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Our waste, his bike
Have a look at this guy on his bike
This is probably the most curious bike you have ever seen. I had seen the chap biking through our neighborhood but never got the chance to talk to him. The bike had always caught my attention. Also the local children, including my own, had referred to this “funny and strange man with his bike”.
Today he stood in the street and I asked him how on Earth he could have made that thing? His answer was quite clear and inspiring. He found so much junk thrown away by people that he collected it and made objects out of it. Giving it a second life. This bike was entire made out of scrap materials that he had found thrown around.
Waste culture
In reality the bike was a remarkable demonstration of our waste culture which everyone complains about, no one ever seems to have contributed to and meanwhile is piling up in every corner of our environment. The bike was showing our polluting lifestyle and this man had made a rolling confrontation with our mentality.A genius!
He caught my respect and I asked him if I could take a picture? His name is Victor Sonna and originates from Cameroon. After finishing Design Academy in Eindhoven (Netherlands) he decided to stay and develop his talent further. On his website I found his personal story:
Victor Sonna:
“As a child, I had worn-down slippers for shoes. Not daring to show the holes in them to my mother, I remade these slippers into a boat, a car or an island. I invented a new context for each particular slipper, giving it a new identity. Reality and image got blurred. For me, an attribute doesn’t necessarily carry the meaning given to it by its context. Instead, an attribute ‘challenges’ me into stripping it from its obvious contextual meaning and giving it a new significance.
The transformative and regenerative power of destruction is my incentive to shake and stir up people’s minds. I do so by alienating them from their set ways and patterns and confronting them with the consequences of their actions. We need contrast, otherwise everything would be invisible. I deliberately blur the edges of my use and non-use of materials, making them flow into one another. That way, my materials and ideas get to play a new role and acquire a meaning that can be different from one person to the next!”
I can’t wait to meet him again and invite him to work together in one way or another, stirring up the mind of people and showing them that everything can be seen in various ways. Watching him on his bike and knowing now who he is and what he stands for shows how remarkable the world is if we care to open our mind to it.
I have died twice already and resurrected
A lot is being said about people who claim to be highly “something”, in relation to some degree of intelligence, special talent of gift. I too introduced terms like “being highly aware” or state of “high consciousness”. I now come across people who like to refer to themselves as “highly aware” as the next level above highly intelligent, highly talented or highly sensitive. They go into endless discussions on forums on very intellectual points of view, get bored and start looking for something else. They promote themselves to “highly aware” as if it were a career of stepping up intelligence to see if they get satisfaction in further open ended discussions, or maybe more acceptance of the propositions they suggest to their discussion partners.
I have to disappoint all these intellectuals. Awareness and consciousness is not a contest nor degree of intellect. Their is no university that can make you more or less aware and you cannot be certified in higher awareness or high consciousness by some government authority. Awareness and consciousness is a consequence of living life and reaching the highest level of “understanding” when you have to die and resurrect again. Let me try to explain.
This is not a blog about near death experiences of people who claim to have been at the gate of heaven and returned to find out that they were a different person. In a sense there are many similarities yet in the practical execution of the life after the “resurrection” there may be some significant differences. The similarity is that people adopt a servant attitude to their fellow human beings. The difference is in the way they position themselves in this new way of addressing life.
Higher, or if you please “deeper” aware people have lost their entire trusted lives at least once. What does that mean? It means that at a certain moment in time you were faced with a situation in which you had to make very intense existential choices and decisions. You volunteer to “die” in one life in order to be able “to live” another one. The choices have to do with morality of life, responsibilities or ethics, whatever this means. It is that meaning captured in the intense decision making that produces the growth in conscious awareness, a kind of awakening to some higher truths.
This implies the need to let go of a comfortable way of life to regain a piece of true life that otherwise would have disappeared or not lived. Allow me to try to explain with my own experience as example.
From international executive to “nothingness”
At one time my life consisted of traveling the world as top career executive in large global institutional firms. I had top salaries, benefits and a high status of social recognition. My work consisted in managing large groups of people in pursuit of certain institutional (financial) objectives. I had a status of multilingual, multicultural problem solver that could be expatriate to any part of the world and reorganize large groups of people.
