Episode 80 - Angeles Arrien Part 2 – Co-Creating Planetary Myths for the 21st Century

Transcript

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational. You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification. A breath of fresh air! Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya

In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, I featured a special series of dialogues with myself and other elders in the weeks leading up to and including the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. 2008 elections. Those dialogues can be listened to separately on this site or as gathered as a series on my website www.livingdialogues.com under the collective title “Engaged Elder Wisdom Dialogues”. They address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

In all my Living Dialogues from their inception I talk in various ways about the call to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out -- required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative ways of living and sharing together, to engage our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN, ROBERT THURMAN, DAVID MARANISS, DAVID BOREN, GEORGE LAKOFF, TOM HAYDEN, JAY INSLEE, BRACKEN HENDRICKS, BOB GOUGH, VAN JONES, BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, LESTER BROWN, DAVID MENDELL, DEBORAH TANNEN, JOHN GRAY, ARI BERK, SUSAN JACOBY, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.

All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the appreciations received from you.

This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com.

Angeles Arrien: It’s great to be here today with you. I really appreciate everything that you do. You’re very gifted in what, what you do and that synthesis of many different ideas that you can on the spot weave together and bring in and take the conversation to a whole other level. It’s really, it’s really impressive.

Duncan Campbell: Well that’s very kind, Angeles, and as you know very inspiring. I think part of what we’re both experiencing here in the world is this mutually inspired co-creative calling to…

Angeles Arrien: That’s true.

Duncan Campbell: … weave together a new set of myths.

Angeles Arrien: That’s really true. That’s wonderful, to make this contribution.

 

From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of western visionaries, such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning… a dia (flow) of logos (meaning)… beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now, as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues

Duncan Campbell: Welcome once again to Living Dialogues. I’m your host, Duncan Campbell, and with me for this particular dialogue I’m again delighted to have as my guest my great friend, Angeles Arrien. Angie is known to many of you as an anthropologist, educator, award-winning author and corporate consultant. Angeles is the founder and president of the Angeles Arrien Foundation for Cross-Cultural Education and Research, and she can be reached at her website, angelesaririen.com. So Angie, again, a real delight and pleasure, of course, to be back in dialogue with you.

Angeles Arrien: It’s always an honor and privilege to speak with you. I so admire what you do with Living Dialogues and the contribution that it makes.

Duncan Campbell: Well, thank you again, Angie. It’s just something that I was inspired to do back in, oh, the early 90s by you, yourself, when you and I were conducting a radio interview in Boulder, Colorado when you were appearing in Boulder at Naropa Institute. And at that time you indicated that this was something I should really put more attention into. I was doing it only casually at that point and you were, in fact, the font, the original inspiration that saw what this gift was to be uncovered. And I, on more than one occasion, expressed my real deep appreciation of gratitude to you for having been such a wisdom keeper as to see another’s gift and to encourage them to bring it out, which I think is really the role that all of us are called to fulfill now, as elders and mentors – those of us that are at that stage of our life -- to see the gifts of others and to bring them out. And when you said that to me -- I think it was about 1994 -- it reminded me of the vision that I’d had in 1990 where I saw the end, I felt, of an era of planetary consciousness in which the old model of teacher/student, guru/disciple -- Moses on the mountain and then coming back and distributing the information to the beings that had not had the direct experience of the divine…

Angeles Arrien: Ah ha…

Duncan Campbell: …was, was over and that we were embarking on a new evolutionary era. And the vision that came to me was of a limitless diamond with limitless facets -- a new diamond mine emerging as the collective expression and manifestation of the spirit and consciousness in all its forms – human, animal, plant, mineral. And that each of us was a facet of that limitless diamond. And that my role was somehow going to be to hold the space where all of these different facets could shine and be seen by each other and inspire each other into co-creative manifestation. And so when you said that to me… I thought, well, perhaps the thing to do is to have a place on the dial, literally, of the media, which becomes in our modern era that, that kind of fire or the hearth where the stories are told and have a place where instead of people getting fixated on a single inspirational teacher or mentor, and quote, “buying all their books,” like Caroline Myss says, for many people the spiritual path begins and ends at the bookstore, you know.

Angeles Arrien: Right.

Duncan Campbell: And they don’t, they don’t take it in personally and they begin to talk about their favorite authors’ opinions as a way of, you know, not having confidence to express their own. And that the next step would be if, on the dial, people could tune in, let’s say every week, and be exposed to yet another brilliant shining manifestation, they would become gradually aware of the fact that it’s always co-creative. That when a person enters into dialogue the depth and wisdom of what is vocalized by one person is always, I feel now, directly proportional to the depth and attention of the deep listening of the other. And so even as you and I are talking now in our one-to-one relationship, we’re very much aware of the fact that we’re blessed with an extremely intelligent and co-creative audience. And it’s because we know that larger audience is participating with us virtually; that whatever may be called forth in this dialogue as a contribution is very much a three-way collaboration.

Angeles Arrien: Yeah, that’s very well said, and what a powerful dream and what a powerful image for this time.

Duncan Campbell: I think of your three primary processes that you talked about in a prior dialogue, that we all have our inner one-to-one dialogue that goes on between our self and our own heart, in our deepest internal reflection. And then we have the one-to-one relationship kind of dialogue of the sort you that and I are having at the moment…

Angeles Arrien: Right.

Duncan Campbell: And then there’s this large collaborative community dialogue which is fact is happening even now in anticipation because we know what we say here today will be shared with a much broader community when it is broadcast. And so we have really all three of those elements coming together and every…

Angeles Arrien: That’s fantastic. And that’s really fantastic because those are the three processes that every human being regardless of their family conditioning or cultural imprinting is involved in, that work with self, or that one-to-one work or collective or team or group or community work. So I’m really glad we’re going to plant many seeds in those three areas today.

Duncan Campbell: Well, indeed, and in one of the seeds that you planted in a prior dialogue was telling people about the World Indigenous Council from the United Nations that you have been working with through your
Angeles Arrien Foundation and who did a very deep study in the late 1990s about the various prophecies that have been preserved worldwide in any number of cultures. And particularly indigenous cultures, but cultures of all sorts. And the work was done to see if there was a common thread that could be elicited from this wonderful fabric of many, many different stories and reduced to a certain kind of essence or an epigram that would be the essence of the human drama; that is, a brilliant future, predicted for all of us as our possibility in many cultures throughout the world and perhaps you could just talk specifically a little bit, Angeles, about that project and how you came to be aware of it and what exactly again was that essential description of the human endeavor that emerged from that.

Angeles Arrien: Oh sure, I’d be happy to because it was very exciting that the World Indigenous Council would want to see if there were similarities from different prophecies from the different indigenous traditions of the world for this time. And particularly for the time, so many of the prophecies were clustering to the years 2000, the millennium, to 2010 or 2020. And so whether they were Mayan prophecies or African divination prophecies or island peoples’ prophecies, or Asian prophecies for our time, or traditional Native American seers for this time; and what they did find, you know, even though each prophecy was very different and to the style of their continent of indigenous peoples, they did find that there was one thread that was consistent that kept coming up through the stories and through the prophecies for this time, which was when the wisdom of the sky merges with the wisdom of the earth and is braided through the human heart, then we will have rainbow peoples. And I just thought that’s such a powerful image. I know that the spiritual traditions of the world all say if -- people will perish that cannot vision, and so it’s the indigenous peoples always have seers or vision makers or vision weavers or vision catchers for the generations of the future. And so, it’s a wonderful image to hold for our time, that the wisdoms of the sky, which would be computers and fiber optics and satellites, would merge with the wisdoms of the earth, which are all the incredible ecological, environmental or eco-spirituality or bioneers, or the indigenous peoples and their land-based wisdoms of tending to the earth. And those wisdoms are preserved and sustained and -- from generation to generation; and how we can take care of the earth and that both the wisdoms of the sky -- the modern -- with the ancient wisdoms of the earth are braided together through the human heart then we will have a rainbow peoples. That the old and new are not sacrificed, one for the other but are braided together through the human heart. Then we’ll have a rainbow people or a rainbow bridge, which is a metaphor for increased tolerance and understanding between all the races of the world. And I just think that’s very exciting.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell