One agenda that is boldly
expressed and nurtured here is that we are a global Consciousness
Shift Movement!
In The
Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, Paul
H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson address
the very issue this part of the wHe web has been built to nurture and
celebrate:
"The
weakness of the Cultural Creatives [and by extension, this entire global
Consciousness Movement] is that they don't yet have a basis for supporting
each other and working together. Lacking social support, social
isolation becomes a great problem for them. Until they develop a
substantial sense of community, their fledgling movements, businesses, and
institutions cannot grow, potential political leaders cannot create a common
cause with them."
Long before discovered Ray and Anderson's important book about the Cultural
Creatives, I and friends, acquaintances had felt the stress and isolation of
this tremendous unmet need. It was not surprising and yet truly thrilling
to see this as a primary incentive for their book.
What
is this LAL Movement and What Is its Purpose?
Joining the LAL [membership]* is about formally acknowledging
ourselves as a great global force for good [see EHE
aftereffects as the
essential referent for the kinds of universally connective and
caring values we hold in common]. It would provide a powerful, galvanizing
platform from which
we can together support various endeavors. It can become the living heart of a
world-wide, transformative movement!
Much of this development would coordinate itself on the basis of an
intuitive self-organization and a kind of natural, mutual consensus born
out of these values we hold in common [again, see Aftereffects].
I believe many of us live out of this understanding already from all over the
world. But most of us are not mutually, actively aware of this, except for
the more academic and to some extent experiential contingencies of the
consciousness movement itself, which does have a modest global presence and is
also growing rapidly. An extraordinary example of how this may look and
feel, the Direct Action
Network [DAN], is cited
further down this page.
Relying largely on a similar "consensus process" the DAN demonstrated
brilliantly within and among
aptly-called affinity groups who I believe exemplify this Awakening moral consciousness in-common,
we, under the auspices of the LAL, as a consciousness movement, could unify our
protective concerns and efforts on the basis of a clear and simple
purpose. The organizing
principle would be this:
Together
as a grassroots global community of and for and by people everywhere, we will
gently but firmly take back our power as the unified and sacred peoples of the
Earth who share an uncompromising commitment to a sustainable planetary
environment and to the global awareness of the significance of an apparently
evolutionary shift
in human consciousness
that has been quietly affecting untold numbers of people worldwide and
continues steadily to grow in effect and influence. Additionally, we are
now organizing to fulfill this task consciously
and collectively on a global scale.
The potential unfolding of this part of the site requires the coming together of
others far more informed than I to formulate how we may together have the
greatest, most sustaining impact, but on a mega-scale -- on the order of an
organized, worldwide, grassroots movement, a kind of from-the-ground-up
"United Nations." It would evolve both on the level of
individual participation and also from the perspective of a huge contingency of
grassroots organizations.
How can we, like activated electrons jumping to a higher orbit of power, develop
a 'next-generation' within the world-wide activist agenda that increases our
effectiveness on this level of operation without compromising the
flexibility of smaller organizations? Imagine our operating on the scale
of conglomerate transnational corporations -- but in a form that circumvents the
shadow side [in-house politics and strife, money issues, destructive ambitions,
etc.] What follows are my thoughts along these lines, assuming others will
have much to contribute to the vision we will bring into being together.
There
Are Two Levels of Operation
[1]
A S.W.A.T. Team Addressing Crises
This Movement on the LAL would function on two levels, the most
basic being that of our individual involvement within community -- voting,
signing petitions, participating in online and offline events, contributing
dollars, time, expertise to the causes that most compel us. We
can almost instantly bring effective, well-informed, even overwhelming support,
resources, leadership, witnessing "conscience"
to any situation. This could include bringing local community interests to
the LAL or taking the LAL to them. The LAL will have a
definitive directory of [LAL] constituent-reviewed activist organizations and concerns from all over the
globe with -- I want to emphasize -- up-to-the-minute information about what is happening and what is
needed and the resilience, networking capacity, proficiency, and creative
ability to respond effectively.
We could create a kind of "frontline" hothouse environment of
opportunity where, day by day, acute situations are brought to our attention
that millions of us can respond to in the moment. The needs and [I want to
be careful to note,] not the sponsoring organization would be in
high-profile. Not only individuals, but also whole organizations can add
their various means of support that could produce far more helpful results in
the long term. Moveon.org does this so beautifully! But
let's think how we can take this to the next level and bring in a veritable
"UN" of thousands of organizations working together, and always
with the fluid, responsive activist individuals as an essential part of the
action.
