Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth
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Practicing the suggestions in this book strengthens your leadership. A leader is simply the one who goes first. Even though parallel cultures with higher than mainstream levels of responsibility have been operational since the 1960s and before, almost none of them implement the clarity of thoughtmaps and processes provided in this book. Those cultures hunger for these ideas and could well be waiting for you to trust your own leadership and bring these ideas to them. Didn’t you ever, just once, want to be the chosen one? Well, here is your chance!
There is no hurry for you to go there, of course. At the same time, why would you want to wait? If a part of you comes to life while I am speaking like this why not let your heart and soul move you to take actions in these directions? You don’t even need a reason.
IS HAVING FEELINGS STRANGE? OR NORMAL?
It can be both disturbing and astonishing to experience conscious feelings. You will either make it through the shock and adjust to your new experiences, or you will rebound back into mainstream.
If your personal experience does not fit within modern society, what are you supposed to do? Your first impulse after consciously feeling may be to try to get yourself back together the old way, put the happy face back on, and reanimate your familiar act. At least your old behavior seemed acceptable to your friends and relatives even if it was not so entirely acceptable to you.
Experiencing the undeniable reality of authentic feelings confronts you with an option you did not have before. Modern culture rejects feelings. Other cultures thrive on feelings. Who chooses in which culture you live?
What if, regardless of circumstances and evidence, you continuously choose next culture?
WHAT IS NEXT CULTURE LIKE?
Next culture already exists; yet, in contrast to modern culture, next culture is relatively invisible. Learning to perceive next culture begins with recognizing what next culture is not. Next culture is not marketed in three-second sound bites. It does not seek to sway your political opinion and get your vote. It does not explode in blood and suicide bombers across the headlines of CNN. It does not announce itself like drunken World Cup champions. Next culture is a finer signal easily overlooked amid all the modern noise and hubbub. The following Map of Comparing Cultural Attributes can offer some clues.
THE GNAWING QUESTION
How has humanity so seriously messed up its future? How have we come to the edge of ruining the only life-supporting planet in this neck of the universe?
The short answer is that our cleverness exceeds our intelligence; we did not grow up before we got smart. Global leaders are stuck at the childish Me! Me! Me! level, and the rest of us have not matured beyond sheep. We have not taken responsibility for our individual authority.
The long answer is that as soon as the human nervous system evolved to the degree of sophistication that it held enough consciousness to become self-aware, that consciousness sought clarification about its most urgent question: Who am I?
There are two obvious answers.
The first answer we find when we are babies: I am my body, because we feel sensations. We identify ourselves as our body, and our body requires instant gratification, unable to care about others, the future, or the big picture.
MAP OF COMPARING CULTURAL ATTRIBUTES
World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org
You are under a spell if you think modern culture is present culture. There is no present culture. Humans are a biology experiment of planet Earth, living in hundreds of thousands of cultures around the globe. One particular culture has turned cancerous and is devouring the ethnosphere, teaching its victims to think that it alone is present culture. Can you free yourself of this memetic virus? We moderns are a minority of arrogant fools consuming 80 percent of Earth’s resources and hiding our greed by marketing the story that everyone can consume like us forever if they adopt modern culture. Are you under this spell? Can you break out of it? The term cultural relativity was not known until 1948. Human cultures are so immature. Can you grow up?
MODERN CULTURE:
PATRIARCHY: That was the old days. We are modern! There are women presidents!
MONEY: Everybody needs money! How can you live without money?
GOVERNMENT: There are 192 members of the United Nations. Whoever has the most guns tells the UN what to do.
OWNING LAND AND BUILDINGS: Everyone and everything has a price. If you can aord to buy it, then you can own it. OWNING RESOURCES: God gave man dominion over all things.
TV: But it has important news and educational documentaries. I don’t watch the commercials anyway.
CARS: How could we live without cars? Are you nuts?
SUPPLY CHAINS: A 3000-mile Caesar salad? What’s that?
PROFIT: Free market competition is good. The
WTO and World Bank help the poor countries.
SCHOOL: What would kids do if they were not in school? School teaches the three Rs and prepares us to get a good job.
RITE OF PASSAGE: When kids can drive, vote, drink and smoke, they are adults.
GMO: You can’t stop progress.
OVERPOPULATION: It’s all those Africans, Indians and Chinese. They should do something about their overpopulation, but it does not affect me.
