While doing the violet flame meditation, notice that, despite mainstream media’s depiction of a world going to hell, thanks to the internet, we know otherwise. Or, maybe I should say, both are moving right along simultaneously, destruction and creation, Heaven arising out of Hell. Jan Lundberg, an independent oil industry analyst, eco-activist, and author of Songs of Petroleum, for example, thinks so.
Here are the first two paragraphs of his Where We Stand on the Cusp of Tremendous Change:
As we plod along daily in this time of great change, we activists for the Earth often feel paradoxically that nothing is changing. More and more of us fear the clock is ticking faster and faster toward extinction. At the same time there are clear signs we should soon expect a better way of living in balance with the Earth to come about fairly soon.
No one has hit the right lever, it seems, to allow everyone to “break on through to the other side,” as the Doors exhorted. We see tragic trends of destruction persisting at the same time that small bursts of awareness often illuminate a growing number of people paying attention. Some needed an impact in their personal lives to be brought low off their material cloud, while others have steadily kept learning and expanding their awareness of the big picture. The question for those asking is: “What will it take?”
Then there’s Paul Hawken, whose Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being has inspired hope and affirmation in the thousands of NGOs and millions of people in them whom he writes about. That book was published four years ago. I can just imagine how many NGOs have been created since then! Here’s a video of a talk he gave in December, 2010. I plan to watch it this weekend.