My first wife had experienced some of such adventures with great personal difficulties. The life of an expat is exciting but that of an expat’s partner certainly a challenge of its own. She could not cope with it and asked me to move back to her home country. With my languages I could steer my career to some extend and we were indeed expatriated into her natural, cultural environment. One would expect that our lives would converge but they did not. A lot has been said about the years of trying to save our marriage but nothing seemed to work. We talked about separating but even that did not seem to be materialize.
At a certain point she got pregnant and gave birth to my first daughter (my first wife never had another child, I did). I had long cherished fatherhood and a dream came true, just not in the happy family circumstances that I had envisaged. Our daughter was however a powerful instrument for awareness building. She is a new life that needs security, warmth and care and we could only give bits and pieces of that while we struggled with our own growing up processes. In my executive position I had a lot of intellectual recognition but as a husband and father I was confused and searching for truth and awareness.
Two worlds to choose from
My expat contract got to an ending and I was asked to take the next step in my world wide career. At the time the Asian market was booming and my next position would be Singapore or Hong Kong. My wife had already said that she would not come with me which meant that I would have to leave my daughter behind too. Two worlds had opened up to me. My traditional world of intellectual recognition as a global executive that gave me status, financial security and wealth. And my new world of fatherhood with all the related responsibilities. Both worlds would drift apart by thousands of miles if I accepted the new professional position. My world of fatherhood was also conditioned by a divorce and a all kinds of legal obligations surrounding my relationship with my child. One world was intellectual, independent and gold plated , the other muddy, dirty, dependent and highly emotional. For some it would be crazy to let go of the gold, for me it was impossible to let go of my next of kin.
I choose for the emotional part and to do that I had to die in my previous life. When that happens you enter a phase of deep self pity and sorrow. In my case I had to leave behind my top wage executive position, my wife, my child, my house, my income….everything, in a foreign country, just to be left alone without anything else but myself. I had everything that a person could want to possess and had to let go of it all. My old world collapsed, my executive personality died in a process of pain and tears.
Resurrection
But at that deepest point of sorrow, when no energy is left in your body to continue crying, a light ignites as a burning fire from deep inside. A resurrection takes place, a deep trust inside of warmth and belief in oneself as the only security that is needed to proceed. An illumination captures one’s soul and the enlightening makes the world look different. The choice that has been made is the right one. Why all the having if the true purpose in life is caring? My life views changed dramatically. I had thrown off everything I had, I became nothing, yet I suddenly had everything I needed. “Everything” revealed itself to me. I got to “understand”what “meaning” meant.
It happened to me twice, with seven years in between. The first time I suffered a lot, my dying was extreme, I broke through into my new state of awareness but I got lured back into my old executive life again. I set up a business myself that grew out of proportions rapidly. I had remained close to my daughter and that had been significant, but life goes on. The second time my eyes were opened for ever. I then understood, after the message had repeated itself a second time. My higher or deeper awareness confirmed itself afterwards as I could not go back anymore into the world view of the majority of the world. I looked at things differently. I had died twice and resurrected.
My views of the human world had broadened its perspective. I started to look at the human being from an evolutionary point of view, interacting with its surroundings for sustainable progression. I could now clearly see the problems humankind faced, which was primarily humankind itself. I could see a struggling self aware species wound up in ancient greed and selfishness. I saw a species with great difficulties to let go of old securities that were going to collapse anyway in deep crises. I saw myself as if I were humankind, only 10 years earlier. My dying was predestined for humankind too. Was I aware of that now just to be able to something about it? Of course I was, not by a magical hand from God but by inner illumination and motivation to make best use of my awareness. I could not neglect my understanding and let humankind enter into collapse and death without trying something.
Sustainocracy was the result of all my experimenting ever since my resurrection. I was introducing it as something that humankind was looking for if it could stop ignoring its own frustrated, vulnerable reality and accept the need for change. The consequences if we did not would be too big. I would have to take responsibility for myself and hence for humankind. When I changed, humankind changed too.
