Society – The Fullfilment Project

Art Is I; Science Is We

This is a quote by Claude Bernard, a French Scientist, and it reflects the two modes of being human; to create individually for the purposes of creating is Art; to create individually or together for the collective good is Science. For me the best Art blurs the line between these two, because some Art changes society.

Art can also be how you live your life, how you interact with people. Leaving a person uplifted after your interaction with them is Art. Solving a person’s problem in the way only you could is Art. It is turning an interaction, a collection of ideas, an opportunity of any kind into something that makes a life or the world better. It is creation in its best sense.

You can change the world for the better. We can change the world for the better. It does not necessarily matter which, only that the lives of others are blessed by your presence. Go be an artist my friend.

Inner And Outer Circles

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership

In the business world there is often what is referred to as an inner circle, a group of high ranking colleagues who have their own circle that the majority are kept out of. There are also examples of inner circles in other types of organisation too.

The problem with inner circles is that they create a division that casts everyone as lesser or below those in the inner circle. I guess you could say that everyone else is in the outer circle.

Any division creates conflict and there is an us and a them. Within an organisation if there is division within it, hopes of working together are reduced. The idea of a circle is a positive one though, what matters is how many people are included within it. It is better to be inclusive than exclusive. The more we include the better our society will be.

How to find fulfilment

Happiness, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

“Your soul is the power and

core of who you are.

Feed it well.”

– Anonymous

Recently I have been reflecting a lot on what is meant by fulfilment, whether it is selfish or generous to seek it. How it is that we might find fulfilment and what it actually is. As human beings, we are all unique in our likes and dislikes, our personality and our passions, our behaviours and our tendencies. So, it makes sense that fulfilment would be an individual attainment, it would not be the same for everyone.

Since February last year I have been writing this blog about fulfilment, which I call The Fullfilment Project, with Fulfilment spelt with ‘FULL’ at the beginning, to signify a full life. I have been exploring happiness and success and what they mean in relation to fulfilment and I have come to believe that for fulfilment to occur we need to have both happiness and success, which to some degree is obvious. However, many who are looking for either happiness or success, I believe, focus on unfulfilling goals, as they are misguided by our culture and unhelpful beliefs. I am not now or have I previously claimed to have figured out the way to find fulfilment, I am an explorer looking for answers by asking questions and diving into hypotheses, and I have found some conclusions along the way, which I would like to share with you in this blog post.

I have created what I call a Fullfilment Framework, pieces of the puzzle of how to live a fulfilling life. These are drawn from personal experience and meditations, as well as seeking wisdom from both secular and religious sources. Wisdom comes in many forms, but it is still wisdom. In order to live a fulfilling life, I believe we need to begin with a good foundation, which is the core of a life well lived. There are three things I think we need in our fulfilment foundation.

Firstly, we need good self-knowledge, a deep understanding of ourselves, through self-reflection, knowing our values and beliefs and being tested in difficult situations and seeing how we deal with them. Secondly, we need acquired wisdom. Self-knowledge is not enough to guide us on a fruitful path, we also need to be steeped in wisdom, from secular, philosophical and religious sources. Thirdly, we need what I call the Good Health Triad. This is focusing on building for ourselves good mental health, good physical health and good energy or Chi health. Chi is an Eastern word for the life energy that flows within us and to have good health we need good Chi. All of these things we cannot do alone, we need friendships, companionship, and sometimes professional support, we need to learn good dietary and exercise habits and ways to boost and maintain our chi, all of which are good things.

From this Foundation comes our values and beliefs, which are like a prism through which we see the world, through which we think, speak and act in the world. The next level of finding fulfilment, I think, is to find out our ‘why’, our reason for doing all that we do. It is the purpose that guides us, distilled from our values and beliefs, from our self-knowledge and acquired wisdom. It can be difficult to figure out our ‘why’ with clarity. Often, we borrow from quotations or religious and philosophical ideas. I attend a Unitarian church, which was built on the idea that each individual person has a right to explore their own theology, to search for their spiritual truth rather than be told what The Truth is. All Unitarians connect with that, which is why they gather together and attend a Unitarian church. However, for each of them this may not be their personal ‘why’, because everyone is an individual, with different histories, experiences, values and beliefs. This is why I believe it is so important for each of us to search for what we believe our purpose to be in this life. It should be our North Star that guides us through both the calm and the troubled waters of life.

