So how are we going to do this? What does the plan look like?
First we need to be clear on where we are going. What do we truly want for this world? What would light us up all the way? I suggested earlier that we don’t have to over think this. Let our love for our children guide us. Let our inner child guide us. We already know what we dream for the world, we just have to dare to believe it is possible. On some beautiful day the world is going to wake up in love and joy. But we can’t just jump straight there from where we are now. This is where the work is.
The first step is getting our stories straight. The stories we have been telling ourself up to now have not been serving us. They have been keeping us helpless and isolated. We need to find a bigger story that brings us together. A story that gives us solid ground to stand on. Fortunately, I think much of this work has already been done. Ken Wilber is a brilliant philosopher who had the insight that it is more than past time to integrate all the different worlds of human experience into one integrated theory. Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy, Empiricism, Spirituality, Buddhism, and everything else all brought together as one. This theory is called Integral Theory. I find that it is a great foundation to build upon. It explains a lot of things well.
This is his beautifully succinct summary of the work we all need to do:
I add on one more:
Before we can change the world we have to really understand and model the vastly different ways people look at the world. We are missing a map to help us chart our way. We need to go deeper than just assuming that everyone thinks about things pretty much like we do. They don’t. Not even close in fact. And yet some how, some way we need to convince people to open their hearts wider and wider. How do we do that? First we need to meet them right where they are and talk to them in a language that works for them. There is a theory called Spiral Dynamics that I think is perfect for this. I think it works best as a story of our history. It describes the major stages that humanity has already gone through and offers some predictions on what wants to happen next. Each stage described in Spiral Dynamics builds on the next. We don’t have to shift everyone, but we will need to shift as many people as we can before we can create the new culture that is needed.
We start with our initial wounds as children and then over time we accumulate more and more junk inside of ours ourselves that hides us from our true nature. In Spirited Away there is a wonderful scene where an incredibly stinky spirit comes to the bathhouse for help. At first it looks hopeless. Why waste good medicinal water on something so dirty as that? But the heroine, Sen, bravely persists in trying to help. Then it becomes clear that there is something stuck to the spirit that doesn’t belong (it looks like a bicycle handle). The entire bathhouse community joins together to help pull this thing out. And as they pull more and more stuff keeps coming out. A lifetime accumulation of junk comes pouring out. Until there is just one more tug and a “pop” and all we are left with is the spirit’s true, smiling nature. We all need to pull out this wounded junk of a lifetime to get back to our true, shining nature.
To get there, though, we have to do two things. First we have to heal (or at least address) our wounds. Then we need to learn a more skillful approach to life. These are very related practices but they require different approaches.
When we are in pain all we can do is focus on simple survival. Nothing else matters. We have to step out of our pain before we can start thinking in a bigger way. The urgency of our traumas demand attention. This requires a very gentle, safe approach. A trauma informed therapist can be of real help here. They can help people find where the trauma still lives in them. Where it still in fact lives in their body and then help them find their path to healing. If the wounds are deep enough (eg. PTSD) MDMA assisted therapy might be called for.
Once we have done some of our healing work we next need to recognize that most of our suffering is completely unnecessary. We are caught up in trances and unskillful habits that do not serve us. If we adopt a personal growth mindset we can discover how much more joy we can live in. For example, Buddhists teach that if you are willing to do some very hard growth work there are incredible levels of joy you can get to. But Buddhism is not the only path. Integral theory brings in all the wisdom paths. We need to use these paths to teach the world how to step deeper into joy. Because it is when we are most in joy that we can most be in service.
The bathhouse clip above doesn’t show it, but what happens next after all the junk is removed is that the smiling spirit becomes a river dragon that roars up out of the bathhouse and blasts into the sky. We are all spiritual beings. After we have done our cleaning up this becomes achingly obvious, and then just like that river dragon we go roaring out into the sky. This is what we are meant to do, but unfortunately many of us have too much junk still attached to us. Also most of the organizations that claim to support spirituality are still in earlier developmental stages (growing up). Most religious organizations are not advanced enough to meet this moment.
The end goal, again, is to get people to open their hearts wider than they know is possible. Wide enough to encompass all that needs to be done. A reawakened spirituality can get us there. When we fully embrace our spirituality we know the other as us. There is no artificial separation between you and me. You are all my brothers and sisters and even closer. This is the teaching of both Buddha and Christ. It is, I believe, a fundamental ground of spirituality.
After waking up we take our place in the world. We are grounded in that sense of something bigger than ourself, but now it is time to make practical changes. After the initial euphoria of waking up we need to welcome back our thinking mind. We very much need that part of us too. We need to come up with practical policies that might work. Things like universal basic income, and innovative economic incentives to encourage emissions reduction are so needed.
But this all has to be balanced with the recognition that our science brains can only get us so far. We have to make sure we are creating a just, sustainable world. We need to take into account things like how marginalized communities have always been the ones who bear the worst brunt of pollution. And we have a very long way to go before woman are not marginalized. The women of Iran are currently leading the way in how to Show Up.
The dragon roaring into the air is the first step of wising up. At first we fly alone. But then we dance in the sky with others. We start by recognizing our own strength and beauty. And then we fall down in awe and wonder as we recognize the astonishing majesty of others. We start to see that we are all one. The beauty I see in you is my beauty. But in the same way your pain is mine as well. And oh my there is so much pain! Now that I realize your pain is mine, it is so clear that something needs to shift but what? I think Buddha was one of the very first to Wise Up. He taught us to first just recognize the pain, then step fully into the pain. And then finally we can awaken to something bigger.
If you are at the point of feeling the world’s pain, congratulations. Most of us hide from it. It means that you have allowed yourself to open up to a bigger, wider Truth than most. This is where we have to start. Notice how upsetting all of this is. I personally struggle with this. As I enter my Grandfather stage of life, I am ashamed at how profoundly my generation has failed to provide a healthy, nurturing place for our grandchildren. This is so not OK with me. And again, I stop and breathe and let myself really recognize how much pain there is. It starts here.
I start to breathe into the pain. Letting it be. I stop fighting it and I start to accept it. This is important. I need to pay attention to this. Once I get past the shock of it, I notice that pain always brings a gift with it – the energy to change. We make our biggest shifts when we are in great pain. It takes something like that to make us leap to something new. If the right kind of support is there we can use this pain as a path of transformation. No guarantees on this one sadly, but there is a beauty and joy that can shine out through the cracks of the deepest suffering. And that light illuminates the path that we ultimately need to follow. The pain provides the energy and courage for us to start.
And then I notice something different this time. As I sit with this immense, vast pain I realize that I am at least as big as this pain because I also am immense and vast. How can I not be? I am one with all. Time to own that. I no longer need to hide away – I am big enough to contain all of this.
I then awaken to this vast, shared consciousness that is trying to figure out what wants to happen next. Part of us wants to go back to sleep and part of us wants to wake up. I am on the side of waking up. It is time. And as unworthy and yes, maybe even broken as I feel myself to be, I offer myself up in service to waking the world up. Not even sure if that is ultimately what wants to happen, but nevertheless knowing this is what I am called to do. I look inwards and see my suffering and then I look outwards to see the suffering of the world. I look inwards to see my joy and then I look outwards to see the joy and beauty of this amazing world. Breathing into myself and then out into the world and then breathing in again. Letting myself know that I am as big as all of this. This is my deeper work. This is my purpose.
And then I circle back to where I started – that childlike sense of awe and wonder. That knowing that the world can be very, very beautiful. But it takes a magic wish to start it all.