The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (Sacred Activism): 2

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I think that the public’s willingness to accept lockdowns and in general the break in normal life is that they wanted liberation from normality.

That said, I find myself agreeing with you that this is far from a “mission accomplished” moment, as much as I would like to take some much-needed time off from advocacy. It will in fact require the kinds of technologies that are inaccessible to the consciousness that wants to escape responsibility for earth.My point, though, is that the insights didn’t come from a dramatic life story or unusual discipline. It is the flame of hope—not the false hope of wishful thinking and ignorance of reality, but the true hope that is a premonition of an authentic possibility, a possibility we have agency in creating. We learn as well that all of our external institutions reflect our basic perceptions of the world, our invisible ideologies and belief systems. Here’s a quote, one of your quotes, I’m saying that there’s a time to do and a time not to do and that when we are slave to the habit of doing, we are unable to distinguish between them. Of course, many of us have presaged this development as sense and meaning, story and structure, have broken down in our own lives.

The beauty lens makes it obvious that financial thinking, and quantitative thinking generally, is incapable of producing certain things that the human soul requires. When we tear away the ideologies, the labels, and the rationalizations, we show ourselves the truth of what we are doing, and conscience awakens. And like, and then we can have a unit of small community, and then we can have a unit of, of larger community and, and maybe, but we’re still, you know, and, and organizations and leaders often really are thinking and held accountable for the unit of their organization, but they’re still separate units. Or, the world that would put such resources in my hands would uphold different values than it does now.People’s good opinion of me, if that is what serves change, or maybe if you’re conflict averse, like, that’s another thing I have, like, you know, I’m conflict averse. The first step is to give attention to your yearning, to do that, and to bring into consciousness, things that may have been excluded from the table of your awareness, such as the dissatisfaction with the success arc that maybe has taken you, taking you to a certain place and then hit a glass ceiling, and you realize there’s some other level of wellbeing and happiness that I’m not getting any closer to.

I also reject the Spiral Dynamics thinking that locates our own civilization at a higher point of evolution than other cultures, and fancies itself to have “included and transcended” them. You know, I’m like ranked the number one executive coach in the world, the top 30 thought leader I’m in the top global gurus lists, like all this stuff, I’m good at separation, right? He presents data in dozens of categories showing that the world is far better off in terms of declining violence, longer lifespans, better standard of living, access to health care, declining child death and death of mothers during birth, etc. You have a rare talent of provoking reconsideration of seemingly bedrock aspects of one’s worldview.So my walls are the best thing to sort of protect me and keep me safe in a world that, you know, isn’t the dust that is still acting in the narrative of separation. If love is the expansion of self to include another, then whatever reveals our connections has the potential to foster love. A key precept of the modern world and its scientific view is that, in principle, everything that is real can be quantified, measured and counted. It is never far away; yet at the same time it is in a different universe—a different Story of the World.

Maybe you move to a new city with no plan like that, where you’re traveling, you know, without having booked everything in advance. It really was that eye-opening for me, largely because I have long had a deeply-rooted feeling that we in this modern world of ours are on the road to ruin, even while I embraced technology and gadgets and also while I see much validity to arguments made by Stephen Pinker and others that our modern way of life offers countless improvements over pre-agricultural and pre-hierarchical societies. In many cases, because of licensing requirements, building codes, and so forth, it is actually illegal to do things we once did for each other.I’ve thus found myself comfortable with being in many ways “on the fringe” but it’s not something I sought out. The institutions that have borne us through the centuries have lost their vitality; only with increasing self- delusion can we pretend they are sustainable. By doing this, though, we attempt to borrow legitimacy from the very system we hope to subvert, and indirectly enhance its legitimacy by associating our own with its.