“…our North Star that guides us through both

the calm and the troubled waters of life.”

Then, when we discover our ‘Why’ we must discover how we are going to bring this ‘Why’ to life in our day to day lives. This is what I call our ‘Way’. In his book, Start With Why, Simon Sinek sets out the importance of finding your ‘why’ in order to live a purposeful life. He talks about how companies also need to clearly define their ‘why’, companies such as Apple have a clearly defined Why, to empower the individual against the big system. He also gives individual examples of Martin Luther King Junior who gave the “I have a dream” speech, not the “I have a plan speech”, as Simon Sinek puts it, and the Wright Brothers, who figured out powered manned flight for the first time, working out of their bicycle shop, with the intention of changing the world with their invention.

Simon Sinek says that we need to have clarity of our why first, then we can work out ‘how’ we express this why and then finally ‘what’ we do to prove the why we have. He calls this the Golden Circle, in the centre is the Why, then next the How and on the outside of the circle is the What, and it looks a bit like a bullseye. The important point here is that our human brains work from the why to the what when making decisions. The part of the brain that is responsible for decision making and our feelings like trust and loyalty is the Limbic Brain, which has no capacity for language. This is why we more easily agree with things that match our values and beliefs, not the details and the factual information.

My personal exploration of fulfilment has led me to a phrase that has hit home for me. The phrase is “To help others find fulfilment is to fulfil what it means to be human.” When this phrase first popped into my head I dismissed it as flippant and without substance, but through further reflection and meditation on this I have come to think that it has a certain depth to it that I did not initially appreciate.

“To help others find fulfilment is to

fulfil what it means to be human.”

On an evolutionary level we have evolved to be social animals, and during caveman times there would have been some in the group hunting and gathering food while others in the group would perform other functions for the survival of the collective whole. We evolved to have what Simon Sinek describes as a circle of safety, that everyone in the tribe made sure that they were all protected from the dangers outside of the tribe, whether this be the weather, dangerous animals or the scarce food and resources. It is hard-wired into our DNA to uplift those in our tribe, whether this is our family, our team or our congregation.

To encourage us to behave in a way that supports the tribe, evolution gave us some hormones that control certain behaviours. Our bodies produce Dopamine when we make achievements, it is an incentive to progress and we get a hit of Dopamine whenever we hit a milestone or tick something off our to-do list. Our bodies produce Serotonin when we perceive that others like or respect us. Our bodies produce Oxytocin when we are with our closest friends or trusted colleagues, it is the feeling of friendship, love and deep trust. All of which feel good.

The point I am making is that we have evolved to have hormones that actively encourage us to build meaningful, deep relationships, to strive for progress and try and get the affection and respect of those we care about. In other words, to feel happy and successful, on a biological level, we need other people. We need friends and family, loved ones and people we love. These relationships are key to living a fulfilling life. There is a problem though when we actively look to get these feelings that come from these hormones in unhelpful ways. For example, when we use social media and we get a like or a notification we get a hit of Dopamine, which feels really good, so we do it more, effectively replacing people with a device.

Advertising companies tell us that we will become either happy or successful if we buy their product or service, only to be told a few months down the line that a new product or service will do the same, but neither a product or a service will make us happy, as they are invariably transient, they change or break and the happiness promised is really only excitement and joy. We are often told that the measure of success is the amount of money we have or the amount of things we own, but it really does depend on how we measure success, as individuals.

I believe that success is very much intertwined with happiness and that you cannot have one without the other. As human beings we are hardwired to strive after progress, but if we are deeply unhappy or depressed, progress is not a clear focus for us. So, you could say that we need to be happy to succeed and we need to succeed to be happy, but the success really does need to be in an area that we passionately care about, something that is in line with our values and beliefs, in line with our ‘why.’ Which is why it is so important to figure out what our ‘why’ is.

Many religious scriptures tell us that in order to be happy we must first help others be happy. I think this is partly because we are hard-wired with our hormones to feel good when we help others to be happy in their lives. Their smile makes us smile, especially if we are the cause of it. However, this comes with a warning, we must ensure that we take care of ourselves as well. If we are not careful we can spend all of our time making sure everyone else is OK and we do not look after ourselves. A balance is needed, which is why we need a good fulfilment foundation.

