More from Swami - a message of encouragement

Notes From the Trail
June 29, 2010
SPONTANEOUS RE-MISSIONING

It's Time to Wake Up Laughing, and Wise Up Loving ... For Crisis Sakes!
Dear Friends and Co-Hearts:

     No matter how you look at it, these are extraordinary times where we seem to face crisis at every turn. Interestingly, the word "crisis" first came into the English language in a translation of Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie (Major Surgery) and it meant "the turning point in a disease." 
     Well folks, the body politic - and indeed the biosphere - is one sick puppy. We are at a pivotal moment where things can take a turn for the worse, or the better. Looking at the magnitude of the crises, it becomes clear that - to paraphrase Einstein - these problems cannot be solved at the same level they were created. Inside-the-box economic fixes aren't fixing anything, and technology just seems to be making the oil spill disaster worse.
     Meanwhile, we have an intransigent system invested in remaining the same, doing everything it can do to keep people asleep - or roused up in anger against the wrong enemy. It really doesn't look good for the home team. In fact, it looks more and more like the world needs a miracle. 

A Template for Miracles?
     So, where do we go to find a template for miracles? Well, we can begin with the phenomenon called spontaneous remission. We read about these seemingly anomalous healings all the time, or perhaps we know someone who has had one. One day, the individual is on death's door with a "fatal illness." The next day, they are inexplicably symptom free. This kind of miraculous change that cannot be explained through ordinary science is often deemed a Divine intervention, part of the unknowable mystery.
     But there might be more to it. 
     Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, author of Coyote Medicine, tells us that spontaneous remission is often preceded by "a change of story." In other words, our feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and the meaning we attribute to our situation may actually change the "field" in such a way that it impacts our physical reality. Can this also be true of our collective story and beliefs, and our collective reality? That's what my book with Bruce Lipton, Spontaneous Evolution, is all about. As we say in the book:
     The spontaneous remission we seek appears to be contingent upon a spontaneous re-missioning of civilization through which we change our mission from one based on survival of the individual to one that encompasses survival of the species. 
     In other words, we must spontaneously change our mission from dominate-or-be-dominated to thrival of all. Can it be done? We don't know, but that's what we're playing the game to find out.

The World Game or the End-of-the-World Game: 
     The Choice Is Ours.  And if you're wondering what the game is, consider the one proposed by R. Buckminster Fuller nearly 50 years ago. He called his game The World Game, and if played successfully, everyone can win. The challenge: "To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone." 
     Now, that's a game! Forget reality TV, folks, we've got reality, a once-in-many-lifetimes hero's journey with the entire species in the hero's role. Bucky Fuller, who also coined the term "Spaceship Earth," predicted that the 50-year period beginning in 1975 would be about aligning the planetary resources to insure abundance for all. Bucky was a visionary, but he was also a scientist and mathematician. So he knew it could be done. 
     And now ... more than 35 years into that time frame, those of us who hold that vision must create both a movement, and a "practice" so that we begin to live this One Suggestion that we're all in it together. Weaving a movement means cultivating two evolutionary qualities: awareness and community. And ... to turn this ideal into a real deal requires both intention and action. 
     While this is indeed a whole-world conversation, it begins with the individual. In Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton and I outline a 3-step plan for doing this, because frankly we don't have time for all 12 steps. These steps are:
Evolutionary Awareness.
Evolutionary Intention.
Evolutionary Practice.
     Without going into too much detail - it's all there in the book - this essentially means, first disabusing ourselves of the programmed myth-perceptions we have mistaken for reality; next, making the choice to live into the new story instead of the old one; and finally, "practicing" evolution on a daily basis, by aligning our words and deeds with the awesome notion that "humanity" is one organism.