Special Journal Entry JANUARY 1, 2050 Saturday If Conscious Love Is the WHAT? or the WHY? The HOW? is met( ͭ )apump ‘Infinite’ I to I Naturally, waking up this morning to realise it’s actually the 1st of January 2050 felt off-the-scale surreal, meta, super-déjà-vu-ish – given that essay competition I entered at what was such a delicate point in my own life and did seem the twilight of anything we might call civil society on Earth. But I, we, haven’t just survived. Our species has patently EVOLVED. And it isn’t simply DESPITE the way everything was back in 2024 – but critically BECAUSE of it all. For a start, it might have seemed so ironic that there were cash prizes involved. Yes – a cash prize was offered for the thing that essentially saved the world of its rabid materialism. How crazy is that?! This is surely one of life’s greatest unfathomable mysteries – like a bottle of champagne being offered to whichever alcoholic could solve alcoholism, right…? Where logic might suggest it was absolutely doomed to not just failure but screaming disaster. Yet if we’d only ever stuck with logic, where would we be? Surely not thriving as we now are! So what happened? What did I do?! I came up with what some called the ‘Second Most Important Invention in Human History’. The first being the wheel. What others called THE most important… Though in a sense it wasn’t an ‘invention’ as such at all. A Saviour of our kind? That’s what some said. In any event, it was the thing that made all the difference: the met( ͭ )apump ~ this veritable neuro-psycho-spiritual ‘Internal Combustion Engine’! SO EASY TO GRASP YET SO PROFOUNDLY EFFECTIVE!!! Because it wasn’t, isn’t, just an idea, an intellectual meme. Because it was and is a source of energy – an ever-accessible, usable, inexhaustible thing that always makes some degree of difference. However noticeable or unnoticeable it might at first be to others, since 2024 it’s increasingly come to be known with the understanding that without some pumping of ENERGIES being involved it effectively DOESN’T EXIST. With energies, it could move mountains. Without energies, it couldn’t make a hole in a wet paper bag. And with enough people realistically grasping this, soon enough the right kind of mountains started to be moved… Being on the brink of such mass-scale disaster gave us the focus that we otherwise would never have had – nothing less than that power of focus that was essential to change the dynamic of how it was all going… So… Met( ͭ )apumps energetically connected all the world’s religions, mystical traditions, spiritual approaches, all the best of humanities as they’d never been so connected before – each finding its own weddings with physics, biology, neuroscience, psychology… All the ‘HOW?’s people could ask could all at once be answered with this critical KNOWHOW – this core common denominator of understanding that without such pumps, nothing we were aspiring towards could be done. Like loving one’s enemies – literally impossible without met( ͭ )apumps. Of course, people didn’t even believe in the power of the met( ͭ )apump except insofar as such pumps had taken place within them ~ AS WE BELIEVE, SO WE PUMP… And so, believed, the unbelievable happened and spread far and wide – people’s met( ͭ )apumps CONSCIOUSLY ALTERING CONSCIOUSNESS – straddling energies, pumping ideas; straddling ideas, pumping energies…. Pumping META – multivalently, self-observantly, transformationally… Pumping METTA – the ever-present living potential of loving kindness. All that could be imaginally-actually pumped! Heartfulness and Mindfulness meeting and melding like Gaia and God – or, as different people came to put it, like Jesus and Buddha, Maria and Caroline, Kabbalist and Sufi, and so on – every person’s met( ͭ )apumps helping activate those of others… As a kind of ‘missing evolutionary link’ for affective energies…. And the rest, as they say, is history. With met( ͭ )apumps, we saved the Amazon, restored ecological balances, climate stability – notwithstanding the likes of the MEGA-BIG BUSINE$$ giants of thirty years ago – like the Amazons of the world’s Bezoses. Through this subtlest ‘X’ factor we found our way to the key human determinants impacting the lives of our own and other species, leveraging rights issues worldwide, evolving sustainable energy production – notwithstanding all the impacts of eXce$$es like those of the world’s Musks. Yes ~ we realised the met( ͭ )a within ourselves – notwithstanding what came of the Meta of the world’s Zuckerbergs. With all the pressures at play in 2024, with the met( ͭ )apump and all it invisibly and visibly, silently and sonorously pumped from WITHIN, we began turning back the