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Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Saturday, December 4, 2010
13 Grandmothers' Council
Jyoti, aka Jeneane Prevatt, is an internationally renowned spiritual advisor and psychological consultant; who carries a bundle of fire. Jyoti is the one of primary forces behind the creation of The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. At Kayumari, her retreat near San Francisco, she went to the top of the mountain there and the Mother said to her: "many people from all over the world are going to come here and pray, I don't care how they pray I just need them to pray right now in this moment of our history." And so she became the guardian of this mountaintop with that intention.
Three years into living on the land in 1998, the Mother came to her again and said, "I'm going to give you one of my most precious baskets and in this basket I'm going to put some of my most precious jewels, these jewels represent lines of prayer that go back to the beginning of time; you are not to mix them, you are not to change them, you are to keep them safe and protect them and walk them through the doorway of the millennia and hand them back to me, I have something we're going to do." And up the 14-mile logger road came many, many elders that began to initiate her in the lines of prayer that these jewels represented and to teach how to take care of this basket and how to keep it safe.
Finally, many years passed and it came time to make a study with the 5th jewel in the basket. Her daughter-in-law wanted to find her practice in the field of addiction. So she ended up discovering the plant called Iboga. Through that she ended studying Ibogaine, one of the alkaloids of the Iboga plant. Jyoti said to her: "the way that old people raised me was that if we're supposed to work with a plant and particularly one that is not from this land, then we as a family should go to Africa and meet with the elders of the Bwiti people.“
The intention was to get permission to use this plant and if the Bwiti said no, then to come back and go on a meditation and look to see where the path is taking them next. If they said yes, then to ask the Bwiti to guide their footsteps and their way; so that they will tend to the teachings and the plant in the right way outside of its country. And so, as a family, they went to Africa for the Bwiti initiation. In that process the vision of the basket came up again and Jyoti knew that it was time for this to be put in motion.
After sitting in meditation for some time on her return Jyoti received the following message: "Granddaughter you must start with the seed of it all, the seed of it all is relations. If you start with your relations, then everything will unfold from there, don't worry." So she got on the phone and sent emails out to her whole community, and all the places it lived, and asked them to speak to their elders and to get guidance for which grandmothers were being called by the Universe, for this council. She got 16 names, wrote a letter to them and got answers from 13 of these grandmothers saying they would come.
Next came the process of putting together a gathering of women in Phoenicia in upstate New York, in the Dalai Llama's Medicine Retreat Center. They came, although nobody knew how it would be when they came, nor was there an agenda except to bring them together; but when they got together they recognized each other, they recognized something was happening. The profound energy was recognized at the table when the 13 sat down. Later they came to discover that there are many prophesies amongst most of the indigenous peoples around the planet about the time when the grandmothers speak, about the time of the 13 Grandmothers' Council.
A 71 year old Yup'ik Grandmother, who lives in Alaska, spoke this story. When she was nine, her grandmother sat her down and said: "when you are old and grey like me you're going to be called to sit on a council of 13 Grandmothers. I've prepared 13 sacred bundles and there are 13 of my sacred stones and I have found 13 white eagle feathers for you. You must protect these and keep them safe. And when it's that time, pass the bundles to each of the Grandmothers and take one for yourself and sit down and know that I am standing behind you and all of your ancestors are standing behind you and the times we've been telling you about and preparing you for are here".
The 13 Grandmothers decided they were going to take this basket that their community had walked through the doorway of the millennia with, that they would receive this basket that the Mother had given as representative of her, and they would go to each other's home place, every six months and hold a seven day prayer for world peace and light the holy fire. To date they have honored the Mayan, Mazatec, Tibetan, Lakota, Takelma, Havasupai/Hopi/Tewa and Santo Daime traditions; marking the 7th fire for the next 7 generations.
The 13 Grandmothers usually together for three days for their own private council, because they're also growing their own relationships; and growing their own empowerment process, as a council. When they sit down at a council there are seven languages translated simultaneously, and the Grandmothers remind themselves that they're there for peace and unity and have to step out of themselves to transform that which wants to divide and conquer them. The other part is when they open the doors to the public for four days and they lead prayer at morning, noon and night.
Each of them dresses, as they lead prayer, in their own regalia. Through the day attendees have three different nations that lead them in prayer. By the end of the day another kind of space is opening for everybody. By the end of the fourth day things have happened - people write letters about how cancers have disappeared, bad situations in their families have healed when they go home, people report the Grandmothers coming to them in their dreams and answering their prayers or touching them in some way. The Grandmothers will say they're not here to tell them what to do; they're here to remind people that the answers for everything they need to do live inside them.
