Let's do something already to turn the world around
How about the Beloved Community?
With the world gone mad, now what? More cataloguing of reasons to hate Trump? More disappointment about Harris sticking with Biden’s war policies? It’s like a contest for who does the best job characterizing what’s holding us back while we aren’t looking for any way to move forward.
This isn’t like previous evolutionary hurdles. This one threatens apocalypse. Although it’s natural for species to come and go, we humans reflect on reality as no others can and we have children to think about. And, if what’s natural takes its course and a small number of humans do survive and we get to where nature is revered and love becomes more important than money, at best that would be after generations of life being hellacious for everyone.
So, really, now what? Let’s seriously address doing what’s unnatural. After twenty months writing about ways to move forward, I have some insight into the order of things for getting on a better track. It would start with the best minds meeting. We have the internet. People can think together easily. The evolution of life, going back to single cell organisms, has all come from relationships, things rubbing against each other solving problems that make life better. If humans had been born into Paradise, we’d still be picking fruit off trees and spearing our fish, but it’s where things didn’t work that meetings of minds have made things better and better as far as creature comforts are concerned. The Twilight Club, for example, that operated during the whole last century, was a productive playing field.
The inspiration for the club came from a dinner, in 1882, held to honor sociologist Herbert Spencer. Spencer thought civilization was on a downward trend for culture, beauty, and ethical practices. If there was to be a change, how would it come about? He believed the poets, visionary thinkers, and artists of the world would have the solution. In Britain, he inspired such people as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Darwin to consider the problem. In America, his friends including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie took up the question. These people, searching for a way in which to change the negative direction of society to positive action, formed what gave rise to many of our best practices and institutions – the library system, the scouts, child labor laws, and a lot more.
An attempt to revive something in its name, that I was involved in some years ago, unfortunately was a misguided top-down perpetration that fizzled, but the Twilight Club is inspirational for what could be done in our era.
Now, I want to move on to what shows up repeatedly in the rundowns about what ails us. As today’s thinkers all predict misery ahead no matter what, what’s echoed from all of them is how we need to organize. They say it in passing, however, and there’s nothing anyone is doing to go further. How about that? I can see an apolitical coalition that would be larger than the Democrats and Republicans combined, and here’s how I want to try to make it happen.
I did a MLK Jr Day post of Marianne Williamson where she talked about Reverend King’s idea for the Beloved Community:
How about Marianne calling the Beloved Community into real existence as a mighty force of awake people to wake up everyone else? We need to get over it about woo woo and Marianne. Lordy lordy, people can be unkind. She’s not a God figure or a guru to worship – we’re past that phase of reality. For decades, she’s been tuning people into the more loving energetic that humanity needs en masse now. I bet she’s helped more people awaken to their loving nature than anyone else in the world, and making the Beloved Community real would be a natural progression for her.
Let’s say we had millions of people signatory to it. How to direct this force for the good? What would it get behind? That would be next to deal with.
For a cheerlead for the possibility that the overall energetic of humanity could change, note how the feeling tones of countries and cultures have changed. Even in my lifetime, how different my sense of myself is here in life #2 from how it was before women’s lib in my life #1. And living in the hills above Hollywood’s famed Sunset Strip, in the ‘60s we had to climb over half-naked bodies hanging out on the sidewalks to get to the stores as hippy exaltation was everywhere. For how even one person can change how the whole world operates, look to Steve Jobs and the iPhone. Or, bringing this into very present time, look at everyone wearing masks for how ubiquitous change can be! We are not dead in the water of rugged individualists sucking the life out of the rest of us. What about ad agencies? They are so good at selling things, so how about selling life itself? In our monetized world that’s where our billionaires-who-should-not-exist could come in, to fund such a thing. Zeitgeists of whole cultures can change and landing us in a different reality isn’t an impossible dream.
When I suggested to Marianne, my friend from way back, that she call the Beloved Community into being, she said, “It will have to arise organically, and we need to trust that everything we do, if it comes from the heart, is part of the great effort taking place on the planet to heal the world.” Are people who are reading this fired up by it? Could this be how it organically arises? Will you readers fan the flame?
With Marianne being the opening speaker on October 26, it could be a place to rabble rouse for this evolutionary idea!
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Suzanne, I resonate with your seeming frustration. We need a breakthrough, but seem stuck in a hall of mirrors — ping-ponging from one issue to another, knowing what needs to happen, yet at the moment we seem to be going backwards rather than progressing.
I myself have been through a number of initiatives, mostly related to economics and monetary policy (complementary currency, UBI, wealth tax, MMT, not-for-profit, etc.) — yet I am realizing the truth of the Einstein observation that “problems cannot be solved from the same level of thinking that created them”. It’s not about a policy change or new regulations — we can’t fix the current system, we need to transcend it.
Virtually all human-created problems stem from our loss of a sense of community — that we are all one living organism, one body, one family — and we move and grow best when we all care for each other and realize our joint enterprise. Yet historically, cultures were physically separated, resources were often scarce, and technology was limited, so competition seemed a practical survival strategy. Today, there need be no more scarcity, yet all of our institutions evolved to function on this model, so now perpetuate it unnecessarily.
I used to be part of a Palo Alto-based NGO “Foundation for Global Community” which unfortunately closed in the early 2000s. Clearly, the mission was far from complete. At the time, “global community” was a charming, idealistic concept, yet I think it failed to thrive because it was just that — an abstract concept. In practice, people don’t *experience* themselves as fundamentally connected. (I’m writing this in the comfort of a cafe while others are being burned, bombed, and starved to death in the Middle East. How are we “connected”?)
Yet I believe it is time to restart such an initiative. New understanding in domains ranging from consciousness studies, paranormal inquiries, renewed interest in the philosophy of Analytic Idealism, NDE/post-death recall, and the academics of Quantum Theory suggest we are on the cusp of a major expansion of reality.
It is not a matter of improving or creating greater access to existing institutions but developing fundamentally new institutions. Everything that exists is re-formed moment by moment by drawing from a common set of sources in the subtle domain. There is enough to sustain a universe – no need for us to be fighting and competing over the illusion of scarcity.
What will it look like? One of your past interviewees Brian Swimme once stated that it is difficult to envision a new paradigm from the vantage point of the old. (One practical example, can we imagine a society whose operation does not principally revolve around the use of money?) Yet it will emerge gradually as we continue to explore and broaden our understanding of consciousness.
Susanne, you tirelessly seek to embolden others to bring out their best so that we can work together to build anew. Keep up the great work.
Herb