tide, retrieving humanity’s societies and the planet’s ecosystems from the All-Consuming Mega-Machines of Consumer Mind & Culture. Oh yes. The hitherto unknown, unbelievable or absurd became the known, the self-evident, the vital. Because, met( ͭ )apump or not, we were, are and will always be RIDDLED with ‘pumps’ – perception-pointed, perception-pointing, affect-animated, affect-animating mechanisms. Like breathing, like imagining, these work ongoingly whether we consciously engage with them or not. And with all that was spelt our ‘at large’ and ‘at small’ in 2024, we could clearly enough see and grasp that we COULD so see and grasp them! Engaging with our feelings, with all the energy of our moods, our attitudes, our desperate fears and hopes, we could PUMP THESE PUMPS!! Separating ourselves from ourselves, declutching, re-engaging, connecting with ourselves that much more deeply…. So that’s what happened. – that’s what WE did. And now – LOOK WHERE IT’S GOT US!!!! Time for a bit of celebratory verse, I reckon… Met( ͭ )apump presence through pneumatic oxymoron to ever re-get to grips with as a romance with a war on Effable-ineffable wild-‘wild’ symmetrical lexicon luck like a field made met( ͭ )a physical as quasi-con (Oh yes – back in 2024, how many at first thought it was just some con…. ?!!)
Archives for January 2024
Report by Chimenem Wodi on the great ideas that led to us becoming the cooperative society that we are.
January 1, 2050
Report by Chimenem Wodi on the great ideas that led to us becoming the cooperative society that we are:
It is trite to state that even a rudimentary collective consciousness that is shared between wolves in a pack as they are hunting cooperatively provides a staggering advantage. In lions too, the pride is far greater than the sum of its individuals. In the same vein, collective human consciousness can produce historical events as the moon landing.
In the dark days of 2024 when the survival of humanity was in question, the web of relations that gave life meaning came to be disrupted. The challenge was to transform our ways of conceiving human relations that was based on a little more than utility, greed, and competition to one based on felt connection and cultural continuity. Humanity saw the dire need to transform a greedy populace into an altruistic one.
It was at this time that I was fortunate to read a book authored by Dr. Iain McGilchrist entitled “The Master and His Emissary: A Divided Brain and The Making of the Western World.” In the past, I read works of very penetrating minds on western civilization such as A.E. North Whitehead’s Adventure of Ideas but Whitehead did not make me descend my Ivory tower of imagination. It was not until I came across McGilchrist’ “The Master and His Emissary: A Divided Brain and The Making of the Western World.” Where McGilchrist practically led me by the hand as I descended my imaginary tower by bridging the mind/brain (to say it differently, matter/consciousness) relationship with the human brain as an apt metaphor. He then showed me how the collective intelligence out there in nature resonates with our collective consciousness as a society or community. While using the metaphor of the brain, he demonstrated various ways of conceiving society and the consequences when we privilege a certain way of thinking that is characterised by greed competition which he called left brain/hemisphere mode as opposed to a rather altruistic mode of appreciating the intricate web of connectedness in our relationship as a society which he called the right brain/hemisphere. In guiding me through his teachings which I call “brain hemispherics as a means to truth.” He also showed me the periods of the renaissance, enlightenment and post-industrial age and how a society that was right hemisphere oriented brought about the beautiful period of the Renaissance. After helping me bridge the mind/matter divide and leading me on the path of truth. I restlessly waited to get hold of the sequel to the Master and His Emissary entitled: “The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.” After reading The Matter With Things, I imagined that in my own little way, I could steer humanity away from the dangerous iceberg of greed and competition to a more altruistic society by seeking out a right hemisphere mode of conceiving society and our relationships. By doing so, perhaps I would be taking on the charge in the concluding page of the epilogue of Dr. McGilchrist’ tome where he quoted the seventeenth century priest and physician Angelus Silesius thus:
“Friend, that is surely enough. And should you want to read more, Then go and become yourself the words, and yourself the Being.”
