The act of discovering who we are will force us to accept
that we can go further than we think.
- Paulo Coelho
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Pablo Picasso: The Meaning and Purpose of Life
The meaning of life is to find your gifts.
The purpose of life is to give them away.
- Pablo Picasso
Charles Eisenstein: We Have To Create Miracles
Quotes by author and visionary
Charles Eisenstein
Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
Are the problems of the world caused by bad people who need to be crushed? Or do people do bad things when they are in a certain situation? If it is the latter, then we can go around crushing the villains for another thousand years and nothing will change.
We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overly large houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness; media surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In the ubiquitous world of money, we hunger for all that is intimate, personal and unique.
Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.
No one's ever completely broken. It's just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.
One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.
The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.
Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%.
We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.
We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible.
We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.
The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.
How do we change the world? Change the story.
Trust your intuition and be guided by love.
We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it.
Please go here:
Naomi Klein: Killing the Trump Within
It is my experience that having this courage, value, and commitment to doing our own individual and collective shadow work is what will heal and transform ourselves and our world. What does "shadow work" mean? It means to embrace with curiosity, compassion, humility, and perseverance the deeper work we come here to do - the work of lifting the veils which unknowingly maintain our ignorance, our indoctrination, our sense of separation, our anger and animosity, our projections and fears, our apathy and despair, our blind spots and biases, our misperceptions and illusions, all of our unattended and neglected wounds. These are the inner places that hide out in the shadows of our minds and hearts just beyond our conscious awareness. The good news is that this is also exactly where our unclaimed unique gifts can be found - if we look. To engage in shadow work is to engage in the lifelong journey of making the unconscious conscious. We do this so that we may remember what we have forgotten and embody the Sacred being that is our essence. If we are alive and breathing, my belief is that we all have more work which we have the opportunity to do. This is the process of increasingly shedding that which obstructs our being more fully in our own bodies, in our relationships with one another, and in this beautiful world we share. This is what empowers us to be present with greater and evolving wholeness, grace, and individual and collective purpose.
Bless us all on our journeys - Molly
Killing the Trump Within
For me, and this may sound a bit strange, Trumps rise has also prompted a more internal kind of challenge: it has made me determined to kill my inner Trump. We have already seen that the new regime in Washington has led a great many people to try to understand and overcome our own latent biases and prejudices, the ones that have kept us divided in the past. This internal work is crucial as we come together in resistance and transformation.
There are some other, often-overlooked ways that many of us can do more to confront our inner Trump - something, anything, that's just a bit Trumpish in our habits. (And to be clear: I'm not saying these omissions make all of us responsible for the outcome of the 2016 elections - this is not about who voted for whom and why.) Maybe it's the part that has learned to see ourselves as brands in the marketplace rather than people in communities. Or the part that sees other people doing similar work not as potential allies in a struggle that will need all our talents, but as rival products competing for scarce market share. (Given that Trump's presidency is the culmination of corporate branding's insidious colonial logic, perhaps it's past time to leave all that behind.) Or maybe it's the part that can't resist joining a mob to shame and attack people with whom we disagree - sometimes using cruel personal slurs and with an intensity set to nuclear. At the very real risk of bringing on on the kinds of attacks I'm describing, is it possible that this habit too is uncomfortably close to the Tweeter-in-Chief?
Or maybe it's the part that is waiting for the billionaire to ride to the rescue, except this one will be kind and generous and concerned about climate change and empowerment for girls. The liberal billionaire savior may appear very far from Trump, but the fantasy still equates great wealth with superhero powers, which, once again, is just a little too close for comfort to the Ministry of Mar-a-Lago.
If some of these impulses and stories seem hardwired inside us, it's not because we're terrible people. It's because so many of us function within systems that are constantly telling us there are not enough resources for everyone to thrive, so we'd better elbow our way to the top, whatever the costs. Willingly or not, anyone who consumes and produces media swims in the cultural waters of reality TV and personal branding and nonstop attention-splintering messages - the same waters that produced Donald Trump. There are different parts of that fetid swimming pool, to be sure, and some people are in zones with no lifeguards and with way more waterborne diseases than others - but it's still hard to get genuinely outside the pool. Recognizing this can help clarify our task: to have a hope of changing the world, we're going to have to be willing to change ourselves.
The good news is that as we de-Trump - perhaps resolving to spend a few more hours a week in face-to-face relationships, or to surrender some ego for the greater good of a project, or to recognize the value of so much in life that cannot be bought or sold - we might just get happier. And that is what will keep us in a struggle that does not have a finish line in sight and indeed will require from us lifetimes of engagement.
