Creating Our Future

Creating Our Future has, thus far, had two iterations or incarnations. The first was a social action/training program for high school students (ages 14-18), which I began with my daughter Snatam, Jiwan and Nam Kirn; with the help of Ram Dass, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, amongst others.

Creating Our Future’s statement of purpose, as developed by the students, was:
We are the youth of the planet in alliance to create a reality of peace and balance on the earth. We are committed to ending environmental destruction, bringing and end to war, and working for social justice. We are also committed to learning the skills needed to work together and to have meaningful impact on the world. Our purpose is: to train ourselves and other young people to work together effectively for social and environmental change; to train to be, individually, empowered spiritual warriors; to train, as a group, to work and act together toward a world in balance in every way; to be conscious and effective world citizens while learning to care for ourselves and one another physically, emotionally, and spiritually; to gradually create a network of awakened young people, first regionally, then nationally, and ultimately worldwide.

Beginning in 1987, it grew to a nationwide organization that touched the lives of many students. In 1991, when I went on to start Rainforest Products, Creating Our Future segued into Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!).

A second iteration began in the late 1990’s as collaboration between Ram Dass and myself, which mostly manifested as a series of interesting workshops, but which did not grow into an ongoing organization. It was in working towards this that I realized that I needed to learn more about effective meeting process.

After the enormously successful Creating Our Future (COF) conference I had put together with Ram Dass on Memorial Day Weekend in 2001, there was quite an impetus towards forming an ongoing (2nd iteration of) COF organization. There were follow-up meetings and workshops, and much initial enthusiasm. I was, however, so concerned about getting what we were doing exactly right, that I effectively squelched everyone’s enthusiasm about taking part in Creating Our Future, because I was trying to control every aspect of what we were doing — out of desire to serve, and perhaps, out of fear that we might not succeed. Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: “ ‘Worry’ is prayer for things we don’t want.”

I came to realize that I did not know how to hold onto a vision, share it with others, and then allow them full participation in developing and shaping our collective vision. Since this was very important to me, I decided to look for examples, primarily within the peace activist community (which was the portion of the larger social change community I was most familiar with). For the most part, I found that organizations were either very grass roots based, using a consensus model, in which it was very difficult for leadership to emerge; or they were hierarchical (top down), with not much in the way of avenues for grass roots participation in major decisions. I also found that meeting process in most organizations was very primitive, making it virtually impossible for the greater collective wisdom to emerge.

Then I discovered URI, the United Religions Initiative, the seed for which was planted in 1993 by San Francisco Episcopal Bishop William Swing. Quoting from their web site (http://www.uri.org/About_URI.html): “From the first global summit in 1996 to the Charter signing in 2000, URI engaged thousands of people from diverse religions, spiritual expressions and indigenous traditions to create the URI Charter. Five global summits and numerous gatherings and consultations took place in different regions of the world. URI used a highly effective methodology for positive change, Appreciative Inquiry, pioneered by Dr. David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University and the revolutionary insights for organizing offered by Dee Hock, founder of VISA international.

I began to study both Appreciative Inquiry and Chaordic Process, which is what Dee Hock called his work. Both of these processes are of fundamental importance for the successful evolution of our species.

As the great evolution biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, has said (paraphrasing her): Humanity is, at this time, a primitive species, a species that is not capable of living in harmony with its environment, as opposed to a mature species, such as any part of a mature forest, which is capable of living in harmony indefinitely. Instead, we are a desert-building species, a kind of a cancer on the planet.

The way I see it, is that if we (humanity) are to evolve into a mature species, we shall need to develop effective systems to make our decisions together, to harness and release our collective wisdom, and to govern ourselves.

That is, if we are to survive as a species on this planet of ours, we shall need to learn how to live in harmony with one another and with our environment, otherwise we will, sooner or later, exercise our ever increasing capacity to destroy ourselves by doing so. There is a profound dysfunctionality in our present system of governance; I am not referring here to the rules and laws of our electoral system, but, rather, to the venality of our whole complex political system. It is not a system that serves the greater good; far from it, I regret to say.

