New Possibilities: A World That Works For Everyone - Part I
Skye Hirst, PhD

Why not create a world that works for everyone? To discover how, we have to ask what would a world that works for everyone look like? First, let’s realize we do have the power to create what we value.  We are not powerless to make a difference.  However, a different worldview of how life works is required; one that is emerging, even as we speak.

What actions are required?  If, we’re going to focus on creating such a world, more is required than affirmations that we soon forget after we make them. There are driving principles found within Life that are being recognized as universal, not opinions or wishful thinking.  Many may dismiss these principles as just another point of view that doesn’t actually work in the real world.  However, these are operative principles much like the laws of physics but functional laws of Life from which patterns emerge that eventually become recognizable as events, attitudes, cultural norms, public opinion, and habits of thinking.  The evolutionary consequences of such laws show up as either healthy or unhealthy organisms and organizations.

To know Life like we’ve never thought about it is what is required to create a world that works for everyone; to sense these intangible and invisible principles; to collectively learn about these principles in how they actually work. The mighty universe is governed by eternal laws, as fixed and universal, as the laws that rule the physical world.

Faith keeps us going in belief that there is more than the daily stuff of life.  Now there is more to support what our faith has hoped for.

The next science frontier is the study of LIFE- ITSELF from the micro to the macro universal perspective; how it works, how it creates and knows itself.
    
Here at the Autognomics Institute, A Center for the Study of Living Process and Life-itself, we are observing, studying and discovering these organizing principles of Life.  We focus on new possibilities for creating living environments that support these essential processes.   Bring your heart first and invite the mind to follow. Let’s learn together how we can create a world that works for everyone and find the effective action to make it a reality.

10 Essential Organizing Processes for Life
A WORLD THAT Can WORK FOR EVERYONE:

Within every living human being exists essential driving functions of Life, or organizing processes that need to be fulfilled and realized. They are both biological and spiritual in nature.  It’s a kind of inherent wisdom that organizes the day-to -day processes of living for the way the organism or being develops, grows, and finds meaning. 
    
Here we will attempt to describe 10 of these processes essential to healthy living entities, be they individual human beings or complex cultures and organizations made up of many people.
 
When living environments recognize and support the realization of these processes in individual beings, something happens that is magical but also quite explainable.  When these processes are suppressed, oppressed, or inhibited in ways that prevent their realization, abhorrent behaviors, more than likely, develop to lesser or greater degrees in the child and or later as an adult.  To be fully realized, as a human being is the fundamental desire of every living being, whether they know it or not.  This is the most sacred of rights, the right to individual freedom of process…. to realize ones own personal intentions of fulfillment at whatever level whether personal, family, worldly pursuits, spiritual understanding and or all of it.

Obviously, most of us walking around today are not fully realized human beings, nor are the majority of us demonstrating explicit abhorrent behaviors. However, increasing numbers of problems are emerging that can be traced to the lack of realization of these processes. It’s as if, lots of people know something is missing but they don’t know where to find it. It’s like having an itch people don’t know how to scratch.  This urge to fulfill ourselves will keep provoking each one of us until we find a way to express what must and needs to be fulfilled.  Until a person begins to get connected with this self-knowing, the results will be and are suffering, struggle, some form of violence against the life that breathes her/him, a dis-ease that sets in to get attention. The dis-ease can be in the human body, mind or soul or it can be a collective dis-ease that grows more obvious each day. If this dis-ease is denied and ignored, you get explosions of all kinds. The dis-ease grows until it gets our attention. 

You will evolve. You will learn sooner or later. How you do it is up to you when you begin to understand the itch you have within that is driving your daily living processes.

There is no fault to find here for why we aren’t able to know this.  It's as if we've been participating in living, doing the best we can.  And now we can choose again. With centuries of foundational beliefs coming from our sciences and metaphysics of dualistic thought, we've developed, collectively as humans, with knowledge that is incomplete.  Most of our beliefs and foundations of thought are founded on ideas that few people even know and yet they rule our lives.  Ideas such as:  (put in later)

The invisible organizing principles of living organisms are being revealed through methods of observation developed as recently as the past decade.  Some findings are shared here. I will speak of essential processes of life by which living organisms and life-itself organize, create and fulfill.  They are almost completely unknown, outside or beyond what is in our collective unconscious. Again, not for any fault we can assign blame to, but there is a process of evolution that we can look at to see how we got here and where we can go from here.