I was able to apply the teachings of Dr. McGilchrist in my household/local community by prioritizing a right hemisphere mode of conceiving the world. A way of thinking that saw our community as one in harmony with nature, intrinsically connected in our relationships and our relationships as being ontologically prior to the relata. Over time my household and later on our community increasingly saw the need for prioritizing/placing higher values of truth, goodness and beauty at the apex of our pyramid of values, while greed, competition, deception, and utility was placed at the bottom of the pyramid. My local community became free of certain vices as we sought the best ourselves in this process of transmutation from basic instincts of utility, and greed to enduring values of goodness, truth and beauty. This further illuminated on the importance of local institutions that were disregarded in the yesteryears because we saw the value of things only from the lens of utility.
Fast-forward to 2050, our local community is one where people appreciate the place of good values in their dealings with their neighbours, there is a sense of shared connection and kinship in community, the reverence for culture, a sense of belonging to a place, and a sense of the sacred. Today I am glad that my willingness to embrace the charge of Dr. Iain McGilchrist set off an initiative that revolutionised my local community. Now in 2050 it is only a delight to see humanity in this track that is set to hand over the baton of an altruistic society to the future generation.
How I saved the World… but not by Myself
How I saved the world… but not by Myself By Mark Campbell In 2024, I wrote a book about Joy that changed everything for me and a lot of other people. Now it is the first day of the year 2050 and, because of that book, I feel like a child heading to a giant toy store. The lines on my face though tell a little different story and so do the heavy bags under my eyes, unless I am wearing my glasses. I have left the spectacles behind today so that I might take the rays of the sun directly into me along with the wonderful crispness of the morning air in this newly revitalized city. I will just have to remember to smile so that I do not scare small children. “Can I hold your face!” Did I hear that right? I look over and there is a small boy with a red toque on his head eagerly taking off his matching red mittens. He is beaming up at me as his mother struggles to regain her balance after being forced to stop so suddenly. She laughs and bends partly over the boy as she places her hand lightly on his shoulder. Her lithe body curls forward and then straightens up in a smile. “He must really like you!” She says after gathering her breath again. “I’m okay with it if you’re okay.” It is an unexpected offering but I will not refuse it since it is the young who have blossomed the most in this more connected world that we have become. As soon as I start to bend, my body reminds me that I will be ninety-two next month. I continue downwards anyway, through the expected pain in my hip and the unexpected pain in my shoulder until my knee touches the cold cement a foot away from the boy who immediately clamps both of his hands onto my temples. He stares first into one eye and I can feel his essence immediately. He is ancient and full of a mystery that pours into me through the left pupil upon which his gaze is fixed. He switches unexpectedly to the other eye and I am swept away by a giddiness that rushes up through my toes and my chest to the top of my head and sends me floating above the three of us. My right side tingles as healing hormones rush through my blood. This never gets old. He flips back and forth several times more, from one eye to the other in what feels like an eternity that ends much too quickly. He releases me and bows slightly with his head. “Thank you for sharing your essence with me. You are wonderful.” I return the nod. “The honor is all mine little one.” As soon as I say it, I want to correct myself but there is nothing to correct even though my body-mind senses that he is an ancient presence. I stand instead, only a little surprised that there is no pain and the movement is both smooth and strong. I have been renewed by his gift and my body-mind revels in the feeling of it as I look into the tear-filled eyes of his mother. It is always very moving to witness an interaction like this one. We exchange warm looks and nods as her essence briefly flows through mine and firmly connects my feet to the ground beneath me. Another gift. I continue along the sidewalk in wonderment of how much the world has changed in the past twenty-six years. There has not been a war or even a rumor of a war for over ten years now and I have not seen a homeless person in at least as long. Did I actually have a hand in this transformation? Can I truly say that without sounding too conceited, even to myself? I ponder the question for a while before I smile and say out loud “Yes I did!” It all began with that contest to explain how you would save the world. I remember being very excited to learn that so many others were focused on the same thing that had been plaguing me for many years and I knew exactly what I was going to do. I first wrote about what I was going to do then I actually went out and did it. I wrote a book in less than two months that explained how people could get the most joy out of their lives. The Guts of the Heart quickly became a New York Times best-seller and sold over eight million copies. In the book I laid out how it was possible to follow the beckoning of your heart towards joy while doing the best you could for the world around you. I went even further and showed that you could