blog023 Man, Who Are You?

Layers On Soul by Emelie Dupree
www.kunstnet.de

If your self-image is based on what you see when you look in the mirror, your woman is on the way to being very bored.

Sure, it makes sense to think of yourself as hair, skin, meat and bones, with clothes on, a solid, visible personality. After all, there you are in the mirror. You see that reflection with every wrinkle and pimple. The feedback is undeniable. Your own father probably imagined himself to be something very similar. He is your role model.

Think about it. Either you want to be like your father, or you want to be nothing like your father.

Either way makes him your role model!




You look at yourself in the mirror and you think, I am the bread winner. Or you think, I'm failing to be the breadwinner.


Disk of Nothing by Timo Wuerz
www.timowuerz.com

You think, I bring security, stability and protection, or I fail to bring security, stability or protection.

You think, I know the way, I have the answers, or you think, I don't know how it goes because nobody ever cared enough about me to show me.

You think, I am a strong reliable leader, or you think, I am weak and ineffective as a husband, father, leader, I am not reliable.



We ongoingly know ourselves to be successfully fulfilling our self image, or failing to live up to our self image. And that is exactly what makes us boring to women, because we insist on seeing ourselves as someone who must be knowable.


Possibility Lab
www.nextculturetrainings.org

If we can be known, then we should know who we are, right? Do you know who you are?

If we can be known, then we must exhibit predictable behavior, hold steadfast opinions, maintain old decisions, not change our tastes. Herein lies the conflict. We imagine that we should identify ourselves as the content of our lives, and as soon as we identify ourselves as content we are killable.

For example, as soon as our woman has an opinion that is different from ours we think we are supposed to defend our position stronger than she defends hers or we are not men.

As soon as our child disagrees or argues with us we are forced to prove ourselves right or win by force, or else we are not the parent.

In neither case does the idea cross our mind to change the game.



By now most men have stopped reading this article. Yet this is exactly the point where it becomes interesting.

We stop reading because we have already paid full price to join the patriarchy. We have exchanged our souls for the illusion of safety and power defined by the hierarchy of godfathers. We cannot comprehend that we could regard ourselves as anything other than what we have always been: needy, greedy, sucking little boys, chasing after mommy for the goodies, trying to one-up each other for favors, being exactly what looks out at us from the mirror each morning, with emotional justifications to match.


WHAT ELSE?
If you are knowable then you can be projected upon. You are a target for expectations. Expectations kill intimacy. One unfulfilled expectation is enough to generate resentment. Then whenever you touch her you trigger her resentment. She doesn't feel you; she feels her resentment. It is a mess.

I am saying that you, as a man, can have a completely different quality of self image. There are many additional options to play with. Each format opens an entirely new world of relationship with your present, with your destiny, and with your woman.

What if who you are is not what you see in the mirror? What if that thing is only a vehicle or antenna for who you are?

For most of us this seems like an absolutely insane line of inquiry. What else could there possibly be than what we see in the mirror?

What else indeed!



Emerging by Sharan Ragan
www.facebook.com/sharronragan

Below is a list of alternative options to the question: What else could I be?

Regarding the options on the list below as concepts or as good ideas cements you into your mind, which makes you even more boring that being flesh and bones.

The proposals listed below are not concepts. They are invitations to experimental action.

Each experimental orientation starts with the word "I". But the experiment is not about "I". The experiment is about what is there instead of the "I". So forget the "I" part. The "I" just gets in the way.




NEW ABILITIES
Shifting from representing yourself as a knowable, visible, solid, stable man who brings home the bacon, to being one of the spaces listed below will involve going through some initiatory processes and developing some new abilities.

For example:

You need the ability to declare what is - which only comes after the ability to accept what is, because you first need to start where you are with an accurate assessment of current reality before you can shift the details into something else, otherwise you are merely another fool in a fantasy world.

