IONS Talk: 

“Our new Life-aligned culture is emerging! Here’s some of the evidence.”

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Vancouver WA Community Group

July 20, 2024

Elaine Cornick, Cultural Butterfly Project

 

​Context and Introduction

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On July 20, 2024 I gave the monthly talk to the Vancouver WA IONS (Institute of Noetic Sciences) Community Group on: “Our new Life-aligned culture is emerging! Here’s some of the evidence.”  

 

This section is the Context and Introduction for that talk, followed by the references and website links for each of the four categories I highlighted:

• Section 1: New ways of relating to the Earth, ecology, climate, food, and agriculture

• Section 2: New ways of relating to economics, working, and doing & being in business

• Section 3: New ways of relating to ourselves, other people and other beings

• Section 4: New ways of living and relating to our ”stuff”(clothing, houses, buildings, etc.)

 

Context and introduction:

Since we create our lives and experience through our stories and world views, an important purpose of the Butterfly Culture Project is to give us new perspectives about the cultural stories we have been living by and see other possibilities.

 

What I call a “butterfly culture” is one that is regenerative and life-affirming, in "right relationship" and harmonious balance with all beings in a culture of respect for the well-being of all. This is a world that reflects our highest aspirations, our deepest desires, and our most life-giving dreams.

 

Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” He also said, “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”

 

It’s obvious that our current world is crumbling in so many ways. What’s important to know is that while our old world is crumbling, our new world is developing and emerging.

 

This is not to dismiss the tremendous tragedies and trauma that are occurring in the world. In the face of all of that, it’s critical to activate a larger, life-aligned vision and energize a new cultural story in order to co-create the world we want as the old one unravels.

 

Connections, cross-pollination, and cooperation between and among imaginal cells are critical for creating a new and different life, both with the butterfly and in our human cultural lives/experience.

 

There are innumerable examples springing up of this emerging socio-economic cultural transformation that is creating new ways of living and working together. These examples are showing up through the breakdowns and cracks in the “concrete” of our current structures and mindsets.

 

The lists in the following sections give some of these examples. They are by no means exhaustive, and are not meant to be.

 

Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” May these examples help us have “new eyes.”

 

And as Iain McGilchrist says, "The kind of attention we pay to the world changes the world we pay attention to".

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A final note: These challenging times are not just a speed bump.  The path that brought us here goes no further.

 

It’s becoming a whole new road, and we build the road as we travel.

 

Cultural butterflies, anyone?  ​