First of all, happy World Environment Day. May we all continue to co-create positive physical conditions conducive to developing life on our planet!
Community development= social development= ever changing relationships; ie. relations between developing participants vary constantly. We can only plan for progress, not for perfect solutions. That makes for a bumpy and uncomfortable route map. So why do most of us still try to fix as many variables in our life, for as long as possible? Why don’t we chill out and continually change & develop?[mfn]Charles Eisenstein touched on this phenomenon in his essay The Coronation in March 2020: “Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19 … Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan. Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot. Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.” source: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/ [/mfn]
Where this understandable reaction fails, is in its application to solely external & material things, systems, processes and concepts. Alas those things cannot but be relative, so that what we’re spending our precious resources on is trying to stabilise the intrinsically instable! Hence nothing much can change in our life — like with many of our New Year’s resolutions!
Life, at the material level, is continual movement — ie. the picture. What we CAN and must stabilise are the right (=your definition of “good”) principles we dream about seeing manifested in our reality — ie. the frame.
What we believe is what we see is what we get. WYSIWYG.
In the words of Neale Donald Walsch’s indomitable conversation partner: “The idea is not to live without [outer, rational systems and processes], but to elevate them, to lift them up to the next level of articulation and expression, to move from concept to principle in the living of your lives.
This is about raising consciousness, or becoming more fully aware of all that is involved in the process of life expressing.
For many people, this may not be easy, given the human penchant for keeping beliefs as they are, no matter how unworkable they have become (or always were).”
Big Business has now (again?) begun to uncover this: cq. the following article! We can glean quite a bit from the qualitative analysis which, seemingly, even classic HR is starting to find important. Sure this stuff will be spun & misused; what isn’t?! But at least valuable messages are getting an airing in the mainstream! Let those with open enough ears hear…
Matter, relationships, duality are all about compromise. How many deals can you make before you forget what it was that you originally thought was so important? Elevation/transcendance simplifies, which brings clarity and its own set of new, exciting and even tougher challenges than before! Hence the need for regular and “deep inner listening” and loads of experiential faith. For it’s only by our very own “fruits” that we truly know ourselves…
