In consideration of giving birth to the new think tank, The Circle for Original Thinking, I set out to answer the question:
What is the problem or need your organization is trying to address?
Today’s society is largely adrift in a false sense of security that all is getting better and better through technological advancement. What is really occurring, continuing from the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution mentality, is a vain attempt to conquer Mother Nature: the giver and sustainer of all life.
We march forward, believing that we alone are the accumulators of information and knowledge, dismissing any other talents and abilities as “instinct.” We march forward, thinking that the future is ours alone to seize— to direct—to conquer. We march forward, thinking that the wisdom of the past is no longer relevant. We have too rarely questioned our path, for our inventions have improved our creature comforts and our economic standard of living. But as we focus on moving forward, something from our past has been left behind—something that we were never intended to forget.
We have lost the very essence of what it means to be human in relationship with the rest of creation. We have lost our connection to all of life through isolating our thoughts and actions from the source that sustains us. In the end, this is folly.
We must remember that the true origin of our thoughts, our bodies, and our hearts is in the heart of nature. We are in the cosmos and the cosmos is in us; all of our life and intelligence is only a product of a living, intelligent cosmos. We are alive because the light, air, water, and earth that gives us life is alive. To realize this is to feel immense gratitude for the Great Mystery, for all there is.
What happens when we forget to feel gratitude for all the bounty that nature provides us? We operate from fear, from a sense of scarcity and lack that propels us to cordon off the earth’s resources for ourselves—human over animal, plant, or mineral—and sometimes human over other humans. We forget to look for intelligence in all of nature and believe instead that we alone are the knowers—the homo sapiens, “wise, judicious ones.”
In truth, we have made a grave error in consciously choosing to base our decision-making almost exclusively upon what benefits the lot of humanity. Humankind can only thrive when all of nature thrives. To think otherwise is to facilitate our own destruction along with countless other species. This is a process well underway, but this process can be reversed with conscious awareness of the interconnection of our hearts, thoughts, and actions.
Not everything we do is wrong or misguided. The impulse to penetrate to the heart of a particular issue is an aspect of the Sacred Masculine, as is the impulse to initiate an outward path of focused mission and tangible results. Unfortunately, the Sacred Masculine has become ungrounded and unfettered in its reach. What began as a hero’s journey—once understood to always necessitate a return—has instead become a one way direction. This one-way journey is mistakenly called “progress” when it is really distance from the origin.
It is now time for the Sacred masculine principle to be regrounded in the wisdom of the Sacred Feminine principle of life-giving wholeness. If this occurs, the actions of humans will once again be based in the divine inspiration of our ancestors—what was once referred to as our original instructions for how to live on the planet in harmony with the rest of creation. When the Sacred Masculine is grounded in the Sacred Feminine, wise actions ensue—actions that are taken with respect for all. It is only then that human beings will have earned our self-appointed title of homo-sapiens.