive nature and capacities derive from the dynamic relationships
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of its parts.
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synergistic, generating emergent properties and new possibilities, which are not predictable from the character of the separate parts.
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Thanks to the continual flow-through of matter/ energy and information, open systems are able to self-stabilize and maintain their balance
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homeostatic function enables systems to self-regulate amidst changing conditions in their environment.
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monitoring the effects of their own behavior and realigning their behavior with preestablished norms,
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evolve in complexity. When challenges from their environment persist, they can fall apart or adapt by reorganizing themselves around new, more functional norms.
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It is how systems learn and evolve.
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As ever-increasing oscillations upset the balance of its interrelated parts, the system loses coherence and complexity— and begins to unravel.
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Every system is a holon
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both a whole in its own right, comprised of subsystems and simultaneously an integral part of a larger system.
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holons form nested hierarchies,
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Each new holonic level
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generates new emergent properties that are not reducible to the properties of the separate.
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order tends to arise from below, as well as be summoned or inspired by its larger context.
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The system self-generates from adaptive cooperation between its parts for mutual benefit.
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What had appeared to be other can be equally construed as a concomitant of self,
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What we had been taught to dismiss as mere feelings are responses to our world no less valid than rational constructs. Sensations, emotions, intuitions, concepts all condition each other, each a way of apprehending the relationships that weave our world.
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“I am part of the rainforest protecting myself.
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Through widening circles of identification, we vastly extend the boundaries of our self-interest, and enhance our joy and meaning in life.
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the requisite care flows naturally if the self is widened and deepened so that protection of free nature is felt and conceived of as protection of our very selves.
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tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life.
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Islam. Perhaps only we who are shaped by the Industrial Growth Society have forgotten our embeddedness in a larger, living whole.
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ideas become real for us through our senses and imagination— through stories, images and rituals that enlist our capacity for devotion, our tears and laughter.
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Buddhist teachings and practices, deriving from our connectivity with all life, help us experience the world in terms of process rather than in terms of things to grasp or reject.
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The Buddha Dharma provides images of interconnectedness and models for a life of action.
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The bodhisattva, the Buddhist hero figure, is one who deeply comprehends the dependent co-arising of all things.
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This one knows that there is no private salvation and therefore turns back from the gates of nirvana to reenter samsara (the world of suffering) again and again, until every being, every blade of grass, is enlightened.
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as kin to the animals and plants, rocks and winds of this sacred world, we can tap its powers, take part in its healing.
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In humans, and some other big-brained mammals, mind is endowed with a remarkable feature: self-reflexive consciousness. It emerged by necessity, when the system’s internal complexity grew so great— and its range of options so large— that it could no longer survive by trial and error alone. It needed to evolve another level of consciousness in order to weigh different courses of action; it needed, in other words, to make choices.
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The self-observant I arose. It arose by virtue of decision-making.
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we can always choose our response.
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We discover who we are in our choices.
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Sometimes the best choice is to let go, to fall apart.
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In humans, our internal codes and organizing principles are basic to our sense of self. The realization that they are no longer valid can be very disorienting, making us frighteningly unsure of who we are.
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it allows more adaptive understandings of self and world to arise.
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Sometimes we panic or shut down; sometimes we get mean and turn on each other.
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History cannot instruct us, except by analogy. Our old codes do not apply, no matter how hard we try.
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It helps to recall that the life living through us has repeatedly died to old forms and old ways.
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self-reflexivity on the next holonic level. It would emerge from the necessity for swift collective choice-making at the level of social systems.
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today we are seeing people act together in a new way on behalf of life on Earth.
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Their motivation cannot be reduced to private gain, but it can be understood as manifesting a collective consciousness in defense of life on Earth.
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This holonic shift does not sacrifice, but indeed requires, the uniqueness of each individual and his or her perspective.
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Its function does not depend on its firepower but on the quality of its connectedness….
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Living systems evolve in variety, resilience and intelligence; they do this not by erecting walls of defense and closing off from their environment, but by opening more widely to currents of matter/ energy and information.
