The Community Awaiting Us
The Community Awaiting Us
To help us meet the challenge of climate chaos—the biggest challenge humans have ever faced—we have the science now, the telecommunications, and vast amounts of information. What we need more than anything is our natural strength and legacy of being in community. We are meant for community, we’re enlivened by community, we are nurtured by community.
I doubt that we have a clear idea of how we have all been misshapen, stunted, even imprisoned by the hyper-individualism of the last five centuries and what it has done to our experience of our self. It has shrunken that self. It has weakened it. It has made us feel separated and isolated.
As we discover in the Work That Reconnects, our grief is natural and wholesome, and so is our outrage. In community, our collective common sense can defy the notion that our distress for the world is a sign of weakness. In our culture, there is a fixation on being the captain of our fate and the master of our soul—a delusion which psychologist James Hillman called the “lonely cowboy ego.” We have been taught to compete and made prey to fear.
It is time to remember that we belong to each other. We’re made for each other. We cannot do it alone. We come out of our world, just like a tree comes out of the soil and the rays of the sun. Gratitude is a swift way to come back to our sanity and rediscover our inter-being. It’s an antidote to the wounded and fearful self. That is why in the Work That Reconnects the first step on the path together is gratitude. It’s so easy; once we are given the chance, the countless things that we love about being alive in Earth come pouring out—and it’s hard not to fall in love with each other while that is happening. For the native people in America, on Turtle Island, giving thanks is their first step: “the words that come before all else.” What we discover again and again is that gratitude grounds us.
In the consumer society, gratitude is subversive. To be thankful for something is a revolutionary act. The simple and liberating message of gratitude is, “I am not that needy.” That’s empowering; it gives us the strength to face what is hard. When we are alone, unsupported by community, it is easy to let our acute distress for the world be pathologized. After all, we have Big Pharma to take care of our pain for the world, and, for that matter, our grief and outrage and dread, whereas the suffering we are carrying for our planet today is natural, wholesome, and probably necessary. Through the exercises and rituals of the Work that Reconnects, we have learned to honor these feelings as being a natural and powerful expression of our love.
I doubt we can even imagine what can pour through us when we feel our true kinship with each other. We’ve been lonely, scared, and isolated at a deep level, as well as set on competing and outdoing each other. I wonder if we are able to envision how beautiful it will be, and what will come through our hearts, our hands, our voices when we hold each other’s backs.
The time for the loneliness, fear, and cowering so that nobody will see how inadequate we are, is over now. It is over because we’re going to move forward in the kind of community that we know is possible. That will not be done by the protests and marches. It’s done by living and working together. It’s done in late-night meetings, song circles, and teams we can count on. Perhaps, most urgently right now, community means growing food. As we do this, we will be learning from each other and getting our hands dirty together, and we’ll be kissing each other’s lips while there’s still dirt from the soil on them. With each other, we will come home.
Let us celebrate that whatever happens, we have choice. In Tibetan Buddhist practice, that’s what you begin with: you give thanks for having a human life, not because humans are better than any other beings, but because this big brain is too complex and highly differentiated to rely on instinct or trial and error. That is to say, we have self-reflexive consciousness and can choose. Often we choose stupidly, forgetting, as the native people say, “our original instructions.” The other animals stay splendid in their true nature. We can forget, but we can choose. We can choose where we put our mind.
We can choose the story we want to get behind for our world, and it seems that there are three basic ones. There’s Business as Usual, which is the version of reality we hear the most. From the politicians, the corporations, the military, and the media, we hear that everything will be fine as soon as we get back to growing our economy.
The next version of reality that more and more people are pointing to is that we are wrecking our world. There is a Great Unraveling going on, and people are even talking more and more about “collapse.”
But the third story is evident when you choose to see all the ways that our new culture is beginning to grow and sprout, like green shoots coming up through the rubble of a dysfunctional civilization. We see new ways of growing food, new ways of holding the land, new ways of resolving conflict, new ways of generating energy. We see that we are in transition to a life-sustaining culture and society. Many of us call this the Great Turning. Most people who are involved in it don’t even know the phrase. It doesn’t matter. But it matters to pay attention because the corporate-controlled media don’t report it. So, community becomes the way that we can put our ear to the ground, and become ever-more aware of what’s really happening.
It’s not about which story is going to win, the Business as Usual or the Great Unraveling or the Great Turning. The question is, what do you want to give your one wild and beautiful life to? That’s been a great help to many of us as we face the fact that we do not know how the story will end, as we live with uncertainty about the very future of complex life forms on our planet.
As we envisage the Great Turning, it would be nice to be bathed in confidence and assurance that all will work out. But I don’t think it’s all that helpful, because there is something more precious than confidence or even hope. And that is an unconditional readiness and freedom to be here, simply glad to be on hand.
We are given this incredible razor’s edge of possibility, where we’re totally in the moment together, not distracted by wondering whether we’ll fail or transform the world. I’m not going to ask for that kind of assurance. The strength of uncertainty is to be fully present. When you are distracted by how much to hope, you are only conditionally here.
In this present moment, facing this unrepeatable challenge of climate chaos, we can feel we are being joined by both those who have gone before and those who will come after. Our ancestors have brought us to the Great Turning, and future generations are here as well by virtue of their utter dependence upon our response. Their presence expands the community that opens to us now and invites us into deep time. It’s the sweetest thing that we don’t even have to know how all the gifts—seeded by our ancestors and evoked by the future ones—can pour through us. These gifts are not our personal property, nor meant for the separate self. They come through now for the sake of Life itself.
This article is possible through a collaboration with CCC19: Climate Change and Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth, at the Findhorn Foundation, North Scotland, April 20-26, 2019. The event will feature some of the clearest and most passionate voices for the Earth ever gathered together in one place. Kosmos is an official hub for CCC19
Dancing with Gaia
Dancing with Gaia
Editors’s Note | CLIMATE CHANGE & CONSCIOUSNESS: OUR LEGACY FOR THE EARTH, at the Findhorn Foundation, in North Scotland, April 20-26, 2019, will be a unique conference about surviving and thriving in a climate changing world and post-carbon economy. The event will feature some of the clearest and most passionate voices for the Earth ever gathered together in one place. Kosmos is an official hub for CCC19.
It may be difficult for organizers and strategists, planners, activists, and environmentalists to comprehend how an event as broad in scale and as detailed as the upcoming gathering, Climate Change & Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth, was delivered completely through spiritual guidance. But it was.
I am a neuroscientist, a clinician, a researcher, an author, and an educator. I am a mother and a grandmother, and I am married to an environmental attorney who tests my ideas through the lens of his critical thinking about how things work. While I have cultivated spiritual awareness my entire life, I have also trained extensively in somatics and make every effort to be grounded and anchored as I must be to meet all my responsibilities.
Yet on the night of November 8th, 2016, as I was heading in the direction of enormous despair by what was happening in my country, I was lifted up by the delivery into my physical body—starting at the crown of my head and descending in increments to my toes—of a clear plan. This was a structure for gathering together a diverse assembly of humans at a place known for its profound relationship to nature so that they could awaken to, celebrate, and act on the power of human resilience and evolution to meet the climate crisis and alchemize it through action.
The skeletal design, the central players (indigenous leaders, youth, environmental scientists, activists, artists, permaculturists, diversity farmers, neuroscientists, community organizers, physicians, social entrepreneurs, architects, transportation and urban planners, businessmen and women of all ages and from all over the globe) would come together and, in collaboration with the unseen realms and the creatures of the earth, pool their innate brilliance to rally humanity practically and effectively in the name of the children of the future.
Many of the speakers were named to me along with the location for the gathering. The instructions were logical and direct, but the manner of their transmission was completely revolutionary. It was an outline for action, and it was given with such clarity and insistence that there was no resistance possible. And it all downloaded in less than fifteen minutes. I have never turned back from this assignment, though it transformed my life completely in virtually every regard from that moment forward.
What has impressed me the most since that stunning moment two years ago is the neuroresilience that has accompanied it. I have moved into thought realms and collaborative relationships that are unlike anything I would have chosen for myself. The joys I experience from living brazenly on these new creative frontiers bring with them a unique neurochemistry that I did not even know was possible. This speaks to my conversation with environmentalist Bob Yuhnke elsewhere in this journal about ending habituation as the path of consciousness in a climate-changing world. It is letting go of the very ways in which we identify and value ourselves that we enter the neuroplasticity required of this new era.
I am sharing all this with you right now in order to encourage you to step into activism and leadership not as a duty but as a love affair. Nothing promotes radical transformation as much as love. And who is the affair with? It is with life itself: with Gaia, with the natural world, with the promise of a future. It is also a love affair with your own highest potential. The art of love is the art of surrender. As someone who always thought she would be an artist (meaning a poet or a dancer) I never would have considered social leadership as an art form, but that is exactly what it is. We are dancing with the forces of fate and the subtle realms—listening to the music of an evolutionary symphony that oscillates between discordant and rhapsodic. This is what Climate Change & Consciousness means to me: the dance of life, the art of love.
Images by Zach Street
Zach Street is an Artist/Activist/Educator living in Hilo, Hawai’i, and shares his island home with the ‘Ōhi‘a Lehua featured here. Endemic to the island, these iconic trees are symbolic of love, dance, and the spirit of Nature. Currently under threat from human introduced diseases, the ‘Ōhi‘a Lehua are inspiring the local community to act for the future of the forests of Hawai’i. MORE
Yes, we are living on the brink of utter disaster. Yes, species are being lost and the grief is unbearable. We do not know if there will be a future worth inhabiting for our children or our children’s children. Yet, at the same time, the symphony of miraculous, impossible change is being composed for us. Please listen. As someone who has survived and thrived despite overwhelming trauma, I know the paradox of hopelessness conjoined with limitless possibility. This juxtaposition is what I am looking at now as I survey a world in crisis. I do not deny the despair that comes over me, but it is always alchemized into faith by astounding neural connections that are built as I evolve through and with this crisis.
While I study the science of climate change, I also study the human nervous system. I have become more focused and clearer about their interaction. From a physiological standpoint, we have every capacity to innovate ourselves and to shift behavior, speech, and thinking in unforeseen directions. Foremost among the health consequences of climate change is the loss, panic, and stress that is virtually everywhere and that will accelerate. There is nothing more important for us to do than to step courageously into the role of leadership in this regard—whether we think we are qualified or not—by modeling a pioneering response to challenge. I invite you to embrace the crucible of our climate-changing world as you would welcome a lover or unique friend—someone so unpredictable and provocative that they wake you up to the present. This reality we are moving into has many hidden twists and turns. It is full of surprises. Dare to enjoy the growth it ignites and embody how that translates into activism. We are all newcomers to what Thomas Berry called the Ecozoic Era when humans would recover their creative orientation to the world.