- Naomi Klein
Excerpted from No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's
Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Please go here for more information:
Riane Eisler - Building an Integrated Progressive Agenda: The Post Election Crisis and Its Opportunities
I have read several of Riane Eisler's books, have seen her speak on multiple occasions, and respect and recognize this amazing woman as among our wise and treasured Elders. Her books have been printed in up to 25 languages and have been among international bestsellers. I highly recommend all of Riane Eisler's work. - Molly
By Riane Eisler, President, Center for Partnership Studies
The 2016 election laid bare the urgent need for an integrated progressive agenda. Our challenge is to prevent cyclical regressions that cause so much suffering and hold us back from building a more equitable and caring world. Meeting this challenge is a long-term project based on an in-depth analysis of what lies behind the 2016 election results.
Progressives will respond in the Trump era with an array of campaigns aimed at combatting loss of hard-won gains. However, existing assumptions and institutions are proving incapable of effectively dealing with massive socio-economic and technological shifts, and Trump was able to exploit people’s fears and insecurities. We have been here before, as people vote for easy answers from a dominating figure who promises to make their country great again. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, people are understandably focused on the policy threats. But we must not be just reactive. To be proactive, we must first take a deep look at what underlies the impulse of many people to turn to “strong-man” leaders in times of economic and social upheavals.
A Deeper Look
Economic insecurities, false news, hacking, and voter suppression were important factors in the 2016 election. But the question is why these led so many voters to elect a man who incited scapegoating of immigrants and other minorities, who bragged about his sexual assaults, and debased women? Why did so many Americans vote for someone who painted women as disgusting and untrustworthy, as in his call to “lock her up”? Was that really about the emails or was it about punishing a female candidate for aspiring to powers “rightfully” belonging to men, as indicated by Trump’s announcement of a possible cabinet post for General Petraeus who, unlike Hillary, actually breached email security? What led so many people to elect a man who claimed that he alone had the answers, condoned violence at his rallies, and presented himself as a “strong-man” savior?
To answer these questions, we need new thinking, and new thinking requires new social categories that go beyond the traditional religious vs. secular, right vs. left, capitalist vs. socialist, or Eastern vs. Western. Societies in these conventional categories all fail to take into account findings from psychology and neuroscience showing that what children experience and observe impacts how their brains develop – hence their beliefs and actions, including how they vote.
New Thinking: The Domination/Partnership Social Systems
Analysis of society through the lenses of the domination system and the partnership system reveals connections that are invisible through the lenses of the common right vs. left categories. These new categories show that how a society constructs childhood and gender relations – the relations that children first experience and observe – is integral to what people consider normal, possible, and moral in all relations, from intimate to international.
Be they secular like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union or religious like Eastern and Western fundamentalist, regressive societies — characterized by political and economic domination, injustice and violence – advance their political agenda on the foundation of domination, injustice, and even violence in gender and parent/child relations. They recognize that the four cornerstones for either partnership or domination systems are 1) family/childhood relations, 2) gender relations, 3) economics, and 4) language/narratives about human nature and human possibilities.
For most progressives however, parent-child and gender relations are peripheral. While progressives understand the importance of economics, they do not recognize the importance of the distribution of resources within families or how undervaluing caring work undermines progressive principles. All too often they buy into the old stories about a flawed human nature where rankings of domination are “just the way things are.”
Our job is to make progressives aware that regressive politics and economics are only the top of a domination pyramid, and that unless we leave behind traditions of domination in the gender and parent-child relations that are cornerstones of the pyramid, domination, political and economics will keep rebuilding themselves on these foundations in different forms.
Please continue this article here: http://rianeeisler.com/building-an-integrated-progressive-agenda-the-post-election-crisis-and-its-opportunities/
Please also go here: http://rianeeisler.com/
and here: https://www.google.com/search?q=riane+eisler&rlz=1C1PQHS_enUS510US510&oq=riane+&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l4.3925j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=riane+eisler+books
Please also go here: http://rianeeisler.com/
and here: https://www.google.com/search?q=riane+eisler&rlz=1C1PQHS_enUS510US510&oq=riane+&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l4.3925j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=riane+eisler+books
Monday, June 26, 2017
Timothy Snyder: Believe In Truth
Timothy Snyder is an American author, historian and academic specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. This is #10 as excerpted from his book "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century." I highly recommend this book. - Molly
10. Believe in truth.
To
abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one
can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If
nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the
most blinding light.
