Who Do We Choose To Be with Margaret Wheatley (Part 2)

Hunger for Wholeness: Who Do We Choose To Be with Margaret Wheatley (Part 2)

In the second part of their conversation, Ilia Delio and Margaret Wheatley discuss what it means to be fully human in the face of corporations, AI, and a sometimes gloomy outlook. They explore possible futures, their hopes, their concerns and most importantly what the inexhaustible zest of the human spirit offers us in our current situation.

ABOUT MARGARET WHEATLEY

“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.”

Margaret Wheatley, Ed.D., is a consultant, senior-level advisor, teacher, speaker, and formal leader, who has worked on all continents (except Antarctica) with all levels, ages, and types of organizations, leaders, and activists. Her work now focuses on developing and supporting leaders globally as Warriors for the Human Spirit. These leaders put service over self, stand steadfast through crises and failures, and make a difference for the people and causes they care about. With compassion and insight, they know how to invoke people’s inherent generosity, creativity, kindness, and community–no matter what’s happening around them. Margaret has written twelve books, including Leadership and the New Science, and been honored for her pathfinding work by many professional associations, universities, and organizations. Her website is designed as a library of free resources as well as includes information about products and her speaking calendar: www.margaretwheatley.com.

Transcript

A HUNGER FOR WHOLENESS TRANSCRIPT | S03E10

Who Do We Choose To Be with Margaret Wheatley (Part 2)

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia finishes her conversation with writer and teacher Margaret Wheatley. Together they lament what appears to be a gloomy future, but nevertheless find hope in the simple and exhaustible zest of the human spirit.

Ilia: We at the Center for Christogenesis, we actually started small groups around the country because kind of small is beautiful, you know idea, like it's easier to talk to.

Margaret: Well, we need each other. We need each other.

Ilia: Groups can be eight, ten people or so. I think the largest group has about fifteen. But people who can share some new ideas about a way of being in a world of change and complexity, evolution. But also, that place of the mystical root within us. You know, living from that kind of deep infinite center, what I would call, you know, the divine center.

Margaret: So just yesterday, I'm leading a class, a three month course on restoring sanity. And yesterday with another friend, we decided to bring in the topic of grace. And it was a luminous experience with 95 people online. Where you could just feel the moment you opened to grace right there, and it's always there. What I've learned from Catholic sisters is, it's all grace—to look for grace in everything. But it was a reaffirming experience that in

Produced by the Center for Christogenesis

your groups or any group, if someone is just willing to open the topic of grace or spiritual experiences or my experiences in prayer, people show up in a whole—I mean, they have these stories; they have this experience.

Ilia: People are hungry.

1

Margaret: But they've already had the experience, but they fear it or they don't have a way to say, oh yeah, this is common. They're afraid to speak about these because science condemns them, and just says, "Well, you're illiterate."

Ilia: You're just a bunch of neurons. Margaret: You're just crazy.
Ilia: Your dopamine is overflown.

Margaret: So I think it's essential because I know what we need most is a regrounding, and that is not about regrounding me, it's about feeling I belong here, and understanding that there's so many energies, elements, whatever you want to call them, working to support us at this time. “Guardian angels” is good enough for me as a description, but most people have experience with things, but they don't talk about them. But you can't get through this craziness by just participating in it; you have to be grounded. And faith is what grounds you. But also more and more, I just have to speak about things like grace.

Ilia: Yeah, I think that's wonderful. I think grace is the energy of love, divine love that's everywhere. And sometimes I think a lot of God language has just really thrown us off course, quite honestly. You know, I think we had the big guy in the sky idea that, you know, the grandfather, the wee deep word player, the one who is taking tabs on everything. It is so unhelpful because God is like none of that really. That's just a total construct of something. Probably Freud made it up or something like that.

Margaret: Well, whoever made it up, but it's very disabling, disempowering. I was very moved when there was a terrible shooting in a Texas evangelical church a few years ago, a gunman came in, I think he killed eight people. And one of the women of this evangelical church with the belief that God is making everything happen, she just said very quietly, you don't know what to say to God because an event like that just ruptures your whole belief system.

2

Ilia: Yes, for sure. I think especially if we think, you know, we pray to God and we followed the law idea, and something like this comes along and it's like—I had a friend one time who said, I'm not a believer, and then he got liver cancer and he said, "Why did the God allow this to happen? And what kind of God is that?" And that kind of God is always going to fail us.

Margaret: Exactly. Well said, well said.

