blog017: Welcome To Archearchy

Not that it matters but Marion and I spent Christmas 2011 exploring the home town of my mother's ancestors: Prague.



Every bakery in Prague offered Vonocka. ("vanotchka")

What is Vonocka? A slightly sweet braided yeast bread often made with split almonds and bits of candied fruit.  

How does Vonocka taste? Mmmm!

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During the past four days here at Tempelhof twenty-eight men and women from Europe and the USA co-created what I regard as an astonishing Possibility Lab.

"This was the most amazing Lab of all!" Marion said. But then she added, "I notice I'm saying this after each Lab these days... I wonder what is happening..."  

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Definitely something is happening, also for me personally. Two weeks ago I wrote to our circle of friends: I woke up this morning feeling particularly happy. Why? Because, while I was alone at home in Tempelhof doing my annual liver cleanse procedure, Thomas and Anne Schmid were leading Expand The Box over in the Tempelhof training room, Michaela Kaiser and Daniel Nüsser were leading Expand The Box in Bielefeld, and Marion was off to Wertheim with fourteen other women having a Women’s Archearchy Research Weekend.

When I recognized what was happening I danced a little jig around the office. I was celebrating that human thoughtware was being significantly upgraded to radical responsibility in at least three different locations around Germany simultaneously this past weekend and I wasn’t doing any of it!

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On Sunday of the PLab, after being with the 27 other participants for four days, it came to me as a four-body experience that there are already enough Possibility Managers on planet Earth creating and sustaining the radically responsible context of an archearchal culture that it is self sustaining. It can now carry itself. Further unfolding of archearchy will occur under its own momentum.

(More about archearchy, the culture that emerges after patriarchy, can be found in the book Directing The Power Of Conscious Feelings, also in German under the title Die Kraft des Bewussten Fühlens.)

Possibility Making at a Possibility Lab

The basis for next culture has grown solid enough that I can get off my personal lone-ranger campaign that I’ve been riding all my life and actually be received into a culture that understands and accepts and respects the stuff I came here to deliver. There is a global team at work (Portugal, Nederlands, Switzerland, China, USA, France). You are probably on that team.

Up to now I had been working through radical reliance on a message from a Chinese restaurant fortune cookie:

Be patient. Your proposals will be remembered.

Thoughtmap for Opening Your Pearl

Now my (im)patience is being replaced by a novel experience: belonging.

I can simply be a person in this archearchal culture, in relationship, doing my work. I no longer have to function as the reality-hacking edgework-revolutionary often regarded in groups as a dangerous problem. 

In response to my Sunday afternoon realization the PLab participants performed an improvised nonverbal ritual of receiving me into archearchy.

The ritual began when I stepped into the center of the room, stretched out both my arms, closed my eyes, and waited. In seconds I was embraced wholly, without reservation, from feet to head, front, back, hands, face. I was warmly welcomed on all sides, and tears long restrained burst out with sobs of relief loud and long from deep within me. Man. It was wonderful. And it went on for a long time. Long enough for me to get it.

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A Welcoming To Archearchy

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Being welcomed inside of a culture after trekking in the wilderness for decades, sometimes lonely, sometimes lost, sometimes nearly hopeless, was quite close to unbelievable.

I had been on a seemingly endless self-appointed research expedition to formulate the language, distinctions, tools and processes at the core of archearchal culture. I was creating and documenting ways for others to cross bridges to get to sustainable adult culture too. For me to suddenly find that there are already enough people co-creating archearchy on a daily basis in their own lives in different places in the world, enough so that the culture won’t immediately vanish if I died, and to recognize the possibility of dropping my long-practiced survival ways of the outsider personality and to be welcomed in and received as one of the people in archearchy, this is quite an extraordinary and transformative experience. I highly recommend it. I am blown away, and very glad, and relieved, and excited about what comes next, and I thank everyone from the red pill of all four of my bodies for holding and navigating this process for me and for being part of the team. This was definitely one of my most important initiations.

Sunday was also my 60^th birthday. Just after the ritual of being received into next culture Marion took me by the hand and led everyone into a transformed dining room, the floor now carpeted with cushions, stirring music coming from a CD player, a table ablaze with 60 tea lights sitting within an infinity symbol created out of 28 cans of American Root Beer soda (which Marion had secretly collected) and five tubs of vanilla ice cream. I hadn't had this in over ten years. And there was enough that I could introduce everyone to personally experience the ambrosia that the gods of Gremlin food have named Root Beer Float!  I think you can believe me when I say this was the best birthday party I ever had in my life.

(The second best birthday was back in college when I was "kidnapped" by my friends and left naked in the middle of the night in a sleeping bag by a lake after being blindfolded and skinny dipping with and being kissed by one or more unknown women... but that's a story for another time.)

blog006 Grow Up Or Die, But How?

27 June 2010

Carolyn Baker, an astute alternative-news analyst, and author of Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, recently emailed that she published a commentary on my new book. A few days later I clicked back to her website and got the ominous error message: "Website Expired."

