Engagement and Consciousness 08 Become who you are Just to let you know: We are happy to invite you to our two weeks intensive training program with Orland Bishop and Nicanor Perlas in the Summer 2008 (20. July to 01. August). (Remember that date, the best thing you can do is to grap your calener and write it down!) At the moment we are still in the sensing process how the form as well as the content of the training will look like Because the nummber participants is limited, make sure to chek in from time to time . As soon as the end of December/ Beginning of Januay the registration form will be online as well as a questionar so that we know what you want! Until than you can check out what we did last year in our Review of the last training week. With warm regards The orga team Adrian Wagner, Anna-Lena Goerke, Jannis Keuerleber, Lena Sutor-Wernich, Rebekka Kreisel, Ulrich Morgenthaler ¦Be who you become Visit: www.engage08.de

In an article in January Nicanor wrote about neuroscience, social tools, and the need for civil society to build collective structure that can meet the new challenges. Nicanor’s argument is that neuroscience will play a key element in order to meet the challenges. First I want to give a summary of which I think is critically important and expressed in a very clear and beautiful way: “Their different initiatives need to address not only their immediate concerns but also contribute to the strategic and integral advancement of the world. “ Activism as a reaction and as a first aid treatment is not sustainable and doesn’t take the complexity of today’s global village into account. The powerful exterior tools (see “Why trucks don’t deliver moral values”) are not even half understood by civil society, in order to reshape and to build a new strategy we will have to understand how they are used and misused. It requires development of a creative open understanding that reactions and protest are necessary, but that a constant development of creative solutions is far more important. “ No sooner do they come together, however, that they start to slowly drift apart again.” The critical globalization movement is more or less dead, the reaction and fear driven protests in Seattle and Geneva were successful but things still seem to be getting worse. It is time for a retreat and for introspection of the essence of the movement itself. “New perspectives and skills are needed.” If we take the challenge of globalization seriously we cannot avoid our own problems, pains, shadows and personalities. In order to get an overview of the movement and the problems so that we know how to move on, it is incredibly important to take as many perspectives into account. This is where an integral methodological pluralism (IMP) could play a major role to define the strength and the weaknesses of the movement. “If they are honest and self-reflective, many proponents for a more sustainable world, would be horrified to discover that they too have within themselves the very same habits of hearts and minds that move them with disgust when they see these played out by elite powers they want to depose.” What I don’t want to see in myself I point out in others. One of the maybe most painful lessons in the near future for civil society will be to face its on shadow to truly acknowledge the motive of the engaged individuals which might be not so pure at all. If we want to face the challenges it does not mean ‘us or them’ it means to create in ourselves a different motive which is not driven by greed, anger, fear, pain or other ‘negative emotions”. “It is also about changing simultaneously the deep flaws in one’s emotional and mental character and behavior. It is also about learning new skills of coming and being together, new collectivities that can arise at the same level where the challenges of the world exist.” In order to work on our inner development, new skills like an integral transformation/life practice (ILP) designed for social activists and their needs could be incredibly supportive in order to build new collectivities, only if we move one step further than the problems we are able to look at them and to solve them. This requires the understanding of natural growth (social organism/Three folding). “It is into this strategic weakness where neuroscience comes in.” This is a point at which needs to be looked at closer, can neuroscience change our lives? It can provide and support from an intellectual perspective. It can help us to understand how powerful thought and imagination is and outlines the “ scientific” exterior basics how the brain works and what amazing capacities are still not used. But to develop a powerful imagination interior development like any transformation practice is nessacery. “What we constantly will out of freedom and initiative reshapes the very structure of key areas in our brain, reinforcing our initiative for the good.” This unfortunately works also the other way around, and it shows how deeply we are conditioned by old structures, in order to overcome them to just study neuroscience won’t help us. ”The brain essentially does not distinguish between what we actively imagine and what we actually do. When we do mental rehearsal, we predispose our brain and our self to successfully carry out any intention that we have actively imagined we can achieve. The book advances the radical idea that we have now come into the threshold of a new science of change; one rooted among others, in the profound discoveries of neuroscience. If we can "relate, repeat and reframe", both inwardly and outwardly, we can change the world, especially if others are also able to do this with us. “ This is very profound and true. Only one thing I want to point out. The book claims to have found a new since which describes the world and changes and the human power of imagination through an ‘it’ perspective, that means it is describing an process and looking at this process. The major challenges on the other side, to implement and to communicate such a process in a group of people and to actually live that change as an individual are not taken into account. The “science of change” is describing change, but if we as civil society and as individuals resist to change we can read as many books as we want, to be the change requires to take into account at least three perspectives: The description of the process of change from an objective view like neuroscience. The communication and group process of change like the U-Theory and equally important are individuals, which have accomplished a great deal of inner work to facilitate and to hold the space of such a process. “Ignorance, genetics, and past failures are not valid excuses to escape from our responsibility for creating a better world. The necessary tools for profound global change are there. We either use them or lose the world. We either "change or die". “ This is true and very clear, all this things are not valid excuses but they still do exist, people are still incredibly ignorant and conditioned by their past. Only if we are willing to face the challenges and to go through some pain we can avoid more suffering. The message of the world today is clear: "if you don’t want to change and you are continuing to procrastinate, I will make live very difficult for you." Nature increases pain in order for us to change. And from that point of view is telling us “Change or die”.

