blog032 A New Decision

I think I surf the internet because I am looking for something...
something besides distractive entertainment.

I think I am looking for a way out of what is not me...
and a way-in to contributing my talents and gifts to Earth and her abundance of interrelated beings.


I think I am seeking a way to play full out for life rather than for mere economic survival.

What about you?


If you surf the internet I think you are a social entrepreneur, looking for your playing field, trying to create your gameworld, with an entirely new set of rules of engagement.

I think your gameworld sits directly in front of you, begging for you to take one step along the path that further skills-you-up through taking each further step.

I think a part of you knows this each morning when you wake up - you have a sense of the one possible first step in front of you that you could take...

...it stares you right in the face before you move each morning.

I think the part of you that sees the action you could take tries to look away as fast as possible, for numerous reasons. Reason number one is that you feel terrified.

You are terrified because you went to school where you learned to sit silently in rows and be still, for weeks... for years.

But if you take a step now to apply your unique talents to solve problems in the world, you would have to move.

You would have to step out of line. And you are still afraid of getting punished for being out of line...

Still, here you are, reading this blog. I think you are reading it to get yourself a new possibility.

So here is the new possibility: You are no longer in school. That game is over.

(Or if you are still in school, you shouldn't be, because it is still trying to teach you to "Stand still, Laddy!")

The other part of the new possibility is that if you escape the school system and do experiments as a social entrepreneur you are not alone. There are thousands of social entrepreneurs out here, all around the world, playing full out to make the changes one-step-at-a-time that make the world a better place for everyone.

Social entrepreneur (r)evolutionaries don't have guns. They don't have money. They don't have political power. What they do have is a simple idea for dealing with what is right in front of them in a new way, and they have the same curious, inventive, rule-breaking, nonlinear urges that you have, plus deep inside, the same fear.

The only difference between them and you is that these social entrepreneurs have made one new decision: They have decided that taking that step is more important than the fear that comes with. It's a sacrifice they make. They feel the fear and take the step anyway, and many other people benefit. To them it is a fair trade, part of the job.

What is interesting though, is that through taking the present step, that fear automatically changes into a resource of wisdom and energy for taking the next further step that automatically appears after taking the first step.

So.

What about you? What about changing your mind?



















You can take a breath, make a new decision, and leap.

You will know that you have made a new decision when you suddenly take a step that is right in front of you on the path of being a social entrepreneur, whatever that step is.

It might be simply to watch this Social Entrepreneur video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk5LI_WcosQ#t=509

It might me to make a Kiva loan: www.kiva.org

It might be to hold a weekly neighborhood potluck dinner at your house to check-in with your neighbors about becoming more resilient together.

It might be to have a rotating neighborhood de-lawning and veggie-garden planting party, like Ron Finley and his Guerrilla Gardening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w

It might be calling people over for a movie and watching the video End:Civ with Derrick Jensen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hx-G1uhRqA and sitting together afterwords sharing about your experiences from it.

It might be a few of you committing to each other as adults helping each other grow up through ongoing initiatory processes - committing to each other to such a degree that even society's money neurosis cannot get in the way of more love happening.

One step leads to another. There is no top end. Please keep going!

blog028 Thumbscrews

Thumbscrews are metallic torture devices progressively tightened on your thumbs until your will is destroyed.

You are wearing thumbscrews since childhood.

If they somehow get a little loose, you tighten them back on yourself, just to keep things feeling normal.



 





With a crushed will you don't even try doing what you are capable of doing because even vaguely thinking about it brings up the fear that the screws will be tightened even more.

You have memories...

With shocking efficiency modern schooling and corporate-herded society have applied thumbscrew devices to your brain, your heart, your body and your being.






1. Screws are clamped on your brain to cripple your perceiving and thinking so you can only function within a framework of external authority. From then on, instead of ongoingly generating interesting new frameworks from within yourself, you search for the "correct" framework outside of yourself. You automatically adapt to that external authority so you know what to do and when to do it without getting in trouble. Your life curriculum is already determined. Nobody has ever asked you what you want to learn (as in the film Accepted) so you can't imagine that asking this question of yourself might be valid. Unpredictable actions never become an option.

2. Screws are clamped on your heart so that feeling numb equals feeling good. Your rocket fuel is locked away. Your squeeze-dried heart can no longer cry out what is important to you.


 



3. Screws are clamped to your body so you cannot engage in work that matters to you. Instead you merely survive.

4. And perhaps most horrifyingly, clamp-rings squeeze your being, so you cannot unfold into what you are, which means you cannot give what you have because you don't have it, and you cannot let yourself be seen because you cannot be you.

As we speak, you allow the schools and corporations to screw your children in the same way because your memories prove that, if you interfere, the pain could be applied to you again. You feel completely trapped and helpless.

After a couple decades the handicap becomes normal. Even if you suddenly recognize that present culture is suiciding the planet, you are unable to take unprescribed actions.





You are too numb and scared to leave your pitiful job.

You are too disconnected from yourself to creatively organize with like-minded people to develop a culture that you would love to live in.

You are too ashamed to admit that the slave masters have succeeded in sucking out your will. Since you think you are keeping this a secret you cannot ask for help.

You cannot stop shopping, drinking, smoking, overeating.

You cannot stop those occasional rage fits, or the depression.

You cannot turn off and discard your TV.

You cannot resist the internet sex.

You cannot wear old clothes or go without shaving your armpits or legs.

You cannot hesitate to compare yourself to the computer-enhanced magazine images of ideal product users.

And you cannot speak openly for fear of being beaten into submission again.

What sort of spineless scum have you become?

No amount of increased awareness can get you to change behavior because your will has been snuffed. Any resistance must be nonviolent for fear the pain will return.

























You are a prisoner of memories of childhood nightmares. What is the use of trying to get out? You may as well keep putting on the smiley face and pretending everything is just fine.

Sure it hurts to keep the thumb screws on.

But it probably hurts even more to loosen the screws and feel your lifeblood start circulating into unexpected capacities. Is that even possible? Could unrecognized beneficial talents still come to life?

That is an edgework question.

Who put the thumbscrews on, actually?

What was their original purpose?

Are conditions still the same around you?

Have you learned anything in the meantime that could make a different solution possible for you now?

What if you discovered there were small secret teams all over the world helping each other loosen the thumbscrews on all four bodies? Slowly, carefully, and thoroughly. Without permission. Taking extraordinary actions by the power of their own authority.

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.

blog009 Re-Teach The Teachers

If Einstein was right about the atom bomb he may also have been right when he said, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." This means school teachers, as they are presently trained, are unable to provide students with what they need to become the leaders who create a bright future for humanity. The challenge is to re-train teachers to deliver a new paradigm, to deliver the practical skills and theoretical basis for creating an environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling human presence on planet Earth. We cannot create a bright future by duplicating the past. We need a strong and immediate, nation-wide teacher training program to reboot education. Private individuals are rapidly proceeding, already doing this for themselves, leaving the educational system in the dust.

Teachers determine the future of the human race.

Current events indicate that modern education produces adaptive consumers and self-centered, greedy, short-sighted leaders, avoiding responsibility, focused on getting all they can for themselves. It is becoming apparent that the planet will not tolerate this educational orientation much longer. Multiple crises of unimaginable magnitude loom ominously on the near horizon (e.g. peak oil, climate change, corrupted governments, spreading ocean dead zones, plastic contamination, expanding population, vanishing fresh water reserves, methane clathrates, species extinction). New forms of education are immediately required to unleash enough nonlinear human intelligence to create an environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling human presence on Earth. Let it be known that the critical educational challenge facing us today is not how to teach the students but rather how to teach the teachers. Today’s teachers are incapable of delivering what is needed by students now.

One must ask: Who are the people choosing to work as teachers? The answer is simple. People become teachers who themselves did well in school. They liked school. They fit into the system. They felt like school was designed and implemented correctly. People become teachers who are prepared to rigidly defend the educational system as it is because this is the system that worked for them. As a result, the mightiest barrier against educational transformation are the teaching staff. They feel no urgency to change, and in fact feel terrified to have school be any other way than it was for them.

Exchanging current ideas for new ideas is neither comfortable nor easy. Embodying new education would change everything: agriculture, business, city planning, social services…

How long would it take for teachers to change their classrooms into safe havens for learning how to love, how to communicate authentically with feelings, how to liberate nonlinear creative intelligence, how to unfold each individual’s contribution to humanity? The good new is that the entire school system could transform in one day. How do we know this? Because the people of Estonia have already proved it.

On one day, May 3, 2008, more than fifty thousand people (4 percent of the Estonian population) suddenly changed their behavior and removed ten thousand tons of garbage that for decades they themselves had scattered throughout their forest lands. True, operation Let’s Do It! required intelligent fore-planning, but it also awakened local communities to their ability to self-organize – and it worked! It was the most ambitious volunteer action in modern times. The entire territory of Estonia was cleaned up in five hours at almost no extra cost. In the same way, teachers across the country - or across your village - could self-organize a new curriculum in one day and transform the relevancy of school.

