welcome to new connection where you can tune in and grow i'm your host vicky thompson you may be familiar with new connection magazine for conscious living which has been enjoyed by readers in the pacific northwest for more than seventeen years now are excited to bring new connection to life in your home on new connection we welcome authors practitioners and visionaries to share new ideas for alternative health spirituality and personal growth today i'd like to welcome to new connection sharif of doula a social spiritual activist and author of seven seeds for a new society this groundbreaking book provides tools to help us change society from one based on fear lack  violence to a society based on love compassion and relationships with all beings sharif welcome to new connection really good to be here well it's wonderful to have you here today because i love the idea of seven seeds for a new society it's like we plant the seeds and we can grow and also means that we're fertile were rich we have all that we need right here to grow new society so we have seven steps seven seeds that we'd like to step through and the first seed is called the offering and so what do you mean by the offering well my question was when i first started writing this book was who i to be writing it who what do i what do i bring to the table in order to write a book like this and i think that always we should be asking the question when somebody is offering something to us who is making the offering and what is really being offered and my being offered more problem and are being offered some solutions and so it's our offering and from the offering we move into seed number two that helps us to see the problems that we're facing but oftentimes does it happen that we become too focused on the problems we can see lots and lots and lots of problems and there are people who actually have a whole career telling us how bad things are but if you don't see the tally of the problem then you really are you're applying partial solutions you not really part of applying a solution that gets to the real problem so right now we have democrats saying the republicans are the problem and republicans saying the democrats other problem and we get really caught up in things like that but there is another problem and this is a problem of our human consciousness and how do we effect and how do we change our consciousness where the good of all so you're definitely taking a much more spiritual point of view which you don't see we actually can start to solve that and then all the other small ones get get lined up the right way but our problem isn't america our problem isn't the health care system the problem is  financial meltdown all these things are contributing some symptoms to a worldwide problem and that's the that's the bad but those the good news is that it also can lend can can bring itself to a worldwide solution which is seed number three and so it sounds like in c three for the solution does it involve changing our thinking that is the solution what we're looking at right now is our emergence in into a whole new way of thinking about ourselves thinking about our relationship to the earth thinking about our relationship to spirit what we're looking at is the beginning stages of the evolution of humanity to its next step now we know that caterpillars will evolve into butterflies but a butterfly is not a caterpillar with some wings stuck on it what the butterfly is is a completely different being that had to completely rearrange itself in order to become this butterfly so we're in the process right now of doing some very significant rearrangement of our beings of our lives of our of our institutions etc we can't carry our caterpillar ness into our butterfly ness what we have to do is start the process of looking at how do we really become this other being how do we really become a global human family that has an that is an integral part of the earth not trying to live on top of the earth and so with that come in to seed for where we have to address our principles and values and change those so that we can support this new solution that we talk about human values but what we wind wind up doing is talking about the values that we are taught from whatever our wisdom tradition is it may be christianity or maybe islam it may be buddhism it may be judaism it cetera but what we have to do is start looking at how do we cross all those lines how do we cross lines so that we can see our of our global values and our global visions one of the things that i've had the the honor of doing is going around the world a number of times i've been to thirty six different countries and i've been to probably about one hundred distinct cultures in those countries and i begin to see that that there are some values that all of a share as human beings not as christians muslims buddhists hindus but just general values as human beings and if we can first articulate those values then recognise that each one of us is an interim part of those values then what then what we begin to see is we become part of the global human family not just whatever the wisdom tradition is that we are all that we're focusing on so that gets to be like to me really exciting first of all can we identify these values second of all can i begin to cross articulate values so that i can see that what was called the golden rule in in christianity has a similar footprint in every other wisdom tradition so we get we begin to see that that's really really important and we can start acting as though that's really important it's one thing the see these values it's another one to base our lives and base how we act towards each other on this on that operating system it sounds like a very respectful way because if you've gone into many different cultures and societies christianity will often come in and convert or say i'm the dominant  that way but there are so many things that we share what are some of the values and principles that you've discovered in your travels but one of the things that i that i recognize almost immediately is that this idea notion that i call inclusive ity this notion that i i'm linked to you i cannot break the link with you the link isn't established because i like you or dislike you or whatever it's that all of us all human beings and all other beings are linked and if we're linked i have to treat you a certain way and if i have to treat you the certain way than i have to treat myself i have to treat all other beings t this gets called