(mental) structures vs. let-go

[Fabio Cecin]

This article from Charles Eisenstein is special. Need to share it
here. It has everything.

We Don’t Know: Reflections on the New Story Summit

http://charleseisenstein.net/we-dont-know-reflections-on-the-new-story-summit/

"
(...)The ingredients for both a descent into chaos, and emergence into
a new kind of order, were all there.

The gathering did not take this path, and the reasons why are
illuminating. There were fundamentally two: the organizers were not
willing to let go, and the participants were not willing to let go
either. What the conference revealed to me (and I realize that this
too is a story I’m constructing) is that our civilization has not
quite yet reached the point of readiness for a new story.

The unwillingness to let go manifested each time the discontent, the
chaos, and the rawness began to emerge. The organizers contained each
outbreak through various interventions that amounted to a direct or
indirect assertion of authority, for example by appealing to “respect
for the schedule.” This was not because they are authoritarian control
freaks! From what I saw, all of them are on a deep journey of personal
transformation and have done a lot of shadow work. It was that the
structural role they occupied tends to bring out the inner control
freak in anyone. They were juggling a lot of plates: the concerns of
the Findhorn Board, the needs of the dining hall staff, and the desire
to be fair to presenters who would be left out if the schedule were
not followed, to name a few. Notice, though, how these concerns mirror
those of anyone in a hierarchical position of authority; for example,
the people running governments and corporations. Uncontained protests
and political disruptions do indeed cause severe dislocations in the
lives of ordinary people who, like the dining hall workers, are just
trying to get to work on time.

(...)

But let me tell you something I do know. The existing institutions of
our society are insufficient to the task of transitioning us to a
sustainable world. They are products of the old, and propagate the
status quo via the built-in dynamics of their structure – even when
the people within them yearn for change. Organizations routinely take
actions that nary a single person within the organization agrees with.
It is necessary to disrupt these institutions, the habits they induce,
and the stories on which they rest.

And! And, we must be careful in our disruption not to conform to even
deeper stories that underlie our civilization; for example, the story
of us versus them. Ours is a revolution of love. We seek to disrupt
the dance of the oppressor and the oppressed, and enter into a new
dance together. We look at each person, whatever their role, and know
that I would do as you do, my brother, my sister, if I were in your
shoes. We appreciate the impossible pressures those in power face –
that anyone in a position of any privilege faces – in striving to
reconcile their humanity with their position. We don’t castigate or
vilify them, just as we don’t indulge in self-hate over the conflict
minerals in our smart phones. We make our disruptions as an offering.
If the offering is declined, we do not say, “What’s wrong with them?”
We do not inhabit the smugness of thinking that if we were they, we
would have done differently. Instead we see the response as a message,
a temperature reading that reveals both the state of the public and
the state of ourselves that the public mirrors. Integrating this
information, the next step becomes clear. We are on a mapless trek,
each step becoming visible only after the last has been taken. This is
true whether or not the disruption is successful at bringing change;
either way, we are entering the territory of We Don’t Know.

(...)
"

Fabio