SEE INTO OUR WORLD
Breaking from historical acts of trying to negotiate and broker peace – under the shadow of threat, fear, and mistrust – preparing deeper and sacred ground (“pre-conditions”) upon which we can dismantle the reasons for those fears, is to fundamentally change how we understand power, resistance, the necessity of the other, reverence, authority, chaos, currency – “God.”
Deep peace takes root as we name and mobilize sensibilities of soul that have power to secure, in the spaces opened, deeper ground for trust. Political, economic, religious, clinical, and military interventions will have as their primary goal, not the building of peace but the dismantling of fear.
PEOPLES AND NATIONS UNITING AROUND SENSIBILITIES OF SOUL
Deep peace takes root as we name and mobilize sensibilities of soul that have power to secure, in the spaces opened, deeper ground for trust. Political, economic, religious, clinical, and military interventions will have as their primary goal, not the building of peace but the dismantling of fear.
Release our fear of power, pain,and vulnerability
Know who we are
Risk putting our expertise out into the world. Not waiting for others (“authorities,” races, power structures, nations) to acknowledge the value of our personal skills and native insights into the deep peace process.
- Preserve, even redefine, who we are (beyond what we identify with) and
what our founding values ask of us so we can resist projecting onto others our fear of their fears.
- Resolve whether acts of war and torture are justified to protect nations and the innocent citizens of those nations. Realize that the cost to life – the deep scars that war perpetuates on our collective soul – have not necessarily made our world safer.
- Accept the futility of holding onto the “rightness” of our singular beliefs,
of racial, cultural, economic, religious, and national prejudices and practices that have lost or corrupted power. - Be open to learning about what dignity, freedom, and equality mean and look like to those seeking the same.
Let pain touch us
Trust that our pain is bearable so we can stop projecting it onto others – stemming the dangerous proliferation of our global pain (the accumulation of human atrocities and suffering around the world and throughout history).
- Allow pain to touch us, deeply change how we see and live, and move us onto more restorative paths.
- Companion anxious and disillusioned youth, whose drive may simply be to move a better world forward. Help them harmonize their hopes for a pure and orderly “state” with what can advance their cause.
See deeper into what we’ve feared
Take back the truth of what we dream for our world and our children’s future.
- Admit we are ready to come to the table with whole new understandings and ways of seeing one another.
- Allow vulnerability to set the tone and create sacred ground for meaningful diplomacy and negotiation.
- Enter disparate areas of the globe, even lands of our “enemy,” seeing deeper into what we may have feared or not known – and finding pieces of our selves there.
- Take in a greater sense of what, beyond our presence and our faith, creates “power of place” – that sense that, in gathering together (geographically or spiritually), a power greater than ourselves can expand within us.
- Accept that there is pain and times of powerlessness – we can help each other see through the noise to simply be with one another.
Our will to exist is “unsurrendable”
We are part of nature
Trust that life holds us personally and collectively within its sacred essence – we are part of an indivisible nature.
- See that what lies at the core of our humanitarian, global, and planetary crises is often spiritual in nature – not the religious and political issues we make noise about.
- We each have an “unsurrenderable” need to exist, to belong, to know that we have value. When we believe these rights are being thwarted, we react, attack, and violate what symbolizes our oppressor, and the seeds of violence are unleashed.
- Make peace with personal fears and inner voices that hold us back and deny us our place of deep belonging.
- Hold steady when our sense of belonging feels threatened by old stories, current stories, or new stories.
- Permit conditions for peace rather than trying to reconstruct them.
- Look at our dilemmas with one another through the lens of many disciplines and experiences in history. See progressive ways to uproot together what divides our energies and frustrates our hopes.
Life respects us
Trust that life intends a deep reverence toward us, not a relationship of authoritative obedience.
- Turn childlike dispositions toward other powers (God, nations, systems of governance, money) into one of openness to learning and coming together. Trust sacred forces to shape what will not be under our control.