When it comes to success, achieving success with others feels more magnified than a solo achievement. Even athletes who take part in sports events individually could not achieve success without a coach and their loved ones supporting them. When we focus on goals that are innately selfish, like earning a large amount of money, we often sacrifice our relationships to earn the money, which is an empty success when achieved, because it brings very little happiness. But if we do it with the motivation to help others we feel great happiness when we succeed, because of the positive effect we have on others.

I am now a firm believer that both happiness and success are reciprocal, in that they are received, in part, when we give them to others. And as fulfilment is largely dependent on both happiness and success, fulfilment is reciprocal as well, but it is not something that we can go out and find, like a treasure hunt, fulfilment is a sense of being that comes from living life well, through positive relationships, a good understanding of ourselves, the wisdom of others, good health, and living in a way that brings more joy, love and peace into the world than their opposites. To help others find fulfilment is to fulfil what it means to be human.

Something to reflect on:

Whether you believe that we only get one life or not, to live deeply is to live well. cultivate positive relationships, help others when you can and strive to be your best self, so you can help other to do the same. This is a worthy goal and we need a worthy goal to live a fulfilling life.

The importance of leadership

Leadership

“Leadership is not about the next election,

it’s about the next generation.”

– Simon Sinek

Imagine a world where there was no leadership, what would it be like. There would undoubtedly be an upsurge in chaos throughout every sphere of human culture. What about good leadership? What happens when we have no good leadership? To me good leadership is about taking care of those around you as much as it is about having a vision and leading people towards that vision. If people in any organisation are not looked after, whether it be within a voluntary organisation like a church or a business with a thousand employees or more, these people will invariably become self serving and feel that they have to watch there back in fear of losing their job. Anxiety goes up, well-being goes down and eventually the organisation collapses under the strain through the self serving actions of people create splits into tribalism or the selfish actions of some cause massive detriment to others in the organisation and those outside of it as well.

Morality in leadership

The price of bad leadership is very high. Just look at what is happening in the US at the moment. Almost all of the actions President Donald Trump makes are self serving, which causes those around him to compromise on their own ethics and the office of the President, which is supposed to lead and support the people, becomes eroded. This highlights very strongly in my eyes that good leadership requires a higher morality, either taken from religious, philosophical or secular ideals. This higher morality must come from something outside of ourselves, something that is a guiding star in all decisions and actions made by a leader.

Inspiration in leadership

It is well understood that good leaders inspire others to follow them, but many leaders fall back on the default of managing those they lead rather than inspiring them. If you only manage the work of others then they will do their job but they will rarely show any brilliance in what they do, they will do the minimum and go home at the end of the day unfulfilled. A good leader creates leaders in others, they actively encourage others to strive towards an ideal that allows them to be more than they believe that they can be, because the vision laid out be the leadership demands it. This is how innovation happens, how social action happens, how people change the world for the better, through the creation of a vision of a better world.

Humility in leadership

There is a term which gets bounded around quite a bit when talking about leadership and that is ‘servant leader’. A servant leader is someone who’s primary drive is to take care of those they lead, someone who lifts people up, who builds confidence and skills in others so that they can excel at what they do. When someone is looked after by the leadership in their organisation then they will do everything they can to move that organisation forwards. This is not top-down leadership, this is ubuntu leadership. Ubuntu is a South African word that means “I am because of you.” It is absolute respect and compassion for every other human being. When this is the focus of the leadership then those they lead will feel like there organisation is more like a family than a workplace.

“Everyone who takes care of

those around them can be a leader.”

If these three things can be manifested in leadership then the world will be better for it. You might be reading this blog post and be thinking that you could not be a leader, but I would politely disagree. Everyone who takes care of those around them can be a leader. If at your workplace you make sure that everyone else is OK, if you regularly ask them how they are doing and offer them solutions to their problems you are a leader. Even if you are not in an obvious leadership role, but you look after your team and help them move forwards in what they are doing you are a leader. To be a great leader we must also have the capacity to inspire others to follow a vision of a better world and to have a strong moral compass to guide us through the tough times.

