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.)

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.

blog004 Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchal Pain

21 June 2010

Last weekend we led a Possibility Lab, our three-day deep-healing and personal-transformation training. (Pre-requisite is Expand The Box training - see http://www.nextculture.org/).

The training began Friday morning with 22 participants in a converted farm house 90 Km north east of Munich. After a day and a half one couple left - said they were maxed out with learning. The rest stayed for the long haul. And it was long.

Saturday night we entered the Archetypal Man Woman communication process. The eleven men, after practicing a specific form of listening (how to be killed and not die) silently entered the room and stood facing the row of nine women, already trained in conscious feelings and speaking from their heart.

As the men listened attentively and vulnerably from the opposite side of the room, the women began to speak. They spoke the pain of ten-thousand years of unheard pain of women and children living in the patriarchy.

They spoke for women of all lands and all times whose children starved or were sent to fight the men's wars. They spoke of rape and abuse, slavery and disrespect, unconscionable wars and pollution, and suffering under adolescent, greedy, shortsighted, corrupt male leadership.

The women spoke long (nearly 3 hours) and loud, with full expression of anger, fear and sadness.

Their grief over losing so much potential for living in love was almost unbearable.

We men repeated back what we had heard the women say. The women said again what we had not heard. In this communication a piece of the global heart of humanity was healed.

The pain was redeemed through being consciously experienced and expressed. This numbness of Man was brought back to life through authentic adult listening to Woman. We experienced the value of reconciliation.

I wish every man on Earth had the chance to hear and feel what I heard and felt this weekend.

blog003 Four Years. Go.

2 February 2010

I feel glad. Why?
1. Peak oil.
2. Global warming.
3. Exponential population growth.
4. The sixth great extinction.
5. Seas are dying.
6. Loss of topsoil.
7. Desertification of farmlands.
8. Rapidly sinking water tables.
9. The USA is dragging the world into resource wars.
10. Copenhagen climate talks failed.
The present regime has created the perfect storm...

And I feel glad?

Yes. (Every now and then a person is allowed to go a bit over the top, wouldn't you say?)

For me, that time would be now.

The perfect storm is already upon us.

What we ordinary people need is the perfect umbrella.

And now we have it.

It is called Four Years. Go. http://www.fouryearsgo.org/

It is not a new organization. It is a new strategy for every organization.

If a massive global campaign was being launched by the largest ad agency in the world for the purpose of creating a worldwide surge of energy, enthusiasm and action to shift humanity to a sustainable, just and fulfilling world – would you want to be a part of it?

Consider yourself invited!

I mean, if we don't get it together and do this ourselves, who will?

It's time to save our own asses!

The website officially opened 14 February 2010.
Still, you are hearing this news before the rest of the world - but the rest of the world will hear it - as loudly as they heard Just Do It! because the same ad agency (Wieden & Kennedy) is 100% behind Four Years. Go. and for free! I mean, if there is no civilization left how can you advertise? May as well help the world shift to sustainable culture before it gets nearly impossible.

Four Years. Go. is a rapidly expanding open-sourced global meshwork of intelligent and mature activists taking radical responsibility for humanity’s great shift to sustainability. It is an umbrella platform with unbiased and formidable emergence leadership connecting and amplifying everybody's efforts.

You hold a piece of the puzzle. That piece is needed by many others. At the same time there are many who wish to support your efforts. Four Years. Go. is our chance to all pull in the same direction. Together we can take humanity into a different story.

Here's who is on the team so far: Earth Action, Shaping Tomorrow, State of the World Forum, The Pachamama Alliance, WiserEarth, Generation Waking Up, Global Community Africa, Global Village Commons, Rainforest Action Network, Amazon Watch, Next Culture Research & Training Center, plus 800 others and rapidly growing. Please help.

I wanted to tell you about this now so you could start informing your people and begin getting involved if you want. At the bottom of the Four Years. Go. website are links for details of how to collaborate.

My opinion is this:
Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Let's deal with it. We have four years before Earth’s tipping points become irreversible. Four years is enough time to connect and learn. Enough time to change your values. Enough time to take radically new actions. Four years is the time we have to save our asses.

You want to sit around and bemoan your ills? You want to blame somebody else? You want to negotiate so you have an economic advantage? Forget it. That is the strategy that produced the perfect storm.

This is one planet. And TANSTAAFL! There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Under the auspices of the global community we are taking action. Here is what you can do:

If you are an individual:
1. Go to http://www.fouryearsgo.org/ and register your intentions.

2. Invite your colleagues to connect in too. You can invite them by sending them a link to this blog or by copying a more formal invitation letter from the Four Years. Go. Wiki.

3. Contact all the organizations that you like and ask them to collaborate too.

4. On the Four Years. Go. website register bold sustainability actions that you promise to make, and then do whatever it takes to keep your promises.

5. Put the Four Years. Go. widget on your website.

If you are an organization:
1. Meet with your decision-making body and present the opportunity of Four Years Go. to them. Ask them to adopt the goals of Four Years. Go. and to put the Four Years. Go. widget on your website.

2. If your suggestion is approved, go to http://www.fouryearsgo.org/ and register the intentions of your organization.

3. Contact the organizers of other groups that you respect and invite them to do the same thing, or ask if you can present the opportunity to their decision making body.

4. Keep defining bold Four Year. Go. sustainability actions for your organization, and go online and register your commitments in public. Then do whatever it takes to keep your promises.

Our time has come. This is what we were born to do.
We have been trained as far as possible. Now it is time to collectively act. We have at most four years before tipping points become irreversible. I think this is maybe our only shot at a sustainable future. Let's take over responsiblity and do this.

It's the beginning of an entirely new chapter in human history. Four Years.

We have time to act but no time to waste. Go.