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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.
Europeans are not Euros – visualized
With reference to my previous blog I decided to visualize the situation of Europe by using my model of the human complexities (first published in 2008) expressed by two lines (to be + to do) crossing. These lines symbolize at their intersection the eternal conflict between our actions (to Do) and our moral ethics (to Be). This happens at individual but also at cultural and institutional levels, creating societies in cyclic situations of greed, chaos, awareness development or around wellness. In each country individual people and institutions can be in the different phases themselves yet what I show here is the dominant situation of the majority, not the minority.
Low level of ethical morality reigns throughout money driven Europe
The “saving” of countries in the chaos zone is nothing more than an attempt to pull them back into the area of institutionalized greed at the bottom right hand side. This is necessary to avoid the collapse of others in that area. It is just a matter of time for all to go down in a violent confrontation with ourselves by ending up in chaos all together. Still it is not necessary! There is another route, not by pulling back into greed but taking responsibility for wellness and sustainable human progress.
This desired European situation represents a jump along the line of ethics, responsibility and awareness. This line (To Be) consists of various levels of awareness. At the conflict crossing at the center we situate the area of self-awareness, a point where the pain of consequences are converted into knowledge and conscious understanding. We have gone through this point very often already, as individuals when we grow older and wiser through personal experiences, and as communities throughout time and the same. Chaos is often represented in society by depressions and even wars. Chaos represents a violent letting go period, painfully creating room again for renewal through awareness. Awareness often comes when the blindfold of greed and control is taken away. There is a sincere possibility that this is going to happen again, in Europe and anywhere else in the world. Enough signs are showing and can affect us at any time.
The big difference today with our past is that we can now pinpoint where we need to place society within the human complexities and act accordingly. In the past societies only knew that they collapsed or were surprised by the collapse of something else causing their own. Knowing the 4 areas in the model as a logical sequence we can also position ourselves where stability and sustainable progress occurs. This is a simple ethical choice of educated awareness. The only excuse that people can have in our current Europe is that they have not yet seen this blog. When they do, then they have no excuse anymore to make the choice and take responsibility, as an individual and as a professional. Each of us can take personal responsibility now, get educated to deal with it or we can be asked by their surroundings to do it. At first it takes guts to decide. If you do not you can be blamed in the future. What is worse? Guts now or having to give painful explanations afterwards?
A stable Europe is an educated choice of ethics and responsibility
The choice of ethics of all people involved is to let go of the Euro as the sole dominant goal and adopt European wellness as something to take responsibility for, not by creating it but by allowing it to be created by everyone together. This can only be achieved by working in purpose driven processes in which money is a means, just like anything else needed for this process. It is a choice but once the choice is made the complex process starts to make it happen, based on the new ruling of such wellness based self sufficient European society. This is where the need for a new European constitution comes in. Our current constitutions are based on managing greed and avoiding chaos. We need to work on new constitutions that develop and protect ethical awareness and co-create wellness, avoiding greed.
This cannot be done in the fragmented jobs and self interests of politicians, civil servants, business people, bankers, individual consumers, scientists, educators, etc. In our current society they interact through money based systems and dependencies. None of these institutionalized individuals can take the initiative, if they are aware at all at professional level. Professional blindness tends to rule making people incompetent to ethics and responsibilities beyond their professional position. The only one that can take responsibility is the human being itself, liberated from all previous dogmas, professional limitations and dependencies. This person, any person, on the verge of absolute material poverty in the old world, but totally free from burdens, can invite all the powerful fragmented authorities to come over to the new world together and become instrumental to it.
That is what I did when I created Sustainocracy. I invited all people whom I had made aware through my personal interaction and explanation. They were invited to take that personal choice to position themselves in the new wellness based society and come join me in purpose driven human co-creation processes. In these sustainocratic processes all fragmented responsibilities of the old world are represented together, in equality, without dependence of each other but through the authority they represent (entrepreneurial creativity, regional government, knowledge based science and education, and behavioral cultural populations). They come from a fragmented structure of self interest into a holistic environment of common purpose.
Only people who can actually take responsibility are invited to Sustainocracy, the rest follows through leadership
The city of Eindhoven and province of Noord Brabant is the first place where Sustainocracy is applied in the world of complex societies. The combination of the right people with the right ethical attitude and awareness, on the right levels of authority, were found to make it happen in AiREAS (health & environmental quality), VE2RS (self sufficiency) and other initiatives. It is first step and still far from getting the entire nation or Europe to adopt the process. But with the precedent in Eindhoven en Noord Brabant I expect that more and more will follow.
Of course, the same counts for America and China and any other area in the world.
Now that you have read this, you can choose too and take responsibility accordingly.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 