Something to reflect on:

In your life who would you consider to be a good leader and who would you consider to be a great leader? What is it that make them such a good or great leader? Are these things that you could do to become a great leader yourself? Leadership is a mindset with actions to back this mindset up. Let us lead humanity to a better place.

Stepping into the unknown

Happiness, Success

“Until you step into the unknown,

you don’t know what you’re made of.”

― Roy T. Bennett

Making choices

In life there are many avenues to go down, many paths to take, or not as the case may be. Some of these paths lead to dead ends and some to wonderful opportunities. The challenge we have is that we never know beforehand, for certain, if making a particular choice will bring a positive outcome or not. Each time we are stepping into the unknown. We can, however, as the saying goes, learn from our mistakes and use our experience to weigh up the options and make a decision. Some say we should go with our gut, with what feels right, but if this is not tempered with wisdom and experience then we will only be following our instincts, which are primed for survival, not necessarily leading a fulfilling life.

The unknown could be a new job, a new relationship, trying a new hobby or something that changes lots of things in our lives like moving to another town or city. We make these sorts of changes every day, but they still come with uncertainty and some anxiety. Each new change begins with a decision and leads to more decisions along the way. I would argue that no approach to making decisions is the best or the worst, as we each live individual lives and we are all individual people, but there are some things that can help when we are stepping into the unknown, which I will come onto in a moment.

Why do we step into the unknown?

However, first of all I would like to explore why we might feel the need to step into the unknown. It has long been part of the human spirit to push beyond our boundaries into uncharted territories. Human history is full of examples of men and women that have strived beyond the boundaries of their day to create new innovations and break records, whether this is manned powered flight or reaching the South Pole on foot.

For most of us such challenging goals are not things that we aim to do, partly because we are interested in other things and partly because we have commitments in our lives that need our attention and focus. That being said, we all have things that we are passionate about, things that we would happily do for free if time and circumstances permitted. This is the unknown territory that I want to talk about today, the venturing into the things that we are passionate about. Often, we don’t jump into our passions because we have responsibilities that we feel we must commit to or we lack the confidence to do so.

“…the past does not equal the future.”

More often than not we do not follow our passions because we have had bad experiences trying new things in the past and we think that the same thing will happen again. There is an important principle connected to this that I have recently being trying to apply in my life, which is that the past does not equal the future. A lot of people, including myself, are held back by failure, because based on past experience we expect to fail again. The problem is that we see failure as a negative thing because of our past experiences. If we accept that we will fail sometimes then we can employ all of the resources that we have to make it work and to succeed.

Not everything is instantly obtainable

We also live in a time when almost everything is instant. Whatever it is you want to buy, often there is an option to have it delivered the same day. We can do our banking on our mobile phones, we can send an email to someone and they will receive it a few seconds later, no matter where in the world they are. Innovation has made our lives a lot more convenient, but not easier. This is because we expect everything to be instant, but many of the important things in life take time and effort. For example, relationships take time and effort to become strong and durable through the ups and downs of life. It is the little moments of asking how someone’s day is going and caring about the answer, of engaging in small talk in the moments between doing other things. These things help to build strong, healthy relationships.

Too often we are spending time with people without spending time with them. I’ve seen couples in restaurants where they are both on their mobile phones and not looking at or communicating with the person they came to the restaurant with. It has become an accepted thing to do to scroll through our Facebook feed instead of making a connection with the person we are with. This has had a knock-on effect that means young people are finding it difficult to build relationships, because the social skills that are normally built up through trial and error as a child cannot be practiced if they are looking at a screen and not a person.

Failure also seems all the more magnified because if we expect something to be instantly successful, and we fall at the first hurdle, we give up. We are becoming conditioned for insecurity when we should be conditioned to fail our way to success. I guarantee that every successful person who is famous for their success has failed more times than most other people have. It is not about how many times you get knocked down, it is about how many times you keep getting up. Having this sort of mentality will enable us to stride forth into the unknown with the confidence to fail and try again.

For this to work, however, we need to have the right motivation. Wanting to be successful so that we can be rich is a motivation, but it will inevitably lead to an emptiness, because you cannot buy happiness. If, on the other hand, we want to be successful so that we can help more people live better lives, then fulfilment will be our reward. Motivation is key and it has to fit with our values and beliefs, this above all else is important, because to live a fulfilling life our thoughts, speech and actions should reflect what we value and what we believe.

