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In this issue of The NGWS News
Letter we will look at the idea of Courage and the crisis of Personal
Responsibility
The NGWS web site is devoted, more
or less, to the exposure, to the revelation, actually, of a new kind of
consciousness in the world, a kind of consciousness we call group consciousness.
As we mention in the Introduction to this site, this new group consciousness is
a growing evolutionary development in the Human family. “The people who live
from this point of view are concerned with the welfare of wholes, with the long
range health of entire systems. They avoid systems that feed or sustain only a
part of a structure or community at the expense of other parts of the
community.”
For this reason, our News Letter,
NGWS in Action deals, first of all, with Ideas because ideas are really
group entities, abstract synthesized wholes, which require a different kind of
consciousness to “see”, that is group consciousness, and which no one dense form
can ever fully encompass. And next, NGWS in Action deals most frequently
with groups, groups that are trying to implement some aspect of one of these
group lives we call Ideas.
Thus, in the past 3 and a half
years, we have published news letters on Tolerance, Forgiveness, World Finance,
Religion, Children, Leadership, The Feminine Principle, and very recently
Synthesis, Healing and Beauty. In these letters we feature groups from around
the world that work diligently in these various areas to bring these ideas into
form, into the infrastructure of our civilizations and cultures, thus growing or
evolving the consciousness of humanity. The group conscious point of view of the
individuals who make up these groups renders them acutely aware of the
interrelatedness of all life and results in their efforts to build sustainable
systems that nurture the whole, and reveal the innate interdependence life.
All very good. Humanity is making
progress in many areas of living. However, it is clear to any informed person,
certainly any person who is developing group consciousness, because group
consciousness puts one in touch with the condition of the whole, that at this
particular time, Humanity and the planet are facing a very dark hour.
The planet hangs on the thread of
human choice. Given the principle of Free Will, it always has. People are making
choices and the choices are determining the direction of our unfolding. The
situations in the world, the wars, the poverty, the crime, the inhumanity, the
daily rape of the environment… are all the direct results of people’s choices,
including the choice to not choose, but to ignore, to turn a blind eye on these
situations and to carry on as if everything in the world was just fine. The
clear indications are that many, many people - because of the constant drum beat
of propaganda and outright lies that issue forth from the controlled power
centers and media, or for some other reasons, are simply not aware of the
situation. However, many of the persons who are turning the blind eye know
better, but for some reason
they choose to not get involved.
In thinking about this situation,
it appeared to us that humanity is at a crisis point, and the crisis has to do
with courage, the courage to be responsible for what we know, for what we love,
for what we think is the way into the light, into the future for the planet and
the beings in and on it.
So, we give you Courage and the
Crisis of Personal Responsibility.
The Editor
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Lucette Bourdin /
Evening Song / 12x16
http://www.lbourdin.com/
Martin Luther
King, Jr.
by Robert Shetterly
Clergyman, Civil Rights
Leader 1929-1968
“Non-violence is a powerful
and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields
it.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist
minister. He completed his formal education with degrees from Morehouse
College, Crozier Theological Seminary and Boston University (Ph. D. in
Systematic Theology, 1955). While serving as pastor of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, he led the boycott which resulted in
the desegregation of that city’s bus system. His resolve in the face of
threats to his safety as well as that of his family, his conviction that
“injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and his ability to
write and speak with extraordinary power and clarity brought him to national
prominence as a leader of the movement to achieve racial justice in America.
He studied the writings and example of Mohandas K. Gandhi in India who
powerfully influenced his philosophy of non-violence. When he accepted the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King said: “Non-violence is not sterile
passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social
transformation.” Like Gandhi, King also understood the strategic value of
non-violence “We have neither the techniques nor the numbers to win a
violent campaign.” His commitment to non-violence led him to oppose the
American war in Viet Nam.
Like Henry David Thoreau, Dr. King believed in the necessity of resisting
unjust laws with civil disobedience. As a leader of many demonstrations in
support of the rights of African-Americans, he was subject to frequent
arrest and imprisonment. His Letters from a Birmingham Jail (1963) was a
call to conscience directed primarily at American religious leaders.
