Beyond Awakening

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Archives for 2016

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When our joy can meet the world’s great need with Colin Beavan

AC_COLIN-BEAVAN_0412_085-739x1024On Wednesday, April 20th author Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) joined me for “Helping the World by Wanting What Actually Makes You Happy.”

Colin Beavan is a well known voice on environmental issues, consumerism and human quality of life. His most recent book is How to Be Alive: A Guide to the Kind of Happiness that Helps the World. In it, he invites readers to explore the practical spirituality that can arise from questioning the story that we can’t make a difference. He also suggests that taking small, practical steps that express our compassion for others and the planet can simultaneously bring unexpected happiness into our own lives.

No Impact Man, Colin’s previous book, is required reading on over 100 American college campuses and has been translated into 15 languages. The documentary film with the same name, was featured at Sundance and some 50,000 people have been through “No Impact Week”, an immersive educational experience offered by his non-profit.

Colin was also a Green Party candidate for Congress in 2012. And he is a senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.

What I appreciate about Colin is how strongly centered he is in compassion, and how that impulse has given him a moral center from which to live his whole life and to influence the lives of many others.

During our dialogue, Colin reflected on one of the major themes of his work — all the ways in which we tend to be captured by the dominant “stories” told by our culture. He spoke appreciatively of Byron Katie’s The Work as one means for disarming these stories.

He also shared his personal journey of becoming aware of these dominant cultural narratives. Early in life, he experienced people close to him struggling with loss, addiction, and trauma, failing to live out or be nurtured by these inherited narratives.

He began his own inquiry, questioning these stories, eventually discovering a whole new level of personal fulfillment and community.

Colin continues to connect with others who like him, are forging non-standard lifestyles that are better for them and better for the world. He continues to write about and learn from these “lifequesters.”

Being a lifequester doesn’t have to mean striking off on one’s own to live in seclusion in the woods or to be self-sufficient and “escape the system.” Colin reminds us that the system is just a series of networks and people. The problem lies in the fact that our systems don’t actually reflect true human nature, which Colin sees as essentially kind and of service.

How do we change the system? We move into our authentic selves, from “self-help” to “each-other-help,” liberating ourselves from whatever systemic defects we were inauthentically colluding with.

And it’s not about being “good” or trying to do or be “better.” Colin says we are pulled forth by excitement, playfulness, even a kind of rascally, naughtiness as we move toward our truth, because it’s not about being a good boy or girl, it’s about being real.

Colin also spoke about his latest book How to Be Alive as a “series of questions” rather than a directive or list of “shoulds.” During the tours and talks for his first book, he noticed that people often assumed that the changes they needed to make were just carbon copies of the shifts he had effected during his No Impact experiment. Not only was this assumption simplistic and inauthentic, it often wasn’t possible to enact the same changes, such as totally forgoing cars for a bike or eating only locally grown foods.

Colin says that if we look within ourselves for the direction, starting perhaps with some small thing that’s been niggling us, we are likely to find ourselves on a path that over time takes us to greater satisfaction, a more authentic life and relationships, and eventually the place where “our joy meets there worlds great need.”

You can listen to the whole dialogue here.

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Helping the World by Wanting What Actually Makes You Happy with Colin Beavan

AC_COLIN-BEAVAN_0412_085-739x1024This Wednesday, April 20th at 5pm PST, please join me for a special broadcast with author Colin Beavan, for a public conversation we have titled:

Helping the World by Wanting What Actually Makes You Happy

(Participation instructions are at the end of this post)

Colin is best known as the man who committed to reducing his carbon footprint to zero by living sustainably for a full year in New York City, as chronicled in the documentary No Impact Man. His new book is How to Be Alive: A Guide to the Kind of Happiness that Helps the World. In it, he invites readers to explore the practical spirituality that can arise from questioning the story that we can’t make a difference. He also suggests that taking small, practical steps that express our compassion for others and the planet can simultaneously bring unexpected happiness into our own lives.