in some cultures the golden rule in some cultures it's called inclusively or acronym idi or or but regardless of the language and we put around it this to me is not only a common principle i believe that it is the central principle followed very closely by the concept of nonviolence which is  do no harm in some religions which is in other religions which is you know love your enemies and so we all know these princip but how do we actually act toward our principles how do we act toward our enemies do we do we actually act like we love them or do we say oh that's a really bad enemy let's kill that enemy and then i'll go to church on sunday or temple on saturday or the mosque on friday and i'll spell out the words but i will actually practice something different i think that's a hard thing more people will believe in principles but getting to action  the the operating your operating system is what you do when you get out of bed in the morning ok your operating system is the thing that you do when you're living your life you're carrying out your activities you see the homeless person on the corner asking you for a quarter you either give it to them or don't give it to them but well whatever you're doing it's all a part of your operating system we have watched in our lifetime the operating system called communism disintegrate and die we are watching right now from the inside the operating system we called capitalism disintegrate and die so what we have to do is come up with another operating system if we know that communism doesn't work and we're watching capitalism not working what comes next and that's the question i started asking myself as i was going around the world and as i was seeing all these other cultures all of those cultures having the similar problem a similar challenge of how do we respond as human beings to going into this twenty first century that none of us can predict or anticipate it cetera and so i began to see that an operating system has three basic elements to it every human society have seen as three basic elements consciousness economics and power by consciousness what i mean is is how we see the world how we think about the world what is my relationship to me is my relationship to the rest of other human beings where is my relationship to the planet and what is my relationship to the transcendent or the divine whatever name i know that by by economics what i mean is how do i meet my basic needs and how do you meet your basic needs and how do we do that in some way for the good of all and by power what i mean is how do i govern my own behavior and how do you govern your behavior how to all of us govern our own behaviors and the behaviors of other for the good of all so these three elements will come together and will form a either a very healthy dynamic way of being will create a very unhealthy in a very diseased way of being that disease is in the society itself it's actually in the operating system and that disease is transferred into my heart into the hearts of each of us and so in order for us to create a world that actually can work for all beings what we have to do is start looking at how do we make the shift from consciousness economics and power that only serves a few to consciousness economics and power that that is about the upliftment and the and lightman creates co create and supports an operating system we either support one that is healthy that is uplifting that is conscious and that that actually triggers and builds our consciousness or we support an operating system that is negative that actually hurts my own being that actually hurts my my hurts the way that i interact with myself in the world etc so i am either the agent of a adversarial operating system a system that is against something or someone or i'm the agent of what i call the relational operating system and by relational operating system i mean let's we can create global human societies that actually act like we are all related to each other i have a friend who says that when she's driving down the street she acts like everybody in every car surrounding her is someone she knows by their first name if you do that then you'll be you will interact with people in a very different way than if you act like you're that you're surrounded by a bunch of strangers in bozos who don't know how to drive and you can flip them off you can ignore him you can honk your h you can say bad words to them because nothing comes back to me and so if so i at all times the agent of this this relational operating system now how how do you create an economic system that's based on relationship well i think it's really easy i think that the thing that gets in our way is we've got this system that is that that where people are making trillions of dollars and how to cut someone else's throat how to gobble up market share how to do all the things that that aren't good for human beings not even the people who are doing these things not even the people weren't successful doing these things so let me tell you a quick story i was in somewhere back east and i was in a small town and the went to a pizza parlor and the place was jammed and really good food really good attitude of the people and the owner of the pizza parlor girl like table t table how are you doing is everybody happy here and when he came around to my table i said you know this is a really good place and you're really you know you got people standing in line to get in here you could open up two or three more of these and he looked at me and he got really philosophical and he said you know i have enough money for my family i have enough money to pay my employees really really well i'm able to support the little league team and i'm on the chamber of commerce  i figured i'd leave the water in the well for the next guy and that's what i would call a relational economics in a relationship with this entire community  contrast that with what for example a wal mart does at the end of every business day all the money that wal mart collects in wherever it is is else can get some of the water all that work goes dark and saw to feel the walton family now and i'm not picking on them i mean this is a very common business practice where instead of enriching your community what you're doing is is impoverishing the community for the good of just a handful of people so what we have to do with our our process is that we have to create a relational economic system  relational political system and to have a relational consciousness system that means we have to really rethink what religion means which is a very tall order but all these things are ready for us to ready to happen right and right now so we've talked a bit about economically how we can create innovation relation operating system how would you do that from a power position the first thing i would do is ignore what's happening in congress right now if you ignore them long enough they'll go way too many real political power is very very local this is something that thomas jefferson believed when he was in his last days he was working on something he called word word democracy that he believed that all of that in his day the federal government was too big so so  he believed that all of the power of the government should be in something as small as a ward like up like a voting precinct and when people get at that level all of those big distinctions disappear when you get when it's just a matter of where do we put this building as a matter of how do we route the stream for the good of all well where do we put the road and if you create a respectful environment where you're inviting all parties parties to the table and you try to reach consensus you can reach consensus on amazingly sticky messy issues if you don't try to do that what you wind up doing is creating a the kind of mess where you have to have people at ever greater levels make decisions about what's happening in your life so there are people three thousand miles away in washington d c making decisions about the columbia river and they've never seen it they've never been on it they have no relationship to it so to me relational economics is intensely local economics and intensely consensus driven one you can kind of consensus as soon as you get there go back to the values back to step four that that if you if you understand our values our values being we are one we come into consensus is very very easy and so there's another position in the relational operating system of consciousness and is that a tall order is that something that we can do it's something that i think that we're looking at right now i'm seeing people starting to practice what i call blended spirituality where instead of saying i  him solely that they draw on a number of different influences on a number of different ways of life and and by doing that what they'd wind up doing is having a very  deep but not very deep spiritual experience but not found in any one book so when i do my workshops and i do talks with people one of the things that i ask is you know what is the nature of your own spiritual experience and people will say you know i'm i'm a i'm a christian and i go to church regularly but i read these books on buddhism and i've got a picture of the dalai lama on my wall and you have this  this very different looking spiritual experience now the contrast to that is the fundamentalism and the fundamentalism it's interesting the fundamentalism of christianity looks an awful lot like the fundamentalism of islam and the fundamentalism of judaism and cetera so all those form a blended religion and it's  something that's that's based on violence on hatred and on self hatred on i know this isn't feeding me and i am really is not feeding my soul and i'm angry and i take that anger out by trying to kill another human being when people learn how to be fed when they learn what's actually feeding them in the world then they're going to be looking in a very different kind of way and are going to be looking at how can i make sure that you fit as opposed to taking anything away from me how can i make sure that you get fed because my security lies in making sure that you're fed which is a different way of relating together because i think we're in competition normally we're getting what ours economically and we're grabbing for power and all of that stuff is based on fear on the one side and ego greed on the other side and these are just two sides of the same coin the coin being i'm separate from you once i get over that i can see that yes i have legitimate security issues ok there may be someone who actually wants to cause harm to me but we know how to disarm that person we don't disarm them by withdrawing from them we don't disarm them by making them more angry we don't disarm them or trying to kill them first ok we just arm them with love and compassion and it may take a couple of applications ok but that is the only way to to to in a lasting way get rid of your enemy because you no longer have the enemy what you have is a brother or sister that you didn't have before so that leads nicely into seed number seven what are our next steps for humanity to grow into this new society one of the things i find really interesting is that there are very few long term plans that we have in our society there are very few situations where we have a hundred year plan a two hundred year plan a five hundred year plan and i think that it's imperative on us to do that right now that what we have to have is a plan that would stretch a thousand years or more to to undo the damage that we've already caused to the earth undo the damage that we've already caused to the human psyche right now every so every government that i know with except for one spends the the most of its wealth and most of its money on killing and violence and war and they all claim to the christian buddhist muslims that are ok so what we have to do i change that picture that we are the ones that would set a hundred year plan or even a thousand year plan fine let's go and colonize mars but let's not leave this earth until all of our problems that we created on earth are solved let's not go to mars to try to just take the problems to mars what we have to do is and war we have to and hunger the notion that there's a hungry human being on the planet is on a planet with as much bally as this one as is ridiculous what we have to do is create a global human family diverse cultures diverse languages but we all know the same thing we all see the same thing and from that position we'll be in a position to actually cause the evolution of humanity the evolution of our planet and maybe the evolution of mars wonderful well such a wise plan and such a beautiful plan with the seven seeds for a new society so sure if it has been wonderful having you here and learning about this wonderful new book of yours  you you can learn more about social and spiritual activism at our website at w w w new connection journal dot com join us next time a new connection where you can tune in and grow