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As life-forms evolve in complexity and intelligence, they shed their armor in order to grow sensitive, vulnerable protuberances— like lips, tongues, ears, eyeballs, noses, fingertips— the better to sense and respond, the better to connect in the web of life and weave it further.
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power over is dysfunctional because it inhibits diversity and feedback; by obstructing self-organizing processes, it fosters entropy or systemic disintegration.
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To the powerholders themselves, it is like a suit of armor: it restricts vision and movement. Narrowing awareness and maneuverability, it cuts them off from fuller and freer participation in life. They have fewer options for action and fewer sources of joy, except to grasp for more of what represents power to them.
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not a struggle to seize power so much as to release it for efficient self-governance.
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Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.
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Attune to a common intention.
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an open-ended aim:
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Welcome diversity.
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Self-organization of the whole requires differentiation of the parts.
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Know that only the whole can repair itself.
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You are only a small part of a much larger process, like a nerve cell in a neural net.
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Trust means taking part and taking risks, when you cannot control, or even see, the outcome.
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Open to flows of information from the larger system.
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Speak the truth of your experience of this world.
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Believe no one who claims to have the final answer.
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Work increasingly in teams or joint projects serving common aims.
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Be generous with your strengths and skills— they are not your private property.
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Draw forth the strengths of others by your own acknowledgment of them.
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You do not need to see the results of your work.
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Putting forth great effort, let there also be serenity in all your doing; for you are held within the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding your own. 14 i.
Chapter 4: What is the Work that Reconnects?
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This world, in which we are born and take our being, is alive.
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Our true nature is far more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit and society.
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Having evolved us into self-reflexive consciousness, the world can now know itself through us, behold its own majesty, tell its own stories— and respond to its own suffering.
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Our experience of pain for the world springs from our connectivity with all beings, from which also arise our powers to act on their behalf.
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Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only acknowledged, but experienced.
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When we reconnect with life by choosing to bear our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity.
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Concepts, which bring relatedness into focus, become vivid.
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Significant learnings occur, for the individual system is reorganizing and reorienting, grounding itself in wider reaches of identity and self-interest.
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The experience of reconnection with the Earth community arouses the urge to act on its behalf.
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bodhichitta, the desire for the welfare of all beings,
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Earth’s self-healing powers take hold within us. For these powers to function, they must be trusted and acted on.
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the Work That Reconnects as occurring in a spiral,
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Coming from Gratitude, Honoring our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes and Going Forth.
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The Spiral begins with gratitude, because that quiets the mind and brings us back to source, stimulating our empathy and confidence.
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What had isolated us in private anguish now opens outward and delivers us into the wider reaches of our collective existence.
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we know more genuinely our relatedness to all that is.
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we go forth into the actions that call each of us, in keeping with our situation and gifts.
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In the face of devastation and tragedy, gratitude will hold us steady, especially when we’re scared or tired.
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We may need to honor that pain with a practice or ritual before moving on.
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fearless experience of pain for the world.
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radical connectivity of all life.
Chapter 5: Guiding the Work that Reconnects
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A workshop is an island in time where, removed from other distractions and demands, we can focus together long enough to explore our deeper responses to these realities. The group helps us to sustain the gaze.
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our task is to provide processes that help people know their pain for the world, their interconnectedness with all life and their power to take part in the Great Turning.
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Be sure you’ve done your own despair work before attempting to facilitate it for others.
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One of the greatest gifts that a guide can offer to participants is the opportunity to listen to themselves and each other.
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In stillness, they can listen to their body, what is underneath the words they spoke or what is awaiting articulation.
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Remember that anger, sorrow, fear and overwhelmedness are natural responses to the suffering of other beings and the deterioration of our world.
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A defining characteristic of a ritual is that it invites those taking part to speak archetypally— that is, to speak as part of a larger sacred whole.
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more encompassing awareness tends to release us from the grip of a hyper-individualized sense of self.
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assume a natural authority without altering your manner.
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Make all preparations and give all directions for the ritual before its actual start.
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AH stands for all that has not yet been spoken, and for those without a voice.
