Our better angels: dancing across beliefs
A hyper-polarized world? Who wants it!
We explore nurturing and expanding cohesion in diversity with John and Colleen (Freddie) Kessler. This includes inter-belief discussions, polarity practice and weaving us together.
Our better angels are set to emerge.
Read: Our better angels
We met John and Freddie in Salt Lake City, USA for this inaugural (be) Benevolution interview. Many many thanks to both of them for helping us to explore this work.
In this story you’ll find 10 pieces:
- Introduction – the dilemma in 10 short sentences
- Delivering change – and “just doing things!”
- Global consciousness – human development is supporting spontaneously emerging solutions
- Sense – It makes so much sense but do we act?
- Weaving us together – our evolution and awareness to overcome barriers
- Honoring diversity – whoa! This is not easy 🙂
- More human – the integrity and wisdom in youthfulness
- Better angels – are set to emerge
- Inter-belief – mature leadership
- Trust – an enabling mature place with community kinship and individual agency
Pictures: Freddie Kessler; John Kessler
by Festina Lentívaldi 
Please credit all pictures to (be) Benevolution
Introduction
In our hyper-polarised world, you can be struck dumb and flabbergasted while simultaneously becoming energised and compelled to inner and/or outer action.
Wait a minute I hear you saying? Those concepts – flabbergasted and energized – are mutually incompatible. Are they not?
Such paradoxes are at the heart of this interview. We encounter conflicts like this every day. Moreover, today’s world magnifies polarities into gaping chasms.
There is, however, space in the middle. In this interview, John and Freddie dance beautifully through such difficulties: within their family and local spheres of influence to big-picture practices, to polarised politics, to views where we could imagine there is little common ground.
Delivering change
We start as John explains some of the groundings for local to global action – a philosophy of just doing things!
The journey, John:
Five years ago we established Utah Civil and Compassionate Communities. as an affiliate of the Charter for Compassion. The Charter is bringing the theme of loving compassion explicitly into public policy! We are orienting communities around those themes.
Initially, this was pretty closely tied to the Parliament of the World’s Religions which came to Salt Lake City four years ago. We dovetailed that event with having the city become a compassionate community – the idea for it came out of a Tedtalk. Karen Armstrong is a scholar of comparative religions and the history of religion. The TED prize funded her and we got involved as our nonprofit does a lot of work with homelessness
Then an interesting thing happened.
In 2016 a friend of mine – kind of a cofounder of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute, John Steiner – was at Sundance. He and his wife are part of the group called Impact Partners funding documentaries that have social significance. He and Mark Gerzon (a very well known speaker consultant about bridging and mediation and just wrote a book called The Reunited States of America) had been trying for several years to put on a citizen’s summit. They wanted to create a space for everybody to come together to bridge differences.
The middle 80% of Americans don’t want this hyperpolarization – there’s gotta be a way to bridge it. John and Mark were saying let’s have the first summit… and they’d gone to Kansas City trying to start it.
We don’t need money, we just do things. The resources you need kind of show up.
John invited me in and I said, well, we’ll just do it. I mean, we don’t need money, we just do things. The resources you need kind of show up.
Just doing it meant we put on a Utah Citizen Summit. We gave awards to people around the United States who were prominent in this bridging world, prominent in trying to heal our society.
We did another one at the beginning of 2018 bringing in the arts: dance, theater and poetry. It was a much more enriched, much less about politics, much more about our culture, stories and dialogue.
People started calling me up and saying this is the only place that this idea has traction. Why don’t you do a national event? And so, at the beginning of 2018 John Stiener began to coming into Utah regularly. We started getting support from leaders of the community, of the state and then the grassroots.
It has taken over! When I am not practicing as an attorney I’m working on and with the Salt Lake Civil Network. We got absorbed in this project.
The Salt Lake Civil Network intends to develop a global civil network—the type of organization which organizers locally and globally are calling global action networks.
Festina:
Where’s that interest coming from?
John:
Many years ago I was running a thing called the US Coalition of Healthier Cities and Communities. I was also a co-chair of the Global Healthy Community Network which was, perhaps, the first example of a global action network.
Global consciousness
A Global Action Network is a form of spontaneous emergent organization. It just sort of happened and I was of part of this founding. We were creating an organization that could model what’s arising in integrally informed way.