When a fellow civil rights worker was killed after the 1965 march from Selma
to Montgomery, Alabama, King said: “If physical death is the price that some
must pay to save us and our white brothers from eternal death of the spirit
then no sacrifice could be more redemptive.” Martin Luther King’s own
redemptive sacrifice was exacted by an assassin’s bullets on April 4, 1968,
in Memphis, Tennessee.
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Lucette Bourdin / Hawaiian Flowers
http://www.lbourdin.com/ |
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Choices
by Tom Carney
We have all heard the comment,
“You are what you eat.” Esotericists might think of “eating” in a more
inclusive way, and would say, “We are what we embody.” Also, after a few years
of experience on the "Path", many of us have come to realize that there is a
big difference between knowing something, that is, having an
intellectual awareness of a fact or an idea or principle, and being the
embodiment of that something. Our path, the next pitch that
immediately faces us on the mountain, is in fact, that very stretch between
what we know and what we have embodied, created or, you might say,
revealed.
In addition, we gradually come
to realize, if we are being honest with ourselves, that a large part of what
we eat or embody is not what we know, but what we desire; for, somewhat
frequently we suspect, it is our desire, rather than our knowledge that
motivates and directs that incredibly powerful engine of embodiment, or you
might say the mechanism of creation, which results from the coupling of our
imagination and the lower mind. It is true that energy follows thought, but
thought does not always get its impetus from knowledge. The simple facts are:
a) We do not always embody, that is--will--into our lives, that which we know,
and b) It is our desires that account for an awful lot of what we do
create—that is, give life to through our livingness, or “embody” and c) Much
of what we embody, we do without any conscious awareness of it at all.
Think of how many times we sort
of “wake up” or come to, as it were, in strange, not to say amazing,
situations and have no idea how we got into them. I know that we have all had
these kinds of experiences. Think for example how weird it would be to wake
up, or come to, in a prison cell, convicted of some serious crime. Well, corny
as it may sound, we choose our way into those bags.
When you get right down to it,
Life, that is,
being, or living, is all about choices. This is sort of what the Wisdom
means when it talks about the spider spinning the web of its life out of the
silk of its livingness. Not as poetic, I suppose, but you get the idea.
Anyway, we are choosing our
way through this incarnation, just as we have chosen our way
through countless other incarnations, and as always, we are making the
way
as we make the choices. This is not a very profound or insightful
utterance, I suppose, but think about how we go through our days sort of on
automatic pilot, just kind of bumping along without much consideration about
our direction or about what we are doing or not doing, or more accurately,
choosing to do or not do, because, friends, conscious or not, we are choosing
practically every moment of our day.
Go to a
printable copy of the remainder of this article by Tom
Carney... |
Donald
Trump said " When we want to do something we find a way,
but when we don't we find an excuse."
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Americans Who Tell the Truth
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
A collection of portraits & quotes.
Paintings by Robert Shetterly
Artist's Statement
The
second strong feeling --- the first being horror --- I had on September 11 was
hope, hope that the United States would use the shock of this tragedy to
reassess our economic, environmental, and military strategies in relation to the
other countries and peoples of the world. Many people hoped for the same thing
--- not to validate terrorism, but to admit that the arrogance and appetite of
the U.S., all of us, have created so much bad feeling in many parts of the world
that terrorism is inevitable. I no longer feel hopeful. If one looks closely at
U.S. foreign policy, the common denominator is energy, oil in particular. The
world is running out of oil. Political leadership that had respect for the
future of the Earth and a decent concern for the lives of American and
non-American people would be leading us away from conflict toward conservation
and economic justice, toward alternative energy, toward a plan for the survival
of the world that benefits everyone. We see hegemony and greed thinly veiled
behind patriotism and security. We get pre-emptive war instead of pre-emptive
planning for a sustainable future. The greatness of our country is being tested
and will be measured not by its military might but by its restraint, compassion,
and wisdom. De Toqueville said, “America is great because it is good. When it
ceases to be good, it will cease to be great.” A democracy, whose leaders and
media do not try to tell the people the truth, is a democracy in name only. If
the consent of voters is gained through fear and lies, America is neither good
nor great. Nor is it America.