not do the best for the world around you without following the beckoning of your heart and the true scent of joy wherever it led. Naturally, people compared it with the works of Frederick Nietzche but they were only partially right in doing that. Although I do sense that Nietzche wanted people to experience as much joy as they could, I think he missed out on the biggest sources of joy and I showed that in the book. Even so, I don’t fault him since he inspired me and many others like me to pursue our joy. The problem was that our culture and almost all organized religions seemed to suggest that it was somehow wrong to derive joy and tangible benefits from caring for those around us. That was the key – learning how to access a deep and lasting joy by first caring for yourself and then engaging fully with the body-mind as you sought out the true essence of those around you using practices that focused on truth, vulnerability, and courage. Once these practices were revealed, people began to experience a true lasting joy that exceeded anything they had felt before and it was only accessible by sharing in the true essence of the other people around you. Immediately there were copycats who claimed they had a shortcut to this same joy. Some had a measured success but in time they all failed to achieve even a fraction of the joy that true practitioners were experiencing. As con artists attempted to game the system, they were either ignored or converted as their practices came too close to the real thing. But my book was only the beginning of the transformation. Soon many other books, movies, songs, and works of art exploded onto the scene with an impact that dwarfed the launch of my work. The book How to Have the Best Intimate Sex of Your Life sold over twenty million copies and was loosely based on the practices outlined in my book. Divorce rates dropped off only a year after the book came out while the porn industry suffered a total collapse two years after that. I was grateful to the author for both the positive changes she brought about in the world and the relative freedom her fame offered me as a past celebrity. How to Crush the Competition was the very unlikely name of a book that taught employers how transparency and care could facilitate a productive workplace with committed employees and fiercely loyal customers using some of the practices I had outlined. Companies who adopted the practices quickly outcompeted all others who refused to change. Again, there were those who tried to fake their way but they met with only marginal success after heavily investing with consultants who promised that they could guide them through a process of joy-washing as it came to be known. In the end, it became impossible to fake the personal rewards of the joy practices since they became so prominent and recognizable in the body as people got better at it. Healing and longevity quickly became the most noticeable and sought-after side effects but the actual personal embodied experience of joy was the biggest payoff that allowed the cultural movement to sweep the globe in less than fifteen years with an almost religious fervor. It turns out that the ancient religions were a paradox that took us close to the point of experiencing this same phenomenon while at the same time providing the impassable barrier that prevented us from getting there. How was it that a religion that held Love thy neighbour as thyself as the highest commandment could at the same time direct that you should not gain any personal reward in doing so? Because of this, we have been prevented from reaping the highest rewards of being human – experiencing a real and intense healing and empowering love with everyone else on earth. As I near the next corner, two young men embrace and then head their separate ways. “Don’t sell out!” the one says. The other replies “Yean man! Don’t sell out!” He then heads down the sidewalk towards me. I smile as I recognize the words as a reference to a practice that I helped to popularize. It sometimes feels like these practices have become part of a new religion but to me, it is much more like truth and science. I close my eyes and silently go through the steps. They flow through me now as one embodied experience: 1. Ask what came before the birth of the universe and what comes after death while dropping all of the stories that made you feel safe with this question and breathe deeply into the truth of the answer I don’t know while allowing the peace of that truth to flow up through you. 2. Turn your attention to the you that is receiving this mystery of everything and breathe into the truth of the mystery that is your own being while feeling the energy and joy there that is your essence. 3. Now experience everything and everyone around you in this way while allowing the joy and healing of their unique essence to permeate your own essence. The saying “Don’t sell out” came later as people used the term to refer to what was routinely marketed as joy all around us. Money, casual sex, and material possessions still have a magnetic pull even today although their marketing has dwindled to almost nothing. And yet the term is a reminder of the true, powerful, and lasting joy that is always available as a healing gift of the present moment. As I open my eyes, I notice that the young man has stopped two feet in front of me. He extends his right arm and I grasp his forearm as he grasps mine. He closes his eyes for a second and takes a deep breath before reopening them and staring warmly at me for a few moments. He smiles, releases me, nods his head, and moves on. I am renewed by his essence and feel a wrinkle or two straighten out on my face. Maybe I am not so scary looking after all.
