iHaveNet.com
World - The Next 500 Years | World
  • HOME
  • WORLD
    • Africa
    • Asia Pacific
    • Balkans
    • Caucasas
    • Central Asia
    • Eastern Europe
    • Europe
    • Indian Subcontinent
    • Latin America
    • Middle East
    • North Africa
    • Scandinavia
    • Southeast Asia
    • United Kingdom
    • United States
    • Argentina
    • Australia
    • Austria
    • Benelux
    • Brazil
    • Canada
    • China
    • France
    • Germany
    • Greece
    • Hungary
    • India
    • Indonesia
    • Ireland
    • Israel
    • Italy
    • Japan
    • Korea
    • Mexico
    • New Zealand
    • Pakistan
    • Philippines
    • Poland
    • Russia
    • South Africa
    • Spain
    • Taiwan
    • Turkey
    • United States
  • USA
    • ECONOMICS
    • EDUCATION
    • ENVIRONMENT
    • FOREIGN POLICY
    • POLITICS
    • OPINION
    • TRADE
    • Atlanta
    • Baltimore
    • Bay Area
    • Boston
    • Chicago
    • Cleveland
    • DC Area
    • Dallas
    • Denver
    • Detroit
    • Houston
    • Los Angeles
    • Miami
    • New York
    • Philadelphia
    • Phoenix
    • Pittsburgh
    • Portland
    • San Diego
    • Seattle
    • Silicon Valley
    • Saint Louis
    • Tampa
    • Twin Cities
  • BUSINESS
    • FEATURES
    • eBUSINESS
    • HUMAN RESOURCES
    • MANAGEMENT
    • MARKETING
    • ENTREPRENEUR
    • SMALL BUSINESS
    • STOCK MARKETS
    • Agriculture
    • Airline
    • Auto
    • Beverage
    • Biotech
    • Book
    • Broadcast
    • Cable
    • Chemical
    • Clothing
    • Construction
    • Defense
    • Durable
    • Engineering
    • Electronics
    • Firearms
    • Food
    • Gaming
    • Healthcare
    • Hospitality
    • Leisure
    • Logistics
    • Metals
    • Mining
    • Movie
    • Music
    • Newspaper
    • Nondurable
    • Oil & Gas
    • Packaging
    • Pharmaceutic
    • Plastics
    • Real Estate
    • Retail
    • Shipping
    • Sports
    • Steelmaking
    • Textiles
    • Tobacco
    • Transportation
    • Travel
    • Utilities
  • WEALTH
    • CAREERS
    • INVESTING
    • PERSONAL FINANCE
    • REAL ESTATE
    • MARKETS
    • BUSINESS
  • STOCKS
    • ECONOMY
    • EMERGING MARKETS
    • STOCKS
    • FED WATCH
    • TECH STOCKS
    • BIOTECHS
    • COMMODITIES
    • MUTUAL FUNDS / ETFs
    • MERGERS / ACQUISITIONS
    • IPOs
    • 3M (MMM)
    • AT&T (T)
    • AIG (AIG)
    • Alcoa (AA)
    • Altria (MO)
    • American Express (AXP)
    • Apple (AAPL)
    • Bank of America (BAC)
    • Boeing (BA)
    • Caterpillar (CAT)
    • Chevron (CVX)
    • Cisco (CSCO)
    • Citigroup (C)
    • Coca Cola (KO)
    • Dell (DELL)
    • DuPont (DD)
    • Eastman Kodak (EK)
    • ExxonMobil (XOM)
    • FedEx (FDX)
    • General Electric (GE)
    • General Motors (GM)
    • Google (GOOG)
    • Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)
    • Home Depot (HD)
    • Honeywell (HON)
    • IBM (IBM)
    • Intel (INTC)
    • Int'l Paper (IP)
    • JP Morgan Chase (JPM)
    • J & J (JNJ)
    • McDonalds (MCD)
    • Merck (MRK)
    • Microsoft (MSFT)
    • P & G (PG)
    • United Tech (UTX)
    • Wal-Mart (WMT)
    • Walt Disney (DIS)
  • TECH
    • ADVANCED
    • FEATURES
    • INTERNET
    • INTERNET FEATURES
    • CYBERCULTURE
    • eCOMMERCE
    • mp3
    • SECURITY
    • GAMES
    • HANDHELD
    • SOFTWARE
    • PERSONAL
    • WIRELESS
  • HEALTH
    • AGING
    • ALTERNATIVE
    • AILMENTS
    • DRUGS
    • FITNESS
    • GENETICS
    • CHILDREN'S
    • MEN'S
    • WOMEN'S
  • LIFESTYLE
    • AUTOS
    • HOBBIES
    • EDUCATION
    • FAMILY
    • FASHION
    • FOOD
    • HOME DECOR
    • RELATIONSHIPS
    • PARENTING
    • PETS
    • TRAVEL
    • WOMEN
  • ENTERTAINMENT
    • BOOKS
    • TELEVISION
    • MUSIC
    • THE ARTS
    • MOVIES
    • CULTURE
  • SPORTS
    • BASEBALL
    • BASKETBALL
    • COLLEGES
    • FOOTBALL
    • GOLF
    • HOCKEY
    • OLYMPICS
    • SOCCER
    • TENNIS
  • Subscribe to RSS Feeds EMAIL ALERT Subscriptions from iHaveNet.com RSS
    • RSS | Politics
    • RSS | Recipes
    • RSS | NFL Football
    • RSS | Movie Reviews
The Next 500 Years
Robert C. Koehler

