When the footprint was first introduced early ’90’s of the 20th century it also suggested the principle of equality of all human beings on the usage of the Earth resources. In the 2001 calculations the estimates are that every human being on Earth would have the right to use 1,8 hectacres for personal use and self sufficiency.

Before that no one actually had a clue that many were keeping up their wealth against the poverty of others. The footprint made us all think! But tough to do something about it.

Prior to the extensive explosion of human population on Earth our planet gave a sense of unlimited abundance. This sense has been engraved into our genes, mentality and behavior. When we learned about the finite resources for the first time we had already irrevocable systems in place that were based on infinity rather than shortage. Looking back we now see how we even used these systems to ensure our own individual interests by monopolizing our access to all kinds of resources.

So many people started to think when acquianted with the footprint rights and its distribution across the globe:

• What right do I have to step on the footprint of someone else?
• What can I do to be self sufficient in abundance on my own share?

Other people elsewhere may have started to think?

• What right does anyone else have to use MY footprint?
• What can I do to get to use my own share for my own abundance?

This thinking is slowly meeting. Some people call for sustainable transformation, other fight for their legitimate rights. In any case the human world is about to change. We become aware, we abolish (some try to maintain) the old selfish systems and introduce new ones (which some try to block).

Science has evolved so much that we never need to feel scarcity and can have abundance for everyone on Earth. There is no need at all to step on any one’s else’s footprint, or occupying it unrightfully. We just need to let go of what we were used to and embrace with confidence and moral joy the new world of true abundance, not only in terms of material wealth but also in spiritual significance proper to the purpose of our species.

1958 was my year of birth. Looking back 52 years now I can see an evolution of the world. And I was in the middle of it when I grew up. It has been an incredible time, in hind sight as a realize now. It has made me what I am today. It has motivated me to do what I do today……..the desire to change everything! Not the past of course, but the way we conduct our lifes, organize ourselves and especially how we prepare our children for the future through education.

Looking back at my own education I realize now that the scholing that I was provided tought me how to count, read and memorize geographical locations and historic dates. It never tought me about life itself, its purpose, its complexity, its morality or beauty in relation to our universe. Spirituality was educated in a dogmatic way in church but not given attention in our education. I gradually had to find out through life itself. It took at least 43 years and many events in my life to open up my eyes to those wonderful complexities too and for the first time feel in control of my own decisions.

My eldest daughter was born in 1994. Looking back at her 16 years she sees a mismatch. She sees two divorces of her parents, her struggles to move between two cultures and systems (Spain and Holland), the aggression she suffered on the street and at school, the lack of understanding of teachers and tutors, growing up in a broken up family and a broken up society. It has motivated her to do what she does today……the desire to change everything!

I realize that for the last 9 years I became much more capacitated to support her in the complexity of her life and decisions that she had to make. Looking at her I see a person who at age of 16 is much further than I was at the age of 35. I also see that her progress has been personal, with my assistance thanks to my own deepend understanding of life, and not at all by the educational system that we offer her. On the contrary, we clash often with the system that wants her to perform in the spiritless manner that characterizes our current times. As she experiments with her life, with the development of her feelings, her own morality, her spirituality and energetic relationship with her surroundings, she is learning exponentially more than at school. She is ambitious in doing things differently, with a feel good attitude right from the beginning.

What characterizes my own situation and that of my eldest daughter, not to mention that of my youngest daughter, whose personal story is even more dramatic to tell and her attitude towards life even more motivated and strong, is the fact that LIFE educates us, the hard way. This has opened up my eyes to the need to transform also the entire educational system, bottom up.

I grew up in a post war epoque when society was being defined. In the 60’s it was a rich, warm and constructive culture, full of passion. In 1974 I moved to Spain to widness the death of the dictator Franco and widness a new epoque for the country. One of modernization, growth and wealth. Only when I came back to Holland in 2001 I felt the deterioration of society in all its magnitude. Now, in 2011, Spain is one of the weakest economies of the European Community and overall deterioration is progressing fast there as well. Italy is in bad shape too and so is the rest of Europe.

