8th Life illustrated! & discovering Visions

Two amazing things happened today.. and after doing my early morning growing ritual - today is monday so I looked after the Arachne Garden and Forest in the morning (where Marco has just brilliantly resolved a piece of our gray-water-system puzzle), whilst listening to the audios of instructions for the Idea 4Humanity course-competition. Then it was particularly hot (calima blowing today) so I spent the rest of the day studying in my hobbit-dome.

Inspired by my audio-class I decided to do my application for the Idea 4 Humanity competition, and when they suggested you add a logo for your project I went to look up some 8, vaguely thinking I could find one in nice colours to add... and I was blown over at finding this:

which is so much more than I hoped for in terms of beauty but also .. all the spiral colours! Quite apart from being a sucker for rainbows from very young (pretty much anything in this colour sequence looks wonderful to me), these are also the Spiral Dynamics colours, here put in spiral forms, and the project is all about integrating all levels, and the 8th level transitions: going from green to yellow to teal. And here is a perfect map of that, with a nice big yellow nearly-S (which is the meme I think I mostly hover around, with moments of all the others) right there in focus, and the beautiful image of two staircases to heaven, rainbows vibrating out in every direction, like a big ideas-echo to infinity. Wow.

And then I looked up the artist. Another big wonderful surprise: it's called The Infinite Eight and it's by David Friedman, a kosmic-kabbalist. Read up all his site, loved another two of his paintings, for the colours, elegant harmony: The Wheel of Lifeand Transcending and Including, also delighting at reading he's also a KenWilber fan.

This, after weeks of very patient help from Nuccia, my wonderful RC mentor and strict grammatist ("that doesn't mean anything Stella, we have to re-write it"), and encouragement from Esther and Marco here on the farm, finally clinched that I'd call this crazy project we've been gestating, 8th Life, (although still the title sounds a little silly to me, I simply can't think of another one). I wrote it up as one of my designs in my permaculture portafolio, http://reemergence.pbworks.com/8thLife and sent David an email asking if I could use his art to illustrate it. He quickly wrote back that he would be delighted! 7th Heaven re-visited - as I so often do these days.

So it's decided: we'll go ahead with 8th Life as the title, with David's art and blessing, and I started the web for it, http://8thlife.org (the org stands for organic here, not organisation :) hoping that with the help of google-sites I can more easily cross-reference all the levels and definitions, as it's got a great indexing system.

But this was only the beginning. What later today blew me over even more ... wasfinding this Visionary video

What 8th Life is precisely about inspiring and permaculturally-adjusting that future vision, I love that there's so much coming together about all this, am thrilled to find stuff about conscious evolution, integral thinking, so many transitioners coming together.

But, on a personal note, particularly what struck me was my gut reaction at the very first minute of the video, where Barbara says she was walking and pondering, after reading a lot on the great mystics of the past, with relation to positive views of a future humanity, on the 12th of februarly 1966, and her cosmic question of "how to bring all the thoughts together".

I can't describe the instant trip I went on just after those two sentences .. in one second I flew to the past and to the future at the same time, my toes and head went cold, and tears came to my eyes. The thought that struck me was "Jeesus, it was you!" ...and.. this is freaky ok, but remember it is only a story (and stories are only how our imagination weaves together a disparate set of facts into something that makes some kind of colourful satisfying sense... they are not reality - and of course everything is a story) ...

I was born one moon after Barbara posed her question, on the 10th of March 1966, and I was born knowing how to put it all together. But I was also born pissed-off, not just because this odd talent just predisposes anyone to much frustration, practically every day, but mostly because I felt that I was somehow yanked against my full will, from a blissful state of 'Being Everything', and squished into a tiny, horribly uncomfortable body, then flown without any return ticked into a completely irrational world, world where I was surrounded by mad-people and zombies.

Mad people and zombies are just today's normal people ok. This is just what any child feels, I believe, but most have the sense to repress it all and fit in. I just decided to remember .. because it was obvious to me that all adults had to have been children and felt exactly like I did, and they must have simply forgot in growing up, so I did some anchoring against this pandemic amnesia.

I remember the moment lucidly, I just sent a clear message to my future self, saying "you won't forget this" and the big implication (although I don't quite remember being that clear about this bit) was "and so you will do something about stopping this crazyness from perpetuating itself". And I've been an activist ever since. Ending injustice - all and any injustice - came up as my no.1 passion recently, when I did thePassion Test. It always has been. And am quite sure I've always had the 'we' mentality that automatically comes with that, and hence the incapacity to separate anything from anything else. I think in fractals.

But back to before that, and the moment I was yanked, prematurely, from the blissful Being Everything. I don't actually feel resentful about that all the time (I have increasingly learned to bliss out more often on just being here, now, in my later life), but I have always have felt it, since I can remember, on and off. I always felt that I was due some more eons of rest, but something called me back. And I was cajoled, or tricked .. but I definately didn't quite say yes... and then it was too late to go back.

So when in the video I heard Barbara say she asked that question, just before my birthday, and given the ingrained systemics curse-gift I came into the world with, one of the trillions of things I felt, all squashed up together, was a big "sorry" for my parents. Because of course I always blamed them for calling me down here, and this has been the irky base of all our wars, really, badly magnified by their attitude that I should somehow be thankful to them for raising me.. when infact I was very annoyed they'd got me born in the first place, thanks very much.

Maybe it wasn't even Barbara to call me (and many more of us) down here, but a prayer many people sent out around that time, and maybe it doesn't matter..

Now that am having a lot more fun, and that I can see possibly much more suffering happening, maybe I can stop being so cross, start to forgive everyone, especially myself, stop being half-hearted and get on and do some serious work. And write some more interesting story.

finding more of my family each year, adopting Dana Meadows as mother and Howard Odum as father a few years ago, understanding what am doing here and that perhaps it was worth it, although I do have many days that I feel discouraged, and this amazing video summarized brilliantly what I've been living these last few years,

culminating in the last ActionLearning programme and this decision of quantum-leaping that programme to something bigger - possibly crazier - but a lot more realistic.