I Change Myself To Change The World By 2050
I have done so much regarding doing my part to help humanity live in the wonderful society that we live in here in 2050. I knew that if I changed as a person, the world would follow and change around me by virtue of the facts that everything is a fractal of everything else and everything exists as a manifestation of both individual and collective consciousness. By following the golden rule of “treat others how you want to be treated” and meditating daily with the intent to spread love everywhere, it was only natural that everything that I experienced in my life would be of a love-based nature. As the days went on, I did things little by little for improvement, knowing that trying too hard all at once would be too hard and too much of a shock to the system. As I meditated, I asked that thoughts come to me to help me eliminate that which no longer serverd me as well as thoughts that would lead me on the best timeline for living a happy life on easy street (or the closest thing to it.) I made good on following the thoughts that came to me, and my world and the world around me changed for the better. Realizing that there are better ways to help the world than just meditating in nature all day long, I knew that being active would be a great way to improve the world. I kept interviewing people for my internet radio show about the nature of reality, and the more people who saw my show, the more humanity awakened as a whole. I kept in mind what I heard someone once say that if you wake up 1 person you can cause a “disturbance in the force” which can wake up 1000 people. The fractal nature of reality makes this possible. Being active in the community was always something I enjoyed doing, and making my presence felt at rallies and conferences played a big role in waking up other people. I also attended events that would heal me and expand my consciousness, such as visiting metaphysical centers where the speakers and healers would do healings on people. The most significant thing I did was learn that if I ever wanted to see the day where money would no longer exist, I and the rest of my fellow humans would need to realize that acting as a service-to-others entity will bring rewards that money cannot bring, and being a service-to-self entity is beneficial but is nowhere near as good at changing the world for the better like being a service-to-others entity. Humanity was able to live in the free world that we live in here in 2050 because we learned that just because money doesn’t exist doesn’t mean humanity must work for free. There is no such thing as “working for free” because even in a society without money, working as a service-to-others entity brings good things to all and makes life worth living.
The Merge. The untold tale of when true collaboration became possible.
I am not a numerologist, but I believe in the power of numbers. 2 and 4 were the numbers that catalyzed the change you now see in the world in regards to how men and women co-create.
I’ll tell you the whole story.
In 2024, the 24h of January to be precise, I came across an Essay Competition that marked the beginning of what you now call reality.
At that time, the balance between masculine and feminine values, that you now take for granted, was not present. The collaboration between the sexes, that your generation benefits from, has only come about in the past 20 years. You must know, from the stories your parents tell, that the balance between male and female power had been in disharmony for a long time. We were confused, and the gender wars was at its peak.
Let’s backtrack for a moment.
In many of the ancient tribal cultures, women’s and men’s business had been both held sacred. Just like now. Yet, they were also held separately, not together, like we do now. Men’s business was over here, and women’s business over there. Each responsible for a domain of power and they didn’t mix.
As we expanded and became one global tribe, we chucked the baby out with the bath water. Our growth happened quickly, over a few hundred years, and through the process we lost the capacity to see what was baby and what was bath water. Imagine the havoc this caused!
Love, nurturing, community, relationships, intimacy and trust, as you know, are not bathwater. But our systems had been created mostly by men that are quick to act, and for that reason had left out – initially as an oversight – the domains that are held sacred by women.
In 2024 humans were in the precarious position of having more power and technological development than our maturity could handle and not many wise women in the public domain to keep us in check.
Now, as you know, it is very clear that older women in our communities should be listened to. Our culture knows that they are the ones that make sure we are still connected to our core values and that whatever new technology we create needs to remain focused on the well being of all. That is their job.
But at that time, most of our older women were also had by culture. They believed more what gossip magazines told them about ageing than their own hearts. So instead of focusing their energies in keeping society, specially impulsive and creative young men, in line, they spent their time and resources trying to hold on to their youth. It was a difficult period of our history.
The cosmetic industry was extremely strong and women would line up to try to keep themselves young. Youth, culture told us, was the doorway to the appreciation for women.
This was just one of the symptoms of the disconnect of those days and we can’t blame women for that. They were, just like everyone else, trying to survive under those conditions.
We were in a pickle.
Feminism had come about long before that as an attempt to bring gender balance and put an end to women’s suffering and abuse. It was a very powerful and needed movement and it did great good but it also,with the best of intentions, ended up including women’s voice in a world that had barely any feminine input in its design and therefore lacked most of the qualities that women value.
Our systems were dry, devoid of connection, intimacy and play. In fact, even thinking that systems could include such attributes, as we now see, is the domain of female creativity. And that, was completely lacking in the public spheres. Specially in the way we engaged with the economy and politics.
Women did end up finding ways to be part of such systems but of course they didn’t thrive. Quite the opposite. Even if they achieved financial success and status many had become ill, depressed and anxious. Not to say, they were often misunderstood and underestimated.
To put it simply, to fit into the constructs that were valued back then, women had to give up their connection to their bodies and many became, just like the male leaders, talking heads!
This didn’t turn out well for our older women and society in general, as mentioned above, but it also had tremendous negative consequences in the lives of younger women that had been taught by culture to distrust their bodies. An example was that women’s bodies of that time forgot how to birth and breastfeed. It’s never been the head that births. It was always the domain of the body. But our culture subjugated the body to a lesser category and we all paid the price. In many countries, in those days, cezarean sections became more common than natural births and, whats worse, this fact was not even seen as a problem by our medical system.
Please don’t get me wrong, most women did attempt to give birth naturally, under the tight guidance of a doctor that rarely understood the timing of a birthing body. So she did try and, when she failed, she blamed herself and never the system.
Those were difficult times. There was Covid, climate change, political and economic uncertainties and there were wars, with hundreds of thousands of people dead. We had reached rock bottom with the type of solutions we had been seeking. We needed something else.
There were well meaning men asking good questions but they just couldn’t see that the key that was holding many of the solutions they were looking for, was a key they dared not touch. Or didn’t think of touching.
The menstrual cycle. And that’s where the story gets good!
Of course it would be too simplistic to say that the menstrual cycle gave us all the solutions we needed. It wasn’t as simple as that. The thing is, these were days in which women (and men) were living oblivious to the fact that the world of unlimited progress, that was destroying the planet, had been the product of the creativity generated by male bodies.
Male bodies, as you know, are powered by the super-strong and energetic hormone testosterone, and they move from the impulse to action very very quickly. They created skyscrapers, bridges, cities, the internet and so much more. But they lost the “why”.
The why, was the domain of women, hidden deep inside their embodied nature.
Women’s bodies, powered mostly by a very different cocktail of hormones, estrogen and progesterone (and a bit of testosterone), were designed to slow men (and themselves!) down half the month so we could make sure the projects we created together worked for us all and the planet at large.
But instead of women honouring their bodies and guiding men and their creations, men’s creations influenced women’s psyches and they would do anything to not slow down! Menstruation was something that many young women avoided by taking the pill (which would keep women from being cyclical) and the calming hormone progesterone had no chance in modernity! Our resistance to slowing down even got us angry, which culture nicknamed PMS.
Slowing down was what we all needed.
We needed to P-a-u-s-e.
The good news is that the mechanism for that pause was already inbuilt in the system. In our female body-system. We just needed to recognise it.
The menstrual cycle, just like all life cycles, follows a pattern. Birth, growth, full-bloom, harvest, decay, death, re-birth, over and over again. Just like the seasons. Spring (birth and growth), Summer (full-bloom), Autumn (harvest, decay), Winter (death). But we, as modern women, had only been taught to appreciate the birth, growth and full-bloom phases of our cycles, available only half the month! The luteal, and menstrual phases, the answer to what our society needed, we had been taught to push away.
So it became clear to me that reminding women of the wisdom of their body/minds was a worthy enough mission to undertake. It was also important to teach men about such wisdom, after all, we needed to create new culture together. We had already been living as the future of a disembodied past. To correct that we needed to bring the body with us.
This was the vision.
That’s when I created the C-Lab with the mission to dispel confusion about cycles and lines. It all started with conversations that involved both men and women around what it would mean to have a cyclicacly informed society.
The pillar of C-lab, was education through story telling. Women are oral storytellers and if the history books have kept us out of history it was time to create, in our own terms, herstory.
You have to remember that people were still living as if our deep physiological differences didn’t matter. But we now know that physiology trumps psychology and its crazy to think that smart people at that time didn’t acknowledge that.
A lot of our material was designed to bring clarity to such topics and make our assumptions more visible.
The sex hormones, that we now know deeply impact who we are and how we create, had been completely ignored from the field of psychology. Through our material we started showing how modernity had been designed by and for people fueled by testosterone and for women in the follicular and ovulation phases of their cycles. Imagine a year with only Spring and Summer! That’s how we lived.
The modern world hadn’t been designed for or by women in the luteal or menstrual phases. So the world we lived in was the result of only half the way a woman is meant to live and create. The other half had been unspoken for. The Autumn, and the Winter. The seasons our culture had been craving for.
There was a double bind, though, that we also needed to make visible. Estrogen is a hormone that makes women accommodating. So women were quick to accommodate to that reality and work with it. Many women found pseudo-excitement using their creativity towards being beautiful and getting followers on social media. Think of the beauty and excitement of Spring, that energy needs to go somewhere. The problem was that women were accommodating to culture unconsciously, whist imagining not be had by their hormones.
So the first step, obviously, was to make the unconscious conscious. You know the drill. From unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.
The best way we found to do that was through conversations between trusted groups of people. So we started getting people together. Thinkers, philosophers, designers, artists, writers, stay-at-home mums, engineers, psychologists, doctors, teachers, nurses, fashion designers, etc We all came together to speak and to listen.
You have to remember that at that time technology was at its peak and humans had lost the capacity to trust and foster deep intimacy with one another. We thought we could actually create systems and solutions to the worlds most pressing issues without developing love for our fellow human beings. Again, a blindspot created by the male uber-efficient gaze.
C-Lab was working under a very different premise. It kept trust and intimacy as sacred pillars and it grew with it at the centre.
It was truly a simple concept but quite new at that time. C-Lab offered a more private space than youtube, but more public than regular unrecorded conversations. These dialogues worked as teaching method, but instead of having a teacher at the front, it was a group of people sharing vulnerably how they were affected by certain things and how they saw the world.
The recorded conversations, at the start, were shared only to members and offered people the opportunity to have a look inside intimate spaces and slowly start recognizing what they had been missing but didn’t yet know.
Some of the topics we started with were quite daring for the time, for example: stories of women’s first period. But remember, we had all sorts of people participating, that’s what made it groundbreaking! We had a series of such conversations. Through them, people had an insight of how it felt for many women to start having periods and live in the world as it was, with no role models. These conversations were disarming because they were not preaching anything. They were just disclosing how culture had impacted them.
For a while our topics had to bring the menstrual cycle to the foreground, as a counterpoint to the mechanistic culture, but soon they morphed into more open dialogues about the workplace, sex, pleasure, relationships, war, grief, politics, the economy, healing, education etc…It became a melting pot of interesting ideas and novel ways of executing them exactly because we included both male and female styles of engaging with problems.
There were some teachings too. The simple approach of mapping the menstrual cycle into the seasons and into other cycles to make it more visible to women and men, was a tool we used a lot in various contexts. Since our female lineage was so broken, we had to teach parents and educators, through videos and articles, about the importance of the physiological rites of passages for girls. We explained how the way a girl was initiated (or not) when she started menstruating would ripple through her entire life. The way she would birth and go through menopause, would be a direct result of such initiation (or lack thereof).
If she was ashamed of her cycle as a young woman and disregarded her body’s signals, it was more likely that she would have medical intervention when giving birth and that she would need HRT when going through menopause. HRT was nothing to be ashamed of, but it kept women in a rhythm that didn’t have her mind/body/spirit wellbeing as priority. It helped her to “keep calm and carry on”. But the world didn’t need more of that. We needed her on her game!
Because of that we started actively working with post-menopausal women. They were a very powerful demographic to work with because they didn’t have the hormones cycling in them anymore, so they were more forthright and sure of themselves then women that were still cycling. Most of these mature women, however, had also not been initiated (when young) in the wisdom contained in a female cyclical nature so they also had to be introduced to that wisdom in order to support the younger generations.
After winning the essay competition, C-Lab became more visible in various contexts and it started getting a lot of traction.
After five years, C-Lab had become a very inclusive platform that offered tools, resources and helped people initiate conversations in their own communities about how to include the cyclical nature of a woman in the wider culture. New policies came out, new ways of looking at psychology, new methods of education, a new and updated medical system, and a much deeper general understanding that both males and females grow and mature in different ways and need different types of support and environments to blossom.
C-Lab became a greenhouse where a new culture could be hashed out, where connections were made, and kinship was re-established.