HOME > WORLD

 

SocialTwist Tell-a-Friend

The participants in this unique dialogue may have been doing no less than opening the window on the next 500 years.

As scary and stupefying as our world sometimes seems, we are at a place of enormous potential right now -- a transition point of unprecedented understanding among cultures and peoples and worldviews. Pushing that understanding, creating, in the words of the late physicist David Bohm, a milieu of "participatory consciousness" among radically diverse thinkers, is the idea behind the Language of Spirit Conference, sponsored by the SEED Graduate Institute, which has been held in Albuquerque every year since 1999.

Last week I attended the 12th annual Language of Spirit Conference, which brought together Western scientists and scholars and Native North American and Australian scientists, philosophers and storytellers, not to argue, but to grope for commonality at the far reaches of their belief systems. The original dialogues, convened by Bohm and Leroy Little Bear (former director of Native Studies at Harvard) in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1992, came about because Little Bear, who was well-versed in the developments of quantum physics, realized that Western science had reached the end of linear thought and finally got it: The universe is a living, conscious, interconnected organism.

This is how the world's indigenous people see things. They always have. Reverently tied to place, they have been the natural world's caretakers for thousands of years. They are of the world, living not just sustainably but in intimate relationship with their sacred piece of Planet Earth.

"We are a people who never made singing or dancing unrespected ways of knowing," said Pat McCabe, a Navajo writer and scholar who also goes by the name Woman Stands Shining. "All of the five-fingered ways of knowing remained open to us."

And now . . . now . . . 500 years after Western conquistadors subdued and divided the planet, devastating indigenous people on every continent and, while they were at it, pushing the natural world to the brink of eco-collapse, we are turning -- some of us -- to the wisdom of connectedness that has been ours for the asking all along.

This isn't easy or simple. Our disconnect from one another, from ourselves and from the natural world is embedded in the Western languages, which break the world into millions of discrete, manipulable pieces, called nouns ("My name is Matthew. I'm a nounaholic," cried linguist Matthew Bronson). Westerners control reality through language, but they don't evoke it. Indigenous languages are, as I am slowly coming to understand them, verb-based, intrinsically linking speaker and object in a flow of motion that cannot be linguistically sliced and diced.

Just as I began writing this column, the New Yorker arrived in the mail. On the cover of the Aug. 30 issue is a drawing of a middle-aged white guy sitting on a beach chair at the edge of the ocean, smugly pointing a TV remote at it -- perfectly illustrating the disconnected, control-fixated Westerner the Language of Spirit Conference was addressing . . . the one who has done so much harm.

With eerie synchronicity, the water on the New Yorker cover flows back to the dialogue. Speaking about the BP oil spill, SEED founder Glenn Aparicio Parry noted in amazement, "The mainstream world believes that water is dead -- yet we're 70 percent water."

"The assumption of the laws (of science)," said biophysicist Beverly Rubik, "is that we're a non-living universe. We ought to start over. We have a science that starts with deadness. It's time to revision science -- in a living universe."

These words begin to get at the vibration of the conference -- this exercise in participatory consciousness -- which struck at the core of something vital. The ostensible subject of the 12th Language of Spirit dialogue was time. The speakers dismantled linear time, the kind that moves in a straight line and pulls us along on its track. (In the U.S., time wasn't standardized until 1886, when the railroads demanded it.) Nonlinear time -- the timelessness of dreaming, reverence, prayer and awe -- filled the room, and I could feel the living universe pulse. It pulsed with love.

"The eagle is more valuable to you alive" than as merely a source of feathers, said Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan. "The sacred thing is the life force."

It also pulsed with anger. Writer M.J. Zimmerman, speaking about SEED spiritual mentor Leon Secatero, who died in 2008, said: "Grandfather Leon always talked about getting ready for the next 500 years. We're in a transition point. The anger of colonization should not be brought into the next 500 years.

