Increasing our Cosciousness

Consciousness is my theme at the moment. Well, actually, It has been for many years. That’s how it ended up in the title of my book, Conscious Spending, Conscious Life, which grew out of my teaching college students to be conscious consumers.

In the time that has passed, I’ve become ever-more aware of the urgent need for increasing our consciousness on all fronts. We must, if we are to resolve the world-scale chaos around us.

That phrase—the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible—is borrowed from author and essayist, Charles Eisenstein. It’s the title of one of his books, and is completely relevant to this time where we must find ways to increase our consciousness.

Seeing the bigger picture…

One of the hallmarks of increased consciousness is the ability to see a bigger picture. And one of the best ways I’ve found is to pay attention to people who are speaking and writing from that greater perspective. It gives me the sense of a perspective I might take and the questions to ask. It helps me shift to another paradigm.

I’m not saying that when I hear a good speaker I immediately take on their views and start parroting them. What I mean is that it gives me other things to consider that may not have been on my radar when I was coming from a more limited viewpoint.

Charles Eisenstein  thinks deeply, writes thoughtfully, and is highly readable. I find him one of the most useful voices in the cacophony of the current chaos.

For consideration…

Click image to hear Charles Eisenstein reading his essay “Reinventing Progress”

So in that spirit, today I’m bringing you Charles Eisenstein reading one of his essays. In it, he describes the paradigm we are currently living under and presents a more expanded one for our consideration.

A paradigm is a framework that contains the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodology that are commonly accepted by members of any discipline or group. This framework determines what people in that group believe is true, and discounts other beliefs as impossible.

We can change paradigms by shifting our perspectives. And this is where the viewpoints of deep thinkers such as Charles Eisenstein can be of value.

Essay summary…

i was going to list key points, but changed my mind.

Content of this nature needs to be taken in as a whole. It wouldn’t do it justice for me to fragment it into bullet points.

The way we perceive things changes what’s possible.

For more of Charles Eisenstein’s perspectives…

This week’s energy activation…

Energy activations are designed to enliven (activate) an aspect of your energy field. The words communicate directly with the field, guiding it to a new formation as needed. For more free activations, go to Sarah McCrum’s YouTube channel. For courses and activations to purchase, visit Sarah McCrum’s website.

Wobbling with the world…

Right before our eyes, the world has become a wonky place. Unpredictable and unthinkable events have occured. Things we thought were firm and stable aren’t.

And we don’t like it!

Living in uncertainty is hard. It requires us to be flexible, lest we snap under the pressure. Yet the systems of Western culture do nothing to cultivate our inherent flexibility and resilience. Indeed, materialism, competition, and our cultural notion of success all reward a rigid approach to living. And we’ve become so used to living this way that we often don’t realize it’s a cultural meme and not an immutable fact of life.

We have two choices…

In uncertain times, we can cling tighter and push harder in hopes of getting things back to the way they were. Or we can change our mindset about how things are meant to work, what is possible, and what’s to be expected in the new circumstances in which we find ourselves through no choice of our own.

As my Tasmanian friend Gill so aptly put it, we have to wobble with the world. She should know. Gill has lived through plenty of wobbles including a broken neck and open heart surgery. Yet she is still here, after 84 years, with an inspiring curiosity and zest for learning and growing. I think it’s fair to say that Gill’s mindset is what made it possible for her to wobble with her world while it lurched along through her share of adverse events.

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There can be truth in nonsense…

Nonsense takes us beyond the limitations of logic, into the quantum world where all is possible. It activates a part of us that is not always respected in our modern-day left-brain culture. Oftentimes, this disparagement of the nonsensical is to our detriment.

A master of nonsense…

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The making of an agile corporation…

This is the story of what it took for one huge company to transform its leadership and ways of working.

Why is this of interest to me?

It’s another of the “imaginal cells” that are emerging in this time when we see ever-more clearly that old systems are no longer working. As I mentioned in my post on Metamorphosis, I’ve been on the lookout for examples of different ways of thinking and the experiments that are testing these new paradigms. Continue reading

Metamorphosis

In school, I learned a simplistic version of how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly—it hangs from a branch, spins a cocoon, and then a butterfly comes out after a process called metamorphosis. I took this description at face value and didn’t think much more about it until I became interested in transformation.

Butterfly

It’s actually much more magical than I was told…

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Beautiful & Hopeful

The unrelenting upheaval around us has finally got to me. I am aching for something, anything, that is beautiful and hopeful. And I’m guessing I’m not the only one feeling this way.

Two images stay with me…

Two images have been with me since 1994 on my first trip outside North America. I landed in England, made my way south to the city of Exeter, and took a walk to orient myself. Continue reading

Why not start over?

I have long been interested in the big picture of life and its events. I often ask myself: What is the point? Why am I doing this? What exactly is going on here? Continue reading

Life After…

We’re all getting restless, I notice.

Aching to get back to normal after six weeks of carefully following some pretty restrictive rules.

But…

Do we really want to go back? I wonder if it makes any sense to return to doing the very things that created systems so fragile they failed us at the time we needed them most?

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