What does this mean? Social Activism as it is defined on this Blogg is a human being that is engaged in changing the social condition for better living. Not in an academic way or in an political sense but trough practical (active) work on the ground. This might indeed need relationships with the sectors of politics and business and the academic world. And here the idea of integration comes into play. A social activist is integrating the different needs, knowledge, approaches, cultures, which are playing a role in the social system he is active in. His/Her task is to put things together which are working and to torn apart things which are not working. He/She is the one in the field who sets up initiatives and communicates between all the different parties so that the social system develops in the most natural as well as the most effortless and in the least painful way (organic or natural growth or flow). He/She helps to design and to put thing into practice and stands between the political sector and the economic sector. The major task is to balance that everything is integrated and a stable, natural development is unfolding.

The training week is over. 35 young people from Germany, USA, Canada and England came togehter with Nicanor Perlas and worked on several issues like trust, heart quality, learnd optimism and shadow work. We learned about heart math, a technic thatz allows you to connact with your higher self and to face depression. Also to see the how shadow of the world the problems that we are facing globally are deeply connacted to are own shadows was a topic. But just talk is cheap, their was a lot of painting, worldcafe sessions, singing, Qi Gong and Bodywork going on as well. In the middle of the day, their was space to relax, to present initiatives or to go into the park near by. Very special where the moments after the world cafe where some of us could expirence a sort of presence, what you also could call collective intelligence. It was the feeling of being in a flow, time slowed down and your Ego dropped, and some sort of self moved into the free space. In that space you feelt closer to everything in the room, in the world and the most important you feelt deeply connactet to what you true nature is. The week was very intense through a lemniscate process, basically a hero jouney where you start with a call, you move on into a crieses and you find through an inner struggle an idea which brings you back to the world. The symbole of the butterfly was present during the whole week. It is not so much about a revolution, it is much more like the transformation that a caterpiller is to going through. In the real critical point it needs so much energy that it starts to eat itself. If we look close to ower own self and to the world we can see the same process going on. Are we ready and willing to go through a trasformation and break out of the cocon ( much TV, boring Jobs, unnessecery secruitis and fears) as indivduals and als as a collective(overcome starvation, wars, climate change and so on)? And let our soul fly free like a butterfly, circle for circle in a sprial higher and higher? To start with this process, the training week was a steping stone an a long journey. Even if it is not as visible like the 68 revolution, the evolution through trasformation is more sustanable. To quote Nicanor Perlas: " In the furture it will become more and more important form which inner place an initiative is build on. It can be the same initiatve but is will be a totally diffrent outcome. In order for that you have to deepen your own essence and to to be engaged in the world at the same time." To see pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11171063@N07/

