A Worldwide Epidemic is spreading with enormous speed.
The 'WWO' (World-Wellness-Organization) foresees billions of people becoming infected within the coming decade!
Here are the most prominent symptoms of this wonderful enlivening 'disease':
1). The tendency to let yourself be guided by intuition instead of acting under pressure of fear, forced ideas and pre-conditioned behavior.
2). A total loss of interest in: - judging others, convicting yourself and preoccupation with things that create conflict.
3). A complete loss of the capacity to worry: - This is one of the most serious symptoms!
4). A continual pleasure in appreciating humans and things the way they are, which weakens one's tendency to want to 'change' others.
5). The desire to change oneself so that innate thoughts, feelings, emotions and bodily matters are managed in ways that facilitate only Health, Creativity and Love.
6). Repetitive attacks of smiling - a smile that says "Thank You" and stimulates being at-one with all those around.
7). A growing openness towards childishness, simplicity, laughter and happiness.
8). More frequent moments of communication with one's Soul in non-duality, that in turn creates the pleasant feeling of fulfillment and joy within.
9). Finding pleasure in acting as a Healer who spreads Joy and Light, instead of criticism and indifference.
10). The ability to effortlessly live alone, as a couple, with family, or in a community on the basis of equality, without any need to play the role of executioner (or wanting to be sacrificed!).
11). A feeling of responsibility and joy to share with the world one's dreams of an abundant, harmonic and peaceful future for all.
12). Total acceptance of one's own presence on Earth and the will to choose each moment only for what is gracious, good, truthful and alive!
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Do you want to continue living in fear, dependency, conflict, dis-ease and conformism?
If, then at all cost avoid people who display these symptoms; this disease is very contagious!
Medical treatment can temporarily repress the symptoms, although the progress of the disease has very often been inevitable.
There just isn't an 'anti-happiness' Vaccine'!
Because this Happiness Pandemic causes a loss of fear of death, the central pillar upon which the beliefs of materialistic modern-day society rest, there is now a risk of societal turmoil with a complete loss of interest in warfare and the necessity to always be 'right'!
Gatherings of happy people who sing, dance and celebrate life, the emergence of people who celebrate their physical and spiritual healing, crises of extreme joy and even Séances of collective emotional vent, are all now at hand!
Please infect others with 'HP101' where ever you go.
This landed in my inbox without authorship. WOW! It plays into my last Journal Entry: Come Wayfind With Us. It is fun, alive, and worth playing. These are the kinds of scenarios that need to be engaging us. It makes me think of Rumi's quote:
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,there is a field. I will meet you there."
What was the Dr. Suess book where there was a critter carrying the tail of the king, while one carried his, and another carried his, and so on down the long, long line of one tail after another being carried by a subordinate. Finally, the last one in line (with no one carrying his tail) said I quit! He dropped his tail and then like dominoes, each tail was dropped. And the deceit was over.
What is the mind shift and how do we imagine it into being? Another wayfinding exercise. Can we let go of our asumptions and engage in healthy designs forward? Can we set aside the here and now and create such a hunger that we cannot help but pursue a happiness pandemic? How long will it take for our tails to drop?
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"The average working week was now twenty hours … but those twenty hours were no sinecure. There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photoelectric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.
The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom. The general standard of culture was at a level which would have once seemed fantastic. There was no evidence that the intelligence of the human race had improved, but for the first time everyone was given the fullest opportunity of using what brain he had…
People could indulge in such whims, because they had both the time and the money. The abolition of armed forces had at once doubled the world's effective wealthy, and increased production had done the rest. As a result, it was difficult to compare the standard of living of twenty-first century man with that of any of his predecessors. Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were provided free, provided as a public service by the community, as the roads, water, street lighting, and drainage had once been. A man could travel anywhere he pleased, eat whatever food he fancied without handing over any money. He had earned the right to do this by being a productive member of the community.
There were, of course, some drones, but the number of people sufficiently strong-willed to indulge in a life of complete idleness is much smaller than is generally supposed. Supporting such parasites was considerably less of a burden than providing for the armies of ticket collectors, shop assistants, bank clerks, stockbrokers, and so forth, whose main function, when one took the global point of view, was to transfer items from one ledger to another." Arthur Clarke, Childhood's End, 1956
I think of this quote often wishing to make it so. Some people read this and scoff at the notion claiming that people would simply be lazy living in a socialist state. Human nature they say is to be idle and corrupt. But I don't think so. I believe that the society that Clarke sets forth is extremely interesting in that it unfolds a world where real ingenuity and meaning is realized. Work becomes an advocation where many skills and talents are recognized. People progress through the years learning more and more. Work can be selected for the psychological and emotional needs of the individual. Easy work that allows the mind to relax and renew; stimulating work that challenges every part of the body; family years; etc.