Wisdom guides us

But where do our beliefs and values come from? They are manifestations from the culture and community we grow up in, the examples our parents give us and how they raised us, as well as the experiences that we have had. Through all of this input we piece together what we believe and what we value. All of this then effects the decisions that we make on a day to day basis, but I believe that if we are to make wise decisions in life then we should seek out wisdom, which can be found in any of the many religious scriptures, philosophical and secular texts from around the world. If we have wise guidelines or principles to follow, then stepping into the unknown will seem less scary. I suggest firstly analysing what is holding you back from stepping into the unknown and try to overcome it, through seeking wisdom and figuring out your beliefs and values. These things will guide you on your path. It helps to accept whatever is in front of you on your path and then figure out how to deal with it.

Something to reflect on:

Often what is holding us back is our own misguided beliefs and the baggage we carry from past experiences. Holding on to bad experiences weighs us down. Once we let them go we are more free to move forwards. This is not easy but essential if we are to live a fulfilling life.

The blessings of bordom

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success

“Boredom always precedes

a period of great creativity.”

– Robert M. Pirsig

In the age of instant food, TV and same day delivery there is very little that we have to wait for anymore. There was a time when we had to wait a whole week to see the next episode of a TV series, but now we can binge watch a whole series in one sitting if we want to. The rise in technological communication has meant that we have a world of both knowledge and entertainment accessible anytime anywhere through a variety of devices that can access the internet. So why is it that we feel the urge to reach for our mobile phones after having nothing to do for more than 30 seconds?

The rise of convenience

Part of the problem is that it has become so convenient to download and access a plethora of apps that can do almost anything you could imagine, if you can think of it then there is probably an app for it. As the app market became big business the gaps in the market began to be filled and someone built a app to fit each of these gaps, not necessarily to improve the lives of people or to better enable humanity to become our best selves, but to fill the gaps in the market. Often the apps that we can see as we scroll through the options in the Apple Store or Google Play are manifestations from the ebbs and flows of fads and popular culture, like the variety of bottle flip games for example. Convenience has become such a market commodity that the experience of having to wait for things has become a rarity.

Addiction to devices

Another part of the problem is that unwittingly we have become addicted to our mobile phones, and more specifically social media. There are a number of studies I am sure that back up the fact that more and more of us have become addicted to our mobile phones, we are never really separated from them. We use them as alarm clocks to wake us up, then we check our emails and Facebook notifications before getting out of bed, we spend time scrolling down the news feeds liking post after post, then we share some posts that we like and wait for others to like our post. Then we spend time through out the day with our heads down transfixed by our devices instead of interacting with the people we are physically ‘spending time’ with. We impatiently keep checking our Facebook posts to see how many people have liked them, refreshing our timeline every few seconds to see if the number of likes has gone up.

This is an extreme example, but many of us, including me, do some of these things on a regular basis, but we think that it is OK, as it has become the new normal in our culture. We can sit with work mates during lunch or with our friends or relatives in a restaurant and no one is talking to each other because everyone is looking at their mobile phones. People in their early 20s and younger are losing the art of conversation, it seems, because, having grown up with mobile phones from an early age they have not practiced the art of having a conversation face to face. Relationships are suffering because the skills needed to have successful relationships are practiced while awkwardly bumbling through social interactions as a teenager onward.

There is now scientific evidence that the use of mobile phones, and specifically social media, generate Dopamine in our bodies, which is one of our feel good chemicals which is also released when people drink, take drugs and gamble. Addiction to these things is really an addiction to Dopamine, and we are allowing children to have access to mobile phones and social media from a very young age, which needless to say, will not have a positive outcome. I am not saying that I am somehow above such things, I too have a mobile phone and go on social media, but I am trying to be mindful of its negative aspects so I can avoid my mobile phone ruling my life. Social media and mobile phones are tools to be used by us for the greater good, if you can see them that way.

The blessings of boredom

When I was a child I spent a lot of time climbing trees, building dens and going on ‘adventures’ with my friends and I have very few memories of being bored, because when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s we largely had to make our own fun. It was the very fact that we would have had periods of boredom that we began to invent things to do, often very creative things. I remember trying to build a zip wire in my back garden, which incidentally didn’t work, and making our own Scooby Doo style horror films with a camcorder and whatever costumes we could cobble together. Being bored is a gift that can precede the most wonderfully creative projects.

