“I Am” documentary | What is Wrong with the World? What can we do about it?

After facing his own death, film producer Tom Shadyac suddenly had an instant sense of clarity and purpose. He went around the world with a film crew of four, to talk with significant minds, authors, journalists, academics, leaders, historians, religious leaders who had been extremely influential and inspirational in his own life, to ask two questions: What is Wrong with the World? What can we do about it?

He created this documentary film in three parts. This is it. Tom Shadyac director of I Am. Part one.

Asking whether there is a fundamental, endemic problem, that causes all the other problems?

I Am, Albert Einstein quote

I Am Part Two introduces HeartMath, the concept that the heart is smart and in many indigenous cultures, the heart is the center of consciousness, not the brain. It also ventures into quantum entanglement.

Desmond Tutu God says I dont have anybody else except you

I Am Howard Zinn No evidence that war comes out of some innate human need

“I Am” Part Three introduces the fact that mass mind – many individual actions together – really does affect the fabric of reality. The evolutionary biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, states
this is a participatory universe. Interconnectivity. Everything that we do in it, changes it. We have an interior role in co-creating with all the other species.

Everything on our planet is alive.
 

I Am Part Three Howard Zinn talks about how change happens in increments by individual actions together. Desmond Tutu states that change happens, when each person feels concern.

I Am quote Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Power of One person.

I Am video on Vimeo Dr David Suzuki

I Am We should be grateful and celebrate our relatives

Dr. David Suzuki, scientist, author “The Sacred Balance”, mentions Wade Davis’s term the ethnosphere: the sum total of all of the ways that humans beings have imagines the world into existence. Suzuki talks about the separation of humanity from the natural world, and the fact that the economy is the most important thing in our lives.

Among the people interviewed:

Lynne McTaggart – Author, “the Field” talks of the stories that fashion our worldview, in a competition, scarcity, in which a person needs to be significant, at someone else’s expense

Dean Radin – Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences,

Howard Zinn – Historian, Author “A People’s History of the United States”

John Francis – Environmentalist, Author “Planetwalker”

Noam Chomsky- Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, MIT

Desmond Tutu – Archbishop, Cape Town, South Africa

Thom Hartmann – Author “Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight”
There’s a fundamental difference between machines and life, and we are running our society as if we are a machine and as if the world is a machine
Thom mentions Jack Davis Professor of Native American studies at UCA Davis, talks of the Native American term “Wetico” = cannibal – one who eats the life of another. It is considered an illness.

Daniel Quinn – Author, “Ishmael”

Ray Anderson – CEO Interface

Chris Jordan – Photographer

Coleman Barks – Poet, Author “The Essential Rumi”

Marc Ian Barasch – Author, “Field Notes on the Compassionate Life”

Dacher Keltner – Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley

Rollin McCraty – Senior Researcher, Heartmath Institute

Elisabet Sahtouris – Evolutionary Biologist

Marilyn Schlitz – President, CEO Institute of Noetic Sciences

 

eco_revolution

Carol holding the plastic globe

Clearly Unclear Place > Trust Mentors’ Inspiring Words

Deepak Chopra I am here to serve, inspire and live my truth.

I have come to a place where I am indeed stuck, hence the title, clearly unclear. I had catapulted myself, with ease actually, out of Pennsylvania, with several hours of creating a profile and investigating a work-exchange site, specifically a WWOOF position. The host needed someone immediately, and then I miraculously found an automobile to transport across the country, that also was so urgent, that the owners tossed in an extra 100 dollars to entice someone to drive it. So I reduced what I’d take with me to two bags and was off. It was with ease that I also found my way back from the west coast destination for the automobile, back to my host in rural Arizona. I would make it work, the idea was to be isolated with electricity and internet access, to complete my eBook and start composing music again, while writing my blogs. It was a choice just beyond homelessness, and closest to an artist residency. And then I learned that I was the only worker there, that unlike other work-exchange operations, that this was not 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, but every day, and pretty soon I discovered that there was way more work to do than could be easily snipped off at a 5 hour point. Then personality differences ensued. After delicately communicating expectations against the reality and letting reproachful comments slide, one morning the tension fractured, and I was asked to leave immediately. I had just enough time to wash the alfalfa hay and dust out of my hair and pack. When I had the audacity to finally make a statement about the current situation and express my own opinion while being driven from the remote farm to the next town, the tires screeched to a halt and I scrambled to make sure that I could get my valuables, now three bags, out of the vehicle before it sped away.

Eckhart Tolle Life will give you the experience necessary

I felt more of a sense of relief, than panic. I had been maintaining a meditation practice and had scooped out a bit more time through my own demands to at least do a little bit of my own work in between sleeping and working on the ranch. The animals I loved, the people were angry and overworked. I still remained calm as I stood on this dusty road in the middle of nowhere hitchhiking. A woman of the church finally stopped, she brought me to a place where I was able to approach a man sitting with his iPhone and laptop, to ask if it would be possible for me to poach some of his internet waves in order to send a message to my cousin, who I was pretty sure lived in Phoenix.

Charles Eisenstein We are Interbeings Anything happening in the world happens to us

It turned out that in the very small allotted time that I sat there with WiFi through this guy whom I had some nice conversation with, that my cousin had returned my email with his contact information. I figured I’d start hitching to Phoenix, and discovered that my cousin lives in Tucson, the other direction. I found rides to take me there also effortlessly.

Charles Eisenstein Trust you Intuition be guided by Love

I have been here a little over a week. I have not had a clue of where to go. I have never warmed up to Los Angeles. I like to discover a city through having the option to walk around narrow streets and bicycle. I like to be in a place where I don’t HAVE to have a car, but can easily find the local ultimate frisbee pickup games, tennis courts, having a place to swim nearby is also lovely…and being among people who are artists and musicians with full hearts and open minds.

Wayne Dyer How you react is your karma

Suddenly it occurred to me that Tucson is this progressive place, particularly since it has a university, that is like an oasis in the desert of massive business chain entities that line several of the wide 4 lane highway streets that cut through the city. You know, the massive chains that are everywhere in the United States, as soon as you get out of the ‘old town’ or central quaint neighborhoods, you are confronted with these massive familiar businesses that are like flavors of ice cream, their brand names are so familiar to everyone.

Carlos Castaneda Your Perception Changes

So I decided, yes, I’ll look for work here, and housing, and then I had an experience one day that said, no, this is not what I want. And then I had another day that gently encouraged me to go with this new plan – do the duty, pay the price – and then the following day I was again feeling discouragement. As I communicated in a letter yesterday, perhaps I shouldn’t have come across and listened to, most of my adult life, the words and messages of Carl Jung, Carlos Castaneda, Joseph Campbell, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Charles Eisenstein, Wayne Dyer…

i.e. Tolle “Awakening to your Life’s Purpose”, Campbell “Follow your Bliss”, Jung “synchronicity” “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”, Chopra ‘I am the creator of my best life”, Castaneda ‘the teachings of the shaman Don Juan”, Charles Eisenstein “We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.”

Carlos Castaneda Does the path have a Heart

And in my confusion, I’m delighted to have opened up this to read today.

http://charleseisenstein.net/books/the-more-beautiful-world-our-hearts-know-is-possible/nondoing/

“If we are stuck and do not choose to visit the empty place, eventually we will end up there anyway. You may be familiar with this process on a personal level. The old world falls apart, but the new has not emerged. Everything that once seemed permanent and real is revealed as a kind of hallucination. You don’t know what to think, what to do; you don’t know what anything means anymore. The life trajectory you had plotted out seems absurd, and you can’t imagine another one. Everything is uncertain. Your time frame shrinks from years to this month, this week, today, maybe even to the present moment. Without the mirages of order that once seemed to protect you and filter reality, you feel naked and vulnerable, but also a kind of freedom. Possibilities that didn’t even exist in the old story lie before you, even if you have no idea how to get there. The challenge in our culture is to allow yourself to be in that space, to trust that the next story will emerge when the time in between has ended, and that you will recognize it. Our culture wants us to move on, to do. The old story we leave behind, which is usually part of the consensus Story of the People, releases us with great reluctance. So please, if you are in the sacred space between stories, allow yourself to be there. It is frightening to lose the old structures of security, but you will find that even as you might lose things that were unthinkable to lose, you will be okay. There is a kind of grace that protects us in the space between stories. It is not that you won’t lose your marriage, your money, your job, or your health. In fact, it is very likely that you will lose one of these things. It is that you will discover that even having lost that, you are still okay. You will find yourself in closer contact to something much more precious, something that fires cannot burn and thieves cannot steal, something that no one can take and cannot be lost. We might lose sight of it sometimes, but it is always there waiting for us. This is the resting place we return to when the old story falls apart. Clear of its fog, we can now receive a true vision of the next world, the next story, the next phase of life. From the marriage of this vision and this emptiness, a great power is born.”

Alas, as I take in information with my brain and heart, and also stop and allow new messages to come in, I must trust that I’ll find my way.

Charles Eisenstein message to his Self of the Past The organic intelligence will become visible, the answer will find you.

Dalai Lama War and military establishments the greatest source of violence in the world.

I’m still looking for that artist residency and community….

Carol Keiter the blogger

Greed & Profit-driven Aims to Protect Wealth & Power = Path of Destruction

This blog was incited by having read a comment on someone’s Facebook page, regarding a man’s decision to NOT give a TED Talk, because he wouldn’t be paid.

The idea of some kind of monetary compensation for presenting a TED talk never occurred to me. Of the many excellent presentations I’ve seen, shouldn’t the fact that one’s ideas are considered worthy enough to present them to an audience of potentially hundreds of millions of people, suffice? I was under the impression that the point of TED Talks is to spread ideas, for the good of humanity and all of the other species that cohabit this planet. Through the education and perspective I personally received through my family heritage and genetics, I have been granted a great deal of wealth; health, intelligence, analytical skills and an abundance of creativity. On top of that, I am physically fit, allowing me to move through this world unencumbered. I have education and knowledge, and the resourcefulness and curiosity to obtain more. Yet, I am teetering on the edge of financial poverty. Not because of poor planning, but because of my adventurous spirit combined with idealism, which leads to risk-taking. The wisdom I follow is from those who genuinely care about humanity and all of the other species with whom we share this planet. People like Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Carl Gustav Jung, Deepak Chopra among others, including the wisdom coming from Native American Indians and literary and spiritual guides from the Middle East and Asia. I wish to continually create possibilities to learn and develop my skills, to be the best that I can be in order to give something back to the world. Reading about a person complaining because the TED talk doesn’t pay the presenter, irked me. It made me stop everything else, to comment. It ignited the fuse of my annoyance regarding the injustices I see presently in the world today.

Our world is corrupted by money, and the greed and drive of people to make a profit and protect their power, no matter the consequences. It is the large, incorporated manufacturers of the world, those who have invested in the extraction and transport of non-renewable energy, telecommunications, technology, pharmaceutical industries and those who control information, that often are responsible for the careless and myopic profit-making, resulting in the path of destruction of the environment and eradication of many of the species. The imbalance of wealth, lack of education and instability of the planet (human industry-induced global warming) are all a result of this misplaced greed of a small percentile. The vast majority of people and species, are all suffering from overpopulation and economic misfortune, driven by sustained ignorance.

Many of the scientists, teachers, artists and people with creative insights and ideas who genuinely help to guide people and make the world a better place, are NOT the movers and shakers. Presently, the “leaders” of the United States government are not elected for their insight and desire to do good and justly represent the people, they are corporate sponsored actors who tug the line, speak the voice of those who place them in these positions, for an inflationary cost that is disproportionate to what democratically chosen elections should cost. In the world today, those who have more wealth, are more easily able to carve paths that slide around the rules that everyone else must follow, making deductions, avoiding taxes through all sorts of loopholes, while the vast majority are just getting by. I am absolutely disgusted with the idea of people protecting their wealth and power, at the cost of others.

Malala Yousafzai

Do you think that Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who passionately wants to improve the condition of women in Pakistan, by voicing the right of girls to receive an education (which will ripple to affect many other parts of the world) who was shot by the Taliban because of her courage and honesty, is driven by profit? I could go on, but I’ll share this in another forum – my own blog, for which incidentally, I earn absolutely no money, but am driven by my own passion to recirculate ideas and events, purely because of their value and the wish to share. Thank fucking DOG, because even the concept of GOD, by most religions, has been distorted and compelled by those wishing to sustain their wealth and power.