In the hosted conversations portion (the unconference) at Wisdom2 this weekend we discussed the flow from Big Data —> Collective Intelligence —-> Collaborative Insight —-> Big Wisdom, the universal awareness that we hit in moments when the right people gather for amazing moments like this past weekend.
I look forward to producing, hosting and collaborating on more of these events with you and this community.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides (quoted by copyright from Council on Spiritual Practices)
[Preamble] People have long sought to enrich their lives and to awaken to their full natures through spiritual practices including prayer, meditation, mind-body disciplines, service, ritual, community liturgy, holy-day and seasonal observances, and rites of passage. “Primary religious practices” are those intended, or especially likely, to bring about exceptional states of consciousness such as the direct experience of the divine, of cosmic unity, or of boundless awareness.
In any community, there are some who feel called to assist others along spiritual paths, and who are known as ministers, rabbis, pastors, curanderas, shamans, priests, or other titles. We call such people ‘guides’: those experienced in some practice, familiar with the terrain, and who act to facilitate the spiritual practices of others. A guide need not claim exclusive or definitive knowledge of the terrain.
Spiritual practices, and especially primary religious practices, carry risks. Therefore, when an individual chooses to practice with the assistance of a guide, both take on special responsibilities. The Council on Spiritual Practices proposes the following Code of Ethics for those who serve as spiritual guides.
This draft for public comment was released 10 August 2001. The current version is available on the Internet at http://www.csp.org.
Copyright © 1995 – 2001 Council on Spiritual Practices
Permission is given to reprint this Code, provided that the text is reproduced complete and verbatim, including the and this notice of limited permission to reprint.
Thanks to Formless Mountain for the graphic.
Elucidate my friends! Holden @ GiveWell challenged us this week to speak from the heart and get to the core of why we support our primary cause. This is your AMO Challenge for the week….write your own blog post explaining your contribution to the Giving Carnival and link your blog back to Holden.
Why Do You Do What You Do?
My friend Tony Deifell asks it this way…wdydwyd? When he asked me a few years ago back when Omidyar Network was young, I considered love to be the renewable resource that could move us beyond our complex problems; love is the gift within all of us that must be held as primary for all other solutions and opportunities to arise. What I was seeing back in 2005 was a fundamental closedness and hardness within us towards the world, many layers of walls and boundaries set in place to keep away the pain and fear thrust upon us by unfriendly fire.LOVE is still my primary cause, it’s the root of the Amoration inquiry. But has my pursuit of wisdom through love brought greater or less impact in the lives of others around me?
There are certain things our avatars cannot fully do for us. For the past few years I have grown deeply quiet, speaking more through blogs and threads than through direct hand and eye contact. DIRECT CARE AND TOUCH is what we need now more than any other gift we can give to one another. As much as we need to plug in, we also need to feel the flow that we share with others as a direct current, a circuit formed every time we invest in each other.
Every motion we make in this world is an investment.
Our lives are full of practices that bring us closer to the world or away from it.
To be honest, right now I feel deeply wrong at some level, a bridge with little land to anchor in.
We have a great time moving others into AMO Action Dances, PeaceTiles project workshop, OYA and Sugar Arts there are missing pieces, ways that I have not been able to successfully bridge in my community. Serving on my local neighborhood council has been a trial by fire and I’m not made for long meetings in hard chairs. At heart I want to be home, creating, mentoring and working with others to amplify and spotlight their dreams in development.
Admitting imperfection in love gives me room to grow
There are so many things I would like to change about myself…first on the list is my weariness with the homelessness and displacement so common in our world (and on my doorstep!). It is inhumane how we allow so many people to suffer right in front of us without care or compassion. I do this every day, pass a homeless person without offering them food or anything that can help them. When I think of 10,000 people here, another 70,000 ejected from another refugee camp in Darfur forced to close by the Sudanese government….how can we let our people die right in front of our eyes in silence, without a tear? Have we lost all touch with ourselves?