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The end of the ritual should be similarly clear and definitive. You can ring a bell or gong.
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share the benefits of the practice with all beings.
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ample, unhurried time to make the transition back to ordinary conversation.
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The sacred living body of Earth. Everything we are and know and will ever have comes from Mother Earth. That fact is our true nature and ultimate security.
Chapter 6: Coming from Gratitude
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by our own decision we can consciously enter the dance.
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gratitude is not dependent on our external circumstances.
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take care not to tell people what to feel.
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we turn to the breath, the body, the senses— for they can help us to relax and tune in to the wider currents of knowing and feeling.
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The breath is a helpful friend in this work, for it connects the inside with the outside, revealing our intimate and total dependence on the world around us.
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Our bodies pick up signals that our minds may refuse to register.
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Your senses are real; they connect you with your world; you can trust them.
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“Open your eyes and look in the mirror.”
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Even in Honoring Our Pain, we are reminded to be thankful— for the chance to speak the suffering, and for each other.
Chapter 7: Honoring Our Pain for the World
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to choose to be in love means to have a mountain inside of you,
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You will have no protection from the world’s pain because it will be your own.
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“What we most need to do is to hear within ourselves the sounds of the Earth crying.”
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We do not try to inspire or instill these feelings in people; compassion— the capacity to suffer with— already flows in us like an underground river.
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With half-suppressed anger, I tend to swing out and do something impetuous and ignorant, but a fully-felt, grounded, familiar anger can move me through a life-time commitment to make things better.
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acknowledging our pain for the world validating it as a wholesome response letting ourselves experience this pain feeling OK about expressing it to others recognizing how widely it is shared by others understanding that it springs from our caring and connectedness
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So don’t you apologize for the tears you shed or the rage you feel about what’s happening to our living world. They are just the other face of your belonging.
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Please tell the Prophecy only if you have received it directly as an oral teaching.
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Before you stands someone living in a beautiful, fragile and poisoned planet.
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We can face this together. We must not let our common danger separate us. Let it bond us. Keep breathing
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Allow your awareness to open to the real possibility that this person will play a pivotal role in the Great Turning to a life-sustaining civilization.
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They have the gifts, the strengths, the motivation.
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respect for the web of life is our birthright, it evokes both sorrow for its loss and a yearning for its return.
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The web of life, so revered by Seattle, lets this truth-telling become redemptive, because it both owns the grief and opens us to possibilities of change and healing.
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Guilt tends to close us down. Instead, as each name is read, let people take the opportunity silently to honor the beauty and wisdom of that unique, irreplaceable species.
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As we relate to what is happening to our world, concern and compassion are not all we feel. There is fed-upness too, even some callous indifference. To be whole, to be present and real, we need to acknowledge those responses as well.
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To be able to embrace our suffering and not pull back in denial or defense is a gift and one that is transforming. It pushes us, stretching our hearts to be able to hold all of life’s experience, not just the good or the joyful, but the difficult and the painful.
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And, in so doing, we get to experience the great paradox of opening to the suffering, which is the opening to more life and joy and love and compassion.
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The very ground of this mandala is hope. If we didn’t have hope, we wouldn’t be here.
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The Truth Mandala is not for lectures or reports, but for direct and simple expression of our pain for world.
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Our sorrow is in equal measure love. We only mourn what we deeply care for. “Blessed are they that mourn.” In speaking fear, you also show the trust and courage it takes to speak it, in a fear-phobic society. The anger we express has its source in our passion for justice. And as to this bowl, its emptiness is to be honored, too. To be empty allows space for the new to arise.
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The seed syllable AH in Sanskrit stands for what has not yet been spoken and all the voices not yet heard.
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People confessed, not their sins, but their sorrows. This had the effect of creating emotional solidarity.
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Here the dread, rage and grief we express are not ours alone; given our interconnections in the web of life, the tears we shed could also be those of an Afghan mother, a street child, a hunted whale.
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We use language not only to communicate, but to protect ourselves, distracting others’ and our own attention from what is painful.
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it felt good to have my sense of hopelessness become palpable.
