Now is the time to rediscover the spirit of community in all social relations.
In November 2021, friends of World Goodwill and students of the Ageless Wisdom from around the world gathered in ZOOM sessions, broadcast in various languages from Geneva, London and New York, to work with the power of group imagination, intuition and thought. Focusing on the theme of Imagination and Social Regeneration, we used meditation and visualisation, focused listening, and discussion to create group thought-forms and images. Key servers in fields of regenerative design, community development, collective trauma, personal development, and biography work, offered insights based on their experience.
This Newsletter seeks to inspire further creative thought and intuition around the theme. It features edited extracts from a small selection of the insights shared by the 7 guests, together with some brief introductory thoughts. Videos, additional texts, and further resources are available at www.worldgoodwill.org/regeneration §
Restoring the Divine Circulatory Flow
Christine Morgan is the President of the Lucis Trust, the parent body of World Goodwill.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#cm
Imagination and Social Regeneration is ultimately about restoring the divine circulatory flow on earth so that humanity becomes directly aware of the essential unity of all things. Circulation and transformation are the essence of life – the air we breathe and the water we drink, the blood that flows – all that sustains life pursues cycles of transformation in response to the divine circulatory flow from which they have emerged. Harmony can only occur when this flow is reflected in human enterprise too: money and provisions, knowledge and information, art and culture – free circulation determines the wellbeing and steady evolution of ‘all things.’ The most important factor in this is consciousness – resonance with flowing change creates an upward spiralling into ever higher levels of synthesis.
Clearly, the divine circulatory flow that should link all of humanity together as one, is blocked by dissonant forces of materialism and selfishness. The regenerative art is to draw upon the imagination and the spirit of goodwill. This is outstandingly illustrated in the work of the New Group of World Servers, who are bringing so many creative ideas into expression at this time. Their creative projects show us that the world doesn’t have to work as it has done and that we can dynamically change it through our collective imagination as we strive to create a new and better reality for all. §
Mass Thought Images and the Problems of Our Time
Laurence Newey is the Vice-President of the Lucis Trust, the parent body of World Goodwill.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#ln
Although the imagination is traditionally associated with art and culture, it is, in fact, the instigator of all creation. Through the creative imagination and the production of thought images, energy is transferred from one level of the Divine Mind to another – the direction of travel being dependent upon the type and quality of the image produced. Thought-images representing the set of values, institutions, and laws of all of the great societies of the world become embedded in the collective subconscious of their populace, and the energy that passes through them guides social evolution forwards.
This may all sound highly esoteric, but it isn’t really so these days, as the concept of the “Social imaginary” is quite well-known in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies. The social imaginary represents the system of meanings that govern a given social structure. Professor John B Thompson, a sociology professor at the University of Cambridge, describes the social imaginary as “the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life.”(1) And in “The Imaginary Institution of Society”, the philosopher and social critic, Cornelius Castoriadis, wrote: “…the imaginary of the society … creates for each historical period its singular way of living, seeing and making its own existence… the central imaginary significations of a society… are the laces which tie a society together and the forms which define what, for a given society, is ‘real.’”(2)
So, it’s in this dimension of the social imaginary, or the realm of mass thought images that are conditioning human behaviour, that we must look to understand, not only the problems of various societies around the world, but also the big world problems of modern civilization as a whole. §
1. John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, p.6.
2. Ibid, Quoted by J Thompson, pp. 23-4
Healing Trauma so that Our Good Intentions Can Manifest in the World
Kosha Anja Joubert, CEO of the Pocket Project, has worked extensively in the fields of systems regeneration, intercultural collaboration, and trauma-informed leadership. The author of several books, she received the Dadi Janki Award (2017) for engaging spirituality in life and work and the One World Award (2020) for her work in building the Global Ecovillage Network into a worldwide movement.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#kj
One of the most underutilized resources we have on our planet today is the good intentions of citizens around the world, and our wish to be part of the solution, rather than the problem. However, it seems as if there is ‘sand in the system’, preventing our good intentions from manifesting in the world. Take the UN COP26 Climate Conference for example. The pledges and agreements that have been signed by 195 countries at UN COP26 have been an incredible accomplishment. Yet the lack of effective action on pledges to address climate change are deeply painful and threaten our very survival. Many are suffering, e.g. there has been a sharp increase in past years of the numbers of youth who are taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medicines.