PEAK OIL: It’s just oil companies trying to make more profit. We can replace oil with solar, wind, waves and free energy.
GLOBAL WARMING: It’s probably caused by solar variations, but no one really knows.
METHANE CLATHRATES: What’s that?
NUCLEAR POWER: Cleaner than coal.
NEXT CULTURE:
PATRIARCHY: Is thinking that our culture is better than your culture if we can kill. you. Next culture is not matriarchy; it is archearchy: the collaboration of masculine and feminine archetypes. Any culture that respects human dignity and sustains the diversity of life is of equal value.
MONEY: Next culture supports each person to develop and give fully of their special talents for the benefit of all. When people give their talents they are ecstatic and there is abundance. The abundance is a magnet that attracts whatever is needed by the village. Who would work for anything but love of the work?
GOVERNMENT: How can anyone else authentically represent me? Only I can speak my own voice. Responsibility is localized.
OWNING LAND, BUILDINGS, RESOURCES: Human beings are owned by the Earth. Resources are borrowed from the future.
TV: Looking outside of ourselves for our center comes from the false assumption that we are not already that which we seek.
CARS: Moving faster than the speed of love leaves love behind. Ego is as intelligent as bacteria.
SUPPLY CHAINS FOR PROFIT: Profit is a false paradigm. In a closed system, externalizing costs is suicidal. Irresponsibility is an illusion.
SCHOOL: Creative, loving intelligence does not grow in a production line. Each person is unique.
RITE OF PASSAGE: People remain children unless they have a formidable rite of passage to adulthood. Putting children in leadership positions?
GMO: Diversity leads to stability. GMO is suicide.
OVERPOPULATION: Humanity now consumes 2.5 planets of resources. Overpopulation affects everybody.
PEAK OIL: Has arrived but not soon enough to avoid
GLOBAL WARMING that releases the planet-killer time bomb METHANE CLATHRATES.
NUCLEAR POWER: Produces uncontainable toxic wastes in the interconnected planetary ecosystem. It’s more stupid than poisoning your own drinking water.
The second answer we find when we are children: I am my Box, because we have thoughts and feelings. We identify ourselves as our ego (the Box), and ego is an unconscious mechanical survival strategy with no more intelligence than bacteria.
Nothing dissuades us from the certainty of our answers because they both seem indisputable. Nevertheless, both of these indisputable answers are wrong. The wrongness does not reveal itself except through an authentic rite of passage into adulthood.
Disidentification from our body and disidentification from our Box are two key elements of an authentic rite of passage into adulthood. Very few of us gain freedom from being identified with body or Box because very few of us go through a true rite of passage to adulthood. We remain lifelong adolescents.
Philip K. Dick, the science fiction author, framed his longing to grow up thusly: I wish to encounter a disinhibiting factor that will trigger my anamnesia. He wished to find a way to remember who he truly was. Most of us have such longings, but we allow society to discourage us from truly committing to them.
Having no rite of passage equates to having no entrance to the path of self-discovery where you would learn to elegantly and effectively function as what you actually are: nothingness, a space of possibility through which the Bright Principles that you serve can creatively benefit humanity.
Instead you consign yourself to reacting to circumstances as a psychoemotional ego-mind trapped in an individual body, competing against other adolescents stuck in the illusion of separation, all struggling for survival in a capitalist patriarchal empire. The boring details predictably play themselves out until we arrive at today’s news headlines. Authentic rite of passage to adulthood would eradicate modern civilization and replace it with something better.
The gnawing question comes down to this: Will humanity implement the shift to sustainable cultures in time to save ourselves from the consequences of our immaturity? Or not?
The race is on. Which will win?
• The tipping point for climate change, peak oil and the collapse of civilization?
or
• The tipping point for a paradigm shift from patriarchal empire to radically responsible archearchy?
Talk is cheap and the frightening deadline for action is quickly approaching. What are our chances?
CULTURAL CREATIVES EXIST
People thinking outside of mainstream culture and applying their discoveries for the benefit of humanity are called cultural creatives (from Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson’s book of the same name). This wildly diverse nongroup of social entrepreneurs has become what Paul Hawken, in his book Blessed Unrest, calls “the largest social movement in history.”
Cultural creatives are paradigm shift in action.
