Reflections on: Imagination and Social Regeneration
Humanity is coming of age and needs a ‘new story’ that is powerful and meaningful enough to galvanize global collaboration and guide a collective response to the converging crises we are facing. Transformational responses at a personal and collective level take place when we question deeply ingrained ways of being and seeing and in the process begin to reinvent ourselves. In doing so we also change how we participate in shaping culture through our interaction with the world around us.
Daniel Christian Wahl
re-gen-er-a-tion: Renewal, revival, restoration; spiritual transformation; an aspect of living systems without which there would be no life; a process through which whole new organisms may be created from fractions of organisms; an adaptive and evolutionary trait that plays out at different systemic levels.
Curtis Ogden
If we are interested in effecting change, it is crucial to remember that we are working within webs of relations, not with machines.
Margaret J. Wheatley
… when any civilisation and culture loses its sense of spiritual values and responds mainly to the material values, then it has served its usefulness and must pass away, and this in the interests of life itself and progress.
Alice A. Bailey
The freedom of human beings lies in their ability to imagine another world.
Vincent Claessens
Future consciousness will not bring the future under control but will allow us to develop our capacity for transformational response to its possibilities.
Bill Sharpe
We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born – a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.
Dee Hock
Human Progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
Martin Luther King
As Homo Sapiens’s entry in any intergalactic design competition, industrial civilisation would be tossed out at the qualifying round. It doesn’t fit. It won’t last. The scale is wrong. And even its apologists admit that it is not very pretty.
David Orr
Climate change… is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense – for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
Amitav Ghosh
The massed power of goodwill, the dynamic effect of intelligent and active understanding, and the potency of a trained and alive public opinion which desires the greatest good of the greatest number, are beyond belief. This dynamic power has never been employed. It can, today, save the world.
Alice A. Bailey
To see without the interference of the past is to look in complete silence. Out of this silence a transformation arises that is not conceived, not planned and not conditioned. Only such a transformation can bring order to the world.
Krishnamurti
... we cannot address climate change globally unless communities claim their power to implement solutions – and creative solutions – on the ground.
Christina Figueres
Imagination is often misunderstood, defined as a fanciful flight away from reality – and sometimes it is. But there is another kind of imagination, one that is based on deep inner listening, with a quality of calm presence and a curious, open-minded focus. When ideas, images or symbols arise into that kind of spacious awareness, imagination is tapping into a source of wisdom, a type of intuition that puts us in touch with more of reality, not less.
Leslie Davenport
Regenerative cultures are co-created by people who have become conscious of the way their participation activates certain possibilities...
Daniel Christian Wahl
… the true life-theme of humanity,… is brotherhood, founded on divine origin (equality) and leading to a free and true expression of divinity (liberty).
Alice A. Bailey
I believe our task is to develop a moral and aesthetic imagination deep enough and wide enough to encompass the contradictions of our time and history, the tremendous loss and tragedy as well as greatness and nobility, an imagination capable of recognizing that where there is light there is shadow, that out of hubris and fall can come moral regeneration, out of suffering and death, resurrection and rebirth.
Richard Tarnas
... to understand true self – which knows who we are in our inwardness and who we are in the larger world – we need both the interior intimacy that comes with solitude and the otherness that comes from community.
Parker J. Palmer
Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist.
E. F. Schumacher
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it is going to be a butterfly.
R. Buckminster Fuller
There are three stages on the path leading beyond ordinary perception of the world. The first kind of knowledge accessible to man can be described by saying: he beholds the world through his senses and assimilates what he perceives by means of his intellect and the other faculties of his soul. Beyond this, there are three further stages of knowledge, of cognition: the first is the stage of Imagination, Imaginative cognition, the second is the stage of Inspiration, and the third is the stage of Intuition – but the term ‘Intuition’ must be understood in its true sense.
Rudolf Steiner
Our mainstream worldview has expired. What will replace it? A world of deep interconnectedness. Jeremy Lent
Regenerative development is as much about an honest give-and-take between humans and nature as about reviving human communities at the local level.
Herbert Giradet
The [human] race faces a new crisis of opportunity wherein new values can be seen as important, wherein the establishing of right human relations will be deemed desirable, not only from the idealistic point of view but also from the purely selfish angle. Some day the principles of cooperation and of sharing will be substituted for those of possessive greed and competition. This is the inevitable next step ahead for humanity – one for which the entire evolutionary process has prepared mankind.
Alice A. Bailey
Cultivating ecological imagination has a powerful role to play at this pivotal time in human history, as scientists around the world continue to report the accelerating impacts of climate change. Imagination is a gateway to wisdom, and wisdom is an essential foundation for right action, an internal shift that can steer us towards eco-harmonious living. The stakes have never been higher. Leslie Davenport
We are living on the planet at the time when the evolutionary dynamics are changing. And the simple way of saying it is that they’re changing from genetic determination to cultural determination… That is an amazing new power that’s taking place on the planet. We, then, have to confront the fact that this planet is evolving according to our decisions… Our responsibility is to structure the human presence on the planet so the fundamental conditions of life are strong and vibrant, and carry into the future.
Brian Swimme
The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We require more than ever a social imagination capable of mediating between these two separate realms of past and future. The tension between tradition and utopia must be maintained, but in such a way that the momentum of the possible is retained.
Bernard Lategan
What we need is an education for collective living rather than for individual success.
Brian Goodwin
So blind are men and women that when a civilisation comes to an end, when the familiar mode of cultural expression is brought (as is usual) under the hand of the destroyer, humanity regards it as a major disaster and dreads and fears the ruin which usually surrounds such an event. But from the standpoint of the world of significances, progress is seen and the day of fulfillment draws much nearer.
Alice A. Bailey
Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
Terry Tempest Williams