I am a big fan of Marc Gafni’s teaching. He presents a leading edge approach to human enlightening. He currently has a new 10-session tele-course underway, and after participating in the first session past Wednesday, I know it will be wonderful. The course meets online continuing Wednesdays at 6:00pm PST. Registration is still open, and you can download any sessions you that you miss. Here’s Marc:

Hi Friend,

I could not be more excited to invite you to join us for the Awakening Your Unique Self course. I want to take this opportunity to share with you —at least in part— why this course can change your life.

I want to link together two ideas: outrageous love and awakening to your unique self. We will go deeper into this in the course, but I want share this preview.

To awaken to your Unique Self is to be Lived by Love. It is the way to access all of the joy, depth, delight and profoundly powerful meaning and purpose that comes only from glimpsing Your Awakened Unique Self.

It is also the way to make yourself a beneficial presence on this planet right now which will change the very core of way you experience reality.

It is the way to make your life a gift to “all that is” and it is precisely what will naturally cause “all that is” to shower you with gifts of all kinds in return.

Let me try and go even deeper into this with you for a few minutes.

We live in a world of outrageous pain. Boston, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Congo, Kenya, Jerusalem, Manhattan, Bangladesh. Outrageous pain is everywhere.

The only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love.

There is an outrageous act of love that the worlds needs from You. No one else but You is capable of addressing that unique corner of Un-Love and healing it into Love.

The world is going to break your heart. The world is outrageously painful. There is outrageous betrayal. Outrageous heartbreak. Loneliness beyond imagination. 20 million children dying a year of hunger or hunger related diseases when there is enough food to feed every child four times over. There are seventeen million slaves in the world today. The world is outrageous.

The only way to respond to the outrageous pain is to commit acts of outrageous, audacious joy and love. Every time your hearts breaks it also opens more deeply. More pain can enter your heart and more outrageous love action can come from within your heart.

When your heart opens you are filled with the powerful energy of outrageous love that makes you more whole. When you let your heart break you do not become broken. You become more whole. There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.

To be outrageous doesn’t mean to break inappropriate boundaries. The outrageous lover keeps every sacred boundary that should be kept and breaks every boundary of smallness and contraction that desperately yearns to be broken.

To be an outrageous lover does not mean to be insane. The only insanity is the belief that you are separate from the whole – small and impotent. Outrageous love is the only possible path of sanity.

It is insane for children to die hungry when there is food for them to eat. It is insane for human beings to murder each other in order to cover up the fear of death. Awakening to outrageous love, to the knowing that you are part of the whole, that you are a unique expression of greatness, that you are powerful beyond measure, is the only sanity.

The path of outrageous love is the path of Your Unique Self.

To live Your Unique Self is to walk the path of the Outrageous Lover.

That is what it means to be a Unique Self.

You are a Unique Self! This is the simple and powerful truth of your life.

What does that mean?

To be a Unique Self is to realize that you are a unique expression of the LOVE INTELLIGENCE and LOVE BEAUTY that initiated and animates all that is.

You are Love’s Verb.

Your Unique Self is Love’s Verb.

You are an Outrageous Love Letter from infinity to our world with a Unique Love Language that can only be spoken by You.

Reality needs You to Commit Outrageous Acts of Love that no one but You is capable of doing.

God needs Your service. Your Deed is God’s Need. Reality’s Need.

God waits for You to partner with him/her in the way of outrageous love.

Reality itself is God’s outrageous love letter.

The unmanifest becomes manifest in order to love.

Your life is love in action.

To awaken into your Unique Self is to be LIVED BY LOVE.

It is for this reason that I know that there is nothing more important to do in this lifetime than to Awaken to Your Unique Self.

That is the purpose of our time together. I’m so excited. There is nothing I would rather be doing.

In Outrageous Love,

Dr. Marc Gafni

Registration is still open, and you can download any sessions you that you miss.

Happy Leonardo Day, April 15, 2013. GIFTing has been activated at The Gifting Earth. It is now fully operational. Members can now begin helping each other with gifting and sharing.

The Gifting Earth — Why-How-What

WHY

We humans are really one people—the human people. We share one earth—we breathe one air—we drink one water.

We humans need each other—sometimes I will need your help, and sometimes you will need mine.

The truth of our human oneness means that we are an interdependent species—we are at our best when we work together and trust each other.

HOW

The Gifting Earth is based on only one rule: Be Love.

If you choose to Be Love then you can only Do Good, and if you only Do Good, you will discover that your community will so value you that it will insure that you Have Everything you need and want.

WHAT

The Gifting Earth is a free community website that enables its users to easily help and be helped through the gifting and sharing of: Goods, Services, Knowledge, and Compassion.

Goods are THINGS: Any material object that has value. Services are ACTIONS: Projects, Labor (skilled and unskilled), Jobs and Tasks. Knowledge is KNOWING: Expertise, Consultations, Counseling, and Advise. And, Compassion is KINDNESS: Empathy, Sympathy, Love, and Support.

So it’s easy really, just Be Love, Do Good, and Have Everything.

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Getting Started

Imagine a world where Co-Operation has replaced Market — a world where GIFTors and GIFTees have replaced sellers and buyers.

When you become a member of The Gifting Earth (TGE), you will always have a dual role. You will be both a GIFTor and a GIFTee. In your role as a GIFTor, you will register your offer of GIFTS to others within the community. In your role as a GIFTee, you will also register your NEEDS for what you would like to receive as gifts from other members within the community. Gifts can be Goods, Services, Knowledge, or Compassion.

The GIFTor is always the ACTive partner in a gifting encounter. GIVING is a verb. The role of GIFTee is always the passive partner in a gifting encounter. Receiving is passive. A GIFT is a noun.

As a GIFTee, your list of NEEDS is available to all GIFTors. Those GIFTors who have GIFTs that match your NEEDS can make you an OFFER of Help.

Also as a GIFTee, the list of all GIFTS being offered is available to you. You can request a particular GIFT that you think might meet your needs. The GIFTor offering that GIFT will be notified that you are interested in receiving their GIFT. They will then have the opportunity to look at your membership history, profile, and comments made about your previous gifting exchanges. They are free to offer or decline to offer their GIFT to you.

As a GIFTor, you decide when, where, and to whom you will offer your GIFT. All GIFTing is voluntary. As a GIFTee, you will be notified when an offer of a GIFT has been made to you, then you will have the opportunity to take a more careful look at a description of the offered GIFT, and the history, profile, comments about the GIFTor offering the GIFT. You may accept or decline the offered GIFT. All receiving of GIFTs is voluntary. Once a GIFTor and GIFTee agree to a gifting encounter, they are provided with each others contact information so they can connect and make the exchange in the real world.

The only information that is public in the system is your name, home town and state. You have complete control over who sees your email address, your street address, and your telephone number. This private information will be given by you to those whose help you decide to accept. And, you will need similar information from those who desire your help. We are moving from Market to Co-Operation. We understand that we are INTERdependent. Sometimes I will need your help, and sometimes you will need my help. Our relationships with each other will be personal and caring. Personal and caring relationships are not anonymous.

Once the gifting is concluded, both GIFTor and GIFTee rate the gifting experience from one to five stars, and may add a paragraph of text in a comment field. This becomes a part of a both members’ exchange histories.

While GIFTing can be global, regional, or local, many GIFTs are only available locally. Since this is the initial launch of TGE, you may be the first in your community to join. And, so to increase the opportunity for helping others, and for getting help from others, you will want to invite others in your local community to join us here at TGE.

To learn more go here.

The Gifting Earth is now open for charter membership.

How does it work?

Timothy Wilken, MD

The Gifting Earth is a free online system that enables its members to help each other through the gifting and sharing of: Goods, Services, Knowledge, and Compassion.

I am a synergic scientist. The word synergy derives from two Greek roots: erg meaning “to work,” and syn meaning “together;” hence, the term synergy simply means “working together.” Synergic science is the study of working together. It is a relatively new science, but it has produced a powerful new understanding of human behavior and of human organization. Synergic science reveals a relatively simple solution to our present human difficulties. That solution requires that we work together and act responsibly.

One of the discoveries of synergic science is that the best organizations – the most efficient, the most productive and those wherein the members are the most happy – are those organizations where the participants have win-win relationships with each other.

From synergic science, a tensegrity is the pattern that results when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other. The pull is continuous and the push is discontinuous. The continuous pull is balanced by the discontinuous push producing an integrity of tension and compression. This creates a powerful self-stabilizing system.

We humans have needs that are continuously pulling on us to be met. To meet these needs we or an other, working on our behalf, must take actions to meet these needs. While our needs continuously pull on us, actions are the discontinuous pushes to meet those needs.

Humans as the INTERdependent class of life can have positive relationships with each other. We can form a gifting tensegrity, where we are continuously being helped, and where we are discontinuously helping others. Needs are continuously pulling on us. Gifts are the actions of others which are offered as the discontinuous pushes to meet our needs.

For convenience, We can combine the two terms ‘gifting’ and ‘tensegrity’ into a shorter term GIFTegrity. The GIFTegrity is a newly invented mechanism for the the gifting and sharing of human help.

GIFTegrity is the engine that powers The Gifting Earth. Let us begin by describing how a GIFTegrity is structured and how it works. Every member of a GIFTegrity community would participate in two roles – as a GIFTor and as a GIFTee. Every member participates by both gifting help to others and by receiving help from others. The continuous pull of the GIFTees’ needs are balanced by the discontinuous push from the GIFTors’ offers of help. Again we see as an INTERdependent life form, there will be times when we will help others and times when others will help us.

 

You help. Others help. You help others. Others help you. You help others help you. Others help you help others. You help others help you help others. Others help you help others help you.

A GIFTegrity works on trust, generosity and gratitude. I give help to those in need and trust that when I am in need there will be those who will give me help.

Can I trust you? When we use the word trust, it usually means can I rely on you not to hurt me.

Synergic Trust is a larger term. It includes ordinary trust, so I can rely on you not to hurt me, but it also means that I can rely on you to help me.

Synergic Trust was discovered long ago, and was once known as: The Spiritual Principle Of Giving And Receiving“When we give to one another, freely and without conditions, sharing our blessings with others and bearing each other’s burdens, the giving multiplies and we receive far more than what was given. Even when there is no immediate prospect of return, Heaven keeps accounts of giving, and in the end blessing will return to the giver, multiplied manyfold. We must give first; to expect to receive without having given is to violate the universal law. On the other hand, giving in order to receive — with strings attached, with the intention of currying favor, or in order to make a name for oneself — is condemned.”

