We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
![What Is the Best Example of the Principle of Interdependence? [Quote Poster]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/the-principle-of-interdependence_750.png)
The principle of interdependence is the key to the existence of nature’s entire system. The best example we have of this are the cells in the human body. They connect with one another through mutual giving for the benefit of the entire body. Every cell receives what it needs to exists, and applies the rest of its strength toward the general body.
–Professor Günter Blobel, M.D., Ph.D.
![The Happiest People Have Vibrant Social Networks & Work Hard to Cultivate Relationships with Other People [Quote Poster]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/happiness-quote_caroline-adams-miller.png)
The happiest people have vibrant social networks; they work hard at cultivating relationships with other people. So it’s the togetherness, the bringing people together that brings people the most joy.
–Caroline Adams Miller
We don’t want to be all the same, but we want to respect each other and understand each other.”
Sheikha Al Mayassa is chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority. In this TED talk she focuses on her small Middle Eastern state of Qatar—and the new emphasis the nation is placing on redesigning their culture to resemble a global village.
We are changing our culture from within but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions… It’s important for us to grow organically. And we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance.”
And this is what the leaders of this region are trying to do. We’re trying to be part of this global village, but at the same time we’re revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development.”
Now over and over again, people have said, ‘Let’s build bridges,’ and frankly, I want to do more than that. I would like to break the walls of ignorance between East and West… Culture’s a very important tool to bring people together. We should not underestimate it.
This is a very interesting journey. I welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions. Familiarity destroys and trumps fear. Try it.”
What we’re finding is it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.”
Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, founder of Good Think Inc. and frequently on-demand speaker for a variety of audiences, discusses problems with the workplace’s current formula for happiness and success, proposes a new formula based on his research and some techniques for its implementation.
If I work harder, I’ll be more successful. And if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.”
First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we’re going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. And that’s because we think we have to be successful, then we’ll be happier…”
If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise.
In fact, what we’ve found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.
What we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you’re positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.”
We’ve found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully.
We’ve done these things in research now in every single company that I’ve worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they’re grateful for, for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.”
By training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we’ve found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create a real revolution.”
Quotes from this post were taken from this video:
Images from this post were taken from this video:
You are personally responsible for everything in your life once you become aware that you are personally responsible for everything in your life.”
– Bruce Lipton, Ph.D.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVECAlT4AXY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcg_ldoU40c
Bruce Lipton’s complete library of DVD’s and video is available through:
Spirit 2000, Inc.
1 (800) 550-5571
Write:
Spirit 2000, Inc.
P.O. Box 41126
Memphis, TN
38174-1126
What the people really needed was just some basic common-sense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth – that their way of life was coming to an end – and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.”
– Richard Heinberg
“A Letter from the Future” is an imaginary letter written in the year 2101 to by a 100 year old Richard Heinberg – senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and author of 10 books on issues of energy, the economy and ecology – to people of the world living in our times, about the tough future expected according to tendencies scientists and economists foresee humanity experiencing in the coming century.
It portrays a picture of a humanity struggling to make its way when the life it created for itself throughout the 20th century faces its depletion:
After painting a bleak picture of a suffering humanity dealing with all of the above during the 21st century, Heinberg raises the question…
Possibly, as a result of reading this letter, you might do something that would change my world [the world of the person living in the year 2101]. … Then, I suppose this letter would change, as would your experience of reading it. And as a result of that, you’d take different actions. We would have set up some kind of cosmic feedback loop between past and future. It’s pretty interesting to think about.
Maybe I should mention that I’ve come to accept a view of history based on what I’ve read about chaos theory. According to the theory, in chaotic systems small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes in outcomes. Well, human society and history are chaotic systems. Even though most of what people do is determined by material circumstances, they still have some wiggle room, and what they do with that can make a significant difference down the line.”
Image: No Identity by HaPe_Gera
Many scientific researches have shown an obvious fact, that the behavior of a human being is created by the environment. If genes predispose a certain behavior but the environment doesn’t support it, then that behavior won’t manifest, so in this case, genes aren’t important.”
– TROM Narrator
The section ENVIRONMENT in the documentary TROM (The Reality Of Me) shows how the environment shapes human beings’ behaviors via:
Dr. Gregory Forbes, recorded at TEDGlobal 2010:
We live in a remarkable time the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That’s why we look different. I’ve got brown eyes you might have blue, or gray; but it’s not just skin-deep.
The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies, and yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes.
Likewise, every connectome changes over time.
What kind of changes happen?
- Neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and then can lose old ones.
- Synapses can be created, and then can be eliminated; And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller.
2nd question: What causes these changes?
It’s true; to some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that’s not the whole story, because there are signals: electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons, and chemical signals, that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change.
If you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that’s why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might be true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome; an idea that you may find empowering.
Think about the way you act, your facial expression, the values accepted by you, the way you talk, everything, and remember that they are a result of your environment.”
– TROM Narrator
Male & Female Behaviors That Result From Environmental Conditioning
Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist and author of The Female Brain (2006) and The Male Brain (2010), recorded at Dominican University of California, March 31, 2010
The nature nurture debate … is dead … for the following reason: the brain is very, very malleable.
We’re all born with male or female predispositions, and then we’ll have hormones that increase that circuitry for behavior, which is what a hormone is supposed to do. A hormone’s job is to make us predisposed to certain behaviors.
However, the way we’re raised, for example, little boys: Studies have shown that little boys who were told they’re not supposed to touch something, they often will grab it and touch it, whereas a little girl can be given a verbal demand not to touch it.
Little boys worldwide are punished more frequently for transgressions. Little boys are told not to cry, that they’re supposed to “man-up,” right? Even at a young age, dads sometimes are very, very scared if their little boy is showing any version of effeminate behaviors.
