It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.
- David Whyte, an excerpt from Self-Portrait, a poem from Fire in the Earth
It's not easy to claim where we stand right now.
What's easy is to analyze the situation - and analyze it again tomorrow. This is the primary business of the youtube and television networks, of almost all newspapers and radio reporting. We're not suffering from a lack of analysis. But it’s not always easy to find courage.
Courage is usually thought of as an individual virtue, a private affair. In reality, it's like all human characteristics in that it partly lives in a social context or field. It’s part of a larger system. Bruce Lipton says this well here, in an observation I frequently refer to: "When you break up the individuals from a community into individual units, they become disempowered because it's the collective consciousness and the collective energy of the group from which power comes.”
That’s an important truth but not the whole of it. Power also comes through the individual and needs him. It's not that an individual can’t act courageously; it's that without a community, he or she is unlikely to do so - even unlikely to see the need to do so. Courage and meaning have their roots in a larger system. It's not realistic to think that an individual can sustain courage without that larger social field to be courageous in. And not just any social field, an intelligent social field too. A mob will not do. A mob will hold blame and anger and justify acting out. The social field or community needs some degree of consciousness or else it will scapegoat and ostracize the person who brings unconscious material up. And bringing unconscious material up and working with it is the challenge we face now. The mainstream media and conversation don't touch on it.
Lipton's observation is helpful even if it's not a road map. When people become isolated and disconnected they become disheartened and lose courage. And when they lose courage they can't see the context around them. Horizons shrink. Dreams die.
And, by and large, that's what's been happening to us. We are those people. Not just now but over generations - intensifying over the last three - members of the social field (the communities we're in) have become more isolated and disconnected in almost every way: as neighbors, as co-equal partners in the dance of women and men, as members of extended families, as communities of families, as members of coherent organizations and political systems.
The already-weakened social field has been further weakened by social distancing and masking because of Covid fear. The result is that almost every organization and group is less trusted because members don't know if they’re welcome in each other's physical or mental space.
Many high-profile authorities believe that the isolation and weakening of social bonds has been intentional and is part of a multi-pronged attempt to make people more easy to control, that all this is simply a business plan for the modern era. Whether that's true or not, digital identity as the future basis of economic and social systems is the clearly-stated objective of many or most central bank. As digital identity rolls out it will powerfully weaken the sense of self that in the past has always been based on biological identity.
The lines of a battle around who we are and who we choose to be are quickly being drawn.
What do we do with that?
Does there come a time at which we draw a line and says no further? Or do we adopt a warrior stance and affirm a radical and life-changing Yes to something else? And how do we find our way with that?
Our very personal response will need more than further analysis. If we’re to look back with firm eyes and says this is where I stand we’ll need heart, more than a little courage - and friends and allies along the way.
I do believe we can do this and must, for our own benefit and well as for that of others. I’ll be sharing what I know of navigation skill over the next months. In the meantime, please reach out if I can help with personal coaching or constellation work.
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My own journey is helped by friends and allies who help arm my own courage. Please join in by commenting and sharing your thoughts, insights. Since we're talking about a shared issue your input carries most weight when it's shared publicly rather than writing to me privately, though that's welcome too.
This is so on point. I'll also be checking out the book quoted at the beginning of this.
Andrew, if we need others to find and sustain our courage we will never truely find the real thing, and if we do find a facsimile in the company of others, we will not be sustained by that illusion when alone.
Courage is an internal experience - something that can only be found within The Realm of Possibility - that which exist within the minds of every human being and exists before why and why not!
Warmly ... John