And while, The Spiritual Principle of Giving and Receiving relies on “Heaven to keep account of giving,” a GIFTegrity relies on a public database to keep account of giving and receiving. This database of the history of gifting is a public space where the gifting events are made visible to all members who are participants in good standing.

Imagine a world where Co-Operation has replaced Market — a world where GIFTors and GIFTees have replaced sellers and buyers. We are all familiar with Market and our dual role in Market as Sellers and Buyers.

Market requires money. To get money, most of us sell the hours of our lives to employers. Our employers then make some product with our help, which they then sell to buyers for money. So in the world of Market, the participants are both sellers and buyers. You have to sell something first to get money, if you don’t have money, you can’t buy anything.

When you become a member of The Gifting Earth (TGE), you enter into the world of co-Operation, here you also have a dual role. You will be both a GIFTor and a GIFTee. You will post the Gifts you would like give or share with other members of the community in your role as a GIFTor. You will also post the Needs you would like to receive or borrow from other members of the community in your role as a GIFTee.

What you might gift or share

Almost any good or service can be gifted or shared on TGE. Our database is organized into four general classes of Gifts and Needs.

1) Goods – THINGS: Any material object that has value. This would include: tools, appliances, electronics, computers, telephones, equipment of any kind, lawnmowers, house furniture, household goods, furnishings, materials, supplies, foods and even large things like automobiles, or houses. Any material object that is of value can provide some good to the user, hence the term goods.

You can give Goods away fully or only gift the use of them for a specified time. Location is very important for the gift of using a tool or appliance, perhaps less important if the item is given away fully.

Things that are gifted can be new or used. Working or not working. The important thing is to describe the offered gift accurately. A television repairman might like the gift of an old TV, that he will repair and use or gift to someone else. So your description of an offered gift needs to be very accurate. No one will be criticized for gifting junk as long as they describe it accurately as junk. Those seeking junk will be happy. Remember one person’s junk is another person’s treasure.

2) Services – ACTIONS: Projects, Labor (skilled and unskilled), Jobs and Tasks. This could be as simple as baby sitting, or giving someone a ride to as complex as building a room on someone’s house or writing a custom software program, etc., etc., etc.. It could be a million and one different forms of helping provided by humans in action. Location is very important. Many services would only available locally.

3) Knowledge – KNOWING: Expertise, Consultations, Counseling, and Advise. Those humans with expertise in almost any field can make that expertise available to others as a gift. Physicians, Attorneys, Accountants, Engineers, Scientists, Teachers, etc., etc., etc.. Location may be less important with telephone and internet communication. Knowing can also be available in the form or books, art, courses, online files, etc., etc., etc.. Location may be less important with telephone and internet communication.

4) Compassion – KINDNESS: Empathy, Sympathy, Love, and Support. Compassion is a very personal form of gift. It is the most human of gifts. Compassion can come in many forms. It may just be lending an ear, holding space with another, or holding someone’s hand. Those humans with experience of the difficult challenges encountered in life can share the lessons they have learned from those challenges with others as a gift. Those that have lost the most, have often learned the greatest lessons. Those that have faced Death in the form of Cancer, Major Injury or Illness, and those that have lost loved ones — children, spouses, or parents, may be best prepared to help their fellow humans who face similar challenges. Because the personal touch is so powerful with Compassion, this gift is often best given locally, but location may be less important with the growing power of internet communication — such as Skype and FaceTime.

Gifting – Local, Regional & Global

Also considerations of location are important in a GIFTegrity. Gifts and Needs may be Local, Regional or Global.

Goods and especially the use of tools will mostly be local. However, it may make sense to gift a major appliance or automobile regionally. And rarely, smaller lighter items might be shipped globally especially if they are unusual one of a kind.

Services will usually need to be local, occasionally regional, and rarely global.

Knowledge is usually available as a global, regional or local gift.

Compassion is often best gifted locally, but with the internet and modern communication devices, I can help people all over the world.

Conditional Gifting

You can gift anything with conditions. A gift is an offer of help. The GIFTee is under no obligation to accept the offer. GIFTing is fully voluntary. The GIFTor makes offers of help when and to whom he chooses. The GIFTee accepts offers of help when and from whom they choose. Conditions of gifting is both intelligent and synergic. A common example for non-local Goods might be to Gift an item with the provision that the Giftee pay the cost of shipping. Many of us have tools that we only use occasionally. If I gift the use of a tool for a weekend, I may do so with the condition that it be returned in clean and in good condition.

However some conditions are prohibited. I can’t offer a gift with the condition that you pay me. That is Market, not co-Operation. I can’t request a gift for purposes of resale. Again, that is Market, not co-Operation.

Read more on the Terms and Conditions page.

Do No Harm

Co-Operation is about working together to help ourselves and each other. Members of TGE are committed to a world where I win, you win, others win and the Earth wins. Win-Win-Win-Win.

I am prohibited from offering a gift that is harmful to others, illegal to possess, or known to be dangerous.

Read more on the Terms and Conditions page.

History of Gifting Events

As members use a GIFTegrity, their history of giving, sharing, receiving and borrowing is documented and recorded in the community space. Gifting, sharing, receiving and borrowing is transparent. It can be seen by all members of the gifting community. Your member profle shows all the gifts you have given, all the gifts you have shared, all the gifts you have received, and and all the gifts you have borrowed as well as any comments made by you and your partner’s in the gifting events. Since your Gifting event rating and comment profile is based not on the number of gifts offered, but rather on the number of gift offers accepted, it is of great importance to have a good relationship between GIFTor and GIFTee. Remember, every gifting event generates a GIFTor’s rating and comments on the GIFTee, and a GIFTee’s rating and comments on the GIFTor.

To be successful in The Gifting Earth community you need to give and interact in a positive way with other members. This means you want to accurately describe your offered gifts and make sure those accepting your gifts get what they expect from your descriptions. You also want to be courteous and friendly in your encounters. If you have an encounter that earns you a low comment from an gifting partner, you will want to repair that encounter as quickly as possible so that that gifting partner will modify or withdraw their low comment. For instance, if I gift a used computer to someone and it doesn’t work as described, I need to be willing to take it back at my expense if the GIFTee paid for shipping. Or pay for disposal and give up my credit for the gift. Remember, every gifting event effects the ratio of giving-receiving for both the GIFTor and GIFTee.

Ranking the Gifting Event

This the score awarded at the end of a gifting event by your gifting partner.

GIFTors are ranked on Communication, Generosity and Co-Operation.

COMMUNICATION: How accurate, complete and clear was the description of the offered GIFT? How timely, complete and clear were messages related to the offered Gift?

GENEROSITY: How did the GIFTor relate to the GIFTee?

CO-OPERATION: How well did the GIFTor embrace the spirit of working together? What is your overall rating for the gifting event?

5 Stars — Amazing Event
4 Stars — Great Event
3 Stars — Good Event
2 Stars — OK Event
1 Star — Neutral or Negative Event

GIFTees are ranked on Communication, Gratitude, and Co-Operation.

COMMUNICATION: How timely, complete and clear were messages related to the requested NEED?

GRATITUDE: How did the GIFTee relate to the GIFTor?

CO-OPERATION: How well did the GIFTee embrace the spirit of working together? What is your overall rating for the gifting event?

5 Stars — Amazing Event
4 Stars — Great Event
3 Stars — Good Event
2 Stars — OK Event
1 Star — Neutral or Negative Event

Getting Started

Now once a new member has completed their registration as a GIFTor-GIFTee, they will first need to offer a gift. Once you have posted an initial gift offer, then you are unrestricted in your ability to post both Gifts and Needs into the data base, the TGE software program is designed to help members sort and match Gifts of help with Needs for help.

Within a GIFTegrity, the role of GIFTor is active. The role of GIFTee is passive. The Browse page contains all active Gifts and Needs currently available. Here you can search and sort to find Gifts that might help you or Needs that you might be able to meet for others. The list of Gifts and Needs can be sorted alphabetcially, by rating scores and by distance from the users location.

Freedom of Choice in the Synergic Help Exchange

GIFTors are free to offer their gifts to any member who requests their gift. GIFTors may also offer a gift in response to a posted Need. The GIFTors are in control of their giving. Once a GIFTor selects a GIFTee to receive their offer of help, then the GIFTee is notified that an offer of help has been made to them. The GIFTee can then access the profile and gifting history of the offering GIFTor. Using this information, the GIFTee can decide whether to accept the offer of help or not.

Freedom of choice is an absolute tenant of GIFTegrity. The GIFTor decides when and to whom to offer a gift of help. The GIFTee decides when and from whom to accept a gift offer of help.

GIFTors and GIFTees get to know to each other initially by reading each other’s member profiles and Gifting event histories. The GIFTee is under no obligation to accept an offered gift. At this point the GIFTee may contact the GIFTor with questions or clarifications about the offer. If the GIFTee accepts the offer, than that action is recorded as a finalized gifting and both profiles are updated. Both GIFTor and GIFTee can make comments about the interaction then or at a later time if more appropriate. If the GIFTee declines the offer of help, the GIFTor is notified so they can offer their help to some other member of the GIFTegrity.

Gifting Event Overview for GIFTS

The chart below describes the gifting event process for Gifts. If you are giving away the gift, you are the GIFTor. If you are receiving someone else’s gift, you are the GIFTee.

1. GIFTor logs into The Gifting Earth and posts a Gift offer
2. GIFTee browses or searches the website, finds the gift and clicks “Request Gift”. (Note that more than one member may request the same gift.)
3. GIFTor selects one GIFTee (or more if there are more items available) to whom to Offer the gift.
4. GIFTee receives a notification that they have been offered the gift, and elects to accept it.
5. GIFTor receives notification that GIFTee has accepted the gift, and activates the gifting event.
6. At this point both parties receive contact info, and, if and as necessary, meet in the real world to transfer the gift to GIFTee
7. After the gifting event has occurred, both parties return to The Gifting Earth to complete and rate the gifting event
8. Once both parties have completed and rated the other’s participation, the gifting event is complete.

Gifting Event Overview for NEEDS

The chart below describes the gifting event process for Needs. If you are receiving the gift, you are the GIFTee. If you are meeting someone’s need, you are the GIFTor.

