Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth
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Next cultures recognize themselves and each other as but one of an unlimited number of possible gameworlds, each with its own language, customs, music, foods, architecture, clothing, rituals, handicrafts, celebrations, thought patterns, religious ceremonies and indescribable feel. The domain of possibilities for life experience and relationship is wide open and multiplying. There is so much to be explored and appreciated.
Cultural relativity destroys your certainty of control while providing you with the stability of diversity. After awhile globilization and mono-culture become the horror, and cultural diversity the delight. People who find comfort in seeing Wal-Bucks and McPizzaKings replicated in every town around the planet live a hair’s breadth away from the stark raving madness of having their culture proved fictitious. But the truth is that all cultures are fictitious.
REACHING YOUR OWN PERSONAL CHOICE POINT
You could well be at your own personal choice point right now, standing on the fringe of modern culture and deciding whether to return to the cultural marshmallow zone and stay numb, or to leave the numbness behind and consciously feel the pain of what we humans have unconsciously collaborated to create. It is shocking and painful to find yourself standing on the fringe of something you were told has no fringe. You perceive two drastically different perspectives (see the Map of Having Two Views at the Fringe).
MAP OF HAVING TWO VIEWS AT THE FRINGE
World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org
The two perspectives seem to exclude each other. Sometimes it may seem that you pop back and forth from seeing exclusively one perspective or the other. Sometimes you hold an overview and seem to hold both perspectives at the same time. It is not comfortable standing on the fringes.
There are two things to consider when making a decision as to whether or not to lower your numbness bar and feel more:
1. It does not matter what other people think, feel or do about your decision to feel or not to feel. The choice is yours alone—it is extremely personal.
2. The choice affects every aspect of your life—there will be enduring consequences to whatever you choose.
For me, personally, the consequences of choosing to feel are still unfolding. For example, even though the fatal trajectory of modern consumerism was already recognized, documented, and published in 1972 (read Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, by Donnella H. Meadows), I managed to stay completely ignorant of it all until December 2007 when I was fifty-five years old. Denial fogged my view for thirty-five years, then drifted silently away to reveal a staggering clarity. The catalyst was my decision to consciously feel. My deep and long-held delusions are still shattering in the aftershocks.
The chasm between what I thought was happening and what is actually happening spans wider than a heart can embrace. I considered the human race to be approaching a global celebration of modern civilization with its flashy entertainment and amazing technology. I thought we had a Star Trek future. What I find instead are fear-based, small-minded, greedy, corrupt political, religious and business leaders all around the world playing adolescent power games, forcing the extinction of a potentially intelligent species.
The outrage, grief and horror of simultaneously perceiving, like Janus, both the past and the (lack of a) future ignited enough emotive force to reflexively eject me from modern culture.
At first I thought that lowering my numbness bar was a grave mistake (read Appendix D: Bambi vs the Collapse of Civilization, by Tim Bennett). I felt completely alone, captive of a specter that hungrily devoured the happy world I had known my whole life. I was in the solitary confinement of recognizing that modern culture is a sham, a dream world, where up until that moment, I had been one of the willing dreamers. I was awake trying to get back into the dream and no one could help me. No one could disprove the stark evidence of the imminent collapse of civilization. No one could turn the alarm clock off.
NEW CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
After a few months the thought-shrapnel stopped flying with such deadly force in my mind. I found myself considering new questions. For example, if what I had been holding as reality is false, what then is actually possible? What is wanted and needed of me in these new circumstances? In what ways will serving my destiny principles unfold now?
As soon as I dared to ask these questions out loud I found people around me who understood—people who, in fact, had been asking such questions themselves for some time and who were already shifting to other contexts in which workable answers to these questions become obvious.
These people collaborate in meetings that tend to have a circular seating arrangement. They interact using new meeting softskill technologies such as Open Space, Possibility Team, Dialog, Forum, Phoenix Process, World Café, The Problem Is the Solution, Appreciative Inquiry, Swarmsource, and the U Process. They genuinely understood what I asked and freely shared what they had so far discovered or invented in the new contextual territories. They welcomed my participation. (They may also welcome yours!)
I was astonished about what I was learning. Half the books in my library were replaced. I wanted to talk with the authors, but how dare I? Hesitatingly at first, I called or emailed writers of the blogs, websites and books that most inspired me. More often than not these individuals were open to contact and enthusiastically encouraged me to keep going.
I was afraid to express my true thoughts and feelings, but since I had already rewired my mind so that fear equals fear, I could write while feeling tremendously afraid, and I produced a few articles conveying my strongest opinions. To my surprise, these articles were published on world-class alternative news websites such as www.truthout.org, www.democraticunderground.com, www.thepeoplesvoice.org, www.stwr.org, www.informationclearinghouse.info, www.climatetruth.org, www.mwcnews.net, www.worldproutassembly.org, www.novakeo.com, www.countercurrents.org, www.dissidentvoice.org, www.opednews.com, www.globalresearch.ca, www.commondreams.org and www.alternet.org.