"Hurt people hurt people," she added. "Europeans have moved into every part of this planet and hurt people." She offered the plea that we in the disconnected West find our own roots, dig "way back into our own traumatic history" and begin to heal our brokenness.

And for the first time in my life I found myself groping in the darkness of my own past, beyond a few generations of known ancestors and beyond my identity as an American, toward an ancient tribal commonality that has fallen out of history, and I felt a slow give in the assumptions of my life.

"Everyone is indigenous," said Jill Milroy, dean of the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. Perhaps knowing this is the first step in envisioning the next 500 years.

SocialTwist Tell-a-Friend

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

The Great Gamble

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

 

  • No 'I' in 'Team,' but Plenty of 'I' in India
  • Afghanistan - There Can Be No Graceful Exit
  • Afghanistan Timetable Remains a Factor of Uncertainty
  • We Are Playing Fidel Castro's Game
  • Has the Time Come to Legalize Drugs?
  • Handling Tensions on the Korean Peninsula
  • Richard C. Holbrooke: Pakistan Aid Inadequate
  • Afghanistan Leaks Answer Few Questions
  • Afghanistan & The Karzai Problem
  • Afghanistan - Winds of Changing Policy
  • Obama's Juggling Act in the Middle East
  • Defusing Lebanon's Powder Keg
  • Germany's Good Fortune Tips the Scales Against its Neighbors
  • End Poverty: Export Capitalism
  • Haitian Quake Hasn't Dislodged Status Quo
  • Why We Go Back to Haiti
  • Iraq - Mission Accomplished II
  • The Fight Escalates Against Fake Drugs
  • China's Coal Addiction
  • Afghanistan: The Pentagon's Lost War
  • Afghanistan: The Cost of Nation Building
  • Afghanistan: Pentagon Papers Redux?
  • Behind Iraq's Long Political Indecision
  • Venezuela - Colombia Spat to Pass, Return
  • Will China Rule the World?
  • NATO's Future Involves More Global Partnerships
  • Gloom Awaits U.S. Climate Diplomacy
  • U.S. - U.K.: Difficult Duet in Afghanistan
  • 'Pariah of the Pacific' Has Ham-handed Grip on Fiji
  • Turkey Takes the Veil
  • For Israel a Two-State Proposal Starts With Security
  • Is It Too Late to Stop Iran
  • The Middle East's Private Little War
  • Reality and Reform for How the EU Keeps Its Peace
  • Chancellor Angela Merkel's Sinking Support
  • The Real Reason Why Afghanistan Is a Lost Cause
  • The War Drones On
  • When the 'Right War' Goes Wrong
  • The Afghanistan Paradox
  • Pakistan's Gambit in Afghanistan
  • Obama Wasting Opportunities in Latin America
  • Stopping Nuclear Proliferation Before It Starts
  • Veiled Truths: The Rise of Political Islam in the West
  • Steps to Stop Iran From Getting a Nuclear Bomb
  • Iran: The Nuclear Containment Conundrum
  • Iran: The Right Kind Of Containment
  • China Is the Key to Handling Nuclear North Korea
  • Coping With China's Financial Power
  • What China's Currency Reform Means For Investors
  • Russian-American Obstacles Overshadow Obama-Medvedev Meeting
  • Russia's Courtship of Silicon Valley
  • Ukrainian Blues: Viktor Yanukovych's Rise and Democracy's Fall
  • Russia: Prisoners of the Caucasus
  • The Afghan Challenge Is Far Tougher
  • New Guard, Old Policy on Afghanistan
  • Fear and Uncertainty in Afghanistan
  • Afghanistan: Bribing the Enemy
  • Afghanistan Poses Difficult Challenges
  • Defining Success in Afghanistan
  • Sad Stan, Famous Petraeus
  • The Challenge of Reconciliation in Kenya
  • The Tyranny of Unity in Zimbabwe
  • Mexico: The New Cocaine Cowboys
  • Under Santos Colombia Could Rise to the Next Level
  • Autocrats' Latest Weapon: Indirect Censorship
  • Latin America's Rich Should Be More Generous
  • Castrocare in Crisis

 

(C) 2010 Robert C. Koehler

 

Recommend

Search Powered By Google

Google Search   

ADVERTISEMENT

Advertisement

Advertisement

ADVERTISEMENT

Job & Career Search

career & job search                    job title, keywords, company, location
  • HOME
  • WORLD
  • USA
  • BUSINESS
  • WEALTH
  • STOCKS
  • TECH
  • HEALTH
  • LIFESTYLE
  • ENTERTAINMENT
  • SPORTS

World - The Next 500 Years | Global Viewpoint

  • Services:
  • RSS Feeds
  • Shopping
  • Email Alerts
  • Site Map
  • Privacy