How many cultural creatives are there? Such individuals frequently organize their projects into nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Wikipedia reports the present number of international NGOs at more than forty thousand, each with its own support staff, field agents, network of volunteers and clients. The number of national NGOs is far higher. For example, Russia has 277,000 national NGOs. India has somewhere between one million and two million! Ray and Anderson estimate the present number of cultural creatives at fifty million and climbing. Clearly, fifty million cultural creatives working hard to reinvent social reality is a formidable change force.
But is it formidable enough?
Comparing these fifty million cultural creatives to a world population pushing seven billion reveals that only 0.7 percent of the world’s people are working toward next culture. 99.3 percent work to sustain the mainstream, or are Gremlins doing whatever they can to survive.
What is the critical mass number of people needed to reach a tipping point for a paradigm shift to radically responsible archearchy?
If we use the seesaw model of a simple scale, at least 51 percent of the world’s population needs to be thinking, perceiving and acting with greater responsibility than their leaders before next culture gains majority vote. Building from fifty million to three and a half billion (a factor of seventy times more) will probably take more time than the few years we have before the demon of peak oil calls down the Four Horsemen.
People are stubborn and serve agendas and purposes that are often hidden even from themselves. Consciousness expansion seems to have a speed limit. On the surface, our present ideas appear to have worked well enough so far. If it works, why bother to fix it? Exchanging current ideas for new ideas is neither comfortable nor easy. Embodying new culture would change everything: agriculture, city planning, schools . . .
Think about it. 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 create high drama in service of each individual’s Bright Principles? The truth is that it could happen in one day.
The nation of Estonia proved this.
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 teams 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. In the same way, teachers across the land could self-organize a new curriculum in one day and transform the relevancy of school.
CRITICAL MASS VS CRITICAL CONNECTIONS
It makes total sense to think that a paradigm shifts only when a critical mass of individuals begins using new thinking. When the tipping point is reached the new paradigm takes over. Even though this critical mass model seems so logical it turns out not to be the only source of sudden change.
Since 1973, Margaret Wheatley has been exploring how living systems organize and reorganize themselves
“But networks aren’t the whole story. As networks grow and transform into active, working communities of practice, we discover how Life truly changes, which is through emergence. When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how Life creates radical change and takes things to scale.”
Emergence has a life-cycle. It begins when individuals form a network to share information. When these individuals desire something more substantial than a mere network they commit to support each other as practitioners in their lineage. When this community of practice makes critical connections with related communities of practice they weave a powerful system of influence that facilitates the emergence of global scale change.
During a private conversation with Meg Wheatley at the 2010 Authentic Leadership In Action conference in the Netherlands
made.”
The classic example of emergence causing a large scale system to reorder is the Berlin Wall suddenly vanishing on November 9, 1989. The thing to recognize is that the Wall did not suddenly vanish. Many interrelated communities of practice worked for years in parallel to re-weave local conditions so the old systems that built and maintained the Wall were no longer relevant.
This is happening again, only on a much grander scale. After five thousand years, the entire system of civilization has proven itself to be a fatally flawed paradigm. The parasitic system of multinational corporations and national megagovernments has become irrelevant. Next culture is emerging. And you have a part to play.
YOU ARE A CULTURAL CREATIVE
Your Phase 1 and Phase 2 feelings work makes a far bigger difference than you may have suspected. Your feelings work is cultural transformation happening personally and promptly, even by reading this book. If you simply read this book all the way through it builds a landing strip in you for new understanding to arrive for the rest of your life.
If while reading this book you do 25 percent of the recommended experiments, your attitudes and daily life behaviors could possibly begin to change.
If while reading this book you do 50 percent of the experiments, some of your friends and acquaintances may not be able to resist behaving differently in response to your new invitations to relationship.
If while reading this book you do 75 percent of the experiments, you will naturally emit memetic waves that modify the morphogenetic field of what is possible for humans. You will embody a new common understanding. You will hold space for a new cultural context. Your experiential clarity reshapes how the world looks to you, and this impacts all that you do, even washing the dishes.
In addition to your feelings, you have imagination, premonition, inspiration, intuition, nonlinearity, direct experience of your experience, and clarity about your Bright Principles. Your awareness manifests itself through your actions. You were born in these times with a real purpose. Consciously using the intelligence and impulse of your feelings enlivens that purpose. You are implementing you. In doing so, you serve as an agent of change, a cultural creative.