Principles of Abundance for the Cosmic Citizen: Enough for Us All, Volume One

By Dorothy Riddle

We are part of an ever-evolving and abundant (though not unlimited) universe, but we often live in fear of scarcity. The principles presented in this book, based in science, provide a profound paradigm shift that can help us shift from fear to joy and transform ourselves, our communities, and our worldview.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorothy Riddle
• Release date: Aug 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466063761

Dorothy Riddle

I am an award-winning author, psychologist, and social change specialist. I’ve worked in more than 85 countries and taught at graduate institutions in Canada, the U.S.A., Europe, and China. At present, I serve on the Board of Directors of the School for Esoteric Studies, as the Director of the Service Growth Project, and as the Operations Manager for the Employment Readiness ScaleTM. My engagement in my community and the world focuses on building bridges of understanding among persons from different cultural, socioeconomic, and faith communities while working compassionately for justice and equity. The "Enough for Us All" series reflects the breadth of my awareness and my ability to integrate disparate fields into a meaningful whole and provide practical strategies for shifting from scarcity to abundance, from fear to joy.

Book preview

Principles of Abundance for the Cosmic Citizen

Enough for Us All, Volume One

Published by Dorothy I. Riddle at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Dorothy I. Riddle

[abridged from the original print version]

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

********************

Enough for Us All is dedicated to my mother, Katharine (Kittu) Riddle, whose loving energy and inquiring spirit have brought joy to me and to hundreds of others all around the world.

It is from my mother that I first learned the meaning of abundance, as well as the worth and dignity of all beings, and began to see beyond the confines of our planetary life and to question the assumptions that seem to hold us captive.

********************

Table of Contents

Part One: Our Context

1. The Challenge of Our Potential

2. The Myth of Scarcity

3. Having Enough

Part Two: The Principles of Our Universe

4. The Principle of Interconnectivity

5. The Principle of Participation

6. The Principle of Nonlinearity

7. The Principle of Nonduality

8. The Principle of Interdependence

9. The Principle of Adaptability

10. The Principle of Cooperation

Part Three: The Implications

11. Learning What We Need to Know

12. Becoming Cosmic Citizens

Appendix: Declaration of Interdependence

Notes

References

About the Author

********************

Part One: Our Context

Chapter 1: The Challenge of Our Potential

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. . . .

As we are liberated from our own fear,

Our presence automatically liberates others.¹

What liberates us from our own fear is knowledge, an understanding of who we really are and what is possible for us. Our lives are so often driven by old paradigms and outmoded assumptions. If we are to emerge into our potential, we need to be able to identify those limiting misconceptions so that we can choose how we wish to change them.

The astonishing findings of quantum physics have become clearer over the past 100 years; and yet we remain mired in the limiting beliefs of Newtonian physics. Whether or not we remember studying classical physics, its assumptions permeate our everyday thinking—concepts like duality, determinism, linear cause and effect, innate competition, and an anthropocentric (human-centered) view of the world. As a result, we experience ourselves as small and powerless, at the mercy of global warming and accelerating violence.

But our actual reality is quite different. Together we will explore the ramifications of being interconnected, of creating reality through our observations, of understanding time as relative and nonlinear, and of living in a dynamic and nondualistic universe. We will also look at how to expand our awareness to recognize all life forms as equal partners, examine the truths of our interdependence, and make a case for cooperation as the keynote by which we survive and thrive. This journey, if you choose to take it, will lead you through fear to hope, through scarcity to abundance.

Who Are We—Really?

We are made of stardust—literally! The carbon atoms that make up a significant portion of our bodies, and that form the chemical basis of what we identify as life, are created during supernova explosions and then scattered throughout the galaxies.² We may not be aware of it, but we are citizens not just of this Earth but also of an immense, vibrant cosmos. Our context is indeed lavish in its abundance, providing us with incredible possibilities.

Immersed in our everyday lives, though, it is easy to overlook this cosmic context, to forget that there is more to life than going to work, preparing meals, and juggling priorities. Often we act as if there were nothing beyond what we see around us and on the news. If we live in urban areas with ambient night light, we might even forget for long stretches of time that there is a vast cosmos just beyond our eyesight. All we actually have to do is to look up—well, actually look out since the cosmos surrounds us. During the day, our sun blinds us to the existence of other universes. But the night sky sparkles with energy.

What we can see, without the help of a telescope, are the stars and planets on our own block, so to speak. Our Milky Way Galaxy, while enormous to us, is actually an infinitesimal component of a local section of the cosmos—or metagalaxy, as our astronomers call it. And there is increasing evidence that our metagalaxy is, in turn, only one of a vast number of metagalaxies that together comprise a meta-universe, or Metaverse.³

Returning to our own small corner of the Metaverse, we know from the physicists and cosmologists that we are part of a magnificent, organically interconnected, ever-evolving whole. In fact, the actual characteristics of our cosmos are life-changing in their implications. It is not the empty dead space that many of us have been taught. Instead, it is a vast sea of surging energy, reflecting back to us a vibrant potential beyond our wildest dreams.

Imagine deliberately recognizing that everywhere you turn there is life, in a wide range of forms. Imagine waking each morning to the conscious excitement of star creation and fresh perspectives. Imagine relishing the contribution you are making, that every type of work is respected and valued—the leadership vision and the support function. Imagine being in tune each day with the flow—the ongoing cycle of beginnings and endings, creation and implosion.

All of this is not just imagination; it is in fact our everyday reality on a cosmic scale. Why, then, is our immediate awareness usually more limited? We may have peak moments when we are in the flow—that sense of childlike wonder, of being present in the here and now instead of fretting over the past or worrying about the future—but they evaporate all too quickly.

If we accept that we are all part of a cosmic interconnected sea of energy, what does that mean for us? Are we living separate, distinct lives, or are we part of a continuity of consciousness stretching over eons of lifetimes? Are we driven by self-interest to compete, or are we cooperative at heart? Each of these images holds part of the truth.

Our Web of Possibilities

Quantum physics tells us that nothing in the universe is completely predetermined, that no outcome is inevitable. There are strong probabilities as to what will happen next, but what actually happens depends on what we each do as part of the web of energy fields that comprise our universe. Stem cell scientist Robert Lanza goes a step further in what he calls biocentrism, or a view of the universe from the perspective of biology rather than physics.⁴ He asserts that life, or consciousness, creates the universe and that time and space are simply constructs that we use to make sense of our experience. For example, we use time to compare events and identify changes, and we use space to distinguish the boundaries of entangled items.

This biocentric perspective places crucial importance on the choices that we make. Possibilities are just that . . . possibilities. We have to act in order for them to become actualities. Cosmic dynamics are neutral in intent; they simply are. We are the ones who attribute meaning through the values we choose. If we want change, if we want to be able to realize Buckminster Fuller’s 1980 vision of enough for us all, then we must become conscious of the values that lie behind the choices that we make. But how do we know what choices to make?

Let’s take a simple example of sitting on a bus at the end of a hard day’s work. Suppose, just as we relax into our seat, a wizened old gentleman totters onto the bus and staggers to a place in the aisle directly in front of us. Do we get up and offer him our seat? Physically we may be exhausted and wish to remain seated, but suddenly we are confronted with a choice. Suppose we get up—how will we feel? Probably good, even virtuous. We might tell others later what we did, expecting praise. But we might also be in a lot of pain by the end of our trip from standing all the way. Or we might try to influence another person to yield their seat instead, through eye contact or even a comment, and we might be irritated if others do not jump up. Now, suppose we just ignore the gentleman and remain seated, especially if others also ignore him—how will we feel? Will the whole episode fade away? Or will we start justifying to ourselves why we remained seated? If the man had not appeared, we would probably leave the bus without giving a second thought to that routine part of our journey home. But, since he did appear, we become preoccupied with the choice presented and the possibilities that exist.

What Is Life?

To explore the possibilities that surround us, let’s start with the deceptively simple question of what it means to be alive. Aha, we say, we know the answer—humans, animals, and plants. Is that actually so? James Lovelock, a researcher and inventor for NASA, has spent years testing his Gaia Theory, which proposes that the organic and inorganic components of our planet comprise a single living, self-regulating global ecological system, or biosphere. The theory states that the physical and chemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself. . . . Regulation, at a state fit for life, is a property of the whole evolving system of life, air, ocean, and rock.⁵ It is unclear how much of the adjustment process he describes is conscious—that is, deliberately aware—on the part of Gaia (our Earth) rather than automatic, but what is clear is that Gaia’s actions lead to a broad stabilization of global temperature and chemical composition.

What difference would it make to the debate if Gaia’s regulatory process was automatic or consciously deliberate? We are kept alive ourselves by a range of automatic (autonomic) activities, such as breathing, cardiac function, etc. The fact that these activities occur below our awareness is actually very efficient and certainly does not detract from any sense that we are alive.

Some would expand the Gaia Theory to suggest that all planets and solar systems and even galaxies are each themselves living systems and, in turn, organs in an ever-larger series of energetic entities. Here we see a galactic parallel to the integral theory of Ken Wilber, a writer integrating science and spirituality, which describes how we are both whole in ourselves and at the same time part of a greater whole.⁶ Integral theory raises the interesting question of whether or not we are the only living entities in the vast cosmos of billions of galaxies filled with trillions of stars, each with planets. Are we really the single spark of activity in otherwise inert space? Put that way, it sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it?

While the Gaia Theory was initially rejected by the scientific community as outrageous, the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change,⁷ issued by 1,500 scientists from over 100 countries in four international global change research programs,⁸ asserted: The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological, and human components. The interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-scale temporal and spatial variability. Thus, the scientific door was open for us to examine Gaia’s functioning more closely.

In trying to determine whether or not Gaia is alive as an entity, how we define life becomes immediately relevant. We usually consider entities to be living organisms or life forms if they have all or most of the following six properties. These properties reflect an organism’s basic need to acquire energy, reproduce, and exchange material with its environment:⁹

Organization: Living organisms are composed of one or more cells, the basic units of life. Certainly Gaia is composed of a range of living organisms.

Metabolism: Living organisms are able to maintain their integrity by consuming energy through the conversion of chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and then decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Gaia has demonstrated a global control system by being able to maintain a relatively constant surface temperature over the millennia while the Sun has increased the heat or energy it provides by 25 to 30 percent.

Growth: Living organisms are able to maintain a higher rate of synthesis (the combining of components into a greater whole) than of decomposition so that they multiply and expand, particularly in regard to complexity. The history of Gaia demonstrates an increasing complexity in its life forms and an ongoing growth.

Response to stimuli: Living organisms are able to sense external and internal stimuli and respond appropriately in order to regulate their internal environment and maintain a stable, constant condition (homeostasis). Despite pollution by humans, Gaia has kept the atmosphere at a constant composition of 79% nitrogen, 20.7% oxygen, and 0.03% carbon dioxide, and