2 New Films: Occupy Love And Surviving Progress

Occupy Love: A Film That Captures The Global (R)evolution Of Compassion In Action

 

Occupy Love will be a moving, transformative feature documentary that asks the question: how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story?

A profound shift is taking place all over the world. Humanity is waking up to the fact that the current system that dominates the planet is failing to provide us with health, happiness or meaning. The dominant paradigm is based on separation, as exemplified by the financial system, and the corporate emphasis of profits before people.”

This crisis has become the catalyst for a profound transformation: millions of people are deciding that enough is enough – the time has come to create a new world, a world that works for all life. We have experienced an extraordinary year of change, from the Arab Spring, to the European Summer, and now, erupting into North America: the Occupy Movement.

This is a revolution rooted in compassion, direct democracy, and shared power, as opposed to the ‘power over’ model of the corporate world view. The new story is one of Inter-dependence. Love is the movement.”

  • For more information, updates and videos such as the one below, visit occupylove.org

Surviving Progress

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired Surviving Progress, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps” – alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behavior, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.”

source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1462014/plotsummary

Watch the 2 min. trailer for Surviving Progress:

Quotes from Some of the Speakers

Ronald Wright, Author of A Short History of Progress, the book which inspired this film
“If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.”

Jane Goodall, primatologist
“Arguably, we are the most intellectual creature that’s ever walked on planet Earth. So how come, then, that this so intellectual being is destroying its only home ?”

Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist
“We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. But I’m an optimist.”

Simon Johnson, former chief economist International Monetary Fund
The bankers can’t stop themselves. It’s in their DNA, in the DNA of their organizations, to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries and to collapse…”

Marina Silva, senator & former Minister of the Environment, Brazil
It is impossible to defend models that cannot be universally applied because we would have to start from a premise that some people have rights and some don’t. Thus there is no technological problem, but an ethical one.”

David Suzuki, geneticist / activist
Money doesn’t stand for anything and money now grows faster than the real world. Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.”

Surviving Progress official site: survivingprogress.com

Surviving Progress Facebook page: facebook.com/survivingprogress

Author Charles Eisenstein Says Occupy Wall St. Is A Different Type Of Revolution

The system isn’t working for the 1% either. You know, if you were a CEO, you would be making the same choices they do. Institutions have their own logic. Life is pretty bleak at the top too; and all the baubles of the rich – they’re kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what is really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning.”

That statement was made by Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, in the below video, which was made as part of a documentary film project in the works titled Occupy Love. The film asks the question: “how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story?”

Watch Occupy Wall St – The Revolution Is Love [5 min.]:

Highlighted quotes from the video:

As More People Wake Up, The Easier It Is To Change

I think now, as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we’re here to give, and wake up to that desire, and wake up to the fact that the other way isn’t working anyway; the more reinforcement we have from people around us that this isn’t crazy, this makes sense, this is how to live.

And as we get that reinforcement, our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service. This shift of consciousness which inspires such things is universal in everybody – the 99% and the 1%. And it’s awakening in different people in different ways.”

The Felt Experience Of Connection

An economist says that the more for you is essentially less for me, but the lover knows that the more for you is more for me, too. If you love somebody then their happiness is your happiness; their pain is your pain.

Your sense of self expands to include other beings. That’s love. Love is expansion of the self to include the other. And that’s a different kind of revolution: there’s no one to fight, there’s no ‘other’ in this revolution.

Everyone has a unique calling and it’s really time to listen to that. That’s what the future is going to be. It’s time to get ready for it, help contribute to it and make it happen.”

Click here for more information about the film Occupy Love