Colin discovered a whole new level of personal fulfillment by rejecting the standard narrative of what makes for a happy and successful life. That story, in its many forms, usually results in two things: one is the hamster-wheel of always chasing money and status; the other is the endless search for personal happiness. He says that what really creates happiness is moving from “self-help” to “each-other-help.”

Our conventional life approaches have not only failed to bring us happiness — they’ve also caused grave problems for the planet. But there’s a growing movement around the world of many thousands of people who Colin calls “lifequesters.” These people are forging non-standard lifestyles that are better for them and better for the world.

Colin’s most important message is that living a life in line with our values is much easier than we think. The first step is to understand what actually makes human beings feel happy and purposeful — as opposed to what society tells us. Then, one small step at a time, we can begin to build those happiness and service-oriented elements into our everyday choices and decisions, experimenting with finding what makes us feel healthy, safe and like we matter to the world.

Using our experiences with these small decisions to build confidence, we can then begin making larger adaptations to our life circumstances to support the new, purposeful way of life we are discovering.

Colin helps people notice how our lives are deeply shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. If we tell ourselves the story “I don’t make a difference” over and over, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of us are trapped inside that story. Also, we often assume that if we tried to make a difference it would mean doing all kinds of things that don’t feel “natural” to us.

Colin turns this thinking on its head, suggesting that all we have to do is to notice and choose what is natural to us. As we make choices that express our innate compassion, we can emerge from the false narrative in which so many of us are trapped. We can begin to make new, more compassionate choices toward making a difference, even if at first they seem like baby steps.

In the context of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, most of us are “refusing the call.” The good news is that this refusal is the first step of the Hero’s Journey! Within each of us, our psyches yearn to complete that journey. When we don’t find ways to express our innate compassion, we painfully stunt our development as human beings.

Helping the world is not a sacrifice. It can be the greatest fulfillment of our nature. You can become yourself to save the world. And you can save the world to become yourself.

We deepen spiritually as well. Colin recently spoke at Harvard Divinity School about Tolstoy & Gandhi’s concept of “bread-labor.” Tolstoy said the first commandment was “by the sweat of thy brow, you shall eat your bread.” If we don’t put the labor into feeding ourselves, we become divorced from some essential aspect of ourselves. Tolstoy saw this as a political and a spiritual issue. The aristocracy were disconnected from God because they didn’t do any manual labor. For this reason, Gandhi spun his own cotton. Today, self-reliance, growing our own food in our communities, creating with our hands, puts us in a better place to experience Mystery and allows us to be in the existential insecurity that comes with experiencing God.

Colin offers an invitation to reframe the possibility of making these kinds of “each-other-help” changes to our lives. Rather than being shamed by the “shaking finger of should,” we can regard these shifts as a happy opportunity to live our values more fully, build community, and contribute to the betterment of the world.

I’m excited to dialogue with Colin and discover a different place where some key themes of my own spiritual teaching, like Courage and Trust can be enacted in new ways. I hope you will join us!

About Colin Beavan

Colin Beavan is among the world’s best known spokespeople on environmental issues, consumerism and human quality of life. He was called “one of the ten most influential men” by MSN, an “eco-illuminator” by Elle Magazine, a “best green ambassador” by Treehugger.com, and his blog was selected as one of the top 15 environmental blogs by Time Magazine. He has spoken at and consulted to the hippest of brands–from eBay to CliffBar, from Northface to Ideo–and has been invited to speak everywhere from California to the Czech Republic. Colin’s work has been the subject of stories in the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and literally hundreds of other national and international news outlets. Colin has appeared on The Colbert Report, Good Morning America, Nightline and countless other TV and radio shows.

Colin’s latest book is How to Be Alive: A Guide to the Kind of Happiness that Helps the World, published by Dey Street Books (a division of HarperCollins).  He is the executive director of the No Impact Project, the author of the book and the subject of the documentary No Impact Man, a 350.org “Messenger,” a dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen, and a board member of Transportation Alternatives. He was the Green Party’s candidate for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in the 2012 electoral race for New York’s 8th Congressional district. He holds a PhD from the University of Liverpool and is the author of two books previous to No Impact Man.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

*Wednesday, April 20th 5:00pm Pacific; 6:00PM Mountain; 7:00pm Central; 8:00pm Eastern

*Find Your Local Time

Please Note: There will be a limited number of lines available on the live conference call, so we encourage you to listen online if possible. To make sure you can get through by phone, we encourage you to dial in early.