As people of goodwill, we tend to want to look away from the parts in ourselves, others and the world that we experience as difficult or challenging, where pain is stored and touched upon. And that is part of the problem. It impedes the functioning of our goodwill in the world.
The Pocket Project, founded by Thomas Hübl and Yehudit Sasportas in 2017, builds pockets of increased awareness, healing communities, that start addressing pockets of trauma, residues of experiences that were too intensely painful to be processed at the time they occurred. We have built up ‘archaeological layers of trauma’ collectively throughout humanity’s history, through wars, colonialism, enslavement, racism, gender-based violence, and so on. We have been born into this web of trauma. These hidden pockets of pain we bring from the past shape the way we see the world, the ways we communicate, and they shape our institutions and societies.
The Pocket Project is aiming to increase awareness of individual, ancestral and collective trauma and open up pathways towards integration so that wounds from the past can be healed, shifting humanity towards a path of collaboration, innovation and emergence.
We create group environments (sometimes involving large numbers of people) to cultivate presence, relational sensing and coherence in individuals and groups. Participants become fully present in the body, in the heart, in the mind, and in the higher self. Once there is a certain level of group integration, the shared witnessing presence can be consciously turned towards traumatic content, meeting first the protective layers of denial and resistance that surround such content. Slowly, we can begin to acknowledge and digest what could not be processed before. The ensuing integration and restoration lead to a decrease in isolation and polarization and an increase in compassionate and collaborative ability.
Through programmes using social media and online summits we have reached large audiences – over 100,000 took part in the 2021 ten-day online Collective Trauma Summit. Beyond these large public events, training courses are offered to civil society groups and professionals – scholarships ensure that the Global South is well represented. International Labs bring together specialist groups to focus on specific collective trauma themes and geographical regions. §
https://pocketproject.org
Imagination, Grace & Social Regeneration
Joseph Murphy, is the founder of the Good Grace Foundation and Graceworks, small grassroots organizations based in UK, Egypt & Kenya. He has over 20 years’ experience working for social and environmental renewal as a “Reflective Practitioner” with the homeless and those in trauma.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#jm
When I started thinking about imagination and social regeneration, I remembered the times in my life when I started new endeavours and things seemed difficult. “This cannot be done”, I would think. And people would say to me: “Why bother? Nobody cares … don’t waste your time … it’s best to stick with what you know.”
Yet, as Colin Wilson said, “Imagination should be used, not to escape reality, but to create it.” The understanding that energy follows thought is one of the most treasured gifts that any of us can have. If only we would sense its true power. The same can be said of the idea that as a person thinketh in their heart then so they become. For, truly, we create our own environment, our own life, our own story. And when we use the imagination to bring ideas into the world to benefit life on the planet, we also champion the collective story.
For many years I worked on the streets supporting homeless people with the Community of Grace in Leicester, UK. The founders created something like home and family for those who had lost their home. They always believed that everyone had hidden talents yet to be used and developed and that Grace is always with us.
What is grace we may ask? It can be thought of as elegance, stylishness, poise, favour, good will, generosity, love … as unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their generation or sanctification … as a state of sanctification enjoyed through divine assistance. From this divine sacredness flows the good grace of the holy spirit, the divine Sophia, as she sings through the harmony of the spheres and all creation in the unison of love.
For years I used to walk past an old derelict playground, and after hearing that it may be turned into yet another car park, I felt we had to act. We raised over forty thousand pounds and a team of volunteers transformed the space into Moira Street Pocket Park. It is now a thriving public garden, looked after by a self-help diabetes group.
Many things come from humble beginnings! The Good Grace Foundation, and Graceworks were born offering permaculture-based programmes to “enable people to live and enjoy sustainable lifestyles and promote well-being”. Graceworks is now part of ‘Grow Together’, a local network of garden-based community projects, sharing a common aim to “help communities to act together for the common good”.
Recently, Graceworks has partnered with the African Population and Health Research Centre, delivering urban food growing, and nutrition centres to those living below the poverty line in the slums of Nairobi. Right now, we are in process of developing the Jorah-Grace Complex on a 1,000-acre site in Kenya. The ground-breaking rehabilitation complex will assist individuals in recovery from addiction, while at the same time offering employment and income generating opportunities, transforming the local economies through a whole systems approach. §
goodgracefoundation.org
www.graceworks.online
Imagination is the Key to Ending Poverty
Richmond Msowoya is a Livelihoods & Economic Inclusion Consultant with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Malawi and Sudan. Through his many years of work as an economic empowerment specialist in Malawi and Southern Africa he has facilitated livelihood interventions that have benefited over 51,000 refugees and their host communities.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#rm
As a student of the Ageless Wisdom, I have been working for most of my adult life on interventions to lift refugees and extremely poor households out of poverty. So, this focus on Imagination and regeneration has enhanced my deep-rooted thinking about service.