You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.
The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.
Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”
The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”
Eugène Ionesco, the great Romanian playwright, watched one friend after another slip away into language of fascism in the 1930s. The experience became the basis for his 1959 absurdist play, Rhinoceros, in which those who fall prey to propaganda are transformed into giant horned beasts. Of his own personal experiences Ionesco wrote:
University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards, one after the other. At the beginning, certainly they were not Nazis. After fifteen of us would get together to talk and to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy... From time to time, one of our friends said: I don't agree with them, to be sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I admit, for example, the Jews...," etc. And this was a symptom. Three weeks later, this person would become a Nazi. He was caught in the mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Towards the end, only three of four of us were still resisting.
Ionesco's aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of a a rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening.
The rhinoceri are roaming through our neurological savannahs. We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call "post-truth," and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. Yet there is little here that George Orwell did not capture seven decades ago in his nothing of "doublethink." In its philosophy, post-truth restores precisely the fascist attitude to truth - and that is why nothing in our owrld would startle Klemperer or Ionesco.
Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confuse faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.
Post-truth is pre-fascism.
― Timothy Snyder
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Please go here for more:
Naomi Klein: The Need to Fiercely Protect Space to Dream and Plan for a Better World
This is excerpted from the conclusion in Naomi Klein's latest book,
No Is Not Enough, a book I will recommend again and again.
Please go here: https://www.noisnotenough.org/.
We can work together to build a just and caring world.
- Molly
The hour calls for optimism; we'll save pessimism for better times.
- Jean-Claude Servais
I opened this book with the word shock, since that's what a great many people said they felt on election day and after. But as I've reflected on the word during the past months of writing, I started to question its accuracy in this context.
A state of shock is produced when a story is ruptured, when we have no idea what's going on. But in so many ways explored in these pages, Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination - the logical end point - of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the nature world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own.
Given these stories are, for many of us, part of the very air we breathe, Trump really shouldn't come as a shock. A billionaire president who boasts he can grab women by their genitals while calling Mexicans "rapists" and jeering at the disabled is the logical expression of a culture that grants indecent levels of impunity to the ultrarich, that is consumed with winner-take-all competition, and that is grounded in dominance-based logic at every level. We should have been expecting him. And indeed, many of those most directly touched by the underbelly of Western racism and misogyny have been expecting him for a long time.
So maybe the emotion beneath what some have been calling shock is really, more accurately, horror. Specifically, the horror of recognition that we feel when we read effective dystopian fiction or watch good dystopian films. All the stories of this genre take current trends and follow them to their obvious conclusion - and then use that conclusion to hold up the mirror and ask: Do you like what you see? Do you really want to continue down this road? These nightmare futures are horrifying precisely because they're not shocking - not a break with our underlying stories, but their fulfillment. I've come to believe that we should see America's first nuclear-armed reality TV president in a similar fashion, as dystopian fiction come to life. Trump is a mirror, held up not only to the United States but to the world. If we don't like what we see - and throngs of us clearly do not - then it is clear what we need to do.
We have to question not only Trump but the stories that ineluctably produced him. It's not enough to superficially challenge him as an individual, foul and alarmingly ignorant though he may be. We have to confront the deep-seated trends that rewarded him and exalted him until he became the most powerful person in the world. The values that have been sold to us through reality TV, get-rich-quick books, billionaire saviors, philanthrocapitalists. The same values that have been playing out in destroyed safety nets, exploding prison numbers, normalized rape culture, democracy-destroying trade deals, rising seas and privatised disaster response, and in a world of Green Zones and Red Zones.
At the same time, perhaps it's okay - healthy even - for us to be just a little bit shocked by Trump. Here's why: those stories that produced him were always contested. There were always other stories, ones that insisted that money is not all that's valuable, and that all of our fates are intertwined with one another and with the health of the rest of the natural world. The forces Trump represents have always had to suppress those other, older, and self-evidently true stories, so that theirs could dominate against so much intuition and evidence.
The persistence of these other stories should remind us that, while Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system, the current neoliberal system is not the only logical culmination of the human story. Which is why part of our work now - a key part - is not just resistance. Not just saying no. We have to do that, of course. But we also need to fiercely protect some space to dream and plan for a better world. This isn't an indulgence. It's an essential part of how we defeat Trumpism.
- Naomi Klein
From No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock
Politics and Winning the World We Need
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)