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Reflections

(From my very small corner of the world in Melbourne, Australia

The bushfires, followed by the global pandemic, have been a reminder and wake up call relating to many things including:

  • The fragility of human life
  • My own fragility as an older person, accompanied by the realisation that I am very fortunate to be still alive and enjoying life
  • The importance of relationships. As we are being required to isolate ourselves physically, our online interconnectedness presents new opportunities to experience and expand our interconnectedness with each other. I gather that Zoom (and other similar technologies) have been experiencing an enormous surge in new users! I have, paradoxically, found myself ‘busier’ than I have been for sometime: unexpected phone calls to check that I’m ‘OK’, keeping up regular contact with friends via Zoom, email and telephone, and dealing with the enormous increase in email as so many or us from around the globe seek to offer helpful advice to others. (And, of course, I have to recognise that I am contributing to this ‘virtual clutter’. 

Where to from here?

If you could choose our global future directions, what would be your focus? I would like to see two practices taking place collectively, one ‘external’, the other ‘internal’.

Words and talk have achieved much. And we can be grateful and appreciate this. But, talk alone is not enough: we need practice on a collective scale to take our human consciousness to a new level.

So I would like to see the practice of a Universal Basic Income taking root. We all struggle at some point in our lives just to survive. Some, more so than others - artists, free lance entrepreneurs, indigenous people, victims of domestic and other forms of abuse, to name just a few. Generosity and barter still have a role to play. But the universal currency is money and the divide between the rich and the poor seems to be inexorably widening. To start the practice of giving every adult a basic income that covered their needs for a roof over their head, food on the table and payment of regular activities, would, I believe, be a small step towards diminishing the financial inequality that makes daily life so hard for so many.

Survival is at one end of the scale: self-realisation is at the other. I classify self-realisation as an ‘internal’ practice.

But not the ‘old’ form of self-realisation that focuses on individual evolution. Yes, we still need individuals to practice expanding their emotional and spiritual intelligence in whatever way or ways is best suited to their innate gifts and specific circumstances. But we also need to recognise our deep interconnectedness with each other. We need each other. I can only become more fully myself when I am prepared to connect with you in giving and receiving.

So I would like to see our collective practice of coming together take root, with the intentional focus of creating a safe collective space where we can freely and spontaneously practice the art and science of giving and receiving from each other.

What is your vision?

If you were to wake up tomorrow to find that your deepest and most meaningful vision for life had unaccountably happened over night, what would be the first thing you noticed?

Treat your vision like gold. Because it is gold.