Again, this interactivity accents the cause or need, rather than the primary
supporting organization/s; for some this will be challenging. We could
also offer our own honest, compassionate news organ, by the way, [on- and
offline; think Christian Science Monitor, or?], which could also expose more
people to what we are creating together. This also opens the door to
greater opportunity for collaborations among even disparate organizations to get
needs met. More flexibility in immediate and transient coordination
of efforts among organizations that can best support the urgency of the
moment. This
would mean, within hours or overnight, millions of individuals could sign a
given petition or respond to a physical disaster in a highly coordinated
way.
There would be a
most competent and ever-ready mediation network [like an Emergency Room staff]
that would be in place on a meta-level, within a context outside the sometimes
potential bureaucratic bottlenecks that can happen within organizations or
between organizations and governments and the geopolitical populations in
need. This response level would be sourced in the LAL itself or a
collateral, fed by many [LAL membership] organizations and individuals in some
way, that has the flexibility, integrity, sanction of the larger organization [LAL]
[via some kind of fully recognized certification process], savviness, etc. to
play this critical role, almost on the action level of a guerilla unit or a well
practiced surgical team. Again, see the DAN example below.
[2]
Further Planned Objectives as a Meta-Organization
In regards to global activism outside the bounds of such critical needs, for
which we plan our activities [not to forget celebrations!], our primary objective is to become a highly
responsive, meta-organized and mobile "ether network" for a collective
global alliance of interests that clearly shares these [so-called Aftereffect]
values in common and that
we want to support and to be allied with. We are back to a "United
Nations" conception comprised of possibly tens of thousands of grassroots organizations and people from all over the
world.
We would have our own budget/s and financing operations right out of the
grassroots billions of us as "of the people, for the people, and by the
people," and protectively on behalf of the Earth, with our "UN"
charter, of course, to this effect. And we together will be a
world-changing and formidable presence. What would bring all of us
together would be the simplicity of ecological sustainability and human
rights. It would include the universal recognition of "the
Sacred"; The Earth is sacred, all life is sacred, and Humankind is also
sacred and can choose to participate as sacred co-creator and guardian within
this Divine drama.
The key here is grassroots and global. And: all things EHE [see R.
White's article, The Collective Message
Inherent in EHEs]. Emphasis of our work and play together will be
education, healing people and planet, creative imagination that attunes us to that
Something More, and [especially for now] conflict transformation.
These activities are integral to a spiritual civilization of the whole of
humanity based on the universal values and worldview that EHEers, Core Cultural
Creatives, and many of the First Peoples know from direct experience, and many
of us otherwise recognize intuitively.
In summary, this global alliance of activist GROUPS
and individuals will share a common and compassionate commitment to ensure ecological sustainability
and a mutual regard for all beings [and all Human Beings] as sacred. We
together will form an inspired and
actively engaged social ethic that lives out of the heart of "I am you /
you are I in another body" and [in other words] "do unto others as you
would have them do unto you." The source of this
Awakening human consciousness, the direct experiencing of the
Larger
Life Reality and the "Self we all are," will ultimately become a
lived reality and the direct knowledge of every person on this blessed Earth.
~~~~~~~~~
*** ~~~~~~~~~
The
Direct Action Network / DAN: An Incredibly Successful Example of an
Instantly Responsive "Consensus Process"
One model we can learn much from for this LAL collaborative is the famous Direct Action Network
[DAN] that masterminded the 1999 protest in Seattle against the multinational
globalization agenda of the the World Trade Organization. The WTO represented the worst-case scenario of the multinational
“robber baron” mentality that wanted to exploit everyone in the
world they could with the single-minded intention to line their
pockets. The Marchers amazingly represented the most
disparate social groups imaginable, walking and chanting arm-in-arm –
what a fascinating, magical, powerful Awakening moment this was!
