Elisabet Sahtouris 486 words, 16K views, 6 comments
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On Jun 28, 2010Pancho wrote :
My family calls me Pancho and I'd like you to know that I love you all.
It's been a month since I've been out of the Bay Area, and every Wednesday at 8PM Arizona time, I sit and synchronize with the Kindness Temple in Santa Clara, California.
This is a fascinating piece that reminded me my early days in Natural Philosophy. The bottom line is that life has learned over billions of years the advantages of cooperative, locally rooted self-organizing enterprise in which each individual organism is continually balancing individual and group interests. Many ideas came to mind. I will share 3.
1. Love and Life: The Quintessential Symbiosis
2. Something Revolutionary... what about Life?
3. Principles of Life & Biomimicry
1. Love and Life: The Quintessential Symbiosis
[Here is where the weaving of ijourneys will be magic... ;-)] It is a poem I shared in the second point of this Wednesday.
2. Something Revolutionary... what about Life?
This is an excerpt of an email I wrote some years ago:
Life exist only in relationship with other life, that is, COMMUNITY. And the organizing principle of life is partnership, it is its very essence. Life exists only in living communities of diverse and mutually interdependent species.
How do we free ourselves from the self-inflected alienation and oppression of the last Empire? We need to _create_ societies that support every person in connecting to life in ways that enhance the creative potential of both self and community so that all may enjoy the joys of the Earth Community.
Species that survive and prosper are ultimately those that find a niche in which they meet their own needs in ways that simultaneously serve others. Aggressive competition leads to the threat of extinction, which is then avoided by the formation of cooperative alliances.
[...] It is entirely possible to create societies that are at once human, rooted in their place, and modern in their global connections, understanding, and use of technology. How do we apply the organizing principles of partnership to the restructuring of human institutions?
Two key factors:
We need a turning from money to life as our defining value and
We need a turning from relations of domination to relations of partnership based on organizing principles discerned from the study of healthy living systems.
Then with family life, work life, and community life more geographically proximate and people in more regular and natural contact, our lives would be less fragmented and more coherent, the bonds of community denser, stronger, and more trusting.
Breaking up global corporations into human-scale, locally owned enterprises would free still more resources by eliminating the massive burden of inflated executive compensation packages and by removing bureaucratic barriers to innovation.
We would be working less (on assignments/papers/midterms/finals) and living more. Our lives would be freer and richer. Our environment would be cleaner and healthier. A world no longer divided between the obscenely rich and the desperately poor would know more peace and less violence, more love and less fear, more hope and less hate. There would be little need for dominator structures to impose order. Earth could heal itself and provide a home for our children for generations to come.
An we can do it because our community is about COOPERATION and SHARING.
The (r)evolutionary change is in our hands. It is about getting clear on our values, setting new priorities, redefining progress, and consuming less so that we become more human and in the process experience that abundance of authentic relationships (i.e. intellectual life and scientific inquiry are vibrant, open and dedicated to the development and sharing of knowledge and life-serving technologies that address society’s priority needs). As Lobo Corriendo [a Native American of the Black Foot Nation] said yesterday: "relationships, not money, are the true measure of the well-being." What matters most is our connection to and participation in the life of community.
3. Principles of Life & Biomimicry
The processes by which forests ecosystems evolve offer a potential model for our societal transformation: The earliest, colonizing, stage of forest-system development is dominated by fast growing, aggressively competitive, and transient species that are eventually displaced by the emergence of the more patient, cooperative, settled, energy-efficient species that define the mature phase.
If we were able to do true biomimicry–that is to mimic Nature's functions to solve many of the problems we are grappling with (i.e. clean water, energy, food production, climate change, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, etc.) as well as to mimic Mother Nature's principles– we were on our way to heal the entire Earth Community.
What principles? Mother Nature:
is organized bottom-up
rewards cooperation
promotes diversity
is about interdependence
is about resiliency
And there is a more important part, sister Janine Benyus says. We cannot forget this part. It is the part where we say thank you. It is the part in which we remember to be mannerly towards the rest of the natural world, to say thank you for the ideas that they gifted us with.
And not only that. It is the part where we are grateful to be alive and to be witnessing this ~14 billion year unfolding story of the Cosmic awe and wonder, the Universe' life and its expanding ever compassionate, courageous and wise consciousness.