I think it’s because consciousness gets to a certain point and people see connections that they didn’t see before. Spontaneously, within a decade, these networks were popping up around the world.
Festina:
This is now a significant project – the YOUNIFY summit?
John:
Having the opportunity to do YOUNIFY is ideal.
We’ve got polarization, we’ve got demagogues showing up everywhere. And there’s so much knowledge and energy of people who are doing things exactly like you are. Making connections, seeing new possibilities of connecting people and evolving our world.
But, we’re not very well connected. So the idea behind this is to find people who are doing the work, find the language and the approach that attracts everybody and do it in a way that it doesn’t appear as competition. But, do it so that everybody will be interested in this and intrigued by it – a little bit!
We took six months even figuring out what our name was and our brand because we felt it so important to do focus groups with conservatives, with people from various ethnic groups, liberals and progressives. Then bringing them together and sort of mixing and matching.
The people who wanted to do the national events are like; So what are you doing? You’re taking six months to even get started.
We thought, well, we just think it’s the first here. We need feedback. We need to list what’s going to attract people – somebody from a rural environment, or white farming family, or inner-city African American family.
How do you language this, how do you do this? How do you reach out to people? We took a lot of time working on that. It’s coming together slower than a lot of people hope but I think it’s emerged the way it probably had to.
February 2020
With resources it’s now underway. We’re moving for the summit in February, 2020.
The idea is to help practitioners do work in the world. It’ll be less about an event as much as a start to see things and have conversations around the country. People will come to make connections but it really isn’t an event as much as a catalytic moment to connect people, to create the resources, to harvest in the moment, to have a significant budget and allow it to really move.
An interesting story is that when the Parliament of the World Religions was here in Salt Lake City I was the co-chair of the hosting committee. I felt bad about the failure to have a very healthy or successful interface between the Mormon church and the World Parliament. I thought both sides could have done a better job.
I just kept whining about it! And so they said, okay, okay, come to the next one in Toronto and give us a talk.
What I talked about is less about whining and more about what’s possible – how the inter-faith community could help convene the inner-belief community, which is everybody.
Convene the inter-belief community: everybody!
How do we bring everybody together to make connections, to experience, to appreciate things in multiple dimensions? The arts, the politics, conversations, the systems?
About two weeks after I got home from Toronto, I was at a meeting at the Salt Lake County mayor‘s office. They had already heard about my talk and YOUNIFY. The office has been a primary sponsor in America for welcoming communities and know it’s really not about whether you should have refugees or not. People are coming, people are arriving—how do we make them a part of our community?
The point is; the energy behind this and the main connectors are more political than not. Part of what we’re trying to do is create a more multidimensional perspective including the arts. It isn’t about an agenda or politics. It’s about how do people come together in ways that are about how to bridge and to live with one another, honor one another.
I think that’s part of our evolutionary story. I’m very excited to hear about (be) Benevolution because of that. I think that’s what this is really about.
Festina:
Thank you! And just before diving into that, if you will, a lot comes from your experience in working with communities and community-minded organizations across diverse beliefs or in processes. Some of it sounds like it’s intuitive as well.
Are there examples of where you have really seen this working?
John:
Well, I’m just kind of known as an interfaith guy. We’re Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I’ve always been interested in figuring out how to be friends with everybody and how to make everybody feel part of the community.
I have a passion for reaching across those kinds of divides. Who knows what somebody’s karma is or how the energy starts – you have that deep desire to do this kind of work. I found a way to make a living as an attorney but this has been my passion. I really realized this about 25 years ago when I discovered Ken Wilber’s work.
That’s fed me a lot. It has helped me work with other people to co-create opportunities over the years.
I was a hospital trustee chair of the local University of Utah hospitals and clinics. I was chair of their board and they were doing a healthy community project. I said, what’s that? I thought this is great and got involved, formed the state coalition of healthy communities and then got asked to be on a state network of healthy communities. Somehow, after the second meeting, I was co-chair of that. I was the only non-health sector person who was involved.
Festina:
What is a Healthy Community?
John:
A Healthy Community is multi-dimensional flourishing. Everything’s connected to everything else. One common framing of it is the social determinants of health. What is the impact off housing on health? What is food’s effect? All of those things have to do with generating health and wellbeing.