A chill went down my spine.
"What?" my mind asked blankly.
I was stunned.
I quickly wrote Carolyn an email to ask what was happening and if I could do anything to support her. My email bounced back to me, unreceived.
The panic of powerlessness grew. I wrote to a couple of her friends who might know what was going on.... nothing.

A day passed. Two more. Then Carolyn sent an email. Whew!!... It turned out she was switching servers - a process that can take longer than instantaneous. The "expired" message came from chasing her website into internet Bardo zones. "Thank God she is okay," was all I thought. I found myself with tears of relief.

Since then the incident reverberates in my system. "What was actually scaring me?"

So far I have two possibilities.

1. Shock. Since I only know Carolyn (and many others) through internet connections I do not know what is going on in her or their daily lives. If I knew Carolyn personally I would also be more aware of her state of health and well being. Now I only know her as an amazing writer. When Juan Santos, another such internet friend, suddenly died in January 2009, I had a similar shock. I was not prepared for Juan to disappear from my life so suddenly. We still had important things to talk about. Same with Carolyn.

2. The Front Lines. The other possibility is this: What if she had died? What's my fear about then? I think it must be fear of getting closer to the front lines. There is a war going on between conscious evolution and business-as-usual. It is an internal war that involves practicing with discipline, paying attention to your attention, growing the matrix that holds consciousness, and taking strong clear actions that are consistent with what is actually needed. Certain people are on the front lines taking such actions. To some degree I am hoping these other people are handling it themselves. But what if so many frontliners have already died that it is already my turn? What if the front lines are at my front door? Then in this moment, these very words are the front lines and you are there with me.

(Some of Carolyn's links are still inactive, so I reproduce her blog in its entirety below. At the end I add a few live links both to Carolyn's blog, and to the Beware the Psychopath, My Son article she refers to.)
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GROW UP OR DIE, BUT HOW? By Carolyn Baker
http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/1681/1
Wednesday, 16 June 2010

A commentary on Clinton Callahan's Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings

In May 2008 I was approached by psychotherapist, Clinton Callahan, offering me an article entitled "Beware of The Psychopath, My Son" which asserts that people in places of power in the systems of empire are often devoid of conscience and therefore have participated in setting industrial civilization on a self-destructive course that cannot be altered by rational dialog or appeals to altruism within those individuals. Callahan's thesis brilliantly illumines the aberrant behavior of politicians and corporate CEO's, offering a perspective that makes sense of their anti-social and anti-ecosystem behavior.

More recently, Callahan has published Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings: Living Your Own Truth (Hohm Press, 2010) This book is nothing less than an encyclopedia of emotional healing, offering a "biblio-boot camp" of preparation for the collapse of industrial civilization and the Next Culture that might emerge from it. I highly recommend the book, and although I have not experienced any Next Culture trainings, they appear to complement all that I have written and taught about the inner transition necessary for navigating the coming chaos.

In recent years, writers such as myself and Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Richard Heinberg, Michael Meade, Malidoma Some, Joanna Macy, and others have written extensively about the infantalization of the citizens of empire and have suggested that rites of passage or an initiatory process is needed in order for us to become responsible adults who accept and live within the limits of our planet. Callahan adds:

Modern culture is a child level responsibility culture, far below adult level. Modern society does not require that a person grow up prior to being given (or allowed to take) positions of responsibility...Our society makes messes without having consciousness of, or taking responsibility for, the consequences of those messes.

The example Callahan gives is the corporate practice of "externalizing costs", but a more timely and poignant example is quite simply, the worst manmade environmental disaster in the history of the United States, created by the BP Corporation, now turning the Gulf of Mexico into a giant dead zone - an event which will soon have unfathomable ramifications globally. In a child's world, there are no worries about cleaning up messes. Caretakers (governments and taxpayers) exist in order to provide the child everything it wants and needs, and if messes are made in the process, then it is the caretaker's job to clean them up.

Yet few who have addressed infantalization have offered a specific path for the journey from it to adulthood. While Callahan has no formula for this, he asserts that the principal rite of passage from emotional immaturity to maturity is the capacity to consciously, constructively work with one's feelings, directing the power of feelings in service of the entire earth community. In Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings, he validates what most of us have felt all of our lives regarding our feelings in relation to modern culture, namely that none of them are acceptable.

Many of us have experienced that feeling sadness, fear, or anger in this culture is threatening to others, so we keep those feelings in check, preferring to share them only with trusted others. Yet even joy in the culture of empire is unacceptable.

Recently, I was speaking with a friend who had just returned from a visit with her son who is in his late-twenties and works as an executive with a major transnational corporation. My friend has done a great deal of work on feelings and appropriately expressing them. In a conversation with her son, she verbally expressed her sadness about something in her life, and he responded with, "Could we not have any drama today?" The next day she mentioned feeling angry about something that had nothing to do with her son, at which point, he said, "You know, I'm really tired of your drama."

I share this story because as Callahan clearly demonstrates, the ideal in the culture of empire is a state of numbness. No feelings--sorrow, fear, anger, and even joy, are acceptable. People are esteemed for abiding in a state of numbness which is defined as sane, stable, and even-tempered. While following the recent oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a public outcry for President Obama to become outraged regarding the devastation BP had created, but the ideal perpetuated by political pundits and advisors was for Obama to remain "cool-headed". They and the President knew that any passionate display of any emotion would result in a decrease in popularity and a perception of him as "irrational." The desired and only acceptable state in the culture of empire is numbness, and any variation from it is frequently perceived as "drama."