Ilia: And we're always going to feel like, you know?

Margaret: Built-in failure.

Ilia: But truthfully, the word God from a biblical perspective really is about life. I am life— existence itself. You know, I'm the fullness of life, the wholeness of life.

Margaret: That's beautiful.

Ilia: Isn't that just—I started using the word life instead of God, like that life force, that life energy, that life love, that life that's the heart of my life, and therefore, I give myself to life. I just think the West has done such damage, really, to a lot of male thinking, this kind of patriarchal top down, power-oriented, disincarnate, dissociated between matter and spirit; the quenching of power. There's things that have really just unraveled, like taking the cloth of the earth and the cloth of life woven out of love and unraveling it, like thread by thread until now it's just a bunch of threads on the floor. But we know that unthreading, we still know that quilt within us, like you say. That God's center of us is unquenchable. Like, one thing about God is, you can't manipulate God. You can't absorb God. You can't flatten out God. If you look within that center is infinite. It's infinite love. And one saying, I love the gospels, you know, is, I am with you always until the end of time. Like, that unconditional love God.

Margaret: I have loved that also. Even to the end of the world.

3

Ilia: Like no matter what happens, that love is always our power. To me, that's our hope. You know, I think you're saying the same thing from your own perspective; that is how we get up and move into the future, from that infinite love within us. If we know we're at home there, then we're at home wherever that love is, which is the entire world. And then we want that world to be healed. The one thing in love is you hate to see the suffering of the beloved, you know, of the one you love. And so, we'll always be driven by passion for helping to see more clearly, helping to move more clearly into a new future. So, I think maybe I hear you, you know, kind of what you're calling the sanity, but how did you phrase your new work?

Margaret: “Islands of sanity” or “restoring sanity.” And I have a longer definition of sane leadership. That's my field—that sane leaders have unconditional faith, that people can be generous, creative, and kind. But it's the leader's role to create the conditions so that people move out of their fearful postures, out of their withdrawn lives and can do meaningful work together again. But the only unit size for this is very, definitely a buffered condition where you keep the destructive forces and highly negative tsunamis at bay so that we can together become fully human beings again. And I don't know how long this is even possible with the rate of destructive forces, but I do know it is possible, and I've been working many years in the past, in other countries, that were already in collapse, that we just have to give it our best.

Ilia: I agree.
Margaret: Because isn't that a meaningful life, a meaningful work to try and awake them in

human spirit?

Ilia: I agree. I mean, you give it your best and you give it your all. We may not see the results; that's the whole thing. And it may go through a death period, you know, that's the whole thing, but I do believe that where there is love, there will always be life. And so I do think participating, in other words, we contribute to this world and movement, out of the wellspring of what impassions us for life and gives us that wholeness of life. And I do think

4

—maybe this again is my optimism, but I think that life will prevail. I mean, I think it will go through a great suffering. But on the other side of that suffering, maybe I'm truly Catholic in this way, I believe in the resurrection.

Margaret: I believe that life exists in a multitude of places in this universe—and planets do die.

Ilia: Oh, yeah.

Ilia: So life as we define it in this narrow, constricted way, I don't think we're in for survival, but I do know, I agree that life prevails, but we have two restricted divisions of what life means, what that means.

Ilia: Oh, I completely agree. Actually, I wrote a paper on Terrodack axial age and intergalactic consciousness. Oh, absolutely, completely agree. Terrestrial life it's not the only life in the universe right? We're just one little planet...

Margaret: We're just like a grain of sand.
Ilia: Oh, yeah. No, and that's what's so amazing about it. This universe is absolutely

spellbinding.

Margaret: It's incomprehensible spell bounding. It's incomprehensible. And honestly, I am so amazed that we can build instruments to know this universe in the way we do. I mean, there's something about us that we are between animal and angel, that we're our unique species. You know, you got to admit it.

Margaret: For here. When you get to extraterrestrial consciousness and their capacity...

Ilia: We're terrestrial, as far as we can know, but that we can build these telescopes that we can peer into other universes, that we can, you know, begin to identify planets and intergalactically and begin to speculate on extraterrestrial life. I mean, this is fantastic. We should never think too small, you know? So I absolutely agree. Like, don't shrink your life

5

and think like this is it. Earth life is over and we're out of here. I think we have to think big, think wide.

Margaret: And I think we need to be far more humble than thinking that we're—that we do have these gifts. But at one level, building a space telescope to know the reaches of the universe is quite primitive. It's quite primitive compared to what in other cultures, what yogis can see and know about the universe. So, we had to do it in a very clumsy way, but we've done it. And if this isn't humbling, nothing will be.

