2019 GPC Spiritual Civilization Meeting
2019 GPC Spiritual Civilization Meeting
Friday, May 10 • Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Pocantico Hills, New York
Members of the Spiritual Civilization Group gathered at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture to explore ways to increase consciousness of the ideals that drive members of society to help each other and work towards the greater good.
Resources
Highlights
Emotional, Social and Ecological Intelligences – and Being a Force for Good
Daniel Goleman, Psychologist, Author and Co-founder, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)
“I had the honor of writing a book with the Dalai Lama for his 80th birthday. He is 83 now. It’s called A Force for Good. In that book it turns out he’s a social activist. He encourages everyone to do three things. The first is what he calls emotional hygiene, which is the calm and clear part. He says if you’re going to help anyone, you first have to help yourself. You have to get your inner world under some level of control. The second thing he says is adopt an ethic of compassion, of caring. The third thing he says is act now in any way you can. Each of us has a different skillset, has a different platform, has a different set of abilities, or assets, or whatever we can offer the world. He says act now, even if you won’t live to see the fruit of your action.
He names several areas that I am happy to see are areas that have been focused on here spontaneously. One of them is poverty, a widening gap between rich and poor. Another is the us/them divides that are getting stronger and stronger. The third is the environment.”
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Insight Talk
GPC Member, President and CEO, Fetzer Institute
“Our mass culture that is becoming globalized is pulling us increasingly toward a superficial – what I think of as a bread and circuses – kind of life. Now, how are we responding? Our response is not at the global level. We’re not seeing this problem as a whole. On a good day, maybe we apply systems thinking to education or healthcare; rarely to the economy as a whole. Most of our response, if you look at philanthropy and civil society and government, is not even at that subsystem level. It’s down at the level of particular problems.
It’s very difficult to maintain a sense of hope if you are working within that sense of isolation and on an overwhelming problem beyond your control. I don’t think we have to live there. I don’t think we have to work there. I think this group is in a powerful position to be part of the push to thinking at the level of the global system, global culture, global civilization. I think the first and most powerful thing that emerges when we make that shift is we move from complexity to a certain simplicity because if we go deep enough, and I think this group will be particularly open to this analysis...what we realize is that the fundamental pathologies in each of those systems arises from a particular way of being, from a particular level of consciousness.”
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Building Movements for a Compassionate and Resilient World
GPC Member Diana Rose, Founding President Emerita, Garrison Institute
Oren Slozberg, Executive Director, Commonweal
Diana Rose:
“Every morning my prayers and my practice start with...the four immeasurables. They really help set my intention, not only for the day but in my life. The four immeasurables go:
May all beings be happy and have the causes of happiness,
May they be free of suffering and the causes of suffering,
May they know the joy that has never known suffering, and
Dwell in equanimity free of all anger, attachment, hatred, and ignorance.
Connectivity is really important. In today’s world, creating a place and creating programs and creating an atmosphere where real connectivity can take place is vital. It’s the connectedness in your inner work, but it is also the connectedness to your outer work.
We’re more creative that way and we collaborate more.”
Oren Slozberg:
“Spiritual crises are not resolved by going to a retreat for five days, but it’s going and thinking about how do you integrate that back into your life, which in the old days would be a religious practice...Muslims, Jews, Christians, mostly familiar with Abrahamic traditions, but I also know many Buddhist traditions...you practice every day. So in today’s world, what is the parallel to kind of lift us out of that crisis? It could be that being on retreats, being in places where there is community support, and then thinking...the irony...is that how can we sustain that because they’re not going to go to church. ..maybe there is a way that we might be able to sustain some of that transformation, which once again puts these spaces where these transformations happen, not only as a place where the internal work happens but also when they go back home they take it with them.”
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Optimists Ruined the World: Can Pessimists Save it?
Elif Shafak, Turkish-British Novelist, Essayist, Academic, Public speaker and Women’s rights activist
“How can we all become more engaged, more alert, more aware, but also awake citizens? I believe this is going to be the challenge of our times. It is precisely those gaps that are widening, both economic, political, but also cognitive cultural gaps that are worrying me because we might make a lot of progress in one field...in technology and medicine...but if the rest of the world is going backwards, that’s not going to help us. Actually, the negativity is going to influence the progress. We have to care about bridging those gaps.
A healthy dose of pessimism will make us more engaged, but at the same time we need a dose of optimism and faith. That will come...I don’t think it will come from politics; it will come from our fellow human beings. The more we connect across borders...national borders, ethnic borders, religious borders...I think we will have the healthy dose of optimism that we need.”
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