Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture - Softcover

Baldwin, Christina

 
9780553379006: Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553379003 ISBN 13: 9780553379006
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams.

50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity.

In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christina Baldwin is the author of Calling the Circle, Seven Whispers, and most recently Storycatcher, which won a 2006 Books for a Better Life Award. She teaches and lectures extensively through her educational company, PeerSpirit. She lives outside Seattle, Washington, on Whidbey Island.

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The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams.

50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity.

In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring.

Aus dem Klappentext

The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams.

50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity.

In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring.

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CHAPTER 1
 
 
 
Awakening—Where We Are Now
 
I come from the middle. I grew up in Indiana and Minnesota, in the matrix of two families: descended from my mother’s line of Scandinavian farmers and my father’s line of Scotch-Irish-English tinkers, beekeepers, and preachers. I spent the first twenty years of my adult life living in the middle of the country, in the middle of the middle class. This sense of personal placement is important because it is the rootedness of middle ground I bring to my own awakening—and to the work of the circle I present in this book.
 
On the suburban edge of Minneapolis, where I lived most of four decades, the air is still breathable, trees grow, and children cluster brightly on street corners to wait for the school bus. From this center place, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, I ventured out across the continent to teach but always returned to rest in the lake-studded city with its drastic seasons. Here I was surrounded by the moderate people who collectively represent the “American dream” of a decent and comfortable life. It teaches us much, this life in the middle, whether in Missouri, Minnesota, or Manitoba; downtown Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Cape Town, or Sydney; farms in Kansas or Sweden, vineyards in Spain or Israel. While taking on the cultural flavors of a thousand different surroundings, the stability of middle-class existence has become the dominant model of modern life worldwide. This is the vision we have been taught to aspire to, the scene that shows up in countless variations on television, in movies, and in books to reinforce the collective fantasy about what is desirable and achievable. It is this fantasy that is falling apart.
 
As we grapple with the awareness that our personal lives cannot be separated from the life of our times, we are forced to reconsider the assumptions, expectations, and values that have guided our lives thus far. One by one by one by one, something happens that shakes us into awareness.
 
When one vision falls, another vision rises. This is not usually a sudden switch, but a long process of the old paradigm fading away—struggling with itself to let go, subverting new forces, becoming reactionary and rigid exactly because the inevitable is obvious. We are losing our way of life; and we need to lose it, in order not to lose life itself.
 
Our awakenings come in many guises—some surprise life has up its sleeve—and bang, we are shifted out of personal or cultural sleep. Trying to describe this phenomenon once to a friend, I remember saying, “I’ve been lifted up, given a brisk shaking by huge unseen hands, and set firmly down again. Everything around me looks the same, but everything inside me will never be the same again. And then somebody casually asks, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and I don’t know what to say.”
 
And so the fading of what-is-established gives rise to what-is-possible. The new vision starts to come into focus—struggling with itself to shift from dream to reality, tangential, experiential, a vulnerable and determined seed. We are claiming a more aware way of life; we need our awareness in order to save life itself.
 
Questions flood us: How will we live through this much change? How will our children and grandchildren live? From what sources will we draw our values? What will have meaning? What will offer stability? How will we take care of ourselves, our loved ones, and all the world’s strangers? How will we care for the planet that sustains us? Is everything all right?
 
As our vision of what constitutes successful living shifts from acquisition to accountability, we seek social and spiritual forms that help us address these questions. It is the premise—and the promise—of this book that gathering in peer-led, spirit-centered circles provides such a community forum.
 
The Experiment
 
We are living in the middle of an experiment in how to be human. Since around 1970, with the rise of popular psychology, millions of people have gone through some form of awakening to consciousness. Tumbled along with everything else that is happening in the culture and in our personal lives, there is this added ingredient: consciousness. Throughout human history there have always been lone visionaries, but never before has the call to awaken been heeded by so many ordinary people.
 
In a decade-long series of studies, Paul H. Ray, a research sociologist, has identified three main worldviews that act as dynamic subcultures in the United States: three different worlds of meaning and valuing.1 The first worldview is held by Traditionalists, or Heart-landers, who believe we can correct the ills of the modern age by returning to small-town, religious America, corresponding to the period 1890-1930. The second worldview, held by 47 percent of Americans, is that of Modernists, who idealize capitalism, technology, materialism, and science. The third worldview is held by Trans-modernists, also called Cultural Creatives, who push the edge of social-psychological-spiritual movements.
 
While I personally identify with the Transmodernists, the circle as it will be presented throughout this book can be applied within all three worldviews. The central example concerns a group that is certainly Modernist in its view, and many short examples show the circle in Traditionalist settings, being used to uphold the values of the middle ground from which I come.
 
Though Ray’s study was conducted in the United States, the roots of these subcultures arise from European history and can be seen in other Western nations as well. The amazing statistic in this study is that 24 percent of the American population identifies itself as Trans-modernist. We’re talking about forty-four million mostly middle-class, highly educated people, about 60 percent women, 40 percent men. Cultural Creatives tend to be savvy idealists who consume in an ecologically sound manner, support diversity and self-actualization, and are determined to integrate their personal experience with an optimistic view of the future. As Ray points out, the basic question Trans-modernists ask is, “Having reinvented ourselves, how can we reinvent “society?”
 
Forty-four million people contemplating the connection between personal growth and social change sets loose an amazing force in the United States, and the impact of these numbers keeps multiplying, country by country, throughout Western culture. This is a force way beyond the “hundredth monkey.” We are a global subculture based on consciousness. We do not know what long-term influence our consciousness will have on the species—but it is certainly shaking things up, speeding up the rate of change, and generating tremendous social and spiritual tensions. It is my greatest hope for the circle that it can provide a forum for bringing these tensions into dialogue.
 
A basic definition of consciousness is the mind’s capacity to observe the self in reality and to be thoughtful about our actions. I remember the day I really “got” consciousness. I remember it because I was twenty-four years old.
 
It was early spring of 1970, the year Ray cites for the inception of Transmodernism, and I was living in England, working part time and actively seeking something for which I had no words. I wandered around London, especially the Soho district, the focal point of the counterculture. There was a head shop I hung around, soaking up the atmosphere, the incense, and many cups of jasmine tea. I was still a not-very-worldly, drug-free onlooker to most of the hippie scene. One day in the midst of a small group...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553379003
ISBN 13 
9780553379006
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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