In response to the question: "what can people do to encourage and develop right relationship with the planet and their relations?"; the 13 Grandmothers offer their insight. Take a glass of water, this amazing element that Grandmother Aggi says can hear us, and take this glass of water every morning and go outside and face the sun and give thanks to that day with that water. Pour that water on the Earth and feed her first, then take some for yourself and have your family stand with you while you do this, let your children drink this water, let your companion drink this water. Start your day this way; it puts something new in motion.
They also tell the story of a psychologist that was taking small groups into the Amazon. After being in canoes for several days, they got out of their boats and they saw oil in the river. They saw an old man standing by the river and went up to him and the psychologist said to the old man: "I'm so sorry for what we have done to your river." The old man looked down the stream and he said: "things are as you dream them, you once had a great dream. You had many beautiful dreams but then your dream turned into a nightmare." And this young man said to him: "but I don't know what to do, I don't know how to change out of this nightmare," and the old man said: "The world is as you dream it, turn around and pass a new dream, pass an awakened dream, one with wholeness and balance, pass that to the one standing right behind you, do this as long as it takes you to do it."
Three years into living on the land in 1998, the Mother came to her again and said, "I'm going to give you one of my most precious baskets and in this basket I'm going to put some of my most precious jewels, these jewels represent lines of prayer that go back to the beginning of time; you are not to mix them, you are not to change them, you are to keep them safe and protect them and walk them through the doorway of the millennia and hand them back to me, I have something we're going to do." And up the 14-mile logger road came many, many elders that began to initiate her in the lines of prayer that these jewels represented and to teach how to take care of this basket and how to keep it safe.
Finally, many years passed and it came time to make a study with the 5th jewel in the basket. Her daughter-in-law wanted to find her practice in the field of addiction. So she ended up discovering the plant called Iboga. Through that she ended studying Ibogaine, one of the alkaloids of the Iboga plant. Jyoti said to her: "the way that old people raised me was that if we're supposed to work with a plant and particularly one that is not from this land, then we as a family should go to Africa and meet with the elders of the Bwiti people.“
The intention was to get permission to use this plant and if the Bwiti said no, then to come back and go on a meditation and look to see where the path is taking them next. If they said yes, then to ask the Bwiti to guide their footsteps and their way; so that they will tend to the teachings and the plant in the right way outside of its country. And so, as a family, they went to Africa for the Bwiti initiation. In that process the vision of the basket came up again and Jyoti knew that it was time for this to be put in motion.
After sitting in meditation for some time on her return Jyoti received the following message: "Granddaughter you must start with the seed of it all, the seed of it all is relations. If you start with your relations, then everything will unfold from there, don't worry." So she got on the phone and sent emails out to her whole community, and all the places it lived, and asked them to speak to their elders and to get guidance for which grandmothers were being called by the Universe, for this council. She got 16 names, wrote a letter to them and got answers from 13 of these grandmothers saying they would come.
Next came the process of putting together a gathering of women in Phoenicia in upstate New York, in the Dalai Llama's Medicine Retreat Center. They came, although nobody knew how it would be when they came, nor was there an agenda except to bring them together; but when they got together they recognized each other, they recognized something was happening. The profound energy was recognized at the table when the 13 sat down. Later they came to discover that there are many prophesies amongst most of the indigenous peoples around the planet about the time when the grandmothers speak, about the time of the 13 Grandmothers' Council.
A 71 year old Yup'ik Grandmother, who lives in Alaska, spoke this story. When she was nine, her grandmother sat her down and said: "when you are old and grey like me you're going to be called to sit on a council of 13 Grandmothers. I've prepared 13 sacred bundles and there are 13 of my sacred stones and I have found 13 white eagle feathers for you. You must protect these and keep them safe. And when it's that time, pass the bundles to each of the Grandmothers and take one for yourself and sit down and know that I am standing behind you and all of your ancestors are standing behind you and the times we've been telling you about and preparing you for are here".
The 13 Grandmothers decided they were going to take this basket that their community had walked through the doorway of the millennia with, that they would receive this basket that the Mother had given as representative of her, and they would go to each other's home place, every six months and hold a seven day prayer for world peace and light the holy fire. To date they have honored the Mayan, Mazatec, Tibetan, Lakota, Takelma, Havasupai/Hopi/Tewa and Santo Daime traditions; marking the 7th fire for the next 7 generations.
The 13 Grandmothers usually together for three days for their own private council, because they're also growing their own relationships; and growing their own empowerment process, as a council. When they sit down at a council there are seven languages translated simultaneously, and the Grandmothers remind themselves that they're there for peace and unity and have to step out of themselves to transform that which wants to divide and conquer them. The other part is when they open the doors to the public for four days and they lead prayer at morning, noon and night.
Each of them dresses, as they lead prayer, in their own regalia. Through the day attendees have three different nations that lead them in prayer. By the end of the day another kind of space is opening for everybody. By the end of the fourth day things have happened - people write letters about how cancers have disappeared, bad situations in their families have healed when they go home, people report the Grandmothers coming to them in their dreams and answering their prayers or touching them in some way. The Grandmothers will say they're not here to tell them what to do; they're here to remind people that the answers for everything they need to do live inside them.
