oneVillage Foundation

Benoit Couture apeaks of “organic spiritual unity” as he seeks to splice together the various Open Leader groups “into this root,” in order to create the wholeness from the working of many minds. He also offers up his “From BrownToGreen” manifesto.

Benoit in his intro to the Back To The Root group says:

I am a human who is one brown set of molecules. I am part of the dirt of humanity. I am corruptible, therefore I am BROWN. One day, in my natural dark journey of decomposing from age and corruptibility, I get to be seized by something that takes my corruptible, BROWN humus nature and brings the set of molecules that I am made of to combust; the inner connection of the roots into the unit of molecules ignites "what" I am into "who" I am. The Vine of Eternal Life's Currency has now reached me with its deep root and I am now aware of being aware. From the BROWN unaware nature of corruptibility, I am now in the GREEN of spiritual infancy.

Benoit’s improvisational writing style definitely takes some time to digest. However, in it I see his noble attempt to graft to the fractured realities of our lives towards a place of convergence in seeing our own reflection in others. This desire for seeing that reflection among us is not a desire for homogeneity or sameness but rather a desire to get back to the root reality that we are all of one essential embodiment that was a unified singular force at the birth of this universe. It is simply a desire to acknowledge the interconnectedness that is in all life. As an antidote to the cynicism and jadedness that has the dominant currency of this age, he sees a beautiful brew emerging and in that his role as intellectual grafter as part of his own journey from “brown to green.”

Our evolution towards evolved beings involves a permeating, all consuming consciousness that overpowers the mind's need to think incessantly. It is process not so much THINKING microscopically, at the level of molecules, but BEING at the level of the molecules.

Indeed some psychics believe that they can see and understand the molecular world. Some have even contributed to science based on dreams and visions they had only to find that science verified their vision of reality.

This unique attempt to infuse poetic prose into our struggle for transcendence as a species reflects what many of us have more or less contemplated this in some way or form. Joy notes, "Our continuing reflections and sharing would probably lead us to answer the questions you [Benoit] have raised." This requires a willingness to descend deeper within ourselves so that we can begin to be more honest about ourselves and where we are at right now.

Joy Tang asks:

How could we be the mirrors of each other?
How do we acknowledge the phenomena that are around us but cannot be seen by our naked eyes?
How do we find out who we are?
How do we stay truthful to who we are?
What is our deepest desire?
How do we manifest our desires?

What is truly our state of being now?
Is something inside of holding us back so that we are not effectively able to share our essence – the essence of who we are - with the world?

Psychical Distancing is a term the aesthetic philosopher Edward Burroughs came up with. He also identified overdistancing and underdistancing as two simple terms that describe the role communication and the sublime in art in relation to the difficulty of finding that proper balance to achieve Psychical Distancing. So the ideal is to create a sense of psychical distance so that subject is able to transcend his own cocoon view of reality and emerge in a more deeper state of conscious to consider thoughts, perspectives and understandings that he/she never considered as that was not a part of their environment/culture:

There are two ways of losing distance: either to 'under-distance' or to 'over-distance.' 'Under-distancing' is the commonest failing of the subject, an excess of distance is a frequent failing of Art, especially in the past. Historically it looks almost as if Art had attempted to meet the deficiency of distance on the part of the subject and had overshot the mark in this endeavor.

1. Overdistancing (usually on the part of the artist) is when I basically go soooooo deep into the unconscious and I bring all sorts of complex ideas but if I don’t consider the context in relation to other people’s lives. Many times, I have done and I was the only person getting it and that can be very frustrating.
2. Underdistancing on the other hand (usually on the part of subject) is when a creative idea barely scratches the surface of the conventional and yet it appeals to our desire for comfort, for style and for beauty.

Often when we engage in the specialization of a particular culture (and this includes academic as well as cultural endeavors) in humanity, more concentration has to go into deciphering or making sense out of the writing, particularly when someone who is not well versed in the language and concepts of that culture comes in. When there is too much jargon or when we communicate in a way that is not easily accessible to those who wish to communicate our life essence with, we are overdistancing. In order words either overwhelming the subject with too much information or presenting it in a way that has that has a negative psychological impact on their consciousnesss, so that they resist understanding or grasping the core essence of what we are trying to say.

When we penetrate into other more divergent realities or are still forming a culture among ourselves, the communications in effectively introducing your ideas becomes even more important. When we overdistance in our communications, the group is not able to see the compelling nature of organizing to move the group’s consciousness forward to a higher level and so the group’s potential is not realized and it either stagnates or pulls apart.

The objective is therefore not just to engage in deep and innovative thought but also to develop a pattern for binding/organizing these innovative ideas together so that it flows as effortlessly as possible into as many minds as possible, exciting and inspiring billions of little neurons in the process of our communications with others. This in my view is how ideas become converted into memes and how we in the process embrace these memes and help nudge them along. In this process they become mirrors of us and as that they become our creations, reflecting what is hopefully a progressively evolving and emerging global human consciousness.

A lot of this relates to social movement theory, critical mass theory and this idea of a Tipping Point that have been attempts to understand how innovative ideas evolve and then rapidly become embraced by the mainstream society.