DINNER GATHERINGS
Start your own gathering – it’s easy!
Bring a group of four to six friends together to hold four potluck dinner gatherings – or dessert, coffee, hors d’oeuvres, whatever you like – to connect in the heart about what’s happening in the world and why, when we join hands, we are far more powerful than we may think!
Instructions and details here.
“We cannot solve the problems we face from the same level of thinking that created them.” – Albert Einstein
“The only way to get it together is together.” – Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
“Whether you believe you can, or you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
Mass Overwhelm
Climate crisis.
Economic crisis.
Democracy crisis.
How might more of us respond so we don’t check out, numb out or burn out?
The Power of Us is a consciousness-raising, active movement in its infancy, organized around a seven-point framework, pictured at left. The goal is to engage 12.5 million Americans in collective action for positive change. It will include a social app and an invitation to small in-person dinner gatherings, to connect with friends in our grief and despair – or our joy and hope – and to give us a hopeful path towards a regenerative, cooperative future that’s possible and that nearly everyone wants. What’s missing is a critical mass of political will and the inspirational awareness that can lead us to a renewed sense of effective collective engagement in creating the future we want for ourselves and the coming generations of all life on the planet.
A Mental-Emotional-
Existential Crisis
Let’s face it, the great majority of Americans are in a state of despair, depression, general hopelessness, numbed-out paralysis or simply distracted disengagement. Witness the 37 million Americans on antidepressants, the 21 million with substance addictions, the rise in suicides and mass shootings. Less than a percent of Americans are involved in social-political action, and for understandable reasons – the traditional channels of change – protests, marches, strikes, writing to representatives, letters to the editor, etc. – appear to have no effect on the system of political and economic power, and activism as most of us know it is a major turnoff, demoralizing at best.
Our greatest hope in healing our society is in addressing what’s happening at the individual level, emotionally and spiritually. Only when we tap our greatest grief and rage can we tap our greatest power.
Being with What Is –
Showing Up Exactly as We Are
The first step in addressing our collective depression and disengagement – the first step in any recovery process – is to name what’s going on within us and come together to acknowledge where we’re at – in person, among friends. When we come together in our hopelessness, another kind of hope can be born when we realize we are not alone and that our depression is not a sign of our weakness of character, it’s a symptom of our broken social and economic systems.
Questioning our Cynicism
The second step is to look closely at our hopelessness or depression and get smart about it- maybe the world is not as hopeless as we have been led to believe by the 15 billionaires who own and control our major channels of news and information. What are the assumptions we might be making about what we believe is and isn’t possible? The book, Not Too Late by Rebecca Solnit reveals the great potential of possibility that lies hidden in our unexamined hopelessness. Hear an interview with her on Tricycle here.
There are a number of hopeful paths forward which, if they had much larger numbers of Americans energizing and activating them, the hope for the future could rise significantly. Consider the United Nations 17 Point Plan for Sustainable Development, or The American Anti-Corruption Act and the related Represent.us movement.
Educate & Inspire Ourselves
The Power of Shared Consciousness
The third step is to educate ourselves specifically why there is hope – drawing lessons from history, the present day and our extraordinarily possible futures – and that we, collectively, can become unstoppable in creating the world we wish to live in when enough of us join hands with each other and stand for that better future. What the movements of Gandhi, King and Mandela had in common was a shared sense of the power of the moral good, an idea of transcendent consciousness, or satyagraha, as Gandhi called it.
What has caused movements in the past to succeed and what has caused them to fail? How many Americans do you think have a clear understanding of those lessons? Let me offer you a hint: Not many. We have become largely blind to the courage and greatness of which human beings are capable, since the images and messages fed to us by the establishment are mostly cynical, negative and dismissive of our amazing, creative and bold humanity.
Freeing Ourselves from
Internalized Oppression
The great Peruvian activist Paolo Friere wrote about the ways in which we each carry within us the pessimistic, paranoid and violent worldview of our dominant culture. The more aware we become of this conditioning we carry, the easier it becomes to free ourselves from it, and choose a different worldview – one which is life and human-affirming, embraces the fact of our interdependence and can engage in effective action towards the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible (thank you, Charles Eisenstein for those words). As Gandhi, King and Mandela understood, nonviolence, and hence the real power of the movement, is not possible unless we do our inner work. What we don’t transmute we transmit. Love is the most transformative force in this world, as all the great wisdom traditions teach us. Unless we heal from the bulk of our trauma and reactivity, we will only replicate the systems of oppression that we are seeking to shift.
From Hyper Individualism to a
Culture of Collaboration
American culture has generally been obsessed with the archetype of the cowboy, the fixation on “me,” the Newtonian myth that every person, and particle, is an island; disconnected from everything else in a vast and meaningless universe. Quantum mechanics and string theory have been telling us since 1912 that the model of separation is woefully misguided, and that the universe is actually profoundly interconnected and organismic in nature. As we learn to harness our collective intelligence and recognize our interdependence, we can shift our mindset to the only one offers our species a future – understanding our insepparability and our cooperative potential.
We Only Need 3.5%
The research of Harvard political scientist Eryka Chenoweth revealed that every political change movement of the 20th Century that was nonviolent, had clear goals and had reached 3.5% of the population of their nation was a slam-dunk in reaching their goals. In the United States, that would be 12.25 million people. Consider the subscribers of the following pop musicians: Eminem, 57 million; Katie Perry, 42.9 million; Billie Eilish 45.7 million, etc. 12.25 million people is not out of reach when enough of us see how much power we can have when we are connected in a consciousness and vibration of compassion and nonviolence. Combine that with critical political goals that become possible at scale.
By engaging our existing networks of friends who already appreciate this worldview, and having them spread the word by mouth at a rate of 5 people per contact, we could reach our goal in 9.3 cycles. We believe we have a good chance of success with a no-brainer of an invitation – when we are decentralized with clear goals and strategies; when we have become skillful in communication and collaboration; when we have freed ourselves from our beliefs in our powerlessness; and when we have a shared understanding of the inspiring past, the present and the possible future, we, too, might be unstoppable.