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Workshop of Alliance Partners

from Asia & Pacific

The last workshop of the Alliance for a Responsible and United World (Asia) that was held in Bangalore (India) in December 1997 was an attempt to focus on a few themes related to Globalisation and efforts to make a critique and propose alternative scenarios (See Caravan, Vol I/1, September 1998, p. 6).

The Bangalore meeting also discussed the nature and role of the Alliance. There was general agreement that the Alliance was a significant process of networking, of solidarity and exchange of perspectives. It was felt that the Alliance should organize a series of meetings in the region to facilitate the sharing of ideas and experiences and work concretely towards clarifying the objectives of the programme for the year 2000. The programme for the year 2000 is not a mere symbolic one. It is meant to globally rouse a large number of movements, activists and intellectuals to the daunting tasks that lie ahead if we are to make the next century more just, more democratic and more interwoven with each other and with nature.

Keeping these objectives in mind, Julio Xavier Labayen (Bishop-prelate of Infanta, Philippines) and Siddhartha (Pipal Tree, India), two founding members of Asian Rainbow - an initiative that aims to explore the role of the spirit in social transformation, convened a workshop of Alliance partners from Asia and Pacific in Tagaytay (Philippines) between 28th and 31st of October 1998. In anticipation of the publication of the report of the meeting, we are reproducing here the presentation made by Bishop Labayen to introduce this workshop on " Interwovenness and Sustainable Societies ". [A full report of both the Bangalore and Tagaytay meetings can be requested from PIPAL TREE, 188, 5th B cross, Domlur Layout, Domlur, Bangalore - 560071, India; or E-mail to: pipaltre@blr.vsnl.net.in]

From Cultural Values and Sustainable Alternatives to

Interwovenness and Sustainable Societies

Bishop Julio Xavier Labayen

We are here in Tagaytay to sharpen toward a directional focus of what happened in Bangalore. We expect that this directional focus provide us with guidelines for our future action. Hence, the importance of appropriate and practical mechanisms to effect the continued swelling of our river of consciousness from ‘Cultural Values and Sustainable Alternatives’ (Bangalore) to ‘Interwovenness and Sustainable Societies’ (Tagaytay). Our hope is that the swelling of this river of consciousness will inundate the whole earth and renew it in the process toward a Responsible and United World.

The world cannot, by itself, become responsible and united. We, human beings, who make up this world are the agents of responsibility and unity in the world. We, not the world as such, can bring about our dream for a responsible and united world.

That we become these agents for a responsible and united world, I offer the following guiding principles which stem from our common human endowments : self-awareness, conscience, creative imagination, independent will. I say this, because it is here where I find meaning for myself and a hope for a future other than what is offered today by the dominant globalizing organizational process of the neo-liberal capitalist system. I trust that all of us, human beings, enjoy the same human endowments.

1. Self-awareness : Our capacity to take distance from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, our habits and tendencies. It is being able to take off our "glasses" and look at them as well as through them. It makes it possible for us to be aware of the social and psychic programming in us (1). Here I can be honest with myself. I can criticize myself as I should.

2. Conscience : Conscience connects us with the wisdom of the ages and of the heart. It is our internal guidance system that allows us to be aware when we act or contemplate on acting whether our acts are in line with our principles. It also gives us a sense of our unique gifts and mission. Here unity finds its raison d'etre (real reason, real meaning for being).

3. An independent will : It enables us to act. It gives us the power to transcend our actual paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act according to principles. While environmental, social and genetic influences may be very powerful, they do not control us. We still have the option to choose. We still have our freedom of choice. We are not their victims. We are not the product of our past. We are the product of our choices. We are "response-able" (responsible) to choose beyond, or other than (alternative), what the present situation and system have to offer. We have will power to act according to our self-awareness, conscience and vision.

4. Creative imagination (2) : It is our power to envision an alternative future, to create future dreams in our minds, and to join others in acting in a synergistic way (3). Creative imagination is the endowment that enables us to see ourselves and others differently and better than we do now. It makes it possible for us to formulate our collective mission stalement, and set our common goal and objective. It also enables us to visualize ourselves living and carrying out our collective mission in the most challenging circumstances and to work out our principles effectively in new situations.

These are our human endowments that inspire and promote the International Alliance pour un monde responsable et solidaire. Accordingly, we should then feel privileged to belong to it. We should have a renewed faith in gIobal solidarity and a firm hope for a better tomorrow for this world where we live in. We should make the difference for the future of our world!

These endowments will also help sustain us in our commitment in the midst of trying and difficult situations, and prevent us from being co-opted and instrumentalized by the globalized economic system that makes our world irresponsible and disunited.

For our practical purpose, I believe that the crucial personal responsibility that I have together with you is to interiorize in my consciousness the above guidelines. More importantly, together with you I must own them! Then and only then can we become agents together of the global movement for a responsible and united world.

(1) Stephen Covey, First Things First.

(2) Andrew Greeley writes : " The religious experience, symbol and story come into existence in that dimension of the personality which may …called the imagination… Religion occurs, at least primordially, in that dimension of ourselves that produces dreams, poems, stories, myths and great or lesser works of art… The poetic and imaginative dimensions of religion come before its propositional, cognitive and theological dimensions. " In Andrew Greeley and Mary Greeley Durkin, ‘How to save the Catholic Church’ Pengiun, New York, 1948, pp 24-25.

Carl Jung was a modern pioneer in the land of the psyche. He conclued that Symbolic imagery is the first langage of the psyche. The psyche expresses its depth experiences first in imagery and only later in rational concept : " …that the work of art… as well as being symbolic, has its source not in the personnal unconscious of the poet, but in a sphere of inconscious mythology whose primordial images are the common heritage of humankind. I have called this sphere the collective unconscious… " C.G. Jung, ‘the Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature’, p. 15.

(3) Synergistic way of acting is simply maximizing the potentials, distinct and different as they may be, of each and everyone who act together.

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