ACCESS INSTRUCTIONS

Join the Dialogue: About one hour into the dialogue, we’ll open up the lines and you’ll have the opportunity to interact with us directly over the phone or via instant message. Here’s what to do:

To interact live by voice, dial into the conference line number and wait until we ask for a question from someone in your region, or

Send us your question via instant message in the teleseminar window on your computer, or

Send us your questions and comments before or during the live dialogue by posting them on our Beyond Awakening Community Facebook page

We look forward to your attendance!

Sincerely,
The Beyond Awakening Team

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The Great Reckoning—Making it a Great Homecoming with Michael Dowd

dowdOn Sunday, March 27, Michael Dowd joined me for a powerful, deep, searing public conversation we titled “The New Ten Commandments and the Coming Apocaloptimism.”

Michael Dowd is an evolutionary theologian, bestselling author, and evangelist for Big History and an honorable relationship to the future. What I appreciate about Michael is that he combines the most commonsense virtues associated with religion — heartfelt access to tears, gratitude, wonder, inspiration, grief, and moral care (to the point of organizing his whole life around service to the future) — with those of science— rationality, skepticism and rigorous grounding in an evidence-based orientation to reality.

In recent years, I’ve especially appreciated his courage — the fierce courage to face the most discouraging facts about our human “overshoot” of our planet’s carrying capacity, as well as the humble courage to question and evolve his own beliefs and assumptions.

As regular listeners to this series are aware, I have long been fundamentally optimistic, but also mindful of our powerful tendencies toward denial of what’s most disturbing. So I’ve recently been holding conversations that dare to “walk on the dark side.” Peter Russell and I asked “supposing it’s too late, what then?” Stephen Jenkinson and I examined our death phobia and grief illiteracy.

Growth is like an ever-deepening spiral, and facing realities we fear to face is essential to real integrity. Michael is a dear brother. He and his wife, Connie, have pointed me to many important ideas that have helped evolve my evolutionary consciousness, and I have no doubt they will continue to do so.

As we began or dialogue, I asked Michael to articulate what he sees as the New Ten Commandments or “what the voice of Reality is telling us through evidence.” Michael regards Reality as God. They cannot be separated. Our current understanding of Reality, including environment and ecology, did not exist three thousand years ago. Climate was seen as a divine blessing or judgment.

What are the limits (the “Grace” limits) we must observe in order to thrive in the future? Michael has shared this with dozens of other religious, spiritual and ecological leaders, who have helped him refine this language, so the New Ten Commandments reflects their collective intelligence.

These Ten Commandments express the Grace Limits of our time:

  1. Stop thinking of Me as anything less than the voice of undeniable and inescapable Reality.
  2. Stop thinking of ‘divine revelation’ and ‘God’s word’ apart from evidence.
  3. Stop thinking of Genesis, or your creation story, apart from Big History.
  4. Stop thinking of theology apart from ecology.
  5. Stop defining and measuring ‘progress’ in short-term, human-centered ways.
  6. Stop allowing the free or subsidized polluting of the commons.
  7. Stop using renewable resources faster than they can be replenished.
  8. Stop using non-renewable resources in ways that harm or rob future generations.
  9. Stop exploring for coal, oil, and natural gas — keep most of it in the ground!
  10. Stop prioritizing the wants of the wealthy over the needs of the poor.

I responded by pointing to the obvious: Humanity is violating all of these Grace Limits right now! We’re caught in the act. How do we relate to that sobering and humbling reality?

Michael says that this requires us to encounter the language of religious condemnation: if we don’t live in right relationship to Primary Reality or God’s Nature, we are inevitably on a path to self-destruction.

We have overshot our use of the planet, and we will have to face a future of less. There are consequences to living outside out of right reality. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, we are “sitting down to the banquet of consequences.” No miracle or shift of consciousness will change this.