Curiously, Callahan talks about drama in the book but uses the term "low drama" to describe any action that is designed to avoid responsibility. Actions like this are legion, but we could say that any time we avoid feeling our feelings, we are engaging in low drama because the abdication of responsibility begins with numbness.

The author inspires us with the term "next culture", also the name of his website, and gives us a glimpse of what that culture might look like in terms of how people relate to their feelings and to each other. He uses the term "archearchy" to describe a culture that is not dominated by the masculine principle or the feminine, but by both. As he says, it is "a new and truly sustainable culture, oriented more toward being present and being with, and less toward consuming, owning, having, going, and doing."

Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings is filled with diagrams, charts, illustrative photos, and "maps" which make the book remarkably reader-friendly and beautifully clarify the author's concepts in no-nonsense fashion. My favorite is a map comparing the attributes of modern culture and the next culture which contrasts the essential mottos of both cultures and leaves us with: "Human cultures are so immature. Can you grow up?"

By the time the reader reaches this point in the book he/she will have been given a treasure-trove of tools for boarding the ship of feelings and steering it in the direction of a new culture that cannot be realized without conscious emotional, and I would add, spiritual, preparation. I believe that these tools constitute a profound rite of passage for non-indigenous people and provide a structure for psychospiritual maturation.

The work Callahan offers us doesn't look easy, but it does look amazingly rewarding. The time to begin that work is not when we are in the throes of the collapse of life as we have known it, but now, as we create all manner of lifeboats for navigating inner, as well as outer transition.

Clinton Callahan may be contacted at the Next Culture Research and Training Center at: clinton@nextculture.org .

Last Updated by Carolyn Baker (Wednesday, 16 June 2010)

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Working links:

Grow Up Or Die, But How? by Carolyn Baker
http://worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&cid=183:all-content&id=8017:grow-up-or-die-but-how-carolyn-baker&Itemid=171

http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/13405-grow-up-or-die-but-how-.html

http://www.countercurrents.org/baker170610.htm

http://www.aclimateforchange.org/profiles/blogs/grow-up-or-die-but-how


Beware the Psychopath, My Son by Clinton Callahan
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_clinton__080508_beware_the_psychopat.htm

http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/beware-the-psychopath-my-son/

http://www.endgame.org.uk/2008/05/civilization-as-we-know-it-is-largely-the-creation-of-psychopaths/

blog001 Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings

15 September 2009

I consider whoever reads this blog (meaning you) to be a facilitator of the shift to next culture – or you would not be reading it. As a facilitator of the shift to next culture you are a friend of mine. Whether social entrepreneur or employed by the corporate government, we all start where we are.

Reading is a proven way to weave understanding for holding more consciousness. Each new distinction that you understand widens the territory in which you can think for yourself. This blog only works for me if it contributes to your self-empowered thinking.

Distinctions create clarity. New clarity adds to what is thinkable. By adding to what it thinkable you expand the next culture movement.

I just returned from two weeks at El Cabrito on La Gomera a semi-tropical paradise in the Canary Islands off the north-west coast of Africa. It was paradise in a greater sense than just mango heaven, which it also indisputably was …

…it was paradise in the sense that Marion and I invited anyone who had been to Expand The Box training plus at least one Possibility Lab to come along with us to experiment in the context of next culture.

All told, six others came. After unpacking and taking a swim (where I saw octopus, cuttle fish, flounder and giant sea urchins) we wrote a flyer inviting other El Cabrito guests to investigate interesting life questions with us in a space we spontaneously named: The Dome. From the second day on about eight of us met every evening from 8:00 to 10:00 pm, often with additional morning and/or afternoon sessions.

We had improv theater, global and organizational constellations, resentment clearing in relationship, saying goodbye to people who died before you had a chance to say goodbye to them, getting balls back from childhood abusers, separating mixed fear and sadness feelings, sighting two moons of Jupiter through a telescope, and a wild dancing night. We also designed strategies for the next culture movement. The plan is to bring as many people as possible as quickly as we can into next culture. I think it will work.

On the morning just before we departed Munich for La Gomera, Marion emailed the final German draft corrections for my next book: Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings to Tilman Neubronner of Genius Verlag who published the book in Germany as Die Kraft des bewussten Fühlens. Delivering the finalized manuscript was the climax of a tidal-wave of work. If you can’t read German and can’t wait til spring I recommend Radiant Joy Brilliant Love, also available online through www.hohmpress.com. It explains what archearchy is.

Completing Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings does not mean I’ve stopped writing. I’m a writer. Writers write as relentlessly as sharks swim and bats fly. Actually I was in the middle of writing another book when the inspiration came for DPCF. Now I can get back to writing Next Culture. It needs to come out soon, so I am hoping this open blog dialog with you will speed up the process. I look forward to your ideas, experiences, and further questions.