Drawing on the esoteric teachings I look at imagination as the key component to ending poverty through innovation. While many see imagination as fantasy, essentially unreal, those with discerning wisdom know that it is the seed of the future around which reality can materialize. It was through the power of imagination that God Himself, or Allah (the Great I Am) created the universe – designed the sky, the earth, trees, and animals.
It is undeniable that we influence the future by our thoughts. Through imagination and visualization, thoughts create the ideas and circumstances that help us begin to control our outward life in extraordinary ways. This is what happens for those who work in the field of social regeneration. The definition that is often used for social regeneration is “about ensuring that the places where people live, now and in the future, create new opportunities, promote wellbeing and reduce inequalities so that people have better lives, in stronger communities, and achieve their potential.”
We need to call forth the imagination as we consider the regeneration and re-igniting of a spirit of companionship between people, communities, nations, and between humanity and the living earth. Only this can lead to freedom and success for the excluded and disenfranchised and for all human beings.
But how can students of the ageless wisdom help to foster this spirit of imagination? In my opinion, we nurture this within ourselves through the practice of daily meditation, study, and participating in online events. And as we do this, we find that the call to serve humanity becomes clearer and clearer everyday – like a cymbal ringing in our ears: service to those that suffer poverty, service to those who suffer unemployment and distress.
The two approaches that I have found to work best to lift poor people out of poverty have been a market-based systems approach and the graduation approach. I believe that these are models of the future. In a market-based systems approach interventions are designed to link the income-generating, entrepreneurship activities of poor people directly to markets, trying to eliminate the middlemen who traditionally buy their produce at very low prices. During the past 19 years I have facilitated the linking of small-scale producers in Malawi to international markets in the tea, legumes and dairy industries. This has brought enormous changes to poor farmers.
Interventions using the graduation approach are designed to lift families out of extreme poverty. For a limited time, say 6, 12 or 18 months, depending on the nature of the intervention, cash is provided so that basic needs are met. During this period equipment, asset transfer, and training are provided, helping families generate income, plan their finances, and develop the skills needed to be self-sufficient. At the end of the prescribed period, financial support ends. By this time the family will have started earning sufficient income to meet their basic needs.
These two approaches have been proven to create lasting, systemic changes impacting the material conditions or behavior of large numbers of people. §
Individual Imagination and Social Regeneration
Félix Torán combines a career in science and engineering (including over two decades at the European Space Agency) with more than twenty years as a student and leader in the fields of personal growth, leadership, time management, spirituality, and meditation. He has published 19 books on personal growth.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#ft
Today’s world is based on fragmentation, on the illusion of separation. This false sense of distance is at the root of all the problems of humanity. Different spiritual paths (religious, philosophical, initiatory, esoteric, etc.) propose different approaches to the problem and provide a way forward as a solution. But, in general, the problem tends to be the same (the false sense of separation) and the solution has a common substratum (the return to unity).
But we must recognise that the fissures created by the illusion of separation have made the task of returning to unity very difficult for human beings. So, what tools do we have to get the job done? Among those that exist, I would like to highlight the enormous power that the creative use of our imagination puts at our disposal.
Imagination is the power to create mental images. It can be used in a variety of ways. For example, when an image appears involuntarily in the mind, the imagination is controlled by the subconscious. In order to use our imagination creatively, we must control it voluntarily.
This voluntary control of the creation of mental images is often called “creative visualisation”. It has two aspects. On the one hand, there is imagination. But, in addition, a second aspect is concentration. This is the ability to keep our mental focus concentrated on a single object for long periods of time, without wandering or being distracted.
Through imagination we can create a mental image of what we want to manifest. Then, using concentration, we keep this image in the mind for a certain period of time so that it can be transferred to the subconscious as a form made of mental matter, which has a much higher vibratory rate than physical matter. Then, when the thought forms created are oriented to the good, universal laws begin to function constructively, and the thought form attracts others of a similar vibratory level. Universal laws are always constructive and positive.
