Slaughtering Sacred Cows...
Humanity is starving, but we won't kill the cows! (but the vision revolution is taking care of that!)
A good friend of mine was fond of slaughtering sacred cows in the business world. You know, those old beliefs and long-held assumptions that everyone accepts as true? He had the courage to confront those old cows head on... and he made hamburgers of them. He was paid royally for butchering those cows.
He wasn't actually a good friend of mine in the sense that I knew him personally. It seemed I'd come to know him from reading so many of his writings, and in my mind we're friends. His name? Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
What does all this talk of sacred cows have to do with the Vision Revolution? LOTS! Bear with me!
Let's look at the sacred cow metaphor for a moment.
It comes from the idea that there are or were starving or hungry people in India, who don't think about eating the cows that roam freely, because the cows are considered sacred. They don't even consider questioning the idea of not eating cows, while it could easily solve a very big problem.
There are assumptions/axioms in probably every field of study that are generally accepted as true, and thus not often seriously questioned. By not questioning the assumptions/axioms upon which much of your decisions are made, you limit your power to the field given by the unchecked assumption.
How is your power limited by not questioning basic assumptions?
A simplistic example: You are getting poor grades in math class. You assume your problem is one of intellectual ability. Your parents always treated you as not as smart as your brother, and you've always struggled more in school. So, it's a given: "I'm not good at math." Or, "I'm just not that smart."
If this assumption goes unchecked, your range of solutions is quite narrow.
==> Get a tutor
==> Study harder
==> Pick other courses to specialize in
==> Buy Math For Dummies
Etc.
What you are blind to is other causes of the problem.
==> Maybe your eyesight is poor ==> Solutions include getting glasses, sitting closer to teacher, etc.
==> Maybe your teacher speaks in a dailect different from yours ==> Solutions include getting a different teacher, learning more about your teacher's dialect, etc.
==> Maybe you are using the wrong mathbook ==> Solution is obvious
==> Maybe you are in the wrong mathclass--a 5th grader studying college algebra==> Solutions obvious
OK, of course we could go on and on.
The point is unchecked assumptions limit your range of solutions, and thus your power.
Consider that anywhere you see ogoing problems that only get worse, there could be a gross misunderstanding of the problem, and perhaps a major blind spot causes by an assumption that no one dares question... a sacred cow.
Remember my "friend," Eli Goldratt? He turns businesses around by slaughtering sacred cows.
Well, what does this all have to do with the VISION REVOLUTION?
We can turn humanity around if we're willing to slaughter some sacred cows. Indeed, if we're courageous enough to look the cow in the eyes and see it for what it is, LUNCH!, then we can reverse this terrible downward spiral of more and more death, destruction, terrorism, addiction, depression, reactionary politics, system-abusing lawsuits, corruption, disease, hunger, pollution, murder, war, etc.
Indeed, those who are leading the revolution are the ones with bovine blood-stained butcher knives.
I'm being a bit blunt here, because being a visionary leading the Vision Revolution means being willing to face anything, to look anywere, to question ruthlessly and rigorously. Are you up to the challenge?
OK then, consider this...
There is one domain where human beings have extraordinary power compared to another domain.
We can fly to the moon, instant message to Tokyo from Australia, detonate a nuclear weapon and cure many diseases. We have great power of in the domain of the hard or physical sciences: chemistry, physics, quantum physics, etc.
Yet we're embarrassingly and miserably inept in the realm of the soft sciences: psychology, politics, sociology, etc. Let's face it. Are we backwards hillbillies or what? We still solve our personal and interpersonal problems with frivolous lawsuits, slander, war, prisons and prisons and more prisons, laws and laws and more laws, crack cocaine, chocolate icecream, alcohol, murder, counterproductive ego arguments, blame, force and threat of force, blackmail, heroine, ritalin, soap operas, preaching selff-righteously, etc.
The more we apply all these "solutions" to fix our problems, the worse things get.
Could it be... could it really be... that there is a whole heard of fatty cattle in the streets?
Could it be that there have long been assumptions that human beings have dared not question very much?
The most sacred of sacred areas of reality are where? In the human mind. In consciousness. For in the mind, in consciousness lie the boundaries of religious belief and all beliefs which give us a sense of moral and psychological security. As open-minded as most of us like to think that we are these days, most of us separate our areas of intellectual or scientific exploration from our areas of religious or spiritual exploration with barbed wire fences.
Yet more and more these days, we are seeing some of the cattle in the herd as LUNCH! The Christian who comes to see the mental, physical and psychological benefits of yoga (once undquestionably the Occult) and then makes it a daily practice is an example. The person who increasingly uses his or her own natural faculties of honesty and rationality, rather than relying on dogma, is an emerging "visionary." This person need not disavow her values of spirituality or morality in order to gain the values offered by a yoga practice.
It is simple processes of facing what we've not been facing and standing for our values in the face of fear, criticism, dogma, etc. that are the hallmark of the emerging visionaries and the new revolutionaries. It is this process of personal emergence, or conscious evolution if you will, that is at the heart of the Vision Revolution. Look around you... signs of the Vision Revolution are everywhere.
Sacred cows are being slaughtered in the streets, in the hallways, in the churches, in the closets, in the boardrooms, in the schools and in homes all across the world.
There are new ways of guiding oneself that do not require the sheltered, parental protection of a self-righteous position. We can, all of us in this world, rise from being Positionaries to being visionaries. It's already happening. It can't be stopped... though the institutions of power will try as they might.
A new day is dawning... the rising generations may actually live in an almost unimaginable world of peace, prosperity, freedom, synergistic co-creation and ethical progression.
This is the Vision Revolution.
A good friend of mine was fond of slaughtering sacred cows in the business world. You know, those old beliefs and long-held assumptions that everyone accepts as true? He had the courage to confront those old cows head on... and he made hamburgers of them. He was paid royally for butchering those cows.
He wasn't actually a good friend of mine in the sense that I knew him personally. It seemed I'd come to know him from reading so many of his writings, and in my mind we're friends. His name? Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
What does all this talk of sacred cows have to do with the Vision Revolution? LOTS! Bear with me!
Let's look at the sacred cow metaphor for a moment.
It comes from the idea that there are or were starving or hungry people in India, who don't think about eating the cows that roam freely, because the cows are considered sacred. They don't even consider questioning the idea of not eating cows, while it could easily solve a very big problem.
There are assumptions/axioms in probably every field of study that are generally accepted as true, and thus not often seriously questioned. By not questioning the assumptions/axioms upon which much of your decisions are made, you limit your power to the field given by the unchecked assumption.
How is your power limited by not questioning basic assumptions?
A simplistic example: You are getting poor grades in math class. You assume your problem is one of intellectual ability. Your parents always treated you as not as smart as your brother, and you've always struggled more in school. So, it's a given: "I'm not good at math." Or, "I'm just not that smart."
If this assumption goes unchecked, your range of solutions is quite narrow.
==> Get a tutor
==> Study harder
==> Pick other courses to specialize in
==> Buy Math For Dummies
Etc.
What you are blind to is other causes of the problem.
==> Maybe your eyesight is poor ==> Solutions include getting glasses, sitting closer to teacher, etc.
==> Maybe your teacher speaks in a dailect different from yours ==> Solutions include getting a different teacher, learning more about your teacher's dialect, etc.
==> Maybe you are using the wrong mathbook ==> Solution is obvious
==> Maybe you are in the wrong mathclass--a 5th grader studying college algebra==> Solutions obvious
OK, of course we could go on and on.
The point is unchecked assumptions limit your range of solutions, and thus your power.
Consider that anywhere you see ogoing problems that only get worse, there could be a gross misunderstanding of the problem, and perhaps a major blind spot causes by an assumption that no one dares question... a sacred cow.
Remember my "friend," Eli Goldratt? He turns businesses around by slaughtering sacred cows.
Well, what does this all have to do with the VISION REVOLUTION?
We can turn humanity around if we're willing to slaughter some sacred cows. Indeed, if we're courageous enough to look the cow in the eyes and see it for what it is, LUNCH!, then we can reverse this terrible downward spiral of more and more death, destruction, terrorism, addiction, depression, reactionary politics, system-abusing lawsuits, corruption, disease, hunger, pollution, murder, war, etc.
Indeed, those who are leading the revolution are the ones with bovine blood-stained butcher knives.
I'm being a bit blunt here, because being a visionary leading the Vision Revolution means being willing to face anything, to look anywere, to question ruthlessly and rigorously. Are you up to the challenge?
OK then, consider this...
There is one domain where human beings have extraordinary power compared to another domain.
We can fly to the moon, instant message to Tokyo from Australia, detonate a nuclear weapon and cure many diseases. We have great power of in the domain of the hard or physical sciences: chemistry, physics, quantum physics, etc.
Yet we're embarrassingly and miserably inept in the realm of the soft sciences: psychology, politics, sociology, etc. Let's face it. Are we backwards hillbillies or what? We still solve our personal and interpersonal problems with frivolous lawsuits, slander, war, prisons and prisons and more prisons, laws and laws and more laws, crack cocaine, chocolate icecream, alcohol, murder, counterproductive ego arguments, blame, force and threat of force, blackmail, heroine, ritalin, soap operas, preaching selff-righteously, etc.
The more we apply all these "solutions" to fix our problems, the worse things get.
Could it be... could it really be... that there is a whole heard of fatty cattle in the streets?
Could it be that there have long been assumptions that human beings have dared not question very much?
The most sacred of sacred areas of reality are where? In the human mind. In consciousness. For in the mind, in consciousness lie the boundaries of religious belief and all beliefs which give us a sense of moral and psychological security. As open-minded as most of us like to think that we are these days, most of us separate our areas of intellectual or scientific exploration from our areas of religious or spiritual exploration with barbed wire fences.
Yet more and more these days, we are seeing some of the cattle in the herd as LUNCH! The Christian who comes to see the mental, physical and psychological benefits of yoga (once undquestionably the Occult) and then makes it a daily practice is an example. The person who increasingly uses his or her own natural faculties of honesty and rationality, rather than relying on dogma, is an emerging "visionary." This person need not disavow her values of spirituality or morality in order to gain the values offered by a yoga practice.
It is simple processes of facing what we've not been facing and standing for our values in the face of fear, criticism, dogma, etc. that are the hallmark of the emerging visionaries and the new revolutionaries. It is this process of personal emergence, or conscious evolution if you will, that is at the heart of the Vision Revolution. Look around you... signs of the Vision Revolution are everywhere.
Sacred cows are being slaughtered in the streets, in the hallways, in the churches, in the closets, in the boardrooms, in the schools and in homes all across the world.
There are new ways of guiding oneself that do not require the sheltered, parental protection of a self-righteous position. We can, all of us in this world, rise from being Positionaries to being visionaries. It's already happening. It can't be stopped... though the institutions of power will try as they might.
A new day is dawning... the rising generations may actually live in an almost unimaginable world of peace, prosperity, freedom, synergistic co-creation and ethical progression.
This is the Vision Revolution.