In the process of healing from early trauma, I have reclaimed some of the childhood that I lost because of it. This imparts a capacity to be incredibly curious, like a child coming into a room for the first time and noticing all the energies that are there: the colors, the shapes, the nuances, the sensations. This sensory experience of discovery is a key aspect of moving into the unprecedented qualities of this historical moment. Paradoxically, I see the world as if for both the last and the first time. I am made anew by the guidance that is available to flow through me and direct my words, my gestures, even my very steps. Every action we take is programmed in the somatosensory cortex, the behavioral hard drive of the brain. Addictions are sustained by addictive gestures, down to the simplest ones like lighting a smoke, ordering a burger, or turning on the ignition of a car and expecting to hear the engine turn over. When we break an addiction, these behaviors no longer engage. Instead, new neuronal connections are sparked. That is what I experience as I step into leadership. It is a cellular regenerative high that no drug can replicate. It is sustainable and sustaining. It is available for you, free of charge, if you are willing to dance with your beloved Gaia. She is waiting expectantly for you, her hands outstretched.
Attend the parallel Kosmos Event | Climate, Consciousness, and Community Summit | April 20-23
Consciousness and the Combustion Engine
Consciousness and the Combustion Engine
Featured Image | by Zach Street
This article is possible through a collaboration with CCC19—Climate Change and Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth, at the Findhorn Foundation, North Scotland, April 20–26, 2019. The event will feature some of the clearest and most passionate voices for the Earth ever gathered together in one place. Kosmos is an official hub for CCC19.
Introduction
Getting to zero emissions by 2050, as the IPCC Report demands, requires a collective detox from our addiction to oil. We are in the midst of a global overdose. We need to enter a universal treatment center with consciousness as the lead therapist.
Environmental Attorney Robert Yuhnke, who is developing the transportation policy position for the U.S. Climate Action Network, and Stephanie Mines, a neuroscientist and the convener of CCC19, have a conversation about how to come clean from our addiction.
What We Know About How Humans Are Changing the Climate
Robert | Thirty years ago, scientists warned that adding CO2 and other heat-trapping gases to our atmosphere would warm the planet and disrupt the stable climate system that has supported the development of agriculture and the evolution of human civilization for the last 8000 years. Now, those changes predicted a generation ago are happening: more massive floods; more powerful hurricanes; expanded tornado zones; hotter and longer droughts that cause crop desiccation, forest die-off, and unstoppable firestorms; ocean warming that has bleached more than one-third of the coral reefs; and ocean acidification that threatens the survival of all shell-dwelling critters, thereby putting the entire marine web of life at risk.
Stephanie | Thirty years ago, I was pregnant with my second child. Less than a year prior, I had completed my doctorate. I felt like I was starting all over again with a new career and a baby on the way. Climate change never crossed my mind and, as far as I could tell, none of my friends, family, or clients were thinking about it. Jumping into my car whenever I had to go anywhere was a sign of my freedom. I was close enough to town to walk there for meetings and errands, but time was always tight with a bustling practice and children. I and the people in my world chose to be completely unconscious of how we had been manipulated into believing that each one of us had to have our own vehicle, and that we needed it to do everything quickly in our important, busy, and individually-focused lives. We could afford it, so why not?
Robert | Climate change consequences arrived sooner, and are more severe, than scientists anticipated two decades ago. An ice-free Arctic Ocean was not expected for another generation, but likely will occur this summer. Massive melting of Antarctic glaciers was not expected for a half-century or more, but is happening now. Damage from climate-related events in the U.S. alone exceeded $300 billion in 2017. The Climate Assessment released by 13 U.S. agencies in December 2018, reports that damages from climate disasters soon will routinely exceed $500 billion annually, contributing to a significant contraction in the national economy.
Many of these effects were not expected to occur until after the global temperature had warmed at least 2 degrees (C), but, to date, the global average has climbed only 1.1 C since the beginning of the industrial age. Heeding warnings that a rise of 2 C might result in a runaway climate catastrophe beyond human intervention, global leaders at the 2015 Paris Conference asked the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to determine what must be done to limit the increase to 1.5 C.
Stephanie | Now that daughter, who I was carrying in my body thirty years ago, has launched a career and is entering the relationship that may be her soul partnership. Her life is blossoming, but due to my ignorance and blindness, climate change is disappearing her future. While I tried to keep her clean and well fed, and educate her and prepare her for life, I was completely ignoring the devastation that I was contributing to as I chauffeured her from one event to another, from one class to another, to and from play dates and lessons and swim meets and overnights. I was raising my children and counseling my clients in total ignorance of what we were doing to our world. Like a blindfolded captive, I was erasing the future.
What Must Be Done to Stop a Runaway Climate Catastrophe?
Robert | In October, 2018, IPCC reported that because no notable progress had been made in reversing greenhouse gas emissions, it might be too late to avoid exceeding a rise of 1.5 C. But if some of the unknowns work out in our favor, it might be possible. If CO2 emissions are cut to net zero by 2050, with half of those reductions achieved by 2030, AND if a large portion of the land surface currently dedicated to raising beef and other domestic animals is reforested to grow the planet’s capacity to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, we might not cross that threshold. To achieve these emission targets, almost all energy uses that rely on the combustion of fossil carbon must be stopped or converted to zero emission technologies by 2050. Half of those reductions must be achieved within the next 11 years to avoid total atmospheric loadings that will drive temperatures above the 1.5 C target over the next 1000 years while we wait for forests and phytoplankton in the oceans to restore stability to the climate by extracting CO2 from the air.
Stephanie | What qualifies as an addiction? It is insistent, obsessive repetition that is hardwired into the brain. Pain is experienced if the satisfaction center that is the goal of that repetition is not reached. Other options for satisfaction are nullified. In all cases, the original impulse for satisfaction was innocent, but having been completely defeated, it has been forgotten. It takes considerable effort to remind the brain of what it wanted originally: love, connection, peace, and joy. Neuroplasticity is fueled by the potential to replace the compensatory satisfaction with something real. Then it is possible to live past the pain and remember what it feels like to make another choice. This is a change in consciousness. It is synonymous with coming out of addiction.
Transport As an Example of the Challenge We Face
Robert | Worldwide, over one billion cars and trucks, tens of thousands of aircraft, and many thousand ships at sea and railroad locomotives together combust roughly 50 million barrels of the 100 million barrels of petroleum extracted from the Earth EVERY DAY. The petroleum burned to provide the motive power to move people and goods accounts for nearly one-quarter of all CO2 emitted daily into the atmosphere. In the U.S., where coal burned to generate electric power was once the largest source of CO2, emissions from power generation have been reduced during the last decade by switching to natural gas, wind, and solar. Now, transport—a sector of the economy where emissions are growing—is the largest source of CO2, at 35 percent. The IPCC global emission targets cannot be achieved without reducing transport emissions to net zero by 2050.
The climate crisis demands that the use of fossil fuels in the transport sector must end. This calls for the accelerated replacement of fossil fueled (FF) internal combustion engines (ICEs) throughout the transport sector. Electric and hydrogen powered vehicles emit no greenhouse gasses (GHGs) from the vehicles themselves. And, zero emissions are achieved if the electricity or hydrogen is generated using renewable sources of energy.
Recently developed battery technology is resulting in commercially available zero emission vehicles (ZEVs)—passenger vehicles, vans, transit and school busses, and passenger and freight rail. New electric pick-up truck and 18 wheeler models were commercially introduced in 2018, and Tesla anticipates releasing a long-haul truck by 2020. Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles also are in use in California, Europe, and Asia. The challenge is to deploy these technologies quickly enough to replace one billion ICEs by 2050.
Currently, more than 60 million new passenger vehicles and a few million new trucks are sold annually worldwide. In the next 20 years, 1.5 billion new vehicles will be produced—both to replace the existing global fleet and to add vehicles to meet growing demand. As of 2018, less than one percent of global new vehicle sales are ZEVs. But to meet the IPCC’s zero emission target and replace all ICEs by 2050, 100 percent of sales must be ZEVs within a few years.
This could be accomplished if every new car buyer insisted on buying a ZEV. Public demand, if consciously guided by the choice needed to protect our planetary home, could transform the world’s vehicle population by 2050. But that is not happening here, either because people are not making conscious choices or their choices are not guided by planetary consciousness.
We should look to Norway where 30 percent of new vehicle sales are ZEVs, and 40 percent of miles driven are in ZEVs. How has Norway created broad public demand for ZEVs? It’s investing in a ubiquitous electric vehicle (EV) charging network where power is often free; creating tax benefits that offset the incremental purchase price of a new EV; and setting 2025 as the deadline for ending the sale of new ICEs. Clearly, the public will respond if the price signals are set.
Capital costs of new EVs are dropping rapidly as advances in battery technology reduce their cost and weight. Bloomberg estimates the cost of battery EVs will be comparable to new ICEs by 2023–2025; California estimates comparable costs by 2030. Soon, special tax incentives may not be needed to make EVs price competitive. But competitive pricing will shift only some market demand; not 100 percent. To achieve the IPCC targets, the sale of all new ICEs must end within the next few years. Can this change in attitudes be accomplished in our democracy soon enough to save the planet?
Stephanie | The brain never stops evolving. My entire focus in life has been on the human experience of the resolution of shock and trauma, individually and in community. I have seen over and over again the enormous human capacity to change. Just recently I was asked to help resolve the conflict between the head of an organization and a staff member who felt abused by him. For hours, the CEO defended himself saying that the charges of abuse were impossible. The incidents had never occurred. He was convinced that the staff member was fabricating the events. Then, in the last 15 minutes of our meeting, it dawned on him that he had been blind to the impact of his words. He had been culturally insensitive. He had failed to see how he had put a roadblock on someone’s path by not paying attention; by being self-serving. In that moment he woke up.
Like this CEO, we can still wake up while there is just enough time. A big shift can happen in just a few moments when we reroute our attention and open to new ways of reaching satisfaction. I can face the truth of what I contributed to our painful reality and make a new choice now. If everyone reading this becomes a vehicle of change by only driving electric cars, inspiring someone else to do the same, and demanding that governments act to require automakers to meet the needs of a planetary system in crisis, we will be many steps closer to thriving in a climate-changing world.
Emergent Universe Oratorio
Emergent Universe Oratorio
SAMUEL GUARNACCIA composer | PAULA GUARNACCIA producer | CAMERON DAVIS visual artist
The Emergent Universe Oratorio (EUO) is an hour-and-a-half long choral and orchestral composition which often is co-presented with a series of dynamic paintings created by the visual artist, Cameron Davis. It was conceived in response to the current scientific cosmology as presented in the 2011 documentary Journey of the Universe.
The EUO was deeply inspired by the work Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim from the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. These seminal thinkers have endeavored to lead us to a new understanding of the place of humans in the Universe. The film, Journey of the Universe, inspired this artistic musical expression built on the themes of the documentary—to provide a way to enter in, and directly experience, this new cosmology, deepening our evolving understanding of and response to the ‘new story’.
“The great discovery of contemporary science is that the universe is not simply a place, but a story—a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose.” (Swimme/Tucker)
The EUO music and lyrics express this new story, endeavoring to evoke reverence and responsibility. The EUO also is a call to inspire humanity to participate in Earth’s transition toward a mutually enhancing Earth-human relationship. The work includes lyrics and texts of visionary poets, scientists, writers—Thomas Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wendell Berry, Brian Swimme, John Elder, and Mary Evelyn Tucker.
The EUO’s intent is to provide a pathway through art and music to a “total commitment to (all) life” (Thomas Berry), which arises from the deep awareness, awe, and reverence for our absolute unity with the Universe.
Interview with Sam and Paula Guarnaccia
Kari | Sam and Paula, what prompted you to interweave science, music, words, spirituality, philosophy, and billions of years of history into this beautiful narrative that tells the story of everyone and everything?
Sam | Well, the simplest answer is the insatiable curiosity that drives all inquiry—and that is that everything is connected. Something came to me in thinking about that—music is like water flowing beneath that bridge that is—being. Music has a way of expressing the inexpressible. It HAD to be a great interweaving of all the ways of knowing that are possible for humans.
Paula | With that being said, we wanted this also to be scientifically valid, so we had a number of scientists read through it and they did make some very substantive changes. Obviously it’s evolving all the time, but right now, the scientists have said it’s valid.
Sam | Absolutely. At the Philadelphia concert introduction, Ursula Goodenough, a phenomenally important cell biologist (who was one of the people who reviewed the libretto and made some changes), declared it “scientifically flawless,” which was very, very gratifying to us. She also very succinctly and powerfully talked about how humans really process everything through stories.
Paula | We are really standing on the shoulders of giants. Giants who have thought through these concepts so beautifully and we’re just giving the latest voice to this wonderful story that is not just ours; it’s everyone’s story. We don’t claim it, we just are expressing it.
Kari | Why did you choose to tell the story in the form of an oratorio when you could have maybe chosen to do a series of songs, a concept album, one long Guinness World Record track, an opera, a soundtrack that could include a filmography, or images, or dance? Why an oratorio?
Sam | I love that question. It’s not one that I’ve ever been asked before. I guess one answer is the oratorio has a great history. It’s a story form in music that goes way, way back, before opera. Probably the world’s best known oratorio is Handel’s Messiah. It was important to me, and then to all of us as we went forward, to think—what form could stand up to the test of time and hopefully become an important contribution to mainstream art and cultural expression? My hope was that this would have enough substance and be good enough to be able to do that.
Paula | In terms of your question about images, we always felt that the visual was an important component of the performance. That’s why we collaborated very closely over several years with visual artist, Cameron Davis. Cami created 12 beautiful, very large paintings for the first performance, and they’ve been present for all of the performances in one way or another. They formed the set, a visual representation that carried so much of the emotional content as well. We’ve always felt that was extremely important.
Sam | And then another important part of my answer to this wonderful question is—the real dream that we have for this project is, at some point, to have the resources to collaborate with a passionate and highly skilled documentary filmmaker. The oratorio would be essentially the soundtrack source for a really beautiful documentary that contained all of the music, but most of the words transformed to beautiful visuals, maybe with some underlying text.
Kari | Oh, I think it would lend itself to that! Hopefully, somebody comes forward that you could collaborate with. I also wanted to comment on how well it integrates science with beauty and things that we ‘know’ about the universe. Then there are things that we ‘can’t know’. How does this tension inform your work?
Sam | Well again, I love this question—so insightful when you put the first ‘know’ in quotes, the ‘knowing’ of facts—the great science story—the lists of truly astounding things that we now know. Then there is the knowing of personal relationship. One thing this question prompted in me was thinking of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme’s original The Universe Story book of the early ’90s; they talk about, “How does the universe work?” In the language of Thomas Berry, there is a cosmological principle that has three elements: diversification, interiority/subjectivity, and communion.
Once you get these different identities, then they can enter into relationships. The title is Emergent Universe Oratorio, and emergence is not a new concept, but it is relatively new. It is the appearance of unpredictable, unexpected, unforeseeable dynamics and structures from elements that exist at lower/simpler levels. Everything in the universe is emerging through this process of what is called cosmogenesis. It’s the constant becoming of everything. Another way of saying it: the Universe is astonishingly creative.
Paula | It’s one of the concepts … or the takeaways for an audience, and it starts right in the title, Emergent Universe Oratorio … emergent … this idea that things are evolving or changing, that things are going to be revealed, that there’s an unfolding in life and the great humility that comes from knowing that. So the world we ‘know’, and I love the quotation marks too, because we know something but it’s not complete. Is it ever complete? We’re in an evolving world.
Kari | Let’s move onto the idea of Rising Earth Awareness, the theme of this edition, which is sort of related to ‘emergence’. How does the oratorio speak to that? And do you think the Earth is becoming more aware of us too?
Paula | Oh yes. As a matter fact, there is an Emergent Universe Oratorio phase two project that’s going to be earthbound. Sam can tell you about that.
Sam | If you are familiar with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work, she is a Native American and a brilliant scientist. She is probably the leading authority in the world on mosses, which are among the first plants, and which are responsible for you and me being able to have this conversation.
Paula | Robin’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is tremendous. We’re beginning a collaboration on a piece that, hopefully, will be reflecting earth awareness, so it’s going from the cosmos down into the world of mosses and lichens—very earthbound. One way to say this in terms of rising earth awareness is that once you take on board the story of the universe and you understand where we came from and the factors that have led to the development of the Earth, then you can begin to understand where we are, and perhaps where we’re going.
Sam | Your question also suggests Lynn Margulis’ and James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis—that the Earth is a sentient being, a self-organizing system that is actually experiencing a fever and is responding with an immune response to that fever, and that immune response is this conversation we’re having. There are hundreds of thousands of little NGOs, individuals, and groups like Kosmos, Emergence Magazine, Bill McKibben’s 350.org, and so forth, all contributing to a global immune response to the planetary threat.
Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said, “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”
Freeman Dyson is, I would say, one of the most skeptical scientists on Earth. For him to say that is a powerful affirmation that the Earth is becoming more aware of us too.
Kari | I wanted to talk a little bit about the film, Journey of the Universe, by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme, and how that film acted as a catalyst for the libretto that accompanies your oratorio.
Paula | Well, I can start that. When we met Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim in June of 2011, we were already working with Cami Davis. All three of us were working together on a piece that was Earth-based at that point. We had the concept of an oratorio, a libretto and we were working toward it. There was a little bit of music written, just the beginning of things. When we met Mary Evelyn and John—they came to dinner at our house—and it was like a lightning bolt quite frankly. We saw the film, and thought “What other story is there to tell? I mean this is THE story.” We worked with Mary Evelyn, John, and Brian Swimme to vet the libretto. They have been tremendous supporters of this work. There’s a deep connection there.
Sam | Yes, the way the chapters are arranged in the book and in the film—the sequences of scenes in the Journey of the Universe documentary—when you have a chance to see it, you will for sure recognize the flow.
Kari | They are some of the giants that you’re standing on the shoulders of.
Sam | Yes, they are. They’re just really remarkable. They started the Forum for Religion and Ecology at Yale. Yale has arguably the best environmental school—the Yale School of Forestry—and the Yale Divinity School is renowned. They have bridged those two things, bringing religion and ecology together. There’s great power and great insight in all of that work.
Kari | In the same vein as the ideas of crossing domains and integrating everything and everybody, you involved children in reading the Lament, and it struck me as a very powerful and very timely addition because we have so many young voices now as leaders of movements. Was the decision to include young voices a deliberate one or was it arbitrary? Do you feel it’s important that they’re included?
Paula | Oh yes, and it was not arbitrary at all. We had this idea to do a narrative of lost species, ecosystem loss, and just loss. We worked first with Amy Seidl (biologist at the University of Vermont), who did the initial writing, and we were searching for a young person to read with her. We settled on her daughter Helen, who auditioned and was just great. So it started off being a mother-daughter conversation first. Then, when we went to Cleveland, we thought, “We don’t have a mother-daughter, but why not two young people?” We had connections to some charter schools in Cleveland. We auditioned a bunch of young people and two of them, Niko and Anaria, did the reading there.
In Philadelphia, we changed the format again. We thought, “What about having the young person speak to the adult?” We ended up with the narrator—again a young person—with the adult reflecting the species losses back to her. All of these losses—like the 9/11 memorials when they recite all of the names—the naming is so powerful.
Kari | I got the sense that it was very deliberate, but you just highlighted exactly how deliberate, what a process that was, which I think is so beautiful, powerful, and a really great idea.
Paula | Well, it did evolve. Each one is a little different. We tweaked them a little bit, too, by looking at the list of what’s currently endangered or extinct, and asked if there was some new species on the list? There is this huge list you can find online and you can just pull from it and there’s so much to choose from. Those lists are enormous. It’s absolutely terrifying. We share the Lament part—yes, very, very deliberate, evolving and powerful—right in the middle of the oratorio.
The Cascade – Lament involves children naming endangered and extinct species. This video shows the different ways that children made their statements in each of the three performances.
Endless Spring | The Art of Cameron Davis
The Emergent Universe Oratorio project represents a three-year collaboration between composer Sam Guarnaccia; his wife and executive producer, Paula Guarnaccia; and myself, a visual artist.
We immersed ourselves in the insights of readings addressing climate disruption, ecological collapse, and frameworks of courage for moving forward, trusting that there is a place for the arts to contribute. We came upon the insights of deep time thinking and evolutionary processes revealed in the book, Journey of the Universe, by Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker. We realized that was the content to frame our project, and began a period of consultation with Mary Evelyn Tucker and her husband, John Grim, co-producers of the film, Journey of the Universe.
I created a body of 12 major paintings that I titled Endless Spring to accompany the oratorio premier.
The series began with imagery informed by ecological issues: Tar Sands Tonglen, Prayer for the Monarchs, The Meter of Eternity, a glacier elegy (Ursula Le Guin). Then, during late winter of 2013, snowdrop flowers became a personal metaphor for loss and renewal and the last half of the paintings included those images. Snowdrops emerge at the edge of retreating snow in Vermont’s early spring. They seemed like the perfect form to reflect both my despair of ecological collapse, and a notion of resilience. Endless Spring is also one of the many Buddhist terms for awakening. We need nothing less if we humans are to continue. In this way, I see the paintings as an invitation to celebrate our awakened belonging to Earth and the Cosmos. – Cameron Davis
Kari | When you encounter people who may not be as open-minded as children, or think as deeply about our future, or are unable to think in transformative terms, what would you say to someone who asks you how you define success with your project? How do you explain this project to people who wonder what’s in it for you?
Sam | These are such provoking and thoughtful questions that say so much about you and about the Kosmos community! Success with the project has been just being able to have the time to think and probe one’s insides, one’s heart, one’s emotions, and to express these things. Just the reward of being able to have the freedom, the choice, the privilege of being able to reach for something like this, to delve in and to try to evoke as much beauty as possible in a creative work, that is a huge success all by itself.