Chapter 8: Seeing With New Eyes
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The very distress that, when we hid it, seemed to separate us from other people, now uncovers our connective tissue.
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parinamana— turning over— and described as filled with jubilation and dedication to the welfare of all.
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This conceptual framework, furthermore, helps us understand the ultimately suicidal nature of a growth-driven industrialized economy.
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The Industrial Growth Society cannot be sustained.
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it is destroying the biological and ecological systems on which all life depends.
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a. Unlimited economic growth. Nothing in the universe grows endlessly without limits.
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b. Maximizing profit. When one variable in a system, e.g. profit, consistently trumps all others, the system cannot stay in balance, goes into overshoot and heads toward eventual collapse.
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c. Externalizing costs and blocking feedback. In order to maximize profit, ecological and human costs of production are off-loaded to third parties, such as taxpayers and the natural world. This distorts both perceptions and accounting of a corporation’s impact. It blocks the feedback that any system needs in order to know the effects of its behavior.
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Incapacity to receive and register feedback is ultimately suicidal.
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d. Top-down power. The worldview underlying the Industrial Growth Society sees reality in terms of separate entities, which are in linear, hierarchical and competitive relation with each other. Hence power has been understood as power over and win/ lose, an assumption that breeds insatiable wants (see Chapter 3).
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perceive once again the interdependence of all things and build a Life-Sustaining Society upon that understanding.
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a. Power is understood as mutual and synergistic, arising from interaction and generating new possibilities and capacities within the limits of biosphere.
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b. A life-sustaining economy does not alter the integrity and balance of natural systems through technological innovations, such as genetic or geo-engineering.
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c. The goal of economic activity is not the profit of a few, but sufficiency for all, now and into the future.
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d. Feedback is essential for accessing the true costs of our behaviors and our responsibility for any harm they incur.
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e. Humans are seen as both unique and inseparable from our matrix, the web of life; our genuine self-interest includes that of other beings and the living body of Earth.
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The global crisis is at root a crisis in perception.
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Remember that you are not trying to convince people. The only questions you should try to answer are those seeking clarification of what you said. Your role as guide is not to resolve people’s doubts, but to offer food for thought and room for sharing insights.
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When you contrast worldviews, keep the focus on their psychological and behavioral effects instead of trying to disprove one theory and prove another.
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that life is composed not of separate entities so much as of the relations between them 2. these relations allow life to self-organize
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The self-regulation of open systems requires constant internal activity.
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It is a brave and generous act to make room in your mind for another’s experience and to lend them your voice;
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the uniqueness of the human species in the cosmos 2. our long evolutionary journey 3. the uniqueness of each individual and of each personal history 4. the intricacy and beauty of the human organism 5. its universality, linking us to other humans around the globe 6. and its vulnerability
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The world of sanity and decency that lies ahead will be built by hands like this one.
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Now before you begin, bow to your partner— and to the essential mystery at the core of this being.
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The three sides symbolize the three fetters that hold the ego together: craving, hatred and delusion.
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the self-centeredness that creates our suffering is not substantially and permanently real.
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This adulation is important because egos love to be admired.
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the bodhisattva does not seek enlightenment in order to exit from this world, but turns back from the gates of nirvana, having vowed to return again and again to be of help to all beings.
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Spiritual traditions affirm that true liberation arises when we can fully own the particulars of our lives, seeing and accepting all that has shaped who we are now.
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The challenges take many forms— from nuclear weapons and climate chaos, to mass extinctions and billions of people sinking into poverty— but one thing is clear. A quantum leap in consciousness is required if life is to continue on Earth. Hearing this forces us to consider whether or not to return and take birth as humans, bringing everything we’ve ever learned about courage and community. This is a major decision. And it is a hard decision because there is no guarantee that we will remember why we came back, or that we won’t regret it at moments, or that we will succeed in our mission. Furthermore, we will feel alone because we’ll be arriving at different times, different places, in different colors and circumstances, and we probably won’t even recognize each other.
