TRANSFORMING VALUE SYSTEMS
By E. Margaret Fulton
an article for
The Women's World Summit Foundation Newsletter 2000
Part II
The time has comes, as we move into a new millennium,
to transform positively our values to a system which puts emphasis on selflessness, on becoming a serving society rather than a conquering and controllong one. We need concepts of peace, justice, sharing equality, rights and responsibilities to replace individualism, exclusivity and superiority. The perennial values of love and forgiveness cannot make possible the new morphologies of time, space and spiritual connection that are ready to migrate into human consciousness unless we first visualize new patterns of social organization. Such a transformation of values must be visualized in a different pattern to hierarchy if it is to become a reality practiced by the majority in the age ahead. Model No. II illustrates this needed alternative pattern of values. This model is interactive in terms of both humans and nature. It demands that our species go beyond the limitations of written language, of intelligence, the reasoning and rational activities of mind, and develop through meditation practices and close observation of nature our spiritual and sensuous perception of the world in which we live. As David Abram in his remarkable book "The Spell of the Sensuous" demonstrates, we must move beyone our human-made technologies which are proving to be disastrous to nature and our own species and learn to listen and harmonize with the non-human world. All creatures are born out of time and space and die back into time and space, We must learn to carry into our daily lives the spiritual wisdom that connects all life. Only as we recognize and visualize new patterns of values stemming from the interaction with all the eyes and voices of all forms of life on the planet, can we go beyond what we have called civilization and develop a truly inclusive living based on a genuine culture of forgiveness and love. To create such a culture, we need to follow the United Nations call for a Civil Society. This means visualizing a model which will transform Individual Needs to Social Needs. Central to such transformation is the recognition of the lives of Rural Women who for centuries have given the kind of nurturing leadership essential if our globalized 21st Century is to be one of peaceful co-existence and harmony. |