By being the co-chair of that I became on the board of the US Healthy Community Coalition. About a year later, when their executive director left, they asked me if I could run it on a part-time basis for a couple of months. And then, you know, three years later I’d become co-chair of the global entity!
Multi-dimensional development
I think that experience helped me realize it’s about human resilience. Suspend individual and collective flourishing and it is something regarding our growth as human beings and our ability to see things, see systems, see inner connections and do inner work. It is being able to hold-hold those kinds of containers, a spacer in the world so that people can have experiences which give them an opportunity to connect in ways that they otherwise would not.
All of that just kind of organically, almost unconsciously, happened. I think it’s because from day one I was just so interested in how do we bridge these divides? How do we connect? How we can create community? Almost from the beginning, I could tell what you are doing in Australia very much connected to community.
Festina:
There were a lot of strands like that as you so rightly see. In some ways I wonder whether the people who run across integral theory suddenly say; oh, here’s a wonderful way of having a universal language of connecting the world. You get terribly excited about it for a while. It catalyzes energy because this makes sense.
Connecting communities makes sense, being connected. It makes sense as human thrive because we connect with each other. It’s core to the success of humans as a species. And seemingly, even although it makes sense we often don’t do it.
My example is the Sense story below.
Sense
It is 1989 and we have just arrived in Dili, now the capital of East Timor, at the time part of Indonesia. Traveling overland to Dili was sketchy. For years an independence war had been underway. It’s leader, Xanana Gusmão who subsequently became its first president, was hiding in the mountains. The politics and pursuit of independence created obvious impact. We were solitary westerners, few visited. You could easily see shell holes in buildings. Many people appeared to be nervous. The trip across the island, from Kupang (West Timor) to Dili, partly used the beach at low tide – the road was nonexistent. A tiny minibus taking two days.
The little group of us that made this trip was looking to leave another way. By boat to the islands of Nusa Tengara sounded romantic and we found a small wooden fishing vessel about to make the trip. Youth, nativity, looking for more traveling ease and adventure encouraged us onwards.
“You are very brave to get on that boat,” said one local grabbing my arm firmly, almost considering trying to hold me back.
Bravery indeed. Foolishness, probably.
2 hours out of port and a storm hit. With the gunwales only centimeters above the waterline we ran before the storm all night. Of the crew nearly all were too scared, they said, to help. We bailed the ship, the cabin boy kept the engine running, the captain steered. When the storm finally died the cabin boy repaired the ship by diving underwater to hammer flattened coke can metal over the gaps in the hull.
Which makes no sense really. Can we be too scared to bail water from a sinking boat? Perhaps the crew knew far more than the naive youths we were? Perhaps they could only manage through withdrawal? However, knowing something makes sense – to bail in this case – and choose not to act is far more common in our lives and society than we perhaps believe.
Festina Lentívaldi
Weaving together
Festina:
I so often feel that things make sense that is, there are really obvious courses of action that benefit ourselves, everyone around us and all sentient beings. And yet we don’t act! Despite the fact action delivers great results. This includes for our own health, finances and family plus people and ecologies more generally.
Some pieces we need to overcome this is Integral approaches. It’s always seemed to me that we need to be able to step past barriers and simple explanations – the sort of common threads integral theory helps explain. Overcoming barriers was part of my attraction to the field originally.
I think you are seeing impulses and needs to work with such problems? You’re seeing the time is right and opportunities are opening up?
John:
Integral is a label to capture thinking and create a metaphorical model around something that’s emerging. This clearly has something to do with evolution. It has something to do with the emerging capacity of awareness and connectedness and moving beyond barriers.
One of the really interesting aspects of integral theory is ego development. There is a lineage going up through Jane Loevinger, Suzanne Cook-Greuter and Terri O’Fallon, is that stages of development come in pairs. The first part of these pairs is an immature stage. This is when new understanding creates a new quality that comes online and people don’t have the capacity to handle that new quality maturely or competently.
For example, what really happened in the 1960s was a critical mass of people started to be more aware: context-awareness. They could see the connections, they could see the importance of being holistic. But, what that led to was seeing how all sorts of assumptions were incorrect and should be deconstructed. It led to postmodernism, to the deconstruction of everything. It led to people who started using very inclusive language, who loved everybody but excludes people who are different from themselves.
Festina:
That’s hard! When we have people feeling like they love everyone but somewhat blind, to their own intolerances of difference, you can’t help being conflicted!
John:
There’s this evolutionary emergence but when a critical mass of the first pair of a new stage comes online. It creates a deep destabilization. It is one of the key things that it’s just missing from social commentary today.
We need to understand the insecurity that this is creating in an increasing number of people. There are people rejecting what used to be seen as modern, used to be seen as traditional. That is very foreign. It’s very threatening.
A trust paradox
Even though the center of gravity, the level of ego-development in populations, is rising the trust level is going down. This is because of division and the lack of understanding. I think one of the key aspects that is invisible and is misunderstood is that the people who are on the cutting edge of evolution in that regard are seen as very foreign. They’re not happy with the people who are less developed than they are. We need to be careful with developmental language and its generalizations but it’s one of the factors explaining an incredible alienation and generalized feeling these aren’t our people anymore. We have people over here are saying: all these people, they’re primitive – we have moved on; people saying, well, those people they’re not Americans or not Australians anymore.
The paradox is this evolutionary emergence creates a destabilization, which creates a lack of trust, which sees people retreat into more protective stances. For example, we need to protect our borders, we are not sure about these people who look different than I do.
Collectively, we create a culture that is very demeaning of one another. There is much less trust. We start electing political leaders who were some of the least mature among us.
My whole Integral Polarity Practice is about how you work with polarities and how an immature approach handles a new polarity. Is that the enemy or this is? Is this right or this is wrong? You can learn to hold such dilemmas in a bowl, learn to wait, then you learn to integrate them.
The promising aspect of that whole story is that sooner rather than later we’ll get to a critical mass of people who are moving into the second, the more mature stage of the context-awareness pair. They are people who see things can be woven together, things can be brought together, that everybody should be honored. Everybody should be respected. Everybody’s story is important. Everybody needs to be listened to and we can’t condescend others, they’re no less human than we are. We’re all invaluable human beings and it doesn’t matter where you are in the spectrum of growth.
The point is that everybody’s important. Everybody’s message is important. And, there’s a way to weave that together for the benefit of all in ways that are true. That is, we can do this at a level of inclusiveness and a height of flourishing that hasn’t existed before.
Bridging the trust paradoxes
I think it’s only when things are getting really dark that silver light, that possibility, is there. The question is, are we going to destroy ourselves before we can develop that capacity?
Festina:
Two threads of this are: where do you see the way of supporting the capacities needed to do what we’re just talking about here – supporting the more mature part of the developmental stages to come on board?
I’m also really curious about the younger generation that is so full of energy and ideas but are not necessarily in that later developmental stage. Just from age alone. Even though they seem to be, to me. When I look at my 23 year old son and some of his cohorts, they seem to be developing at a different level than is my experience with my contemporaries. I’m curious about that youthful population. They are honing in on capacities for this nuanced, inclusive, broad and yet also energized and focused, not watered-down, action-inclusiveness.
John:
I think there are a lot of people who recognize we need to bridge, we need to figure out how to do this.
One of the things is to create opportunities for everybody and anybody who has that impulse to connect, create convening spaces and opportunities, to help them make connections that they might not otherwise be able to make. I think that’s kind of the driver of this summit (YOUNIFY). People are working with all sorts of lenses from all sorts of centers of gravity. They see the danger of not doing this, the importance of making the connections and working with hyperpolarization.
It takes design capacity to bring people together. It is less about everybody has to be evolved or something. You have to have cultural attractors. You have to have system design pieces. You have to have leadership. All those factors help to allow everybody to come together in ways that don’t seem to be very apparent right now.
Ultimately, in the long run, we have to be building the critical masses of people who have those capacities, who can provide that leadership, who can create such cultural attractors. It’s really only in the last decade that enough psychologists, consultants, thinkers have been bringing on programs and creating opportunities to help people realize these opportunities. If you’re conscious about it you can grow a little faster rate than you otherwise would.
An invisible growth snowball
We have increasing numbers of groups like Pacific Integral and Stages International come along and create opportunities for people. I think one of the big catalysts too is that the most advanced and effective consulting groups in the world now get all of this. These groups are consulting with governments. They’re consulting with communities. There’s a lot of professional work starting to come online and it’s almost invisible. It’s behind the scenes.
Some of the business schools around the world are picking up on these ideas. At some point, I just think it will get incorporated into our educational streams.
Festina:
Easy?!
John:
I co-founded a charter school in Salt Lake City called the City Academy. Founded by education professionals it tried to research and model how public education might ideally be. I said, okay, now is the time we’re going to put this into schooling, put in an integral approach to education.
After a few years I suggested that in marketing the school we make explicit that it modeled an “integral approach to education” and, within a year, the student population dropped by about two thirds! People were asking, about integral and development, so what is that?!
I realized that you can’t use integral terminology in that way, when people don’t know what it is.
So you just have to play with it. I’m the generation who started talking Integral, using the jargon. Like Freddie says, it’s a foreign language to anybody who isn’t in that little community.
The truly “integral” is how do you speak to connect to everybody? How do you say an argument? How do you know you are persuasive? How do you actually listen to them to know what their real needs and concerns are? And desires and goals? And honor that.
Honoring diversity
Freddie:
I have a great example. John was attending this conference and a lot of the other attendees were staying at this home. It was kind of like an inn with an older lady running it. She was a lovely person.
The idea was that people would wash the dishes, put them in the dishwasher, do little chores and then go about their business. Of course, I was the one that was left after everybody went to the conference. I was exploring the island and doing my own thing. I really engaged with this woman and I would help her clean up.
When we were leaving she said: you know, it’s interesting you’re about the only person I’ve connected with. I said to John…
John:
We’re in a big lodge down by the way saving the world!
Freddie:
What are you guys doing? Because, if you’re trying to connect, you’ve missed the boat on a very simple level!
I come from this totally different perspective. It’s hard to understand. Sometimes we miss the picture. We want to connect with the world but we’re ignoring our neighbor across the street.
John:
I’ve always felt I find my grounding by the person I’m married to, here. She asks these tough questions. She gets it. She sees me and it’s been just so helpful for me to gain a lot more wisdom.
Freddie:
We went to breakfast with a gal and she was talking to John. I was just listening and, of course, the lingo I was out of that. I didn’t know what they were saying.
But she said, well my dad’s orange and I just can’t connect with him. Afterwards, I went to John and I said so she has orange dad! I said, really? What are you guys talking about? This is her dad!
John:
But the thing that really bothered Freddie the most was that she was saying that in a very patronizing way.
Whoa, how did that conversation go?
Festina:
Whoa, where did that conversation go and what did it reveal to you? Because that’s super interesting to think about how do keep going forward in this.
John:
Well she’s helped make me more human – we were talking about it as we were driving away from the big event.
Freddie John 2019
Festina Lentívaldi
More human
John:
I mean, I’m not changing the subject but I think that’s something that the younger generation of integral people sees. My generation was a lot about language. It was a lot about the theory. It was a lot about let’s save the world. We weren’t reflecting it very much in our lives in lots of ways. We weren’t very grounded. We weren’t very embodied – and even in embodied practice.
There is a level of integrity and wisdom that’s coming with the younger generation that the threshold generation, that was into all of this, never quite adequately modeled. I mean, hooray for some great ideas too. But, I think it takes another generation to see you guys are a bunch of hypocrites! You know, you guys haven’t figured this out at all.
I think there’s a deeper, more authentic, greater sense of integrity that’s coming from the younger generations. That’s to say: Okay we can do this, we can do it a little bit better. I have a lot of hopefulness from what I hear from younger people that I talked to and interface with.
What’s helped me stay grounded is Freddie really saw all of that and helped me overcome, realize there were lots of flaws! She helps me see what I’m trying to do and this whole movement was trying to do.
Being more than ourselves
Festina:
What do you think could have been different at the inn?
Freddie:
There’s no substitute for time, just taking the time. I’m guilty of the same thing when we get involved in our lives we all ignore things that we wish we can do more on and that we aren’t sensitive to.
One of my dearest friends, I’ve observed her over the year. When she was living in Aspen she dated Kevin Costner for about five years off and on. What I noticed when I would go to visit her she was just as sweet and kind to the mailman, she knew the grocery people… I love that about her. It wasn’t so much the power and prestige but that she was just really a good kind person to everyone.
I’m guilty of the same thing when we get involved in our lives. We all ignore things that we wish we can do offer and that we are sensitive to. That’s one thing I’ve loved about the Johns meditation is just being in that moment and I think that sometimes that’s really not as easy as it sounds.