In our modern culture there seems to be an aversion to boredom, because it is uncomfortable and the marketing messages that we receive day in day out from companies trying to sell us distractions tell us that boredom is almost a sin. If we drown out our uncomfortable experiences with distractions then we are censoring our emotions, which is akin to clipping the wings of a bird. If we do not allow ourselves to experience life in it’s fullness then how can we ever learn to fly.

The problem with division

Happiness, Leadership, Success

“When fear displaces reason, the result is often irrational hatred and division.”

– Al Gore

We have all experienced division in one form or another, often in the groups of people we share our lives with, because we interact with them the most and opinions and beliefs can cause friction and division.

Division and disagreement are not the same

Having a difference of opinion is not the same as division, though in the many public spheres of society it is seen as such, especially in politics and religion, as cliche as this is. Disagreeing and division can be seen as the same thing, as if to have a point of view you have to be one extreme or another. This creates the unfortunate paradigm of a polarised society. We have seen this in the recent presidential elections in America and the confrontational tweets, comments and rants from President Trump.

We also see it in the politics in the UK, with many feeling that they have to be either Conservative or Labour supporters, and these are seen by many as polar opposites. This disagreeing in a society that appears to value, and in some cases promote, a them and us mentality has brought about a situation where there is little room for people to debate and disagree and still remain on good terms. It is definitely something that is promoted in the media and in TV programs because it improves the ratings, because, though we might not openly admit it, many of us enjoy watching other people at loggerheads. This has given rise to the era of reality TV, soap operas and gossip magazines. Rarely in these type of programs and magazines are people getting along and being nice to each other.

Division creates conflict

At the heart of every division is a conflict created by the very division itself. This begins when we are born into the world and all of our senses are jumbled up and we have not yet learned to differentiate between things. Slowly we learn to know the difference between ourselves and others, between colours and object, and this goes on until we have categorised everything so that we can understand the world and operate within it. This often then leads onto catetorising groups of people, almost as tribes, like football teams and religions groups.

Many of the great sages and prophets from the variety of world religions and philosophies from around the world have promoted the idea that we have to unlearn these categories, as they are in effect divisions which set one thing against another, such as man and nature or culture and culture or person and person. But deeper than that they promote the idea of an overall oneness to the universe that, once acknowledged, will allow us to temper our conflicts and remove them, because once the divisions are gone then so are the conflicts.

We all have a part to play

Often when we are in the middle of a conflict with someone we are offended largely because we see the conflict as the other persons fault and their responsibility to walk away or solve the conflict, because they started it. However, this is massively dis-empowering, because this leaves all of the power with the other person. In every conflict that we are apart of we have a part to play, either because we in some way contributed to the conflict by our behaviour or lack of actions, or we have a chance to end the conflict with what we choose to say and do, or not say and not do.

For example, if someone is very angry and shouting at you, putting ourselves in their shoes or asking questions and listening actively we can find out the cause of their behaviour. Often when we do this we can easily resolve the problem by focusing on the cause rather than the behaviour. Taking some responsibility in every situation gives us the power to make change in the world and help more people than we hinder. Division and conflict are things that we can all work to minimise in our lives, and as a result we can have a positive impact on the world, leaving it better than we found it.

Choosing unity or division

Happiness

“The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.”

– W. Somerset Maugham

In many areas of our lives there are divisions; between the good and the evil, the reds and the blues, parents and children, the religious and non-religious, the rich and the poor, one religion and another, one political party and another, and many more, but there are also those who strive towards unity, towards the acceptance of and respect for others. However, even with such people in the world our society is divided, in many ways. There is a lot of them and us mentality about, which makes any effort towards unity and acceptance very important, in my view. What often gets in the way of working towards unity is the human need to belong to groups. Belonging to any group automatically creates them and a us situation, which creates a division, whether small or large.

Belonging To Groups

So, what is it that makes us want to belong to a group? It happens in all walks of life, all ages, all genders. Whatever country we were born in, or religion we were born into, this too is part of our identity, whether we have left them behind or not. And I do think that we need to belong somewhere in order to fill in a piece of who we are. This could be a hobby, a football team, a religion; whatever group we choose to join the group becomes part of who we are. It tells ourselves and others that we are sporty or religious, or whatever, which is part of why, I think, we are drawn towards belonging to groups.

