I've just added the papers I coauthored for the 2005 and 2007 Conference For Global Transformation.

You will find in the 2005 paper a history along with analysis of what happened in supporting the Challenge Day Circles of Change in the Midwest. I might note that we were successful in putting over 300 Challenge Day programs in schools during the time I was involved with the Midwestern organizations. This led to the Oprah Winfrey show featuring one of the schools we as a Midwest community worked with for the program she did on Challenged Day.

The 2007 paper is a truly international effort at creating a presentation. The projects and initiatives we supported as presented in the paper dealt with peace in Israel/Palestine, transformational retreats, thriving artists, international travel, international phone conferencing, and sufficiency. We deal with the issues of culture, time, and distance in working globally and internationally. If you want to reach beyond your back yard in making a difference, or in normal business, you will find this paper worth a good read.

You will find both of the papers fascinating. Find them under the INITIATIVES button on the left of the screen.

Steve

Year before last, I did some genealogical research on my family, and I found that the earliest Roberts I could trace in my family line, emigrated from England to the New World in 1635. Thomas Robert Roberts married Susan Downing in 1642, who also had earlier emigrated from England to the new world, and they settled in or around Ipswich, Massachusetts.

I come from a family of immigrants yet my family's citizenship on this soil predates the original Thirteen Colonies and the subsequent United States of America. After nearly four hundred years, we Roberts's are still living in a land that afforded opportunity to those willing to take on the challenges of leaving the land of their birth for a new land. It is the land that was acknowledged by the French in the 1800's with a gift of the Statue of Liberty, under which are the words, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

The original inhabitants of this land, decimated, ravaged, and near silenced through disease, doctrine, and deceit, seem no longer to lift a cry of complaint, yet us Johnny Come Lately's  appear now to be all wrapped up in the I, me, my, and mine conversation of selfishness. Stinginess cloaked in a garment of fear, security, and a banner emblazoned with 9/11.

We are of the world. We are a global people who make up the populace of this land. We are a place of spiritual freedom, with liberty to have faith, or not, of our own choosing. We are a people who have risen to greatness and now stooped to being petty and selfish.

We have forgotten our roots. Some now place their American-ness as a priority over their Godliness. Some use 'illegal' as if we the people are not the source ourselves of the determination legal, or illegal. It is we the people, not they the government, that gets to say who we are as a nation. We are the government.

It is time for us to all now remember our own global foreign roots. It is time for us to all draw on our own family's historical journeys to opportunity. It is time to remove the boundaries of selfishness, stinginess, and protectionism. It is time to reclaim our greatness as the "Land of Liberty".

No wonder so many are taking to the streets in protest against the recently proposed conservative Republican U.S. House bill that would make illegal entry into the United States a felony. I stand with them (the protesters, that is), though not in protest. I stand with them in being for the global nature of our community. I stand with them for gratitude in the past and present opportunities for my family. I stand with them for generosity to all humans who take on the challenge of seeking liberty, opportunity, and sufficiency. As a universal citizen, I am for honoring the request found below the Statue of Liberty quoted above.

Will you join us? If you will, please contact us using the contact page. Let us know what you are doing, how you are supporting liberty, freedom, and opportunity.

SRR

©2006

There is more to know in how we know what we know than there is to know in what we know itself.

No matter what we know, it seems, whenever we learn something new, how we know what we know gets left out of the picture in favor of the immediate gratification of knowing what we now know that we did not know before.

Now there are philosophical arguments both pro and con regarding an objective reality, the real truth, or the way things really are, we might say. Without even taking sides on that issue however, it seems more pertinent to question whether we could know an objective reality if it really did exist.

Most of us humans, while giving no credence to either inquiry, live our lives attempting to place every bit of information we take in into a true or false model matching it against what we know to be objective reality. We actually think, no actually we have it as a given, that what we know and accept as objective reality is accepted universally as such. In cases where it does not occur to be, we are willing to argue for its reconciliation. Inside our own models for universal reality, it becomes inconceivable that other, differing, views could be valid.

This is where our general neglect for knowing how we know divides us up as humanity and locks us out from learning all that may be available and possible for us to learn. It also seems to be the root of all the intractable human differences and ideological struggles known to man up to now. In many ways, knowing can and does cut off access to learning.

What if we were to allow ourselves to start from a model of being aware of or being conscious of and granting space for the validity of any and all further information, or of other points of view? What if we gave up the positions of conviction, truth, and belief in learning?

In this new paradigm, we may find it possible to view anything from previously unavailable contexts, or viewpoints. We may find the validity in all things known. We may find the acceptable in things previously held in contempt.

In placing ourselves at the opposite ends of spectrums of learning, we have limited our power to know and make sense of the origin of our existence and of our purpose and virtually everything else there may be to know. There is everything to gain in giving up our position of knowing. Giving up that position is the beginning of learning and the foundation for wisdom. For, there is vastly more to know, in knowing how we know, than there is to know in what we know. Our contexts for knowing have always been carriers of much, much, more information than the things we think we know.

What we know can be referred to as the content of our knowledge. How we know is the context in which we know it.

Content occurs for us as facts. Bits of information stored up after the process of conceptualization has taken experience and made simple decisions or projections about them. It is the context that governs how the decisions, ruminations, calculations, and projections will be made on the experience that stimulates the learning.

 SRR

©2006

The Origin of Our Existence

And the Balance of Separation and Wholeness

Can the existent be aware of its primal essence?

As conscious existents, we have become used to an environment that occurs as being made up of different materials. From the observable point of view, there appear to be different elements of make up for all things existent.

From this point of view, it has become accepted to look for the basic building blocks of physical existence as if these building blocks would be distinguishable to the existent. However, this point of view may have been overlooked.

The mode of awareness of the existent seems to be the evaluation of observable phenomenon. Observable phenomena occur as observable when, and only when, the phenomena are distinct from the environment in which they occur. Phenomena are only phenomenon when they are not the background against which they occur.

Therefore, it seems reasonable that distinguishing what we are of can only be accomplished by distinguishing what we are not of. Our essence only occurs as essence in the occurrence of the absence of this essence (as when something, which is not nothing, occurs within nothing). Essence will not show up in essence. Only non-essence can be observed in essence.

We thus, will never be able to observe, nor describe, our primal essence.

The all pervasive, that shows up only in its observable absence, is the Nothing. It is what we have always related to as the void or emptiness that only shows up by its discernable absence. Only when something or some object interrupts or occurs within this void can we actually experience the nothing. Everything must therefore, be made up of the primal essence of nothing, the one 'thing' that disappears into the background as background. Everything that occurs as something, occurs as something against a background of nothing. Nothing is so abundant and so pervasive we lose sight of the fact that we deal with nothing more often than we deal with something. This abundant essence occurs as the vast emptiness between 'real' things.

Is it possible that what we relate to as awareness, or consciousness, is also this same primal essence, and that it stands to reason that consciousness or awareness is only distinguishable in the occurring of its absence? Consciousness cannot observe nor comprehend itself for it does not distinguish itself as other. Our experience as existents is only experienced in the observation of separation from nothing, as other. In the experience of same, there is no experience. Separation gives the experience of something and the observing of that which occurs as distinct from selfsame.

Everything that consciously occurs to us, occurs as not self, not consciousness. I cannot share the point of view in consciousness of other and still be aware of other.

I therefore celebrate the difference, the distinction, the diversity of individual point of view as an enabling tool for my own conscious existence. Separation and Nothing are the Source of my being existent.

What practical value can be drawn from this existential proposition? This is no mere intellectual exercise in philosophical meandering. This is an exercise in context creation in support of creating the context called The Great Big Idea. It is in its application to our relationship with our context for other that it finds its value. This is in two ways.

First, we could say that our existence as individual is sourced in nothing. There is no inherent advantage for my being me over my being any other point of view in existence. I am not superior, nor inferior, to anyone other or any other thing. All are of equal value in the experience of life.

Second, experience of separation is valuable in that it allows for experience as individual. It is not wrong to experience separation as compared to experiencing wholeness. Our experience of individual is not an illusion. Experience as individual seems to require the experience of separation. Experience of separation is the source of other, the source of experience of experience.

When I have my experience as separate individual tempered by the context of being whole, I can avoid the experience of being 'unwhole', lacking, imperfect. I can actually experience the experience of life, coming from being perfect, whole and without lack, completely sufficient. I can be fully up to the challenges of physical life, responsible for an experience that is uniquely mine. I can avoid the occurrence of feeling needy to complete my unwholeness, or fill my lack. I can come at life with all the tools I have being all the tools I need in the moment. I can experience each moment, being present, being alive and ready for all that life throws back as experience. I have all the most basic tools I need for creating the life of my dreams.

As with all The Great Big Idea propositions, this is not an assertion of 'Truth'. Nor is this an outline for a structured belief. Yet I have found that a wise balance of wholeness and separation seems to provide fertile ground for the growth in the area of enlightenment.

SR

_©Steve Roberts 2005

My commitment in writing this weblog is to keep alive the conversation for transforming the globe into the world we have dreamt of.

In doing this, you can expect me to comment on what is current in our world, but you can expect more. I will openly examine the structures that keep the world the way it is and keeps it going in the direction it seems to be going. I will examine the occuring systems that seem to have gotten us where we are today.

It is my goal that you enjoy the read. As I read Deepak Chopra once had said, "I'm just singing in the shower enjoying myself. If anyone hearing enjoys it, that's up to them," I'm not creating a "new truth", I'm just sharing the view from my context.

Welcome!

SR