Sustainable Being Gifts
An ancient answer to our current reality
The future is now
Now is our time. A lot of us feel it, know it. Wherever you look, you see it: we’re trying to ‘breathe life into a dying system’, as Otto Scharmer calls it. Now is our time! ‘This is the moment I have been prepared for’. Me too, I feel the calling. We are transitioning from the Age of Disruption into a new age, the Age of Love, if you ask me. And in this transition phase (that is said to last somewhere between 10 and 21 years) the possibility of profound personal, societal, and global renewal has never been more real. What can I do? How can I contribute? This is a question I hear a lot: people and organisations wonder what role they are to play in all this. How to contribute to a world that is also feeding our children, how to give back to our Earth.
What?
The agenda for this new era is pretty clear: whether it is the SDG’s (Sustainable Development Goals), climate change, circular economies, ecosystem restoration, whatever name we’re giving it, the ‘what’ is about paying our bill as Humanity to Planet Earth. She will continue to exist, no worry; it is us, humans, who will have to act to make sure we’ll also still exist for the next generation to come. Let alone for the next 7 generations to come….
This moment of disruption deals with death and rebirth. What’s dying is an old civilization and a mindset of maximum “me”, that has led us into a state of organized irresponsiblity, collectively creating results that nobody wants. What’s being born is less clear but in no way less significant. It’s something that we can feel in many places across Planet Earth.
But How?
This future is not just about firefighting and tinkering with the surface of structural change. It’s not just about replacing one mindset that no longer serves us with another. It’s a future that requires us to tap into a deeper level of our humanity, of who we really are and who we want to be as a society. It is a future that we can sense, feel, and actualize by shifting the inner place from which we operate. This inner shift, from fighting the old to sensing and presencing an emerging future possibility, is at the core of all inner leadership work today. It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking from the head to the heart. It is a shift from an ego-system awareness that cares about the well-being of oneself to an eco-system awareness that cares about the well-being of all, including oneself. When operating with ego-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our small ego self. When operating with eco-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our emerging or essential self - that is, by a concern that is informed by the well-being of the whole. The pre-fix eco- goes back to the Greek oikos and concerns the “whole house.” The word economy can be traced back to this same root. Transforming our current ego-system economy into an emerging eco-system economy means reconnecting economic thinking with its real root, which is the well-being of the whole house rather than money-making or the well-being of just a few of its inhabitants. But while the whole house was for the Greeks something very local, today it also concerns the well-being of our global communities and planetary eco-systems. This shift in awareness from ego-system to eco-system is something that we are approaching and living through not only as groups and organizations, but also as a global community. Pioneering the principles and personal practices that help us to perform this shift may well be one of the most important undertakings of our time.
From human doing to human being, learning from our grandfathers
The good news, is that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make this inner shift. We have just forgotten how to. We became addicts of ‘doing’, forgot how to live a simple life with our ‘being’ as the essence of it. But our grandfathers and grandmothers kept these secrets for us, for generations on end. It doesn’t matter if we listen to indigenous people from Australia, Indonesia or Northern America…they all have this eco-system thinking and living at the core of their lives. The community always being the starting point of everything. Always with the next 7 generations in mind, and in their heart. The only thing we have to do is to have the courage and trust to listen to their wisdom. And funny enough, trust and courage are two of the seven values that we need to create this inner shift…
Honouring the 7 grandfather teachings as Sustainable Being Gifts
‘Treat others and the planet, like you want to be treated’, says the Golden Rule, which is at the core of every religion or philosophy that humankind created. What if this Golden Rule can be lived to the max, simply by developing the 7 grandfather teachings, that have been passed on from generation to generation? Can it be as simple as that? I believe so. I choose to believe so. Imagine what can become possible if 8 billion people start practicing the Golden Rule, supported by these 7 teachings of: wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility and truth…
Aho to ancient wisdom!