May 2008 Books
The 2008 Shift Report; Live the Promise
The 2008 Shift Report
Changing the Story of Our FutureShift happens. And The Shift Report chronicles it. This document offers an easy way to get a handle on what we can do about our future.
Last year's Shift Report , subtitled Evidence of a World Transforming , and contrasted the detrimental influence of the dominant worldview and the promise of an emerging worldview based on very different assumptions about human potential and the workings of the universe. This new report updates some of these issues and explores additional areas, detailing opportunities and roadblocks to be faced as we attempt to mainstream new science and new-paradigm thinking.
The report begins with a review of the basic assumptions underlying the current Western worldview and their influence on “key global indicators of ecological stability and human and social well-being.” Two points raised here I find particularly telling: first, Americans are second only to the Chinese in lack of concern about global warming; and second, MRI studies make it clear that our brains inherently predispose us to resisting new perspectives even when it is clear that our present convictions may be slowly killing us. Yikes! What are we to do?
While neuroscience reveals that “we are as hardwired for cooperation as competition, for altruism as much as selfishness, for compassion as much as fear,” our emotional commitment to the lifestyle we enjoy makes us complicit with the institutional forces of greed, power, and globalization we love to blame for the mess in which we find ourselves embroiled. The report explores this complicity and, thank God, finds reason to believe in our potential for transcending our limitations and rewriting the script.
IONS was founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. This succinct and thought-provoking report is part of a quarterly publication, Shift: At the Frontier of Conscious , available free to IONS members and for sale at select newsstands. Please get your hands on it and read it. Share it with your friends. Discuss it with your neighbors. And most of all, take it to heart. For as the report tells us, “Voting is good, but changing one's mind is better.”
Or, in the words of Ben Okri, Nigerian poet and author, “Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”
—Chiwah
Live the Promise
Can you recall an instance when you were introduced to something—anything—that rocked your world, leaving you with a vague but undeniable certainty that you'd touched into the miraculous?
For both Bodie McCoy and his wife Barbara, that instance came with the introduction of the Lord's Prayer into their young lives.' Live the Promise is their book about the relationship of the Lord's Prayer to the world's major mystical and religious traditions and its magical, mystical, ultra-light and yet entirely down-to-earth power to take us to the ultimate seat of wisdom within.
Live the Promise begins with Bodie's heart-centered story of his own spiritual unfolding. From there, it leads into the creation of a game that opens people to deeper levels of inner truth by exposing some of the limitations they've accepted—with a game board that just turned out to embody the star tetrahedron and the flower of life.
And the journey continues, with a journey to ancient temples with Humbatz Men… to the heart of sacred geometry with Drunvalo Melchizedek… to a variety of Eastern spiritual traditions… to holographic insights about time travel and heredity… to a really expensive cup of coffee… to a simple exercise that brings it all together and offers us our own experience of the promise embodied in the Lord's Prayer.
Live the Promise is a heady book abundantly laced with heart, written by a San Diego author I know as a man of extraordinary love and gentleness. The whole point, he says, is “to offer exercises to experientially reveal the promise of the Lord's Prayer within you.”
It's a book to treasure and dwell with for a long time, to help you uncover in a meaningful way'ever-deeper levels of the God/Goddess that you are.
—Chiwah
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