The lecture is over, only a few people are still there. I had a very intimate talk with a beautiful soul. A heart opening, I just talked to Orland Bishop. I breathe in his presence and his words, after 2 years of traveling and searching things move more into place. I am again in the Forum 3. I still feel the tension and the suffering but something has changed. I sit and immediately pop into a place of stillness. I still see everybody and hear everybody talking, there are even a few thoughts visiting. But something has changed, I feel radiant, like light shining through me, nothing special just I am. It feels like the normal and most extraordinary place to be. I felt the switch, I felt the yearning and the happiness to experience it again. My state of mind changed, I trooped back after a while, talking to a young women who leaves for Israel like I did 2 years ago. I try to encourage her, make her aware, to offer support. It still will be very painful and beautiful for her. It still will be too much and exactly what she needs. That was a few days ago. Orland left on the same evening, I feel suffocated, the tension and the pain, the busyness is back around me. I feel I want to scream, my shell is weak, and my defense mechanisms don’t function very well. It’s like taking drugs, afterwards you fell shitty, that’s why I thought a spiritual practice, like two hours of Tai Chi might suit me better. And still, you are together with a beautiful being, a teacher, a mentor, spreading wisdom and love in the room and is just himself. You have a peak experience and than what happens next after you have had an experience with your Self? I call it the after enlightenment pain. You are open, you are radiant you are bliss, and the world is still a mess and you can just be it and feel the pain and the suffering, and beath into it. I am back in my dysfunctional relationship with my cultural center of choice. I feel my pain buried in my heart, I feel my anger, and I don’t want to move on, to the place where I realize the sadness underneath, I don’t want to stay open, I don’t want to be enlightened. I dont want to breath into the pain. That would mean to cry to scream and to accept the true moment, right now. I am still in my reaction. I am still blame the Flower Generation that started with pure idealism and swept over society in a little bit more than 30 years ago. Now it feels like a disease, not all of it, but a lot. But things got better? Yes they did, I am not a prisoner of conventional norms anymore. I am only lost in the total freedom of choice. The agenda is, there is no agenda. One of my spiritual guides, Rudolf Steiner once said that before the Christbeing (the higher self) could be seen everything needs to be chased into the zero-ness, that humans must find all their power in the nothingness. I still feel cozy enough to stay in the bubble, a bubble right in the middle of Stuttgart. A bubble with an idealistic vision of how the world should look like, a bubble imagined by Cultural Creatives. Sometimes it seems more than a fortress, and I loved to believe that it is like in the Asterix and Obelix Comics. The last little frontier to defend the autumn of 68 from the pain and the nothingness, lying obviously hidden behind the clubs and bars, of which 5 to seven surround us. After 2 years of traveling in the Middle East, Egypt, Turkey, India and Nepal, I am not thinking in terms of ‘us and them’ anymore. I realized what a luxury it is to sit in a cafe and drink with your friends. The bars do feel better, after visiting Bethlehem. But the nothingness increases. The pain needs to burn in your chest. The pain is burning strong, do you want to feel it, do you want to feel through it and out of the place of zero-ness, are you able to bow your head to God and let him create the world through you? I am still cozy enough, I am still in my dysfunctional patterns, I still work on it. I still need to learn to let it be and to be aware. The bubble will burst, the bubble of the culture centre of choice as well as the bubble of the 68 Generation. We are already in the process, the pain is already intense, and most of them are still able to channel it into work, to hold on and to stay attached and through that to recreate suffering. I am amazed by the energy that is put into, I am struggling to be in my center not to blame myself for going slow and of realizing: I am not able to go at that pace anymore. I am not willing to store my emotions in my body or to put them through work into a bubble fortress. I am growing up, it is painful, and I meet despair and fear, a lot of fear on my way. I realize why to be lost in freedom means to meet the zero-ness. Intuitively I know by heart that’s where I will find the power to move on. The 68 project has been dead for quite a while, the last wave was the anti globalization movement. I came with all my naive idealism to my cultural centre of choice just when the movement stagnated. The structures are rigid and hard, and emotions are dealt with in a very unaware, sometimes egoistic way. I am now in recovery and I painfully see that to avoid the after enlightenment pain a generation started to chase freedom and built up prisons in themselves, to search for state experiences and to live images became comfortable places to settle down for the ego. My generation, I truly believe, is not as glorious, and as motivated to move on with a revolution, but there are quite a few that are determined to change. The few of us, I believe have a right to know that only through staying with the feeling and moving through the after enlightenment pain their is a chance for transformation. I am willing to take that pain on and to stay with it, and not try to change something or to get stuck in a dogma, and specially not if the dogma is" everybody is equaly right". The quest of my generation, the few who are willing, understand deeply, by their heart, that it is about evolution and transformation. The time for revolution is over. What will follow is the breakdown of the visible structures. It still is time, I believe to transform, and to move on, to invite the youth and to let go; if not, the structure will break. It will be a fight, and it will be messy and painful. I am coming to the awareness that I truly want to work out my dysfunctional relationship with my cultural centre of choice as well as with the whole Flower Generation. This means to offer two things: either your are willing to work that out with me, either you support me and I support you; or I move one without you. Adrian Wagner

Stuttgart/Germany – July 22-27 '07
Training week for young people on the development of a deeper consciousness - with Nicanor Perlas.