Kari | That addresses my next question. What do you hope the audience or listeners take with them after they experience your oratorio? So, we can consider that as one answer!
Paula | We always made sure that every program included the full libretto so that people could take it home. With one hearing, it does take a while to have things really enter and anchor inside. For people to have it in hand was really important—something that they could actually hold and take with them.
Kari | What does the future hold for the Emergent Universe Oratorio? I think the trip that you took to India recently might have something to do with that, too. Do you want to tell us what you were there to do?
Sam | We were invited by the International Big History Association organizers for their 2020 World Conference in India to create something like the oratorio for a South Asian-centered event. We were trying to integrate it with South Asian text and instrumental sounds to find a way to bring those together with Western music traditions as kind of a celebratory part of the conference, but also to have a portion of a piece—the movement of a larger piece is now what it seems to be—then go out and through India and maybe through the world as a cross-cultural or an intercultural expression of this great story.
Paula | The trip was really an orientation for us. It was really for us to learn about India; to meet musicians, scientists, educators, and writers; to figure out what can be done; and, if we were the right people, how it would fit together. We began to have a little inkling of an understanding about India.
Sam | As for the Emergent Universe Oratorio, there are additional explorations of further places and people to engage this piece with the possibility that one of those occasions might yield that really high-level recording that would be sufficient to become a soundtrack for a film. So there are opportunities … New York, possibly Nashville, California, Puerto Rico, and possibly even Cuba. So those are tentative feelers that are out for further performances of the oratorio.
Before we go, I would love to respond a little bit more deeply to your previous question, “What do you hope the audience/ listeners take with them after they experience the piece?”
Kari | Please do!
Sam | That raises the question we get asked the most, which is “How do we save ourselves? What is it going to take?” This is something that was being wrestled with at a conference we were invited to attend in Southern India, just a week ago. I was asked that question in Princeton, too, a few months ago. What is it going to take to turn the tide of human presence on the Earth so that we become—as a global society—caretakers, and not exploiters, of the planet? How to end war and create a just society that works for everybody? We’ve never had that. “What is it going to take?” and I said this:
To be present to, and to act in your world to what is in front of you; to inspire, educate, and exemplify a new way of being not just environmentally but in every mode of being; and to train your mind, heart, and body to fall in love, to fall in love deeply with every being, structure, and living system around you, to envision and feel the Earth as your child, as if she were your child, your beloved for whom you will and would do anything.
I honestly think that if we can look at each other and other living things and the Earth itself with the kind of love that we have for our children, our husbands, our loved ones, our parents for whom we would do anything … it all does come down to love. Of course, one has to really outline how that love gets shown; what is love really, but living for the other? That glimmer of a feeling, that spark of realizing that we have a living relationship of love, of interdependence and inter-being with the entire planet Earth and with all other humans and all other living things.
Kari | That was beautiful. I’m so glad you read that. Thank you Sam and Paula!
Sam and Paula | You are so welcome.
Companion Book List
1. Swimme, Brian Thomas and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Journey of the Universe (book and/or documentary film). New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
2. Hathaway, Mark and Leonardo Boff. The TAO of Liberation, Exploring the Ecology of Transformation. New York: Orbis Books, 2009. (This book is amazing—leaves nothing out!)
3. Jourdain, Robert. Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy. New York: AVON Books, 1997.
4. Berry, Thomas. The Great Work or Dream of the Earth. New York: Three Rivers Press, Random House, 1999.
5. Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Links
Journey of the Universe site: https://www.journeyoftheuniverse.org/news/emergent-universe-oratorio-2018
American Teilhard Association:
Forum On Religion and Ecology, Yale
The Forum on Religion and Ecology Event http://fore.yale.edu/calendar/item/emergent-universe-oratorio/
The Earth is Doing Her Best
The Earth is Doing Her Best
image | Diane Barker, A rainbow over Dong Tsang Ritro Retreat Center in Nangchen | See more in Gallery 3
Welcome to Kosmos Spring Edition, 2019 | Climate, Consciousness, and Community
Spring is truly the season of hope. Fresh beauty budding-up on trees and bursting through hard ground, emerging against all odds. Irrepressible life. Renewal. A balm to our winter-weary hearts, and maybe an antidote to the despair that catches our breath away in unguarded moments.
Maybe it catches us walking in a woods bereft of birdsong, or hearing about another deadly tornado or wildfire, or imagining our children’s lives after we are gone—this sadness arising. At such times, it helps to look up at the sky or a beautiful flower, to return to slow conscious breathing, and to feel the Earth, above, below, and within us – striving to live. Tender gratitude wells up for all the Earth has given us and those we love. The Earth is always doing the best she can, but it’s getting harder.
I remember, as a child, riding in a car and noticing the fascinating variety of insects whose lives came to an abrupt halt on our windshield. When we stopped for gas, the attendant had to clean the bug splatter off the glass with a squeegee. Today, I can drive for hours on the highway and the windshield remains spotless. Where are the bugs? I learn that the total biomass of insects is decreasing by about 2.5% per year. At this rate, there will be hardly any left in my children’s lifetime. As the insects go, so too the birds, and pollination of flowers and crops. We know this.
When did you first feel ‘at one’ with nature’s penetrating presence and mystery? Were you a child, enmeshed in the strange drone of cicadas on a warm summer day? Was it the first time you witnessed the glittering ocean or the arc of a shooting star? That expansion that suddenly bloomed in your chest revealed your true nature as an essential note in the symphony of creation—not just a drop of water in the ocean, but ocean-water itself.
This stuff of creation we are made from requires something from us now. Animals of the world, trees and flowers, minerals deep in the Earth, already know their true nature, how to be. We have forgotten. The species with the most gifts, the most to give, has forgotten its place in the order of things, has forgotten about stewardship, awe, and grace.
This April 20-23, the time of Passover, Easter, and Earth Day, we gather together as a family in a small town in Pennsylvania, to remember our gifts. The Kosmos Climate, Consciousness, and Community Summit is our opportunity to look into each other’s eyes and recognize our true nature, to share what we have learned, and to carry precious seeds of hope and resilience back to the places we come from.
We will not be alone. Our brothers and sisters at Findhorn Community in Scotland will be sharing the journey in tandem, and streaming to other hubs like ours, clarion voices: Charles Eisenstein, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, and many more. And we will be convening with dear friends in the thriving Transition Town community of Media, PA.
This edition of Kosmos Quarterly touches the themes of these important gatherings: Oneness, grief and loss, gratefulness, hope, preparedness, stewardship, resilience. This collection of works is less about what we ‘know’ about climate, than what we feel, and less about what to ‘do’, than how to be. For, until we remember our at-one-ment with the Earth and all beings, our actions will have little restorative impact.
We thank Findhorn’s Climate Change and Consciousness (CCC19) planners, especially Convener, Stephanie Mines, for contributing to this edition of Kosmos Quarterly. Read Stephanie’s Keynote and see how gifts can flow through us when we open our hearts to the call of the Earth.
Let these stories, essays, poems, and works of art be signposts, reminders to our children that many of us woke-up and started to face the consequences of our actions, that we began, at last, to remember why we are here, and to slowly repair the Earth in thousands of small places, and that maybe—if their own children someday read these words—we did it in time.
In Gratitude,
Rhonda Fabian, Kosmos Editor
May the day be well and the night be well. May the midday hour bring happiness, too.
In every minute and every second, may the day and night be well.
By the blessing of the Triple Gem, may all things be protected and safe.
May all beings born in each of the four ways live in a land of purity.
– Buddhist chant
The Power of Community
The Power of Community
With the newest report of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), presented in September 2018, the global sense of urgency has grown. ‘Climate action’ and ‘ramping up ambition’ were the buzz words at last year’s UN COP24 in Poland. At the same time, thousands of ecovillages on all continents are celebrating and recreating low-impact lifestyles that expand a sense of care and response-ability in the face of a climate changing world. How can such solutions spread faster? How can all human settlements become hubs of regeneration rather than expressions of a destructive culture?
The Power of Community Online Summit: Climate Change and Consciousness, hosted by the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) this past February was a good step. It inspired more than 10,000 participants and 140 local hubs to look climate change in the eye while initiating communities for change. Together, we explored how to move beyond action fueled by anxiety.
On a personal level, as Executive Director of GEN, my everyday life is often characterised by a tendency towards activism, rather than ‘sacred activism.’ I notice the negative effects as soon as my actions no longer spring from spaciousness and presence. The Online Summit allowed me to interview 25 wonderful speakers—a process of listening and learning, a delicious ‘spa break’ for my mind—while taking action in the world!
The Gap
The gap between the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement and what is actually happening in countries is widening. When we travel, we can all catch glimpses of what is really going on. I often come home to the ecovillage of Findhorn, Scotland, where I currently live, with a need to grieve. Travelling across Africa, for instance, I see the ongoing devastation that mining, pollution, erosion, and deforestation leave in their wake. Visiting communities where the access to water and food is hanging by a thin thread on a daily basis forces me to face the fact that privilege continues to shape our world even, and especially, in the face of climate change.
It is painful. Sometimes I would prefer not to see so much and to feel so deeply. How can I not grieve? And instead of turning away or moving into activism, how can I truly connect and listen to what I encounter? That’s why I, and we, need spaces like the Online Summit. None of us can do this alone. We need companionship and collaboration to become able to respond.
Too often, we read newspapers and watch news in isolation without an adequate shared space that would help us ground the information and find solutions together. The Summit brought voices of leading-edge thinkers and community leaders on the frontline of climate change to people’s living rooms. When we start inviting our neighbours and friends, we can build community wherever we are. I need you; we need each other. Maybe the one good thing about climate change is that it forces us to come together.
Activism versus Sacred Activism
Whatever is moving through us is much bigger than we are. If we listen carefully enough, life moves us—we become an integral expression of the healing impulse in the world.
Listening has kept me sane. I grew up in South Africa and went to a conservative all-white Afrikaans school at the height of apartheid. As children, we know when something is deeply wrong. We can feel it in our bones. I heard the indoctrination and watched the justification of injustice, even as a child. However much the truth is veiled, reality shines through. We all have an acute sense of truth. Listening propelled me into the arena of anti-apartheid activism.
In my understanding, our move towards sacred activism starts from listening and acknowledging to each other the truth of what we find. Sacred activism goes beyond ‘fighting against’ to ‘collaborating for.’
And then, there is the life long journey towards finding our personal rhythm of breathing in and out, of listening and stepping into action. Out of my woundedness and anxiety, I tend to move faster than what would be most natural and effective. I have found, like many of us, that having a daily practice becomes crucial the more I engage. The busier my life becomes, the more I need to insert silence.
There’s a story I heard about Gandhi that continues to inspire me: A journalist asked him, “How do you manage to do so much in your life?” Gandhi responded, “Well, I meditate an hour a day.” And the journalist said, “OK, but when you get really, really busy?” And Gandhi said, “At those times, I get up an hour earlier and meditate two hours a day.”
The stillness stays with me in challenging moments. Often, of course, I fail and my habitual, quick reactions rule the day again. But sometimes I manage to take a breath, settle more comfortably into the uncomfortableness of the moment, listen again, and feel my way into a more adequate, fresh response.
Sacred activism grows from this listening, a trust in cooperation and acknowledgement that an intelligence beyond our small personality is waiting to manifest, even when critical voices would call us back. Then we stop ‘doing’ and, instead, allow life to move through us.
Why Ecovillages?
I believe that one of the most underutilized resources we have at the moment on this planet is the good intentions of citizens and our willingness to make a difference. I refuse to believe anything else but that in our heart of hearts, as human beings, we are guardians of Life. Our care and love are the hidden, connecting factor that links us wherever I go: mothers, politicians, businessmen, farmers. We long to be part of the solution. Sometimes, we find it hard to find our way there. Many of us live in structures and jobs we don’t love, following habits we don’t like, buying things we don’t need.
‘Ecovillages’—communities that consciously regenerate life within and around them—start appearing when we notice that the world really needs us to wake up and come fully present now. ‘Business as usual’ is no longer an option. Then we find that we have an endless capacity to find intelligent and different solutions. The impulse of ecovillages as healing biospheres emerged simultaneously around the planet in the 60s and 70s. The Global Ecovillage Network emerged in the 90s to weave a web between these initiatives, supporting knowledge exchange and pattern recognition. GEN aims to catalyse the power of communities for a regenerative world, carefully integrating ecovillage design in all four areas of regeneration: society, ecology, economy, and culture.
This is a time where it needs each and everyone of us to become involved in finding answers. ‘Small is beautiful’ becomes amazingly effective once it starts sprouting everywhere. It’s a game changer! We need community around us to start making sense of the challenges we face together. Healing our relationships and integrating the cruelty of our human past is a necessary aspect of healing our climate.
Ecovillages in Cities?
The current mainstream tends to assume that rapid urbanization is a given aspect of ‘progress.’ Yet, in my eyes, this story of urbanization as a ‘natural step’ of human evolution is also a veil to help give corporate interests free access to rural land and resources. Communities, standing up to protect their environments, are a hindrance to mining, deforestation, and industrial agriculture. They don’t give up their ancestral lands and what is sacred to them without a fight.
With the advent of information technology, the need for human urban concentrations is becoming obsolete and a hindrance to resilience and sustainability. Today, we can see that more decentralised human settlements are more effective in restoring degraded ecosystems. Already, research has shown that biodiversity is higher in and around ecovillages than in other rural areas. The phenomenon of ‘re-ruralisation’ is spreading globally as young families long to move back into healthier environments.
We can also bring ‘the village’ and nature back to the city. We can develop love for place and community in urban environments. Maybe there is a particular bird or squirrel that frequents your balcony? A particular tree in your street that you feel drawn to? As driverless cars and clever designs of public transport increase, spaces in urban environments will open up—already, rooftop, balcony, and vertical gardens are spreading. Will our future cities become green?
Today, municipalities and ecovillage initiatives are working hand-in-hand to transform human settlements together. Community initiatives in cities develop relationships with satellite ecovillages around the city, forming rural-urban interconnections that greatly increase the resilience of a region.
Growing Circles of Influence
‘Small is beautiful’ doesn’t have to remain small! Once I understood that I could make a difference, I started experiencing a continuous growth of my circle of influence. Starting off as a young, extremely guilt-ridden intern in anti-apartheid organisations, I soon became a young nomad, finally settling into a small intentional community when I became pregnant. It was a matter of survival for me as a young mother not to be alone.
Soon, I realized that my family needed a more multi-faceted environment—we moved into a bigger ecovillage. I had the luxury of knowing where our food, energy, and water came from. While my children could build a healthy web of relationships to other children and adults, I was able to engage in the world, developing community courses, co-founding Gaia Education, engaging first in the German Ecovillage Network and then in the European Ecovillage Network.
Next, I was invited into initiating the African Ecovillage Network and started on an ongoing journey of learning in humility about the continent I was born in. Finally, I have moved into the Global Ecovillage Network. My original impulse, growing out of apartheid, was to build bridges across all divides. Looking back, I can connect the dots of my life.
Today, GEN is spreading its wings. Having consultative status at the UN has given us the opportunity to engage and meet well-meaning politicians, especially at the COP Climate Conferences. We have been amazed to find doors opening and people listening. Many governments have become interested in implementing Ecovillage Transition Programmes on regional and national levels. After all, if we want to close that gap, every village needs to become a hub of regeneration, every city needs to transform. For governments, to be seen working hand-in-hand with their communities is a huge bonus.
Of course, the question of how to translate a grassroots approach into a large scale strategic plan is a challenging one. How do we help facilitate participatory processes and empower community interests every step of the way? GEN brings precious experience to the table and is currently engaging—not only in Africa and Asia, but also in European countries like Germany, Spain, and Scotland—in scaling transformation.
A Shift in Consciousness
As Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same mindset that created them in the first place. We cannot solve the issue of climate change without a radical change of consciousness. I have always assumed that the misguided search for continuous profit springs from a wish to keep ourselves and those we love safe. Today, in the face of climate change, there is no safety, other than becoming honest in the face of the consequence of our actions. Our small identities of tribes, nations, or religions should only bring us closer together in the face of the challenge to us all. It takes enormous courage to sit with the vulnerability of giving up the bastions of power and privilege.
It seems like a paradox; to step into our power in the face of climate change, we need to open up to our vulnerability of being one together.
What if, instead of critisizing ourselves and each other for not responding adequately, we were able to express care and compassion for all those parts in the system that are too afraid and traumatised to respond appropriately? Can we embark on a global process of trauma integration, truth, and reconciliation?
Starting at Home
In GEN, we are constantly bridging cultures. Our Board and General Assembly are constituted of an equal amount of representatives from each of the continents. We touch, continuously, on the strain of post-colonial relationships.
How do we learn to own and integrate the scars of the past in order to prepare the ground for our future? My family, fleeing as French Huguenots, arrived in South Africa in 1672. How did my lineage contribute? As I woke up to the injustice of Apartheid, I also questioned my right to live in my beloved homeland.
Those countries and communities that have contributed least to climate change are currently the ones that suffer most. How do we respond to existential injustice? How do we host these issues in awareness? We are part of one another and part of something much bigger that flows through all of us. Will we respond to the challenges by contracting our hearts or by allowing our hearts to break wide open?
Climate change is shaking us, forcing us to wake up, not allowing us to continue reacting from our small and habitual self. It invites us to explore the edges of our nervous systems, of our social systems, of the world we thought we knew. Climate change action is a work of consciousness expansion. We are looking for the medicine of weaving trust back into human relationships and into our relationship with the natural world.
So, starting at home and starting small in your life: in the social area, is there a relationship where you have been turning away when you should have really been turning towards? Maybe with a neighbour, or a friend on the other side of the planet? In the cultural area, what is it you wish to contribute? Do you need to take time in silence to listen? In ecology, do you know where your food is coming from? Do you know which trees are waiting for you to speak to them? Do you know where your water, your electricity, your money are coming from? Are you in right relation, economically? And if not, can you connect to your courage to instigate change?
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
This essay is part of a collaboration with CCC19 – Climate Change and Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth, at the Findhorn Foundation, North Scotland, April 20-26, 2019. The event will feature some of the clearest and most passionate voices for the Earth ever gathered together in one place. Kosmos is an official hub for CCC19.
Quiet Places Initiative
Quiet Forest, from One Square Inch of Silence
Quiet Places Initiative
Gordon Hempton is a natural born listener. Known as the Sound Tracker®, he is an acoustic ecologist dedicated to capturing and preserving one of Earth’s most precious experiences on the verge of extinction: silence. With unprecedented levels of noise pollution, the world and its inhabitants suffer from more than just the annoyance of highway traffic and urban activity; the impacts of overexposure to unnatural noise are reflected in poor mental and cardiovascular health, and even anti-social behavior.
For Gordon, silence is about reconnecting—to nature, and to each other. He has committed his life’s work to seeking and protecting the quietude we all crave. He has circled the globe three times, recording quiet spaces with equipment that replicates the three-dimensional quality of human hearing. His book, Earth Is a Solar-Powered Jukebox, offers a guide to listening, recording, and sound designing with nature, and his book, One Square Inch of Silence (excerpt below) details one of the United States’ quietest places, the Hoh Rain Forest of Olympic National Park.
Preserving rare spaces of silence has become a worldwide endeavor for Gordon. He and co-founders Tim Gallati, Karl Kramer, and Vikram Chauhun have established Quiet Parks International to identify and protect places around the globe that are truly free from noise pollution.
This sound gallery is a collection of audio samples that Gordon has recorded around the world. We invite you to experience these rare moments of ‘silence.’ — Victoria Price, for Kosmos
Quiet Parks International
Quiet Parks International, formerly known as the One Square Inch of Silence Foundation, is committed to the preservation of Quiet for the benefit of all life. Launching on Earth Day 2019, QPI aims to identify and protect rare, quiet places that are free from the noise pollution that overwhelms our planet. With the ever increasing sonic burden of highways, air and shipping traffic, silence is nearing extinction and this initiative is needed now more than ever. To join the efforts in creating a worldwide network of pristine silence and solitude, visit Quiet Parks International.
Sound Gallery
Dawn
Amazon, Ecuador
We are listening to dawn arrive in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This is the heart of biodiversity and the lungs of the planet. One by one, each animal species takes its turn to announce themselves, re-establish territory, and perhaps even attract a mate. Some animal species are blind, however, no animal species are deaf.
Wood Frogs and Thunder
Sri Lanka
I set up my recording gear cautiously high on a mountain in Sri Lanka. The sun was setting. Soon I would be all alone. A prevailing wind pushed clouds against the trees causing drips that attracted my attention. Soon there were wood frogs hiding under the leaves, so small that I never saw any. Each gave long, punctuated accents to the space. The final touch to this unforgettable moment was added by an approaching thunderstorm. (Note: I use a microphone system that replicates human hearing, and because I do not edit my recordings, you are not experiencing my studio artistry but rather the sonic beauty of this planet worth saving.)
Riparian Zone
Belize
We are near Mayan ruins in Central Belize that have been reclaimed by the jungle—a haunting reminder that even great civilizations can vanish unexplained. Life’s necessity is water which instantly draws our attention to the foreground while a distant howler monkey expands our auditory horizon to the far background. For years, I believed I recorded sound, but now I know I record space made audible by sound—that is what keeps me on the hunt around the world for my next nature sound portrait.
Haleakala Wind
Hawaii, U.S.
Haleakala Volcano, Hawaii, rises more than 3,000 meters above sea level, then its crater sinks 1,000 meters back towards the Earth’s center, forming a natural acoustic isolation chamber complete with sound adsorbing volcanic sand. Haleakala Crater is the Quietest Place on Earth; calculated sound pressure levels are in the negative decibels on windless days. Today, silence is made audible by trade winds that skirt the volcano’s rocky rim.
Gecko Lizards
Kalahari Desert, South Africa
I arrived on the scorching sands of the Kalahari to record birdsong, but because it was the seventh year of a draught, there were no birds to record. Frustrated and temporarily disheartened, the sun set, and as it did these gecko lizards began their mocking evening chorus that documents their triumph. Just one example of nature’s important lesson: disappointment is often an epiphany in disguise.
Book Excerpt | One Square Inch of Silence
Washington, U.S.
Everything that you have heard here is unprotected and rapidly vanishing. While we have Dark Sky Parks that protect our view of the Celestial Sea, there is not one Quiet Park where we can listen to nature’s concerts undisturbed to take on an equally awe-inspiring view of life. On Earth Day 2005, I decided to change this when I hiked up the Hoh River trail in Olympic National Park near my home and placed a small stone on a moss-covered rock. I promised to defend it from all noise pollution. Nearly 12 years later, three airlines have altered flight paths to avoid the park. Because of the way sound travels differently than light, protecting one square inch of silence manages more than 1,000 square miles. You can find out more about the effort to create the world’s first Quiet Park at www.quietparks.org.
Prologue | Sounds of Silence
“The day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.”
So said the Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist Robert Koch in 1905. A century later, that day has drawn much nearer. Today silence has become an endangered species. Our cities, our suburbs, our farm communities, even our most expansive and remote national parks are not free from human noise intrusions. Nor is there relief even at the North Pole; continent-hopping jets see to that. Moreover, fighting noise is not the same as preserving silence. Our typical anti-noise strategies—earplugs, noise cancellation headphones, even noise abatement laws—offer no real solution because they do nothing to help us reconnect and listen to the land. And the land is speaking.
We’ve reached a time in human history when our global environmental crisis requires that we make permanent life style changes. More than ever before, we need to fall back in love with the land. Silence is our meeting place.
It is our birthright to listen, quietly and undisturbed, to the natural environment and take whatever meanings we may. Long before the noises of mankind, there were only the sounds of the natural world. Our ears evolved perfectly tuned to hear these sounds—sounds that far exceed the range of human speech or even our most ambitious musical performances: a passing breeze that indicates a weather change, the first birdsongs of spring heralding a regreening of the land and a return to growth and prosperity, an approaching storm promising relief from a drought, and the shifting tide reminding us of the celestial ballet. All of these experiences connect us back to the land and to our evolutionary past.
One Square Inch of Silence is more than a book; it is a place in the Hoh Rain Forest, part of Olympic National Park—arguably the quietest place in the United States. But it, too, is endangered, protected only by a policy that is neither practiced by the National Park Service itself nor supported by adequate laws. My hope is that this book will trigger a quiet awakening in all those willing to become true listeners.
Preserving natural silence is as necessary and essential as species preservation, habitat restoration, toxic waste cleanup, and carbon dioxide reduction, to name but a few of the immediate challenges that confront us in this still young century. The good news is that rescuing silence can come much more easily than tackling these other problems. A single law would signal a huge and immediate improvement. That law would prohibit all aircraft from flying over our most pristine national parks.
Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything. It lives here, profoundly, at One Square Inch in the Hoh Rain Forest. It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Left with a more receptive mind and a more attuned ear, we become better listeners not only to nature but to each other. Silence can be carried like embers from a fire. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it.
Silence is a sound, many, many sounds. I’ve heard more than I can count. Silence is the moonlit song of the coyote signing the air, and the answer of its mate. It is the falling whisper of snow that will later melt with an astonishing reggae rhythm so crisp that you will want to dance to it. It is the sound of pollinating winged insects vibrating soft tunes as they defensively dart in and out of the pine boughs to temporarily escape the breeze, a mix of insect hum and pine sigh that will stick with you all day. Silence is the passing flock of chestnut-backed chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches, chirping and fluttering, reminding you of your own curiosity.
Have you heard the rain lately? America’s great northwest rain forest, no surprise, is an excellent place to listen. Here’s what I’ve heard at One Square Inch of Silence. The first of the rainy season is not wet at all. Initially, countless seeds fall from the towering trees. This is soon followed by the soft applause of fluttering maple leaves, which settle oh so quietly as a winter blanket for the seeds. But this quiet concert is merely a prelude. When the first of many great rainstorms arrives, unleashing its mighty anthem, each species of tree makes its own sound in the wind and rain. Even the largest of the raindrops may never strike the ground. Nearly 300 feet overhead, high in the forest canopy, the leaves and bark absorb much of the moisture, until this aerial sponge becomes saturated and drops re-form and descend farther, striking lower branches and cascading onto sound-absorbing moss drapes, tapping on epiphytic ferns, faintly plopping on huckleberry bushes, and whacking the hard, firm salal leaves, before, finally, the drops inaudibly bend the delicate clover-like leaves of the wood sorrel and drip to leak into the ground. Heard day or night, this liquid ballet will continue for more than an hour after the actual rain ceases.
Recalling the warning of Robert Koch, developer of the scientific method that identifies the causes of disease, I believe the unchecked loss of silence is a canary in a coal mine—a global one. If we cannot make a stand here, if we turn a deaf ear to the issue of vanishing natural quiet, how can we expect to fare better with more complex environmental crises?
Gordon Hempton
Snowed in at Joyce, Washington
The Most Important Thing
The Most Important Thing
An artist, photographer, and author, Brian Sokol is dedicated to documenting human rights issues and humanitarian crises worldwide. Since 2012, Sokol has focused on telling the stories of refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and stateless people in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The Most Important Thing—his ongoing, long-term portraiture project—seeks to humanize and convey the dignity of individuals who have been dehumanized by conflict, government policies, and the media. This project documents first-hand testimonies from refugees, forced to flee their homes, about items they took with them. Sokol’s goal is to engender empathy and action in audiences across the lines of language, race, religion, and culture.
Brian’s work appears in publications including TIME, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has exhibited on 5 continents and in both the New York and Geneva headquarters of the United Nations. A former Himalayan guide and wilderness ranger, Brian is happiest when at extreme altitude or latitude; he initially came to photography through a passion for high, remote places. He frequently works on various themes related to displacement, perhaps owing to the fact that he’s lived abroad for 20 years and feels himself more a citizen of the world than of any particular country.
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Since the day Sebastiao Manuel Garcia arrived in Congo in 1978, he has never set foot in his native Angola. A former soldier, he fled Angola when he learned his life was in danger. Unable to return to Angola due to fear of violence, he still considers it home. If he were again forced to flee for his life, the most important thing to him and his family is the Billet de Composition Familiale document. “This is a testimony that I am a refugee,” he says. “Without it, I could be arrested. Without this, my children could be expelled from here, or their mother would take them and they would become Congolese. This document proves that my children are Angolan.”
Humanizing the refugee crisis | Brian Sokol | TEDxSanDiego
There are more that 65 million people in the world today who are displaced from their homes due to conflict and persecution—more than at any time in human history. As a photographer who spent time in refugee camps and met the people who were forced from their homes, Brian Sokol underwent a personal transformation in understanding their stories, their dreams, and their humanity. It’s time we challenged our beliefs and preconceptions about the refugee crisis. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx
The Most Important Thing has been adapted into performance art featuring celebrities and projected at the Cannes Film Festival. Cate Blanchett performs the poem ‘What They Took With Them’ alongside fellow actors Keira Knightley, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Capaldi, Stanley Tucci, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kit Harington, Douglas Booth, Jesse Eisenberg, and Neil Gaiman. The poem, written by Jenifer Toksvig, made in collaboration with UNHCR. features many of Brian’s photos, along with firsthand accounts from the refugees he photographed. The film urges people to sign the #WithRefugees petition to help ensure refugees have the basics to rebuild their lives—an education, somewhere safe to live, and the opportunity to work. Stand #WithRefugees, sign the petition: www.withrefugees.org.
Video courtesy UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency
The Gallery
In 2013, when Seleka rebels arrived in Fideline’s village, her family hoped that they would be able to stay in Moungoumba and peacefully coexist with the armed men. A week later, this proved impossible. Fideline and other children were playing near the river when Seleka forces got into an argument with a Central African businessman. When the man refused to give his money to the gunmen, they dragged him to the village center. Fideline and her friends watched as they tied his arms behind his back, threw him facedown to the ground, and shot him twice in the back. Fideline’s father immediately decided that they had to leave.
The most important thing that Fideline was able to leave her home with are her notebooks. An excellent student, Fideline one day hopes to be a minister in her country’s government. “I couldn’t take my school bag, my shoes, or the colored ribbons for my hair,” she recalls, “but I did bring my notebooks and my pen.” Holding her history, homework, and practice books—all of which bear an image of the African continent on their covers—she says, “We have suffered so much. My father is out of work, and my mother goes to the fields all day. I want to study so that I can become someone. I want to study.”
Leila*, 9, poses for a portrait in the urban structure where she and her family are taking shelter in Erbil, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Together with her four sisters, mother, father, and grandmother, Leila arrived in Erbil five days before this photograph was taken, after fleeing their home in Deir ez-Zor, Syria. Her family is one of four living in an uninsulated, partially-constructed home; there are about 30 people sharing the cold, drafty space. Leila recalls explosions all around them for days, but the family finally decided to leave Deir ez-Zor when their neighbors’ house was hit, killing everyone inside.
The most important thing Leila was able to bring with her are the jeans she holds in this photograph. “I went shopping with my parents one day and looked for hours without finding anything I liked. But when I saw these, I knew instantly that these were perfect because they have a flower on them, and I love flowers.” She has only worn the jeans three times, all in Syria—twice to wedding parties and once when she went to visit her grandfather. She says she won’t wear them again until she attends another wedding, and she hopes it, too, will be in Syria.
*Name changed for protection purposes.
One morning in 1992, Mayengo Kabamba and his father were outside cooking while his mother and sisters were working in the fields. Several men carrying machetes arrived, dragged his father inside and murdered him, then forced Kabamba to sit in a pan of searing oil, at which point he lost consciousness. When he came to, he was in his mother’s arms as she fled with his eight siblings.
Twenty-two years later, the situation is very different in Angola. Much of his family has returned home. Kabamba, still physically and emotionally scarred by his experience, says “Personally, I don’t want to go back. But I can’t survive here alone, and all my family are returning.”
The most important thing that Kabamba will bring with him is a photograph of his pregnant girlfriend, who he will have to leave behind for now. “She can’t go with me because we aren’t married yet, and she can’t be listed as a family member. In the culture here, you can’t marry a pregnant girl. We have to wait until after the birth to begin the marriage process.”
Yusuf* poses for a portrait in an urban structure in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon on December 12, 2012. He and his family fled their home in Damascus, the Syrian capital, several months before this photograph was taken.
The most important thing Yusuf was able to bring when he fled Syria is his mobile phone. “With this, I’m able to call my father. We’re close enough to Syria here that I can catch a signal from the Syrian towers sometimes, and then it is a local call to call home from Lebanon.” The phone also holds photographs of family members who are still in Syria, which he is able to keep with him at all times.
*Name changed for protection purposes.
May*, 8, poses for a portrait in Domiz refugee camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq on November 16, 2012. She and her family arrived in Domiz about one month before this photograph was taken, having fled their home in Damascus. They escaped on a bus at night, and May recalls crying for hours as they left the city behind. After traveling more than 800 kilometres, they made the final crossing into Iraq on foot. May wept again as they followed a rough trail in the cold, while her mother carried her two-year-old baby brother.
Since arriving in Domiz, she has had recurring nightmares in which her father is violently killed. She is now attending school, and says she finally feels safe. May hopes to be a photographer when she grows up. “I want to take pictures of happy children, because they are innocent, and my pictures will make them even more happy,” she says.
The most important thing she was able to bring with her when she left home is a set of bracelets. “The bracelets aren’t my favourite things,” she says; “my doll Nancy is.” May’s aunt gave her the doll on her sixth birthday. “She reminded me of that day, the cake I had, and how safe I felt then when my whole family was together.” The night they fled Damascus, May’s mother put Nancy on her bed where she wouldn’t be forgotten. But in the rush that ensued, Nancy was somehow left behind. May says these bracelets are the next-best thing to having her in Iraq.
*Name change for protection purposes.
Delivering the UN Global Goals | The Consciousness Perspective
The Seven Levels Model The largest impediment to improving the well-being of humanity is not in finding the funding to implement the Sustainable Development Goals; the largest impediment is the unwillingness of the part of the heads of state, senior government politicians, and business leaders to embrace higher order human values. They have simply not reached the stages of psychological development were these values are important to them. To understand this fully, we need to understand how people grow and develop; what needs they have at each stage of their development, and how best to provide these needs. The model I am using is called the Seven Levels Model. There are two aspects to the Seven Levels Model: the Stages of Psychological Development Model and the Levels of Consciousness Model. We grow in stages (of psychological development) and we operate at levels (of consciousness). The original Levels of Consciousness model was developed in 1996 as a tool for mapping the consciousness of individuals and human group structures, such as teams, organisations, communities and nations. Since that time, the model and associated assessment tools have been used to map the values and consciousness of more than 5,000 organizations, 4,000 leaders and 24 nations. The origins and construction of the model are explained in The Metrics of Human Consciousness and The Values-driven Organisation: Cultural Health and Employee Well-Being as a Pathway to Sustainable Performance. In recent years, I recognized that the Seven Levels Model could also be used as a framework for mapping the stages of human psychological development. Figure 1 shows the correspondence between the Seven Stages of Psychological Development and the Seven Levels of Consciousness. Under normal circumstances, the level of consciousness you operate from will be the same as the stage of psychological development you have reached. However, no matter what stage of psychological development you are at, when you are faced with a threat—what you consider to be a potentially negative change in your circumstances or situation—anything that disturbs your equilibrium by bringing up fears, you may temporarily shift to one of the three lower levels of consciousness. Alternatively, if you have a “peak” experience—an experience of euphoria, harmony or connectedness of a mystical or spiritual nature—you may temporarily shift to one of the higher levels of consciousness. When the threat or peak experience has passed, you will return to the level of consciousness that corresponds to the stage of psychological development you were at before the experience occurred. In rare situations, a peak experience may have a lasting impact, causing you to shift to a higher stage of psychological development and operate from a higher level of consciousness. Similarly a “negative” experience, if it is traumatic enough, and particularly if it occurs in your childhood and teenage years, can impede your future psychological development by causing you to be anchored, through frequent subconscious triggering of the traumatic memory, into in one of the three lower levels of consciousness. The early stages of development Between the moment we are born and the time we reach physical maturity, around 20 years of age, we all pass through the same three stages of psychological development: surviving, conforming and differentiating. What you are learning during these stages of development is how to become a viable independent adult in your cultural framework of existence. These are the stages of development where you learn to satisfy your “deficiency” needs. When you are able to satisfy these needs, you feel a sense of happiness. If, for any reason, you are unable to satisfy these needs, you get anxious and fearful. How well you master these first three stages of development will, to a large extent, depend on the degree and nature (positive and negative) of the parental programming and cultural conditioning you experienced during your infant, childhood and teenage years. If you grew up without too many negative experiences—without forming any significant fear-based beliefs about being able to meet your deficiency needs—you will naturally feel a pull towards the individuation stage of development when you reach your twenties or early thirties. The individuating stage of development begins when you are ready to let go of the aspects of your parental programming and cultural conditioning that do not reflect who you truly are—values and beliefs that no longer resonate with. At this stage of development you are seeking to find your authentic voice, to live with integrity, and become responsible and accountable for every aspect of your life. If you are fortunate enough to have had self-actualized parents, to have lived in a community or culture where freedom and independence is celebrated, where higher education is easily available, where men and women are treated equally, and where you are encouraged from a young age to express and think for yourself, the transition from the differentiating stage to the individuating stage of development will be relatively easy. However, if the contrary is true, transitioning to the higher stages of development can be full of challenges and difficulties. It requires great courage when you are living in an authoritarian parental, cultural or political environment to embrace your authentic voice and explore your potential. The later stages of development Unlike the first three stages of psychological development, the later stages of development—self- actualizing, integrating, and serving, are not thrust on you by the biological and societal exigencies of growing up and reaching physical maturity as the first three stages of development are, they emerge as a desire to want more from your life, to find meaning in your existence, and make a lasting contribution to society. These are the stages of development where we learn to satisfy our “growth” needs. The extent to which you are able to satisfy your growth needs will determine the level of fulfillment you find in your life. As a general rule, we spend the first half of our lives searching for happiness by finding ways to satisfy our deficiency needs, and if all goes well, we spend the second half of our lives searching for meaning by finding ways to satisfy our growth needs. If, due to circumstances or a particular situation you find yourself in, you are unable to meet your deficiency needs, satisfying these will take precedence over satisfying your growth needs. Stages of psychological development The seven stages of psychological development are shown in Table 1. The first column identifies the stages of development. The second column indicates the approximate age range when each stage of development becomes important. The third column describes the developmental task. The fourth column identifies the motivations and needs associated with each stage of development, and the fifth column lists the internal and external value priorities at each stage of development. The age ranges given in the second column are approximate but are generally applicable to well educated people of all races, religions and cultures. Those who are less well-educated, poor and/or live in authoritarian regimes may find it challenging to move beyond the differentiating stage of development. If you were brought up by self-actualized parents living in a liberal democracy, you may be able to accelerate your psychological development by a few years. Although this is relatively rare, it could become more prevalent as more parents self-actualize at an earlier age and more countries embrace the values found in liberal democracies. In recent years it has become increasingly noticeable that some young people find their sense of purpose and feel the impulse to make a difference in the world quite early in their lives. This does not mean they have jumped to the integrating stage of development. Their urge to make a difference usually comes from their sense of justice or need for achievement, not from empathy. They will still need to pass through the individuating and self-actualizing stages of development before they are mature enough to fully embrace the integrating stage of psychological development. Surviving The quest for security and survival starts as soon as a human baby is born. The infant child instinctively knows, through its DNA programming, how to regulate its body’s internal functioning, how to suckle, and how to signal to its parents that it has unmet physiological needs. At this stage, the infant is completely dependent on parents or care givers to meet its security and survival needs. Conforming The task at this stage of development is to satisfy the child’s need for love and belonging. The child wants to live in an environment where it feels safe and protected. The young child quickly learns that life is more pleasant and less threatening if it lives in harmony with its parents and family. Staying loyal to kin and community, adhering to rules, and participating in rituals and traditions are important at this stage of development because they contribute to the child’s feeling of belonging and thereby enhance the child’s sense of safety. Differentiating During the differentiation stage of psychological development, the child/teenager seeks to satisfy his or her need for respect and recognition. We want to be noticed by parents, family, friends, peers, gang members or teachers for our achievements. The task at this stage of development is to hone your gifts and talents or make the most of your appearance so you feel accepted and recognized as a valid member of the group, family or community which you identify with. This may involve proving yourself through participating in rites of passage. You will be seeking validation from those around you that you are a valuable member of your community. Your parents are instrumental at this stage of your development for giving you the positive feedback you need. If you fail to get this feedback, you will grow up with the subconscious belief that you are not good enough. You will feel driven to prove yourself. You will seek out groups where you feel accepted. You may become a seeker of perfection or a highly competitive employee, wanting status, power or authority so you can be acknowledged as someone important or someone to be feared. Feeling recognized and respected are our third most important human needs. If you are able to successfully transition through these first three stages of psychological development without experiencing significant trauma and without developing too many subconscious fears about your ability to meet your deficiency needs, then you will find it relatively easy to establish yourself as a viable adult in the cultural framework of your existence as long as you can find opportunities to earn a living that meets your survival needs. Individuating During the individuating stage of psychological development, which usually begins after the age of twenty, you will begin to feel the need for freedom and autonomy. The task at this stage of development is to transcend the physical and emotional dependence on your family and the cultural or religious groups you are embedded in by aligning with your own deeply held values—discovering who you really are and what you stand for at the deepest level of your being. You begin to establish your independence when you set up your own home and embrace the values and beliefs you resonate with, rather than the values and beliefs that were subconsciously programmed into you by your parents and the community and culture you grew up in. This is one of the most important and difficult stages of human development—the shift from dependence to independence. When you reach this stage of development you begin to seek answers to the question, Who am I? Understanding who you are is absolutely essential for finding fulfillment. The progress you make at this stage of development will to a large extent influence how smoothly you are able to move through the higher stages of psychological development. We only embark on the individuating stage of development after we have become reasonably proficient in meeting our deficiency needs. Self-Actualizing During the self-actualization stage of development, you begin the search for meaning and purpose—you want to fully express your unique gifts and talents. You want to know: Why am I here? What do I need to do to find fulfillment in my life? What is my true vocation? What is my calling? For most people, finding their vocation or calling usually begins with a feeling of unease or boredom with their job or chosen career; with the work they thought would bring them wealth, status or recognition in their lives. Uncovering your unique gifts and talents and making them available to the world will bring passion and vitality back into your life. You will become more intuitive and more creative. You will spend more time in a state of flow; being totally present to what you are doing, lost in your work. This can be a challenging transition, especially if the activities that now interest you are less remunerative and offer less secure employment than your job, profession or chosen career. You may feel scared or uncomfortable embarking on something new which may bring meaning to your life but may not pay the rent or put food on the table. Some people find the work they are born to do early in their lives; others discover it much later. Some spend their whole lives searching. Embracing your authentic self by living your values and finding meaning and purpose in your life is the next most important need to emerge after you have found freedom and independence. Integrating During the integrating stage of development, you will begin to feel the need to actualize your sense of purpose by using your unique gifts and talents to make a difference in the world. As you make progress, you will realize that the contribution you can make and the impact you can have in the world could be significantly enhanced by connecting and cooperating with others who share your values and purpose—people you resonate with. By collaborating with others you are able to make a bigger difference than you could