the value of a human being
can not be measured
by his or her performance capacity relative to society’s average,
much less to the world champion of the day.
…the issue, in the words of others:
By 2020, stress disorders and depression will have surpassed cancer and cardiovascular diseases as the gravest global health issues. – United Nations (WHO)
All of our problems stem from the inability to be content in the present.
– Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
We presently try to solve our sustainability problems on a technological and legalistic level. But it is human beings who have created these problems, and we must look at what in our culture turns us into addicts to expansion.
– Torsten de Winkel at Klimaforum ’09, Copenhagen
…and the solution:
It is easier to promote creativity by changing exterior conditions than by an attempt to motivate the individual to more creative thinking. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
In this spirit, BIMBACHE openART provides settings for, as Abraham Lincoln called it, ‘the better angels of our nature’.
BIMBACHE openART festivals, forums and other events are low judgment zones which invite thinking ‘outside the box’ and enable us to leave our comfort zones; open spaces which allow the impossible to become possible and where premier artists and thinkers, students, disabled persons, amateurs and locals meet and collaborate interdisciplinarily and as equals.
On a human, psycho-emotional level there are two main sustainability issues.
In an ever smaller world, we must develop a common culture of communication, most importantly to include open discourse in conflict. Today, there is one international code of communication, based on evasion: shut up and smile. This, however is not suited to solve most of the problems resulting from people having been raised in different cultures, which is to say with conflicting sets of symbols and expressions.
Secondly, we are all firmly rooted in a culture of competition and self-exploitation. The increasing individualization which has developed in Western cultures over the past decades has produced more freedom but weakened social support and increased learned helplessness, the root mechanism of depression, addiction and problems of self-esteem. Globalization, while having great positive potentials, is contributing to the growth of the problem: the WHO predicts stress disorders and depression to become the most serious health issues globally by 2020. At the same time, public consciousness of this problem is at a state comparable to when ecology became an issue in the 1970s, urgently requiring propositions for practical investigation and solutions. The Bimbache Global Initiative is designed to develop and provide such practical solutions and processes.
Related quotes
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. – J. Krishnamurti
We may define cultural evolution by our concepts of reality slowly becoming more reality-congruent, thereby reducing unnecessary suffering caused by poor models. We can hope that all which science has determined in recent years about the illusion of free will and other things will ultimately sift through to every member of our plagued societies, leaving it clear to even the last soul that we all ever deserve is not judgment, but compassion. – Torsten de Winkel
In his first noble truth, Buddha states that life is suffering. But even he was just what I call a foundation thinker of our culture. There have been countless cultures throughout the history of humanity which have other tales to tell. – Daniel Quinn
Example for the profound effects of even one cultural operating system bit:
in 17th century Louisiana, there was a native American culture which had a cast system – with one crucial rule, you could not marry within your cast. Result: respect of the members of any cast towards all others, because people knew their children and grandchildren would belong to them.
Recommended reading:
The Boiling Frog – Daniel Quinn (My Ishmael)
You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell them that this is the Hour. – Hopi Elders
Sustainability and Individual Process
by Roland Gehweiler (www.cybermondo.net)
Be sustainable and change the story of our future.
The challenge of transforming our civilization into a more sustainable one will require the best effort of all of us – artists, scientists, educators, politicians, social activists, clergy… citizens.
The Sustainability crisis is at its core a crisis of consciousness.
A crisis cannot be solved by the same state of consciousness which created it.
A shift in consciousness is required and indispensable.
Today, as over-consumption has begun to cause the breakdown of our planet’s basic life-support systems, developing a connection to the basis of existence has become a social and personal imperative.
Individual Transformative Pratices
On an individual level, taking up transformative practices can awaken us to a consciousness of connectedness and aid in developing a more sustainable state.
Some examples of transformative practices:
• Meditation and Yoga
• Developing Body Consciousness
• Self-Expression
• Music and dance therapy
• Healing the wounded self from the ego-centered perception of the world
• Reconnection to source and the cycle of life
• The acknowledgement that we are all interconnected and interwoven
• Developing an ecological and social consciousness
• Developing a shift in consciousness and putting it into action…
“We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.” – David Bohm, quantum physicist (1917–19