In order to descend to the material plane and manifest visibly, thought forms created need us as a channel. Our thinking stands somewhere between the most spiritual planes and the material world. If we use this great power correctly, we can bring spiritual laws to bear upon the laws prevailing in the material world. Thus, we convert infinite potentiality into finite manifestation, as the Tarot arcane “The Magician” shows so graphically and clearly.
We can begin to use the powers of imagination and concentration to achieve our own return to unity and to create a better society by having a clear mission, oriented to service and to breaking down the separations that exist in humanity. This life mission, which may take many forms, must be in harmony with the higher purpose. It is not something we have to create, but to discover in ourselves. There are three key questions that, if we submit them to the power of our subconscious, will help us find the answers:
1) What talents have I brought into this world?
2) How am I going to serve with them?
3) Who am I going to serve? §
http://linktr.ee/felixtoran
Biography Work: A Paradoxical, Transformative Social Practice
Leah Walker has a deep interest in human development and earth evolution, particularly as described by Rudolf Steiner. She is a biography worker and licensed professional counselor (LPC), as well as a certified homeopath. She is a faculty member of the Center for Biography and Social Art in North America.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#lw
We recognize a profound need for social regeneration. We long for it. The question is: How do we turn this high ideal into action?
I suggest we need a tool that transforms interpersonal perception and advances interpersonal skill. As art, science, and discipline, biography work stands to meet this task. It is born of spiritual science or anthroposophy, the name Rudolf Steiner gave his teaching, meaning “wisdom of the human being.”
Rudolf Steiner, early in the 20th century, spoke in a way similar to Alice Bailey about the needs of our time, naming social understanding, freedom of thought, and knowledge of the Spirit as “lamps.” He made concrete suggestions about how to achieve these lamps, suggestions that led in the 1970s to the birth of biography work (among other earlier initiatives).
Biography work is an experiential study of human life, drawn from objective observation and leading to direct experience of the wisdom of the human being. It is a particular way of looking back into the past so the way forward into the future may be clearer. The human life, as sacred text, is both ancient and prophetic. Biography work is an effort to learn to read this text – a meditative-like practice on life experience itself, pursued both singly and in shared dialogue.
And then there is the social sensitivity biography work fosters – the art. Attention leads to interest; from interest comes understanding. Most of us want to be seen, long to feel understood. When shared in a social setting, biography work becomes not only social art but healing art: evoking brother/ sisterhood and fostering inter-relatedness, to borrow Alice Bailey’s words. Biography work awakens interest in the other, teaches one to see the other, which, as it would happen, is the cry of much current social activism.
In biography work, I discover something new about myself and slowly or suddenly I begin to observe this same phenomenon or quality or behavior or wound … in those around me. The more I know of myself inwardly, the more inclusive my perspective outwardly. Thus, work we do that is self-centered in a way serves the shared social body and being.
One of those I admire most is Karl Konig, who, based on Rudolf Steiner’s teaching, founded the Camphill Movement – a remarkable “study of companionship.” Konig wrote:
… the human being does not merely consist of … body, soul and spirit; above all we consist of everything that is constituted by our fellow human beings spread across the earth as the totality of humankind: the people among whom we live, the family we were born into, the karmic groups into which we are received between birth and death. It is only the totality of these relationships that makes a human being.
It is a task of our time to awaken to this, to come to know “what it means to be a human being on earth among other human beings” (Konig). §
https://biographyworker.com
https://biographysocialart.org
A Transformation of the Sense of Belonging
Daniel Christian Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures, is one of the leading catalysts and thinkers of the movement for social and environmental regeneration. He works around the world as a consultant, educator and activist with NGOs, businesses, governments, and change agents.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#dw
When we talk about imagination and social regeneration, we are talking about a transformation in the sense of belonging, reconnecting to the belief that when functioning at your highest potential you are an expression of the place where you belong – a healing, nurturing, custodian expression of that place. Regeneration is a pattern that is profoundly linked to how life creates conditions conducive to life. Life has made this planet more abundant for all life through diversification and subsequent integration of the generated diversity at higher levels of complexity. So, we are talking about reconnecting and tapping into the deep taproot of awareness that we are life, making the place where we live conducive to more life. That’s really our evolutionary role.
We basically need to come home to place. The only way to restore a sense of belonging and jump back into healing the social, ecological, and regional economic spheres is through falling in love with the places that we inhabit again and going into the journey of re-inhabitation.
