[Oe List ...] WHO WE WERE

[Frank Knutson]

Colleagues,

I ran across this document from Gordon Harper. I share it with you. He articulates what so many of us experienced in those extraordinary years.



What Were We Thinking??

It’s MLK Day, 2015, and I guess I have to write this.  My own fault for letting myself get drawn into this bloody archive project.  I’m one of those who are currently in the process of “accessioning” their own files.  Which is to say, registering in an online database the types and quantities of materials we have in our personal collections.  

I found I had to sit down in the midst of reviewing these piles of file folders and reflect on what on earth it was that we thought we were doing "back then."  As I tried restating for myself some aspects of that, I got sucked into that vortex of wonder that all of us who were around then experienced on more than one occasion.

I’m astounded once again at the audacity of what we set out to do--at the range and scope of even imagining that such an undertaking might be possible (and, knowing that it was humanly impossible, nevertheless committing ourselves to doing it).

What follows are a few of my wonderments.  I’m inviting you to share yours.  Your way of talking about this will be different from mine (of course: we didn’t agree on everything even back then).  Here goes with some of what I’ve been ruminating about:


· We set out to deeply understand and engage the historical moment in which we found ourselves, the global forces at work in that moment and the profound changes underway.

· To do this, we studied and attempted to articulate for ourselves nothing less than the nature, the history and the dynamic relationships of the nations, regions, cultures and religions of planet Earth.

· We created a framework that sought to capture and operate out of an essential knowledge of the key concepts not only of our own Western intellectual tradition but of Eastern and Southern thought as well.

· We took on the challenge of discerning and daring to say what it meant to be fully human and the nature of the existential issues and decisions facing every human being in the twentieth century.

· We undertook a massive crowdsourcing research effort in order to map and describe the nature of human social interaction and produced a model of the economic, political and cultural processes operating at every level of society.

· We explored, reformulated and embodied ancient spiritual practices and created a variety of new ones in order to live spirit filled lives ourselves and to keep its presence at the forefront of everything we did.

· We developed a corporate culture and form of intentional community that sought to hold the impossible tension between radical personal freedom and disciplined collective action.

· We designed a strategy for building a global movement of decisional change agents and constructed a range of tools to awaken, engage, train and sustain them.

· We sought to connect and integrate the interior spirit life and external structural dimensions of the profound changes we saw required in society

· We adopted, adapted and invented methodologies designed to give all people a place at the table and real voice in the decisions being made that affected their lives.

· We formulated and implemented a strategy for catalyzing substantive change from the local level to the global that involved pilot project demonstrations, wide scale replication campaigns and a  reconstituted system of education that provided people, communities and organizations with new and empowering images of possibility.

 
Clearly, only a start.  Join in with what you’d say, how you’d say it.  Not trying to evaluate anything here, just capture a bit of what it was that captured us.






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