Ray and Anderson [who wrote this important work,
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World]
describe these roughly 50,000 people: “Dressed as sea turtles and monarch
butterflies, death’s heads and victims of violence, … [e]cologists
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…”
With the exception of a few dozen, say Ray and Anderson, the marchers were the paragon of
Gandhi’s modus operandi of peaceful civil disobedience. In the
face of an "unprovoked," riot-gear-clad police force that was ruthless
and brutal, their ongoing and unforgettable chant was, "The whole world is
watching!"
The point for our purposes is how the DAN orchestrated this extraordinary event
of people with such widely divergent interests. Again, I defer to these
authors who sing praises of the Direct Action Network: "[They] provided
infrastructure for the protest[; they] 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. ... The
demonstrations had a simple, agreed-upon purpose ... 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. ... " They
brought this amazingly disparate group together on the basis of the one
passionate thing they could all agree on, which was "who and what they were
against." Nevertheless, they "shared common values and a similar
view of the role of the megacorporations and globalization." The DAN
incorporated technologies unavailable during the 1960s that made a radical
difference in the success of their incredibly coordinated efforts, using the
internet, mobile phones and fax machines. Even
when their primary communication system [the internet?] was forcefully taken
over, another organization continued to mobilize the hundreds of "affinity
groups" using radio phones.
In summary, the two authors wrote:
The ability to maintain control and focus in the face of the police violence
depended, too, on 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.
|
~~~~~~~~~
*** ~~~~~~~~~
Notes:
-
Frankly,
we need our own lobbyists, and so much more! Not just in the
USA, but similarly, all over the world, we can be recognized as a
great and powerful collective, plan initiatives together, organize
and work together under one 'banner', not only as individuals, but
also including other organizational identities whose concerns and values
come out of the same [unitive] heartfelt place. We can use
this as a conduit for the heart of a very fluid matrix that has
astounding ability to adaptively respond to many different types of
challenges [e.g., write letters to leaders, generate overnight
petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures and comments,
show up as rallying support for various events. I invite us together to look at how we
can achieve that in a more globally inclusive way than ever before. [Membership;
donations; instant funds for
various causes; political candidate support; think tank, and task
forces].
We need to
think "as one" together now, which is the next generational leap beyond
the experience of hundreds of thousands of seemingly isolated
organizations and causes. The individual
organizations, etc. are essential, but we can transcend this
simultaneously by creating new ways to reach out, connect across all
disciplines and interests, to
organize far more effectively together and thereby become a formidable
force for good, such as has never been experienced on this Earth.
First we must be able to envision we are ONE being together
in our heart-sourced intentionality and mutual regard. As we are
able to take on this vision together, to perceive our
greatness together, to really SEE and KNOW we can do this with emphasis
on mutual support, mutual regard, as one BIG FAMILY of Humanity, we will
also be perceived in this way by the rest of the world.
Sooner or
later as more people open to and have these transformative insights and
awareness [spiritually transformative experiences], and as we share
these with each other and make them a common knowledge and basis for our
shared values and worldview, we will all graduate to this new collective experience of
what it means to be Human. How much more magnificent and
fulfilling can life get than this?!
The
precedent has already been established. Remember the situation with the
World Trade Center event in 1999, and how activists did just
amazing things in terms of being incredibly intuitive, creative, and adaptive to the moment and
organizing and reorganizing with phenomenal fluidity? That's what
we need. The revolutionary toolery -- e.g., the internet and cell
phones, etc. certainly accommodate this possibility, but what truly
connects us is the heart-sourced Awakening we are discovering one-by-one
through our exceptional experiences. On this basis we are
beginning to live a new consensus reality.
We
also need an army of volunteers and staff ... and a .org arm for all
this that stretches across the whole spectrum of activism,
products-services, and other LAL interests--and across the globe. -
Products
and services that similarly mirror a passionate dedication to the
uncompromising regard, even reverence for all life and moral consciousness that
epitomize the EHEerly lifeview.
|
|
LAL Membership
[same as
joining co-op?]*:
*
We could make LAL membership free and joining an LAL co-op as separate
option. The other option in this case is not joining the co-op; still able to
fully participate in all that's offered here, but won't get price breaks or
special offers. I definitely don't want people to feel this is all about $$$.
Or: we could make co-op privileges part of the LAL membership -- that's
one less database or set of databases! And in the meantime, not joining
does not cut one off from anything here except special offers and discounts.
|
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