I began painting this series of fifty portraits --- finding great Americans
who spoke the truth and combining their images with their words --- nearly
eighteen months ago as a way of to channel my anger. In the process my respect
and love for these people and their courage helped to transform that anger into
hope and pride and allowed me to draw strength from this community of truth
tellers, finding in them the courage, honesty, tolerance, generosity, wisdom and
compassion that have made our country strong. One lesson that can be learned
from all of these Americans is that the greatness of our country frequently
depends not on the interpretation of the law, but the insistence of a single
person that we adhere to the spirit of the law.
I plan to paint fifty of the portraits... The paintings will not be for
sale. They will stay together as a group. The courage of these individuals needs
to remain a part of a great tradition, a united effort in respect for the truth.
Eventually, I will give the portraits to one museum or library on the condition
that they continue to be shown. These people form the well from which we must
draw our future.
Robert Shetterly
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Granny D, Doris
Haddock
by Robert Shetterly
"Just as an
unbalanced mind can accumulate stresses that can grow and take on a life of
their own, so little decisions of our modern life can accumulate to the point
where our society finds itself bombing other people for their oil, or supporting
dictators who torture whole populations --- all so that our unbalanced interests
might be served."
Doris Haddock was born in 1910.
She is 93 years old. Two years ago she walked across America in support of
campaign finance reform. She said, “The responsible course for America is no
secret. Our only real safety lies in crafting an American success story that
does not rely upon the repression of the world’s people and the destruction of
their systems of self-determination for the sake of our industrial needs, but
instead upon their rising health and wealth and freedom. Otherwise a state of
constant war is inevitable. We know that. We choose against it.” Granny D is
pragmatic, moral, tough, and inclusive. She says, “We have a duty to look after
each other. If we lose control of our government, then we lose our ability to
dispense justice and human kindness. Our first priority today, then, is to
defeat utterly those forces of greed and corruption that have come between us
and our self-governance.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Rachel Carson
by Robert Shetterly
Biologist, Writer, Ecologist,
1907-1964
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“The ‘control of
nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of
biology and the convenience of man.”
If the courage of a single human voice can be measured by the ferocity of
the attempts to silence it, the writer of The Silent Spring (1962) stands as a
truth teller of exceptional courage and insight. Her carefully researched
exposure of the environmental damage caused by widespread use of pesticides was
vigorously attacked by chemical corporations. In 1992 a panel of distinguished
Americans voted The Silent Spring the most influential book of the past fifty
years. Today Rachel Carson is revered as the founder of the environmental
movement in America.
After the publication of The Silent Spring Rachel Carson wrote to a friend:
“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost
in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being
done. I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could—if
I didn’t at least try I could never be happy again in nature.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Walt Whitman
by Robert Shetterly
American Poet, 1819-1892
“This is what you shall do: love
the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who
asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the
people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown.” (Preface to the 1855
edition of Leaves of Grass)
“I had pinned this credo of Walt Whitman to my studio wall many years ago
because it represented to me the essential democratic impulse, something I liked
to keep in mind while painting. Overwhelmed by anger at the attitude and manner
that our government adopted after 9/11, I wanted to honor Whitman’s words by
painting his portrait. It was an effort to invoke his ghost in order to define
to myself what was honest, humane and necessary for the survival of us all. It
was an effort to define America’s heart in terms of compassion, not aggression.
Whitman was the first portrait” (Robert Shetterly).
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Rosa Parks
by Robert Shetterly
Seamstress, Civil Rights Leader,
1913 –
“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
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“This is an eloquent
statement. But there is no verbal eloquence to match the eloquence of her
action. Has a refusal to stand up ever had such repercussions? She told
the police that they had her permission to arrest her. She would not
relinquish the significance of her act to the mere enforcers of an unjust
law” (Robert Shetterly).
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was riding home
from work on a city bus. When asked by the driver to give up her seat to a
white man, she refused. For this one act she was arrested, fingerprinted
and put in jail, and from this one act grew the 382-day Montgomery bus
boycott of which Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the leaders. In 1956
the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregation of public transportation
is against the law.
In her 1994 memoir, Quiet Strength, Rosa Parks wrote: “I kept thinking
about my mother and my grandparents and how strong they were. I knew that
there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being
given me to do what I had asked of others.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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"Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are,
and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that
decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone
else's life. "
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Noam Chomsky
by Robert Shetterly
Linguist, Political Activist, Writer, 1928 –
“…jingoism,
racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to
people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that
are really intended to crush them.”
