| Many paths, but only one is yours | 2002-01-25 13:33 18 comments |
 by Flemming FunchAs has happened a number of times before, an NCN member just cancelled her membership, giving as a reason her disagreement with the idea that anybody's truth is equally valid, and that all paths lead to the same place. Now, that is a common misunderstanding. I don't think that is something I've said, or something that is any common NCN belief. But it is occasionally interpreted that way. See, I think that NCN should be an example of a space where any constructive approach is welcome, and where people with all sorts of beliefs can co-exist. A place of creative and constructive diversity. That does NOT, however, mean that any one of you is supposed to agree with everybody, or that you're supposed to believe some kind of mish-mash of everybody else's ideas at the same time, or that you're supposed to believe that everybody else's approaches are equally good and true. There's a logical mix-up here. We're talking about very different levels of abstraction, and mixing them up. One thing is to have a space where all sorts of things are allowed. An entirely different thing is what you personally choose to be involved in, what you believe in, and what you feed your energy to. Those are not of the same order. One is a framework, a meta-structure, an infra-structure that things can happen in. It is open and general. The other is the actual things that happen. Those things are specific and constrained in their parameters. Specific activities get carried out when specific people get together and make specific agreements and plans, and they stick to them until they've gotten somewhere. Specific outcomes are accomplished by taking specific step to meet them. Nothing ever happens in general. Everything happens specifically. So, NO, it has never been any aim of NCN that everybody should just hang around and be blandly open to everything in the world, and just patting everybody else on the shoulder no matter what kind of silly ideas they have, and then somehow a new civilization emerges from that. There are places and times for that, and, yes, it can make a positive atmosphere that we're open to other people's ideas, and that we're trying to be encouraging in regards to their projects. That's probably a good approach to use when we meet new people in a chat room. But that's not the real work. The real work is when you get together with a few people and you actually make something happen. You put your minds to solving a problem, and you get results that you can pass on to others. Or you put some facilities in place that will serve a constructive purpose. Or you help make things happen in any other concerted way. We're not all going to be doing the same thing. We're not all going to agree on any one approach or project. You need to get together with some people who do agree what the project is, and you need to make it happen. A structure like NCN is there to help you find those people, and to give you a place to work on it, and a place to tell other people about it. But NCN as a whole is not going to tell you what to do, and is not going to judge your project as to whether it is THE right project or not. NCN is meant to be the equivalent of an eco-system or a planet. The nature of our planet has room for all sorts of different expressions of life. An amazing diversity of life forms exists. There's room for all of them. They might or might not all do well when it actually comes to it, but there's no agency that is going to decide in advance which life forms are allowed and which one's aren't. Each life form does its best in living and multiplying and doing its thing. And each one is complete and beautiful in its own right. But some of the life forms might turn out to be experiments that don't work so well, and they die out again. And notice that nature as a whole doesn't seem to have any abstract opinion about that. It doesn't seem to have any favorites, and we don't seem to hear any statements about what the best life form is, or what we're all supposed to be doing. It seems like we're supposed to do our thing, supposed to do what is in our nature and what we're inspired to do. A butterfly does its thing. It flutters around, drinks nectar from flowers, pollinates plants, looks pretty and whatever else it does. And the butterfly is very good at being a butterfly. But should we decide that the butterfly is the best and most beautiful way of being, and therefore we should all be butterflies, and we should all flutter around and make larvae and stuff? No we shouldn't. Because some of us want to be rhinoceroses and wallow in the mud instead. And, really, the whole system only works if we pick a great variety of functions and we each do them well. We need earth worms and bees and flowers and ants and bacteria and whales. We need all of it. But we do need all those life forms to truly do their thing. We don't need some sort of bland mish-mash of all of them. We don't need a butterflyrhinocerosbeeflowerantbacteriawhale that somehow does all of it at the same time, following the perfect plan, with the perfect design. That somehow flutters around and turns the plankton in the sea into garden mulch and that polinates trees and breaks down decomposing animals at the same time. We don't need that. It really works much better to have the great diversity of creatures who all work together in doing all of these things. So, same thing with NCN. Just because there's room for all sorts doesn't mean that you in particular need to follow all the paths that are present. Just because there are earth worms eating dirt doesn't mean that you have to. What you need to do is to find YOUR path, if you haven't already found it. Do what you need to do, and find others to do it with. That's the truth for you. |