- Turn attention away from what has been given temporary authority (leaders and nations dominating the world stage). Listen for and shine a light on what is coming through the noise but may not yet be evident.
- Make space for new possibilities to move in, exploring (not superimposing) new perspectives and courses of action.
We need each other
Trust that others (peoples, nations) are necessary to evolving dreams and causes larger than what we alone can affect.
- Accept that we alone cannot mastermind what needs to be evolved.
- Move away from objectification of power onto human attachments (land grabs, authoritarianism, and autocratic positions of power) and, within the realities of a competitive global market, build deeper bases for trust.
- Step back from the chatter and distraction of fear. Care more about our place (as persons, leaders, nations) in helping it heal.
Profound life experiences transform how and what we see
Contexts are meant to evolve
Draw upon the wisdom of how the dark and the light – the spirit and the context – inform and transform each other through the spaces in-between.- Remain with confusion – in times of prolonged recession, decades of protracted conflict, and periods of escalating radicalization and political uprising – long enough to grow new possibilities into the frontlines of our national and international entanglements.
- Face dark times together until new meaning and direction come to light. Support and challenge each other in those hard places so that what has become disordered can be turned around and repositioned onto a more hopeful trajectory.
- Believe there are greater liberties to fight for. Work toward some global agreement about what proportion of force and laying down of arms will advance those liberties.
- Create educational models and learning spaces where new mindsets and worldviews can be shaped.
- Get beyond the belief that we unilaterally speak for “God.” Listen to other perspectives, question what it is that we our selves believe, gather around and know the “God of the people.”
- Pause and bear witness to the “other” and say, “I will listen for a while to sense what is being revealed to me, to our nation, through you and your nation.”
- Make room for what complements and brings new understandings to light. Supporting the inalienable rights of any one people does not mean denying those same rights in our own nation – rather than melting down identity, we invite and live amidst what sharpens our sense of the other.
- Accept that sustainability is about coming to global understanding of how to balance national freedoms with international responsibility and accountability in giving back to the earth.
- Allow hard boundaries between customs, faith, and continental identity to soften.
- Open spaces where the question and experience of power is depoliticised.
- Allow the struggles of those who have come before us to touch our hearts. Grow our understanding of what the cause of peace requires of us and our generation.
- Commit, again and again, to the process of deep peace when the temptation to escape into political posturing and military defence threatens the hope that we can get beyond war, hatred, racism, misogyny, and abuse in any form.
Currencies that embody the spirit of our world soul
Bring a dream to life
Gather around a shared purpose – that mutual desire to bring a world’s dream to life.- Travel to new lands – bringing our thirst for new world knowledge, learning from one another, meeting around very divergent ways of seeing the world, and deepening our own spiritual understandings.
- Grow a depth of love and care that makes room for the other to discern what their dreams mean to them. Inspire a new generation of leaders who understand what progress means.
- Join in the community to build schools where those who have not had the opportunity to learn can develop.
- Enter distressed parts of the globe, not to “missionize,” but to work with them and be touched by the raw matter of that world.
- Expand beyond the boundaries of what we’ve been exposed to.
- See others as equal and essential partners in realizing a civil, racial, gendered, moral, and spiritual justice that serves each one – sounding our voices less, and stepping aside so the voices of others can be heard.
- Deepen our appreciation of and humility toward the gifts and rights of vulnerable peoples.
- Create platforms where unique perspectives are brought to the seats of political, government, corporate, and economic power.
- Create local, national, and international initiatives that put freedoms and responsibilities for change in the hands of those seeking it.
- Use financial profit to increase the power and effect of social returns.
- Offer our presence to those who have yet to tell their story – what they’ve seen or been subjected to during war.
- Move beyond justifying and averting our gaze from the moral and spiritual injuries resulting from our actions. Admit and grieve together over what has been done, turning toward what needs to be done.
- Aspire to make unnecessary our meaningless recycling and projections of fear.