Are you creating a whole new world? Do you want to? Is a whole new world really possible?
For many people the idea that we can positively transform our social arrangements will seem fanciful, especially when we are in the throes of profound economic and environmental crisis; but what better time to envision and invoke the new?
I worked for quite a few years as a psychotherapist and that experience made clear to me the most opportune time for people to make real changes is when our lives aren’t working and we’re hurting. We almost have to get to a point where we have nothing left to lose before we’ll take the risk to shift out of the comfort zone of our mental and emotional habits, move through our fear of the new, and step up to a new level of functioning.
In that sense the current economic crash is a great leveler; apart from the ultra rich, everyone is affected. Right now I know people who have lost their jobs, who are losing their homes, who have seen their life savings dwindle away over night. Others are losing friends, relatives and partners to untimely death. It seems to be a time of loss, of people being stripped of external forms of security. And when we’re stripped of our external supports and comforts, our illusions of independence and separation are torn from us too. We become vulnerable, and this is a beautiful and somewhat rare opportunity to find strength and sustenance within ourselves and with each other, in community.
So, it seems to me that a whole new world can start from the stripping away of illusions and rise from the ashes of the old ways. We invite you to join us on this blog to share our experiences of living through, what one of my teachers, Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning. We hope this blog will become a chronicle of what it is like to be living through this time and what our challenges and triumphs are as we work to raise the phoenix of a new way of living together on the planet from the ashes of the old.
It has been very interesting for me living here in the USA for the past two years. I came here from New Zealand, where I lived for twelve years, and before that from Scotland and England, where I was born. I came to Virginia to explore a relationship with soul friend Woods Elliott, whom I met on the Internet. The relationship itself has been a huge journey of learning, and beyond that I’ve had mixed feelings about being in North America. On one hand I tend to like Americans, and all my life I’ve been influenced by leading edge, forward thinking American writers: poets, novelists, psychologists, feminists, deep ecologists, futurists, have all shaken and awakened me. This morning I went back to take another look at Marilyn Ferguson’s classic work, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time. I can vividly remember the moment this book was placed in my hands for the first time, back in 1981, and how my whole being thrilled with excitement as I knew without a doubt there are people like me all over the world, who know something better is possible and who are working to change the world from the inside out.
Living here in Virginia USA, against the backdrop of an administration that has espoused a hard-line military/industrial ideology, which from the point of view of my values has appeared life denying, socially unjust and downright scary, I wrote my book Livin
g your Passion: How Love-in-Action is Seeding a Whole New World. As I was transcribing the interviews with 24 ordinary, extraordinary people, it became clear to me they are representatives of the same culture emerging around the world that Marilyn Ferguson was writing about in 1980. It’s a culture based on the values of peace, living in harmony with nature, co-creation, and being in service to something bigger than the little ego-isolated self. In other words, it’s a culture that points to the possibility that humanity can evolve into a more united, more just, more responsible, more authentic whole new world: One Global Family.
This is the Whole New World I’m envisioning and I know it starts inside each one of us and in all our relationships.
And I know it’s not easy.
It’s easy enough to talk about love and compassion, peace and sharing, and living our passion but it takes a conscious choice and focused intention to live these values everyday and in every aspect of our lives. It’s the hero’s journey the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell wrote about, which transforms us as we live it.
We invite you to join us at The Growing Edge, and through our monthly publication and global teleconference, New Moon Magic, to journey together and to grow a global learning community, where we can share our experiences of living through this auspicious time of transition; to share what we are learning and what we are creating and to support each other to live more abundant and fulfilled lives.
To learn more about Living your Passion, and to download your free e-book introducing the 8 Pillars of Transformation, go to http://livingyourpassion.info
To learn more about New Moon Magic and to become a Founding Member of a Whole New World, go to http://livingyourpassion.info/nmm/
Namaste, Rose Diamond
I confess to a hardly containable excitement at the launching of The Growing Edge blog for our soon to be launched awholenewworld.net website. Let me give a thumbnail sketch of how the co-creative partnership between Rose Diamond and I got started in April 2006 when we met on the Internet and began an immediate, intimate email dialogue which led us both to believe we were destined to become extraordinary soul friends. I found the means to visit her that same August for five weeks in enchanting New Zealand, shortly afterwards she visited me in the States, and after a year of non-working visas and completion of her second book while living with my family, she now has a 3 year working visa for someone extraordinary in her field, and we are off and running.
