Wake Up and Get Radical
LET ME TELL YOU A STORY
The great Sufi master Mullah Nasruddin was on his hands and knees searching for something under a streetlamp. A man saw him and asked, “What are you looking for?” “My house key,” Nasruddin replied. “I lost it.” The man joined him in looking for the key, and after a period of fruitless searching, the man asked, “Are you sure you lost it around here?” Nasruddin replied, “Oh, I didn’t lose it around here. I lost it over there, by my house.” “Then why,” the man asked, “are you looking for it over here?” “Because,” Nasruddin said, “The light is so much better over here.”
SUMMARY
- Waking up is the process of becoming awake, aware and alert
- Being able to detect the filters we apply when “seeing” our world
- Learning to use all the intelligences in our (body, mind, spirit) to make sense of what we see
- Develop a capacity to actively listen
- Practice being present with each other
Waking Up in the context of Conscious.Travel doesn’t necessarily mean a deep discussion into philosophy and metaphysics – unless you want to of course. But it does mean becoming “awake, aware and alert” and being willing to ask deeper questions of yourself and the world around you.
Similarly, “getting radical” doesn’t mean that you are going to become a danger to society, simply that you refuse to accept a superficial explanation of why things are the way they are and seek to “get to the bottom of the problem.” The word radical is simply Latin for root.
The challenges we face (climate change, growing populations, a Tsunami of tourism demand, congestion, waste, wealth disparity, biodiversity loss) are systemic, structural and deeply inter-connected. They are wicked and impossible to solve with the same consciousness that created them. They are too much for individuals to solve alone.
Their root causes stem from the way we “see” our world that is no longer fit for our times. We are looking in the wrong place to find the keys to turn things around.
The dominant institutions, best practices, shared protocols, beliefs and assumptions that have shaped western civilisation and that have spread virtually everywhere, are based on a way of “seeing” that science is proving to be inaccurate and which our own experience suggest is faulty. This worldview, or paradigm, while it helped us develop enormous wealth and power over the past three centuries, is the primary reason we’re in the grip of some pretty wicked problems. This worldview has two fundamental shortcomings:
a. it causes us to behave like Nasruddin and look “out there,” outside for either the key or the source of the problem; and
b. it is incomplete, it only provides a limited perspective. If you want to liken our thinking to a modern car engine it’s like working on only one of four cylinders.
By training and habit we rely on our physical senses and see a material world. We are encouraged to pay attention only to that which we can measure and our blunt measurement instruments don’t tell us the whole truth.
So “waking up” – discerning all the inner states, beliefs, and assumptions that shape who we are and how we behave is a first step to changing direction. That’s why this program is called Conscious Travel. It requires the capacity to step outside oneself and examine why we act the way we do, what values guide our daily choices, and what causes us to judge something good or bad.