“The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it, how you manifest it, is all your responsibility. We face such a big task, so naturally we sit down for a while.”
KOBUN CHINO OTOGAWA
In the midst of revolutionary, disruptive change, the need for evolutionary, conscious insight arises as the only real path by which we might envision a harmonious world.
Having seen the accelerating speed with which we’re collectively conjuring global change—whether it be through a new machine, movement, meme or mouse (thank you NextNower Doug Engelbart!)—we recognize the need to see beyond our own wildest dreams and anticipate the ways our innovations may reverberate into places unknown. On the road to a sustainable, benevolent future, it becomes crucial that we develop the capacity to sense the breadth, and depth, of our impact.
Insight this profound requires practicing the skill of compassion—the ability to feel into situations and the experience of others beyond the limits of our vision and intellect. With it, we can cultivate an intuitive awareness (v. simply a conceptual understanding) of our oneness and recognize the unexpected as it moves toward us.
This kind of compassion is not a gift we’re born with, but an art that can be learned, refined, practiced and applied to extend our endeavors beyond their ordinary limits, for the benefit of all. This kind of compassion in action has always been the glue that holds our NextNow community together, and at the heart of NextNowCollab projects.
This inaugural project of Pop Up Zendo and NextNowCollab is designed to provide new tools for building insight as we go about our work of world change. And as we gather again to celebrate Bill Daul, we’ll first celebrate each other by sitting together and exploring the mystery and meaning of what it is that coalesces us into a greater whole. Joe will unpack the idea of compassion including how to recognize it in ourselves and in our world, and then lead us into practice to develop insight based on the combined work of monastics and neuroscientists. By the end of the hour, our hope is we’ll have a new heartfelt sense of the possible, and new means by which to enter into coherence within it. —Joe and Claudia
N e x t N o w Collaboratory 