You need the ability to go nonlinear and make right-angle turns at light speed - which only comes after seven to ten deep healing and growing-up processes to change your relationship to what happened to you in your childhood and some past lives (www.nextculturetrainings.org) so that you can lighten your load and drop energetic, conceptual and emotional baggage.

You cannot change what happened to you in the past because it happened in the past. But what happened is not what determines how you show up now. You show up now according to the tricks you figured out for surviving through what happened to you in the past. However, you already survived, but you have not gone through the initiation of recapitulation, so you still function reflexively in your survival strategy. You are trapped in what was once a very good plan.

RECAPITULATING
Recapitulation is systemmatic neutral transformative introspection.

Recapitulation distinguishes your survival reaction triggers from what is actually happening to you right now so you get immediate new options for behavior.

Recapitulation springs you from an ancient prison that you long ago forgot you locked yourself into.

Recapitulation starts with new thoughtmaps of feelings so you can be painfully clear about what happened to you in the past without being a victim of it anymore. Then you can freely detect what meanings you gave to what happened back then, and decide if you want to keep or change those meanings in order to reclaim your power of present attention, your inalienable authority, your unique contributory talents, and your free spirit.

This takes efforts, of course. It requires re-prioritizing the energy that you may presently be using up trying to represent yourself as being a "sane" and "successful" "man," as if you knew what those things are...


EXPERIMENTS
Each experiment below invites you to center yourself in a non-knowable self-image. Choose one and use it for a full week (or the rest of your life) without ever shifting back to being something knowable: (Remember, forget the "I". )

I am a distinction-framework, establishing spaces of adventure.

I am a map inventing new territories to explore.

I am stage lights illuminating high-drama.

I am a space navigator for three worlds.

I am a context of radical responsibility.

I am a place of delightfulness, clarity, and transformation.

I am a nonlinear gameworld pirate.

I am a source of unending humor and possibility.

I am a gateway to evolution.

I am a space of mystery.

I am nothing - the kind of  nothing so big that everything fits into it.

Forget the "I".

I am not here to provide you with safety, predictability, peace, calm, and comfort.

I am not an emotional garbage can. I am not a doormat. I am not a good boy. 

I am an ongoing nasty question, noticing without attaching meaning, attentively here, in a very small now, without believing my own reactive stories and incomplete emotions from my past.

I am the space through which a unique set of bright principles can do their work in the world.

Starmaking by NASA JPL Caltech Artist R. Hurt

And you might be also...

If you connect the origin of your self-image to a new source, then your woman might have something a little more interesting to play with.

She's probably been waiting a long time for you to get this...

blog018: Thrive Where You Are

Speaking of creating and navigating evolutionary experiences, it is my opinion that we need Trainers now more now than ever.

(You probably heard me say this before...)

(Yeah, but this time I mean it! )

There is a difference between Educators and Trainers:  

• Educators provide information in classes to learn methods for doing what is already known.
• Trainers provide possibilities in trainings to build capacity for creating what is not yet known.

Perhaps you have been functioning as an Educator but your true calling is Trainer?

Here is one way to reclaim your true calling: Possibility Trainer Program.

Serving humanity as a Trainer is not an easy job. (For example, read my article: We Trainers Have Betrayed Our Clients.)

<>

Conscious Evolution Needs Trainers





 

Hatching Trainers is a challenge. Initializing nonlinear leadership intelligence in a human being requires exposing them to ongoing transformational habitats that provide extremely diverse conditions, as opposed to the crushingly normalizing conditions such as in ordinary school.

If your calling is to serve others as some kind of Trainer, don’t be surprised when the universe provides you with extreme conditions to work in. The universe needs you to unfold into your entire repertoire of capacities to do the jobs that are already on your bench (even the jobs you are pretending are not there…) You need challenges with which to practice.

So even if your circumstances seem extreme, the circumstance are not an excuse for feeling victimized. They are an invitation to practice nonlinear creation. They are an invitation to thrive where you are, and to train others how to do the same.

