In trying to understand this world, with humanity living in pain and fear, flow is one way to get a grasp on everything. The opposite of stagnation, it’s elemental for the human operating system. We take in and we give out, we get nourished and we produce. In a universe that is ever-expanding, there’s nothing stagnant about human life. The particles from when the universe began made the stars that made us. All flowing.
Not so long ago, we thought everything in the universe was fixed, in place. But, as we flowed along, we discovered everything was moving along, where, big revelation, we were not on the Earth, but we were of it. The cosmos is one developing thing. Everything is intertwined! Actually that changed everything!
Life has flowed in eternal renewal— forests, oceans, wildlife. Flow only got spotty when agriculture clamped things down, and we can trace, from then till now, the mechanization that drew us ever further into things and away from the all. And, now, it’s everyone for self, all in a financial container. Fortunes are preserved. Money is paper for deals. NO FLOW. We prize nothingness. In a flowing system, money would circulate. It would give value. Still, some would be richer. You could buy a yacht with circulating money—but you wouldn’t want a hundred of them.
How to get thinking people to be flowing? That’s an edge now. In the process of getting ourselves evolved, the move now is to be with each other. Here, on Substack, writers using Comment sections to engage with readers is good. CHAT isn’t so good for figuring things out, but it can collect ideas (a prompt in our new CHAT is for getting to the localized world we’ll need to be in). How else to mingle so we flow together? The Internet is soapboxes now, and we need conference tables. Problem dire. Letting humanity know. Working up an internet new way is about it taking a while to realize new things new technologies can do, like with us and the Internet. How to get more interacting, more flow? Think on that now.
An emergency, though, is Trump. Drop everything to deal with ridding ourselves of him. With everyone knowing he’s deranged, at least he doesn’t have respectable supporters. How about my idea where he would resign? Can you see conversation everywhere, about what could get him to do that, catching on? Like Hands Across America, We Are the World, and Woodstock, we’ve created civilization-changing come-togethers. We might create another one with The Trump Resignation.
Not getting a response from Heather to this Open Letter to Heather Delaney Reese, how about someone else for starting that conversation? Who has enough outreach to get social networking buzzing with what could get Trump to resign?
Because we are click-averse, to give you an idea of what could get Trump gone, here’s what I shared with Heather:
“He doesn’t relish the job. It’s gotten to where he can’t stay awake for it, so maintaining even the illusion of competence is out his window. But what he does relish is riches. We would make it worth his while. Let him keep all his grift, give him freedom from prosecution, and what else? Do we care if he becomes the richest person in the world as long as he isn’t in office? Let him develop a desert somewhere. Sweeten our deal by making him the first recipient of the Save Humanity Award, in this case for courageously resigning in the face of some physical problem that’s newly diagnosed – a sleep disorder would do it -- so he saves face. A clincher, that gives him points in the adulation department, could be a state dinner in his honor. Just keep our eyes on the prize.”
You know, this isn’t a time for meandering. We all need to smarten up. The universe may have gone over the top in sending what has broken our hearts open enough to accommodate a less opulent but pricelessly warmer and fuzzier civilization, so let’s get on with it!
Having been around for what younger people only have secondhand knowledge about, I can give testimony to the powerful spell of America as the Shining City on a Hill. We took pride in how superior we were, but uh oh, not superior enough. Where racism was rampant and profit was our master, we couldn’t claim our shiny humanitarian destiny. That’s left for us, we who are here now. And, no choice, even in a world consumed by darkness, nobody can know enough to say we can’t move into the light.
What comes next cannot be built from the same assumptions that brought us here. The age unfolding now will test whether we can learn a different measure — one rooted in aliveness rather than acceleration.
Not service as sacrifice, but service as alignment with processes larger than ourselves. Heroism belongs to eras that still believe in conquest and rescue.
This moment calls for something quieter and more durable: orientation.
Orientation toward what is real.
Orientation toward what is alive.
Orientation toward what can still regenerate.
We did not choose the age we are in.
But we are choosing, every day, how we inhabit it.
—Ernesto Van Peborgh THE END OF THE GROWTH STORY
To get immersed in the point of view I argue for, have a look at comments I’ve made in Substack Notes.
HOUSEKEEPING
Dear Followers —please become subscribers so you don’t miss anything. There’s never a charge for one post a week from me plus cross-posts of the best of what other people write.
In Now What? I advocate a revolution. You could say an evolution, to a next phase of consciousness where we act from our interconnection as one humanity. In not having paying subscribers I lose the gods of Substack singing my praises, where all I have for support is you.
In addition to Liking and Commenting on this post, here’s how to help Now What? to be seen:
1. Everyone can Share this post in all ways. If you forward it, delete the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom or people you forward it to could unsubscribe me.
2. Substack writers can Restack this post for Notes.
3. Substack writers can Cross-post this post to your subscribers.
4. The best thing Substack writers can do is to Recommend me to your subscribers. There’s a direct link if you are on the net. If you’re in email, go to your Dashboard. Under Creator Tools on the left click Recommendations → click Add recommendation → search for Suzanne Taylor’s Now What?
Suzanne, I think you’re on to something with your proposal to induce Trump to voluntarily leave office using a “carrot” rather than a stick. But I think the incentive needs to be different. I don't think he really cares about money – as we saw recently, he can grift a billion dollars pretty much with the snap of a finger. Money is simply one way to show what a big deal, how important he is. That is what he really cares about — his public image and self-perception. Everything he says and does is done in service of that — the actual consequences don’t factor in. So let’s play to that.
There are two stages to such an effort. He needs to be convinced that leaving now is necessary and in his best interests. Yet the message has to be communicated by those he respects and admires. According to Columbia U prof Jeffery Sachs, this would be a joint message from Puttin, Xi, and Modi (autocrats themselves, with gravitas on the world stage) — the message being that, for the sake of world-stability, things simply cannot continue on their present course.
Then to put this into effect, the message on our end to Trump is: “You’ve *won*. You’ve succeeded. You’ve accomplished everything that history needed you to do". Then in his “honor”, give him a series of “awards” — an elaborate trophy, a portrait, a statue, etc. — identifying him as “The most significant person in modern history”. “The man who changed the course of the modern world”.
Note that these are literally true but morally ambiguous (at one time Genghis Khan was the most significant person). Then people can project whatever meaning that they need to —for good or ill.
Think it would work? Does anyone in your network have connections to the above world leaders?
“The Internet is soap boxes, and we need conference tables” the visual of that is very powerful and spot on.