Facing the challenges of our time requires the development of a new consciousness and new social capacities for a generation of young people who want to dedicate their life and energy to the shaping of a sustainable future.  This training week attempts to bring these essentials together through facilitation with Nicanor Perlas, who draws upon his rich life experience in the field of individual and societal development. The training will be a dynamic work-process of balancing body, mind, soul and spirit. The participants will have the opportunity in individual and communal training sessions to meet their own aspirations, and to support deeper capacity building each day will be given a special focus: trust, heart-quality, shadow-work and learned optimism. For more information: engage07.de/eng

Wal-Mart considered to the book “The Wal-Mart Effect” is not just “the most powerful, most influential factory in the world”, Wal-Mart has also reshaped the “very ecosystem and rhythm of supermarket business”. The prices are 15 % cheaper than anywhere else. In 2004 Wal-Mart opened 244 Super centers in the States, in 2005 it opened in the first 10 months 232 new Super centers. That is 5 centers per week, each working day a new super center. How can they grow that fast, sell stuff so cheap and have an annual profit of over 10 billions (10,3 in 2004)?

It is due to the revolution of supply chains, which helped to make the world flat1 and Wal-Mart rich. Today in a global village with a hyper dynamic economy what you need is information. And that is what Wal-Mart pioneered, according to Yossi Sheffi, expert in supply chain and Professor at MIT, “It is not about making stuff but how to supply it around the globe.” Wal-Mart was one of the first businesses to implement a work flow2, which includes contradictory elements as well as high tech within the company and within partner companies.

Due to satellite and Internet Wal-Mart is now able to deliver their 60, 000 different goods almost in real time. Each time somebody picks up something in Wal-Mart the information goes to the headquarters and a new order is placed, so that just before the store sells out the products are delivered, exactly what is needed, just in time. Everybody makes a profit, cheap goods for the people, a good shareholder and less effort due to the increase of efficiency and technology. But what was the driving force in Wal-Mart to develop to such a complex organization?

Simply because of necessity, Wal-Mart sitting in nowhere needed to build his one supply chain in order to survive.3 The simple fact of isolated life conditions and the pressure due to the Wal-Mart value “Everything cheaper!” let a new thinking emerge. Due to that Wal-Mart transformed from a tiny food chain into the most powerful business in the world.

In order to build such a work flow supply chain on a global scale it is easily understood that it was a systemic-integrative thinking (yellow) which emerged4 and was than used to in business, with Wal-Mart as a pioneer, to conquer the world almost over night. This is also seen as the flattening of the world5 and the rise of the individual. The capacity of integrative systemic thinking allows us to live in a global village for the fist time in human history. But Wal-Mart is not the solution of the problems today it is even more part of the problem.

The growth and systematical reduction of the price is only be possible if other people work more for less, you get cheaper raw materials or less quality. There is a time when you find out that you can not get more efficient in your supply chain, your trucks have a satellite connection so that they can be moved all over the place at each time, your staff has earplugs which tells them if they do the right amount of work in time (they even can chose between a man and a woman voice) and you even have a meteorologist to watch the climate because if there is a hurricane coming your shops needs more candles and other survival stuff down in California. If you by then still believe in exterior growth than the only possibility at the end to keep the price low is to exploit people and nature and if you are as big as Wal-Mart that doesn’t mean to cut just a few trees. Wal-Mart itself, even if it is operating in a global scale doesn’t understand his complex impact of the world. And one of the reasons why is the moral foundation, implemented by the founder Sam Walton.

Walton was an typical “redneck type” from Arkansas, with a simple entrepreneurial idea of selling cheaper than everybody, with just enough mind to run the business, and with much more determination and energy and an uncompromising nature to bargain until the last penny. He wasn’t a bad guy, he truly believed in hard work and family values. And all of that was reflected in his morals, “Us or them”, if we sell it cheaper we win if not we loose. It is said that even on his deathbed his son was reading him the numbers. After his life, due to his efforts this basic and simple “Cheaper than everybody” was not just part of the Wal-Mart culture, it was and it is the basic value since than. There was basically no place and time to develop world centric morals, but enough determination and a survival threat (in a business world which focuses on exterior growth) to let Wal-Mart integrate yellow thinking in its business structure. But supply chains don’t deliver morals.

Wal-Mart today is not liberated by the flat world but stuck in the flat land. A supply chain (LR) doesn’t include the development of morals (UL) at all. To quote Wilber (Philosophy of Freedom), “ You completely can manage system theories or holistic thinking but poorly be developed in emotion, moral and spiritual streams [multiple intelligence].”

If you take a step back and look at the system that Wal-Mart has created, you identify a business organism embedded installed over the ecosystem of our world. Every Wal-Mart can be seen a cell of this organism. And this organism basically refuses to stop growing, almost like cancer. Wal-Mart is just the perfect example to show how yellow thinking is shaping the world and producing what is called Globalization. Part of Wal-Mart’s “ecosystem”, basically the exterior system, the supply chain, is very yellow and needs to be studied and understood if you want to find large scale solutions for today’s problems. But even more important is the value system, or vMeme, which runs such a complex institution.

