Source: How Resilience Works
We all know that resilience is a good thing. But we are not very clear about what makes for a resilient person or organization. We need pockets and sources of resilience to best respond to the increasing chaos in the world we live in. This article gives good guidance for knowing what we need in our toolkit to create the quality of resilience. It is also beautifully written.
I will be offering a four-week class at Casa Bagus on Clayton Road on the four Wednesdays in April. For more about it and to sign up, follow this link.
In these days I often remind myself that, as Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” While I fervently believe this is true, at times like these I need a bit of reassurance.
That reassurance came earlier this week when I was emailed a link to a new eBook by Ken Wilber entitled, Trump and a Post-Truth World: An Evolutionary Self-Correction. You should know Ken Wilber if you don’t. Some find him a bit hard to take as he sometimes comes off as though he thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. I suspect this may because he is the smartest guy in the room.
While much of what we think of as scholarship drills down into the details of what is, Wilber, as an integral philosopher, is always using the details to construct the largest possible picture of what is. In this 80 page freely distributed book [It’s a pdf. You don’t even need a special reader.] he draws deeply from aspects of integral philosophy to explain what is happening in our world politically and to offer a perspective on what we can do to heal it.
It helps a lot to have a background in AQAL theory and Spiral Dynamics. You can find lots of resources online to explain these terms more fully than he does in the book. But ultimately you will be able to follow his thread if you stay with it.
The bottom line is that while the current crisis is the horrific disaster we think it is, it is also a necessary and ultimately healthy corrective in the progress of evolution to greater health and wholeness for humans and the planet. Or at least it can be. But it will be only to the degree to which we don’t let our fears cause us to regress and follow the paths of hate and division. We will, as one of the earliest authors of nonviolence taught us, have to learn to love our “enemies.”
Read it yourself and then let’s talk about it.
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In these days, the ways that people living side by side make meaning can be vastly different. We can find the facts we want (or, failing in that, simply create the facts that suit us) and construct the meaning or our choice.
Not all meaning is of equal value. The best meaning is that which most closely approximates reality. Ultimately we cannot know what is real. We can only approach it. It is an asymptote; a limit we can move towards but never fully grasp.
When the meaning we make, the cognitive maps we craft, are close renderings of reality, we can make choices which best construct what we need; that is, the conditions which keep us safe and allow us to be satisfied.
Choices which attempt to meet our needs but ignore the needs of others are based on faulty maps. They don’t acknowledge the unity of all things. They are a short-term fix that causes long-term problems.
As we approach the inevitable conflicts of life, especially those with whom we have the most intimacy, we benefit greatly by having a cognitive map that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all and thus supports our ability to create what we need such that others get what they need as well.
The Workshop on Interpersonal Nonviolence is an introduction to just such a map.
President Barack Obama awards the 2013 National National Humanities Medal to Krista Tippett, radio host, from St. Paul, Minn., during a ceremony in the East Room at the White House in Washington, Monday, July 28, 2014. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Today’s On Being with Krista Tippett is an interview with a couple of American Buddhists on how we relate to our enemies and our suffering. It is a part of the work that she and On Being are doing on nurturing Civil Conversations. When we operate out of a cognitive map that defines people as either allies or enemies, and which legitimizes not only the emotion of anger but its expression in violence, we construct suffering — and not just for others but for ourselves as well.
What is the alternative? Jesus taught us to love our enemies, but as Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman point out in the piece, that way of being requires development. We evolve into a way of being that replaces hate and fear and anger with concern and care and love. We have to first of all stop the hate before we can start the love. It takes more than intention to make this shift; we also need discipline.
This is just the approach that we will be taking in the conversation on January 14 that I am calling Interpersonal Nonviolence. We are not only stopping the violence, we are also embodying the love that arises when we can more and more fully experience the fact that we are all connected…that we are all a part of the same body. For more information about that workshop, follow this link.