When I read the news today and hear of all the people out of work, the mortgages falling into disarray; people walking away from all they thought was secure just a year ago my mind starts to play with scenarios. Could it be the ending of our childhood? It is scary, not just for others, but for me as well. Yet, I wonder, could we actually be in the becoming of our singularity moment where the world changes so dramatically ... for the better?
I find myself creating a vision of There, somewhat like in Clarke's novel and then asking myself, given today's falling apart, is it possible to to wayfind our way through apparent disaster and into the phoenix of a radically new world? Somehow I think so. Drexler's Engines of Creation; Ray Kurtweil's work; and many others provide glimpses into a "perhaps" sense that this could be true.
]]>"The new life needs to be inspired with the realization that it has all kinds of new advantages that have been gained through great dedications of unknown, unsung heroes of intellectual exploration and great intuitively faithful integrities of people groping in the dark. Unless the new life is highly appreciative of those who have gone before, it won't be able to take effective advantage of its heritage. It will not be as regenerated and inspired as it might be if it appreciated the comprehensive love invested in that heritage." R. Buckminister Fuller, 1963
In an age where information seems to be doubling every few days - where one innovation stands on the shoulders of another that is just a few days old - it is difficult to see the future, to find what matters. Every system seems to be falling apart; Our political, financial and corporate leadership are failing the ordinary citizen, too busy taking care of each other's business.
Then an article like this shows up in the news and there is hope again. Two paragraphs in the article define a radical shift in how humans define themselves. It is interesting that we need science to know and give legitimacy to our feelings, our sense of self.
]]>If human nature is as the Enlightenment philosophers claimed, then we are likely doomed. It is impossible to imagine how we might create a sustainable global economy and restore the biosphere to health if each and every one of us is, at the core of our biology, an autonomous agent and a self-centered and materialistic being.
Recent discoveries in brain science and child development, however, are forcing us to rethink these long-held shibboleths about human nature. Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirror-neurons--the so-called empathy neurons--that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another's situation as if it were one's own. We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Former US Supreme Court Justice
It used to be that most people hated the SCAN process. They just felt we should get down to business and get results. Today, far more participants enjoy this process of reaching out; reaching beyond the known for new possibilities. They see the value in looking at a problem from many different vantage points. Many realize the art of Play as well. Still for some people SCAN is difficult and probably will always be, even though they come to recognize its usefulness and integrity to good results. Each of us have different thinking patterns and a truly great group process accounts for all kinds of thinkers, knowing that aspects of going from SCAN to FOCUS to ACT will be frustrating at some time or another to a majority of participants.
But I truly love it when someone who really did not like the process comes up after we are done and says, "We got really good results. But surely we could have cut out the first day and a half and done the work in half a day." Well, you see, they don't understand what Oliver Wendal Holmes was trying to convey. True simplicity comes after you have climbed that hill of complexity. We are not after simple answers that have been gotten by cutting out most of the things that cannot be seen up front. Simple answers and answers with simplicity are two very different things.
David Bohm's ideas about play are so important. When will schools, conferences, and all too many workshops stop pounding play out of process? It is vital to our ability to survive and thrive.
If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity. Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.
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Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.
Richard Feynman The Character of Physical Law
The last five projects I have been asked to participate in are all long-term visions! A breath of fresh air. It seems to me that people are reconnecting with their natural hunger for projects that matter, not only to them, but to the larger world. I can feel the excitement in the voices of project leaders. Most are willing to reach out 25 to 50 years in the future and imagine the difference their projects are making. A new form of strategic plan is taking place. No one is trying to do linear goal-setting plans; rather they are leaping out into the future, envisioning the networks to help in their undertaking, and asking themselves "What is it we need to do today to make our journey into an unknown future succeed?" The MG Taylor axiom: "You can't get There from Here" is being used and lived. During the years where only the next quarter earnings mattered, no one paid the slightest attention to the future. It was so disheartening, boring, and of course, detrimental to life itself.
I do feel that a new paradigm is unfolding. Perhaps the fast and slow are getting back in sync.