The good thing is that a few years into C-Lab, new scientific research started coming through to prove exactly that, that female bodies and male bodies were very different and that the menstrual cycle changes a woman’s brain on purpose. This is all very well accepted today but you have to understand that it wasn’t back then.
I became a spokesperson for C-Lab and even though I was the one that initiated that process, C-Lab only became what it is today because it gave voice to the collective. What we soon found out through the growth of C-lab is that people had made really wrong assumptions about each other and by being able to listen to people disclosing their intimate journeys they could recognize how wrongly they had been interpreting their actions in the world.
One of the things that a cyclicacly informed culture knows, as you know by now, is that women are naturally made to be the matriarchs of the outer systems. That’s the role of post-menopausal women. Of course you know that, since you grew up in such environment.
So, my friends, that was the very beginning of what it is now so common to your eyes. It was the beginning of our collective re-membering. The time when we started putting our selves back together and working as a true team. But don’t get me wrong, this didn’t scale. It catalyzed small grassroots movements all over the world and not a coherent and simple movement as some people had thought was necessary. This scaling ideas was also the by-product of the way men think. Women are web weavers and that is what you now see, isn’t it? Webs of connection everywhere!
C-Lab went from a small group of people in one place to many small groups of people and then, just like a virus, it spread.
I hope you like this brief history class on how we went from a world in which the values and systems had been mostly generated by efficient and brilliant men that had lost their “why” to a world in which we, men and women, became equal co-creators, never losing track of the why.
The end is herstory. 😉
Becoming Magnificent
Becoming Magnificent by Adruma Victoria A quarter of a century ago, I made the determination to begin honoring the inherent magnificence of ME. I became convinced at that time that even the most immature individuals possess within themselves qualities of infinite magnificence. My challenge became how to peddle this treasure of realization….at all times and in all directions? I knew that if I lived this truth and listened to the frequencies of my soul song, that this vibrancy would multiply. And it did! Now, mind you, I was not alone. Every day I encountered people who felt courageous enough to love self, others and the creation……..just as the sun shines and the palm trees dance. I teach music at a private school. Music theory gave me a wonderful platform to impart onto my students far greater access to their inner light and their own magnificence. My daughter, Kiah, bought me singing bowls for my birthday. I used them to help my friend, John, who was struggling with cancer. After he received just a few sound baths, his wife called me and shared that his diminished blood count had greatly improved, and that the cancer was disappearing. I was amazed at how sound and positive intention had worked to support John’s healing. I wept tears of appreciation at how the magic of sound and positive energy can afford the most benevolent of outcomes. I believe in angels and have vast experiences of how they have healed me and made me strong, so I began to expand my thinking in this area and asked these angels to co-create with me to produce energy resonance that would multiply love and light. My Rock/Soul band, Side Hustle, plays at clubs and festivals. I invited the angels to dance and to inspire the spiritual surrounding of the many individuals who come and enjoy our music and asked them to multiply in their lives. Somehow, we tapped into the forces of light and love beyond the veil. Behaviors of respect and equity for women, the elderly and any group that was so often marginalized began to spread like wildfire. The beauty that seemed dormant in each soul started resonating and vibrating at higher frequencies, such that love stimulating beauty coupled with respect and gratitude became more common. I had to change ME, and the world changed as I evolved. The true beauty of living expanded. Here in the year 2050, each of us embrace the calibration of our unique inner song of love with harmonic overtones. Just as ten thousand birds can fly like a wave and change direction in beautiful harmony, the sentience of all created beings of Mother Earth share the poetic dance of tension and release resolving to beauty within the earth and sky people. The intelligence of water ripples in human consciousness and throughout atmospheres beyond our human scope. The memories of stars that long ago smacked into planets, affording us the elements of the human body and its support systems vibrate joy. The individual sound signature of each of us is as infinite as numbers affords endless stimulation, passion and discovery of life. We live also as masters in the art of living and masters in the art of loving. I lived more and more with focus on my own magnificence and that of every human being. I sought to honor the feminine aspects of the natural world, and, although I am rather masculine, those of myself. The universe cross-pollinated the heart-centered living that was once dormant in our species. Here in 2050, we love living and giving, and we marvel at the myriad of beautiful expressions of love within our global community of the heart. The mountains and trees sing new songs of joy heard and desired by multitudes.