Saving Our Children: Connecting to Ourselves for Sustainable Well-being (video)

For those who like to put things in context, read this 123-word post covering the big picture of One Planet Thriving.

Video of a recent 60-minute talk with music, entitled: “Saving Rumi: Connecting to Ourselves for Sustainable Well-being”. It’s the best summary of the one planet thriving project. Through words and music, the talk discusses how our current way of life is the largest failure in human history, advocates making changes to maximize sustainable well-being, describes some psychological principles needed, and suggests solutions, ranging from a scientific and cultural project called “Open Source Life Design”, to solutions being modeled by pioneering communities throughout the world, to an incubating idea for a Community Supported Sustainable Lake House (CSSL).

The talk in 9, bite-sized, bits

Follow the outline for the most interesting bit for you (Hot-linked text will take you to related articles; Subjects in italics were not mentioned in the talk, but are related. See the whole 60-minute talk here):

1. Introduction. (a) Silence; (b) “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye; (c) “we are here” (song) [cds and more music here]

2. Our current way of life is the largest and most unethical failure in human history. (a) Societal Collapse; (b) Sustainable Well-being defined with U.S. ranking (Article on measures of resource-use, including income and wealth; article on resilience, a necessary part of sustainable well-being); (c) “nothing is worse than the truth” (song)

3. “Me”: Emotion technology for individuals. (a) How did this failure occur?; (b) Emotion regulation and pathological positive thinking/optimism [related to mindfulness, enlightenment, & pain]; (c) Listen to canaries; (d) Negative emotion as information (article relating this to mindfulness; poem related to being present); (e) “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but Humans are from Earth”

4. We Interdependent Humans. (a) Fundamental Attribution Error; (b) Adverse Childhood Events; (c) Milgram Experiments vs. Mirror Neurons; (d) Other disconnections (and the Precautionary Principle; see Upstream/Downstream)

we are not gods

we are interdependent humans

that’s not just enough,

it is beautiful

5. Big We: The opportunity now for one planet living. (a) Historic wisdom about living sustainably now available for the first time; (b) Survival of the least fit?; (c) Open Source Ecology; (d) Social/software technology is a good complement

6. Open Source Life Design (article). (a) Science (Shambhala Sun article on our work); (b) Some necessary social technologies / relationship tips; (c) “nothing i would not give” (song)

“A community is much more complex than a laboratory experiment in
human behavior but much simpler than the large scale enterprises
analyzed in political science, economics, and other social disciplines. For
this reason it is especially helpful in studying the effects of a social
environment on human behavior and, in return, the relevance of that
behavior to the maintenance and development of the environment.”

(p. 64 in Skinner, B. F. (1968). The design of experimental communities. From: Sills, D. L. (Ed.) International encyclopedia of the social sciences, 58-65. New York: Crowell, Collier and Macmillan)