1. GIFTee logs into The Gifting Earth posting area and adds their need to the system.
2. GIFTor browses or searches the website, finds the need and clicks “Offer Gift”. (Note that more than one member may offer a gift to meet the same need.)
3. GIFTee selects one GIFTor from whom to accept the gift.
4. GIFTor receives a notification that their offer to provide a gift has been accepted, and activates the gifting event
5. At this point both parties receive contact info, and, as and if necessary, meet in the real world to complete the gifting event.
6. After the gifting event has occurred, both parties return to The Gifting Earth and complete and rate the gifting event.
7. Once both parties have completed and rated each other, the gifting event is complete.

Transparency in the GIFTegrity

To help the GIFTors decide to whom to gift to and the GIFTees decide from whom to receive a gift, The Gifting Earth documents and preserves a history of all gifting events. As both GIFTor and GIFTee, I can make my decision to select a gifting partner with benefit of the following knowledge:

1) My potential Gifting partner’s real name, hometown and home state and zip code.

2) How long they have been a member of The Gifting Earth.

3) The number of Gifts they have Given. The number of Needs they have had met.

4) Their cumulative rating for all gifting events (1 to 5 stars) awarded by their previous gifting partners.

5) Their individual ratings for each gifting event (1 to 5 stars) and the written comments by previous gifting partners related to those particular Gifting events.

6) The user profile information that potential Gifting partners have chosen to share with the gifting community.

This makes the processes within a GIFTegrity transparent and helps members make choices that result in win-win relationships.

Read the Privacy Policy

Ratio for Gifting and Receiving

Within The Gifting Earth, the total number of Gifts offered by all members should equal the total number of Needs requested by all members. If there are more Gifts offered then Needs being requested, then the excess Gifts are being wasted. If there are more Needs being requested than Gifts being offered, then some Needs are going unmet.

Ideally, within The Gifting Earth, every member will find themselves both helping others and being helped by others. Over the life of one’s membership, each member could expect to be helped by others as often as they helped others. The number of their needs being met by others would roughly equal the number of gifts that they give to others. So as a guideline, we recommend that you try to post equal numbers of gifts and needs. This is made easier by our recognition of the four classes of gifts and needs: Goods, Services, Knowledge and Compassion.

However within any real community, not all of us are equally blessed. Some of us have more and some of us have less. Jesus of Nazareth said, “That to those who much is given, much will be expected.” Those that are giving more will gain the respect and gratitude of their community. Those that are given more will be helped by the caring and generosity of their community. That which makes any part of community better makes the whole community better. When we realize that we are INTERdependent, we need each other. If I need you, whatever I do that makes you stronger is of benefit to me.

Also there will be times when I have more to give to others than I need to get from others. And, there will be times when I need to get more from others than I have to give to others. These variations within the individual patterns of giving and receiving are also normal. We each need to strive to do the best that we can.

To improve your Gifts to Needs ratio, you will need to gift more. Also, you will want to accept others gifts carefully, and only when you truly value and need them. In co-Operation, we are working together to make all of our lives better. The accumulation of things, you really don’t need or want, is best left in the world of Market.

Bringing Dead Wealth to Life

One major advantage of the GIFTegrity is that it resurrects Dead Wealth. Dead Wealth is that wealth within the human community that is not being used to help self or others. Dead Wealth is found in all four forms – Compassion, Knowing, Action and Goods.

Goods – We all have lots of perfectly good things we have in boxes in our garages, attics, and closets. Used tools, appliances, furniture, clothing, furnishings– things we never use but are too good to throw away. Now they can be easily liberated by simply describing them accurately and gifting them away. Or how about just gifting away the use of some those great tools you only use one day a week or one day a month.

Service – We all have some hours in our lives that could be available to help others. The Gift Tensegrity gives me an outlet for all of those other skills and abilities that I am not currently trading to some employer for money. Some of us can do home and automobile repair, handyman work, cleaning, cooking, sewing, child and elder care, teaching, etc., etc., etc.. Or, it might be that if we knew what help others needed, we could combine their errands with our own when we are out running around anyway. The Gift Tensegrity allows you to quickly find out how you can turn those wasted hours into help for others.

Knowledge – Almost all of us have significant expertise in some areas. Some knowledge of how to solve problems that we have encountered in our lives. However, in our present world we trade the hours of our lives to others for just enough money to earn our livings. Our employers don’t want our expertise and knowledge unless it applies to the limited task they hired us to perform. Yet in the larger context of community our unwanted expertise and knowledge could help others. The GIFTegrity gives us an outlet for sharing that expertise and knowledge. Again, this might be in the form of knowing and action joined together such as consultations, couseling, analysis and real time problem solving, or it may be available in the form of knowing and levers such as reports, books, video or audio tapes, artwork, photos, computer files, etc., etc., etc..

Compassion – And finally, all of us have benefited at some time in our lives from the gift of compassion. We know that it is often the best gift to receive and give. The GIFTegrity expands our ability to gift and receive this most special gift.

Need Help – Look First to the GIFTegrity

The GIFTegrity is a distributor of synergic help. And as INTERdependent form or life, we all need help. In a GIFTegrity, all participants win. Synergic relationships are those that make me more productive, more effective, and more happy. When I need help, this is where I will look first. In the beginning the gifting tensegrities will not instantly replace the fair market. It will begin as simple an alternative to the fair market. I will begin to meet some of my needs at the GIFTegrities. As I begin gifting and finding that some of my needs are met this way. I will have less need to sell the hours of my life for money to use in the fair market. Once I am gifting 10 hours a week.I will then be able to reduce my working week from 40 to 30 hours. This is how the transition will occur.

Out of Work – Look to the the GIFTegrity

The gifting tensegrities can be enormously important to those individuals finding themselves out of work. When there is no market for the hours of your life. There is still no shortage of people who need your help. The gifting tensegrities acts as an immediate outlet for those with help to Gift, but no market for their help to Sell. In fact the GIFTensegrity becomes a new type of insurance for all humans who are at risk for losing their jobs. In this society, that is all of us.

GIFTegrity – Not Just for Individuals

Synergic TeamNets are groups of individual humans that form themselves into Synergic Teams for the purpose of performing a larger and more complex task than they can perform as individuals. These individuals co-Operate through a network based on synergic relationships and synergic compensation mechanisms to accomplish those larger and more complex tasks. Barry Carter has written extensively about this concept in his book Infinite Wealth. And, I have developed a mechanism for organizing Synergic Production Teams called the Ortegrity which is available elsewhere. TeamNets can register with a gifting tensegrity and list the Needs of their TeamNet Project. They may be able to attract the help they need though the free synergic GIFTegrity, or they can attract help, by inviting others to join their team for Synergic Revenue Shares if the project produces revenue.

Economist Wayne F. Perg, Ph. D writes:

“My … understanding of the GIFTegrity is one of a radical move away from trade-oriented or materialistic sort of exchange.

“In the GIFTegrity there is no accounting, there are no prices, there is no barter (no tit for tat), and there is no medium of exchange! For me, it is the road to a post-monetary, post-barter economy.

“Barter and monetary economies both tie together giving and receiving. One cannot be done in the absence of the other. It is this “tying together” that is the ultimate source of “dead resources” and unemployment.

“The GIFTegrity frees giving from receiving and receiving from giving and will, as it is implemented, bring all resources to life and eliminate unemployment.

“The GIFTegrity does this by creating transparency, i.e., by creating good information on the SEPARATE giving and receiving actions of all members of the gifting tensegrity. Because there is no trading, only gifts given with no requirment of payment, there are no market prices and no accounting of trades. What there is is an open exchange of information on needs and resources available to fill those needs and ongoing individual negotiations around actions that will meet those needs.

“I see the GIFTegrity bringing the exchange relationships of a living organism to human society. As Elizabet Sahtouris has pointed out, the heart does not hold an auction for the supply of oxygenated blood and it does not withhold blood from those organs who are currently unable to pay.

“I see the GIFTegrity as a powerful new vehicle for first supplementing and then eventually replacing our present exchange economy that relies on money and barter to facilitate exchange.

“I see the GIFTegrity as a powerful step forward from money systems and barter because it separates the acts of giving and receiving whereas both money systems and barter tie giving and receiving together into formal exchange transactions. It is this tying together of giving and receiving that creates “landlocked” resources and unemployment.

“I do not see the GIFTegrity replacing informal, undocumented and recorded giving and receiving within families, groups and communities within which all participants are known to each other and within which trust is well established. In fact, I see the operation of the Gift Tensegrity increasing the number and size of the groups within which informal, undocumented giving and receiving is the norm.

“It is my understanding that, in the GIFTegrity, I do not make any commitment to giving in advance. As a giver, I have access to information on the needs of those who are seeking what I have to give, but potential receivers of my gifts have no access to me as a giver until I offer my gift to that person, organization, or community to which I decide that I would like to give.

“Also, given my big picture vision for the GIFTegrity, I see givers and receivers including organizations (including for-profit businesses) and communities as well as individuals.”

Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity

The Gifting Earth is now open for charter membership.

This essay was published in Spring 2010 issue of  Inquiring Mind. The focus of that Spring 2010 issue was addiction, but the article speaks to a much deeper human need. 

It was originally titled: The Suffering of Separation.

The Need for Community

Janet Surrey

As a psychotherapist I am continually moved by the anguish of isolation so many experience. Like fish with water, we hardly see the pervasiveness of this condition for our being in the world. Whatever we try to do to relieve this suffering—through denial of our deepest needs for connection, to materialistic pursuits, or to compulsive social or work activities—we are haunted by the “dis-ease” of separation and cannot rest and take refuge in our families or communities. The breakdown in community in the U.S. has been documented by many scholars, and the resultant loneliness and alienation are revealed in the high rates of depression, addiction, anxiety and violence. People in our society feel fundamentally separate, cut off from each other and disconnected from the natural world. We can see our isolation through the lens of the First Noble Truth, which points to the suffering of the separate self. The greater the fundamental attachment to self, the more we suffer.

Particularly in the United States, our cultural ideals support individualism, competition, denial of vulnerability and independence. Relationships are valued as supports or buttresses to the self. But like hungry ghosts we still yearn for the stability and continuity of deep community. When offered the opportunity, however, we often cannot drink fully; our thirst becomes painful and leads us to develop strategies to deny or to avoid feeling our yearnings. The problem is both external—lack of available communities—and internal—the ways we hold ourselves back from surrendering to relationships. Our default position of alienation or non-belonging is often a consequence of painful experiences that lead us to mistrust and run when the going gets rough. We run for protection toward isolation or search for new and improved relationships or communities. Yet we also seek spiritual practices and communities to restore or realign ourselves to our most fundamental condition of interconnectedness or “interbeing.”