]]>We are at a moment of commencement. A powerful ending and dramatic beginning. Standing in the old, hierarchical paradigm is scary. It is looking straight into the abyss.None of the alternatives look good. Leaping this abyss to a paradigm of panarchy requires an optimism grounded in a trust that with these new tools and realities we can give new meaning to our place in the world.
“Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums… Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement.”
-Paul Hawken, 2009 Commencement to University of Oregon
To give this view of reality more than a short bleep in history, it needs care, nourishment, and stewardship of trust building. It demands ongoing design, engaging people of all walks of life in making this great leap and cohering into a powerful resilience on the other side.
So concludes a paper we recently wrote for a client to present to their client, and that is now available on our website. We were asked to address specific questions around paradigm shifts and how one might help to shape them. While this does put a specific context around the paper that the reader should keep in mind, there are a number of ideas embedded in it which we believe can help any individual or community think their way into a new paradigm. We have named this paradigm Panarchy.
These are:
This is a work in progress. We have begun developing it more broadly than the initial set of questions we were asked to consider. There are countless lenses and perspectives to the notion of how paradigm shifts can, have, will, might, or will not happen. The more we learn, the more there is to learn. We hope you will provide us feedback and guidance as we continue to iterate and design our way forward.
Gail and Todd
Download a pdf of From Hierarchy to Panarchy: the unfolding of a global paradigm shift
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Historically, wayfinding refers to the techniques used by travelers over land and sea to find relatively unmarked and often mislabeled routes.
Since we are traveling into an unknown future, a good wayfinding process can help us decide when, how, and where to go. It can help us find unmarked and often mislabeled routes deep into future opportunities, perhaps helping us avoid treacherous paths and dangerous assumptions. Wayfinders help mark the way for others to follow.
]]>CLUE: ORIGIN late Middle English : variant of clew . The original sense was [a ball of thread] ; hence one used to guide a person out of a labyrinth (literally or figuratively).
I watch my two-year old grandson, Owen, pick up clues. That is how he learns, everyday, every moment. His life is discovery and feedback. He explores, by trial and error, tries again and succeeds or fails. He watches for clues from others ... facial expressions, body language ... and then he repeats until he grasps and understands and incorporates it into his behavior or rejects it as something not useful at the moment. He also sends me clues. He engages me in make-believe stories. Since his language is still Oweneese, which I sometimes cannot understand, he gives clues by taking my hand and showing me. Owen is quite bright and capable but I don't think he understands the word "answer" yet. Hopefully as he grows and creates his own life, he will come to know that there are answers for a few things like 2+2 is 4, but for most of his life he will continue looking and connecting clues as he journeys forth into the vast unknown.
Learning is both fast and slow. Facts are fast and can be tested in the present moment; slow is a long journey, absorbing and digesting facts within a much longer time span. Slow is carried forward by context and the ability to connect clues along the way. Slow delights in discovering more, in reshaping one's facts throughout the course of life. Facts remembered can save lives in the moment.(redcross learning, calling 911, seeking safety in a tornado). Fast and slow learning is essential to the well-prepared mind. Unfortunately, too much of today's education for all ages seems to be on fast fact learning. Given this focus, how many facts are immediately forgotten after only a short period? Fast to learn; fast to forget. Since the slow is not immediately measureable, it does not seem to have as much credibility. Taken together, however, the fast and slow weave together bonding facts with context and learning by doing... learning through life.
]]>An effective process through which to put "expertise" is a syntopical reading. Most often (in my experience), this is done in groups, with each person having different books or source material, and taking an hour or 90 minutes to scan and note. However, it can also be an enlightening way of thinking and engaging with ideas as an individual.
Create a dialogue with and among the authors. Don't limit them to analysis and critique - let them imagine and galumph with each other's thoughts. Use syntopical reading as a means of getting familiar with someone's ideas and the all important context and situations they rest upon... and then carrying them forward. Engage both imaginative, play-of-mind thinking as well as analytical and critical thinking.
Don't set your sights on answers. Rather, seek out clues, and explore the relationships that connect them.
I'm using syntopical reading and conversing in this way in a current exploration of paradigm shifts and other kinds of phase transitions. Gail and I recently crafted a paper touching on paradigm shifts in general but more particularly, exploring current history for compelling signs that a significant shift is unfolding, and may be on the verging on a global upcreation to borrow a term from Kevin Kelly.
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