The problems I point to are: increasing numbers of childhood suicides, road rage, workplace rage, drug use (legal and prescribed), school rage, and not the least of which are the 40% of Americans who are depressed.  This says nothing of people who are justifiably unhappy in their lives, young people unwilling to leave home to find work and housing for themselves, young people and adults who are bored and don’t know what they want to do with their lives.  And now we add world-wide terrorism.

So explore these processes with me.  Look around and see how they may apply to what’s happening in your life, in our lives collectively as we each try to find our way.

The following are 10 essential processes to life. They work within everyone. However each will realize them uniquely and in so doing fulfill life's need for diversity.   Each of these processes are operative within each of us as organizing not prescriptive laws of coherence.  They form in us as an interconnected coherent whole, guiding us towards realization of our fullest expression.
 
Our intention here is to study and learn how to foster Life-environments that enhance and allow the realization of these processes.  It is our conviction that with greater awareness of these necessities for living, a more peaceful, healthful and meaningful existence can occur for humanity everywhere.
10 Essential Organizing Processes for Life

#1   Living, Learning and Acting in concert with one's own nature; awareness of INTRINSIC INTENTION; A direct knowing, non-mediated in any way, formed from within, self-determined, self-referential and  self-correcting from the soul’s unique identity. The intention then is to act in coherence with this identity and to recognize when this coherence is shaken in any way.  Each person and life form has an intrinsic uniqueness found nowhere else in the universe. This uniqueness must be expressed for it to thrive.  We’ve all seen the flower pushing up between the cracks in the sidewalk.  It must do so and will strive to express itself against all odds.  A flower knows this and so do humans.  Each being has an inherent right to be him or herself, to thrive and flourish. It begins at least with childhood, but perhaps even before as in a soul's journey of many life-times. 

Children need to be given structure and safety in which they can explore this inner wisdom and guidance. When we create barriers the child cannot overcome, the creative process within the life of this being can be thwarted and never fully realized. The bond between parent and child that can naturally occur from birth allows for a richness of give and take, form and flow of constructive conversations and relating that give each child what she/he uniquely needs to realize her intrinsic intention.   Too often, this relationship doesn't develop and the results are a human being who is angry, unproductive, and unhappy.  Abhorrent behaviors are more likely to develop because the child cannot act in concert with her own knowing. She cannot learn how to find effective action for herself from her own inner knowing of herself.  Instead the focus goes out to the world around it and the child’s inner wisdom is lost sometimes forever, or until by chance someone or some experience intervenes to help the child transcend earlier barriers.

Reflections to help you discover your intrinsic unique nature:
Ask yourself:
  • What are my core desires/values wishing to be expressed.  What feels deeply satisfying to me?    What catches my attention over and over again? What do I want to become really good at doing? What “feels right”?  What feels compelling and satisfying?  You may remember earlier experiences from your childhood of these feelings rather than later as an adult.
  •    
  • When you do something that is intrinsic, you may not recognize it because it is so effortless.  Or when you are on purpose, you may find that you can work against all odds and still feel motivated and inspired to continue.
  • What do I need in my environment to support the expression and realization of this inside>out process?
  • Exercise:  Ask yourself, who do I admire?  What traits do you admire about this person?  You may identify with the traits of an animal.  Those traits you admire are already present within you or you would not even be able to recognize such traits exist, least of all value them.  When you use and express these traits you feel good, fulfilled and on purpose.  A kind of singularity feeling exists. You are at one with yourself and your actions.  Everything lines up and you feel a kind of peace, quiet satisfaction. (See Energy of Money, Enneagrams for more exercises that enable this process)

#2   FIND Sense of Purpose & Meaning
Everyone yearns for meaning and purpose but where and how to find it?  It follows that when we know what our intrinsic self is trying to express, and we act from this awareness, we feel fulfilled. Since there are infinite possibilities within each of us, we get to choose again and again. Yet those actions that we experience as coherent have a certain overall "felt sense" of "it all adding up" in some way.  However, each day of doing something that feels good and on purpose, feels meaningful.  The end product is not so important because each act feels good.  This intrinsic “felt sense” is a guide to us and gives our lives direction and focus.  We can connect to our passions, our ways of being and acting that are true to our unique nature. More often than not, we feel dynamically alive and creative. 

#3   Use SELF- INTEGRITY to find right action
  • When we connect with our intrinsic selves, and act in concert with that self, we feel a kind of internal integrity, a coherence. Some people call this being in the “flow”, the “zone”, being “on-purpose”.
  • It feels like “right action” for us, not for anyone else necessarily, but for us and it feels solid. There really isn't any doubt. We just know it to be the right way for us.
  • It feels like a rudder guiding us. We know when we go off course and can correct our actions to come back into the place of integrity for ourselves.