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..."  

------------------------------------------------------------------

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!

--------------------------------------------------

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.

<> <> <> <>

A Welcoming To Archearchy

I

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.)

blog013 Behaving Powerless?

  

Lee Lozowick

A third of a year has whizzed by since my last blog.

It's unbelievable.

A lot has been happening in the life turbulating around me.

It's so much so fast and so amazing that I must stop for a few minutes and tell you about some of it.

  

To begin with, my teacher Lee Lozowick died 16 November 2010 in his own bed in Prescott, Arizona, from a long and nasty disease.

I wasn't there, but they say he died with a big smile on his face.

What a way to go!

2. If I were to write a SPARK right now it would say this: Behaving as if you are powerless against a system is indistinguishable from being a designer and perpetrator of that system. (See David Hazen's blog below.)

3. Brad Blanton's evolutionary new book is out! The Korporate Kannibal Kookbook. It is scathingly clear and to the point:

The Empire Is Consuming Us

(either we eat them or they eat us, so let's get cooking).

He means it.

The interesting thing is that if you turn the book over and read the back cover, what you will find is:

Yep. Ain't that sumpin'.

4. At Next Culture Research & Training Center we completed 24 videos for our 2010 Adventskalender. The whole thing is spoken in German except the parts where I speak (or fail to speak...), for example:

#9 in the final advertisement http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5o0CTaCLC0

#10 The Cowboy Liver Cleanse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmyaVpADBbY

#17 Tante Calinta's Brownies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTTLTQzOA10

plus English is also spoken in #20 by Ross Jackson (founder of the Global Ecovillage Network) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEnYxhJKmw0

5. I recently got to connect with David Diamond, head joker at the Headlines Theatre in Vancouver, where they do this incredible inquiry on stage with the audience called Us and Them.

 David writes: A new revolution is required on the planet. Somehow, we must find a way to let go of our mechanistic need for certainty - our need to know that "we" are right and entitled and therefore "they" must be wrong and not entitled. We must find a way to relax into the certainty of UNcertainty - to know that in whatever geography, whatever politic, whatever context, there is no certain "them"; there is only an ever-evolving us.

David has a new book out called Theatre for Living: the art and science of community-based dialog. I am just beginning to read it, and it feels excellent.




For Sale +49-89-74949473



6. Our house is up for sale.

It's a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath duplex located south of Munich, close to the Höllriegelskreuth SBahn 7 station. The house will be connected to city geothermal heat this year, has close-by groceries, gas, and a natural pathway along the Isar River to the beautiful little village of Pullach, where Café Dolce serves the best haselnut gelato in the whole world! Really!

Where are we moving?



Tempelhof, Germany



7. ...to Tempelhof, an ancient little castle being transformed into a sustainable culture research ecovillage. http://www.schloss-tempelhof.org/ (the website is all in German...)



Connecting to Tempelhof Land Dec '10



Our 31 hectares of farmland in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, is registered as a Transition Initiative and an ecovillage, and will be the new headquarters for Next Culture Research & Training Center.

More about this later, I'm sure...

8. I found a new ally in David Hazen's blog Victim, Rebel, or Co-Creator? from 30 November 2010:

http://davidhazen.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/victim-rebel-or-co-creator/ He writes:

I do not submit. I have the power to create an entirely different social structure. I have the power to create a world that works for all, and it does not depend upon the domination system to disappear for me to engage in this creative act, although if I persist in exercising my creativity I am absolutely certain that the domination system shall eventually collapse, implode, and die because it will be seen clearly as dysfunctional. This time, there will be no blood, the military-industrial complex will simply dry up and blow away, useless and unwanted.

No struggle, no rebellion, no acts of violence are necessary to destroy the domination system. The dominators are already in trouble and worried about their own survival, and they would be greatly reassured of their power if someone would only rise up in rebellion against it. How reassured will they be when we simply walk away from the battlefield? The presence of millions of culturally creative revolutionaries everywhere on the planet is the beginning of that walk, and is now unstoppable.