The soul journey we’ve been on together has deeply changed both our lives and swept us up in a creative-spiritual adventure beyond our reckoning! We are learning how to harness creative, evolutionary energy, employ it in tandem acts of creative congress, and be powered by that extra dimension that’s larger than anybody; truly a transformational experience.
Rose and I have a very special blog in mind for A Whole New 
World. I’m attracted to the amazing opportunity to share and learn with a larger global audience. I would like to find a more universal language which helps people to feel more unified, and to cultivate a viewpoint that can hold everyone else’s view in it. I began a letter to humanity many years ago and this blog feels like a perfect way to continue that kind of deep conversation and consensus-seeking. I also imagine how exciting it could be to exchange ideas which stimulate and resonate with others and catalyze a deepening progression of exchanges between people.
Until recently, intelligence and creativity have been largely an individual effort, achievement, or undertaking. For me, blogging is about experimenting with collective intelligence, group mind, and potentially, how to circulate the new consciousness. Perhaps wise blogging needs to come from the new consciousness, so competitiveness and mere showboating can be marginalized. I see this blog as representing an opportunity to see if we can co-create a new Olympic or UN forum in which compassionate, supportive connection, mutual aid, and elaboration of human brilliance, rather than competition, are the primary aims and purpose.
A few thoughts about the name of the blog are apropos at the beginning. Rose and I share the conviction that a blog worth its salt needs to stay very immediate, in the living moment, and what’s written needs to have the taste and flavor of what Eckhart Tolle and many other spiritual teachers have called “presence”. Presence entails the activation of a deepened awareness and heart-tempered wisdom, which begins to become more prominent, as over against merely brilliant intelligence without awareness. We believe people who begin to cultivate presenceful experience, can become capable of greater sentience, integral viewpoints, transpersonal convictions, and general wisdom. And these fine qualities enable them to potentially have more intimate, honorable, respectful, tolerant interactions, deeper discussions, spiritual connections, nurturing relationships, and compassion-centered spir
itual alliances. The growing edge is that part which is most alive and present; the bud, the manifesting tip of a whole new world, a creative, organic hologram.
I feel something in myself, and in the collective field we share, which resonates loudly as an impending liberation or emancipation of some kind. In myself, I’ve been experiencing it as a rebirth of personal hopefulness and trust; that people will move from terror and victimization in the current economic crises, and seize the moment to revolutionize and transform their lives and create a new mythology for a Golden Age to come: rise in orbit to a whole new world. We’re capable of that.
Staying attached and subservient to the old world drains away people’s vital energy and inner power. It’s time for us to forge a new, more sacred morality, redefine our most important convictions about living and being human; build more meaningful community and compassionate service to others into our lives; build new global relationships which can help us all to climb above our local, national, religious, and ethnic identities and add to those, our warm membership in the whole family of the species on Earth, and with all life on Earth, which is sacred.
I feel very optimistic and expanded and freed from the old dying cultural forms, and all the stressful and deadening negativity associated, so I can tap into my evolutionary potential and play a more transformative role in assisting in the social remodeling facing us. We need people to stretch into their evolutionary power and strength, if humanity is going to survive the present peril, and allow the past culture no longer serving us, to be fertilizer for the new. We can be free from a world that’s no longer working for us. How can we give rise to, give birth to, the new alongside the crumbling old? And even if we don’t know how, can we do it anyway?! In our growing edge, is where we all need to anchor ourselves.
We invite you to enter the blog
as if you are entering the whole
new world. We welcome your
wisdom, experiences, stories,
triumphs, challenges, questions
and insights, and we'd love to
hear what's evolving on your
growing edge.
Woods Elliott
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