The Club of Budapest
The Economy:
We support the shift of our economic focus from transnational corporate “fusionism” to regional subsistence. Subsistence economy focuses on a “natural” way of living. This is not “back to stone age”. It rather means a spiral, wavelike progress out of the life-destroying habits of today’s so-called civilization and accepting and welcoming the complexity of life.
We support the development of sustainable, decentralized—that is local—high-tech production, combined with local use of local resources. and the redesign of our monetary system according to a fourfold model: 1) economy of gifting (a basic matriarchal feature), 2) counter-trade (barter) economy, 3) complementary local monetary systems for regional trade, and 4) unified currency (for example called “terra”) for interregional and global trade. In our eyes compound interest has to be abolished. Also the concept of “owning” land must be reconsidered.
Regional subsistence is committed to fair trade. It appreciates community, supports redevelopment of social structures and teaches the necessity and the pleasure to share resources—thus making regions ready to downscale consumption, shift values from material to social wealth and to deal with migration in a peaceful way.
http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/act...togenesis.html
Health:
Modern medicine knows fairly much about what makes us sick. In many cultures which have survived "civilization" and industrialization, now threatened by globalization, healers and educators (shamans) are looking for the origins of health instead.
The word salutogenesis (lat. salus = health, genere = to create) was coined by sociologist and stress-researcher Aaron Antonowsky in the late seventies. Although it merely describes a simple and self-evident concept, it works fine as a lever to shift our metaphors. Promoting the expression can produce a powerful shift from the disease-metaphor to the vision of well-being.
Coherence again is the basic idea. This goes parallel with the postulation of the World Health Organization (WHO), which states that an essential ingredient to health is a highly developed spirituality. We strongly support this concept and add the essence from topic 1: the concepts of fields and information.
To promote this concept we currently are planning a five-year conference cycle in cooperation with the Art of Living Foundation.
http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/act...togenesis.html
Society:
Statement 1: Parliamentary democracy has come to the verge of its capacity.
Statement 2: The greatest potential power in the world is civil society—but in fact it is a sleeping dragon.
We support the transition from today’s parliamentary democratic systems to participative democratic civil societies all over the world, which are no longer ruled by politicians, but wisely administered by well wisdom-educated professionals, based on the fundaments of egalitarian consensus principles. In a participative civil society the common guidelines are maintained by parliaments of prudent delegates, who don’t possess political power, but present and negotiate the will of their mandating regions instead.
A new culture means a completely new form of political constitution. This raises serious questions such as: How can security and protection against violence be established without militarism or getting addicted again to controls? What shall we do with the arsenals of weapons all over the planet and what with the people deeply in love with them? It is hard to imagine a completely new, truly participative society without any prohibitive laws and prisons.
We support the establishment of successful new communities. We will collect and promote best practises of participative forms of sociality in order to remove the reasons for poverty, for injustice and greed—and to abolish the fear of those evils arising from poverty, injustice and greed.
Participation means to encourage and to empower everyone who wants to contribute to the welfare of civil society. We want to reframe the word “citizen” so that we don’t always have to put “planetary” in front of it to signify that we speak of citizens of the earth, a privilege we all share by birth. Civil society in this respect equals the super-organism humankind.
An example for this field of action is the “Parliament for the Future“, which comes into life at the moment in Germany.
http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/society.html
The Environment:
Nature is an immanent quality of this planet, it is the intrinsic way Gaia expresses herself.
Nature is not outside of us. We humans are inside of nature, and nature is inside of us. There is nothing else but nature wherever we look.
If we accept that something like spirit and soul resides in us and if it is true that we don't consist of anything else than nature, then of course something like spirit and soul must reside in the tiniest bit and in the whole of nature too.
In the light of contemporary field concepts and of an understanding of the whole as an eternal ocean of information, concepts of segregation and separation appear direly wrong. The idea from where we start is coherence, taking into account that we are neural beings who are only capable to think what our embodied mind permits.
Fields of action are for example: a nuclear free future, sustainable natural resource management, promoting unifying concepts of informational fields in nature philosophy, redefining nature conservation, supporting sustainable agriculture instead of agro-industry, a GMO-free future, water and wastewater solutions, environmental education.
http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/unity.html
Culture:
Although we have probably the best knowledge which ever existed on earth, we still don’t know what keeps the bodies of the stars floating in space. Knowledge without the wisdom of the heart is about to lead us into a dictatorship of those who today have access to knowledge, technology and resources.
We support the shift from brain-focused knowledge, which is based on the metaphor of problems, to heart-centered wisdom, which connects us with values, vision, and knowing.
300 years ago in the western world Enlightenment discovered individuality and reason and addressed the magical and irrational beliefs of the crowd, but it didn’t deal with the no less irrational beliefs of the accepted religion. Instead Enlightenment has put itself in the place of religion and created new superstitions like positivism, materialism, capitalism and atheism. Now Enlightenment has to make a second step and open up for ”the physics of the non-material world“. Also it must integrate the perspectives of non-western cultures which have been left out by the first step of Enlightenment or suffered from its colonialistic and technocratic misinterpretation.
Different from the world’s teachings about wisdom throughout time, wisdom itself cannot be taught. But we can provide the cultural environment in which wisdom will prosper. This very process is in itself an act of wisdom.
Fields of action are the educational systems worldwide. Key principles among others are: free schools, self-determined education, social learning, introducing wisdom to the academic world, developing language to better reflect sustainable values, reintegration of female values, reintegration of the elders into society and—combined with topic 2—concepts of new work and basic income to give people freedom to evolve.
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http://www.clubofbudapest.org/members.php
http://globalspirit.org/pages/mission.php