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You can’t take birth as a generic human, but only as a unique human shaped by particular circumstances. Step into these circumstances now, with awareness of how they will help prepare you for the mission you are coming to perform.
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“How did you first let your heart be broken?”
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We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return.
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Hear us, humans. This is our world, too. And we’ve been here a lot longer than you. Yet now our days are numbered because of what you are doing. Be still for once and listen.
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For all their machines and apparent power, the humans now are frightened. They feel overwhelmed by the momentum of the forces they have unleashed. It does not serve our survival for them to panic or give up, for truly our life is in their hands. If they can awaken to their place in the web of life, they will change their ways. What strengths and gifts can each of us give them to help them now?
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the gifts each life-form has given are already present within us by virtue of the web of life.
Chapter 9: Deep Time — Reconnecting with Past and Future Generations
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Growth Society radically alter our experience of time, subjecting us to frenetic speeds and severing our felt connection with past and future generations.
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We have lost time as a biologically measurable experience.
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Our culture’s readiness to demolish treasures of the past— and to permanently poison the aquifers the future ones will need— reveals a pathetically shrunken sense of time and a pathological denial of its continuity.
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to intervene in the Industrial Growth Society, we can’t avoid falling into its tempo.
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Be with us now all you who have gone before, you our ancestors and teachers. You who walked and loved and faithfully tended this Earth, be present to us now that we may carry on the legacy you bequeath us. Aloud and silently in our hearts we say your names and see your faces
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All you with whom we live and work on this endangered planet, be with us now. Fellow humans as well as brothers and sisters of other species, call forth our collective will and wisdom. Aloud and silently we say your names and picture your faces.
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You who will come after us on this Earth, be with us now. It is for your sakes, too, that we work to heal our world. We cannot picture your faces or say your names— you have none yet— but we feel the reality of your claim on life. It helps us to be faithful in the work that must be done, so that there will be for you, as there was for our ancestors, blue sky, fruitful land, clear waters.
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Gather with us now in this hour. Join with us now in this place.
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So we, with these hands, are grandchildren of tree and sun and wind as well.
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Better to say too little than too much. You’re not giving a history lesson; you’re opening vistas for the imagination.
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You come from an unbroken line of survivors and each has gifts to bestow. Open your arms and hands to receive these gifts; gather them in.
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Take their physical endurance… take gifts of the one with the courage to lead, sending out scouts, choosing the way to go, keeping an eye on the little ones, the aging ones, those heavy with child; keeping the group together.
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Take the gifts of the storytellers around the fire at night… those who watched how the stars moved, so clear, so mysterious.
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Walking with these ancestors, harvest their keen senses— their observant eyes, their knowing fingers gathering leaves and roots for fever and for childbirth. Harvest the knowledge of the healers and midwives….
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Harvest the wild knowing of the shaman who dances between realities, between seen and unseen worlds, and brings back instructions for the people…. Harvest the beating of the drum and the chants as we buried the dead and welcomed the newborn
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Walking up through the centuries, see trust in the eyes of the children, the passion in the eyes of the young…. See the wisdom in the eyes of the aged…. Hear the laughter of two young girls splashing in a stream…. Harvest our kinship with the other animals, watching and learning their ways— our teachers, our totems
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Receive the ingenuity of your ancestors: making tools, weaving cloth, fashioning homes…. Know their love of beauty, music of a flute coming from the hills, hands carving jewelry, feet dancing on the packed earth….
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And people come to be owned as well as the land…. And some of your ancestors are slaveholders and some are slaves…. All have gifts for you to harvest, gifts of endurance, gifts of responsibility, gifts of sorrow….
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And among them, those who rise up to claim the human right for dignity, for food…. Harvest the gifts of ancestors who sing songs of freedom and fight for justice…. Walk with the ancestors who stay on the land, tilling the fields, generation after generation, knowing the soil and the seasons of growth, times of plenty, times of want. Harvest their gifts….
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Harvest the courage of those who speak out for a fair wage and the right to organize….
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And some of your kin sent to the death camps, and others in charge of them. But they all have gifts for you, if only broken hearts and the plea to be remembered….