Ilia: But even the fact, like what is even to know that the whole thought of consciousness itself and what we don't even know a consciousness is, and the extent of those levels of consciousness and the power of the mind, or the ability of thought.

Robert: Where are the small terrestrial islands of sanity in our vast, often overwhelming universe? Next, Ilia and Margaret discuss what it means to be fully human in the face of corporations, AI and a sometimes gloomy outlook. And later, Margaret shares her thoughts about the future, or lack thereof, she foresees for her grandchildren.

Ilia: Going back to where we began here, I mean, we are in an age where corporate wealth is just...

Margaret: Has destroyed the planet, without doubt.

Ilia: I mean, I'm not even sure what to ask, like, you can't even say, well, where do we go from here? I mean, what do you see? How do we begin to pull back corporate wealth? Or do we not?

Margaret: We don't. We can't. This is part of the emergence. Again, it's part of the pattern of empire collapse, that it's always the elites who hold all the power, who could care less about people. And they're into total self-preservation. I mean, why does Elon Musk want us to think he's doing good by getting us to Mars? Just look at that idiocy for a moment, really. But it's very present. And it's always present. What is required now from the elites

6

is to save themselves they got to go to another planet. There's no way of pulling back. I mean, the hard terrible news is that in the mid-eighties, Exxon had scientific research that predicted the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. And instead of changing their business, they decided to go for paying scientists to dispute it, to create confusion. This is all documented. I've written about this—To create deliberate confusion in the minds of consumers, and to do a whole PR campaign about the value of oil. Now, we are living in a petrochemical world where we could not do without it, and even recently, with all of the rise, or could we just stop emissions, which have increased over the past years, not decreased. If we don't stop emissions into the atmosphere by 2030, we're done. And yet we're not stopping. And yet the oil companies are buying other oil companies to create more opportunities for drilling. So this is where we have to accept reality.

And instead of railing against this, I mean, Antonio Gutierrez, Director General of the UN, just accused these companies of being absolutely immoral. They have destroyed the planet. No question. So what do we do in response? We choose our role for ourselves, that is one, being fully human in the midst of what's ahead, which is planetary collapse, loss of habitats for humans as well as millions of species. And I come back, this is so funny when I'm talking to leaders, I have to come back to the question, what is the value of your life? What is a good life? Now we know that from Jesus, from Buddha, from Muhammad, from indigenous leaders, we know the value of life, meaning of life. And it has been so distorted in this culture that we have to come back to basics. And boy, that part, that's a hard message for people to accept. But I'm loving the fact that I'm clear about what gives meaning to my life.

Ilia: Yes. Right. I remember back in the eighties as well, there was the outcry of pollution and toxicity and the consequences of oil and carbon emissions and all this kind of stuff. We've known about the ecological crisis for 40 years.

Margaret: Longer, actually.

7

Ilia: I know Rachel Carson in 1962 with Silent Spring. But you're right. We literally listened —we had a lot of conferences. I mean, I just love the fact that we keep talking about this stuff, and not a single thing in our system, not a single thing changes. So at this point, in some ways, everyone is complicit.

We're all driving cars, we're all gassing up— Margaret: I mean, but you can't live your life and stop. Ilia: No, you can't.

Margaret: I don't think I'm complicit. I think I'm dealing with this emergent phenomena that has what's called technically downward causation. Like, you could go off and you could live off the grid, as some people are doing. You could grow your own food, but you're not going to stop the progression, because this is following natural laws of mother nature now. So I don't want to put people into a sense of, well, I'm complicit or guilty. No, it's just prepare yourself to be a person of love and generosity and serve your neighbor.

Ilia: But then my other concern though is with AI, you mentioned Elon Musk, and he is developing devices for biohacking. I mean, so it's not just that we're building faster computers, it's actually that we are hacking the mind so we can actually change it. You know, we can put devices in. I mean, what's your stance on that?

Margaret: I don't think he stands a chance. First of all, I do believe that in the terrors that are happening now, there's not going to be space or room for these technological research projects to do any more harm than we are doing to ourselves with such pure outright aggression. We are dissolving in, and that's not the right word. I don't know what the right word is, descending maybe, into a world of pure aggression, poverty, migrations. The threat of nuclear war is ever more present. And so, I'm not really worried about AI because I don't think we have time for it to take over.