May we all become proficient students of love and life.
On Jun 28, 2010 Pancho wrote :
My family calls me Pancho and I'd like you to know that I love you all.
It's been a month since I've been out of the Bay Area, and every Wednesday at 8PM Arizona time, I sit and synchronize with the Kindness Temple in Santa Clara, California.
This is a fascinating piece that reminded me my early days in Natural Philosophy. The bottom line is that life has learned over billions of years the advantages of cooperative, locally rooted self-organizing enterprise in which each individual organism is continually balancing individual and group interests. Many ideas came to mind. I will share 3.
1. Love and Life: The Quintessential Symbiosis
2. Something Revolutionary... what about Life?
3. Principles of Life & Biomimicry
1. Love and Life: The Quintessential Symbiosis
[Here is where the weaving of ijourneys will be magic... ;-)] It is a poem I shared in the second point of this Wednesday.
2. Something Revolutionary... what about Life?
This is an excerpt of an email I wrote some years ago:
Life exist only in relationship with other life, that is, COMMUNITY. And the organizing principle of life is partnership, it is its very essence. Life exists only in living communities of diverse and mutually interdependent species.
How do we free ourselves from the self-inflected alienation and oppression of the last Empire? We need to _create_ societies that support every person in connecting to life in ways that enhance the creative potential of both self and community so that all may enjoy the joys of the Earth Community.
Species that survive and prosper are ultimately those that find a niche in which they meet their own needs in ways that simultaneously serve others. Aggressive competition leads to the threat of extinction, which is then avoided by the formation of cooperative alliances.
[...] It is entirely possible to create societies that are at once human, rooted in their place, and modern in their global connections, understanding, and use of technology. How do we apply the organizing principles of partnership to the restructuring of human institutions?
Two key factors:
Then with family life, work life, and community life more geographically proximate and people in more regular and natural contact, our lives would be less fragmented and more coherent, the bonds of community denser, stronger, and more trusting.
Breaking up global corporations into human-scale, locally owned enterprises would free still more resources by eliminating the massive burden of inflated executive compensation packages and by removing bureaucratic barriers to innovation.
We would be working less (on assignments/papers/midterms/finals) and living more. Our lives would be freer and richer. Our environment would be cleaner and healthier. A world no longer divided between the obscenely rich and the desperately poor would know more peace and less violence, more love and less fear, more hope and less hate. There would be little need for dominator structures to impose order. Earth could heal itself and provide a home for our children for generations to come.
An we can do it because our community is about COOPERATION and SHARING.
The (r)evolutionary change is in our hands. It is about getting clear on our values, setting new priorities, redefining progress, and consuming less so that we become more human and in the process experience that abundance of authentic relationships (i.e. intellectual life and scientific inquiry are vibrant, open and dedicated to the development and sharing of knowledge and life-serving technologies that address society’s priority needs). As Lobo Corriendo [a Native American of the Black Foot Nation] said yesterday: "relationships, not money, are the true measure of the well-being." What matters most is our connection to and participation in the life of community.
3. Principles of Life & Biomimicry
The processes by which forests ecosystems evolve offer a potential model for our societal transformation: The earliest, colonizing, stage of forest-system development is dominated by fast growing, aggressively competitive, and transient species that are eventually displaced by the emergence of the more patient, cooperative, settled, energy-efficient species that define the mature phase.
If we were able to do true biomimicry–that is to mimic Nature's functions to solve many of the problems we are grappling with (i.e. clean water, energy, food production, climate change, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, etc.) as well as to mimic Mother Nature's principles– we were on our way to heal the entire Earth Community.
What principles? Mother Nature:
is organized bottom-up
rewards cooperation
promotes diversity
is about interdependence
is about resiliency
And there is a more important part, sister Janine Benyus says. We cannot forget this part. It is the part where we say thank you. It is the part in which we remember to be mannerly towards the rest of the natural world, to say thank you for the ideas that they gifted us with.
And not only that. It is the part where we are grateful to be alive and to be witnessing this ~14 billion year unfolding story of the Cosmic awe and wonder, the Universe' life and its expanding ever compassionate, courageous and wise consciousness.
May we all become proficient students of love and life.
Pancho