Engaged Spirituality Presentation — 2/26/23
Earlier this month, Eileen Watson, the facilitator of the monthly Engaged Spirituality group for the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, which meets monthly, invited me to give a 10-minute presentation about the Compassionate Humanity Community at its 2/26 meeting, to be followed with five minutes for questions and answers.
The following is the script I used for my 8-minute presentation, which began 15 minutes prior to the time for adjournment, and a report on the response.
Engaged Spirituality Presentation — 2/26/23
Thanks, Eileen. I appreciate the invitation.
The Compassionate Humanity Community website, for which I’ve served as pro bono editor, is a public education project that promotes our society's holistic and systemic transformation into a community that serves humanity, the environment, and life itself.
The selfish pursuit of wealth, power, and status prevails everywhere. Society teaches everyone to climb ladders for personal gain and look down on, dominate, and exploit those below — or submit to those above.
Rebecca Harkins-Cross said our society “needs us [to] strive for endless progress: work harder, make more money, try to be better than our former selves and the people around us.”
Barack Obama referred to oppressive actions as efforts to “claim status” and lamented that our willingness to extend “God-given rights to dignity and respect” has been “taught out of us. We start feeling we’re better off if we’re above other people and looking down on them.”
Alicia Garza reported, “A woman said I don't control the channel changer in my house.… I've got to change conditions in my house, I've got to change conditions in my neighborhood, I've got to change conditions where I work.”
Howard Thurman said, “I have known men and women who subscribed and who worked very hard on behalf of the use of nonviolence as a technique of love in the world but who, themselves, were very violent human beings in terms of how they related at the level of the individual. I think this is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for the various groups that work for peace ever to get together.” I assume he was talking about verbal and nonverbal as well as physical violence.
Deeply ingrained, largely sub-conscious, dominate-or-submit dynamics undergird and permeate society. This conditioning fragments community, poisons relationships and undermines political unity.
Our social system — the System — weaves together systems, institutions, cultures, and ourselves as individuals into a single, self-perpetuating system. Countless ills are symptoms of this self-centered problem.
The solution is to grow other-centered community, undo oppressive social conditioning, and address the whole person and the whole society with holistic and systemic transformation.
Regardless of who’s in power, we need powerful independent movements that push for policy changes and hold officials accountable in every country. Activists could briefly support each other on timely, top-priority issues and accomplish more together than separately.
Simultaneous positive growth in every arena — cultural, social, personal, economic, environmental, and political — could promote a synergistic upward spiral toward more justice and compassion. We, therefore, encourage everyone to place their work within the framework of a commitment to holistic and systemic transformation.
Identifying the System as the primary problem could reduce scapegoating and build unity. This focus would help members to tap their compassion, avoid worshiping “saviors” or demonizing “elites,” and trust their ability to live well, be healthy, and act wisely. They would value peer-to-peer learning, mutual support for self-development, deliberative democracy, and community wisdom.
Nevertheless, political organizations, unions, social services, mental health organizations, training and healing centers, schools, and spiritual communities don’t explicitly encourage and help their members and clients provide mutual support to undo the System’s dominate-or-submit conditioning, engage in political action, and transform our social system.
The Compassionate Humanity Community website promotes this alternative strategy.
We ask you to sign Our Commitment, which reads, “I work to relieve suffering and make society more just and egalitarian — as I work on my self-development and how I relate with others as a model for the world we seek.”
We invite you to initiate or participate in a problem-solving dialogue that addresses a non-rhetorical question and post the results on our blog. Some of these dialogues have been action-oriented; others are philosophical.
We also invite you to help compile our comprehensive collection of the best resources we can find that advance our mission. We place these resources in one of eight sections and catalog them on the Index. We invite you to assist with this effort by suggesting additional resources, commenting on the content, or becoming a Topic Editor.
We’ve also convened a Compassionate Action Workshop that helped define our name and craft our mission and Commitment and has experimented with opening meetings with a moment of silence for reflection, meditation, or prayer and a “holistic check-in” as methods that could serve as models for others.
The holistic check-in is a question that groups can use at least monthly to enable their members to report to each other concerning their recent self-development efforts. These reports facilitate members to better know each other — and help hold members accountable to their commitments. If many groups were to use the same question, this shared experience could nurture a sense of community among those who do.
Our check-in question has been, “How have you been working to bring more compassion into your life?”
We’re currently writing a manifesto titled “Transform the System: A Strategy That Unites.” We want this declaration to be stronger than anything we’ve written. Toward this end, we’ll take months, a year, or longer to incorporate input.
If Engaged Spirituality were to dedicate a meeting to review and suggest changes in the latest draft of the manifesto as it stands at that time, I’d very much appreciate it and offer that suggestion for your consideration. Regardless, your input would be helpful.
This manifesto may include a suggested check-in question, or more than one. I’m thinking that maybe we need a deeper, direct question that gets to the heart of the matter.
So I ask you, Do you feel the need to undo society’s dominate-or-submit conditioning, and if so, in what way? Or do you consider this question unimportant or of secondary importance?
After I finished, Eileen asked, “Does anyone have any questions?” I commented, “Or any response to my question?” One member asked me to repeat the question, which I did. She then said, “Whether or not we have a dominate-or-submit society is an open question.”
Following a brief silence, the members talked about other matters for the final five minutes. At one point, I said I posted these links to the Chatbox: