Pathways to a Better Future – Espe part 27: Life Values

“Go easy on yourself.  You are clearing thousands of years of outdated conditioning” Starlight Rose.

What if the future turns out better than you could have imagined?   “The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity” George Carlin.  The majority of humanity, spent several millennia living a life of problems and struggle, and yearning for something better and fairer.  It’s not hard to imagine we are living a metamorphosis of consciousness, just waiting for all that goo from the pupa of the conditioned human, transitioning into something wonderful and uniquely different from what went before.  We need the trauma of the past to create the wonder of the future.  We are not responsible for all the traumas that came from all that conditioning, but as spiritual gurus tell us, we are now responsible for how we now heal ourselves as individuals and collective humanity.        

A continuation of a fictional reflection by a hundred-year-old Espe from 2112 about the start and on-going movement of transformation to Sustainable Living.  I add clarification links and quotes as needed.

In 2112 we still have ‘movie’ entertainment.  It’s not Hollywood or Bollywood anymore or the fantasy building industry it once was, but we humans love to entertain and be entertained.  Hunter gatherers and pre-electronic era people loved to tell stories and saga’s and sing and dance a lot.  Before the Great Change (GC) we moved away from family and friends and used more extensive entertainment systems such as radio, television and movies, and then social media.  Today we entertain again with friends and family, and also, still make movies, or sim-real entertainment (SRE) as we call them now.   

Before the GC, we all imagined life ought to be a lot like we imagined a movie, a good final product that all moved relatively seamlessly into a story.  But few recognized it was the editorial process where the movie was made.  Before the editor got involved, all the filmed footage was extremely chaotic and disconnected – much like life seemed at the time.  There was an overall vision of the final product but it took work and a great understanding of what was ‘filmed’ by the director and their vision.  After the GC that was metaphorically what humanity did.  We took what we had learned and experienced over the millennia and made life a better version of what we envisioned a better life ought to be.  And if came from endless discussions, and dreamers everywhere telling their stories.  It came from sharing information and demanding truth and transparency – something our hierarchies before the GC would not give us.           

Neil Postman, a cultural critic during the pre-GC global society, wrote about two great writers of the twentieth century, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had tried to warn humanity.  “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us” Neil Postman.

The hierarchies before the GC used both our fear and our desires to distract us as they built their global empire. As I have said earlier, it was a razors edge of change and it could have gone either way.  One was coldly technological and the other spiritual.  I still recall my family talking about the coming transition.  In 2023, the world was experiencing an invitation to shift to a new way of living and being on this earth. A shift away from an absolute separation of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine to a balance of these energies.  I talked already about how we chose a more androgenous path, a blending of the masculine and feminine – men supported their nurturing side and women to find a path to reclaim their unique power, but without losing their sense of living within a gender.   Being a good father meant many things: protecting, producing, providing, supporting, and guiding.  But ‘father’ also meant ‘source or generative force.  Therefore, as a new global society we started seeing fathers as a figure that called for action, not simply presence.  We started to move toward centering both the masculine and feminine energies of men and women.  That’s when we start living more consciously, granting equal importance to action and presence.

For most, living before the GC was a patriarchal system that constrained men and women into hard uncompromising gender roles – more austere and authoritarian fathers and subjugated mothers.   Parenting acted as a resistance to our connection with all life.  After the GC, we attuned ourselves to the Divine Oneness of life with compassion for everything.  From that we emerged as a new global society with parenting styles that listened, comprehended the larger connections, and sought to preserve the sovereignty of life for a more harmonious and peaceful world.

Around the world, we went back to the teachings and spiritual philosophies of our ancestral roots.  It wasn’t specifically how they lived but how they thought about connections that influence their living that we needed to understand (see links, Transformation not reformation [March 2018}, and, Wisdom of our Ancestors parts 1, 2, and 3 {April 2018).  Before the GC. Much of what we value now would have been termed common decency and respect, yet such was the societal structuring of a rigid patriarchy, that while we expressed ‘manners and respect’ as valued traits, they were more enforced than freely given.  Don’t get me wrong, most people were kind, but being locked into destructive socially conditioned worldviews that existed before the GC, created the myriad global problems from which we had to spiritually evolve in order to resolve them.    

What we regained from our roots was a worldview expressing simple but a respectful set of values for living better with each other and the natural world.  That’s what formed our new global constitution – The Gaian Bill of Rights 2048 (GOBR) – (see Espe part 16).  A simple summary of these values, that resemble the wisdom of so many indigenous peoples, are:

• Honor Personal Sovereignty.  Give each person the right to their personal expression.  Honor the thoughts, desires, and words of all people. Never break them in, or make fun of them, or imitate them rudely.
• Respect all the things that are on this earth, be they people, plants or animals.
• Be tolerant of those who have lost their way. Ignorance, presumption, anger, jealousy, and greed come from a lost soul. Pray for them to find guidance.
• Find yourself, by your own means. Do not let others make your path for you. It is your path, and only yours. Others may walk with you, but no one can make your way (or walk your path) for you.
• Treat guests in your home with great consideration. Serve them the best food, give them the best bed, and treat them with respect and honor.
• Do not take what is not yours, whether from a person, a community, from the jungle or from a culture. It was not given or won. It is not yours.
• Never talk about others in a bad way. The negative energy you put into the universe will multiply when it returns to you.
• All people make mistakes. And all the mistakes can be forgiven.
• Bad thoughts cause illness to the mind, body, and spirit. Practice optimism.
• Nature is not FOR us. It is PART of us. She’s part of your family in the world.
• Children are the seeds of our future. Sow love in your hearts and water them with wisdom and life lessons. When they grow up, just give them space to grow up.
• Avoid hurting the hearts of others. The poison of their suffering will return to you.
• Be true (transparent) all the time. Honesty is the test of one’s will in this universe.
• Keep yourself balanced. Your Mental person, your Spiritual person, your Emotional person, and your Physical person: they all have the need to be strong, pure, and healthy.
• Get up with the sun to pray. Praying alone is as good as in a group.

“How do we move to a greater level of consciousness?  Simply by not reacting to our environment; by learning how to pause, self-regulate, and wait for the [stress] chemicals to settle down before we act.  This is how we outgrow victimization, judgment, competition, or the need to gossip or misrepresent someone else” Joe Dispenza.