In the early years of my own Theravadan practice, the emphasis on individual, solitary practice often seemed to me to be supporting the Western value of self-sufficiency as well as celebrating the heroic, solitary journey. We practiced together in groups for weeks but never even learned each other’s names. We sensed the underlying power of community in practice but didn’t realize this in real relationship. The practice of taking refuge in sangha seemed to be the stepchild or foundational support to practice, rather than practice itself. The solitary Buddha was the icon, even though in truth the Buddha spent very few days alone, living most of his eighty years in community.

I was later drawn to practice with Thich Nhat Hahn, who seems to intuitively understand the overwhelming suffering of isolation in the West. He emphasizes building local and worldwide communities and teaches the practice of “learning to see with Sangha eyes.” To build “good enough” communities that are not there solely to serve or support us, we need to do the work of inventing or embracing practices that support and nurture sangha, that help us to become “good enough” members of a community. Perhaps we need to add a teaching on “right relationship” to the Eightfold Path.

Two years ago at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, I heard teacher Eugene Cash offer a reordering of the Three Jewels from the usual “Buddha, Dharma, Sangha” to the new “Sangha, Dharma, Buddha.” Even though the Buddha was clear that these refuges are interdependent and co-arising, in our own rank-ordering culture, first is best, most valuable, on top. It is in this reordering that I believe the Twelve Step programs offer a profound vision and practical experience of taking refuge in the sangha.

I have a twenty-five-year-long intimate connection with living at the intersection of the Eightfold Path and the Twelve Step program. I have also worked as a professional in the addiction/recovery community and have coauthored the play “Bill W. and Dr. Bob,” the story of the relationship between the cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous. The ground-breaking discovery of these two men was that “true meeting”—one drunk coming clean to another through telling their authentic life stories to each other—could accomplish something neither drunk could do alone. It could lift them from the destructive and fatal cycle of alcoholism into sobriety and a new dimension of living.

Sobriety describes a state of being, a willingness to face reality—“life on life’s terms”—with equanimity and open-mindedness, becoming “as willing to listen as only the dying can be.” Liberation from the suffering of alcoholism through the Twelve Steps becomes possible through surrendering the separate self, that is, in taking refuge in the fellowship of other sufferers, the healing sangha. In the beginning is the “We.” Step 1 says, “We admitted that by ourselves we were powerless over alcohol.” Relinquishing the ego is essential for achieving and maintaining sobriety. The principles and practices of this surrender, including prayer and meditation, are the most powerful vehicles for taking refuge in sangha that I have experienced.

Addiction is often called a disease of isolation. You are as “sick as you are secret.” Moving out of shame and self-delusion into the light of awareness and nonseparation is essential not only for survival but for spiritual health. Sobriety depends on the learned capacity to ask for help, to admit vulnerability, and to “call before you take the first drink.” There is great and transformative power in learning to reach out to another human being when the momentum of the past and the voracious craving of addiction are calling the addict to take refuge in the substance or addictive behavior. This step, of taking refuge in fellowship and relationship, is a moment of liberation. One of the promises of the Twelve Step program is that “self-seeking will slip away.” The suggestion to reach out beyond self, to “put your ego in your back pocket,” and in the face of craving to do service and share the gift of sobriety with others, leads to the experience of release from suffering.

The fellowship of the Twelve Steps is a worldwide network of meetings and relationships. It is alive, accessible and available 24/7 through face-to-face meetings; telephones or Blackberries or Internet; and through literature, prayer and meditation. In a concrete way the fellowship can be tapped into anytime or anywhere. Isolation thus becomes a chosen state, not a pre-existing condition, not something temporarily ameliorated though a weekly sangha meeting or potluck. Our Buddhist communities could benefit from such a realized, concrete expression of community that can never be lost unless one actively or purposefully “closes the door.”

These Twelve Step relational practices represent the journey from solipsistic, delusional “relief” through addictive behavior to the light and release from suffering in the realization of nonseparation, or anatta. This relational realization is practical, teachable, simple and profound, and ultimately life-changing.

The dialectic between the Buddha’s teaching of “see for yourself” and the practice of surrendering self to refuge in sangha points ultimately to the Middle Way for us humans. On the Buddhist path this living intersection of alone and together is taught beautifully by Gregory Kramer in his “Insight Dialogue” retreats, where the seamless movement between internal practice and relational practice is investigated and realized. Any living sangha can become a doorway to the great web, which Joanna Macy describes as “the Maha Sangha of All Beings,” seen and unseen, past, present and future.

This glimpse of true interbeing can occur when the personal and collective work of confronting obstacles and practicing nonseparation is a central practice of the meditation community. This includes finding creative ways to directly address the suffering and structural divisions of race, gender, class, sexualities, etc. Many Buddhist centers are beginning to take on these issues more directly and to reflect a new level of awareness of this necessary aspect of building sangha. The new multicultural Dharma, the pioneering East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, and the people of color retreats are leading the way in this important work.

The current work of many vipassana teachers in particular is a fruit of Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s authentic commitment to community building and to reaching out to more marginalized or underserved communities. Participating in the Community Dharma Leader (CDL) program, about to begin its fourth cohort of participants, has offered the most profound vision and experience of true sangha that I have known. Resting in Buddhadharma and supported by the commitment of the leaders to practice “dissolving self and other,” my own group of ninety participants found the way to the “We.” Active engagement with diversity, practicing non-violent communication, and relational practice of the Brahmaviharas—all held in the silence and a deep commitment to living and sharing the Dharma—opened the sangha doorway.

When we first began to meet and practice together over two and a half years ago, none of us was exactly sure what “community Dharma leader” actually meant. For some it was a recognition or evolution of their leadership roles in their communities of practice; to others it was a chance to learn and commit to reaching out to new populations. For me it came to represent a new priority and practice of community Dharma. I now feel a passionate commitment to realizing and teaching this community Dharma and drawing on the practices of sangha that the Twelve Step community offers. I see this creative, unfolding refuge practice as aligned with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s call for building sangha as “communities of resistance” to the powerful forces of materialism, alienation and violence in Western culture. I feel its importance for nurturing true healing and liberation in Western psychotherapy. And I hear the voice of Thich Nhat Hanh in his evocative teaching that “the next Buddha, the Buddha of the West, will come as the sangha.”

Copyright © 2010 Inquiring Mind

Janet Surrey, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and lecturer at the Harvard Medical School, she is a founding scholar and board member at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. Dr. Surrey is a co-author of Women’s Growth in Connection and the Psychology of Peacemaking. She is co-editor of Mothering Against the Odds: Diverse Voices of Contemporary Mothers. Along with her husband, Stephen Bergman and Samuel Shem, she has co-authored the book “We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Men and Women”. Dr. Surrey is the author of numerous articles and papers. She has written and spoken widely on many topics, including gender issues, mother-daughter relationships, addictions, couples therapy, empathy, adoption, and peacemaking.

Your Unique Self and The Only Thing That Matters

Timothy Wilken, MD

I am currently reading two new books that may be among the most important books ever written to address our changing times. Even though I haven’t yet finished either book, I am so excited that I had to tell you a little bit about them.

The first is the latest book from a teacher of mine, Marc Gafni. It is called Your Unique Self. I am about half way through and am finding it to be of great value. Marc believes that enlightenment is a human behavior that is available to any human who takes the time to understand and work the process. This makes it one of the most optimistic books every written. Here is a few paragraphs from Marc‘s new book:

I have also started reading a new book by Neal Donald Walsch called The Only Thing That Matters. Here are a few paragraphs from Neale‘s new book:

Neale shares his answer to the question: What is the Only Thing That Matters?

I misunderstood, because I thought he was speaking about “what my small self desires.” Then I realized I was viewing this from the Illusion of Separation. When I shifted to viewing this from the Truth of ONEness, it made total sense, and I experienced a major Aha! moment. Marc explains this idea in a slightly different way:

Then Marc Gafni further teaches us, that we each bring our own unique perspective to answering Walsch’s question: What is the only thing that matters?

What ONE desires is that our Unique Gift be shared. Everyone’s Unique Gift is necessary to make things better for all of us.

Our unique perspective helps us remember, recover, and retrieve our unique gift that we are here to share with all our brothers and sisters. Elsewhere Marc has explained this:

Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self at Amazon or fine book stores everywhere.

Neale Donald Walsh’s The Only Thing That Matters at Amazon or fine book stores everwhere.

If John Lennon were living today, he might have written one more verse for his song “Imagine” …

. . .

Imagine there’s no market

It’s not hard if you try

No advertisements, no commercials

Nothing to sell or buy

Imagine all the people

Helping others, in each and every way

. . .

You may say I’m a dreamer,

But I’m not the only one

I hope some day you’ll join us

And the world will live as one
. . .

Imagine a community where the members freely help each other by gifting Goods, Services, Knowledge and Compassion. Where they help each other unconditionally just because they want too.

There are no exchanges. No bartering. No haggling. Just people helping people.  The market roles of sellers and buyers have been transformed into the co-operative roles of GIFTors and GIFTees.  Imagine a new system where every member is both a giver and a receiver of help. As a GIFTor, you meet the needs of other members with your gifts. As GIFTee, your needs are met by receiving the gifts of other members.

Our members understand that we humans are an INTERdependent species —that we depend on each other —that sometimes I will need your help, and sometimes you will need mine.

Imagine the community has a website that displays all the available gifts and all the current needs of its members for browsing and searching. It serves to connect those with gifts to those with needs, and those with needs to those with gifts.

Whenever a gift is given or a need is met, the gifting event is rated by both the GIFTor and the GIFTee. These ratings from one to five stars as well as optional written comments become a permanent part of our member profiles, and serve to inform all members in future gifting events. Within our imagined community, helping others is an open and transparent process.

When you request a gift from another member, they have the opportunity to view your membership history, profile, and read the comments made about your previous gifting events. They may or may not offer the gift to you. All gifting is voluntary.

When you are offered a gift from another member, you have the same opportunity to view their membership history, profile, and read the comments made about their previous gifting events. You may or may not accept the offered gift. All receiving of gifts is voluntary.

When both a GIFTor and GIFTee agree to a gifting event they are provided with contact information so they can meet in the real world.

This gifting process is a move from Market to Co-operation. Our relationships with each other are naturally personal, supportive, and caring. We do best when we treat each other as loving family.

Within gifting community, you will soon discover that the best strategy is to Be Love and to Do Good. Your goodness will be of such value to gifting community, that you can trust the gifting community to insure that you Have Everything you need.

