Realigning Our Energy
November 1, 2016 Kosmos Community News


Can We Harness Conflict?

By Mark Gerzon
IN THE CURRENT FALL | WINTER 2016 EDITION OF KOSMOS JOURNAL

Notice that the question in the title is not can we ‘end’ conflict, or even ‘manage’ or ‘contain’ it. These are old and usually unproductive approaches. The more useful question about conflict today is: Can we harness it?

After studying and working directly with conflict around the world for the last quarter century, and now witnessing my home country of America bitterly divided, this question seems both important and urgent to me. In fact, I would argue that the human future depends on how we answer it.


Keep Calm & Wake Up

By Richard Hames, CEO, Centre for the Future

Humans shape and construct systems deliberately – but then those same systems shape us – sometimes in ways that are least expected. All systems are designed to deliver what we need. Where the outputs are not what we want (or had intended) then we really only have two options.

1. If it is at all feasible we can redesign the system so that it does produce what we want.

2. Where that is too difficult, for whatever reasons, we can scrap the current system and start again – reinventing it from first principles in ways that fulfil more relevant design criteria.


Confessions of a Hypocrite: Utopia in the Age of Ecocide

By Shaun Chamberlin
PUBLISHED IN THE CURRENT FALL | WINTER 2016 EDITION OF KOSMOS JOURNAL

I confess! I love eating Magnum ice creams!!

But surely as a good, responsible eco-citizen, I must be aware that these relatively cheap, beautifully packaged nuggets of deliciousness are inescapably products of the industrial system that is destroying all that I hold dear?

…So I should stop eating them, right? I should overcome my baser urges and live a lifestyle that accords with my values and beliefs?


Communal Shamanism

By Nixiwaka Stirling

One of the most ubiquitous and over-used words in modern times is ‘shaman’. Before we try to unpack the concept and better understand why it seems to be such a relevant and sticky idea, I would like to propose the following distinctions within the terminology: A shaman is a person born into an Indigenous society, who has the gift of communicating with the Spirit world in an altered state, using any array of techniques available to achieve this state. A shaman directs and moves energy to restore harmony within the individual, between the individual and the community, and between the community and the Spirit world.


Book | The new expanded edition of Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

Hearing the Cry of the Earth, Preface to the Second Edition by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

When we first published Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth in the autumn of 2013, the understanding that there was a spiritual dimension to our ecological crisis was still a fringe idea. The mainstream of environmental discussion and activity was focused on science and technology, politics and economics. But then in the spring of 2015 a remarkable document was published that compellingly reframed the issue for millions of people across the world. Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, calls for us all to see that the “unprecedented destruction of ecosystems” we are visiting upon the Earth is rooted in urgent spiritual and moral questions, and requires from us a spiritual and moral response.


The Systems View of Life | Our Pathway Into the Future

By Mark Phillips, via his blog

featured image, Cliff Matias | Standing Rock Youth gather with supporters in Brooklyn. The new scientific understanding of the universe reveals the radical interdependence of all life on Earth.

By Mark Phillips, via his blog

“The challenge now before humanity is to align our way of being with the latest understanding of what it means to be alive. While applied systems thinking has been studied and popularised by folks like Peter Senge, it is essential that these disciplines are also nested within a larger consciousness of our membership in an evolving community of life on Earth. Otherwise, the application of this knowledge towards increasing corporate profits or more effectively managing industrial agricultural systems is driving us along the same trajectory we’ve been on for the past couple of centuries.

Instead, what we need is a fundamental rethinking of how we live. As Thomas Berry says, ‘we must reinvent the human at the species level’. “