In response to the question: "what can people do to encourage and develop right relationship with the planet and their relations?"; the 13 Grandmothers offer their insight. Take a glass of water, this amazing element that Grandmother Aggi says can hear us, and take this glass of water every morning and go outside and face the sun and give thanks to that day with that water. Pour that water on the Earth and feed her first, then take some for yourself and have your family stand with you while you do this, let your children drink this water, let your companion drink this water. Start your day this way; it puts something new in motion.
They also tell the story of a psychologist that was taking small groups into the Amazon. After being in canoes for several days, they got out of their boats and they saw oil in the river. They saw an old man standing by the river and went up to him and the psychologist said to the old man: "I'm so sorry for what we have done to your river." The old man looked down the stream and he said: "things are as you dream them, you once had a great dream. You had many beautiful dreams but then your dream turned into a nightmare." And this young man said to him: "but I don't know what to do, I don't know how to change out of this nightmare," and the old man said: "The world is as you dream it, turn around and pass a new dream, pass an awakened dream, one with wholeness and balance, pass that to the one standing right behind you, do this as long as it takes you to do it."
Monday, November 29, 2010
Field Philosophy
Philosophers have spent enough time cogitating in their armchairs. A new generation has undertaken a more engaged approach, working with cognitive scientists and designing experiments that will “test” people’s intuitions about traditional philosophic puzzlers such as the existence of God, the objectivity of ethics and the possibility of free will. The result: new, empirically-grounded insights available to philosophers and psychologists. The experimental philosophy movement deserves praise. Anything that takes philosophy out of the study and into the world is good news. But it’s an open question whether experimental philosophy really satisfies the Socratic imperative to philosophize out in the world.
Another group of philosophers is experimenting with an approach called “field philosophy.” Getting out into the field means leaving the book-lined studies to work with scientists, engineers and decision makers on specific social challenges. Rather than going into the public square in order to collect data for understanding traditional philosophic problems like the old chestnut of “free will,” as experimental philosophers do, field philosophers start out in the world. Rather than seeking to identify general philosophic principles, they begin with the problems of non-philosophers; drawing out specific, underappreciated, philosophic dimensions of societal problems.
Growing numbers of philosophers are interested in this kind of philosophic practice. Some of this field work in philosophy has been going on for years, for instance within the ethics boards of hospitals. But today this approach is increasingly visible across a number of fields like environmental science and nanotechnology. Some philosophers have worked with, and challenged, the food industry on the application of recombinant DNA techniques to agricultural crops and food animals. Others have helped to integrate ethics and values concerns with the ongoing work of scientists and engineers. One team even assisted the Chilean government in creating a UNESCO biosphere reserve in Cape Horn.
The “field” can even include the lab, featuring “embedded philosophers” who, like embedded journalists of recent wars, work daily alongside lab scientists and engineers. Field philosophy has two roles to play in such cases. First, it can provide an account of the generally philosophical (ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, metaphysical and theological) aspects of societal problems. Second, it can offer an overall narrative of the relations between the various disciplines (e.g. chemistry, geology, anthropology, public policy and economics) that offer insight into our problems. Such narratives can provide us with something that is sorely lacking today: a sense of the whole.
Field philosophy, then, moves in a different direction than either traditional applied philosophy or the new experimental philosophy. Whereas these approaches are top-down in orientation, beginning in theory and hoping to apply a theoretical construct to a problem, field philosophy is bottom-up, beginning with the needs of stakeholders and drawing out philosophical insights after the work is completed. Being a field philosopher does have its epistemological consequences. It means sometimes seeking to provide “good-enough” philosophizing - it often lacks some footnotes, but attempts to provide much needed insights.
The willingness to take these constraints seriously has meant that the work is sometimes dismissed by other philosophers. Across the 20th century, philosophy has embraced rigor as an absolute value. Other important values such as timeliness, relevance and cost have been sacrificed to disciplinary notions of expertise. In contrast, “rigor” in field philosophy is seen as involving a delicate balance among often competing values. To put it practically, field philosophers often edit themselves; realizing that sometimes what is needed is not the 7000-word scholarly article but rather a three-minute brief or a one-page memo.
Make no mistake; field philosophy does not reject traditional standards of philosophic excellence. Yet in a world crying out for help on a wide range of ethical and philosophical questions, philosophers need to develop additional skills. A field approach to philosophy helps with the challenge facing the academic community today. Underlying the growing popular distrust of all societal institutions, lies a social demand for greater accountability for all those who work in the industry of knowledge production. With budgets tightening, demands will soon be made on philosophy and on all the humanities - to justify its existence in terms of its positive and direct impacts on society.
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