"Beauty does not linger, it only visits.
Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm.
It calls us to feel, think, and act beautifully in the world:
to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful." - John O'Donohue, Anam Cara (1997)
Please be aware that this initiative is very much a work in progress – like so many more wonderful social, cultural, and economic renewal efforts around the world.
In 2006, I established GlobalArtsCollective.org (GAC) as an auspice for the international Anam Cara for Taraarts action effort in support of the campaign to preserve the Hill of Tara, in Ireland. While we didn't succeed in protecting Tara from fraudulent politicians and real estate/banking speculators, I found GAC's shared campaign format enlivening.
Calling all artists: Your fellow humans need you!
GAC was relaunched in 2011 as an educational resource platform drawing upon the work of thousands of researchers supporting key issues which arts practitioners might wish to share with their personal networks, students, and audiences, without spreading themselves thin on burdensome administration.
Collaborative Independence:
As concern over issues of peace, health, economic justice, and sustainability increasingly enter public debate, arts practitioners are finding their roles as collaborators, educators, change agents, and cultural conservationists are growing in importance:
Evolutionary integrity calls for attention to details.
Arts practitioners have always presented the big ideas that take us beyond the surface of our troubles to the source of our joy and ingenuity, and resilience – our ability to heal and empower others.
The arts have the power to touch the heart, and to promote and celebrate awareness of the wealth to be found in all aspects of our culture and heritage:
ReVisioning History -
group-think to peer pressure,
peer review to corroborator,
changemaker to collaborator
inspiring, enlightening, empowering collaborative independence
Let's direct our Natural gifts toward empowering and celebrating our growing capacity for collaborative independence.
Vision Freedom from the burden of involuntary poverty and deprivation: Restoration of our Global Commons – our personal sovereignty and our creative impulse.
Objective
Creating real solutions in
the spirit of friendship This Collective encourages arts practitioners, business representatives, community and government leaders to work together – to 'protect and serve' in the spirit of friendship for a truly 'peer reviewed' collaborative culture working toward practical solutions for the restoration of personal and planetary 'health' and economic security.
Together, we can work to restore our environment, our health, and our equal share in the fruits of the commons: A sustainable future based on ecological integrity, economic equity, and true participatory democracy.
Think about it! We nowknow that ’learning' is processed into memory at the same sleep brain-wave stage as healing and growth – but deeper: In other words, 'remembering' induces deeper sleep, ergo, 'learning' promotes healing and growth.
We've also identified five categories of brain wave frequencies:
Gamma Brain Waves, aka the Insight Waves, are a recent discovery, and they are the fastest.
Early analysis indicates Gamma brain waves are associated with breakthrough intuition, perception, and insight and high-level information processing.>>>more
On 'going deeper' to access visionary powers The study of music cognition covers every imaginable perspective in addressing cultural systemic problems. In August of 2017, University College Dublin presented the 1st Global Irish Diaspora Congress, where I shared my perspective on the theme of "Cultural Resiliance: Catastrophes as turning points in the arts". Excerpt:
. . . 'going deeper' to access my visionary powers in order to write songs, manifested for me with a question:
If I am able to glimpse the slightest insight on the reality of the [Australian] Dreamtime visionary’s way of 'seeing' the world, can’t that degree of insight also help me ‘see into’ my own ancient cultural heritage? ... my readings in ancient Irish and Celtic history yielded concepts such as Personal Sovereignty, Free Will, and Free Speech. . . . That independent musicians must reinvent themselves, over and over, throughout their careers, is testament to the significance of the ‘whole system theory’ considered fundamental to survival, harking back to the 70s teachings of C. S. Holling, the Father of the Ecology movement.
Professor Suzanne Simard, at the University of British Columbia, makes the science understandable: In her 'real-life' model of forest resilience and regeneration, Professor Suzanne Simard showed that all trees in a forest ecosystem are interconnected, with the largest, oldest, "mother trees" serving as hubs. The underground exchange of nutrients increases the survival of younger trees linked into the network of old trees. Amazingly, we find that in a forest, 1+1 equals more than 2.
“Mother Trees” - The hub of system networks spanning culture is an ideal system model for the role of the arts within a culture.
In Do Trees Communicate?(2012), Professor Simard applied classical systems theory models in researching the roles played within forestry networks in an ecological model that can be related to the enhanced survivability associated with the roots of all older cultures. She says, “These plants are really not individuals in the sense that Darwin thought they were individuals competing for survival of the fittest. In fact they're interacting with each other trying to help each other survive."
Simard’s systems theory model applies perfectly to the role of the arts within a culture: In other words, community resilience is dependent on conserving cultural links.
The role played by musicians in nurturing community resilience provides an excellent example of ‘symbiosis’ within community networks - across the diaspora - through their ability to actively encourage energetic reciprocal relationships.
Necessary marketing and networking activity is focused on expanding audience interconnectivity - with the established musicians serving as hubs where younger musicians can launch themselves within those networks that have been established by older musicians. Survival of younger musicians is greatly enhanced when they are linked into the network of the older established musicians. >>>continue HERE
"It really is a question of change
and people seem to want change.
They want to be involved.
They see this as being significant
and worthwhile."
– Alan Dooley, 2009, CHOICE:
Australia's leading consumer advocacy group "Participation!
That’s what's gonna save the human race.
...It's what all my work has been about" - Pete Seeger (1919-2014)
Sir Ken Robinson: Collaboration in the 21st Century
Sir Ken Robinson's Mission: "To transform the culture of education and organizations with a richer conception of human creativity and intelligence.”
Sir Ken Robinson (1950-2020) was an internationally recognised leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources who believed we're all born with creative capacities but we lose them the more time we spend in the world, and that school systems often discourage creativity by favouring academic measurement.
Sir Ken was the central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development as part of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. The resulting blueprint for change, Unlocking Creativity (2010) was adopted by politicians of all parties and by business, education and cultural leaders in Northern Ireland:
"The arts, more than sport, embodied and required skills and attitudes increasingly used by businesses. These involved critical thinking, being able to challenge conventional wisdom and to look at familiar themes from new angles and perspectives, and borrowing and adapting techniques that work in other settings." – Economist Leon Gettler, Ph.D.
The Age, 19 April, 2007
Visionary vs Analytical thought On finding 'holistic' solutions to our evolutionary needs.
Professor Shlain proposes that the process of learning alphabetic literacy rewired the human brain, with profound consequences for culture as we slowly develop our visionary and analytical skills.
With the introduction of the alphabet, Dr. Shlain believed our logical/linear thinking capacity grew exponentially, and that literacy reinforced the brain's linear, abstract, predominantly masculine left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, iconic feminine right side.
Dr. Shlain explained, “This shift upset the balance between men and women initiating the disappearance of goddesses, the abhorrence of images, and, in literacy's early stages, the decline of women's political status. Patriarchy and misogyny followed.”
The good news is that we can develop our analytical capacity to the point where we can reengage our visionary capacity, with profound consequences for culture in that our evolving interdisciplinary visionary analytical thinking will be directed to finding 'holistic' solutions to our evolutionary needs.
"The academic discipline of psychology was developed largely in North America and Europe. Some would argue it’s been remarkably successful in understanding what drives human behaviour and mental processes, which have long been thought to be universal. But in recent decades some researchers have started questioning this approach, arguing that many psychological phenomena are shaped by the culture we live in." >>>Nicolas Geeraert, 2018
"We have a tradition that comes from the first millennium BC, somewhere else. And we are handling that.
It has not turned over and assimilated the qualities of our culture and the new things that are possible and the new vision of the universe.
It must be kept alive.
The only people who can keep it alive are artists."
– Joseph Campbell, 1988, The Power of Myth
A 2019 Harvard study confirmes the 'myth'
- that "Single women live longer than married women
and married men live longer than single men."
(It follows that a man will need a great sense of romance
and humour to benefit from the support of a capable woman!)
Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchies, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies are mother-centered societies. They are based on maternal values: care-taking, nurturing, mothering. This holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike.
Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. They aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a cultural model. This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the patriarchal conception of motherhood which is used to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves. >>>more
In 1986, Heide Göttner-Abendroth founded the International Academy Hagia for Modern Matriarchal Studies, in Germany. She was a member of PeaceWomen Across the Globe: 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was set up in 2003 in Switzerland by women who are active in peace work. A thousand women were collectively nominated for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize as representatives of the hundreds of thousands of female peace activists and as a symbol of the courageous – but mostly invisible – peace work undertaken by women. >>>more
Saga Special Recognition Award - named after the Norse goddess of history and prophecy. (In the Icelandic sagas, seeresses had a high status in society.)
The Association for the Study of Women and Mythology (ASWM) 2012 conference in San Francisco launched the first Saga Special Recognition Award recognising German scholar Heide Göttner-Abendroth's "tireless work to bring to light an alternate cultural narrative” - that matriarchies are egalitarian cultures based on gender equality and consensus decision-making.
ABOUT: International Academy Hagia
Excerpt: In terms of social and cultural structures, matriarchy research opens up a fundamentally different perspective than that offered by the societies many of us are living in. It makes us aware of the patterns in our own patriarchal societies and personal lifestyles; these can then be understood, confronted and changed. New ways of thinking and experience become possible, and visions can develop that shed light on the paths to the future. The study of matriarchy can touch the person as a whole, and above all, it is meant to change society as a whole. >>>more
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,1965 Princeton University Press, by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) Romanian Historian of Religion and Professor at the University of Chicago.
"The founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Mircea Eliade surveys the tradition through two and a half millennia of human history"According to Eliade, one of the most common shamanistic themes is the shaman's supposed death and resurrection. “The Australian medicine man, like numerous other shamans and magicians elsewhere, simply restore —temporarily and for themselves alone – this 'bridge' between sky and earth, which was once accessible to all mortals." p. 134
– Wikipedia features a detailed overview of Eliade's perspective.
The Man Who Skated Right Off the Grid
Everyone has the capacity to dream up what ever they want. – Neurologist, Dr. John Kitchin, aka Slomo: "one person who got away–simply by doing what he wants to"
"Personal Delusional Systems" Op-Docs | The New York Times 'SLOMO'
by Josh Izenberg
Published on April 1, 2014
Dr. John Kitchin quit a medical career to pursue his passion: skating along the boardwalk of San Diego's Pacific Beach:
"I feel like I'm on the tip of a great iceberg of consciousness. ... Once we see the light, we are not satisfied until we experience a kind of divinity... Everyone has the capacity to dream up what ever they want. In psychiatry, this is known as Personal Delusional Systems." – Dr. John Kitchin
Excerpt from the filmmaker Josh Izenberg's report: "I’ve long been fascinated by people who make seismic changes late in life. It goes against the mainstream narrative: Grow up, pick a career, stick it out, retire. I was also curious about Slomo’s concept of “the zone,” a realm of pure subjectivity and connectedness that he achieves through his skating. The only thing Slomo loves more than being in the zone is talking about the zone, so it wasn’t hard to persuade him to take part in a documentary film. Slomo’s combination of candor and eloquence made him a natural on camera, and his background as a neurologist legitimized his metaphysical theories about skating, lateral motion and the brain." Read the full story here.
Is Quantum Physics Necessary
for the Account of Consciousness? Lecture presented by Professor Stuart Hameroff, MD, anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona, before the Center for Consciousness Studies,
Moscow State University, October 2016
"And all this time I thought the world was round.
The world is not round.
It has edges we can fall from
and faces staring in entirely different directions.
And I thought the world was huge but it is not.
It's in our hands: We can hold it; change it; turn it; shake it.
We can solve it, but not by sheer luck or chance. We must be taught."
– Abby Van Muijen, U.C. Berkeley
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that.
Then I realized I was somebody"
- Lily Tomlin
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." – Dr. Seuss
"Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is not easy." – Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. – George Bernard Shaw, Nobel Prize in Literature 1925
"...greater equality usually makes most difference to the least well off, but still produces some benefits for the well off. ... higher levels of income inequality damage the social fabric that contributes so much to healthy societies."– Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009,
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
"To be hopeful in bad times is based on the fact that human history is not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." - Professor Howard Zinn (1922-2010),
"The Lasting Legacy of Howard Zinn, on the 100th anniversary of his birthday."
Words of wisdom:
The Guy in the Glass, 1934, aka The Man in the Glass
by Dale Wimbrow (1895-1954)
If you get what you want in your struggle for self, and the world makes you a king for a day, just go to a mirror and look at yourself, and see what that man has to say. For it isn’t your father, or mother, or wife, whose judgments you have to pass. The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life is the one staring back from the glass. Some people may think you a straight-shooting chum, and call you a wonderful guy. But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum if you can’t look him straight in the eye.
He’s the fellow to please, never mind all the rest, for he’s with you forever, ‘til the end. And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test, if the man in the glass is your friend.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of life, and get pats on the back as you pass. But your final reward will be heartaches and tears if you’ve cheated the man in the glass.
In 1986, Heide Göttner-Abendroth founded the 