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Our worldview can shift when we stop telling ourselves why something can’t happen. By vividly envisioning a hoped-for future, we begin to believe that it is really possible.
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people who approach a problem by imagining it has already been solved tend to be more creative in inventing possible solutions.
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“Though things didn’t look too promising at first, a widespread awakening occurred, and huge numbers of people rose to the challenge of creating the life-sustaining society familiar to the storytellers now.”
Chapter 10: Going Forth
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A heightened awareness of the suffering and dangers besetting our world with a greater respect for our capacity to face them without dodging, denying or numbing out
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An upsurge of energy as we unblock feedback loops by accepting our pain for the world, reframing it as compassion
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A wider sense of identity as a unique and integral part of the living body of Earth
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A growing appreciation for community— with each other, with our brother-sister species, with our ancestors and future generations. We feel supported by them as well as accountable to them
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A stronger motivation to join with others in service to life; confidence in the power of our solidarity
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A fresh sense of the diversity of our gifts and of the many interdependent roles to be played in the Great Turning
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Hence, gratitude for who we are as individuals, with all our personal strengths and limitations— even our wounds— and for our desire to be of use
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Commitment to goals extending beyond our individual lifetime; liberation from dependence on immediate, measurable results
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Gladness in being alive now, in this epochal moment on Earth; a sense of the privilege of taking part in the Great Turning
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We need to worry less about doing what is more important, and more about doing whatever we can.
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Those of us who are used to power need to learn to listen as much as we talk, and those with less power need to learn to talk as much as we listen.
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Beware of making assumptions about the other person’s views because they are a certain age, dressed in a certain way, come from a particular region, class or ethnicity or hold a particular job.
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Find common ground before examining differences. If you begin by ascertaining areas of agreement (e.g. “Nuclear war is possible” or “We need clean air and water for our children”), both parties can trust each other more and proceed to see where their views diverge.
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Then offering the information that has led to your view can fill a gap in the other’s knowledge and lead to reappraisal of old assumptions.
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Share feelings as well as facts. Facts are debatable; feelings are not. We can report our own feelings with varying degrees of accuracy and honesty, but they are not open to question. Sharing your feelings invites other people to share theirs as well, moving the conversation away from argument and towards mutual listening.
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Share your personal experience. The facts and figures we cite take on more reality for people when we describe what led us to the views we hold. Personal experience, like feelings, is not open to debate.
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Trust the other person’s ability to learn and change over time. Even if the person seems entrenched in a contrary position, change may be stirring within. And you may never know if change has occurred as a result of your discussion, or what other information the person may receive from others to add to yours.
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See yourself and the other within the larger context: your shared humanity, the stresses of the Industrial Growth Society, the long, uneven journey to a life-sustaining culture. This breeds patience and goodwill.
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Remember to hold the other person and yourself with compassion, even when you seem to find no common ground. We can never know what suffering and hardship might underlie another’s seemingly intractable position. You can “agree to disagree” with a measure of equanimity.
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Our leaders got confused. So we are all leaders now. They told us there was nothing we could do. They were wrong. When we tell ourselves There’s nothing we can do, we are wrong.… We’re all making the soup we’re all eating. We’re all weaving the cloth we’re all wearing.
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to be open to the horror and awfulness, to let it all flow through me and to let it change into what I choose to make happen.
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look around your life to see the beings who have been your teachers in some way. Some you may live and work with now. Some may have lived a long time ago, but their qualities do not die; they live on.
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Even in an uncertain world, we can still choose where we put our minds and how we respond to circumstances and events.
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that each of us has access to inner wisdom and (2) that this inner light can become clear when a group gives its caring, undivided attention and offers questions instead of advice.
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speak of the qualities they sense in the focus person and the kind of trust they feel in his capacity to make the right choice and take the right action.
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By what right and authority do you think you can solve the mystery of suffering? Just who do you think you are?
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“This is my right to be here; this is my right to seek freedom from endless suffering and inflicting of suffering.”
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We are here for the sake of life. By the authority of our belonging to Earth from the beginning of time, we are here.
