When you change the medium, you can change the practices. In the world of communications, Marshall McLuhan said: “The medium is the message” suggesting that the form of the medium embeds itself in the message. As an example of how powerful this can be, the impressionist art movement came about by technological advances in the medium. The invention of oil-based paint and the tin tube, which replaced the pig’s bladder, made it possible for artists to leave their studios and paint scenes of nature knowing that their paint would not dry. This change in the medium led to changes in the practices of creating visual art, and that led to the birth of the impressionist movement.
Our communication media shapes what makes our culture unique and defines the limits of what’s possible. We, as global citizens, can now communicate with each other like never before. The question is: have we reached the point that we can adopt and adapt the “smart global connectivity” practices to empower each other to yield extraordinary collective results? Can we now organize and coordinate the work of networks of millions of individuals committed to reinvent the planet and create peace on earth by 2030?
In 2009, Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr. and I published a paper we titled: “Deep Social Networks and the Digital Fourth Way.” We described a set of guiding principles and a principle-centered approach to applying Indigenous wisdom to caring for our relationships with all living beings and their environments including the building of online communities. Deep Social Networks establish and maintain an essential social bond of trust while collectively producing measurable results. We applied these guiding principles and started the International Campaign for Compassionate Cities which led to the Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest. There are now almost 500 Compassionate Cities around the world and over 18 million people served through individuals and teams playing in the annual Compassion Games. With compassion, we can turn our empathy into action and apply the guiding principle that “the hurt of one is the hurt of all.”
Nevertheless, we recognize that organizing to create a more compassionate community and to inspire our neighbors to perform acts of service and kindness is a positive step in the right direction, but it is not sufficient. We need empowered individuals and communities capable of bringing about the large-scale behavior changes required at this time. Incremental change, no matter how well intended, is not enough to address the urgent and imminent threats to our human civilization. We need massive, transformative, personal, local, regional, and global change that will enable us to avoid the crises upon us.
What if “We the Global People” embodied a shared multi-vision, coupled with a well-grounded awareness of our current situation, and specific ways to change and measure our results along the path to a peaceful, sustainable and harmonious world?
We’re not suggesting that we can or should all agree on one vision or one great transition story. What we envision are deep social networks in which we attune with each other to develop deeper connections and share our different visions and solutions to co-create mutually supportive ways to lift up each other.
We can learn to honor and respect each other and listen past our differences. We each have three lineages: our Blood Lines, our Milk Lines, and our Story Lines. Our Milk Lines are those ideas that have fed and nurtured us and shaped how we show up and share with each other. Our Story Lines are the challenges, choices, and outcomes that compose the personal and collective stories of our lives and our times. Creating these deeper social bonds can bring to light the many patterns of change and stories rooted in our cosmos, our history, and our biology. While we connect through our similarities, we can innovate and empower each other through our rich diversities. Our partner New Stories maintains the Great Transition Stories website as a collective resource to learn from and appreciate the power of our archetypal stories and the different roadmaps to know where we are and the guides to how we might move forward.
The Knowledge of Knowledge Compels
In June of 2018, Chief Phil and I published an updated version of “Prophecies, Dynamic Change, and the New Global Civilization 2020 – 2030 – 2050”. In the paper we wrote:
“We recognize that the “knowledge of knowledge compels” and that once people know for themselves, they will change the way they feel, speak and act. This knowledge of knowledge obliges us to wisely see that the world will be different only if we live differently. This knowledge and experience are rooted in gaining an ever-deepening spiritual understanding and purpose in our lives. This will require changing how we coexist and live together.”
Chief Phil Lane Jr has been developing this living document since 2012. It includes Indigenous Prophecies and wisdom from Call to Nations, Ancient Days, and Black Elk Speaks. We summarized the vision of these prophecies into four domains:
- A Global Oneness, encompassing the recognition and participation of the entire Human Family, everywhere, all at once, and exercising wise, respectful, sustainable and harmonious development of our vast global resources.
- A Global Civilization that blends and embodies the ideals of both the East and the West and the North and the South. Liberated from the curse of war and its miseries and focused on the sustainable and harmonious development of all the available resources of Mother Earth.
- A Global Commons of cultural and natural resources embracing architectures that empower each of us to create cooperative, distributed, innovative governance structures that are equitable, mutually beneficial, flexible and adaptive.
- A Global Governance System where Force is the servant of a Justice that is rooted in Love and Compassion and All Life and is sustained by the universal recognition of One Creator.
We offer this as one vision of our collective future. There are many. We want to know and share yours. To build this relationship we are co-hosting safe, courageous, and secure environments in which we attune and engage with each other. We are developing a subculture that enables us to thrive while it becomes clear that our dominant society, our “overculture,” is obsolete and failing us. Our large-scale cooperation dilemmas such as terrorism, climate change, and pandemics are no longer best addressed through a nation-state structure. It is up to “We the Global People,” to rise together to address our global challenges. In response to this unique moment, we are co-creating a social change and network exchange platform to empower this collective attunement and uprising. We invite you to collaborate with us in its development and application.
Social Change Games 2.0
Thanks to the visionary leadership of Unity Earth we were invited to carry the Global Compassion Torch to Ethiopia to converge with The Lamp of Unity from Thailand and the Peace Flame. At the height of the Cold War in 1986, the Peace Flame was carried around the world, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund and directly engaged twenty-five million people and 45 heads-of-state in 62 countries. We have now converged these unifying fires to create a Global Fire of One Love.
This Global Fire has fueled our collaboration with David Gershon, founder of the Empowerment Institute and author of Social Change 2.0. David is one of the foremost experts on empowerment and social change, and he introduced us to the founders of Serve Community, and together we are collaborating to create a Social Change Game we call Peace on Earth by 2030. We are designing the game with schools in Santa Barbara, California and Kabul, Afghanistan. The team Hustlers for Humanity organize with the University of California at Santa Barbara. The team at the Marefat High School in Kabul organize with world-renowned teacher Aziz Royesh featured in The Last Thousand.
We will roll out the Peace on Earth by 2030 Social Change Game as part of the Global Peace Wave to take place on September 20, 2020. The Global Peace Wave will launch an International Decade to contribute to achieving the UN Global Goals. Peace on Earth by 2030 is part of a Bottom-Up Grand Strategy to Reinvent the Planet by 2030 articulated by David Gershon. The strategy identifies five strategic levers that focus on building capacity for “second-order change.” Social Change 2.0 or second-order change creates a new way of framing the challenges and empowers people to want to change by evolving to a higher level of performance and social value. The five levers are:
- Climate: Empower cities and their citizens in high carbon emitting countries with the agency to implement a second order change solution to climate change.
- Development: Empower women throughout the developing world with the agency to transform the cycle of poverty and create thriving lives and communities.
- Peace: Empower humanity with the agency and second order change tools to create peace on earth by 2030.
- Knowledge: Empower visionary social entrepreneurs with the agency and second order change knowledge to transform the world’s seemingly insoluble problems into the breathtaking opportunities they provide to reinvent the planet.
- Money: Empower visionary business, philanthropist and grassroots investors with the agency to make second-order change investments that literally change the world.
The following diagram is an overview of the social change games and network exchange platform in development:
Serve Community: The World Game of Service
These strategic Social Change Games are built upon EPIC (Empowerment Platform for Impact in Community) and SINE (Synergized Impact Network Exchange). Together these form a multiplayer, distributed, real-time social change game operating system and network exchange platform. By including distributed ledger technology (DLT) this operating system and platform will act as a balance sheet and scoreboard for the World Game of Service.
Each EPIC Player creates a SuperMe that serves in communities empowered in their quest to create change for good that results in communities “leveling up” to effectively bring about large-scale behavior change with an initial focus on education, health and wellness, and community impact.
The Synergized Playing Field
SINE is a community of leading EPIC Players committed to collective leadership and building a unifying synergizing field capable of lifting up all EPIC Players. SINE members lead Networks of Networks that play together to achieve trusted cross-sector harmonization. SINE members identify themselves as nodes and not hubs. We maintain a field of trust and not control by putting our shared mission ahead of any one of our organizations. Here are the founders of SINE:
Radical Hope for a Reverent Revolution
The global village is here. We are now in a race with time to find each other and establish the new digital settlements necessary to create the just and lasting changes that we seek. The networks of people and the media we choose to operate in do matter and set the “playing field” that shapes the rules of the games we participate in. A level playing field is balanced and fair and, this is the synergized Playing Field in which EPIC Players are collaborating to create Peace on Earth by 2030 and Reinvent the Planet.
“We the Global People” live, learn and work together as one global family in a real-time relationship that is both synchronous and asynchronous, these are two ways of synchronizing and staying connected in a healthy relationship. We highly value the embodied face to face experience and convene on a regular basis at different locations around the world to “throw a better party” and have epic musical, educational and cultural experiences that enrich and expand our lives and our relationships. Discover the U Day Festivals being planned by Unity Earth as part of the Road to 2020.
At the same time, we stay connected in synchronous and asynchronous ways when we are apart. In this way, there’s a steady wave of felt connection that soothes, guides and empowers our everyday choices. This synchronizing wave creates a unified field for our mutual co-regulation and personal self-regulation. This wave embodies the guiding principle of “starting from within, working in a circle in a sacred manner, we heal and develop ourselves, our relationships, and the world.” The great poet Rumi said:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
Game On!
To play in the Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest go here. To partner to create Peace on Earth by 2030 go here. To apply for SINE membership go here.