I had to “die” twice to become aware and live my life in a different way. I created Sustainocracy to help avoid that humankind would need to “die” too to resurrect into a new chance. I am convinced that this step can be avoided when leadership is applied using people with a higher sense of awareness and a sense of responsibility. Sustainocracy is my medicine for that.
Responsibility, what is that?
In STIR we speak of “taking responsibility” for sustainable human progress, but what does that word mean? How do we differentiate between what we take responsibility for individually and what we expect from our surrounding society? And how does responsibility relate to the current crises?
Responsibility is a learning process of Awareness
Within the framework of the evolutionary development of human complexities we see that responsibility belongs to the learning process of our “To Be”. That means that it has different levels of awareness which get people to see reality in different ways as they step up their level of consciousness.
I identify 4 important levels:
1. No consciousness: a stone has no awareness and does not take any responsibility at all.
2. Awareness: Every living species has a basic degree of awareness. A tree looses its leaves in autumn to be able to survive the winter. A dog is loyal to someone who feeds it and provides protection. At this level of awareness the responsibility concentrates on survival without a second thought.
3. Self awareness: Certain species, like the human being, have the ability to be aware of themselves. This means that we can observe our own selves and reflect about our actions, making decisions as a consequence. We intent then to influence our environment for our own benefit and we reflect about the consequences or results of our own behavior and choices. We tend to take responsibility for our self interest, learning from them as we go along. We try to create security for ourselves (and our loved ones) for the short and long term. Our world evolves dynamically and interactively between our “doing things” en evolutionary “being someone”.
We also realize that we create better options when working together in communities that eventually formed societies. We see then also a level of collective awareness appear that may different from the individual. The “collective consciousness” may be seen as a business entity, a regional community like a village or city, a family, etc.
4. The higher awareness: When we reach this point of awareness we let go of the self interest and become aware of existential and universal queries that affect our daily decisions and responsibilities. We now “are” before we “do”. We see ourselves in an evolutionary process and value our interactiona within the complexity of our natural surroundings. Our reality converts itself into a personal mission of contributing something eternal to the infinite universal development of the conscience. This is a relatively unknown are of science and hence a totally new field of investigation.
More higher awareness in the world
At individual level we observe a growing amount of individuals that pass from lever 3 to level 4 awareness. This however does not mean that they can take responsibility accordingly at the same time. At individual level they can but they still need to interact with a society that is structured at a collectiev level of conciousness. The social environment of our societies does not generally surpass yet level 2, the simplest form of awareness. This is often kept this way by the self-interests of dominant people in power positions, maling people slaves to certain securities in exchange for their (democratic) loyality.
After world war II there was a temporary boost of collective awareness. This disappeared again in the 70s when fragmented self interests of greed and economic growth started to develop again individually and collectively. Still, thanks to the short boost, peace in Europe was in historic averages lengthened by decades.
Now, due to the crises, the level of collective self-awareness in certain regions is rising again, thanks often to people with a level 4 consciousness. But most people in the world live in urban concentration points of cities where self sufficiency is nearly impossible. They have a dominant dependency on the level 2 structure of the reigning society, that is insensitive to the health, safety and vulnerability of the human being. If people with a higher awareness wish to take responsibility they either have to move out of the city or enter into a confrontation with the dominant system of control and financial greed and power.
Such confrontation does not have to be aggressive at all. It can perfectly well be executed in a peaceful way through common sense and (sustainocratic) co-creation. There are always people who would block such processes out of self protection of their position of power. But there are also plenty of people in positions of power and authority that do wish to make a difference. The latter are true leaders of change.
STIR, using Sustainocracy, takes responsibility for co-creating society from a higher awareness point of view, inviting everyone to join and contribute. Professionals at a higher level of awareness may now take responsibility to transform society by transforming their institutions at the same time.
A crisis only exists for those that resist change by not taking responsibility for it from their own level of awareness and using the authroity that every individual has.
If you wish to know how it works for yourself you can attend the international seminar in Eindhoven in September 2013.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 