A whole new breed of DVDs accumulated in a stack beside my desk—eco-docs, like What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire; The Corporation (YOU HAVE TO SEE The Corporation!); An Inconvenient Truth; and The 11th Hour. Most filmmakers turned out to be real people, and also contactable.
These preliminary trial-and-error experiments gave me the courage to phone, email or visit whomever I had the impulse to speak to anywhere in the world. As a result, my world expanded.
Suddenly I was accompanied. I found myself in astonishing new circles of friends, people I never knew existed before. These people meet, live or work together outside of modern culture in adventurous new social forms—gameworlds that recognize themselves as gameworlds. There are ecovillages, nongovernmental organizations, conferences, festivals, cohousing neighborhoods, global campuses, virtual universities, trainings, demonstrations, multimedia projects, workshops, pilgrimages, camps, fairs, outdoor programs and informal private circles. The diversity of social forms reflects the richness of human culture that emerges when people relocalize their authority.
The first step in relocalizing your personal authority is stellating your feelings.
TENTH DISTINCTION: ARCHEARCHY IS SUSTAINABLE CULTURE
The tenth of the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling says that stellating feelings turns on masculine and feminine archetypes in you that become the active elements in archearchy, a new and truly sustainable culture, oriented more toward being present and being with, and less toward consuming, owning, having, going and doing.
Previous to five thousand years ago human cultures functioned in various forms of matriarchy, where feminine forces shaped societies. Then patriarchy took over, with empire as its goal and competitive hierarchical structures as its means. In 1985 patriarchal empire exceeded planetary sustainability and thereby doomed itself to extinction. The future of humanity rests in archearchy, cultures that emerge from the harmonious and intelligent interplay of responsible adult feminine and masculine archetypes. Rather than the matriarch
or the patriarch prevailing it is stellated archetypes that prevail. The way to participate in the feminine-masculine synergy of archearchy is to grow up.
This book is about how to grow up. The degree to which you engage your rite of passage into responsible adulthood is up to you. This book provides extraordinary clarity for applying the natural strength and intelligence of feelings to enhance your personal and professional life, yet a singular distinction stands in the foreground:
Understanding feelings is one thing.
Experiencing feelings is something else entirely.
What this means is, if you experientially apply the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling during a few months of daily practice it tends to produce a momentous yet possibly unexpected result: your capabilities expand beyond what can be explained or contained by modern culture. In such a case it may behoove you to gain more insight about what sort of cultures evolve beyond the thought limits of modern culture.
Let us review.
You were culturally trained to be a single fighter in a capitalist patriarchal empire. The successful man is a strong, numb, cunning, powerful and rich lone wolf. The successful woman seduces that man and molds him to suit her own purposes (see the film Charlie Wilson’s War), or else she learns to be a better man than the men and beats them at their own games (see the film The Devil Wears Prada). A few people appear to win in this fierce competition. The rest of us are supposed to watch TV.
You were told in a gazillion ways that having a “negative” feeling means something is wrong with you and that a mythical steady-state happiness can be achieved if only you would be a good citizen living a good consumer life, asking no questions except, “Do you take credit cards?”
The happiness myth flies in the face of intense burnout shouldered by many who follow modern society’s program: go to school, get a job, work, work, work, retire, die. The great deception—that you can be a happy consumer or a happy soldier—remains hidden because cognitive dissonance beats personal experience every time. If not, you can easily obtain a prescription for brain drugs to fog over the gap, or you can simply commit suicide.
This book says that you have far more intelligence than modern society knows what to do with. It says that it is your birthright to use maximum awareness to perceive what is going on and maximum creativity to ongoingly invent diverse cultures that celebrate and continue unfolding your natural gifts and those of your family and friends. It says that you have an important and true destiny serving people through your personal set of Bright Principles even if your vocation can only be classified on the IRS tax forms under the category other.
Once you have stellated your feelings in Phase 1 of your rite of passage, Phase 2 builds solid ground for the responsible adult context during your daily life. Sooner or later that responsible adult context starts having majority vote. In those moments your actions originate a new culture. New culture is needed right now. The need correlates to a massive shift taking place in the human thought field.
EPOCHAL CULTURE SHIFT
Ready or not, twenty-first century humanity is in the middle of an epochal culture shift. It happened once before, more than five millennia ago, when goddess-worshipping child-responsibility matriarchal cultures were gradually replaced by warrior-clan adolescent-responsibility patriarchal cultures (see the Map of the Present Epochal Culture Shift).
This ivory figurine (right) was carved 25,000 years ago and found near Brassempouy, France in 1892. The transformance art (left) is by Libor Balák, Antropark, Copyright 2007
The goddess of Laussel, Dordogne, France, was carved some 27,000 year ago during the age of original wisdom cultures. She was found in 1911 still covered in ochre. Photo courtesy of The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art by Paul G. Bahn, © Copyright 1998.