Asked about the term “apocaloptimism” Michael explained, “I am a short-term pessimist and long-term optimist.” He thinks we are facing a great crash but that humanity will survive, and that we’ll find a way to live within the bottom line of a mutually enhancing relationship to the earth.

But that “crash” will potentially involve failing crops, a shrinking food supply, and sharp reductions in our human population, possibly including at least periods of devastating social unrest. That’s a huge, frightening existential confrontation. How can we come to peace with such a deep reckoning?

Michael responded to my question by honoring the attitude embedded in it: humility, vulnerability and honesty. He quoted Brian McLaren, “If you haven’t been tempted to deep despair by understanding climate, you don’t get it. And if you’ve succumbed, you’re part of the problem.”

He pointed out that integral philosophy can sometime lull people into the false sense that things will always only get better and better, and that we will have a future of more and more wealth and development and consciousness.

But he said, “all civilizations have a life cycle.” The internal dynamics of nature cause individuals to be mortal, and the same is true of cultures and civilizations. We need to bring an ecological and historical understanding to our current circumstances, understanding that civilizations rise and fall, and why they do. We must face the fact that we are all participating in harmful systems, and we don’t know how to get out of that situation. We all rely on cars, fossil fuels, and many other dimensions of our currently unsustainable relationship to our biosphere.

But we’re out of right relationship to reality and that implies profound loss. That means we have to go through a deep psychological, emotional and existential process, including all the stages of grief. As we let go of denial, we must pass through deep anger, bargaining, and depression on our way to acceptance. Until then we aren’t really getting what nature is telling us through the scientific evidence. Assuming the worst is actually the best direction we can go. It’s vital to feel grief.

Our minds tend to “go binary,” either buying into the myth of perpetual progress or to the vision of apocalypse. Both are disempowering ways to surrender our responsibility. The history of the rise and fall of civilizations shows that those are the least likely options. It’s a long descent. It took 325 years for the Roman empire to decline. During “dark ages,” people will still survive and have family and community. There are disruptions and declines, but there are periods of stability and life can be good. But eventually, the old civilization gives way and a new civilization emerges.

I pointed out to Michael that one of the most vital aspects of integral evolutionary consciousness is a living sense of felt contact with the evolutionary impulse and the process of emergence. The story of evolution is filled with miracles, which we call emergence. In our practice, we intend to become an aperture through which such emergent human-caused miracles can happen. So there is a rational basis for thinking our future might not be as bad as we fear. I can take actions based on the “evidence” of coming drastic changes. That may be healthy. But it is also healthy to live in an inquiry, dwelling in the not-knowing, intending to participate in miracles coming into the world.

Michael agreed that coming from not-knowing is vital. It keeps us connected to curiosity and wonder, which is very good. But there are certain things that are truly inevitable. And any philosophical system that is perceived by future generations as being out of touch with reality, and thus keeps us from repenting and changing our current pattern of “intergenerational theft” will be condemned.

He quoted Thomas Berry’s powerful 3 sentence summary of our predicament:

The glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth. The desolation of earth is now our greatest shame and biggest threat. Therefore, all programs, policies, activities and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore or foster a mutually enhancing human/earth relationship.

We must ask of everything — is it pro-future or anti-future?

He summarized by using religious language: humanity is a prodigal species. We squandered our inheritance, and we are now waking up to our reality “in the pig pen.” It is time to come home to God, Reality, our true nature. All previous generations sacrificed to give to the future, now it’s our time to reverse course and become saviors of the future, to be like a protective immune system rather than a cancer.

However, it’s important not just to take this seriously, but to see it in context.

Human beings are not uniquely bad, or evil. We are doing what any species would do if it were in our shoes. We are just biological creatures being biological creatures, the way evolution has prepared biological creatures to be for billions of years. We must change, and recognize a new set of definitions of pro-future goodness and anti-future evil. But self-compassion is healthy.

There’s a process of reckoning, a new kind of conversation. And Michael and I did our best to enter into that conversation. It is one that will continue to deepen and include us all.

Michael brought in many sources and ideas. I encourage you to listen to the whole dialogue here.

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