The paradox of inclusion
Festina:
Within what we have been talking about is a radical honoring of multiple viewpoints. Doing that without decision paralysis is quite a paradox. Some say it’s part of the next revolution. I’d probably think about it as a new world society code, a meta-modern code, a benevolutionary change. But what does the next step of society really look like? How does this work together?
John:
It’s one of the tensions. I’m holding YOUNIFY because I think there is a temptation to say this is a movement rather than creating opportunities for connections to see what emerges and not have to control it – trusting that what emerges is this going to be really interesting.
However, without some skillfulness involved you will have chaos. I have to admit one of the great frustrations for me in this whole Healthy Community movement is it was very much oriented on everybody gets a voice and you’ve been working on something for several months but somebody new comes to the conversation. Their voice has got to be heard from the beginning and so you almost start over.
I’ve been involved in conversations and meetings that went on for years and nothing ever happened. There’s an impetus to be inclusive but you don’t have a skillfulness or the structure to accomplish anything. I think the paradox is overcome by creating the container and the process that gives everybody an opportunity to come together to share their voices but it’s framed in a way that you actually make progress. That takes capacity and skillfulness – facilitative leadership to make it happen.
Festina:
At YOUNIFY if you were to have your vision unfold, allowing spaciousness but also the skilled container, can you say a little bit more about what that looks like?
John:
I mean there’ll be some keynote speakers. For instance, we’re inviting presidents – Obama, Bush. If they come we’ll get the attention we want!
We’re trying to invite those level and we’re having a festival, entertainers from across the musical genres and also across the political spectrum. Given all the voices of people coming there’s a need for people to have the opportunity to give their presentations about best practices.
Design facilitation
In that context, I’m very hopeful that we can have really world-class facilitative design. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You maybe have a theme you’re working on or something with people from various perspectives and you are very present with what’s emerging. Then you sort of harvest that.
At the end of the day, you have a harvest of what’s happened. You say, okay, we made some connections. Then you suggest steps for where the conversation could go. The key is to keep the energy, let the passion go where it goes, but create iterative harvesting and suggestions for possibilities. If it doesn’t have that kind of guidance it could just sort of fall apart.
I’m sure at least in some small part that will be a part of this YOUNIFY. I’m convinced that whatever will happen will be perfect because that was what was supposed to happen. I’m just dreaming that we can have some element of it modeled.
Everybody’s voice is equal yet there is a hierarchy?
The big framing of that Ken Wilber uses is that there are the traditional dominator hierarchies – that is about power. Who gets on top? And there are emergent hierarchies – the skillful means of it is how do you connect with everybody? How do you honor everybody? How do you hold a world-centric ethical container that makes sure that you don’t collapse into some sort of ethnocentric white supremacy! They’ve got to have their outcome too but you can connect with people’s better angels and meet their real needs.
So it’s the paradox.
It is the skillfulness of everybody’s voice that is important. Everybody has a point of view. Yet things could be woven together in a way to optimize things for everyone.
The interesting thing is different situations call for different kinds of leadership. If you’re in a position to realize that you’re dealing with Hitler no amount of talk is going to solve that. Only power will do it.
Part of the artfulness of skillfulness, ultimately of leadership, is being able to move up and down that the hierarchy of leadership styles to address the situation where it is. I think the dream is to create environments in which people are respectful and are willing to be in that kind of facilitative leadership.
Framing this within community inclusiveness – basic rules, keep listening!
There is something about basic rules such as Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten [Robert Fullgrim]. You know, your mom taught you how to treat people. There is something about being thoughtful, considerate and knowing about what the rules are, whatever culture you’re in, being respectful of that.
I am intrigued by the idea, the broader framing of what a civilization is. What are the frameworks we create to flourish together? I’ve talked about that and explored that a lot over the years. I’ve used that language a lot. I just didn’t realize that, through this YOUNIFY project, it’s become very clear there was a culture of civility maintained by the white community in the American south to maintain our exclusiveness.
For a lot of African Americans, particularly those who have a heritage they can remember their mother or grandmother or father came from the south, that civility language meant something very different than what I always intended to mean.
It’s interesting in terms of the language you use. You find that it’s culturally loaded in some cases that you didn’t know. For this kind of an event we’ve had to strips civilities out of it, because it’s so offensive, because of that loaded nature for African Americans who have that southern heritage.
Festina:
What did you find to replace it with?
John:
YOUNIFY and community inclusiveness. Civil is a root of so many parts of our language. Right there about how do we live together in the most elevated way for our benefit. I just have this passion that’s connected to that root word. And, then, this all of a sudden realization … wait, it has limitations.
Every day, every time we try to language something and think we figured it out…. Keep listening!
There’s a lot of language that’s emerging globally around health and wellness that I think has broader implications: resiliency and flourishing and whatnot. It’s a great thing. It’s getting into our social and political arenas too, That maybe has a broader power to it – opening spaces for our better angles to come out.
Better angels
Our better angels are called forth to overcome challenges. For example:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
and Eleanor Roosevelt
Attend not only the meetings of one’s own party but of the opposition. Find out what people are saying, what they are thinking, what they believe. … If we are to cope intelligently with a changing world, we must be flexible and willing to relinquish opinions.
Black-headed Grosbeak
Mum (left) and one of two babies 2019
Festina Lentívaldi
Inter-belief
Festina:
You commented about how the inter-faith movements might catalyze inter-belief capabilities.
John:
What we are trying to do with the inter-faith communities is to say: why don’t you just forget one another about what your issues are between yourselves and just get shoulder to shoulder and help us convene the entire community? It’s fun to use the language. How about the inter-faith community helping to convene the inner-belief community? Maybe we oughta just have an inner-belief entity here!
I think there’s a lot of energy for it. It’ll be a significant part of our summit. For example, at our first meeting. It was just amazing what diversity there is – including a wickan and many others. They’re connected to a tradition that’s connected to something broader and divine.
People are dropping out of organized traditions. Increasingly, those that still have a tradition they are connected to have a lot of credibility in communities. If they come together and help with this effort it could really add credibility connecting with people we might not have otherwise reached.
Festina:
How are we able to stand with and respect the diversity of belief and still stand shoulder to shoulder on what we care about?
John:
There’s so much that connects us. So much that as human beings, as sentient beings, that we have in common.
Enabling that, it has a lot to do for listening. We just have to. We have to learn to listen to each other.
It isn’t about conservatives versus liberals. It’s about what’s important in this community? How do we get everybody in the conversation and modeling how to do that by being shoulder to shoulder and working together, not be polarized and pointing fingers or ideological.
We don’t have to take ideological sides. We have a problem to work on. We’re getting together and we’re talking it through and we’re working on it.
As much as I think I’m right, as much as I still have my progressive or more conservative ideas, I nevertheless see that’s not the answer.
Freddie and I both come out of more conservative backgrounds and we’ve had our own path in that regard. I mean I was a young Republican guy but now both of us just… we haven’t found our way to see that we can affiliate with any political party.
More mature ways of leadership
We’re going to have political parties for a long time but we can get the leadership, alert people, and create the cultural bias.
We just have to face the fact that there are more mature ways of leadership. Those who can hold, listen and weave things together are more mature than those who feel the need to demonize others who have a different opinion. We can work on creating a cultural bias which is a bias that used to hold when the United States was founded. We look at people who have extraordinary capacities and we say, go for it. However, part of going forward is listen, bring us together, have that kind of leadership.
One great example. Randall Paul. Interesting guy. Harvard graduate business school graduate made enough money that he retired when he was about 40. Got his doctorate at the University of Chicago in comparative social systems but turned his doctoral thesis into a foundation called the foundation for religious diplomacy. He developed a model based on people who live in very highly polarized environments, the Middle East and in various places where they just assume that they want to kill each other and if we wiped those people out that’d be a better world.
His model is that in these traditional societies he gets the leader of one group and the leader of another group coming together in a space, in a large conference area or something. And a lot of the followers of these leaders come because it’s a traditional society hierarchy. There’s usually an older male leader kind of a guy.
They agree that, without preaching violence, they’re going to try to convert the other side to their point of view. But they can only do that if they each tell the story of their lives and how they developed the positions and ideas that they so firmly believe in.
I don’t need to destroy them!
When they hear each other talking they realize they’re telling exactly the same story. Oh my god, everybody knows that they’re not going to convert each other but they just dragged in, with enough lack of suspicion, that somehow something might come of this.
The result is they still hate what the others believe. It’s nothing I would ever believe but maybe these are people I could live with. I’m okay. I don’t need to destroy them.
