There is hope

Just a quick update – my mind has been elsewhere recently but I thought i would let people know that there is hope.

A few days ago i filled in at a school doing some mock interviews for some of the sixth form, 16 and 17 year olds.  The idea was to give them experience in a more realistic setting than if one of their teachers had done the interview for them.  I went in my suit in an attempt to look professional and businesslike – i probably didnt make it completely but you never know.  The interviews were part of a whole day of activities for the young students organised by their teachers.

Anyway, back to the point.  I was IMPRESSED… 

Second Tier Money

Over at Emergent Times Jon F has an article about Second Tier Money.

It is well worth a read and I will be following the progress of CHE UK closely so that I can get a better idea of what second tier money looks like.

Of course, there is a need in coming years – and it may, or may not, take a long time perhaps measured in decades to fully percolate through the global systems for a different kind of money system. But what exactly has to change?

My first thoughts are that it is not so much the money itself but the way that we value the things that we buy with it.  If you want my long term view then we will simply do away with money altogether but I think that is a very long way off indeed.

But perhaps exploring the ways in which a society without money might work may give us some clues as to what might need to happen in the short term.

Will we forget what money looks like?

Sharing the Load

Just a quick post with an idea for grocery deliveries.

On occasion I have used the shopping delivery service that some of the big stores now offer.  The trouble is, at up to five pounds extra for delivery (depending on the delivery slot you choose) it adds a lot to the cost.

This morning i got to thinking, why don’t they offer a service where you can share the delivery cost?  This is how it should work when they have implemented it.

Step one – start a neighbours club on the stores website.

Step two – tell all of your neighbours what you have done and give them your club details. A nice email to neighbours button would do the trick.

Step three – every time you order your shopping and pick a delivery slot you will notice a difference.  The slots that your neighbours already have booked for will be highlighted.  Simply choose one of the same slots for a reduced delivery charge.

It is a simple idea but it would give the store a great way to pull in new customers as well as reducing the delivery time and mileage and fuel costs.  Everybody wins.

I am going to pass on the idea to Tesco’s and see if they give me a years free groceries as a prize – I might as well be optimistic, after all, every idea helps.   Especially when it’s an idea that helps a little towards building a “big society”.

Money and Life

Last week I attended a great conference in London.  Great for two main themes.

Marketing

First, the conference was organised by Chris Cardell who is the UK’s, and some say the worlds, leading marketing Guru – check out his marketing tips web site if you have any reason at all to increase your exposure or make money.

Some years ago I was personally anti profit and even anti being wealthy – better to earn a decent wage and provide a good service.  But, gradually I have realised that if you don’t aim to make good money then you won’t.  If you do make money then you become much freer to help others and get done what needs to be done.   And i think it was wonderful that to me, Chris seemed to emphasise the underlying positive reasons for making money much more this time round.

I was at the Cardell conference with Dave Blakeman who runs RPS RoofWright, the software company I work for.  In the last two years since I first went to Chris Cardell’s conference and especially since Dave went last year we have come a long way as a business.

One of the many ways in which you can benefit your business, according to Chris, is to be associated with celebrities so here goes:

Dave and I with Bob Geldof at the Chris Cardell Conference, copyright Cardell Media

How Can We Co-Create New Social Realities?

The following is taken from a speech by Adam Kahane.  It expresses the dualism that is seen in the spiral of human development as it swings from personal priority to group priority and back again.  And it calls for action that expresses both fully and together instead of the tug-of-war battle between the two.  In angel speak – tough love.

Adam has also written a book:

Love and Power

Speech by Adam Kahane to the 3rd SoL Global Forum

Muscat, April 16, 2008

What I would like to do today is to offer you a question that I have been asking myself for fifteen years: How can we co-create new social realities? These days I am asking myself this question using two particular and unconventional words: How can we co-create new social realities with all of our power and all of our love?

A Random Post

I have decided to put a stick in the ground and call it a random post.

Normally i write about something specific that catches my eye.  Over the last few of weeks my eye has been caught by something that is not easily written about so blogging has taken a bit of a back seat.

Zen

In case you might be interested that something else was the arrival of a Zen master right here in the East Midlands of England, just a 20 minute drive from my house.  Zen in its most radical forms can be rather unusual, Jack’s opening remark at the first meeting was that everything he was about to tell us was a lie.  I have not yet worked out whether he was telling the truth or not.

This Zen group is not really for everyone.  You see most people are looking for something and a group that offers nothing is not very appealing.  Of the first batch of people who came to the first meeting not many have been again.  I am struggling to think of many people who i know that might be even interesting – there are some but they are few and far between.

I am drawn to this group, to spend time with Jack, Amy his wife and their young daughter.  Jack says that if you are a dry stick and you stand next to a burning stick then sooner or later you are sure to catch fire.

Zen

What does the world need?

I don’t know the answer to this.  Except to say that the world does not need anything.  It is people that want things not the world.  And that would be want and not need most of the time.

We build models of how the world supposedly works, sometimes they can be rather elaborate, and then we say that things are not perfect because the world does not quite match the model.  Hmmm.  Maybe our models are not quite right.  And maybe it is not possible to build a perfect model – except that everything is in fact quite perfect already – before the mind builds its little models.  But that would be going back to Zen and the need to drop the objective mind…

Data Dot Gov

I don’t think many people quite realise the implications of what is happening on the internet at the moment.

The US Data.gov project

We are seeing a rapid rise in intelligent data.  I just made the term up but what i mean by it is data that has more associated data telling us what it means.

The UK You Gov site

Both the UK and US governments have set out on paths to publish many different sets of information in forms that allow anyone to take it, interrogate it, analyse it and present it in any way they like.  With thousands of people producing tools to present this data in ways never imagined when it was captured we are entering a period where we are going to be exposed to the complexity that emerged in our huge and ever more inter-connected global social system.

To begin with the tools to look at this data will be relatively simple, even though many will provide amazing benefits, but as times goes on we will see tools that allow us to combine multiple sources of data in unexpected ways following the interconnections in the data.

Combine the availability of information with new tools to access it wherever we are and the information world will look very different from ho it does now.  The revolution in data accessability began with the iPhone and Apple will soon take us one more step forward with the iPad with a viewing area similar to a laptop but with the portability closer to a phone.

Apples iPad

Expect the information revolution to flow through the whole world very quickly as education for all becomes very real.

But we cannot rely on technology and information alone to power our civilisation onwards.  It will in some cases merely serve to highlight growing global and social issues that will need more complex tools to manage people not just data.

Change is Happening

We are going through a period of change as a new paradigm begins to take hold of our collective unconscious.   During periods of change, our new ideas struggle to come to the surface.  We need a space in which we give ourselves permission to consider new possibilities and to share them with others who are also open to change.

A few people will guide us forward through the next stage of human evolution.  Chance meetings and events may well be the triggers that set our new thoughts in motion.  We must remain open to change and opportunity.

The coming changes have in reality been emerging in humanity for the last fifty years.  Some people see the variety that is in all of humanity, whatever form it takes, for what it is – human spirit expressing itself in different ways.  These people can understand, hold and use the values of all of the peoples that came before and live on now.   These people hold the key to balancing the human forces around us and holding a space for the new reality to emerge.  So far, they are few and sparse and generally work alone, but their numbers are growing.

And, even more recently, a new holding vision is appearing.  Some individuals are emerging here and now, to connect the strands of new humanity together.  As their influence is felt and accepted a dynamic, living, growing form will emerge.  The new human wizards connecting us together in more and more different ways.

Humanity will find a release from survival based fear and rise towards an intentional creation based platform of opportunity. Honouring and unleashing the potential in all people and peoples.  But change will be required to move toward this new human vision.  And some people will resist.

In a world that has seemed chaotic will arise a new understanding.  An understanding through recognition of the underlying patterns that run through life and existence itself.  With conscious awareness of the energy and matter, yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, that exist in and are life itself, human kind is awakening to a new potential as deliberate holders and even designers of new energy patterns.

No longer will here be a need to compete over resources for the new vision will create patterns that use them wisely.  But this will require a release of fear based individual and collective politics, something that will not happen lightly or perhaps even quickly.  The next years will see a struggle as the old paradigm resists the new, but change will become inevitable as first our collective unconscious and later our social structures realign with the changes.

You might call it intuition or vision or simply going with the flow but as more people engage with our new possibilities the speed of change will increase.  But that does not mean that things will be easy.  We will face challenges.  Perhaps our biggest challenges will be people believing that their way is the right way, success at the expense of others.  There is no right way, only the flow of possibilities and you can engage it or resist it.  Belief in one right way is resistance to the flow.

We should each follow our intuition wherever we can, aspire to our dreams and connect with others who are doing the same.   As each individual becomes conscious of their engagement with flow they will become more effective in their own lives and their engagement with others.  As numbers grow we will see communities becoming more effective and what now seem like intractable problems will be swept away.

When the time is right your opportunities will be waiting.

There is hope and it lives in you.

Rights at the Sharp End – The Kirpan

I am going to admit to struggling with the arguments surrounding the carrying of Kirpans because to me the answer is so blatantly obvious.

The Background

The Kirpan is a symbolic blade of the Sikh religion, originally a defensive weapon.  It is compulsory for all baptised Sikhs to wear a Kirpan (according to Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirpan ).

A Kirpan

The argument is over whether Sikhs should be allowed to wear the Kirpan in public places.  And, at the moment there is support in law for their right to do so but in practise it is not always upheld.  In a recent controversy the question was should Sikh children be allowed to wear the Kirpan?

The Verdict

My verdict is simple: Any Sikh should be allowed to wear a Kirpan wherever they want to – so long as it is not sharp and cannot be used as an actual weapon as opposed to a symbolic one.

My reasoning: we should respect the rights of everyone to be however they want to be so long as it does not impinge on the rights of the majority of other people.  In Britain, we live in a society where weapons are generally banned and we live in a better society because of it.  Anyone who demands a right to break the rules of the majority in a way that could endanger other people, directly or indirectly, is not respectful of our British society and that should not be tolerated.

jon

Fatwa Declared Against Terrorism and Violence

A Fatwa is a ruling or pronouncement by an Islamic scholar.  Unfortunately many people in the west have come to associate the term with a death sentence after the Salman Rushdie story of some years ago.  In fact, this particular use of a Fatwa is extremely rare and the default association of the two is actually quite offensive to Muslims.

Dr Tahir ul-Qadri - image from Wikipedia

Putting the Fatwa in a completely different light, and hopefully dispelling the common western misconception, Dr Tahir ul-Qadri, a prominent Islamic scholar has issued a comprehensive six hundred page ruling that says that Islam forbids the massacre of innocent people under any circumstances.

Dr Qadri has specifically set out to counter all of the documents and arguments that purport to justify violence and terrorism in the name of Islam.  In its depth and coverage the new ruling closes loop holes and rules out exceptions that have been used in the past to justify violence.

The particular Islamic organisation that Dr Qadri leads is called Minhaj ul-Qur’an International or the way of the Qur’an.  From their web site – “The Qur`anic way is the path of peace, progress, prosperity and welfare. In fact, it is the secret of success both in this world and in the Hereafter.”