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In his revolutionary book, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of
Leadership, Joseph
Jaworski
reveals one of the most formative moments of his life, when he
serendipitously managed to spend time with renowned physicist,
David Bohm. After becoming thoroughly familiar with
Jaworski's plans for his "impossible dream," to create
the American Leadership Forum [ALF], Bohm's injunction to him was,
"Just go with it. You cannot be fixed in how you're
going about it any more than you would be fixed if you were
setting about to paint a great work of art. Be alert, be
self-aware, so that when the opportunity presents itself, you can
actually rise to it."
These years later, Mr. Jaworski says, "I've never received better
advice in my life. As I was to discover, acting in the
belief that I was part of a greater whole while maintaining
flexibility, patience, and acute awareness led to 'all manner of
unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no
[person] could have dreamed would have come [his or her]
way.'"
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Partnership,
Funding
& Collaboration
Partnership:
A
Precedent and Promise
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One particular, hirstoric
precedent comes to mind -- we could think of it as a collective Presencing
that was very effective. And by the way, if you are familiar with
Rudolf Steiner's work, other examples based on his "social
way" [never been quite sure what to call it!] are well known to
those who have together consciously cultivated this potential. Ray
and Anderson's example is what they describe as "The Battle in
Seattle," the activist event during the famous 1999 World Trade
Organization meeting. I'm going to quote a little of their version
here:
...Dressed as sea turtles and monarch butterflies, death's heads and
victims of violence, fifty thousand activists showed up from around
the world. Ecologists and feminists, Teamsters and steelworkers
in union jackets, witches and nuns, consumer and health advocates,
native people, human rights activists, and people against
multinationals and globalization came prepared to engage in the great
ritual drama -- parading and shouting slogans, linking arms to block
streets and buildings, getting arrested and going limp, and finally
being dragged off to jail. But the police wouldn't play the
forty-year-old game. Unprovoked, they shot pepper spray into the
faces of sitting demonstrators and beat them with clubs, fired tear
gas and rubber bullets into peaceful crowds. Often they didn't
arrest anyone, not even the looters of electronics stores or the
window smashers at Starbucks. Their only task, it seemed, was to
move all those people away so that trade delegates could get to the
meetings of the WTO to negotiate some trade accords.
In five days of protests, with mutual acrimony on all sides, the trade
talks collapsed. Even without the protests, the trade reps from
third world countries might well have staged a walkout to collapse the
talks. In the end, everybody got mad and went home.
[[This is where it gets interesting:]] ... One striking
feature of the demonstrations was that most of the protesters seemed
to know just what to do. They fell into a kind of peaceful order
at the marches and demonstrations, regardless of what movement or
organization they represented or what country they were from.
Except for a few dozen anarchists who managed to provoke violence, the
thousands were following a culture of nonviolent civil disobedience
that had been developed originally by Gandhi. According to
accounts on the Internet, the DAN (Direct Action Network), which
provided infrastructure for the protest, had been working for months
coordinating logistics, housing, nonviolence training, legal backup,
and the opening day "People's convergence" at the WTO.
They also worked with the police in those months, promising that the
protest would be nonviolent.
What
Really Went On .. according to Ray and Anderson:
... the protesters actually did know what they were about, and they
did agree -- if not on what they were for, then on who and what they
were against. Though they represented a wide variety of
specialized interests, they shared common values and a similar view of
the role of megacorporations and globalization.
The demonstrations had a simple, agreed-upon purpose -- to show
everyone the bad points of the WTO accords and disrupt the
process -- but there was no central command structure or headquarters
running things. The coordination among groups was extensive,
including agreements on strategies, logistics, and information, both
before and during the protests. Between the Internet, faxes and
cell phones, much more technology was used than in any previous
demonstrations. When DAN's communication system was shut down by
the authorities, another group immediately bought radiophones and
became the tactical communications squad for the rest of the day.
The ability to maintain control and focus in the face of the police
violence depended, too, on a strong consensus process within hundreds
of small "affinity groups." The groups had trained in
nonviolent tactics together, and they worked closely on their own
particular piece of the demonstration. Overall, the
demonstrations formed a creative self-organizing system that showed a
lot of collective intelligence, and that made it much harder to stop
or disrupt.
At the end of the week, the most far-reaching result of the protest
was the fact that an enormous range of social movements and NGOs came
together and made common cause, based on a shared worldview and
values. [A famous Vietnam activist, Richard Flacks, describes
his take on this to a California news agency:] "This was
historic, cutting edge ... The linking of groups that have rarely been
in coalition before -- like labor and the environmentalists -- is a
real breakthrough in social movements in American history."
Flacks went on to say that the WTO protesters are "nudging the
public to look at the global economy through a new lens" ..
... He's pointing to the growing political convergence worldwide among
groups like those protesting the WTO meetings. It's still early
in the political process, so these political coalitions are still
uneasy. But as we've seen, the cultural arms of these movements
have been growing more similar for a good twenty years [[this book was
published in 2000]]. It's the political convergence that is the
latecomer to the great current of change moving through Western
culture.
I believe this WTO-focused protest group had a not very conscious
awareness of the Presencing they manifested together through their
strong, integrous [unified] intentionality. Nevertheless, what
they accomplished together, and in not-so-conscious collaboration with
the natural and spirit dimensions, was phenomenal. Two quick
examples of how clear, concerted intentionality can bring
"impossible" things to happen:
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1. |
Obama's
bid for President -- carried out through the internet, no
less. Even Hillary Clinton's substantial backing could not
compete with this! Totally amazing.
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2. |
Lynne
McTaggart's Peace Intentionality Experiment. She herself
is a journalist / writer, not a scientist, but she was able to
interest a number of scientists across the United States in
working with her to set up an excellent and ongoing experiment,
again using the internet, to enlist the support of at least
thousands of participants. You can read more about this
group intentionality research on this
Food4Thot page. |
Imagine what
could be done if Presencing, Dialogic processes and an understanding of
the power of collective intentionality, especially of large numbers of
people, were cultivated from
the beginning in the sense of what defines and infuses the objectives of an entire global grassroots movement.
Plus in this case, we are talking in particular about many millions of
people whose EHEs already predispose them to have a natural, deeply
committed, and even predictable altruistic lifestyle, including among
them the most activist-inclined on behalf of socio-ecological
interests.
This premise offers such a unique and potentially magnificent vehicle of
service to -- and from within -- The Whole, to be initiated from the
grassroots ground of our collective energies and input.
Wouldn't it be great good cosmic FUN if it actually
succeeded?! But of course it would with the right support ..
and intent.
I believe that it can and will. Ultimately, whether from this
project pregnant with promise or something else, it must. It
is the destiny of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful -- if we but
choose it. In our choosing is our destiny.
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The
Prospectus [main page]
The
Precis / The Development Plan
[Prospectus, Part 5]
Partnership,
Funding & Collaboration [main
page]
A.
Big-picture partnership articles:
B.
More detailed, related partnership articles:
____________________________________________________________________
If
you want further information or would like to discuss partnering or
funding possibilities, please contact me.
Rachael Rocamora
PLEASE
NOTE, AS OF MAY 5, 2009, I WILL BE MOVING
BUT
DO NOT YET HAVE A FORWARDING ADDRESS.
For
the time being,
PLEASE
CONTACT ME VIA EMAIL:
rachaelrocamora@gmail.com
Thank
you.
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