on your own. This requires a high level of maturity. You must be able to recognize your limitations, assume a larger sense of identity and shift from being independent to being interdependent. Many people lack the flexibility or adaptability to make this shift. Others get lost in their own creativity. In order to cooperate with others on joint projects, you must learn how to master your emotions (emotional intelligence) and read the emotions of others (social intelligence). Collaborating with others to make a difference in the world is the next most important need to emerge after you have learned to embrace your authentic self. Serving During the serving stage of development you will feel drawn to a life of self-less service, especially if you have become financially independent or no longer depend on the income from you work for your survival. At this stage of development, you want to leave a legacy or give back to the world by alleviating suffering, caring for the disadvantaged or building a better society. The shift to a life of self-less service will affect every aspect of your life; your attitudes, your behaviours, and your values. You will uncover new levels of compassion as you become focused on the needs of others. You will feel more humility as you recognize the added value that others bring to your endeavors and the role that synchronicity plays in your life. You will also find yourself re- examining your priorities as you search to live a more balanced life. Deep down, you will begin to understand that we are all connected energetically, and that by serving others you are serving yourself. Selfless service for the benefit of humanity and future generations is next most important need to emerge after you have learned how to collaborate with others to make a difference in your world. You will find your deepest level of fulfilment at this stage of psychological development. Progression The seven stages of psychological development occur in consecutive order over the full period of our lives. If, for whatever reason, you fail to master the skills required to meet the needs of a particular stage of development, you will find yourself having to return to that stage of development until you have become proficient at satisfying those needs. We begin the journey of psychological development by learning to survive, and we complete the journey by learning to serve. If, as a global society, we really do want to build a sustainable future for humanity, there needs to be a seismic shift in the psychological development of our political leaders: A shift from a focus on “I” to “we”; and a shift in attitude from what’s in it for me, to what’s best for the common good. It is very clear we will not solve the issues we face as a global society until we experience an evolution of human consciousness. What our world leaders are failing to understand is that there is an evolutionary advantage in being able to expand your consciousness (your sense of identity) to include others—in other words, there is an evolutionary advantage in advancing your psychological development. This idea is backed up by the latest scientific research. Using game theory, two evolutionary biologists found that: Evolution will punish you if you’re selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn’t evolutionary sustainable. The world-renowned biologist E. O. Wilson expresses a similar thought: Selfish activity within the group provides competitive advantage but is commonly destructive to the group as a whole. … When an individual is cooperative and altruistic, this reduces his advantage in competition … but increases the survival and reproduction rate of the group as a whole. Wilson goes on to state: The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction—the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own special group. The tragedy of cultural evolution, which became the successor of species evolution with the arrival of Homo sapiens, is that we have not yet learned to restrain our self-interest at the group level. Our group structures (nation states) are still trying to compete instead of cooperating. We have made the mistake of believing that the benefits of intra-group competition, such as improving the group’s fitness and performance, also apply to inter-group competition. Nothing could be further from the truth: From an evolutionary perspective inter-group cooperation is far more successful than inter-group competition. Furthermore, intra-group competition only works to a group’s collective advantage if the competition takes place within an over-arching, rule-based, cooperative environment. For example, teams which are members of a football league cooperate with each other at the level of the organisation of the league, but compete with each other according to rules which are administered by referees from the football league organisation. The same is true of the Olympic Games: Athletes from nations compete with each other within a framework of rules managed by the International Olympic Committee, members of which come from every nation. We also see this form of regulated competition between countries in the European Union and between states in the United States. For intra-group competition to work successfully, it must always take place within a framework of cooperation and shared values. These findings have significant implications for the future of our species. For cultural evolution to continue we must not only learn how to bond with each other as individuals to form group structures (nations), our group structures (nations) also have to learn how to cooperate with other group structures (nations) that have a different “tribal” identity. Without a set of overarching rules to regulate competition, we will not be able to solve the problems of humanity: the problems of humanity are global, but the entities that must solve these problems are national. The only way we are going to learn how to cooperate is by transcending our “tribal and religious” identities. E. O. Wilson calls tribalism “the exquisitely human flaw.” People deeply need membership in a group, whether religious or secular. They know that happiness and indeed survival itself require that they bond with others who share some amount of genetic kinship, language, moral beliefs, geographical location, dress code, etc. … It is tribalism … that makes good people do bad things. Millions upon millions of people all over the planet have died in conflict because of this basic human dysfunction, the source of which is our instinctive need to belong for the purpose of survival. We have to learn to transcend our ethnic and religious origins if we want to survive as a species. Wilson states: In a nutshell, individual selection [self-interest] favors what we call sin, and group selection [common good] favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience…We need to understand ourselves in both evolutionary and psychological terms in order to plan a more rational, catastrophe-proof future. Thus, as far as human beings are concerned, the solution to Wilson’s internal conflict of conscience is found in the individuation and self-actualization stages of psychological development. Only when our world leaders reach these stages of psychological development and create the conditions where their citizens can reach these stages of psychological development will we be able to make significant progress in improving the well- being of humanity.Delivering the UN Global Goals | The Consciousness Perspective
Implications for UN Sustainable Development Goals
Global Citizenship | An Emerging Agenda in Education
Global Citizenship | An Emerging Agenda in Education
Violent extremism and radicalization are among the most serious and urgent concerns in international society. They cause instability, conflict, and violence within and between countries. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has reached out to or recruited up to 40,000 people from 100 countries to date, many of whom are highly educated. What can international society do to prevent recruitment to violent extremism?
Comprehensive global citizenship education offers real hope toward a long-term solution by building young people’s resistance to extremist messages and narratives, and by cultivating a positive sense of identity, empathy, and inclusion.
Introduced at an early stage of child development, global citizenship education enhances mutual respect and understanding, tolerance, and cultural literacy, while substantially weakening the power of radicalized messages. A sense of belonging to the wider world community reduces susceptibility to extremist narratives and generates powerful messages for a more hopeful future.
In 2015, for the first time in the United Nations system, the emerging concept of “global citizenship” was introduced through the historic summit declaration, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” And, in his 2016 report, Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, Former Secretary-General of the U.N., Ban Ki-moon, suggested practical and comprehensive solutions, including global citizenship education, to confront the challenge of violent extremism.
Extremist groups deal in the currency of image, reputation, and perception. Swift countermeasures are required. Training in media literacy that includes recognizing false reporting, hate speech, and cyberbullying equips students with capabilities to navigate the increasingly turbulent media waters. Interspiritual education facilitates mutual understanding and respect for others. All religious activities and practices should uphold the basic universal principles of peace, understanding, tolerance, and compassion.
Combined with interspirituality movement, global citizenship education provides a new framework for young men and women to think critically, reject grievance and hatred, and develop capacity for dialogue and tolerance. We should not leave our children unprepared to confront the increasing volume of radicalized messages, nor leave them insensible to the global challenges and realities our world faces: terrorism, inequality, climate change, and population displacement.
A Global Citizenship Curriculum
“Learning to live together” is an important principle not only in education, but in society and the international community. Promoting an ethic of global citizenship, a culture of peace, and nonviolence equips young people with tools of tolerance and respect.
A pillar of global citizenship is the empowerment of women and youth to recognize their dignity and rights, particularly the rights of adolescent girls regarding their own bodies. Due to refugee crises in many parts of the world, the number of unaccompanied children, who are particularly vulnerable to violence and violent messages, is increasing.
A global citizenship curriculum is needed by all—not only the privileged, but those in rural villages and refugee camps as well—to help restore positive identity, dignity, and self-esteem, and to provide clear information about the rights reserved for every human being by the international community. Students should learn first and foremost that every human being has the right to live in dignity, free from fear.
Understanding our interconnectedness and interdependence, as well as strategies for peaceful coexistence and reconciliation, is a recipe for building peaceful societies and “learning to live together.” The proposition that one community member’s pain is everybody’s pain is a guiding narrative.
Understanding our relationship with our planet teaches that we jointly have the responsibility to protect and care for Mother Earth. People and planet are integrally connected and cannot be separated. Our global commons—air, oceans, fresh water, and cyberspace, among others—belong to us all and should be treated as a single ecological body.
A global citizenship curriculum is concerned with dignity, human rights, media literacy, and the planet that sustains us.
A standard prototype or curriculum model that takes into account cultural differences, while focusing on building the critical skills and concepts required by all learners, is needed. Universal values as described in the Charter of the United Nations should be considered in an initial curriculum. States and local educational authorities can develop their own curriculum-based and culturally-appropriate variations on this model. Intercultural and interdisciplinary collaboration are key, with guidance from universities and academic institutes.
Critical thinking, interactive dialogues and debates, project-based learning, sports, and the arts should all be included. Learning journeys and meetings with peer groups from different cultures should be explored. Learning objectives and evaluation strategies should be developed so that global citizenship can be embedded as a formal subject in the public education systems around the world.
Avenues, an alternative school in New York, provides a curriculum called the World Course from kindergarten through 12th grade. This curriculum addresses questions about the human condition such as: How do people organize themselves? How are societies formed? How do people struggle with adversity? Why do people migrate? How do our actions, choices, and beliefs shape the world around us? Questions like these help students make sense of the world through the lens of global identity.
The private sector could invest in this area as an expression of corporate social responsibility. Corporations could—independently or collectively—envision a global or national initiative to support global citizenship from local to international levels.
While governments and education authorities drive the policies that make global citizenship in the public education system possible, civil society organizations can and should lead projects to raise awareness about, and foster, global citizenship. NGOs and civil society organizations are encouraged to form global and regional coalitions like New York-based Coalition for Global Citizenship 2030 or Helsinki-based Bridge 47 so that this goal can be realized.
There is an increasing trend in foreign policy and international politics to focus on values.
This is the time to reflect on our values and determine the best foreign policy or global compact to make this world more peaceful, more inclusive, more just, and more sustainable. As such, a values-driven vision should be the core of foreign policy now and in the future.
Global citizenship education, if it is well-connected to a values-oriented approach in international relations, could be introduced as one of the comprehensive and fundamental shifts in thinking to tackle violence, radicalization, and intolerance. In 2016, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “We want the world our children inherit to be defined by the values enshrined in the UN charter: Peace, justice, respect, human rights, tolerance and solidarity.” This is in line with what global citizenship education envisions.
Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently launched the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens in Vienna, Austria. This organization could serve as a main platform for an international discussion on global citizenship as it clearly demonstrates that Ban Ki-moon, after ten years of service as the U.N. Secretary-General, recognizes global citizenship as an overarching goal of the U.N. agenda.
In the volatile, extreme, and unpredictable context of the 21st century, we need creative and innovative leadership, both nationally and globally. People-centered, values-driven, globally-conscious, relationship-oriented, compassion-focused, and planet-sensitive leadership with a focus on global citizenship can make our next generation real agents for change.