In the 1966 essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky challenged
intellectuals “to speak the truth and expose lies,” and he carried his
protests beyond the printed page: he became a tax resister and he was
arrested in 1967 at the Pentagon while protesting military involvement in
Southeast Asia.
...“I’m a citizen of the United States,” says Chomsky, “and I have a share
of responsibility for what it does. I’d like to see it act in ways that meet
decent moral standards. It’s back to moral truisms: it’s of little value to
criticize the crimes of someone else—though you should do it, and tell the
truth. I have no influence over the policies of [other countries] but a
certain degree over the policies of the U.S. It’s not a matter of
expectation but of aspiration.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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“Let us have faith
that right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end dare to
do our duty as we understand it.” Abraham Lincoln
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Abraham
Lincoln
by Robert Shetterly
Sixteenth
President of the United States, 1809-1865
“As I would not
be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of
democracy.”
Lincoln’s masterful “Gettysburg Address,” the text of innumerable Memorial
Day observances, is often misconstrued as a patriotic hymn to war, yet
Lincoln abhorred military might and the bloodshed of the Civil War. Years
before his presidency he stated, “The ballot is stronger than the bullet,”
and “…Among freemen there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the
bullet, and …they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay
the cost.” He also said, “…Military glory [is the] attractive rainbow that
rises in showers of blood.”
His often-quoted words from the Cooper Union Address of 1860 remind us of
Lincoln’s understanding of the wise use of power: “Let us have faith that
right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty
as we understand it.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Howard Zinn
by Robert Shetterly
Historian, Political
Theorist, Educator, 1922 -
“The rule of law does not do
away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that
inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in
such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.”
“We can not be secure by limiting our liberties, as some of our political
leaders are demanding, but only by expanding them…We should take our example
not from the military and political leaders shouting ‘retaliate’ and ‘war’
but from the doctors and nurses and … firemen and policemen who have been
saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence,
but healing, and not vengeance, but compassion.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Mary Harris
'Mother' Jones
by Robert Shetterly
Labor leader, organizer, 1830—1930
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“Goodbye, boys; I’m under arrest. I may have to go to jail. I may not see
you for a long time. Keep up the fight! Don’t surrender! Pay no attention to
the injunction machine at Parkersburg. The Federal judge is a scab anyhow.
While you starve he plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves
injunctions for the money powers.”
Mary Harris began life near Cork, Ireland, grew up in Ontario, and then came
to the United States, where she worked as a dressmaker and a schoolteacher.
In 1867, her husband George Jones and their four children all died in a
yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, so she moved back to Chicago where, four
years later, she lost everything in the Great Chicago Fire.
Following these twin shocks, Jones spent the second half of her life
involved in the labor movement. From the 1890s though the 1920s she worked
tirelessly as a political “hell-raiser,” advancing social and political
causes such as the abolition of child labor, and organizing the United Mine
Workers. In 1905 she helped found the International Workers of the World (IWW).
Coal miners and their families called her “the miner’s angel” and, after she
began referring to the miners as “her boys,” she took on the nickname
‘Mother’ Jones. A charismatic speaker, she was adept at staging public
events to get publicity for striking workers, and her physical courage was
legendary. Opponents called her “the most dangerous woman in America,” but
when she was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as “the grandmother
of all agitators,” she said she hoped to live long enough to be the
great-grandmother of all agitators.
Mother Jones, honored today by the political magazine that bears her name,
lived in a time when women were not allowed to vote. “You don’t need a vote
to raise hell,” she said about that. “You need convictions and a voice.” She
perhaps is best known for her saying, “Pray for the dead, and fight like
hell for the living.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Wendell
Berry
by Robert Shetterly
Farmer, Essayist, Conservationist, Novelist,
Teacher, Poet, 1934 -
“The most
alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the
courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the
courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”
In The Failure of War
(1999) he asks: ”How many deaths of other people’s children are we willing
to accept in order that we may be free, affluent and (supposedly) at peace?