If you have any doubts about that,
ask Captain Jack Sparrow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ_1ZZSNFuQ

blog012 Shining Resilience

I have been hit with an inspiration sparkle bomb. I don't feel right keeping it all to myself, so I hereby share it with you.

The sparkle bomb comes as the September issue of YES! Magazine, themed: A Resilient Community, plus these two videos I found through Shareable.net about collaborative consumerism.

Bingo! Talk about positive relevancy!

Such a joy!

What inspires me so much is how many radically different possibilities the videos and the YES! team of editors communicates when compared to mainstream media's manipulated 1984 / Brave New World version of the world. It's as different as life and death.

Yeah. So which version of reality are you choosing to live in moment-to-moment? Which version am I choosing?



Collaborative Consumerism Video



What I feel glad about is having real options to choose from, invest in, experiment with, and express our creative essence through. Having options to choose from... how ecstatic! (Shopping is fun, neh?)

Here's part of the YES! team's menu:
Pioneers of the New Normal
Meet the Radical Homemakers
Why Build Resilience
In the Face of this Truth
10 Resilient Ideas
and especially, Skill Up, Party Down, stories about the Transition Town movement, groups of people addressing the big problems of our time, and doing it with optimism and a sense of celebration.                          Why?

“Emerging at the other end, we will not be the same as we were; we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled and, ultimately, wiser.”

- Rob Hopkins, Originator of the Transition Town movement, author of The Transition Handbook.

  

Not bad, eh?

Go YES!

blog011 Connecting is Subversive

A ten thousand year civilization of patriarchal empire has domesticated a third of the world’s population and enslaved most of the rest of us through increasingly invasive means of disconnection. The most sustainable (and subversive) thing you can do is connect. Connect with yourself. Connect with other people. Connect with the Earth.

Think of modern school where students are divided according to age. In sustainable school the older children naturally teach younger children, deepening their own understanding. Modern school taught us to cut off from our imagination and submit our creative intelligence to an all knowing authority. Alone we competed against others for grades. In sustainable school students succeed by helping each other learn. Imagine that.

Modern media purposely disconnects us from reasonless self acceptance, self knowledge and self satisfaction. Subliminal doubts are implanted that can only be quenched when you buy mouth wash, life insurance, and the right car to look sexy. By disconnecting from mainstream media you will more easily refrain from giving your center away to authority figures. You will refuse to allow another person to represent your voice or your vote. You get your life back.

Modern culture teaches us to fear our neighbors, fear strangers, and pray that a mighty military force can protect an unconscionable way of life. But quivering in this childish victimhood disconnects you from fulfilling your true adult destiny. Deep inside there burns a longing to live the life you were born for, which always turns out to be some form of service to humanity.

To connect with your destiny, with your neighbors, with strangers, and with the Earth, bring together a circle. Regularly hold space for ninety minute dialogs among fifteen to twenty people. Pass around a talking piece so that each person holding it can speak uninterrupted from their heart and tell the story that is in front of them. Ask people to suspend judgment, avoid discussion, let each person be heard, and let themselves be known. This is sharing. Through sharing we connect. You can feel it happening.

There is a way to connect to another person as deeply as the Na’vi of the planet Pandora connect in the film Avatar. It happens through your eyes. Here is how. Find a willing partner. Look gently into the black center of each other’s eyes. Relax. Lower your internal numbness bar. Shift from thinking to sensing. Don’t speak. Don’t move. Don’t touch. Navigate yourself to undefendedness. The connection happens automatically through mirror neurons in your brains exchanging experiential knowing. Through you the Bright Principle of love becomes aware of itself. You can feel it happening.

Fulfill your longing to connect – with yourself, with others, and with the Earth. It is delightful; it is ecstatic. It makes you immune to the deceptions of civilization and leads you over a bridge into sustainable culture.

blog010 Thank You, Transition Towns!