Well, I think that’s sort of a baseline point – we realize traditional societies have these problems. He’s worked with this model. He’s got pilots going around the world.
I think we’re just discovering models of how to listen that are appropriate to the people that are in them.
Festina:
I’m thinking about the different models of listening. What does that look like?
John:
You’ve probably heard of compassionate listening. I mean just the fact that somebody will actually listen. There’s a wealth of facilitated convenings where people have the skillset to do it. It’s very much about sharing, listening and seeing what emerges from the empathy that’s created and the new possibilities that are created.
Another friend of mine, Stan Christiansen worked for years for the Harvard University negotiation project. He was in hot spots all the time. They were in Latin America – the government and rebels had been fighting for years. They were able to bring them together.
Realizing common ground
They were working for about a week – nothing, nothing was getting solved. Somebody just suggested why don’t the two leaders of the rebels and of the government just go down and talk for a while, just take a break, for a couple of hours. And they both realize that they both had daughters that were special needs daughters.
Just emotional hearing about it or telling it – they both shared how much they cared and what they did to try to make the lives of their daughters more fulfilling. They came out of that couple of hours and said we could solve this. And they did.
It was listening in a special way about something that they have in common that touched them deeply. We’re human beings, we care about the same things. We don’t believe the same thing yet, all of sudden, because we’re human beings and we have this shared compassion in our own lives we’ll find a way.
I think so much of it has to do with trust and so much of it is the problem of the lack of trust that we’re developing in our society. I’m interested in this developmental story of the early context-aware stage but, ultimately, it’s how do you find enough shared humanity? If you’re going to be in an intimate conversation then you can really listen, be heartfelt and connect. It creates a foundation for trust.
Freddie:
I love that primary school song be a shining star! The words are so simple – it’s about helping others to shine. be who you are and no one else can be hidden. You blossom were you are planted. I think if everybody blossomed where they planted, where they reached out and cared…
There this 12 year old, her mom was a nurse for assisted living places. The girl would travel with her mom and started to ask, what are the three things you want? Not in life but just, if you could have them, what would you want?
They didn’t want a Ferrari or some beautiful home. They wanted Vienna sausages or some oranges! Talk about blooming where you’d been planted. A 12 year old started a charity, she’s on gofundme. With that money she goes and buys the things they want. Oranges, sausages.
There’s millions of those stories out there.
Festina:
I’m wondering, I love the metaphor what is the step we’re taking now which could be much more localized and much more big picture? At the same time as you are looking at a shining star locally, you’re observing a large slice of the whole cosmos. How do I blossom locally and hold that global-plus polarity too?
John:
I think that’s so important. I think that’s a vision to hold this. So important.
Local, global, internal trust – see more clearly.
In my Integral Polarity
Long story short, the five primary qualities of human resilience based on multiple stories, multiple recent research studies have been boiled down by scholars to principles of human resilience. All inhabit that particular polarity grounded in trust.
I can be on my deathbed and I’ll have something hopeful to say. Love just sort of flows out of that environment. When agency and community in its mature form come together, you can’t even conceive of your agency, of yourself, outside of the context of something larger than yourself. You have a sense of meaning and purpose in your life that’s connected to something larger than yourself.
There’s a lot in terms of working with those qualities. I try to find opportunities to work with people. So much of it has to do with how do you find agency and community? How do you ultimately find a sense of trust?
The interesting thing is trust. It’s all based on trust but none of the scientific studies say that. They’re all surrounding that cause, that still
The experience of the other, in its most prevalent form, is fear. Yet, there really is no other. You’re connected deeply. However, you hold that, your sense of God, your sense of the divine, your sense of your higher self.
The paradox of these still points is that, seemingly, you’re just going to be taken for an idiot out there, take advantage of. If you can be present holding that, not coming from a place of fear, you can see more perceptively,
Each of these still points has a fullness side and an emptiness side. The fullness side is trust and the emptiness side is no other.
Festina:
How can we help?
John:
We’re trying to find beautiful examples. It’s the DNA of where I come from in an evolutionary sense. What is happening is people are dreaming of this and they are doing and creating. They are connecting through beauty, emotions, mind and humanity and the whole living world.
For example, (be) Benevolution] looks like something that’s going to happen. It’s very beautiful. It’s several dimensions.
Festina:
Thank you!!
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