How shall we change this? A first step would be to develop functional governance systems. Happily, this step has already begun. Certainly, there is the possibility that more and better systems could be developed in the future, but the new models do work. Both the AI process and Chaordic systems are substantive contributions to our collective wisdom, and when combined together, as they were in the case of URI, they work positively brilliantly. A next step, which has not yet happened, would be for there to be widespread use of these systems. These systems have been implemented; they have been put to good use, there are excellent examples of how well they work. (See the following web sites for case studies: http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/practice/toolsCases.cfm and http://www.chaordic.org/past_projects_summary.html). But right now, knowledge of and use of these systems is still relatively esoteric.

For any of us, who might work with others in circumstances that would be well served by being able to effectively develop the collective wisdom of fellow participants, and/or by having excellent processes with which to make decisions, there are two very good reasons for using these processes: 1- They work; 2- The more people who make use of these processes, the more widespread will become the knowledge and application of said processes.

At this time, there is no real way to change the way our governments work, as there are no generally accepted alternatives. I am not referring here to the question of how to bring about political change, or how to replace one kind of an administration with another, but, rather, to the question of what kind of a governance process would allow for better, more effective governance at all levels. When the, now relatively esoteric, alternatives become widely used and generally accepted, they would then have the possibility of replacing current systems.

For our movement to become successful, we will need to be able to work together effectively, and to include vast numbers of people as full participants. When we will have done this, we will then be in the position to replace the current dysfunctional systems.

There are three major vectors that have the potential to substantially shift the evolution of humanity’s collective destiny, of our capacity to live in harmony with one another and our environment. Our collective understanding of what these vectors are, and their importance to the critical changes that will need to take place for humanity to be able to continue to live and thrive on this planet of ours, decreases with respect to the subtlety and importance of the vector. That is, the more subtle and important, the less understanding and knowledge of the subject.

The three vectors are:

• Digital communication – its evolution and expansion, and its role in providing for rich and complex regional and global communication
• Meeting process – the technology that facilitates our capacity to reason together, solve problems, run our organizations, businesses, and communities;
• Self Worth – the capacity to heal the wounds to our sense of self, and to create safe and cozy environments for children to flourish in.

It is imperative that we shift our collective consciousness, awareness, and understanding of what is possible for us as human beings on this planet of ours, so that we can:

• Believe in the possibility of happiness and contentment
• Be able to open our selves to trusting and being trusted, to loving and being loved
• Forgive our selves for our faults
• Accept ourselves as OK as we are
• Open our selves to the flow of life’s abundance
• Know that there is nothing we need to prove to be OK, to be loved, to succeed
• Know that we deserve to be treated with kindness and grace
• Love ourselves as we would love those around us, and love others as we aspire to love ourselves.
• Be able to acknowledge the humanity of others
• Be wise as to the choices we make with respect to our impact on our environment.

A hypothesis I am currently exploring in this work, is that a community in which all players have had the opportunity to lead one another through healing journeys, and be led by one another through these journeys, would have the capability of living in relation to one another, in a deeper and more loving way than has generally been possible for us (humanity) to achieve. I have been leading Self Worth workshops, and training others to lead them, pretty much full time, for the last ten years, and could easily spend the rest of my working life continuing to do so. But, I am feeling a need to begin to do something more.

I have, over and over in my life, felt called to train those who wish to become effective social change agents, to offer those who wish to devote their lives to serving the greater good of humanity, a very deep and comprehensive training in how to make ones whole being an effective vehicle to do that work. And, to create a community (an actual physical place and a community of people) within which to base this training, that would also establish a model as to how people can live and work together. Gandhi called his work an experiment with truth, “satyagraha” experimenting with the force and power of living in truth. I see our work as continuing with that experiment, carrying it forward.

I am writing a book about this, which I hope to finish by the end of the year. And, am ready to begin this new iteration of Creating Our Future, a community building /training project for those who wish to learn how to dedicate themselves and their whole beings to working as effectively as possible towards moving humanity’s collective consciousness forward. Over the next year, I will be developing a curriculum and faculty (from among the many social change pioneers I have had the privilege of working with over the years), and beginning some pilot training programs in the USA and Europe.

Sat Santokh
July 21, 2011

If this is of interest to you, please get in touch with me.