Here is a communication close to my heart from Diana Leafe Christian who refers to herself as an "Earthaven Airspinner". I don't know what an airspinner is, but Earthaven is one of maybe six stable functioning ecovillages in north America. Diana's column is from Earthaven's Summer 2010 Newsletter.

----------------------------------------------

Thank You, Transition Towns!

The way I see it, Transition Towns (now called Transition Initiatives) are doing exactly what ecovillage activists always wanted folks to do.

Ecovillagers worldwide support local economies and/or create our own economies (sometimes using alternative currencies). We support local farmers and/or grow our own organic food. We generate our own electric power if we can. Similarly, Transition Towns (or islands, peninsulas, counties, or city neighborhoods) create their own local economies (often with alternative currencies), grow their own local food, and generate their own local power. The Transition Movement got started by applying Permaculture principles to social design. Likewise, most ecovillages, Earthaven included, are designed according to Permaculture principles.

Ecovillages and the Transition Movement are both involved with Permaculture. Here (in the photo) members of Source Farm Ecovillage in Jamaica are determining their site design, lead by Earthaven member and permaculture designer Chuck Marsh (on right).

Ecovillagers have been motivated over the last 20 years or so by hoping to make the world a better place. Similar to “putting your money where your mouth is,” we attempt to put our lifestyle where our values are. But our motivation has not been to prepare for Peak Oil and climate change, which most of us didn’t know about until a few years ago. We live this way because it seemed like the right thing to do.

Transition Town activists, on the other hand, are specifically responding to Peak Oil and climate change. Yet . . . their response is totally resonant with the values and lifestyles of ecovillagers. For example, here’s the vision of Transition US: “Every community . . . will have engaged its collective creativity to unleash an extraordinary and historic transition to a future beyond fossil fuels; a future that is more vibrant, abundant and resilient; one that is ultimately preferable to the present.” Well of course. That’s exactly what we want for the world too.

Transition Towns are seeking to live more sustainably: ecologically, economically, and socially. And ecovillages provide models — little pinpoints of sustainability in the broader mainstream culture — where Transition activists can come and see what living like this actually looks and feels like. In fact, you could say we are trying to inoculate the culture. Jonathan Dawson, past president of Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and author of the book Ecovillages, writes, “Ecovillages can be likened to yogurt culture . . . small, dense, and rich concentrations of activity whose main aim is to transform the nature of that which surrounds them.”

Over 100 Transition Initiatives are up and running in the United States, and as of July, 2010, you’ll find 321 Transition Initiataives on six continents — and the movement only started in 2005! Websites on the Transition Movement exist in Portuguese, Danish, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. Ecovillages also can be found on six continents, from Europe (which has the most number per population), to Latin America (especially Argentina and Brazil), Asia, New Zealand and Australia (which has plenty, mate), and a few in Africa. North America has relatively few ecovillages relative to our population: Earthaven is one of only about six well-developed ecovillages on the whole continent.

I’m an ecovillage activist: in my work I advocate ecovillages and present workshops on starting successful new ones. Yet I believe Transition Towns — not ecovillages — are more likely to rapidly spread ecological values and practices worldwide. In fact, the Transition Movement seems to be the fastest-growing social/ecological movement the world has ever seen. I say, “Hallelujah!” As someone who lives off the grid and deals with buckets of compost daily — and wishes everyone everywhere would do the same for the Earth — I certainly hope this is true!

Diana Leafe Christian is author of  Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community, and Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. She teaches workshops on starting new ecovillages, serves as a consultant to existing ecovillages and other kinds of intentional communities, and speaks and conferences internationally. She is publisher of Ecovillages, a free online newsletter about ecovillages worldwide, and her monthly column about ecovillages appears on the homepage of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) website. Diana lives in Earthaven’s Forest Garden neighborhood.