The
great conflict which Steiner describes in cosmic terms: We all
still feel the Great Battle enjoined, whether we consciously see this in
the greater sense or not. We FEEL it nonetheless. When there
is a sense of it through largely denial or lack of visionary knowing,
there is an uneasiness that does not go away. THAT feeling is our
identifier that we have not yet realized this deeper truth of our isness
in the human condition unfolding on this sacred Earth.
Personally,
I cannot imagine this in terms of us [individuals/forces] vs. them
[individuals/forces], on the order of various religious or ethnic or
cultural populations.
It's
all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do
not have a good story. We are in between stories. The
old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into
it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new
story. ~~Thomas
Berry
Paul
H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson regal us in the clarity of their
visioning of the "cultural creatives,"
[definition:
] They describe in crisp detail a litany of incidients dating from
primarily the early 1960s about several of the many explosive
turn-the-corner incidents, that imprinted themselves in our collective
psyches at that time, such as the story of Rosa Parks that sparked the
magnificent Civil Rights Movement; scenes of the Viet Nam War, and the
coming alive of the Women's Movement, the Consciousness Movement, the
Ecological Movement--really, what a totally extraordinary time, looking
back! Ray and Anderson tell us, "Because the images and the
events are so indelibly etched in our collective memory, we think that
we know what happened, and that it's over now, and that we've all pretty
much gone on with our lives.
"But
we're wrong. As a nation, we don't know what happened.
We know the first part of the story, but we think that the decades of
great dreams went away, because we no longer see dramatic events on
television. We don't know what happened next: how those
early movements and the ones that followed have shaped the lives of the
people who are Cultural Creatives today. And so the Cultural
Creatives themselves don't know where they came from. And like any
culture that lacks a history, they imagine themselves to be outsiders,
strangers, out-of-place pieces in a puzzle that seems to fit together
just fine without them."
Thomas
Berry and Brian Swimm reveal to us a local-to-cosmic New Story
Here's
another great ..okay, thrillingly resonant metaphoric story from
what has become one of my treasured sources, The Cultural Creatives,
described to Ray and Anderson
by evolutionary biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris. She
introduces it as her favorite analogy for how she perceives the
evolutionary leap we are now in the midst of, focusing on the dozingly
familiar caterpillar. Eating many times its weight daily, it
eventually spins its cocoon and slips into a months-long state of what
looks like stone-stillness. ..You think
you've heard this story waaaay too many times--yadda yadda? Well
pop those eyes open, wash away the glaze and LISTEN UP--I shudder to say
this, but it's irrepressible: This is just too cool!!
[dog shake, saliva everywhere... Whew!] Now:
At that point, precellular entities called imaginal
discs start to form. [Did
you get that??! but it gets better and better:]
They're not full-fledged cells yet, and when they first appear, the
immune system actually wipes them out. So long as the discs are
independent and separate, they are snuffed out as if they were foreign
bodies. But as the metamorphosis goes on, more and more discs are
created, and soon they start coming quicker and faster and clustering
together and the immune system just breaks down. At that point,
the body of the caterpillar begins to turn to a soupy nutrient
fertilizer that nourishes the discs as they grow into full-fledged
cells. These cells develop into the body of the butterfly.
It's a real kind of chemical transmutation, a natural force."
------=
There
are many great options from Myths in the large sense [see near bottom of
this page].
But we live in a time of intense individuation, and it is most important now to discover our inner story and guiding myths
The outer proffered myths are helpful, sometimes great guiding lights of wisdom and direction. But when push comes to shove, on what bedrock inner feeling of YOUR principles and sense of experienced knowing are you going to make decisions?
=-
The old power-over is still somewhat useful, but we are now Waking Up to discover, to have to discover this guidance from within. [John Heron vs. Ken Wilbur]
We are thus becoming painfully aware in our individuating unfolding that the voice that’s under heard, under acknowledged is that from within.
=-
Steiner example of difference in listening to external Yes or No .. vs. taking this decision process inside self and strengthening the will, finding our inner will and knowing. Big difference and important in our present development as a species.
=-
?: example of a true story and its mythic side and how they play off one another to help us grow [and/or shadow: cause harm]
Do I ‘do my part’ to save Earth [recycle, etc] because someone told me I should? Do I do it because I see, I know from personal experience I should believe or do this because others say it’s good, or out of my own convictions and knowing? If I’m recycling etc. merely because I grew up on this idea others preached to me, and yet it doesn’t connect, I have no convincing personal experience, then I might continue to recycle merely because of appearances or because I feel vaguely guilty if I don’t or I just don’t because it’s not from any personal inner conviction that I do or don’t.
Only when it becomes my experience – the need to recycle etc. – such as I live near a landfill that affects the health and wellbeing of those I know and of self [[find example]]
Another example: a medical doctor who was convinced that all the tv hoopla and so-called news coverage about the original manned space flights, eventually culminating in lunar landings was a hoax, faked to get money from people [tax dollars]. Listening to her was a revelation of no small proportion. I had relatives who had worked at NASA since its beginning. One of them was the last person to see them into their module and seal the door before lift-off. They shared different kinds of stories about their workaday reality, and that this very educated person believed this was a shock, especially since she grew up in – I forget – New Jersey or something like that and was approximately my age.
=-
We need to speak our own stories, to hear those of others, need a way to hear into speech our own voices, stories, myths, experiences that move something deeply within us.
Our lives are or can be so over-laden, burdened with all the daily schtuff – all the necessary and unnecessary trivia that tumbles us through our daily lives – till years and whole lifetimes pass and we do not get to WHAT COUNTS MOST: our own inmost bedrock, motivating sense of ‘I’, of the conviction of who and what we are and what we truly want to know, to experience, to be, to be present to and within us and in others about us and in life-writ-large.
Sometimes the significant experiences, the important stories [anomalous, spiritual, paranormal, soul-growing, spirit-manifesting, meta-physical] stories are there, but we don’t know how to feel about them, what to do with them, even when we believe in their veracity. There doesn’t seem to be ‘a place’ for them in our outer, shared world. Others don’t mention such things, either, or they come up in ways counter to what is our experience and so we doubt ourselves or imagine we must have been hallucinating … and our experiences fade or we repress them [Joanne].
We need to hear each others’ stories in a place devoted to this purpose. And it must by definition be safe. We need such a place to speak our own such stories. We need the opportunity to hear and to be heard into speech our own voices / stories.
Out of this we will come to recognize our true common mythos, which will be born right out of the shared emergence of our stories, our experiences of the “realer than real” that includes more than the merely physical.
Imagine that the USA is a bit of a microcosm of the world population, and let’s look at statistics that have been observed in this country and project them into globally inclusive numbers. It’s rough, it’s true, but probably not improbable or too far off the beam.
Here we go: There are just over 300 million people in the USA. The world population is well beyond six billion, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll use this figure. 300 million is about 5% or 1/20th of the world population of six billion.
According to a number of polls in the USA 5% [of 300 million] have had near-death experiences [NDEs] – that’s about 15 million people [x20 = 300 million, the size of the entire US population!]. Here’s another factoid about NDEs: on average, 774 people/day in USA [see my statistics page] have NDEs. That is 282,875 people/year. The USA population just topped 300 million people in 2006, which is equal to about 1/20th of the world population now at well over six billion. There's no telling how off this figure is either way, but just for fun: if there is even a rough correspondence in numbers, that would mean 282,875 x 20 = 5,651,500 people in the world may be having NDEs/year.
25% claim to have had out-of-body experiences. That’s 75 million people in the US, times 20, which equals 1.5 billion people.
The 2001 Gallup Poll said more than 50% of the population have admitted to some kind of anomalous or spiritual experience [see Rhea White’s list of over 500 types] – that’s 150 million in the USA and worldwide, three billion people.*
---
*NOTE: When you take into considerations a few expected yeah-buts about how unreal and unreasonable it is to extrapolate this way, here is my reasoning. Similar polling outcomes have been collected in most of the European countries and in Brazil. India and China are running neck and neck for who has the most people, each at or over one billion. I figure India’s openness to such experiences predisposes them to the likelihood of actually having more experiences of this nature. On the same principle, it could be that the Chinese, steeped more in the Communist ideology, may have had less on average and/or to have been less open to interpreting their experiences in this way [and certainly not publicly] and more likely to explain them away or suppress them.
[re: Figures above] This adds up. If you had some kind of nonphysical, anomalous, spiritual experience, such as an OBE or after-death-communication experience [ADC], but had not heard of anyone else having such experiences, or all you heard of such things was, they are the ‘nut cases’ or probable hallucination due to drugs of whatever origin, what would you think/feel/theel about your experience? Here are a few likely possibilities:
o You may continue to doubt the authenticity of your own experience, in spite of the fact that to you [typically] it was “realer than real.”
o You might be further convinced or afraid that you’re crazy or you were hallucinating.
o You would most likely not dare tell another person, especially your doctor or psychotherapist. Until the early 90s, almost no one admitted to such things, for all the reasons cited above. These kinds of events were still listed in the Physicians’ Desk Reverence [PDR] as pathological. They are still frequently described in the research and medical literature as assumed “hallucinations,” although this has been changing steadily.
But if you found out that several million people a year are known to have such experiences and that sharing their stories especially with other experiencers is known to be one of the most therapeutic events of their lives, wouldn’t your theelings about your experience and about your sanity be vastly different? Most likely, although even the assured safety of a very receptive audience of others who have had similar experiences is certainly no guarantee. The outcome scenario could and typically would include the following, starting with the awareness that the “you” before the experience and the “you” after are noticeably different:
o You would want to read and hear others’ stories of this nature, even if you had never imagined being interested in such things previously.
o You would probably welcome the opportunity to share your own story in an appropriate and safe setting and with people who understand, even better if they have themselves had such experiences.
o You would feel a deep sense of validation and would also appreciate how your telling of your own event naturally empowered others’ self validation.
o You would have a heightened sense of optimism about life in general and about your personal life.
o You would then be free to explore the deeper ramifications of your experience through inner reflection and discussion with others.
o You may feel touched by a sense of the miraculous, of the sacredness of this, like it was the most important thing that ever happened to you.
o You would be more open to the transformative value of such experiences and to honor the sensed shift most such experiencers discover, usually along the lines of a more altruistic perspective and greater concern and reverence for life and all living creatures, a lessening or loss of a fear of death, and so forth [see aftereffects]
Actually hearing others’ stories may be a atruly life-changing event in itself. Being able to tell your story to others who are genuinely interest and want to hear it is a major healing event for many. If you know that this is a fast growing phenomenon – people having and also people more openly sharing these experiences. You would then be able to better access with greater clarity their implications for all of us as a species and for this troubled world.
What kind of impact do these experiences have on the experiencer? What do experiencers have in common as a consequence of their experiences?
A lot of peopoe lave been changed in a powerfully positive way. That would give you a whole different view of life, of what it means to be human, of human evolution, of yourself in the great scheme of things.
Experience is the ultimate mother of conviction that comes from knowing from inside out. When your own experience is corroborated from outside, that’s enormously strengthening to you, and through you, an increased blessing force to others, even if they and you are unaware in the moment. Not only do you now know-that-you-know, but it is an in-common knowing with many, many others who have had similar experiences and transformations.
This is how MYTH writ-large, the “truer than true,” grows organically from the inside out, from the ground of being in many individuals who have been similarly initiated into a greater direct awareness of the larger-life reality that encompasses the familiar physical perspective but is infinitely more. MYTH is most fruitful and empowering and a guiding force when it is shared by many as direct experience that they all instantly recognize.
[[[FINISH THIS PART:
the concern for lack of a New Story==Campbell and Berry; there are quite a few empowering new Myths emerging. I haven’t stopped to study them in this way, but I would imagine that in most if not all cases, almost by definition, they each must have sprung from the same fertile soil of expansive consciousness implicit in these spiritual experiences that can so transform us one by one.]]]
I believe this is the New Story that is emerging within our very everyday midst, all about us, and all over the globe. We are Waking Up, one by one, and experience by experience, epiphany by epiphany, shift by shift into this larger-life view and finding more and more of us having this Awareness in common. That’s big. …
=====LOOK
AT ALL THIS BELOW BEFORE DISCARDING...
The ecologist priest, Thomas Berry, captured the universal dilemma of
our times with this observation:
|
It's
all a question of story. We are in trouble just now
because we do not have a good story. We are in between
stories. The old story, the account of how the world came
to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet
we have not learned the new story. |
As a
species we are enmeshed in a wondrous web of STORY! The threads of
our individual lives, from even before we are born weave us into
relationship, into family and community.
We also
each weave our own internal Story, even if we just sit on a log all day
Our
weaving is the artform that is Humanity. We together weave "our story"
You might
ask, how can a story be so powerful that it could save us and our world
from ourselves? STORY is to the mind and heart and soul as breath
is to the body. We need stories to draw us, inspire us, give us
direction, clue us in to others' thinking, feeling, experiencing.
The most powerful stories are those we live, that we know in our
bones. The most powerful of the powerful are those that let us in
on the Universal Secret of who we are and why we are here. To have
the
Whatever
that new story might be, it would have to be most powerful and roomy
enough for all of us for all of us to In talking with Paul H. Ray and
Sherry Ruth Anderson, authors of The Cultural Creatives: How 50
Million People Are Changing the World, Joseph Campbell
What
puts us most in touch with the genuine Mystery of life, that put us on
alert we do not have all the answers and there is a universal
Mystery that will not be left out and that will not leave us out -- and
we/you/I are part of it. IT visits us, each of us, sooner or later
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rhea A. White says the act of finding value in one's own spiritual
experiences, and by extension, writing one’s EHE autobiography ..
|
has
value for society, and even for the planet as a whole.
This is because we need a new story
to make sense of who we are as human beings and why we are here.
The story of mechanistic, behavioristic science has
resulted in anomie, loss of meaning and connection, boredom, and
the need for ever more violent “kicks” and dangerous
“highs,” as in drug abuse.
In our society today there is a dangerous lack of
reverence toward other humans, other life forms, and life
itself. Perhaps the most practical thing
we can do is write a better story.
What better place is there to begin than with ourselves?
By writing a new story, weaving in not just what parents
and siblings and friends and intimate others have said about us,
but what that still small voice within has been whispering to us
down through the years, starting with some of our very earliest
recollections. By
doing so, we not only integrate our inner world but the outer
world also seems to fall in line to an extent that can vary.
The big surprise in all of this is that in writing about
our most secret, intimate, personal EHEs – those that are
uniquely our own – we come to experience ourselves as rooted
in our common humanity and as connected to all life.
We come to know in our bones what Tom
Berry [in The Dream of the Earth] has expressed so
well: that
|
“the
human being is less a being on the earth or in the
universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the
universe itself….” |
People
who are centered in the[ir and our transformative types of] experience are bound to live vastly
different lives than those who are bent and twisted by anger,
doubt, fear, and pain such that their best hope is to seek
recreation or entertainment, or at worst, to seek kicks in
killing or maiming other humans or animals or to get lost in
drugs or pornography or crime.
A person who has experienced Berry’s vision and who constantly seeks to build on it and connect
with it would not be capable of any of those things....
|
Beyond the EHE Autobiography
White points
out, what we need is a story for each of us, [and ultimately and to the
point,] for all of us. . .
... What we need is a story that will unite science and
spirituality, self and world. But first it must occur at the
individual level. ... Each of us needs a story that charges our
daily lives with meaning and puts us personally in touch with
the sacred. There are many books about writing or better yet,
living one's own story, one's own myth. But the myths of old
contained an element that is missing from most stories told
today, and that is a link with the sacred. Exceptional human
experiences can serve as those links; they are those happenings in our lives
that can pull us out of boredom and disconnection into a world
of meaning and connection. We have to learn how to honor these
experiences and let them into our lives.
|
Again, from
"The Aftereffects of My NDE," White continues to broaden our
perspective of what is sublimely possible within a continuum ranging
from individual single experiences to the recollection and revaluing of
a lifetime of such events from which we derive new, transcendent meaning
within the wholeness of a tapestried life.
And further still, she expands our sense of the benefits of this
process within the context of society. She invites us to contemplate the
value of a collective sense of story garnered from the amassing in our
social awareness of many EHE autobiographies and the fresh new washes of
meaning and empowerment as a culture, perhaps as a world culture, we may
experience. It is very conceivable to envision this process evolving
into the realization of a whole new collective or unified understanding,
a world-sized new paradigm coming in play:
When a sufficient number of people [undertake the writing of
their EHE autobiography], the larger story [-- our cultural or
world story, at least the human part of it --] will emerge.
Exceptional human experiences catapult us into the new paradigm
[beyond our present disenchantment and lack of meaningful
connection with each other, with the world, and with the sacred,
i.e., the new paradigm]. We become a part of it and we discover
it is a part of us. We are no longer apart from it. The
scientific method cannot take us there. But once we ourselves
are there, and when we are willing to take the further leap of
sharing our experiences with others, we will not only be inside
the new view that is needed to join physical and spiritual, mind
and matter, body and mind, but we will be playing a significant
part in bringing it to birth. Once more, as in ages past, the
story of each human will be the story of humankind, and vice
versa. We and our times will be in step and will move forward as
one. Science can do nothing but follow, as it is right that it
should.
... Creating one's story is not simply
something one can do alone. Part of the act of creating one's
story and working out the meaning of one's life involves living
it out in some way (i.e., acting on it). So only does it really
become real to oneself. One of the first ways to do this is to
tell others about it, in a context where it seems relevant, even
though it may be embarrassing or difficult. By sharing our EHEs,
the other person validates the experience, even if he or she
reacts negatively. But often the response is positive, and when
it is, the other person may be moved by the first person's story
to share his or her EHEs as well. This heightens the sense of
meaning and reality for both in ways that go beyond simply
describing one's EHEs. A process seems to be initiated by such
interchanges that operates independently of both persons and
that leads to connectedness and interconnections. One has
entered into the process of spinning the web of the new
paradigm. We don't think it out; we live out of it and into a
new way of being in the world.
|
|
References
|
-
|
Berry,
Thomas. The Dream of the Earth.
Sierra Club Books, San Francisco
,
CA, 1988/1990.
|
|
2.
|
James,
William. The Varieties of
Religious Experience. Penguin American Library, NYC,
1982 [originally published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902]. |
|
3.
|
Ray, Paul H., and Anderson,
Sherry Ruth. The Cultural
Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World.
Three Rivers Press, NY, 2000.
|
|
|
Tucker,
Mary Evelyn [Professor at
Bucknell
University,
Department
of Religion,
Lewisburg
,
PA.
]. Thomas Berry and the New Story: An Introduction to
the Work of Thomas Berry. Found at: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC24/MacGllis.htm
|
|
4.
|
White,
Rhea A. The
Aftereffects of My NDE, IN:
Exceptional Humana Experience:
Background Papers: I [Exceptional Human Experience
Network,
Dix Hills
,
NY
, 1994]
|
|
|
White, Rhea A.
EHE
and the More We Are
IN: Exceptional
Humana Experience: Background
Papers: I [Exceptional Human Experience Network,
Dix Hills
,
NY
, 1994]
|
|
|
White,
Rhea A. Introduction
to Writing EHE Autobiographies IN: Exceptional
Humana Experience: Background
Papers: I [Exceptional Human Experience Network,
Dix Hills
,
NY
, 1994]
|
|
|
White,
Rhea A. “Why Write an EHE Autobiography?” IN:
Exceptional Humana Experience:
Background Papers: I [Exceptional Human Experience
Network,
Dix Hills
,
NY
, 1994]
|
|
Highly
Relevant and Recommended
|
|
|
Aftereffects
of EHEs
|
|
|
The
Narrative is the Thing: The Story of “Necessary Spirit”_and Psi
|
|
|
The
Import of Individual Exceptional Human Experiences for the
Species - and Beyond
|
|
|
Integrating,
Applying, and Validating Our EHEs
|
|
|
The
Act of Sharing EHEs as a Catalyst
|
|
|
The
Collective Message Inherent in Exceptional Human Experience
|
|
|
The
Inward Olympics: On
Finding Ways
to Deepen Consciousness and
Touch the Self We All Are
|
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notes,
re: The Cultural Creatives
In their landmark work, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million
People Are Changing the World, Paul
Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson quote Thomas Berry, the
inimitable theologian / ecologist / “geologian”:
“It’s all a question of story.
We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.
We are in between stories. The
old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into
it, is no longer effective. Yet
we have not learned the new story.”
p.
42:
the
stories of the Cultural Creatives are true stories of what it’s like
to create a new, meaningful way of life in the midst of an old way that
is declining and destructive. Toward
the end of Crow and Weasel, Barry Lopez’s luminous fable of a quest to
an unknown land, a wise old female Badger explains that telling true
stories of where you’ve been and what you’ve seen is how people care
for each other. “Sometimes,”
Badger says, “a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
We think we are in a time like that now, as we face the tipping
point where one civilization is ending and the new one is not yet in
sight. We offer these
stories of Cultural Creatives as food for our common journey.
==-
Mythos
carries the soul-level truth of a culture.
When that truth begins to change, we thirst for new stories and
images: not only to help us
make sense of the changes, although that is immensely important, but to
help us find our connections to each other, to the natural world, and to
our past and our future. Without
these stories and images, we lose our connections.
It is as if we are chopped intofragments with our worlds broken
apart, the physical separated from the imaginal.
Jungian analyst
Marion
Woodman told us, “At that point, we lack the cosmos that keeps us in
touch with the universal reality. Without
stories, we have no way to recollect ourselves when our personal world
shatters.”
Is this right?
Could our modern sense of disconnection, our lack of continuity
with the past and lack of responsibility for the future, be caused by
lack of a story?
Or even more unbelievable, a
myth? Any schoolchild
will tell you that myths are stories that aren’t true.
But, as storyteller Erica Meade says, a myth is a story that’s
true on the inside. And
it’s a storyteller’s work to reveal the inside truths of a culture.
It’s a natural part of what Cultural Creatives want and value:
a way to remember that they do not stand alone, a way to weave
new patterns into the social fabric, spinning lifelines that link the
generations.
p.
300
--=
p.
300
…
As [Joseph] Campbell put it so forcefully, Modernism has no shared myth
that gives it coherence, no guiding story that educates the individual
in the stages of life and grounds the community in the great mystery of
being. We are, as he said,
just going in raw [as individuals and as a culture without a Story to
connect us and ground us].
There’s another way to see
this situation, however. It’s
not just that we have lost our story, but that we had to lose it,
because every age needs its own wisdom.
Clinging to old stories is not only dangerous and foolish, it
keeps a culture stale and without imagination.
Because we are living in the time of the Between, we dare not be
lulled into listening to the old stories over and over again.
And that means that those who carry the wisdom for our time
cannot be simply storytellers. They’ll
have to be story-listeners, story-evokers, artists, teachers of every
sort who can call forth the stories we need now.
When an individual loses his
story, Jung observed in the wake of the conflagration of World War II,
confusion and disorientation result; but when a people lose their story,
the entire culture suffers from strange pathologies.
We have been living in the aftermath of that loss for centuries.
At the beginning of a new millennium, our landscape is still like
the first season after a forest fire.
But out of the ashes, sharp green shoots are sprouting
everywhere, growing up between the blackened stumps.
One of the marvels of our
time is precisely this new growth that has never been seen before.
After the holocaust of the Nazi Reich and
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki
, and the tragedies of the native peoples of North and
South America
, many wisdom traditions were destroyed.
But the dead wood of the feudal system, the absolute power of the
Church and the agrarian empires, has also been burned away.
From all our grave losses and all our fortunate releases, a space
has been cleared for innovation and creativity.
This fertile soil is where
the Cultural Creatives are working, preparing the vay for a new culture.
The new growth, as we have seen, includes the large social and
consciousness movements of the last forty years.
But it also includes one of the oldest and most powerful forms of
human social life: mythos.
Its fruits are story and image, visual and performance arts,
theater and song, usic and
metaphor and ritual. New
forms of the mythos are springing up today, cultivated by a variety of
artists and experimenters of all sorts.
In addition, a world culture of music and story is growing as
moderns understand ancient teachings in a new way.
And everywhere that harbingers of a new mythos are appearing,
Cultural Creatives are preparing the way.
==-
“I’m
interested in plays that come from people who have been outside of the
core,” director George C. Wolfe said about Tony Kushner’s Broadway
play, angels in
America
. “(I’m interested in)
people who have had to stay in touch with their strength and have had to
go on journeys of self-examination because they were not, as I like to
say, invited to the party. So
they’ve had to stay in touch with a whole series of truths, and
muscles, that those in the party didn’t have to because they were 0f
the power base.” These
people and their stories, Wolfe said, are not only witnesses and sources
of understanding for who we are and where we are going.
They are lifelines.’
Some of those lifelines are coming from dreams . .
[the authors give several dream images depicting something or a
space for something that has never been created before.]
==-
Story
of Kevin W. Kelley and the book he made happen, The Home Planet, because
of his powerfully compelling interest.
He ‘could not get the photographs of Earth from space out of
his mind’s eye; nor could he forget the stories of the astronauts and
cosmonauts who had been transformed by their voyages.
After years of wondering whether those experiences, portrayed in
a book, could transform others, and doubting his ability to create such
a book; and afate deciding to go ahead and try; and after three more
years of intricate negotiations and phenomenal cooperation between the
Association of Space Explorers, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Mir
Publishing of Moscow, Addison-Wesley Publishing, and a host of
translators, Kelley bought out The Home Planet.
Published simultaneously in Russian and English, is is the most
extensive collection of photographs of Earth from space ever published,
with words from the space explorers written in their native languages,
including Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Mongolian.
The sense of ‘one planet, our home’ is inescapable.
…why this passion for
seeing the Earth? We asked. What
difference did you think it would make?
He told us tht overviews are very important and quoted the
astronomer Fred Hoyle: “In
1946, the year I was born, Hoyle said that when the first picture of the
Earth from space is shown, it will change the world.” That’s
what Kevin really wanted: to
change the world by giving it new pictures of itself.
When you see the planet a a whole, he explained, without man’s
boundaries dividing it up and separating each country from every other,
it can open a different sense of who you are.
“I waned to create a clearer picture, a more informed picture,
a more highly defined image of the Earth, and I waned to raise this as a
context in people’s consciousness. I thought the world needed this.”
He paused for a moment. “Desperately.”
But there was a problem with
this grand vision. “Look,
I was a 38-year-old handyman with no credentials,” Kevin explained.
“I’d been a boat builder, a general contractor, a wild rice
farmer, a fisherman, and every time I got to the end of a project, I’d
say to myself, ‘This isn’t what I want to do with the rest of my
life.’ I felt like I’d
wasted my entire life, like a dog on a chain that had worn the ground
bare.” The fact was, he
said, that nobody would believ that someone who had never gone to
college, never been an editor, never accomplished anything big and
impressive, could produce a book involving millions of dollars and the
cooperation of Soviet and American publishers, the space agencies, and
the most celebrated heroes of the world’s superpowers.
He was right.
Hardly anyone did believe it.
Kevin was turned down many times by many people, and some of his
closest frieins advised him to drop the project completely.
His perseverance – his critics would certainly call it
stubbornness or worse – was phenomenal.
If ever someone was stretched and strengthened by following
through on what he believed, it was Kevin Kelley.
Not only was he learning new thins, but the parts of himself that
he was embarrassed by, the ones he thought got him in hot water too much
of the time, unexpectedly turned out to be advantages.
He was funny, and very honest, about how this worked.
[ He says at one point one
of the astronauts wanted to go out and get a regular editor who knew
what he was doing .. but when it was over, “our lawyer said, ‘Kevin,
a normal editor wouldn’t have done this book.
Afte the first hurdle or two, he would’ve said screw this and
been out of there.’”]
At the end of the interview
… Kevin said, “Tell people not to give up.
If I can do it, anyone can.” … His words … reminded us of
something of the greatest importance:
the power of ordinary people to make a difference, simply by
persevering in what they believe.
==-
p.
304
how
do you tell a tale untold? For
many Cultural Creatives, it is by developing places and occasions where
such tales will be welcome. It
means building the equivalent of new tribal fires where people can sit
around and tell the truth about what they’ve seen, what they’ve
personally been through, and what it means.
Telling the stories in the presence of thoughtfufl listeners was
once done in community with the guidance of elders.
It is a way of sharing the gifts of what you’ve learned so far,
of integrating the discoveries from the new territory.
Cultural Creatives need this kind of integration, and so they are
creating settings where it can happen.
==-
Under
the subtitle, ‘Former Sleepwalker’:
Re:
Willis Harman, renowned futurist, was convinced Western science contained
the bottom-line answer as to the nature of Reality.
The experience that set him on his journey to becoming in the
eyes of The Cultural Creatives authors Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth
Anderson, a quintessential example of that esteemed population was what
was supposed to have been a two-week retreat described as a “nonreligious
discussion of ethics and life principles.”
What it turned out to be instead, much to Harman’s great and
initial dismay was what today we might refer to as a cross between an
encounter group and a spiritual retreat.
Meditation was one of the major practices taught, and people were
encouraged to get in touch with and express their feelings.
This was in 1954, long before there was much even imagined in the
West along these lines. Dr.
Harman has said that if he had had any inkling what he was in for , he
would not have gone; he felt as if he had been “tricked.”
So it was a shock to him when near the end of the retreat, with a
decided emphasis on joy, he burst into heaving sobs!
The event totally reoriented him about the meaning and direction
of his life. The then
Stanford
University
professor said, “Clearly, there were aspects of life they never told
me about in school.” At
60, he was invited by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell to co-found the
Institute
of
Noetic Sciences
, a unique research organization focused on consciousness studies in a
way that acknowledged body, mind and soul – and for the good of the
Earth. Harman was its first
president. ..[p. 43-44]
[[[[this
is also at the very top.]]]
Emerging
New Stories -- some of the best I've come across thus far
[send me your favorites!]
|
1.
|
Rhea A. White
[and
in tandem: PMH Atwater, John Heron, MT Benedict, N.
Coxhead, A. Ardagh, many others] |
The Collective Message Inherent in EHE: The One Way to Save Earth and Ourselves
|
|
2.
|
Paul H. Ray,
Sherry R. Anderson
|
The Cultural Creatives;
The Ten Thousand Mirrors
|
|
3.
|
Elisabet Sahtouris
|
Caterpillar-Butterfly and so much more! .. "Imaginal Cells"!
|
|
4.
|
David
Spangler
|
Not the Center but the Growing Edge ; The Center is Everywhere!
|
|
5.
|
Thomas Berry, Brian
Swimme, Teilhard de Chardin
|
The Universe Story
|
|
6.
|
Rudolf Steiner
|
The New Isis Myth
|
|
7.
|
Ervin Laszlo
|
Science and Re-enchantment of Cosmos: Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality
|
|
8.
|
Willis Harman
|
Global Mind Change: The New Age Revolution in the Way We Think
|
|
9.
|
Rasha / Oneness; Rudolf Steiner; David Spangler
|
Awakening, Ascension
|
|
10.
|
Mellen Thomas Benedict
|
The
first person ever known to ask the Light presence who greeted
him on the Other Side after death, if it would answer his
questions before it "took him," which it did.
Consciously we are going to
Shift; We are going to link up, join hands and walk out of Hell
together
|
|
11.
|
George Leonard
|
Transformation [??]
|
|
12.
|
Sri Aurobindo / the Mother
|
Living Consciousness [??]
|
|
13.
|
Bernard Lievegoed [and speaking on behalf of Rudolf Steiner]
|
Humanity on the Threshold
|
|
14.
|
John White
|
Homo-Noeticus:
An evolutionary leap of consciousness defining this shift into a
new order of being as a whole new species
|
|
15.
|
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
|
Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily
|
|
16.
|
Abraham-Hicks
|
Intentionality and the Art of Allowing
|
|
17.
|
Kevin Kelley; Vijali Hamilton
|
Individuation
|
|
18.
|
Charles T. Tart, Amit
Goswami, Edgar Mitchell, Bruce Lipton
|
Science and the Validation of Consciousness; science and spirituality are the SAME reality;
The Biology of Belief: Unleasing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles
|
|
19.
|
E.
Pagels, R. Eisenman, ...
|
A Total Re-Write of Christianity [a
slight re-write of Judaism]; Gnosticism
|
|
20.
|
William Tiller
|
Science
and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness
|
|
21.
|
Tom
Atlee
|
Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
|
|
22.
|
AK
Mozumdar; Neville [Goddard]; R. Steiner; Abraham-Hicks; ...
|
We are creating it all …
|
|
23.
|
Sri Aurobindo Ghose and The
Mother
|
Pulling down the Descending
Force of the Supramental Ligt
|
|
24.
|
The Mother [Mirra Alfasa]
|
Discovering the connection
between the physical and the Sacred that we can Awaken to ..
|
|
25.
|
Mother Meera
|
Bringing down the Paramatman
Light
|
|
26.
|
Others to explore
|
Walter [AE] Russell; Peter Russell;
Russell
Targ; Michael Murphy;
Jean Houston; Margaret Mead;
Jane Roberts and Seth; Joseph
Chilton Pearce
|