What would education then be about? That is a reasonable next question. The answer is also simple: It would include what has been excluded by the patriarchal empire.

But asking about the contents of next education is a trick question, for how can a teacher or administrator understand what is next to be taught while still thinking within the constraints and values of the old paradigm? Einstein was quite confrontive when he stated, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” But remember, Einstein was right about the atom bomb. He may be right about this. Einstein’s observation explains why it would be nearly impossible to describe to a modern day educator what next education is. Still we must begin somewhere, so here are a few distinctions from next education:

• Irresponsibility is an illusion.
• Each person’s childhood survival strategy is like a cocoon housing the still-forming adult. Education explains what is going on, in so far as something better than the survival strategy is awaiting them.
• Education prepares children for their rite of passage to adulthood during the ages of fifteen to eighteen. In the rite of passage a person is guided to distill their destiny and their hidden purpose, connect to their archetypal lineage, and re-commit to deliver what they came here to contribute to humanity.
• There is a difference between surviving and living. If you work for money, you are merely surviving. You do not need money to live. Thinking that nature has value only when money changes hands is a suicidal paradigm.
• There are specific practices for building the matrix for holding more understanding. There is no top end to human development.
• There are tools and procedures for creating possibility for one’s self, for other individuals, and for groups and organizations.
• Communications persist until they are completed. The central message in every communication is, “I love you.”
• There is a difference between low drama and high drama. Low drama is not life; it is merely low drama that creates scarcity, competition, and “I win, you lose” games. There are other games to create.
• Each person has four bodies, physical, intellectual, emotional and energetic. Traditional education focuses almost exclusively on feeding the intellectual body, so it is grossly over-expanded out of proportion to the other three bodies. Almost nothing is fed to a child’s emotional or energetic bodies. These bodies are starving.
• Each of the four bodies requires its own kind of food, and has its own kinds of pain, ecstasy, and intimacy. There is a difference between heart food of the emotional body and soul food of the energetic body. If this difference is not respected people are less likely to be healthy and capable adults.
• Resentment is caused by expectations that are not fulfilled. In this way expectations are relationship killers. Even one resentment blocks intimacy. Resentments can be healed and avoided.
• There is a difference between thoughts and feelings, and between feelings and two kinds of emotions. The difference can be learned experientially through inner navigation skills.
• Personal and professional relationships can be navigated into ordinary, extraordinary and archetypal spaces. If a relationship space is not navigated consciously to serve bright purposes it will be navigated unconsciously to serve shadow purposes. Serving shadow purposes feeds Gremlin.

• Each person has a shadow side and a Gremlin who is king or queen of their inner underworld. If you do not consciously own your Gremlin, he owns you.  
• Each person has an energetic center of being. No one can take your center away. A typical childhood survival strategy includes giving your center away to authority figures so you are no longer a threat to them. As an adult you can take your center back. An adult owns their own center.
• Where your attention goes your energy flows. Whoever has your attention has your wallet. An adult owns their own attention.
• There are true leaders (responsible) and Gremlin leaders (irresponsible). Neither is good or bad. An adult can trust themselves to take care of themselves around any kind of leader.
• Feedback contains design instructions for what to shift to create better results.
• Adults serve the evolution of the world. The world is not changed through creating a critical mass of people thinking in a certain way. The world is changed through making critical connections that weave community and create systems of influence for the emergence of a more humane and intelligent future.
• There is no present culture. The concept of “present culture” is a marketing scam that tries to homogenize humanity and convince people to accept a McPizzaKing and WalBucks on every corner. Human culture is as rich and diverse as nature, and can peacefully coexist as soon as adulthood is defined as including cultural relativity, the clarity that all cultures, religions, and worldviews are merely stories, a matter of personal taste and entertainment.
• Next culture is beyond matriarchy and patriarchy. It is archearchy – the creative collaboration between the archetypal masculine and the archetypal feminine.
• The appropriate topic of study for modern education is how to create and hold space for a global meshwork of sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling next culture settlements.

There are many distinctions and procedures beyond these, but the above list would provide a starting point for next education.

Can we make this shift? Yes. Without question.

Will "we" make this shift? Ah. That's the point. There is no "we" when it comes to shifting. I and many others have already shifted to next education and will continue shifting, regardless of what the law says, regardless of what anybody else does.

The relevant question is: Will the modern school system simply be left in the dust of history or will it bootstrap itself into what is actually wanted and needed now? Teachers determine the future of the human race. To upgrade the morphogenetic field of the human race we would begin with re-training our teachers.