MAP OF THE PRESENT EPOCHAL CULTURE SHIFT
World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org
CHILD MODE
Cared for by
Mother Nature.
Organic design.
Essence.
Naiveté and belief.
Innocence.
Survival, being.
Economy of subsistence.
Natural pop. control.
Unconsciously sustainable.
ADOLESCENT MODE
“Cared for” by patriarchal
mega-authorities.
Technical design.
Personality.
Control and security.
Cynicism.
Consume, possess, do.
Economy of presence.
Unlimited pop. growth.
Not sustainable.
ADULT MODE
Cared for by radically
responsible self.
Conscious design.
Holistic being.
Personal development.
Love.
Relationship community.
Economy of power.
Conscious population.
Conscious sustainability.
Some researchers suggest that climate changes six thousand years ago caused general crop failure and out of the ensuing chaos warrior cultures emerged, thriving by capturing and consuming ever more resources and the slave labor of those who could not defend themselves against the improved guns, germs and steel (see Jared Diamond’s book of the same name). Although recently the slave labor has been augmented by oil-powered machinery, laborers must work in town, and their villages are being paved over by megacities at an outrageous pace. The five thousand–year strategy of empire building continues today.
Now modern culture has exceeded planetary parameters. The culture shift to post-civilization will occur far more suddenly than the thousands of years it took to change from nomadic tribes to nation states. This is because modern civilization has so precariously extended its reliance on fossil fuels. After oil peaks, the fall may come swiftly, but the outcome is not entirely bleak. For the first time since the ascendancy of the patriarchal paradigm some five thousand years ago, human beings have a chance to try again. What could that look like? Who is leading us there?
Millions of people have been displaced during Shanghai’s fifteen years of mega-expansion. Photo courtesy of Shoestring.
Courageous geniuses invent next culture in sustainable culture ecovillages. Photo courtesy of Tamera Archive
LEADERSHIP BEYOND THE STATUS QUO
Decades ago scientists well understood that humanity would overshoot Earth’s sustainable limits. However, avoiding that calamity would involve changing modern culture’s status quo. One of the toughest things in the universe to change is a society’s status quo. Even though the science-backed forecasts were far worse than horrific, they made no difference. (Pragmatic scientists might do well to also study Box Technology, the science of changing the status quo.)
Forty years later, now that 100,000-year-old glaciers are melting even faster than the scientists predicted, now that the ocean is measurably rising and storms are flooding low-lying cities, now that methane chimneys are bubbling out of Siberian seas and lakes, now that the oil supply is peaking and the world economy is collapsing, there are large and irreparable cracks appearing in the status quo. Our Titanic civilization, long assumed to be unsinkable, has hit reality and is going down.
Shocking in their finality, these fissures also represent true opportunities for personal, institutional and societal change. Liberation from the status quo is a gift not to be taken lightly. A working strategy for social entrepreneurs is taking hold: in the same moment you detect a crack, move through it, even if what you move into is the unknown.
One part of your Box may be attracted to coinventing archearchy or you would not be reading this book. Another part may have your foot hard-pressed to the brakes. This part may be creating
really good excuses to block Box expansion for fear of no longer fitting within mainstream society, reminding you that your neighbors might notice your strange new behavior and report you to the authorities. Considering Inquisitions and witch burnings, such fears are well founded.
And . . .
What I want you to know is that there are already whole societies of people living wonderful lives beyond the reach of modern culture, ready and waiting to welcome you if you should ever decide to visit. They have been waiting to welcome you for a long time (see the Further Unlearning section at the back of this book).
If you sense external forces of resistance that are trying to keep you from changing, you do not have to face those resistances head on. You do not personally have to convince all of modern society to change. This is important to remember. It’s not your job.
If the forces of resistance approach you personally, you can spin. To “spin” means to keep your center and, at the same time, to energetically whirl yourself—to hold no positions, rebuff no attacks, be a yes, agree with the forces of resistance, and yet keep moving in the direction you need to go. When you spin, external resistances have nothing to grab onto. When they can’t see you anymore they will forget you were ever there.
If you sense internal forces of resistance trying to keep you from changing it could simply be your residual hesitation to experience feelings. It can help to recognize that feelings are integral to every process of change; for example:
• Sadness about letting go of the familiar, knowing its time has passed.
• Anger that change is so difficult.
• Fear that whatever you try, the change may be too little too late.
• Joy that you now have a real chance to live out your destiny.
Let yourself deeply and thoroughly feel these feelings. Communicate them to others in many different forms: singing, art, theater, sculpture, music, dance, poetry, public talks, meetings, workshops, essays, blogs, and transformational acts of kindness, generosity and compassion. Use the vigor and diverse intelligences of your feelings to establish entirely new forms of personal behavior, organizational design, project goals, and societal context. This is what you and your feelings were born for!