The Emerging New Story
Spring | Summer 2014
Dear Friends,
This was another one of those times that I had to wait. Waiting until two days before deadline to be inspired can be somewhat distressing, but I have learned to wait in silence until inspiration emerges. Last week I received a video of an “Emergent Universe Oratorio” and found myself immersed in an inspiring synergy of the arts that told the story of the universe in music, poetry and painting—performed in Vermont in September 2013.1 I jotted down memorable words that spoke to me and looked at them every day, not knowing that they were part of the theme that I was waiting to emerge.
How then shall we live?
Once we hear the story
Once we sing the song of the universe.
How then shall we live?
Next came an email with “A New Story for a New Economy: To Find Our Human Place in a Living Universe” by David Korten.2 My mind began racing with excitement as my heart was still singing with the music of the universe. Mind and heart both said, “This is it!”
In his brilliant essay that will be published in book form in 2015, David gives us an evolving guiding story for our future that brings renewed hope, meaning and purpose—an articulation of the new paradigm that we are all searching for.
“Our essential current need as a species is to reorganize around a new culture
and new institutions grounded in living-system values and design principles
that bring us into alignment with nature and Creation’s divine purpose.”
A beautiful articulation of all that Kosmos Journal stands for!
David tells us how our old stories about separation, alienation and fear no longer serve us or are partial at best—a Distant Patriarch all-powerful male God separate from us in Heaven; The Grand Machine, the scientific view of a mechanistic universe, separating humans from nature; Mystical Unity teaching detachment rather than engagement and not addressing institutional sources of violence; treating money and markets as sacred while defining wealth and the good life in monetary terms.
The new story David describes is about redefining the context in which we live. We are “living beings who survive and thrive only as members of a healthy Earth Community in a dynamic, evolving, Living Universe.”
New scientific discoveries (that the subjective experiences of mystics have long affirmed) reveal a dynamic, living universe with which we can connect. The traditional scientific mechanistic view of a dead universe has led to environmental destruction, alienation and despair. In contrast, a living universe is full of hope, communion and the promise of higher capacities and discoveries as our journey gradually reveals the 95.9% of the universe that is presently unknown to us.
The New Story is about belonging, communing, cooperating, caring and sharing. It is about aligning with divine purpose and learning and listening to Nature as our teacher. It is about all of us as agents of the whole Kosmos, working together to make choices that align with purpose, generate life, and take responsibility for the integral functioning of the whole.
The wonder and beauty of a purposeful life becomes the supreme value of the New Story. We are living within an alive, evolving, purposeful universe with a community of diverse life forms on Sacred Mother Earth whom we depend on for love and care.
The New Story describes Earth as a living superorganism—“a self-organizing, self-regulating, continuously adapting, evolving community of life on whose health and well-being our own health and well-being depend—now and forevermore. Indeed, we must look to the structures and processes of Earth’s community of life as a model for the living human economy to which we must now transition.”
How then shall we live?
Once we hear the New Story
Once we dance the song of Life
How then shall we live?
Then the third piece came, filling my senses with beauty. A TED talk appeared in my email yesterday by Louie Schwartzberg, “Hidden Miracles of the Natural World.”3 It turned out to be a thrilling presentation of LIFE in motion—about living processes of nature that are invisible to the naked eye, because they are too slow or too fast, too small or too vast for human sight.
How little we know. How little we see.
How then shall we live?
1 www.samguarnaccia.com
2 www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/a-new-story-for-a-new-economy
3 www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_hidden_miracles_of_the_natural_world
Nancy,
Thanks for yet another gem (or set of gems)! Marcia and I eagerly await each issue of The Kosmos Journal, and have never been disappointed.
I have an anecdote that illustrates part of Otto Scharmer’s distinction between Big Data and Deep Data.
For a while, I have been referring to those who belong to the LinkedIn group Kosmos Journal as the “Kosmos community”, and thought that the readers might be interested in how I came to be part of that community.
A couple of years ago, I decided to emerge from my largely isolated corner and reach out to thousands of LinkedIn members who were overtly committed to building a world that works for all, and who were involved at various intersections within the ecosystem of personal, cultural, political and economic transformation.
For a statistician looking at the situation without knowing the deeper story, it is astronomically unlikely that a “random” reaching out to a few thousand people (out of 7 billion), that netted me about 1400 (weak) connections would produce the following outlier. 124 of my connections are among the 337 members of the Kosmos Journal group on LinkedIn.
To get a sense of the improbability, I am connected to one out of every 5 million global citizens. If connecting was random, one would expect my number of connections in the Kosmos community to be 337, divided by 5,000,000 = .0000674, which is also the variance for that random variable.
Yet there was nothing surprising about linking to over a third of the Kosmos Journal members. I searched for people whose profile included terms like “social entrepreneur”, “sustainable future”, “triple bottom line”, “deliberative democracy”, “integral institute”, “evolutionary spirituality”, “collective wisdom” and many other terms that helped me identify those with a shared vision, and then I read their profiles to assure the alignment, before inviting them to connect.
I have yet to truly connect with the vast majority of those 1400 “connections”, but I’m having as many conversations as I can fit in the calendar these days, as it looks increasingly probable that Citizen Realty will soon get wings.
Thank you again for making Kosmos Journal a center around which the community of world changers can assemble!
Norlyn Dimmitt, FSA
Norlyn,
Thank you so much for sharing your LinkedIn discoveries about the Kosmos Community. We love what you are doing. As you know we are working on a project to start linking for more impact. We will have an article about it in the next issue of Kosmos.
We will keep in touch for sure.
Nancy