Friends, For about ten years I was part of a sufi study group led by Jim Fadiman, an rn subscriber and co-founder of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California. The group had a reunion last month, which I was unable to attend, and here is a letter I sent to them... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- So sorry I can't be there with you all. I know if I was there, I'd be eager to hear words from those absent, so in that spirit I'll let you know what I've been up to. For the past six years I've been doing what for me is the 'one thing worth doing' - trying to change the world. Such an effort is obviously foolish, but I couldn't see any reason to devote my energies to anything else. Our world is deteriorating rapidly and all the signs are for worse times ahead. How could I not try to do something about it, even if my chances of success were near zero? The first step was to figure out how the world works now, and why. This actually wasn't very difficult. There were two keys to understanding: (1) assume everything officials and the media say are lies, and (2) ignore all 'explanatory systems', such as Marxism. It took about three years to figure it all out. If anyone wants to see what I came up with they can go to <http://cyberjournal.org> and look at "Escaping the Matrix", or the "Guidebook", Chapter 1. The matrix article, by the way, has been published in Whole Earth Review and in New Dawn magazine, an Australian publication. Every week I get a few letters from readers saying how much they appreciated the article. The next steps were to figure out what a better system would look like, and how it could be achieved. Where to start? I started everywhere at once... looking into the history of movements and revolutions, and looking at lots of people's ideas of 'better worlds'. After a while it became clear that the question that needed to be answered first was the following: If we had a 'better world', how would it operate? It's easy to say we want justice and democracy and sustainability, but how would that actually work, practically speaking? You can't just 'demand' these things of government, or even of a revolution - no one can do the impossible. We must understand how it would all work. It turns out that the part about economics isn't that difficult. Lots of people have been working on this... Richard Douthwaite, David Korten, David Goldsmith, and many others. One must start, of course, by getting rid of capitalism, although you first must understand what capitalism is and isn't. Hint: capitalism isn't about competition and free markets, nor about efficiency. Sustainable, productive, and equitable economics are actually quite achievable, given the right political system. The difficult problem is politics. And the reason it's difficult is that humanity (in Eurasia) got sidetracked about 10,000 years ago, and has been living under hierarchical domination ever since. Do you remember the story of the villagers who got invited to the rich man's house for dinner? The one where they kept staying, and eating, and the rich man meanwhile was taking over the village? This 10,000-year sidetrack is what that story was about. Quite simply, we've been domesticated, like cattle and sheep. The 'education' system is dog obedience school. (Except for Peninsula & ITP.) As I see it, the Sufis are doing two things, from a political perspective. First they are reminding us of what freedom is about - what life is supposed to be like. Second, they are trying to help us overcome the thought-conditioning (mental domestication) that keeps hierarchies in power. Zen Buddhism and Sufism have very similar insights. One main difference, I believe, is that the Sufi tradition has a more elaborated political component. So I looked at how hierarchies first arose, and why. It's quite simple. At the time, when agriculture increased population densities, nobody knew how to maintain order - so chiefs took over. Chiefs evolved into kings, into emperors, and eventually to our current centralized global regime. Once hierarchies took hold, their mutual competition evolved them into evermore centralized and oppressive systems. Like dinosaurs, hierarchies prevented competing political species from emerging. Finally, after all this boring research, I came up with my first useful insight: we must do away with hierarchies altogether before anything else worthwhile can be accomplished. Once you focus on this 'necessity', you find out it is quite doable - the knowledge, experience, and tools exist. And interestingly enough, the ones who have the most difficulty entertaining the idea are liberals. In this respect, the right wing has a lot less unlearning to do. Liberals are addicted to authority because government has been the means by which their values have gained dominance. What liberals don't realize is that the favors they've been given have been bread crumbs leading into the dark forest. We thought we were following the friendly woodsman, but he's been the wolf all the time. The key to living without hierarchies, it turns out, is learning to get rid of factional competition. And the way to get rid of that is simply to get together and talk through our problems - rather than choosing among competing solutions, or allowing some authority to decide. Imagine how much more Sarah could accomplish if there were no City Council (or medical corporation), and she only needed to work things out with her neighbors. When we think about 'talking through our problems', we think of endless boring meetings, and nothing getting done. That's simply because we are using all the wrong processes. When it comes to 'process', most of us have never graduated from grade school. There are in fact very workable processes that enable people to work together, despite their differences. Everybody knew these processes in the old days (peace-pipe circles and all that), and people have rediscovered them today, in corporate 'team effectiveness seminars', and in activist campaigns such as Seattle. The name I give to these processes is 'harmonization'. And that's my second useful insight: harmonization is the key to everything. Hierarchy thrives on divisiveness and exploitation; liberty thrives on harmonization and cooperation. How do we achieve such a society? Simple: we build a mass movement based on harmonization. We start working together at the grass roots - left & right, fundamentalist and liberal, men and women. We learn to see each other as allies, and domestication and hierarchy as the shared weed we need to eradicate. It can be done, and it has been done - in microcosm in various places. It turns out the movement doesn't really need to _do anything, such as protest or strike. These things will happen, inevitably, but the only necessary thing is to get everyone, everywhere, into the movement. Being in the movement means that you are harmonizing your interests with those around you. By the time everyone is in, everyone is in harmony. At that point we all (including the military) simply 'down tools' everywhere at once and the regime is out the next day. So the problem isn't 'overpowering the regime'. The problem is having something to replace the regime with. When we build that something, the regime will evaporate like the wicked witch of the east. And when we click our heels together, we'll be back home. This all crystallized in my mind about two weeks ago, leading to my third useful insight: start harmonizing right now in everything you do. Since then, I've suddenly found myself in a network of similar-minded folks. I started spending my time differently, and responding to people from a different place. This led to the fourth insight, taught to me by a house plant: grow toward the light. Or as Rumi put it, spend time with the flowers instead of the weeds. That's why I miss being there with all you flowers! love, richard ----------------------------------------------------------------------------