When I look back I can now see clearly how I was utilized by multinationals and later government as a marionet in a game. I had been educated to perform a show, to become a puppet in the hands of materialistic dictators. My personal identity was intented to be shaped to the benefit of my masters or instructors. I was general manager but could not manage. I was asked to execute commands and not to produce opposition. I was deprived of my identity in exchange of temporary status. I was ordered just to do, not to be, let alone to think!

Only when my personal life got into severe problems I broke through this situation. I was deprived of every hierarchical position and financial power and found ….. myself. It was quite a discovery and I am so happy that I discovered myself for it changed my life. I learned that my life was worth much more than the emptiness of having to contribute to a systemized economy of scale of a wrong focus and organization of humanity. Blindly contributing to the destruction of our interhuman relationships, family bonds and our environment, simply because it is commanded and legalized by our so called leaders, is against my evolutionary nature as member of a species that is supposed to be intelligent.

The question I ask myself is how my 16 year old daughter experiences this evolution? She has grown up in the cold, individualistic and aggressive materialistic, global society. She has access to global information through internet. She receives public education, compulsory, that concentrates on making her a robot to serve the old system that she and I want to abolish. We want her to discover her personal identity and conduct a significant, purposeful life of her own choice. I do not want her to be a robot in a system, a number in society. She has the evolutionary right to BE.

Together we have had clashes with the present educational system. We have tried to figure out how a youngster, a teenager, conducts her life using her past and perception of the future. What education system fills her with purpose and guidance for a sustainable future? There is none, yet. She is fighting for a future by and for herself, not helped but opposed, even threatend by an obsolete education system.

The system wants the children to learn the tricks and trade of a materialistic society, focussed on working a life time to be able to consume continuously. They are tought to behave inside a system, to accept and not question (capitalist) leadership. What the children are not taught is how to deal with their feelings, their joy and anger, their greed and care, friendship and jealosy, skin colors and different cultural behaviors, environmental balance, interpersonal relationships, spirituality, universal energy, the untouchables of life, the morality of our decision, responsibility and self leadership.

Children grow up indocutrinated that they have to work, pay tax and learn how to count. Creativity, art, sport or spirituality is secondary or not existent at all. The consequences are that aggression florishes when people cannot cope with the high productivity demands of society, or when they develop psychological disorders due to lack of purpose or personal identity. Each life becomes standard through categorization and bureaucratization within the system. The system leads through standards allowing little or no progress. People are robots to sustain the system not intellectual aware identities active to contribute to the positive evolution of our species.

In the City of Tomorrow (STIR Foundation) Nicolette Meeder is studying the phenomena and concluded that the Dutch society invests now up to 4 times more money in social security for socially handicapped people than in the entire system for education. Instead of educating our children to become the entrepreneurs of their own lives, to take responsibility and contribute through freedom, entrepreneurship, authenticity and vision, we condition them for an obsolete system.

This needs to change dramatically, but to do so we need to question society entirely. The hierarchy and power of money based economies are crumbling, even though they struggle and fight to stay. In the base of society a new economy emerges, the economy of values. Our children are demanding from us, their parents and adult guides, to build the base of such new world order in which they can find personal warmth and care, security, health and vitality. A world in which they can freely experiment with feelings and energetic connectivity among eachother and the universal powers that surround us. A world where they can lead a purposeful life of their own.

That is the basis of the new education we wish to introduce at all levels of society, right from the basics of primary education all the way up to university programs, MBA’s, and teaching the teachers. We will work together with all those people and programs that share this vision and are willing to join in a network community to accelerate the progress.

Jean-Paul Close, president of the STIR foundation, the Netherlands.

It is nearly two years ago when I got my own enlightenment to draw our material and moral development as two crossing lines. I wrote a book about it (in Dutch “Geheimen van echte Welvaart”) which of course has been my worst selling book ever ;-). Who cares about morality these days? Yet, one of the readers immediately saw enough material for a nomination for the Nobel price for Peace, not now but maybe in ten or twenty years time. It made me laugh.

I laughed because my book was a spiritual and professional semi-autobiography based on my personal awareness enriched by spontaneous illuminations in the process, normally at night while in the twilight of near sleep or near awakening. It had nothing academic, nothing scientific, but surely a personal message for humankind, and especially entrepreneurship.