Sometimes it saddens me that two decades of love inquiry has not moved me past these fundamental fears. I still feel every emotion in the book and struggle with the silly ideas and presuppositions that my culture tries to thrust upon me. Inundated with messages on beauty, fear and imperfection as airbrushed fantasy….here is my ocean to bridge, the walkway to a reality where you are beautiful no matter what is going on at surface level. I strive to give room for these passions to grow into fruitful endeavors, large and small. Every movement, every moment.
Each of us has a glow to share….we choose how to let that out, how to share it with others and use it to power the lives we manifest. Love is the access point, the opening to life and energy in movement. I do not know if it will change the world, nor would I make such presumptions or claim to know The Path to Transformation….I know one path, my own, the smiles I see and eyes I look into every day. Making that decision to look into others eyes is the first step for me in an endless process of reaching out and holding those around me, no matter what background, cause or party they support. I want to be more for you, and for me too.
There’s nothing too big, too impossible. We specialize in dreambuilding and love creating new visions for the future. I feel so blessed to live this life of creative pursuit yet want to do much more with this space, with you. Help me help you grow by telling me here what you need most and how we can help you create more love throughout your circles.
Think of the most beautiful person you have ever seen. Think of the exact moment you looked into his or her eyes, and for a fleeting second you were paralyzed: you couldn’t take your eyes off that vision. You stared, frozen in time, caught in that beauty. Now imagine that identical beauty radiating from every single thing in the entire universe: every rock, every plant, every animal, every cloud, every person, every object, every mountain, every stream–even the garbage dumps and broken dreams–every single one of them, radiating that beauty. You are quietly frozen by the gentle beauty of everything that arises around you. You are released from grasping, released from time, released from avoidance, released altogether into the eye of spirit, where you contemplate the unending beauty of the Art that is the entire world. ~Ken Wilber
The one thing we have is this eternal moment of saying “yes”, the crucial second spent standing on the edge of the cliff, ready to jump into emptiness. Jump. Instincts battle within, fear mounts an uprising and wants desperately to retreat to warm womblike spaces. Beyond the fear resolve stands firm, the strength of spirit yearning to be one with its source. Jump.
The self fears because IT senses that IT is separate from the emptiness. IT cannot see that it has always been dancing with the particles and waves. Air, water, fire, energy in infinite configurations, inextricably woven to create life within life. There is no need to fear release, for IT has always been a participant.
We stand on the brink of flight yet we are always flying. Resolve holds the ground while beauty and awe flood in, allowing for both freedom and coherence. The air becomes a soft pillow of comfort beneath wings of granite, infinitely releasing sparks of electricity into the radiant orgasmic kosmos.
Wilber continues:
…That all-pervading beauty is in truth the very nature of the Kosmos right now. It is not something you have to imagine, because it is the actual structure of perception in all domains. If you remain in the eye of the spirit, every object is an object of radiant beauty. If the doors of perception are cleansed, the entire Kosmos is your lost and found Beloved, the Original Face of primordial Beauty, forever, and ever and endlessly forever. And in the face of that stunning Beauty, you will completely swoon into your own death, never to be seen or heard from again, except on those tender nights when the wind gently blows through the hills and the mountains, quietly calling your name.
Beloved Beauty will jump and dance and sing with us if we’re willing to play. All we have to do is open our eyes, our pores, our seeds of radiance.
i have some amazing things to share with you … the past few days have been very enlightening. you came to mind tonight as i was dancing … we were moving like atoms, bouncing across the floor, CONNECTING, and i knew that the essence of GOD, of all life can be found in the energy within us and our ability to CONNECT to the world. LOVE is that connection, our ability to openly touch the universe and all beings within it. the absence of love is the absence of life is the absence of god … humans build up the toughest armor through the years, but children have an innocent touch and wonder for creation, the purest of love. our goal, as humans, is to widen our scope but retain that pure, loving connection.
Read, write, draw, create, sing, dance, romance….
Weaving colors within, without, in between the layers of the known and unknown, searching for more data to fill the hard drive.
Beautiful solitary line with infinite possibilities for advancement.
It is so easy to get caught up in the excitement of new friends, new experiences, new opportunities. It is much harder to sit and be patient, to love and not expect, to grow within.
My heart is tentative and in need of comfort, but it cannot feel the hugs it already receives.