However, if we don’t conform to any of societies accepted groups, then we can become outsiders and the need to belong and not being accepted might leave a gap in our sense of self. I suppose whichever side of this division we fall on, whether we belong or we don’t belong, this is also a key part of our identity. Our past also inform our present, it is the context within which we understand our place in the present. Without a history, without a story, I suppose we might not have a sense of self at all.

Our Mythologies

This could be why across all of human culture there are many mythologies, stories that explain how everything came to be. These stories vary across the world, but usually place humankind either as owners or caretakers of the world or as an equal part of it. In the novel Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn, this idea is explained with humankind being labelled as Takers or Leavers. In the novel it is explained that “The premise of the Takers story is ‘the world belongs to man,’…The premise of the Leavers story is ‘man belongs to the world’.” The Takers are those who belong to the cultures of the world who might class themselves as civilized, cultures that try to subdue and control nature. Leavers are those who belong to the indigenous cultures of the world like Native American Indians and Australian Aborigines for example, that try to live in harmony with the world.

These cultural stories, these mythologies, can be a significant part of our lives, explaining how everything that exists came to be, and most importantly where we fit into the grand scheme of things. Some cultures, especially in what we call the West, are becoming secular, and our secular societies have their own story given to us by Science. This story is constantly evolving, as new discoveries are made about the world and the universe in particular, but the story still puts human beings at the top of the pecking order, so to speak, creating a division between human beings and the world.

But what of the “Leavers” in our current world? I have heard it said that Native American Indians see all living creatures as their brothers and sisters, the birds in the air, the fish in the rivers and the animals on the land are all family. All life in this regard is a family community, in need of each other. I think a lot can be learned from these indigenous people. They have a lot of wisdom that we can all benefit from, if we can see past our own cultural mythology and understand the cultural mythology of another.

“At the heart of every division is a conflict, created by the division itself.”

Generally, in our civilisation we have come to regard the world as something to be conquered, something to own. Animals being there for us to eat and hunt and breed. This is, generally, our way of seeing things. It is a perspective shared by many people around the world. Yet, dividing ourselves from anything, I think, causes more problems than it solves. At the heart of every division is a conflict, created by the division itself. The moment a division is created there is an us and a them, whichever side you are on.

Do our groups define us?

Problems occur when we see the groups we divide ourselves into as what defines us, rather than our own personal perspectives. We put our faith in the mythology, in the story that is told by our group, this then separates us from others. Even seeing ourselves as human separates us from the rest of the natural world. This “primary boundary,” as Ken Wilber puts it in his book No Boundary, is, according to him, “…that split between the seer and the seen, the knower and the known, the subject and the object. And once this primary boundary occurs, a chain of inevitable consequences follows. A host of other boundaries ensue, each being built upon its predecessor; the various levels of the spectrum exfoliate; the world as we collectively know it leaps into existence; and we become lost, amazed and enchanted, distracted and complexed, loving and loathing our universe of opposites.”

The main point that Ken Wilber makes in this book is that all boundaries are created by ourselves, in order to make sense of the world. But if these boundaries only exist in our minds, if they truly are our collective view of existence, of the world, then surely we can change how we see the world, change how we see others. We can start to see the good in others, to be grateful for their kindness, to see them as equals in this complex and beautiful world in which we live. This is no small task however, given that we have spent our whole lives learning to see the world as we do. We are very good, on the whole, at community spirit, what we need to do is make our communities bigger than our religion, our town and our country. We need to connect to those outside of the groups that we belong to. Our community is our world; it’s up to us how big that world is going to be.

Mini Reflection: Be a beacon

Mini Reflections

Light is how we see and how we navigate our world. Light is a symbol for many good things, not least a symbol of unity. Light shines upon the whole of the earth throughout its turning. It feeds the plants and trees, which feed all other living beings. Light also symbolises hope in dark places. There are many dark places in the world at the moment and we must share our light, so that others may see hope and may also see understanding, compassion and forgiveness. Together we can bring light back to the minds of those who are blinded by dark thoughts and ideologies, by being beacons for all that is good in the world, through what we do and what we say each and every day.