MESSAGE FROM GARY:

OCCUPY WALL STREET - A THOUSAND THANKS

A thousand thanks to the people in Liberty Plaza and places like it who are giving voice to much that is destructive and painful about our social structures and what lies beyond them. Your presence and courage and commitment are water to the great tree of awareness and freedom that will grow if it is tended carefully. Fortunately, each of us is responsible for tending it. Freedom from fear is the only freedom that now unlocks the prisons of hatred, violence, prejudice, and greed. The kindness of some police officers in NYC is on display to the world and so is the brutality of others. The greed of banks that engorge themselves on the losses of millions of people are on display around the world, and so also are the alternative social structures that will replace them. A thousand thanks are not enough for the glimpses of these emerging structures you are giving us.

You are showing us new forms of cocreation that are built on harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life and contrasting them with old forms that are built on manipulation and control. These new social structures are taking root in Liberty Plaza and places like it and in millions of us as we watch and hold the vision of a new world, a world without victims and without villains, a world where heinous policies are relentlessly uprooted and destroyed and where the people who create and execute them are not hated but constrained appropriately (think of handcuffs and bars). In short, a world of love, growing out of awareness and responsibility, consciously constructed with intentions of love, a world with the courage to experience fear fully – such as anger, vengefulness, and righteousness – challenge it by not acting on it, and cultivate love instead.

This new world will emerge strong and healthy from the decay of the old world not because the dying world is supported by a wealthy few while billions of us are eager for the new world. It will replace the old world because billions of us will tend the tree daily, even in difficult times – challenging hatred, anger, greed, and revenge in ourselves by choosing awareness and love instead. In short, the new world will grow strong and healthy while the old world dies because the old world is based on fear and the new world is built on love – clear, conscious, responsible, courageous, and capable..