Ilia: Ah, okay. All right.

8

Margaret: And I think the climate is coming to us with her laws and her principles. And I hang out with some wonderful scientists, and all of their predictions are, we are so far past any possibility of even slowing down now, where, how these changes in the oceans and the atmosphere and in the soil are just unfolding. I'd put all of my attention, Ilia, on who do we choose to be? I want as many people as possible to step into the fullness of their humanity, confidently grounded in their spirituality, if it's one of love and a contribution, not one of revenge.

Ilia: Actually, I just wrote a book called The Not Yet God, you know, in a sense, basically finding that God within you, to me, which is the fundamental Christian message that God became human.

Margaret: There is. Love thy neighbor as yourself.
Ilia: What do you see for the future for your grandchildren?

Margaret: I don't see a future for my grandchildren. Except, and I have 24 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren. I have a huge Mormon family. I'm not Mormon. But I have a huge Mormon family. I have beautiful grandchildren who have good faith. I mean, good grounding in their faith—are completely involved in consumer culture and career success for now; all I keep testing is what's the strength of your faith, your values, when things are wiped away, who will you be? And then do you have that inner strength? And I say this to all young mothers, bring up your children—let's assume they're here on purpose. How will they fulfill their purpose for being wiser and more compassionate and more communal than we have been? Make sure they have good, strong values. And I'm always asking my grandchildren, no matter their age, what's the most important thing in life? There's only one right answer—be kind.

Ilia: I always thought we need a religious revolution in the 21st century. You know, that could be our—

9

Margaret: Let's just call it a spiritual revolution.
Ilia: Okay, let's call it a spiritual revolution. I just take religion as the energy of connection. Margaret: Well, that's great.
Ilia: I don't take it as an institution. I think I'm post-institutional.

Margaret: Well, people are leaving. I mean, there was just a new statistic here in Utah. I think 38% of people now say they have no institutional reference. Those are the NONES, the N-O-N-E-S, and they're growing. That's fine. But please find a spiritual grounding to your life.

Ilia: I agree. People are longing for it, actually.
Margaret: Well, they need it. It's survival now.
Ilia: It is survival. It's the food for the journey. I mean, if we're going to keep going here.

Margaret: Because otherwise, we've become barbarians, and that's what we see a lot of now in many different places, including car rage. It's just, people are just out with pure aggression to get their own way.

Ilia: Yes. Well, I think, you know, imagine if we are really, I would say body and soul, I don't mean those as two parts, but in a sense, the whole that we are, and you pull that apart, we just take that God center out of us, and then we have this machine called the body, and we're just desperate to find, you know?

Margaret: To protect it.

Ilia: Yes. And you can see, I think Carl Jung is the one that said that unless we undergo that process of individuation, reconciling ourselves within, with that ground, that inner ground, the psyche says we're destined to live that unreconciled self without us, which becomes then the forces of violence and rage.

10

Margaret: So just think about how many great teachers, spiritual, psychological, philosophical, know this truth that you just named. And then the question is, how do we get that to more people?

Ilia: We keep talking, we keep doing the best we can. We keep having podcasts and webinars.

Margaret: But for me, that's the clarity of our work, is how do we get this truth to people, to give them the skills to sustain themselves?

Ilia: We do all that we can. And this is where I think technology can be a help. Margaret: Well, it certainly is right now.

Ilia: We can gather virtually, we can bring people—our Christophany Groups are in, I don't know how many countries around the world—we're on like six continents, so people all around the globe are really suffering in a sense, experiencing the same hunger for wholeness, if I can use that term here.

Margaret: Which is a perfect term.

Ilia: Oh, good. So, one of the things I want to do is kind of reframe technology within the human, like to use your, you know, that human zest for life or that thirst for life, rather than we serving technology, that technology in a sense is...

Margaret: Absolutely. And it's possible. I mean, I do all my teaching on Zoom now, and I'm very happy with it. It's actually a more direct form of communication, teacher/student. I reach people in multiple countries, you can do that, and we just need to do more of this.

Ilia: I agree. And this is what Teilhard thought about, this is what we can do. We can bring ourselves together and collectively bring our energies for the good of the whole, you know, for the good of the earth for one another into a greater union. Technology can do that if you would use it to that end.

11

Robert: A special thanks to Margaret Wheatley for joining us on a Hunger for Wholeness. Be sure to follow the podcast on social media for updates on new episodes and guests. As always, thank you to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. On behalf of the Center for Christogenesis, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.

12