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As we go forth in the Great Turning, there are systems and institutions that we will and must challenge. The men and women who serve these structures may appear as our opponents, but they are likely in bondage to our true opponents: institutionalized forms of greed, hatred and delusion.
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Engrossing and fun, they elicit our innate curiosity, raise our sights and widen our horizons, while offering an immediately rewarding experience of community.
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They uncover our capacity to think cogently about big issues of common concern— a capacity that we may not have suspected we had.
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They increase our respect for our self and each other, breaking down barriers of isolation and powerlessness.
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These functions are multiplied when participants, wanting to embody the values that arise, undertake projects together— and the groups become study/ action groups.
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We recommend rotating facilitators, enhancing the group’s sense of shared responsibility.
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Honor the meeting as sacred time and space with a simple ritual at the beginning and end.
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• I vow to myself and to each of you to commit myself daily to the healing of our world and the welfare of all beings.
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• I vow to myself and to each of you to live on Earth more lightly and less violently in the food, products and energy I consume.
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• I vow to myself and to each of you to draw strength and guidance from the living Earth, the ancestors, the future beings and our brothers and sisters of all species.
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• I vow to myself and to each of you to support you in your work for the world, and to ask for help when I need it.
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• I vow to myself and to each of you to pursue a daily spiritual practice that clarifies my mind, strengthens my heart and supports me in observing these vows.
Chapter 11: The Work that Reconnects with Children and Teens
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At the third-grade level, he found a marked sense of confusion, hopelessness and fear of abandonment. Some had frequent nightmares.
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By fifth-grade, children had more information and felt anger at the stupidity and hypocrisy of the adult world.
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By seventh grade, this anger turned to cynicism and gallows humor.
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In high school, the emotional reactions became more complicated, because these teenagers faced critical choices about college, careers and families, but the shadow of The Bomb robbed these choices of reality and meaning.
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The young people of the seventies began to erect defenses of indifference and defiance.
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Clearly, adult silence, no matter how well motivated, does not serve our children.
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When we provide the opportunity for kids to talk about what’s in their minds and hearts, we need to listen and accept whatever they share, whether personal or global in scope.
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“Children have a natural bond of intimacy with every living thing.”
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“It made a difference for that one.”
Chapter 12: Learning with Communities of Color
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our pain for the world gets viewed in terms of a personal pathology, rather than as a reason for reassessment and change.
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This pattern tends to shame and silence the individual. It fosters a fear-driven, obedient citizenry while promoting a medical model for treatment, in profitable service to the pharmaceutical industry.
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Our cultural identities inform how we move in the world, whether consciously or not.
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Some of us have lost it under the pressure of assimilation; others had it stolen from us by force, through colonization, conquest and slavery.
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Words like privilege, racism, oppression, power, inclusion and exclusion can be charged for us, depending on our histories. By deciding what we mean by them as we work together, we eliminate much of the tension that arises from thinking we’re talking about the same things but actually talking past each other.
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Different is just different, not better or worse.
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“power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
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Orenda; the thread that moves among all beings and between the worlds of earth and spirit. It’s all one system!
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People who were enslaved and their descendants have the experience of being taken out of their world, stripped of their identity as members of deep and rich cultural communities and being made to believe they were/ are less important and valuable than others.
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Most Indigenous people I know recognize that we are not destroying her; we are destroying ourselves. When she’s really at risk of dying, she will shake us loose.
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we all can reintegrate our ancestral wisdom even as we heal our ancestral trauma.
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work on which we can bet our lives… and that of our Mother.
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I had found it much easier to connect to the other-than-human world than to humans. In opening up this doorway, I have been able to hold myself with more compassion, and that compassion spreads out to all humans.
Chapter 13: Meditations for the Great Turning
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We can open to the pain of the world in confidence that it can neither shatter nor isolate us, for we are not objects that can break. We are resilient patterns within a vaster web of knowing.
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when we accept our world’s pain as the price of our caring, it naturally flows into action, without drama or self-righteousness.
Appendix A: Chief Seattle’s Message
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If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit.