GLOBAL CITIZENS
Let’s evolve with a full burst of transcend and include others, and love and nurture global citizens. Ken Wilber, Terry Patten, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli contend,
INDIGO is the first truly transpersonal worldview, meaning a person’s self-awareness extends beyond the personal. It goes beyond an exclusive identification with the personality, while including the personality in its signature uniqueness. By its very nature the Indigo worldview begins to transcend the separation of the subject from the object. Both are seen to arise in an interconnected unity. This level is also marked by a shift to a highly intuitive, flexible, and flowing relationship with experience and phenomena. In the Indigo worldview, existence is seen as a radically interconnected fabric, an ecology of flows of light, life, mind, matter, energy, time, and space.
Wholes are seen in intuitive flashes…Indigo just sees wholes without having to string things together. Systemic and transpersonal wholes are simply apparent, including ecological, political, and cultural wholes that transcend the individual. The personal self-sense opens into these larger systems, identifies with them, and often feels a profound sense of oneness, particularly in the wake state and the gross realm.
The Indigo worldview not only sees through but also lets go of the gross related ego-self as the center and anchoring reference point from which the complex dance of relations, processes, and experience is always seen. This relaxes the tension or stress between individuality and interconnected unity. Life is viewed on a radically elastic time scale, ranging from minutes to years to lifetimes to millennia to deep time to radical timelessness or pure eternity. Indigo individuals feel rested in the Kosmos, in the natural flows of birth, growth, aging, death, joy, and suffering. (Ken Wilber, Terry Patten, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli, Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening, 2008. Boulder, CO: Integral Books, 96-97)
Evolving to the Indigo worldview is a challenge and opportunity and will require passionate intent; a commitment to 100% responsibility—life happens because of me, not to me; facing everything, fearing nothing; and embracing process perspective. And the process needs to start with our kids. The Dalai Lama, who just had a 90th birthday, contends,
The only way out of this drunken stupor is to educate children about the value of compassion and the value of applying our mind. We need a long-term approach rooted in a vision to address our collective global challenges. This would require a fundamental shift in human consciousness, something only education is best suited to achieve. Time never waits. (Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, The Book of Joy, 2016. London: Penguin, 273)
Jasmine Star Horan offers,
Early childhood is the most precious, important, vulnerable, potential-filled time in which our personalities and core issues, attachments, and foundations are formed…Children are the seeds of hope for humanity and they need to be cared for tenderly, watered with love and attention, invested in, and nourished as the fruit-bearing trees that they will become. By planting seeds of love and respect early on, we can nourish the children, as I believe they are the source of healing for our world. (Jasmine Star Horan, The Gazebo Learning Project: A Legacy of Experiential & Experimental Early Childhood Education at Esalen, 2020. Big Sur, CA: Silver Peak Press, 332-333)
Working with our 2-6 year old kids offers a wonderful mindfulness and awareness foundation for the globe; and growing the mindfulness, awareness, and self-restraint of our beautiful kids offers a plethora of fruitful experiences for kids, parents, and facilitators…social skills, social awareness and social interaction, comfort and discomfort, from which growth occurs, and emotional connection; neurological and physiological development, awareness of senses, groundwork for successful academic learning, and self-reliance; independence, exploration, curiosity, and slowing down, watching, and observing their environment with sensitivity; vestibular, proprioceptive and kinesthetic movement; meditation—mindfulness and awareness; balance, mentorship, time structure, and hand-eye coordination; calculated emotional risks, caretaker of mother earth, indigenous wisdom, and environmental care; PLAY, mind-body connection, peace-of-mind, pottysville, dance, and music; weeding, watering, tools, seeds, flowers, and planting; 1st aid, health, wellness, and wellbeing, and respect for nature, animals, and humans; responsibility for the environment, birth and death awareness and responsibility, and putting stuff away. (Noted while reading Jasmine Star Horan’s The Gazebo Learning Project: A Legacy of Experiential & Experimental Early Childhood Education at Esalen, 2020. Big Sur, CA: Silver Peak Press)
Let’s evolve with a full burst of transcend and include others, and love and nurture our global citizens! Mindfulness and awareness differentiate folks. Recently, the “mind chatter” and “heart flutter” have been alive with thoughts about helping kids by supporting potential parents, marital partners and partners who are planning to have children, and parents who have children. Let’s take a quick look:
- As Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, recommended several years ago, potential parents, i.e., young folks who are thinking about marriage, and/or becoming partners, and having children, need to learn, understand, and experience the challenges and opportunities associated with having children and raising children in today’s world. The country needs literature and programs to facilitate this learning process for potential parents before they get married, or become partners, and before they opt to get pregnant and have children.
- Folks who opt to get pregnant and have children need to learn about and understand how to quiet the mind-meditation is a must-and engage, hook-up, emotional/feeling empathy and compassion before the kids arrive. For happiness and authenticity, peace-of-mind is essential, and one’s purpose and connections need to be created on a foundation of empathy and compassion.
- Potential parents and soon to be parents need to learn, understand, reflect upon, experience, and practice how to coach kids through processing positive and negative emotional/feeling-experiences at the time of the experiences. Simply learn to become a first-class, on-the-spot facilitator for their kids. This emotions/feelings processing will help the kids be authentically male or female and not grow up like the culture dictates, i.e., as a masculine or feminine presented self.
