Sorry for the light posting last week – I’m back in town and will have the Decline of the American Empire article up Monday morning. Meanwhile here is something more inspirational to help us prepare for the changes in the world around us. Thanks Kelly Lee Phipps for the quote.
Art by Alex Grey
“”If the Mind is the directive force behind action, the mind and its vision of life must be healed before action can be anything but conflict. This healed vision of life comes from full awareness, for it involves a deep transformation of our view of the world that consists in knowing and feeling that the world is an organic unity.”
-Alan Watts
I love this quote because it demonstrates that everything that we create in our lives and in the world around us comes from the vision of our reality that we hold in our minds. From that vision comes our beliefs, and from our beliefs come our experiences.
This is just as true when the outside world is changing as it is when we are working with our individual experiences. Reality is elastic, and it flexes with the transformation of the group mind (of which we are an important part).
Hi Lynn: hope you enjoyed your vacation. Loved this posting, and wanted to share with you one of those serendipitous examples of synchrony that make you sit up and exhale deeply in gratitude.
Many recent events have called forth deep distress–the famine in Somalia and also knowing that many children in my own wealthy country go to bed hungry, the needless loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the whole budget debacle. Just for starters. I also wonder why no one objects to the fact that all of our manufactured goods are essentially made by slave labor, producing those huge profits. I wonder why there seems to be no real action or outrage against any of this.
I had just read your article when I decided to do an internet search for a quote I remembered from a long ago college course that I had been thinking about for a few days but could not remember by heart.
Here is the quote, and when you read it remember that I had just read your article, and perhaps you too will gasp at the wondrous little kick that maybe the Universe is indeed hearing our thoughts and that we will take action—–
It is obvious, indeed, that no change of system or machinery can avert those causes of social malaise which consist in the egotism, greed, or quarrelsomeness of human nature. What it can do is to create an environment in which those are not the qualities which are encouraged. It cannot secure that men live up to their principles. What it can do is establish their social order upon principles to which, if they please, they can live up and not live down. It cannot control their actions. It can offer them an end on which to fix their minds. And, as their minds are, so in the long run and with exceptions, their practical activity will be.– R H Tawney, The Acquisitive Society
Apologize for the length, and also could not figure out how to highlight that last sentence, which of course was the whole point.
Thanks Julie! A beautiful piece of synchronicity.