A lot of the critics and movements against Wal-Mart and globalization driven by the Cultural Creatives5 unfortunately got stuck on exactly this issue. To be a Cultural Creative simplified means to have a pluralistic worldview and morals. The biggest problem pluralistic worldviews have is that they have difficulties with hierarchies. And of course if you live in a flat world you don’t need them. It is a fact that a lot of hierarchies in this world are missing used or unhealthy. But to develop moral capacities or grow emotional and spiritual, we can’t deny interior growth manifested in natural hierarchies (Holarchie). In order now to fight Wal-Mart and to reshape globalization in a more human way, which means to encourage world centric values, no old approach will help us. The socialist movement is dead and was build mainly on a collective-mythic beliefs, political parties are corrupted and not an option.

Ironically a lot of the “spiritual” and anti-patriarchal thinking and other pluralistic approaches, which call themselves “holistic”, are referring to the new science and the new, thinking (or paradigm) which is basically the same thinking with which Wal-Mart's supply chain runs and ruins the planet (LR, The It's domain in Wilber’s 4 Quadrants). Because just to change your thinking doesn’t mean you are transformed or more enlightened than anybody else. You still can be very egocentric driven and not very evolved in dealing with emotions i.e.. To believe in New Science is one thing, but to develop the interior capacities to integrate body and mind is another. Both Wal-Mart and a lot of the Cultural Creatives are trapped in one thing, Flatland.

Sure a patriarch named Walton formed Wal-Mart’s culture, but the only way to change it, is first to accept that that’s where Wal-Mart is at in its moral and worldview development. In order to help not just Wal-Mart, but the interior world to grow into a more world centric and sustainable thinking you need to include the idea of development and natural hierarchies, better known as Holachies. In order to move on the “Anti-Globalization” movement needs to take a retreat and to do some homework like meditation, shadow work and a good walk at the sea or in a beautiful forest and read some good books. The fear driven wins of Seattle and Cancun are over, know we need big scale solutions.

Higher moral values (like pluralistic and integral) are not developed by business or politics but implemented trough cultural influence7 into politics and than into business. Cultural Creatives need to recognize the deep value systems within each culture in order to move on. People individually need to integrate body, mind, soul and Spirit to develop integral (yellow) moral values. The fact that moral values grow inside a person and are not thrown over by some ideologies (except of mythic-rational world views) make the task for the Cultural Creatives clear: We need to be able to see the whole picture, which means to understand where somebody is in his development and how to talk to him so that he can changes as fast as possible or at least live from the place he is at the most healthiest. You can’t change anybody, just yourself, but you can help to set up the conditions for change, even on a large scale. In order for that, new education approaches need to be developed which are focusing on deeper capacities with in human beings. And there are already people one their way to take this next step like Gaia U, Otto Scharmer and his Initiative and the EIA (European Integral Academy).


Notes

1One of the reasons is if you believe Thomas L. Friedman due to the Flat World. More than that in his 10 flatteners of the world, No. 7 which is supply chaining is dedicated entirely to one Firm: Wal-Mart.

2 “Spiral Dynamics, mastering values, leadership and change”, Don Edward Beck, Christopher C. Cowan, 1996 Blackwell Publishing

3According to senior vice president of corporate affairs Jay Allen, “I wish I could say we are brilliant an visionary, it was born out of necessity. The reason we build our one supply chain is because we are sitting in nowhere.”

4See “Spiral Dynamics, mastering values, leadership and change”, Don Edward Beck, Christopher C. Cowan, 1996 Blackwell Publishing

5 “The world is flat”, Thomas L. Friedman, 2005 Penguin Press, What Friedman describes as “the 10 flatteners of the world” is mostly new technology (Lower Left development, see Wilber, Integral Psychology p. 182, Flatland), the fact that a lot of people don’t have access to it or the ability to use it, and the interior dimensions are not taken into account by his research.

6 "The Cultural Creatives - How 50 million people can change the world", Ph.D. Paul H. Ray and Ph. D. Sherry Ruth Anderson,Three Rivers Press 2000

7Like shown in the graphic below, you can divide the three main powers in authority (the political state which implements and watches the law). The power is the economic sector (brotherhood or partnership in business, builds the physical structure and satisfies the needs). The influence which is basically people or culture (freedom in speech and thought) which influences the authority and the power, because it articulate the needs to the economy and makes sure that the right laws are installed by the authority (the government). Capi is the place where this Sectors overlap. If responsible leaders (more some sort of facilitators) out of the three sector come together and go through a process (described in the U-Theory, by Otto Scharmer) new substantial solution and institutions could emerge.