WE-ness

Timothy Wilken, MD

If we are to move beyond adversity and conflict – if we are to move beyond neutrality and anonymity, then we must get to know each other. The secret of creating synergic relationship is WE-ness. Synergic relationship is close and personal. It requires trust, caring and committment. It requires honesty and openness.

Trust is not a new word for humanity. It was coined long ago when the world was first dominated by the adversary way.

Synergic Trust is more that Trust.

As children we all taught that it is better to give than to receive. Certainly, that seems like an excellent philosophy for making close relationships and living in the social world. Jesus of Nazareth is credited with saying: “It is Better To Give Than To Receive.”

My focus as a synergic scientist is on understanding how humans can relate together using structures and mechanisms that will insure that all parties to a relationship win. That means that all parties to the relationship feel they are better off with the relationship than they would be without the relationship. Each participant determines for himself whether a relationship is synergic, adversary or neutral. This is determined from his point of view, and he cannot be fooled.

We are either more happy, more effective, more productive because of the relationship; or we are less happy, less effective, less productive because of the relationship, or our happiness, effectiveness and productivity is unchanged by the relationship.

The truth is in the eye of the beholder. We can´t be fooled. However, the effect can be partial. There may be relationships that are partially synergic, and/or partially adversary, and/or partially neutral.

True synergy exists when all the participants of a relationship are more happy, more effective, and more productive. True synergy is WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN. I win, you win, others win and the Earth wins.

In today´s world, most humans use monetary exchange and the fair market to meet their needs. In this paper, I will propose a radically different mechanism that humans could use to meet their needs. I will show that our present system of monetary exchange and fair market while important in the history of our human species is now obsolete.

The mechanism of the Gift Tensegrity is derived from a number of new and old discoveries in synergic science. Synergy means working together – operating together as in Co-Operation – laboring together as in Co-Laboration – acting together as in Co-Action. The goal of synergic union is to accomplish a larger or more difficult task than can be accomplished by individuals working separately. These new and old discoveries include:

1) The Golden Rule – Help others as you would have them help you. And, do not hurt others as you would have them not hurt you.

2) Human INTERdependence – The human condition of INTERdependence means all humans need help. This is important enough that it can not be said too often. All humans need help unless they wish to live at the level of animal subsistence. INTERdependence means sometimes I depend on others and sometimes others depend on me.

Sometimes self is a giver of help. Sometimes self is a receiver of help. Sometimes other is a giver of help. Sometimes other is a receiver of help. Sometimes my actions help others meet their needs. Sometimes other´s actions help me meet my needs.

3) Tensegrity – A tensegrity is a balanced system composed of two elements – a continuous pulling balanced by discontinuous pushes. When these two forces – continuous pulling and discontinuous pushes – are in balance, a stabilized system results that is maximally strong. The larger the system the stronger the system.

The Gift Tensegrity is a new mechanism for the human exchange of goods and services. This new mechanism is radically different from the way we do things today. Nothing really effects our lives more than the way we exchange goods and services. That makes this discovery of potential interest to all humans.

“Give, and it will be given to you.”  “This is a law of life. And the more lavishingly we show kindness and concern, the richer is our life. In what manner we get back what we have given is of minor importance. The only thing that Life promises is that Life pays back all its debts to us.”

Synergic Trust means that while I can rely on you not to hurt me, I can further rely on you to help me. And, while it is safe to assume that you are not my enemy, it is further safe to assume that you are my friend. Synergic trust is much more than simply the ability to rely on the absence of a negative. It is that plus the ability to rely on the presence of a positive. Synergic trust means that I can rely on you, not only to not hurt me, but also to help me.

In the future, we humans can use co-Operation to attract help from others by insuring that those who help us are also helped.

When we co-Operate, others will seek to invest their action with ours for a share of the co-Operators’ surplus. They will understand that when we win, they will win, and they will support and celebrate our every success.

If we humans choose a synergic future, we will trust each other. We will care about each other. We will help each other. Our relationships will be loving positive experiences. We will all win. We will be more together than we can ever be apart.

We humans can create a future based on synergic trust. We can build it by working together. We can heal ourselves and our world by co-Operating. The choice is ours.

GIFTegrity Defined    Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity     Specifications for a GIFTegrity   More about Gift Economy

If you are new to synergic science, the basics are covered here: We Can All Win!(PDF) See in html: 1) Understanding Life, 2) Three Ways of Relating, 3) The Relationship Continuum, 4) Three Classes of Life, 5) Human Neutrality, 6) INTERdependence is the Human Condition, 7) What is Wealth?

Today on his The Big Picture blog, Barry Ritholtz  recommended the following article which is re-posted from ScienceDebate.org.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

Science now affects every aspect of life and is an increasingly important topic in national policymaking.  ScienceDebate.org invited thousands of scientists, engineers and concerned citizens to submit what they felt were the the most important science questions facing the nation that the candidates for president should be debating on the campaign trail.

ScienceDebate then worked with a number of the leading US science and engineering organizations to refine the questions and arrive at a universal consensus on what the most important science policy questions facing the United States are in 2012. This is their answer:

The Top American Science Questions in 2012

1. Innovation and the Economy.  Science and technology have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII, when the federal government first prioritized peacetime science mobilization. But several recent reports question America’s continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will best ensure that America remains a world leader in innovation?

2. Climate Change.  The Earth’s climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. What is your position on cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other policies proposed to address global climate change—and what steps can we take to improve our ability to tackle challenges like climate change that cross national boundaries?

3. Research and the Future.  Federally funded research has helped to produce America’s major postwar economies and to ensure our national security, but today the UK, Singapore, China, and Korea are making competitive investments in research.  Given that the next Congress will face spending constraints, what priority would you give to investment in research in your upcoming budgets?

4. Pandemics and Biosecurity.  Recent experiments show how Avian flu may become transmissible among mammals. In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the United States take to protect our population from emerging diseases, global pandemics and/or deliberate biological attacks?

5. Education.  Increasingly, the global economy is driven by science, technology, engineering and math, but a recent comparison of 15-year-olds in 65 countries found that average science scores among U.S. students ranked 23rd, while average U.S. math scores ranked 31st.  In your view, why have American students fallen behind over the last three decades, and what role should the federal government play to better prepare students of all ages for the science and technology-driven global economy?

6. Energy.  Many policymakers and scientists say energy security and sustainability are major problems facing the United States this century. What policies would you support to meet the demand for energy while ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable future?

7. Food.  Thanks to science and technology, the United States has the world’s most productive and diverse agricultural sector, yet many Americans are increasingly concerned about the health and safety of our food.  The use of hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, as well as animal diseases and even terrorism pose risks.  What steps would you take to ensure the health, safety and productivity of America’s food supply?

8. Fresh Water.  Less than one percent of the world’s water is liquid fresh water, and scientific studies suggest that a majority of U.S. and global fresh water is now at risk because of increasing consumption, evaporation and pollution.  What steps, if any, should the federal government take to secure clean, abundant fresh water for all Americans?

9. The Internet.  The Internet plays a central role in both our economy and our society.  What role, if any, should the federal government play in managing the Internet to ensure its robust social, scientific, and economic role?

10. Ocean Health.  Scientists estimate that 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are in serious decline, habitats like coral reefs are threatened, and large areas of ocean and coastlines are polluted. What role should the federal government play domestically and through foreign policy to protect the environmental health and economic vitality of the oceans?

11. Science in Public Policy.  We live in an era when science and technology affect every aspect of life and society, and so must be included in well-informed public policy decisions.  How will you ensure that policy and regulatory decisions are fully informed by the best available scientific and technical information, and that the public is able to evaluate the basis of these policy decisions?

12. Space.  The United States is currently in a major discussion over our national goals in space.  What should America’s space exploration and utilization goals be in the 21st century and what steps should the government take to help achieve them?

13. Critical Natural Resources.  Supply shortages of natural resources affect economic growth, quality of life, and national security; for example China currently produces 97% of rare earth elements needed for advanced electronics.  What steps should the federal government take to ensure the quality and availability of critical natural resources?

14. Vaccination and public health.  Vaccination campaigns against preventable diseases such as measles, polio and whooping cough depend on widespread participation to be effective, but in some communities vaccination rates have fallen off sharply. What actions would you support to enforce vaccinations in the interest of public health, and in what circumstances should exemptions be allowed?

Today I feature an article about one of the contemporary masters of Sufism. It was originally published in the Journal of Human Behavior in 1977.

Grand Sheikh of the Sufis

Edwin Kiester, Jr.

Idries Shah, a worldly descendant of Mohammed, doesn’t mind being known as the leading peddler of Sufism in the West. But please don’t call him a guru. Idries Shah and I are sitting in the village pub near his country estate south of London, elbows resting on the gleaming varnished table top. After a morning of weightier subjects, we are engaged in the middle-age man lunchtime talk – exchanging military reminiscences (his of the Afghan army, mine of the American) and discussing his forthcoming trip to America. Now the waiter places before each of us a plate of cold roast beef and a pint of bitter. In the same idle-chatter vein, I ask the man who has almost single-handedly reawakened Western interest in the ancient tradition of Sufism whether Sufis follow a special diet. Three hours of talking with Shah and a generous sample of this writing should have taught me that Sufis concern themselves with internal matters, not external ones, and that a prime Sufi objective is to rid people of just the kind of preconceived notions and limited thinking I had just displayed. I should also know that ill-informed questions make Shah’s beard bristle. “A Sufi lifestyle, is it?” he asks, spacing the words out evenly for emphasis. “No, my friend, not a bit of it. That’s what people crave. That’s what they demand.

Recently another man came to interview me, and his first question was, ‘What do Sufis eat? You’re vegetarians, of course.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘You amaze me!’ he said. “I said to him, ‘Now if I can be of any use to you, write that down and see what it means. What it means is that you have been able to elicit from me a reaction which helps you to describe yourself. ‘You amaze me.’ Why do I amaze you? I amaze because you think that all metaphysicians must be vegetarians. Does that tell you anything about me? It tells you things about yourself! Now when are you going to get out of that, and learn things about yourself, and not think that you’re learning things about other people?” Shah leans forward, gesturing with the knife and fork. “We are not totemists who eat brown rice and consult the I Ching. That is not the Sufi at all, my friend. We have other things to do than have a lifestyle. We are getting on with our thing. And our thing does not impose on us the sort of restrictions which other people use as a substitute for getting on with their thing. You can either do something, or you can pretend to be doing something. “Western society seems to have exhausted all its investigative potential. It is largely composed of cul-de-sacs. One cul-de-sac is marked Lifestyle; one is marked Vegetarianism, and so on. People want to know about the Sufis in terms of what limitations they observe. ‘What do you eat for breakfast?’ ‘How many pairs of socks do you wear?’ “What is the relevance of such questions? Why don’t they ask something about what I am doing? One of our traditional functions has been to point out the limitations other people have been putting on themselves, not to impose limitations on other people. That’s what the gurus do. We seek to expand, increase vision, deepen perception. You don’t live by decreasing these qualities. “That’s why you don’t find any lifestyle with us, brother. There’s no eating of brown rice, and no muttering of Sanskrit mantras in our way.” With that, Shah turns back to the beef and the beer.

Over the past 15 years, Sayyed Idries Shah, 53, the grand sheikh of the Sufis and a lineal descendant of the prophet Mohammed, has had myriad opportunities to learn how little the West knows about Sufism – and how much it yearns to know. Since his book The Sufis was published in 1963, the lean, intense, Afghan-born prince has been propelled into international celebrity, sought on lecture platforms all over the world. Twenty more books have followed the first, and all have been bought up eagerly; Sufi “study circles” have proliferated (often without Shah’s blessing) across the United States and Europe; courses in Sufism are the “in” thing at colleges and universities; Sufi theories of learning have influenced educational institutions everywhere. Shah himself has won a host of literary prizes and recently was the subject of a festschrift, a collection of published commentaries by 24 renowned scholars discussing his work – an honor usually reserved for a professor emeritus of 70 who has been tending his scholarly vineyard for 50 years. One small sample of Shah’s impact can be seen in his recent appearance at a U.S. seminar sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge. Twelve hundred persons turned out to hear him, at $65 a pop. Ironically, the “product” Shah is “peddling” – to use his term – is anything but new. The Sufis are often called “Muslim mystics,” but their roots go much deeper than Islam. In that cradle of the world’s great religions, the Middle East, Sufi influence has been traced back to the second century B.C. and is said to have cross-fertilized Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism along with the followers of Mohammed. In the golden days of the caliphs, from A.D. 800 to 1800, many of the world’s great writers and thinkers were Sufis. They included Omar Khayyam and Jala ed-Din Rumi, considered one of the titans of the world literature; long before Einstein and Darwin, Sufis theorized that time and space were identical and that humans had ascended from lower animals. One of the West’s own great minds was a Sufi. The Franciscan Roger Bacon, considered the originator of modern scientific thought, studied with the Sufis in Saracen Spain. It was for learning their “black arts” that he ran afoul of ecclesiastical authority.

Explaining Sufism to a word-oriented, linear-thinking Westerner is difficult even for an articulate and insightful man such as Shah. “He who tastes not, knows not,” he says, quoting Jala ed-Din Rumi. Although there are said to be five million Sufis, mostly affiliated with established sects, Shah says that Sufism is “not a religion but a body of knowledge”; the sects represent a “deterioration” or “cultural elaboration of the original internal teaching.” Sufism has no rituals, no holy city and no ecclesiastical hierarchy. Although Shah carries the title grand sheikh, all Sufis are considered equal. Poet Robert Graves, a Shah admirer, compares him to a “fugleman,” which Graves defines as an old army term for the soldier who stood before a company on the parade ground and served as the exemplar in arms drill. Sufis do not even call themselves Sufis, which is a nickname akin to Quakers. They use the terms We friends or Our people.

Genuine Sufism is inward, concerning itself with “true reality – what exists beyond what is observed.” Like peeling an onion, Sufism tries to strip away the outer layers of limited thinking, misconception and social conditioning to disclose the kernel that lies beneath – that unity of existence that Shah calls “the essence of all religion.” Sufism’s goal is to reorganize human mentation so that it is more sensitive to things that are there anyway – “We say in Sufism that exclusion is just as important as inclusion,” Shah says. You can gain Sufi truths from other people and by intuition, insight, folk wisdom and experience. Long before the work on brain hemispheres of Dr. Robert E. Ornstein, the Sufis knew that part of the brain learned through words arranged in sequence and the other part by hunches and seeing the whole situation at once. Of course, over the past two decades, literally dozens of mystical, quasi-mystical and semimystical Eastern sects have invaded the West. If you really want to see Shah’s beard bristle, suggest that Sufism is part of the yoga-and-transcendental-meditation craze. “That gray area of mumbo jumbo and gurus and mantras,” he says, bitingly. “It has little connection with any tradition except the circus. In Eastern countries like India that is fairly well understood. Only the ‘new boys’ profess to see anything significant in the phenomenon. But here the carnival has taken over. We have a grotesque of the true Indian guru.” He also has a few disparaging words for Zen. “No Sufi would ever think it important to think of a phrase like, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ He would regard it as training for automatism. You could obsess people with one hand.” The Sufi has nothing in common, either, with groups that seek to withdraw from the world. “Be in the world, but not of it,” is the Sufi watchword.

When I first met Shah, he struck me as anything but the stereotype of the Eastern holy man. He greeted me in a red turtleneck sweater, glen-plaid slacks, magenta socks and calfskin sandals. He speaks Oxford-accented English with a rich vocabulary and a range of expression that is stunning in its scope; he is the only man I ever heard use the world phantasmagoria in casual conversation. As his books show, he is a gifted storyteller; but in person, his tales are even more compelling, because he acts out all the parts and mimics all the voices. Once, telling of an encounter with a Nubian student from the Sudan during a lecture, he leaped to his feet, put his hand on top of his head to represent a Nubian topknot and dropped his voice a full octave to impersonate the man’s basso.

He also leads the life of a country squire. The Shah home, Langton House at Langton Green, a tiny hamlet nestled into the Kentish countryside southeast of Tunbridge Wells, once belonged to Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement. A rambling, whitewashed, green-shuttered mansion, it is surrounded by 50 acres of gardens and pastureland and by the village green. Inside, like Shah himself, it is a subtle blend of East and West. Oriental carpets, hammered brass trays and a children’s peacock swing designed by Shah’s wife contrast with a massive desk Shah picked up in a junk shop and an IBM Selectric typewriter.

When asked how long he had kept a foot in both Eastern and Western worlds, he said, “All my life.” Although a resident of Britain for many years and a British subject, he was born in the East and groomed from boyhood for his eventual role of building bridges between cultures. The eldest son of the late Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, one of the legendary figures of contemporary Middle Eastern history, he was born near Simla in the Himalayas and was raised in Afghanistan, India and Saudi Arabia, “thus being exposed to three of the five main cultural traditions of the Middle East.” (The other two are Persian and Turkish.) He never attended school in the formal sense. “I was educated by the old oriental tradition that if I needed to learn something, someone was procured to teach it to me,” he recalls. However, his father insisted that he learn firsthand about the world. The young prince worked a year as a laborer on a farm and served a hitch in the Afghan army. As descendants of Mohammed through the prophet’s eldest son, the family carries considerable prestige through the Middle East. Their influence transcends national boundaries and mere sectarian lines. Shah’s father served as an unofficial adviser to several Middle Eastern countries, and often carried out diplomatic missions between East and West.

Often the young Shah accompanied him, gaining access to the highest ruling and spiritual levels in his part of the world. The experience stood him in good stead. Today, one of the little-known and little-discussed aspects of his life is to serve as adviser to several African and Asian governments. As Shah was growing up, he also adhered to the Sufi stricture that every Sufi must earn his own way. “We have a sense of priorities,” Shah says “To belong to the human community is essential. We say, ‘If you cannot earn your livelihood, go out and learn how and then become a Sufi.’” Shah’s education had given him a thorough grounding in literature, history and economics but no profession; he chose to enter the world of business and finance. He established three successful electronics firms, a carpet factory and a publishing house and still serves as chairperson of each. This record also gave him entrée to London financial and social circles. “Many of my sober business acquaintances would never believe I am to be bracketed with what they consider the guru phenomenon,” he says, laughing. “They know me too well to believe that.”

As Shah poured a cup of tea from a glittering heirloom tea service, I asked him how the campaign to familiarize the West with Sufi principles was faring. He lit one of his favorite small cigars before responding. “The people of the West are starving in the midst of plenty,” he began. “They have made all these discoveries about human behavior but they have not related them to their own behavior. And until they integrate this knowledge, I don’t know if we can help them. It may be 300 years before they have properly absorbed this knowledge.

“People can learn from one another which attitudes aren’t scientific, which attitudes don’t work. It’s just a question of absorption. It’s no use just reading about behavior in a paperback and then throwing it away and reaching for the next paperback, or reading to answer questions in an examination, or to torture your friends with a few gimmicks, like ‘You have an Oedipus complex’ or ‘that’s a defense mechanism.’ The potential is there,” he continued. “There’s an old Sufi story that’s relevant to that. An old traditional Sufi used to dress his disciples in patchwork cloaks and have them carry a beggar’s bowl and repeat certain formulae in order to concentrate their minds. He recommended that they eat mulberries off a certain tree.

“One day somebody said to him, ‘Suppose you went to a country where they didn’t have patchwork, and you couldn’t dress your disciples in cloaks. Suppose the seed coconut from which beggars’ bowls are traditionally made was not available. Suppose mulberries were considered unlucky and suppose these repetitions which you require were considered socially undesirable. What would you do under those circumstances?’ And he said, ‘Ah, well, if I were under those circumstances, I would have to get myself a totally different kind of disciple.”

“The challenge now is embodied in the Sufi tradition that you must teach people in the way that they can learn. The West has the requirements to learn, but nontraditional approaches – that is, nonoriental approaches – must be made.

“You have to come to certain conclusions in order to do anything at all. For example, say that you – or the community at large, or Western society – concludes that contemporary physics shows that it is unlikely or impossible that one will be able to exceed a certain velocity of travel in space, so that our galaxy is closed to us. And as we want to go farther there must be some other way discovered in order to slip through the imprisonment of these dimensions of time and space. “You, or your society, would have arrived at that conclusion through your investigations into the physical sciences. An Oriental might have arrived at an identical conclusion by some other route. But you two would be in precisely the same posture if you decided to start your further investigation by some metaphysical method or non-material method. You’d have arrived at the same jumpoff point by different routes, but you would be able to address the same sort of problem.

“That’s what I’m interested in doing in the West,” he concluded. “Or rather, in the modern Western culture that now covers so much of the world that people of my generation in the Middle East are in fact often indistinguishable from Europeans.”

According to Shah, he had dabbled in writing ever since his youth and, in fact, had produced a widely acclaimed book, Destination Mecca, in 1957; but the idea of a book on the Sufis did not take flower until he was past 40. Graves was one of those who encouraged him to “write for the natural Sufis everywhere,” but, Shah says modestly, “I did not yet feel I had the proper literary skills.” In addition, several other developments were necessary before the West was ready for a book on Eastern mysticism. The East had to live down the Rudyard Kipling view of mystics as freaky savages who slept on nails and charmed cobras; and the West had to accept that human beings were conditioned into limited ways of thinking that obscured their humanity within, rather than creatures of free will. Shah places the Korean War as a landmark. Discovering that American fliers could be “conditioned in reverse” by their captors, American social scientists were forced to acknowledge and to study the whole conditioning process. This development, Shah believes, not only explains B.F.Skinner but the revival of Pavlov. “If I had discussed how man has been conditioned away from his origins before 1950,” Shah says, “I would simply have been put into the same box with Pavlov.” A more recent impetus was given Sufism by Ornstein’s work into the bilateral specialization of the brain. For the first time, science supported the Sufi view that learning could be achieved both sequentially and holistically. “After Ornstein’s work, we were able to introduce what we were saying in a framework not available before, because there was no scientific word for it,” Shah says. “Previously we had to say that our way was not scientific, but artistic – and those words were much too loaded. Now we can talk about the left brain and the right brain and it is respectable, in the sense that people will listen to it.“It also helps us to explain by analogies derived from Ornstein’s work what happens to human thinking systems once rooted in human beings and the human community and how our way differs from – and resembles – other ways of thinking. It can be put down almost diagrammatically, and it does help a person looking into it to understand: whatever is this man talking about? Where does he place himself or what he is saying in the pattern of human thought?” When Shah began to write, he reached back into his childhood and brought forth literally hundreds of simple folk tales he had learned from servants, from village storytellers, from Persian literature and “just out of the air.”

In fact, they are so commonplace that one Turkish publisher refused to publish one of Shah’s collections, declaring, “It is unbelievable to me that anyone could make a book of nothing more than he could collect from the lips of peasants while touring the villages of Anatolia.”) Some witty, some epigrammatic, some pointed, the now famous tales are interspersed in Shah’s books with his own reflections and gathered into anthologies of their own. Many of them concern Mulla (Master) Nasrudin, a kind of Middle Eastern Everyman who is sometimes court jester, sometimes cracker-barrel philosopher, sometimes village sage and sometimes buffoon. He combines native shrewdness and insight in a way that helps him see to the heart of a situation that his more analytical “betters” cannot. He also illustrates, in exaggerated form, the kind of fallacious thinking that hobbles the more sophisticated. When asked to tell some of his favorite Nasrudin stories and to explain their role in Sufism, he offered several:

Nasrudin was throwing handfuls of bread all round his house. ‘What are you doing?’ someone asked.

“’Keeping the tigers away.’

“’But there are no tigers around here.’

“’Exactly. Effective, isn’t it?’”

Another tale recalls the time Nasrudin went into the shop of a man who sold all kinds of miscellaneous things. “Have you leather?” Nasrudin asked. “Yes.” “And nails?” “Yes.” “And dye?” “Yes.” “Then why don’t you make yourself a pair of boots?”

Once Nasrudin was called upon to preach a sermon. From the pulpit, he asked the congregation: “Do you know what I am going to preach about?” ”No,” they replied “In that case,” he said, “it would take too long to explain.” And he went home.

Next day he ascended the pulpit and asked the same question. “Yes,” the people said this time, determined to put him on the spot. “In that case,” said Nasrudin, “there is no need for me to say more.” And he went home. Yet again the following day he put the same question. “Do you know what I am going to preach about? But now the congregation was ready to corner him. “Some of us do and some of us don’t,” they answered. “In that case,” said Nasrudin, “let those who know tell those who don’t.”

Although each of these tales has a punchline, Shah explained, it also contains a teaching moral and can be examined on many levels for illumination of human behavior. Nasrudin’s sermon, for example, depicts the Sufi belief that there can be no teaching to those completely ignorant, none to those who profess to know all the answers, and that the best teaching method is when one who has learned by experience teaches another. Shah considers the tales an ideal way to communicate with the West. “One way we use them is as a sort of test,” he said. “For instance, we often use the old Sufi tale of the sands. A little river has to cross a desert, you see, and it runs into the sand. It finds it’s becoming a marsh. So the wind says to it, ‘Come with me and I will carry you over the desert.’ But the little river says, ‘No, no, I can’t! I’ll lose my identity! I refuse to be turned into water vapor!’ So the wind says, ‘Well, all right. But look at you. You’re becoming a marsh. You have to decide whether you wish to become a marsh or become water vapor.’ So after a great deal of consideration the river finally yields up to the wind, which carries it into the high mountains and drops it in the form of rain, whereafter it continues as a river.

“Now when you tell this tale, some people – crude, barbaric types – see it as a sort of commercial. The guru is asking his disciples to surrender themselves to him and he will carry them safely over the marsh, which is death or some other condition in which they are going to stagnate or putrefy. Other people react in a quite different way. They say, ‘Oh, isn’t that a beautiful story! And they talk about nature and the transposition of substances and ecology and so on.

“People who don’t react in either of these ways can then use the story for further training of their hemispheres, as it were. They don’t have the hangup that they think you are trying to convince them of something, or that they desperately want to be convinced.

“What makes it very difficult in dealing with these stories is that people want to know, ‘Is it a test or is it a teaching?’ and ‘How am I supposed to react to it?’ ‘At what point does it become perceptible to me what it really means?’ Which is rather like saying, ‘Is a house for eating in or sleeping in or blowing up?’ It’s all those things. But the so-called linear mind always wants you to ‘get to the point.’ A great deal of Sufism involves learning not in the sequence the Western mind expects to learn it. That is not acceptable to the sequential thinker who is incapable of thinking in any other way.

”The value of these tales is often misunderstood, Shah said. Like Christ’s parables, they are designed to enable the listener to hold in his mind a kind of structure to which he can relate philosophical or other considerations.

“That’s why there are two men and a dancing bear, or two mysterious dervishes,” Shah says. Because the stories are often funny, they are regarded as slight or insignificant by scholars – “It is not my discovery alone that academics do not encourage humor in what they take to be serious areas.” In fact, they are the very core of Sufi teaching.

“The Sufi people,” Shah explains, “have been held in very great esteem while armed with these stories and using them all the time for nearly a thousand years. They have built them into some of the great classics of the least. They are universally revered as classics. Some of these people have been people of great gravity, great mystical attainments and great discoverers of scientific things – the very flower of various civilizations. It hardly seems likely when you approach it rationally that such people would have gone to such lengths to prepare and maintain these stories, even building them into major facets of their thought, if they were a sideline, something old men in their dotage mumbled to each other. The stories are an integral part of Sufi teaching. If the Sufis are to be respected – as they enormously are – then surely one of their major teaching instruments must be given some consideration in the light of their status and achievements.”

The role of the teacher in Sufism is also often misinterpreted. “There is no Sufism without a teacher,” Shah has written. But the teaching role is quite different from that of the gurus in other sects. Whose antics Shah dismisses as filled with “chanting, ritual and phantasmagoria.” “A teacher is someone who is able to connect instructionally with you,” Shah says. “He need not be physically present. You don’t even have to know him. He doesn’t have to have a white beard and sandals. In a sense, a teacher need not even be a person. “I was once walking with a group of people including a spiritual teacher, and someone asked him, ‘What is a guru?’ And he pointed to a stone in the road and said, ‘Look, if I fall over that stone and I learn from that event to look where I’m going that stone is my guru.’ The teaching role should be an instrument, not an opportunity for theater, not a source of self-gratification.

A Sufi teacher does what he can to produce what he has to. He teaches what he can in a way students can learn it. “We see teaching as a system of interaction. In the ordinary course of events, people persist in certain courses to achieve something. Sometimes they learn by experience that they can’t do it. They find they can’t climb the wall, so they have to adjust. Should I get a ladder? Is it worth climbing? Are there other ways to get over it? By the interplay of themselves and the wall and their knowledge and experience, they learn. “A lot of people in esoteric circles, that is, philosophical and psychological circles, ignore this fact. They tend to look for a sort of Eureka! system, a golden key. They look at our stories, for example, for what mysterious depths and teachings are in them, or for what golden key they might be able to worry out of them, in spite of the fact that the stories themselves often illustrate the interplay between the people and their experience and the teacher or the circumstances, which is very similar to the person trying to climb the wall.

“There’s an old Sufi story about a young man who set off to receive illumination from an old teacher who lived in a remote cave on the top of a mountain. He was an old man with a long white beard dressed in a white shroud, a sort of hermit. When the young man, after great privation and enormous difficulties, reached that cave and almost collapsed in front of him, he said, ‘I have come all this way, and had all this trouble, and I want you to teach me illumination.’ But the old man said, ‘Certainly not.’ The young fellow begged and begged, but the old man simply said, ‘No, I can’t teach you that.’ Finally, the old man said, ‘Go.’ “So the young man went back down the mountain track. Almost at the bottom, he looked back and saw a white figure and he realized that the old man was beckoning to him! So he made his way back up, thinking, ‘Ah, he’s going to teach me, after all,’ and so he went up and up until he arrived back outside the cave. The old man was sitting there and he pointed his finger at the young man, and said, ‘And another thing. Don’t you ever come back, bothering me like that again!’

“Now that’s a joke, a sort of shaggy-dog story, but the teaching moral is that the young man was treating the old man like an employee. He had gone all that way, but he was acting like the old man was a machine – you put something in, and got something out. He said, “Teach me to be illuminated.’ He did not say, ‘I want to learn whatever you have to teach me.’ Teaching, you see, is a matter of interchange between a willing learner and a willing teacher.

“There is another story which illustrates how one must learn by indirect methods. There was a merchant in Persia who was to travel to India. Before he left, he said to his pet parrot, ‘I am going to India and I may see some of your relatives there. Is there any message which you wish me to convey to them?’ The parrot thought and then he said, “Tell them that I am well, but that I live in a cage in a house.’ “When the merchant returned, the parrot said, ‘Did you see my relatives?’ And the merchant replied, ‘I did, but I am afraid they are not well. When I gave one of them your message, he collapsed and fell to the ground.’ When the merchant said this, the parrot also collapsed and fell to the floor of the cage. Whereupon the merchant in great alarm picked up the bird and carried him to the window to get air. The parrot immediately recovered, flew out the window and escaped.

“You see, it is a model of indirect learning. The message that was communicated to the parrot was, ‘Collapse and pretend to be dead, and you can escape.’ There are other messages within it. I was told this story recently by a person who was studying with a professed Sufi teacher. He asked me the meaning of the story. I usually dislike to discuss such meanings preferring that each person discover them for himself. In that case, it seemed to me that meaning was clear, ‘Your teacher may have to do something to you to release you from bondage to him.’”

As in yoga, the Sufis believe there are internal “centers of perception” that can be utilized to help heighten the powers of the mind. There are five such “purity spots” that do not have a physical location in the sense of acupuncture points but that can be visualized for the purpose of transcending normal receptivity. Through a series of concentration exercises, a Sufi may be able to fix his attention on these spots as a means of enabling the mind to move to a higher plane. “But these cannot be attempted by anybody,” Shah says. “This is the method of which there is 1 percent operation, and 99 percent preparation. It is one of the most advanced of all techniques. It could take you 30 years to get to the point where you could do it and it might be over in 30 minutes. “It’s like the simple dervish dance. It’s an incredibly sophisticated instrument which can only happen at certain times and under certain circumstances. To try to make it theater, as it is sometimes done, is itself diagnostic of the inability of the person to understand its role. It disables him completely from what is happening.”

For Shah, the task of bringing the Sufi message to the West remains formidable. All too many presumably intelligent persons remain defensive about their thought processes, unwilling to reexamine themselves to see if a situation might be viewed in a different way. “All we really ask is that they detach themselves from their sophisticated analytical minds to just a second,” Shah says. “We’re not going to cripple them, we’re not going to harm them, we just ask them to let go. After all, if you’re listening to music, you’re not constantly tearing it apart in your mind. It’s a protected situation.

The same with our materials. If you don’t try to be too clever and think about what they might mean, instead of what they must mean, you can gain something from them. It’s not necessary to be perfectly secure in order to learn. In fact, the ‘secure’ people seemed to be the most nervous.”

Idries Shah wrote over three dozen books, many of which are still in print, and make great reading. He died in 1996.

Enlightened humans are often described as being consistently kind and compassionate, and are most admired for their total commitment to goodness. They are often described as calm. In fact, they are masters of calmness with the ability to achieve serenity even during the most difficult and stressful of events. They exhibit such a constancy of strength, grace, and inner peace that they are often considered spiritual masters.

Those individuals achieving enlightenment are consistently described as having powerful intelligence and possessing great knowing. They are considered the wisest of the wise. They appear to have stabilized in the highest level of human consciousness.

Some humans seek enlightenment directly by making it their primary conscious goal in life. One of the best examples of this was Siddhartha Gautama, who became known as the Buddha.

Other humans seek enlightenment indirectly as an unintended side effect of their hearing and successfully responding to their personal call. These individuals feel called to fulfill some unique and special purpose during their life on Earth. Some hear their call as a ‘message from God.’ Some of these seekers of enlightenment went on to organize religions. More often, religions, based on their teachings, were organized after their deaths by their followers. Sometimes, their followers considered these ‘messengers of God’ to be supernatural — incarnated Gods come to Earth on a holy mission. However, most humans seeking enlightenment in response to a call do not hear that call as a ‘message from God.’

Mohandas Gandhi sought enlightenment when he responded to his personal call. He felt called to liberate his country from domination by the British Empire. Gandhi innovated the strategy of nonviolent social resistance. His employment of this strategy over several decades won India her independence. Gandhi expressed his understanding of this pathway towards enlightenment when he taught: “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, Albert Schweitzer, and Martin Luther King chose to be the changes they wanted to see in the world, and they realized enlightenment as a side effect of their responding to their personal calls. They felt called to a higher purpose — called to deliver a unique and special gift to their community. And just as enlightenment can never be fully achieved, a life of service can never be fully completed.

When individuals discover their unique and special purpose for living on the Earth — when they live in their calling — when they follow their hearts — when they live an inspired life, then the door opens to the process of their own personal enlightening.

Enlightenment is a unique form of human behavior, which I have been studying for the past several years. Today’s author is one of my favorite enlightenment teachers. This essay is re-posted from his website.

Answering the Call

Marc Gafni

Recently people have been asking me what I mean by the phrase, “Answering the Call,” which I have been talking about so often during my talks about the democratization of enlightenment teachings in these past years. So when I woke up this morning, before I was fully awake, I jotted down a couple of words on this topic. …

Once you understand that your uniqueness is not a historical accident but an intentional expression of essence, then you realize that enlightenment is a genuine option for every human being. Including You. When you realize that your Unique Self is the God having a You experience, everything in your experience of your life changes.

Once you understand that your uniqueness is not the haphazard result of your cultural social or psychological conditioning, but all of these are necessary conditions for the emergence of the personal face of essence which is You, your essential experience of your life transforms. You move from a desperate need to escape your life to the radical embrace of your life.

When this happens, fate is transformed to destiny. Desperation becomes celebration. Grasping becomes purposeful action and resignation becomes activism. The contracted smallness of your frightened suffering self becomes expanded joyful realization of Your Unique Self. At such times, the irreducible human uniqueness of every human being is the invitation to enlightenment. For the full and authentic expression of your uniqueness living in the world as God’s verb, that is, essence living in you, as you and through you, is the essence of enlightenment.

It is from this place that you “Answer the Call.” It is from this place that you give the world your desperately needed “Unique Gifts,” those endowments that derive from your Unique Self. This is what I mean when I talk about Unique Self enlightenment. Enlightenment

Unique Self enlightenment is a genuine possibility and therefore responsibility for every human being. For there is no separation in essence. Every unique expression of essence is part of the seamless coat of the universe. Seamless but not featureless. Failure to clarify the contours of your Unique Self is not a failure of the contracted ego but a failure to love God. For to love God is to let God see through your eyes. Through the unique perspective of essence which is You.

Realizing Your Unique Self and giving your Unique Gifts is the evolution of love which is the evolution of God upon which the future of God depends. There are two key steps involved.

Firstly, you clarify your realization to know that you are not a separate self but a True Self, inseparable from the All.

Secondly, you realize that your True Self has a Unique Perspective. True Self + Perspective = Unique Self. Your Unique Self is able to address a Unique Need that can be addressed by no one else in the world that ever was, is or will be other then you. No one has the capacity to address this unique need in that the way that you are able to do. This is your Unique Gift.

In sum, your obligation and joy in being alive is to clarify your Unique Perspective, realize your Unique Self and give your Unique Gift. This is how you Answer the Call. Transforming your awareness of self to unique Self-consciousness is the change in your life which changes everything.

Democratization of enlightenment therefore does not mean that everyone is enlightened but rather that a full expression of authentic unique essence is a genuine possibility and therefore a genuine delighted obligation for every living being. In other words, it is the joy and responsibility of Answering the Call.

Books, Audios and CDs by Marc Gafni   Marc Gafni’s website   Center for World Spirituality   Spirit’s Next Move

We have just begun private Beta testing for a new online gifting exchange that I call The Gifting Earth. I see gifting as a replacement for Market. As capitalism has been the engine of Market. Gifting is the engine of Co-Operation. Whereas the best strategy of capitalism has been Buy Low Sell High, the best strategy of co-Operation is to Be Love, Do Good, and Have Everything.

Be Love→Do Good→Have Everything

Timothy Wilken, MD

Be Love, Do Good, Have Everything is a phrase I put together. It was created after reading an analysis of being, doing, and having called The Order of Creation by the enlightenment teacher Ilchi Lee, he wrote the following in 2005:

The Order of Creation

After reading this, I realized that some people use other orders of creation.

DO→BE→HAVE, if I DO what my parents say, then I can BE accepted, and then I will HAVE a good life.

Or, DO→HAVE→BE, if I DO Graduate School, I will HAVE a better income and more respect, and then I will BE Happy.

After some reflection, I found myself in agreement with Lee’s recommended order: BE→DO→HAVE, but then I asked myself, could a universal formula be created that reflected co-operation and interdependence, and that also might inspire future humanity? After, further reflection I came up with the phrase: Be Love→Do Good→Have Everything. I have found it so appropriate that I use as part of my signature.

This phrase also seems to form the perfect strategy for following Jesus of Nazareth’s Golden Rule, and for participating in a synergic gift economy.

Click to Enlarge Image

*What do I mean by HAVE EVERYTHING?

It is simple really, if you choose to BE unconditional LOVE, if you choose to DO only GOOD, then you can TRUST that others will choose to insure that you HAVE EVERYTHING that you want and need.

Within a synergic community, humans seek to have Win-Win relationships with each other. They believe in helping each other. They recognize their mutual INTERdependence. They know that sometimes they will need the help of others, and sometimes others will need their help. They choose to WORK TRUST each other.

A synergic help exchange is not a barter system or “tit for tat” exchange system. It is not charity. I give to others and trust that when I need help, others will gift to me.

This is not a philanthropic gift. Philanthropy is defined as the act of donating money, goods, services, time and/or effort to support a socially beneficial cause, with a defined objective and with no financial or material reward to the donor.

The Rules of the Synergic Help Exchange are few and quite simple.

1)   Do Only Good.

2)   Be as kind to yourself as you are to others within the community. Act with responsible generosity.

Be as generous to others as you can be, but remember to take good care of yourself and your family. Do what feels right, but be responsible in your offers of time and resources.

3)   If you become a member, you will always have a dual role. You will be both a GIFTor and a GIFTee.

In your role as a GIFTor, you will register your offer of GIFTS to others within the community. In your role as a GIFTee, you will also register your NEEDS for what you would like to receive as gifts from other members within the community.

4)   The GIFTor is always the ACTive partner in a synergic help exchange. GIVING is a verb. The role of GIFTee is always the passive part of a synergic help exchange. Receiving is passive. A GIFT is a noun.

5)   As a GIFTee, your list of NEEDS is made available to all GIFTors. Those GIFTors who have GIFTs that match your NEEDs are notified of a match. If they are interested in helping you, they will make you an OFFER of Help.

6)   As a GIFTor, you decide when, where, and to whom you will offer your GIFT. All GIFTing is voluntary.

7)   As a GIFTee, you will be notified when an offer of a GIFT has been made to you, then you will have the opportunity to look at a description of the offered GIFT, and the history, profile, comments about the GIFTor offering the GIFT. You may accept or decline the offered GIFT. All receiving of GIFTs is voluntary.

Visit The Gifting Earth