Troubling trends on the path to peace

I want to relate my current take on the general flow of events.

There are revolutions in progress in at least half a dozen countries right now and my country along with a number of allies has begun another air and missile attack against a much smaller nation. Given what I understand as the circumstances I’m hard pressed to argue in favor of standing by and watching another dictator crush his own much weaker opposition. Egypt, meanwhile seems to be making some real progress with very little, so far, violence.

In this country and most of the west we face little threat of cruise missiles taking out whatever their directors choose. But we face a brutal financial reality where a few people control enormous wealth and use it to manipulate the general public and ongoingly change the rules of the game in their favor. They seem to be stepping up the trend of the rich getting richer while something like 90% of the population gets poorer. They pretty much control the media, with the possible exception of NPR and PBS. And, there is currently a powerful movement to cut off public funding of the only non-commercial media. I assume this is in particular because they do “too good” a job of reporting and exposing the greed that is consuming our society. And there still is some excellent reporting going on in the commercial media but it looks pretty fragile and vulnerable to me. The ratio of advertising to excellent reporting grows constantly. Advertising is included inside of most regular shows and seems to me to be creeping ever more into the best of the commercial news programs. And I rue the dearth of good news. What is going on where people are working together to create a better world?

Foster pointed today to a general trend of deterioration in the world he has created. I mentioned his two remarkable daughters Sierra and Annie. Butt he is pointing to something I see as well. The bad news seems to be constantly worse and more of it. Bombing Libya doesn’t seem to be moving in the direction of “no more violence on the part of humans on this planet" by the spring of 2012. That is now technically one year from now.

When I pull together what I see of my world and leave off my creation of it, it does look dire. I can note that it’s always darkest before the dawn but I have to fear that it will get much darker.

And, I believe that each of us and all of us collectively have more say in the matter than we might think. I think we can alter the whole path simply by each of us altering our own attitudes, perceptions and ways of being in the world. All of these are within our reach as individuals. We don’t really even need any help but, in this game, help is fun for everybody.

Love, Woody

Good News

This entry represents good news in itself. I see that I have broken through the barrier that stopped my previous blog at 5 entries. It also represents a shift in focus from my direct approach to a conversation for evolution to simply doing something that I find interesting and instructive to the overall conversation. "Good News" is an interest that has attracted my attention before but I've gone just a little further to follow it up this time.

The last time I looked on line I lacked anything that might be thought of as persistence. I remember being distracted by the amount of religious good news that seemed to dominate the Google results. Perhaps I could refine my search just a little. Nothing against those things but I'm looking for something that points more to the general goodness of humans at large, independent of their institutional affiliations.

Good News! The first item on the Google list www.happynews.com/ is a winner. My advanced search simply excluded sites that used the words church, god and Jesus. The Happy News folks are a wonderful example of what I'm looking for.

I noticed that one of their top stories when I visited just a little while ago is the story NBC Nightly News used as their good news piece this evening. They have excellent categories. I went to business and found a piece from Forbes about who’s happiest with their jobs. I was surprised and delighted to find that secretaries or administrative assistants are near the top of the list. I love discovering that ordinary people doing ordinary work are pleased with what they're doing. It's pretty much the only hope for our world at this point in history.

I would like to see a category something like “humans relating to others.” Others being any other, e.g., the planet as a whole or animals as well as other humans.

And more good news for me is that I’ve just begun to follow the first item on the first advanced search. This project could keep me going for some time.

Cooperation

Ask yourself two questions every day: What have I done to make this a better world? And, What will I do to make this a better world?

Each of us being only one among billions need not take on even a significant piece of the whole. The questions are to provide orientation in the larger sea of life. We are all rowing our boats as best we can in order to assure our own survival and comfort.

The analogy ends at that point but it’s clearly important that we notice that our survival and comfort depends on an astonishing degree of cooperation world wide for us to have what we have. There is the obvious although mostly overlooked cooperation of pretty much everybody doing any physical work to produce and provide all of the stuff we have. There is the cooperation of everybody around us who behaves in a civil manner such as the people driving all of tons of steel hurtling along a few feet apart. There is the cooperation of friends and families and coworkers and the person in line behind me. And I feel like I am being called to focus more on this aspect of our common humanity. So, for me the two questions are more specifically: What have I done and what will I do to empower cooperation?

Love, Woody

Two major players who preceded me into the conversation

Landmark Education is the organization best set up to bring the conversational technologies that I rely on to folks who really haven’t ever even thought about it before. Their rigorous development of language and unflinching honesty and loving support are the best there is. There are others that I haven’t really experienced and there is a whole movement using terms like integral spiritual practice with more brilliant, committed people than I am even aware of and only a few of whom I’ve experienced to the extent I’ll comment.

Buckminster Fuller, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and others were pioneers and there have been many books along the way. Right now I’m finding Terry Patten to be as current as anybody I know of with regard to the actual nature of the conversation. He also appears to maintain a rigorous relationship with truth. He can be found hosting the Beyond Awakening Series of free on-line seminars.