#4   A need to EXPERIENCE A SENSE OF FULFILLMENT AND ACCOMPLISHMENT OF YOUR OWN CHOOSING
  • Little steps on the path we are choosing, however small or difficult feels meaningful
  • We have intended something, inquired about how to do it and through trial and error we learn how to achieve it
  • We experience a full- filling, a filling up
  • We feel inspired and committed to move forward, to keep going to achieve our intention over and over with new choices that feel like effective action for us.
 

#5:  A need to feel in charge of and able to manage our own lives

  • We grow our self-confidence and self-esteem from inside>out in our childhood, hopefully. If a child wants to put on pink socks and they can do it themselves, they will want to do that without any help from anyone as soon as they possibly can. They may do it upside down or backwards, but that's part of the fun and learning to feel that process of intention following through to completion.   Through self-estimation, we grow an inner sense awareness of this process. We grow an ability to know what we know from action in the niche we find ourselves while expressing our intrinsic intentions. The richer the experiences of learning in this way, the more confident the child becomes.
  • We grow a feeling of being in charge and able to manage our own lives by acting from intrinsic intention, by growing a confidence through action, results and ultimately success. 
  • BEGIN SMALL, STEP BY STEP.
  • This is how we build self-trust.  EXAMPLE:  WHEN SOMEONE ELSE IS ALWAYS TELLING US HOW TO ACT AND OR DOING FOR US, WE NEVER LEARN HOW, TRULY HOW TO DO THAT ACT.   Its rather like we are trying to put on our coat and someone else keeps interrupting our way we know to do it.  It can easily become an experience of frustration as an adult if someone tries to do that. Why don't we recognize that with children?

#6:   A need to grow to be challenged Beyond Our Boundaries, Recognizing and Realizing our Genius, a chance to be “somebody” because we are being what we were born to be.
  • Everyone is a genius at something
  • It may not be what those in your ecological niche value, but there is some process or aspect of yourself that absolutely no one else can express as well or brilliantly as you. 
  • You are absolutely meant to be here, now, in this ecological niche!
  • We each need to feel needed to useful. And we need to be challenged to develop skills beyond what is simply an easy task. 

# 7:  A need to be aware and confident that we can think, learn and grow.
  • To discover we can inquire from our intrinsic uniqueness and be able to pursue that inquiry through to new insights and abilities is one of the greatest feelings of being alive.
  • Schooling today, for the most part stops this process cold in day care and pre-school, never to rise again.  If we watch and listen to our children’s basic moment- to-moment inquiry from birth on, they tell us, if we observe and listen to what they need.  Then we can facilitate their process helping them to discover their powers of learning, discovery and self-satisfaction unique to that child.
  • Learning environments are emerging which absolutely focus on the child discovering this for him/herself.  Find out about them, i.e... Grace Pilon's  Workshop Way, Sudbury Valley Democratic schools, Riley School.

#8: A need to Recognize we are part of larger whole, a bigger picture and that we contribute to that picture in a meaningful way
  • Emerging sciences are showing us about electromagnetic fields, how we are all connected in energy, pointing to a system of order in which we all are part of the whole, playing key roles.
  • Schools don’t teach us about ecological systems and how every organism works together cooperatively or dies out. (This is the opposite of survival of the fittest).
  • Technology and business economies which focus only on control, competition, getting bigger and more automated to facilitate making more money with less attention to the individual life value are making us feel more and more helpless; more removed from everything I’ve mentioned up to this point. 
  • It is becoming HARDER for individuals to FIND EFFECTIVE ACTS. What good is a life if you don’t feel you can find an effective act? (that which you intend)  The more you cannot find effective acts, the more violence ensues (towards self or others).  (more to be added here)
  • Parents can teach cooperation early and point out how each of us affects the other.  The more each one is allowed to be true to herself, the child realizes the self-organizational processes that help everyone find what works her/himself.  Age appropriateness on this point is necessary because, if sharing and otherness is emphasized too young, research shows children become aggressive.
  • Learn how one small part effects the whole literally and practically in cooperative activities.
  • Take time to reflect, to integrate what you are experience.  From this vantage point, we discover the bigger picture and how it all works together.

#9: A need to experience a connection to the Spiritual, our inherent loving nature, the breath of life that breathes us, and there, find inspiration and integration.
  • Take time to reflect and integrate what you’ve experienced. Be in a space free of outside stimulus periodically, a time with no goals or" to do" lists. Just stop everything for a minute.  You'll be amazed how long a minute feels and it does miracles.
  • Focus regularly and periodically on the breath that breathes you.
  • Make time for no schedule, no "thinginess"
  • Do some Jin Shin Jyutsu self-help: Teach children to do it on themselves and on their pets.
  • Do something creative for the inspiration.  Sometimes in the act of creation we connect to the spiritual within ourselves, some process that helps you fall in love, to feel loving.

#10: A need to Develop the Ability to sustain “Not knowing” Taking Risk  (The body/mind likes risks) Life requires creativity and novelty
  • In learning to sustain not-knowing, you develop an ability to harmonize greater diversity.
  • You can sustain inquiry required for learning, adapting and living with change
  • Frustration thresholds go up
  • You grow an ability to handle ambiguity that is so necessary in the creation of any process especially problem solving and dealing with change. It’s easier when you are on purpose to tolerate not knowing. 
  • However, it is not easy in a society that values knowing and getting it right.
  • The more you can tolerate “I don’t know”, the greater the value of the insight when     you gather your inquiries into a process of discovery of your own choosing. 
  • The creative by-product will bring with it a deep satisfaction: the quality will be  rich from the depth and variety of learning from following your own inquiries.
  • Break your own rules or habits where you can predict the outcome.  Discover abduction where learning takes place, where you cannot predict an outcome.  (Abduction is trial and error, developing a hypotheses and acting on it to see what happens)
  • Explore psychological ways to take risks, not just physical risk taking; explore ways you can sustain uncertain outcomes.

When these essential living processes become conscious and are fostered within a learning environment by parents, educators, and employers,  children and adults develop the self-knowledge for finding effective action and abilities to be choose self-fulfilling actions for themselves. And they also become aware of the greater whole and their relation to that whole. Many of the following self-knowing "felt senses" result:
  • A sense of identity
  • A self-reliance, ability to be self-determining, ability to find ways through all of the above to achieve intentions when it is in alignment with the identity and the greater good. 
  • A personal confidence, and power to take on challenges with belief in the possible. From the belief in the possible, we have hope and it springs eternal.
  • Health and congruence within body/mind/spirit.
  • Violence and self-destruction are reduced, if not eliminated or never develop.
  • Self-trust and an ability to trust others, knowing how to manage life by learning and changing whenever necessary or desired.
  • The ability to recognize and value own role in the big picture of the greater whole, the living cosmos. Knowing role in it to balance and maintain coherence as the processes of life evolves.
  • A sense of strength, oneness with a source greater than self from which to draw guidance and wisdom.
  • An internal sense of peacefulness, oneness, sense of flow, and joy to be alive and ability to thrive by your own definition.
  • A reduction of stress with less judgment and discomfort with others' differences; a greater acceptance of others to be themselves reducing racism, a need for classism, status anxiety and violence at yourself or others who appear to be different.
  • There is less need for competition to be alive, nor is there a feeling that there is a limited resource of approval and love.
  • It is easier to feel loving and accepting of self and others. 
  • With self-trust and recognition, a kinship with all life and nature seems to follow.
  • A connection to others becomes easier, even those different from you because you've come to realize how everyone has within, these processes, and something all share.  The variety we provide for each other becomes recognized as a good thing.  And the value for cooperation in learning, working and creating a world together opens each of us to an infinite range of possibilities for becoming, knowing you can change, grow and choose again as long as you are alive.
  • The same is true for all life forms.

SUMMARY
  • In a world that works for everyone, each of us can find effective acts to be our intrinsically guided selves, feeling connected to the greater whole.
  • This makes us feel good and that makes us nice to be around.
  • When I can support you to find effective acts as you choose and you do the same for me, we both feel good and that's a healthy environment.  LIFE IS GOOOOOD!

Steps for Finding Peace and Loving Inside>out


The following steps will assist you in growing peace from inside>out and feeling loving results.   The HOGS will have less power to make misery.

Take moment to explore these given assumptions:
  • We all acknowledge that nothing will be the same since 9/11/01 events.
  • Virtually everything we have known collectively and individually as an effective way to respond to violence will no longer work.
  • This is everyone’s opportunity to learn new ways of responding, acting and living together on this small planet.
  • The human spirit and community can change and adapt in amazing ways.
  • We are capable of enormous creativity to find new solutions.
  • We will need experience and practice to master new ways
  • We honor each person’s divine right to come to his or her own understanding of what works for him or her.
  • A world that works for everyone can happen and it begins with Me.
These steps do not provide answers, they give us process guidelines for discovering new solutions for how to live our lives on this small planet, feeling loving Inside>out.

Continue To Part II