To that question I answer: None . . . Don’t kill any children for my
benefit.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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Dorothy Day
by Robert Shetterly
The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in
this life and end up being moral failures. (In her
autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day says,
“I have long since come to believe that people never mean half
of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk
and judge only their actions.”) Day was a person who tried,
it’s probably safe to say, in the manner of a saint, to have
her actions match her words precisely. She took a vow of
poverty and lived a life of service to the poor. Love in
action.)
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/
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"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have
trouble doing it. "
Tallulah
Bankhead
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Lucette Bourdin / School of Boats
http://www.lbourdin.com/
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The
Co-creation of Positive
Possibilities
by Tom
Atlee
1) Let go of
outcome. Since we're not in charge (and never really were),
admit that what happens is much bigger than any of us. Be
willing to die, willing for all around us to suffer, willing
to fail at every attempt to make the world better or to
understand or to be understood, or to even grow and learn
from all this. Let it all go. (I do not mean that we should
expect, encourage or welcome such undesirable outcomes. I
mean we can want or envision positive outcomes even as we
appreciate the fullness of life with or without them.
Honoring our desires without being controlled by them
clarifies our minds and frees us to be fully present. I know
of few forces more powerfully benign than passionate
engagement without attachment.)
2) Come to terms with our own intrinsic participation
in Whatever Happens. Not only are we not in control, we're
not un-involved. Our role in Whatever Happens isn't
something we can escape. (One consolation is we aren't
alone. Everyone and everything is
co-creating Whatever Happens.) This is hard for us to come
to terms with because it looks so much like the guilt-based
responsibility upon which our society is based ("Everything
is not my fault!"); but it is a totally different
thing.
Guilt-based responsibility is part of the linear
cause-and-effect worldview. ("Who's responsible/ guilty/
blameworthy?" is the social equivalent of the scientists'
question, "What's the cause?") But blame can't fathom the
complexity of What Happens in a living/chaotic system.
Phenomena arise from the whole, from the system itself.
Those who stand by when events happen are creating a context
for those events to unfold in the way they do -- even when
they are miles away obliviously watching a sitcom. Even
inanimate objects are participants: Roads are participating
in the death of pollinators (by reducing flora, by enabling
the transport of pesticides, by contributing to ozone
depletion). Everything participates. It is pointless to
point. The route to better conditions is through increased
awareness of the whole, and a more radically expansive sense
of all our roles. This includes the previous item -- letting
go -- because co-creation means we're not in charge of
outcomes, we're just vitally important participants in
influencing them.
3) Look for positive possibilities and ways to partner them
into greater probability. Meg Wheatley and David Spangler
taught me about living in a world of possibilities. We could
say, inspired by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, that the universe
is made of possibilities, not atoms. They are everywhere.
They are everything. Some say God (or the devil) is in the
details. I say God (and the devil) are in the possibilities.
Every moment is filled with them. Although we don't get to
control how they turn out, they are very responsive
to our actions, our beliefs, our caring. That is the edge of
co-creativity where Life resides.
A friend recently proposed that it is pride that makes us
think we are responsible for more than those "whom God has
appointed to be in our care." This is true, if we're talking
about a linear world of cause-and-effect responsibility,
ruled by a linear God. But I see reality as bigger than
linear. I see it as an infinite, infinitesimally dense web
of co-creation, a sea of mutual participation. Spangler has
called this "a co-incarnational universe."
So perhaps we can imagine the God of our co-incarnational
universe appointing everyone and everything -- past, present
and future -- to be included in the scope of our influence
-- and thus of our caring attention -- but not in the scope
of our direct responsibility. We are neither guilty nor
innocent; we are consciously or unconsciously involved.
In everything. Our actions matter. Our awareness matters.
Right here and right now. Because we are a factor in the
Life of Everything.
This ultimate application of the admonition "Think Globally,
Act Locally" points towards what we might call
"participatory responsibility." Are we playing the best role
we can imagine, given the limits of (our infinitely
expandable) awareness?
I care about the larger whole and all the Life within it,
and I act in my own life with the purest awareness and
intention I can muster towards being a worthy participant in
the unfolding of positive possibilities for all, for the
whole. And, of course, I fail, over and over. And within
those failures are more positive possibilities for me to
find and engage...
http://www.co-intelligence.org
Lucette Bourdin / The Guardians
http://www.lbourdin.com/
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