Two years have past since that mid night eye opener I had on the crossed lines and many times they have been used now to explain the evolution of human beings and their social, business, personal or political interaction. It is being used to explain business strategies, evolution of countries and dynasties, and even the present global shift. Above all the crossed lines are being used to understand ourselves!

Deeper and deeper we dig into our insight and awareness as globalization of our current human organization reaches boiling point after boiling point. Even that the model shows and still we try to fight our way back our way up against the current, trying to avoid the unavoidable collapse and chaos. We lack the “science of awareness”.

For at least half a million years the human being has been struggling between her material and moral evolution. We could not keep pace and kept falling back into disaster after periods of wealth. We have been confronted for millenia with ourselves and our quest to understand, but to understand what? There are two things that need to be understood: the touchable and the untouchable.

Understanding the touchable: We call this “science”. The touchable can be accounted for as it can be counted, measured, visualized and described. It can also be reproduced. We can count the amount of people in a country, the electricity consumption, the atoms in an element, the genes of a species, the amount of stars in the sky, etc. We can study this to the immenseness of the universe and the minuteness of the smallest particals or elements.

We have based our science on the touchables and created another touchable, called money. We want to “understand” our physical world and created over time a humankind that is very much focussed on controlling in one way or another this physical world. Science has helped business by inventing cheaper resources, faster transportation systems, hierarchies over other people, miniaturizing technologies to nano-level, space travel, internet and mobile communication infrastructures. Science has stimulated political organizations to build economies and power positions around material productivity and purchasing power of all civilians.

We have concentrated our investigation, intelligence and science on our greed, not only to have but also to control, as a person, a business and as a society. We have become obsessed by science as an instrument, not only for our understanding but as a servant to our greed. We have gone to great length and depth to “understand” that part of our existence.

Now we realize (hopefully not too late) that this is not the only side of the medal of human historic and unique existence.

Understanding the untouchable: When we talk about the untouchable we become weak, we do not grasp the significance at our present (material) state of mind. It is easy to think of the solar energy that makes life possible at all. We may consider the winds and water currents that spread life (and death) across the earth. We may even start asking ourselves the significance of love, friendship, hate, marriage, religion, trust? Some even go beyond and ask about humanity, planet earth, the universe?

When we get into such domain we feel insecure. We lack “intelligence”. We even fear the word “spirituality”, the science of our conscience. It is easy to grasp back to the touchable, the accountable and avoid the untouchable. So much has been discovered in the touchable world that the average human being is happy, especially if this touchable world can be possessed and accounted for. “Having” is power in such touchable world.

Now we enter the untouchable world, the world of energies, flows, unpredictables, interaction and competition. It is the universal world of what we as humans perceive as chaos, yet it has been there for billions of years, survived meteorite impacts, volcanoes, dinosaurs, etc. Why should it not survive “the human being”?

“Action = Reaction” has been a basic law adopted by all of us, for whatever reason. It is an equation for ever lasting balance. It seems simple but it is in fact extremely difficult. It addressed human intellect to the full in a quest to destruction or sustainable progress. What it really means is that whatever changes (no matter how minute) we make we provoke necessary changes elsewhere to re-establish balance. Those changes are not always and mostly not under human control.

We are, like it or not, part of a larger organization.

So if human kind, in all its abundant presence on the globe (6.7 billion people now and growing), work to a degree of material wellness that some territories have enjoyed for decades, it will have consequences somewhere. Here we enter the field of the “untouchable”. Where do the consequences appear? Do they affect us intimately and directly or someone/thing else in the unknow?

The very first human “untouchable” is the deteriorating relationship between countries that want to defend their own wealth. Another one is that people realize that they have become slaves of human power systems that are difficult to break out of. We do not even control them in any way.

And we become aware that we do not even know anymore how to climb the human barricades. We feel controlled and managed by government.

We suddenly become aware that we know nothing anymore about true interpersonal relationships, ie that are not based on material interests, but on kindness, love and care. We realize that our behavior is putting ourselves at danger.

We become aware that we need to enter a new era, the era of insight an awareness. This era is as important as the scientific era we no leave behind, we have enough, we need to assimilate now.

What science did to our material progress does insight and awareness to our spiritual development. One day both will consciously line up and provide sustainable progress to the human kind.