Kia ora

Wintering over in Whakatane has been a quiet season after the busy summer that involved twenty talks throughout the land. In three weeks we will begin to head south to our Castle Hill Village summer base: just another tin hut in the mountains.

Recently I met a group of young people who were wrestling with issues vital to their future and I had no answers to their questions. They saw a divided world: on one side great greed and on the other increasingly desperate poverty. It appalled them: was utterly overwhelming. They felt lost and alone and saw no way forward for humanity.

I’ve just read in a recent National Geographic issue that 48,000,000 Americans can’t feed themselves without government assistance. The pool of poverty in New Zealand has also grown at an alarming rate in the last few decades. This situation has been developing as various economic theories have dominated the world stage. Both ‘The Trickle Down’ and ‘Leave It to Market Forces’ theories have had their day. The aggregation of huge wealth by the few has been amazing. I was astonished to read a well-founded financial report that said just 85 people own the equivalent of half the world’s wealth.

Some economists say our consumer society will eventually have so few left with the means to consume that it will collapse. Hegel said ‘contradiction is the mother of change.’ We live in a world where the gap between the rich and the rest grows ever wider. Even the 2007 financial meltdown led to the rich getting richer.

French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book, ‘Capital in the 21st Century’, is being acclaimed for his careful scholarship, ‘which torpedoes the belief that economic growth is the rising tide that lifts all boats.’ (Brian Fallow, NZ Herald article).

Change is inevitable and the hope we carry forward is what will make the difference. We are called to carry the dream of the world we want to see. That and more, because walking the dream is the key: being the world we want to see.

In Song of the Stone, Grandfather Titus, shared prophetic words that go something like this…‘The real world is the world of spirit,’ and in regards to the rise of the corporations, ‘Those who follow the way of greed and pollute the world, sow the seeds of their own destruction.’

Below the radar change begins to take shape, change propelled by a new awareness that opens the way to a more compassionate, just world. I sense it embodies timeless wisdom from the past, which is founded in universal truths and by open minds in the realms of the arts, science and technology.

I don’t have answers to the questions raised. However, I trust in the way spirit moves to open the way for good change. Many different dreams are needed to shape tomorrow. We are called to be dream makers and pathfinders.
Arohanui.
Barry