Spaceship Earth and the dawning of the age of integrity

I can no longer consider my actions to be separate from the rest of the world. My incredible lifestyle comes at the cost of someone else's. The people in the Maldives have done little to cause the seas to rise, yet their home’s and livelihoods are being lost because of me and multiples of me. We all inhabit the one spaceship earth.

As we grow more and more in our consciousness, every one of us is beholden to more and more responsibility. This is the pathway of the fully integrated adult human. We have a choice - become more aware and accept the responsibility of awareness, or to stay in our teenage years - with little regard to the consequences of our actions. Lets keep partying all night long, binging on oil, buying more and more stuff and spending all of our money, as if there is no tomorrow. And indeed, there may not be, for all inhabitants on spaceship earth.

The wisdom of all of the mystical traditions, taught for eons, that ‘we are all one’, is being demonstrated now in a way that defies argument. The air I breath today is the air someone else on the other side of spaceship earth will breath later on. The ocean currents mean that the Gulf oil spill will affect global oceans. We are all to pay the price.

It is the dawning of the age of integrity. We simply must start with considering Universe first. We must challenge every model, every assumption, every system that we have taken for granted for so long.

Most of us have no comprehensive awareness of our economic system. (See my blog on game change.) Yet we engage in this system every day. Even the policy makers do not really understand it. Yet policy they make. Scary stuff...like operating on a living human with a blindfold hoping for the best. We are playing the supreme gamble with spaceship earth and the stakes are very high.

Our education system has been designed to work in conjunction with our economic system, teaching us to be good little students, learn the game, be compliant, and fill the work force with factory drones, often times making ‘stuff’ that has no real value. “Obnoxico” as Bucky Fuller called it. Plastic toys in the McDonalds kid’s meal pack. A marketing ploy, but at what cost to spaceship earth?

If we choose integrity, if we really do choose to go along with integrity in all areas of our life and work, then we are choosing the road less traveled. We are putting a stake in the ground that declares that we will, from this point on, be fully responsible for all of our actions in our local world, and intent on being fully aware of the field effects, the all-in-consequence, of our actions in the Universe.

This choice, by its nature, asks us to examine everything. Where we work, what we do, what we buy, how we live, what we read, how we speak and to whom.

This is not to say that we must not drive a car, or buy an iPhone, or travel overseas, or become a saint. However, when we drive our car we must be aware of the all-in-consequence of driving. And when an oil company has a spill of epic and catastrophic proportions, we need to acknowledge that on some level we played a part of that. Even further, if we are really committed to integrity, we continue to support, explore, create, build, collaborate with others - to find more viable solutions to the oil consuming, hard to recycle car. The impulse to do so is not one of ‘doing the right thing/righteousness’, rather, it comes from a deep awareness that there is a better, wiser, more compassionate way, and we are invested in that.

Choosing integrity does not mean a faultless life. Mistakes are part of the human experience. Mistakes are our greatest learning devise. Not learning from our mistakes, or denying we made a mistake, or covering up mistakes, or continuing to make the same mistakes, erodes our integrity. Just as this occurs on the personal level, so it occurs on the greater systemic level. Have we learned from our mistakes about the global economic crisis? As Bernard Lietaer has said, it would be like continuing to drive a car with faulty breaks down the mountain thinking it was a steering problem. At some point we must agree that the car has faulty breaks, instead of trying to fix the steering. So far we have only been tinkering with the steering on spaceship earth.

Instead of seeing this time as one of fear, scarcity and heartbreak, we can choose to see the opportunities we have now. It starts with the opportunity to invite a greater wisdom into all of our choices. And to celebrate the sheer ingenuity of human kind available when we put our hearts and souls into real sustainable problem solving. There is no lack of energy, we have more than enough for everyone. More sunshine and wind and water and steam and wave power than anyone would ever need. We have built an economic model on lies and illusion. We need to wake up, for we are all, with rare exception, puppets in this game. There is opportunity to rediscover the vitality that comes from doing real work that adds long term value to all. There is opportunity to invent and create systems that support a whole new earth.

We are all captains of spaceship earth. Lets start behaving like it.

To return from Spaceship earth to Integrity

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