Once we focus our will on the specificity of people and place, and we work on enabling individual and collective potential, then we can most fully express our own individual gifts and potential in service to the larger context we live in: our team, our society, and also the place. In the context of focusing on social regeneration it’s important not to be trapped by mental categories that make us work on social, ecological, and economic issues in separation. The reality is, they are all connected. Regeneration is about giving people a new sense of meaning through companionship not just with the human family, but with the whole community of life in particular places.
Almost 200 years ago Goethe said that he who doesn’t see nature everywhere sees her nowhere in the right light. When I sit with that thought for long enough, I come to an uncomfortable place where I have to admit that all the technology on the planet is also part of nature. And that includes the extremes that I don’t like. Nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons, for example, are also a part of that transforming biophysical unity that is a manifestation of consciousness informing matter. In a beautiful small book, Saving Appearances, Owen Barfield wrote about the original participation in life shared by all indigenous people with their deep connection to place providing the sense of meaning and connection. Walking through the forest and seeing a light beam hitting a dewdrop is experienced as seeing a fairy diamond – as an original participation in the wholeness of Life, rather than seeing nature as separate from the observer. Then, through the period of the enlightenment, we came to see through the lens of Cartesian subject-object separation. This wasn’t some detour from true knowledge, and we don’t need to just turn around and go back to that original participation. We need now to enter a new synthesis – what Owen Barfield referred to as the phase of Final Participation. On this next turn of the evolutionary journey, we have to ask how do we harvest the best of modern technology and the insights brought by the age of separation? §
https://designforsustainability.medium.com
www.triarchypress.net/drc.html
Sociotones: Maximizing the Edges between Social Systems
May, a long-time student of the Ageless Wisdom, is a UNITAR Fellow and currently serves as Director of the Cities Programme at UN House, Scotland. She is a writer and researcher, with extensive experience facilitating community development and training programs around the world and participating in the Global EcoVillage Network.
Video at: worldgoodwill.org/video#me
In ecological science, the transition or edge between two distinct biological communities is known as the ecotone, meaning a place of high intensity where ecologies are in tension. An ecotone tends to be species rich, with resources from both environments providing unique ecological niches, creating conditions for new species to emerge.
One of the principles of regenerative designers working with ecological systems is to maximize edges, because by maximizing edges, you maximize diversity, maximize life vitality, and viability. Over the years I started working with the impact of the edge effect on social systems and I have recently published a scientific paper, attempting to describe a new concept of sociotone.
The hypothesis is that just as it is possible to maximize the diversity and productivity found in the edges between neighboring biological communities, it is also possible to create a more significant edge effect in society between different social groupings, with diverse worldviews, power structures and intentions.
I have been working with sociotones in projects across the globe, and out of this experience three principles can be observed in operation. The first is that sociotones offer a way of looking at a society in terms of potentials rather than problems. They can be seen as pregnant fields creating conditions for the emergence of unique patterns of meaning and belonging which are just at the verge of precipitation. In a sociotone we see the inherent ability for something which has not yet manifested to evolve or come into being. It is a way of conceptualizing the gap between what something is and what it could be if it realized its purpose.
A second principle of sociotone work engages with the Law of Three. From a biological perspective, for anything new to be created, three forces are always present: the activating force, the restraining force, and the reconciling force.
There’s lots of this activating force, initiating action, right now live in our streets. The restraining or receptive force is the receiver of the action, endeavoring to define, refine, and limit the activating force. And then you have the reconciling force which is independent of the two other forces, and which is endeavoring to bring them into relatedness or harmony. The ability to make change is directly related to the ability to practice imaging by, valuing and holding in mind the activating and restraining forces while simultaneously working to discover appropriate reconciling forces.
A third principle active in the sociotone is that serendipity thrives on alertness. The term ‘serendipity’ describes the incidental discovery of something valuable. It appears as an unexpected, brilliant result, created through a combination of effort and luck, joined by alertness and flexibility.
The edges of diverse social intentions coincide in a sociotone, so it is full of surprises, and causing something unexpected to happen is a process of enactment rather than luck. So, while doing edge work within societies we increase the chances of accidental discovery by being alert and curious. One of my realizations over time has been the importance of dancing between the rational, concrete mind and the intuitive abstract mind, paving the way to the interpretation of these new matrixes of meaning. And that can support the emergence of new directions to society. §
www.mayeast.co.uk
World Invocation Day
