What if all of that is just OK – all judgment suspended?

How would you proceed with your day differently from that point of view?

Try looking at it that way.

Dare you!

Joseph Campbell:  Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.

So why are we so hung up with what’s right and wrong?  I was thinking how ‘bad’ it is that so many people are playing video games and watching television rather than out there going for walks in Nature and planting organic veges and reading books etc.  The reason is that they enjoy it! I enjoy it too! (Shock)  

In Conversations With God, Neale Donald Walsch reports that there is no right or wrong just consequences.

So, overdoing it may have consequences in other parts of your life, but it isn’t ‘wrong’, it may just need balancing at some point.

We now live in an age of magic, where we can explore almost anything we want, have any experience, find anything out, that we want.  Old shouldisms have no place today.  

This is an age of exploration where following our bliss is paramount.

Ask not what the world needs.  
Ask rather what makes your heart sing and go do that;
for what the world needs is people with hearts that sing.
Philip Thatcher

The whole natural ecosystem is made up of living organisms individually following their instincts and the collective intelligence comes from the Unified Field between them.  We don’t need to worry about saving the world, we just need to follow our higher purpose, which is making our own hearts sing – following our bliss – and the rest will self-organise.  This is the essence of Faith: trusting implicitly that we are perfect and that  if we follow our bliss that we will be doing the best thing we could possibly do for the world – even when we’re not consciously thinking about it or focusing on it.

As always, Edward Monkton sums this up well:

So explore, marvel and follow your bliss  - see where it leads and be open to being surprised! (…unless of course you don’t want to!!:-))

1 Giant Leap (IMDb) is a great CD and DVD of world music made by a couple of English guys, Duncan Bridgeman and Jamie Catto, who travelled the world with a laptop, a keyboard, some recording equipment and some basic rhythms and then recorded artists from all around the world.  

The DVD has a mixed bag of writers, thinkers and armchair philosophers mixed in with the great soundtrack. One of them is Tom Robbins, who tells this story, which relates well at any time, but especially to how we collectively view our current position in history as discussed in my last post:

The Bodhisattva decided he needed to go and see the Buddha.

So he set off on foot and somewhere along his journey he came upon a man who was sitting in the lotus position, meditating.  But he had made several mistakes, in that he hadn’t chosen a shady spot, so he was out in the sun and getting absolutely cooked by the sun – he was all sunburned and dehydrated.  He had also made the mistake of sitting on an anthill, so the ants were crawling all over him and eating his flesh and he was absolutely miserable.  And as the Bodhisattva went by he said, “When you see the Buddha, ask him how long it’s going to take for me to become enlightened.”  The Bodhisattva promised to do that and continued on his way.

A few days later he came across a second man who was dancing and laughing and singing – just in a state of exhilaration – just bopping around.  As the Bodhisattva went by this man said, “Hey, when you see the Buddha, ask him how long it’ll be before I’m enlightened.”  And the Bodhisattva promised.

So he went on, had his audience with the Buddha, and a few weeks later he came back along the way.  This time he came upon the first man first.  By now the ants had taken most of the flesh off of his body and he was blistered from the sun – and he was practically dead, absolutely miserable.  The Bodhisattva said, “The Buddha says it’s going to take six more lifetimes for you to become enlightened.”

The guy says, “Oh, no! No! I can’t stand it!”

The Bodhisattva goes on and comes up on the other man who was still laughing, still dancing, still singing – having his sips of wine and nice food out of a food bowl from time to time.  

As the Bodhisattva went by he said, “You see that bush over there?  You see that small tree – the one with all the leaves on it? The Buddha said for every leaf on that tree, that’s another lifetime you’re going to have to endure before you’re enlightened.”

And the man said, “Is that all!” and began dancing and laughing and singing even more exuberantly.

And at that moment, he became enlightened. 

Enjoy the moment!

Reinventing Capitalism
In the midst of our current financial crisis, it may seem natural to cast doubt on the entire enterprise of Western capitalism and wonder if its basic tenets of progress and production have led humanity astray. But according to avant-garde cultural theorist Howard Bloom, writing in EnlightenNext back in 2005, such dismissals tend to overlook the true evolutionary significance of our economic system:   

The problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life—industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see. Capitalism works. It works clumsily, awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely. So we need to dig down to find out why. We need to reveal the deeper meaning beneath what we’ve been told is crass materialism and see how profoundly our obsessive making and exchanging of goods and services has upgraded the nature of our species. This is not a mindless consumer culture destroying the planet in an orgy of greed. It is the most creative and potentially idealistic bio-engine this planet has ever seen. We desperately need a reinvention and a re-perception of the system that has given Western civilization its long-term strength and its recent weaknesses. We need to wake up capitalism to its mission—a set of moral imperatives and heroic demands that are implicit in the Western way of life. By reinventing capitalism and injecting our own souls into the machine, you and I can raise the bar of human possibility.

Read the full text of Bloom’s column “Reinventing Capitalism.”

Imagine what it would be like to go to work each morning in a company that saw your passions as your greatest engines, your curiosities as your fuel, and your idealisms as the pistons of your labors and of your soul. Imagine what it would be like if your superiors told you that the ultimate challenge was to tune your empathic abilities so you could sense the needs of your firm’s customers even before those customers knew quite what they hankered after…

Plasticine character Morph on the cover of Esquire magazine (Mar 2009)

If infinity exists at a point, then how important are the apparently ‘small’ details?

How cool is this small detail of Morph sitting on the barcode of Esquire magazine*?!

How important is the battery light on the new MacBook where they machined the aluminium so thinly that the light shines through the metal, when they could have just made a hole?

How important are these details to you – to your relationships, to your perception of brands, to your sense of wonder?

(*I saw this edition of Esquire magazine (March 2009) at the hairdresser.  It had a fantastic section where the animated plasticine character Morph (YouTube) appeared in a fashion shoot (some pics here).  In some editions I think he appeared on the cover.)

It seems to me that trust is the oil that lubricates the smooth running of an economy – without it everything seizes up.  In my last post the picture suggested that Economy is the Art of Sharing – the distributing of resources* (‘stuff’) amongst people equitably – and surely trust is a key component of sharing.

(* I nearly used the classical economics term ‘limited resources’ then, but I now believe that to be limited, scarcity-based thinking of last century.  Especially as the ‘stuff’ begins to include intangibles, there is no scarcity or limitation other than our imagination.)

The recent economic blip appears to my eyes to be caused by a sudden lack of trust in the banking industry.  You could say that the banking industry relies entirely on trust as, other than the notion of ‘security’ (an extension of trust), banks don’t actually sell or offer anything tangible.  In the emerging economy trust will become key.  New-century tools like eBay rely heavily on trust as do citywide car sharing schemes that are becoming ever more popular.

I foresee a new economy based on these principles of sharing and trust, where money still exists, yet isn’t required for every transaction, as the word ‘sharing’ implies.  This is the economic model for our new century where our collective humanity is coming to the fore.

Prediction:  Exciting times ahead – beyond anything we have yet imagined!

Happy sharing!

We are entering into a new age.  The recession is showing that the old ways will no longer serve us in this century – the ‘exploit’ model is giving way to ‘explore’.

What do we need to walk this path – the chaordic path – towards the unknown and towards ‘not-knowing’?  How do we have to Be in this new place (as opposed to do)?  How can we show that this thinking has very practical, especially commercial, value to the mainstream?

I look forward to engaging in conversation with you as we share this journey.

With warmest wishes,