For example, I remember flying coast to coast with a guy who sat next to me. He said his 18 month old son, when he saw his 4 year old sister open a present earlier that week, which was a purse, he said, ‘Oh, can I have a purse too?’ And he said he found himself, like someone had kicked him in the stomach, and he just yelled at his eighteen month old son, ‘No, boys don’t have purses!’ He was reporting to me this event, and he felt so ashamed and embarrassed afterwards, because he realized that his little boy wasn’t expressing anything about being effeminate or not.
So the way we raise little boys, and we raise little girls, our brain circuits are so malleable. For example, we weren’t born learning to play the piano, right? You do practice, practice, practice.
You can retrain brain circuits, to do a variety of things. All of our life, we are trained, gender trained, to be more one way or the other.
Males: facial expressions for example, when they measure them and put electrodes on them, and show them a grizzly photograph that is supposed to make you cringe and emotional, their facial expressions, versus females, actually showed more emotional response in the time before it becomes conscious. Then right after the one second level when it becomes conscious, their facial muscles start to freeze down for frowning or smiling. In females, facial muscles actually amplify, and the males’ go down. Scientists believe, the hypothesis is, that the males have been trained to suppress an emotional feeling.
There is no such thing as: bad, criminal, lazy, brilliant people, thieves or racists. Only people predisposed to such behavior. But if the environment doesn’t trigger them, the behavior never manifests.”
– TROM Narrator
Children Who Lived Isolated From Human Contact From A Very Young Age
The most extreme case is represented by feral children. A feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no (or little) experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language.
Feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in human activity around them.
Oxana Malaya began her life living with dogs, rejected by her mother and father. She somehow survived for six years, living wild, before being taken into care. There are few cases of feral children who’ve been able to fully compensate for the neglect they’ve suffered.
Oxana is now 22, but her future still hangs in the balance. Have scientists learned enough from previous cases to rehabilitate?
For six years, Oxana Malaya spent her life, living in a kennel, with dogs. Totally abandoned by her mother and father, she was discovered, behaving more like an animal, than a human child.
For two centuries, wild children have been the object of fascinating study. Raised without love, or social interaction, wild (or feral) children pose the question: What is it that makes us human?”
“The credit and debt system … is a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.”
Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the ESRC Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE), Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, in his TED talk Economic Reality Check explains the paradox of living in crisis times, the paradox between people’s needs to “save, save, save” and the continuation of an socio-economic influence to “spend, spend, spend,” and suggests a solution of redefining prosperity: for meaningful, altruistic values to spread throughout society in order to achieve a “we” vision of prosperity.
Graph: The dramatic rise in personal debt and the plummeting of personal savings in the U.K. the last 15 years before the 2008 financial crash [taken from the TED talk]
“It is about opening up. It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect [the] fragile altruist within.
[It’s about] … redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations, a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model.
This is not just a Western post-materialist fantasy. In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when Prosperity Without Growth was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu says, “I am because we are.” Prosperity is a shared endeavor. Its roots are long and deep – its foundations, I’ve tried to show, exist already, inside each of us.
This is not about standing in the way of development. It’s not about overthrowing capitalism. It’s not about trying to change human nature. What we’re doing here is we’re taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose. And at the heart of that economics, we’re placing a more credible, more robust, and more realistic vision of what it means to be human.”
Economic growth is effectively over.
There are practical limits to debt, and we’re hitting them. There are practical limits to energy sources, and we’re hitting them. There are real limits to the planet’s ability to absorb our wastes and industrial accidents, and we’ve hit those too.
We’re being told that the economy is recovering. But take away new debt the government has taken on since 2008 to stimulate the economy, and there’s been no real economic growth. There is no recovery. It’s all been done with more debt. We’ve already mortgaged our grandchildren’s future, but to keep the economy from relapsing, we’ll need to borrow even more. The game is up. We’ve reached the end of economic growth as we’ve known it.”
We all got hooked on growth. Rising GDP numbers became our main measure of success. ‘More, bigger and faster’ meant ‘better.’
We’re all addicted to growth. We all want better jobs and higher returns on investments. But we live on a finite planet.
The end of growth is not the fault of any one politician or a political party, but some people benefited from growth more than others.”
We can live without economic growth, but we’ll have to start doing a few things differently:
- We have to measure and aim for improvements in life that don’t require increasing our consumption of fossil fuels and other depleting resources, or piling on more debt.
- Freedom, being with the people we love, good health and the time to enjoy it, a secure happy community.”
All the quotes in this post are by Richard Heinberg, senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute who has written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion, taken from this video made by the Post Carbon Institute, Who Killed Economic Growth?
![Global Interconnection Between People And Nations – A Fact Of Life [TED Talk]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/paddy-ashdown.jpg)
Today, in our modern world, because of the Internet, everything is connected to everything. We are now interdependent. We are now interlocked as nations, as individuals, in a way which has never been the case before.”
– Paddy Ashdown
Veteran Diplomat and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire Paddy Ashdown describes the period we live in as
one of those terrifying periods of history when power changes… And these are always periods accompanied by turbulence, and all too often by blood.”
Most notably, Ashdown points out that this global interconnection is a fact of life, but one which can be either a terrifying prospect or a cause for celebration and peace, as it means that we all share a common destiny:
- If you get Swine Flu in Mexico, it’s a problem for Charles De Gaul Airport 24 hours later.
- Lehman Brothers goes down – the whole lot collapses.
- There are fires in the steppes of Russia – food riots in Africa. We are all now deeply, deeply, deeply interconnected.
- It used to be the case that if my tribe is more powerful than their tribe, I was safe. My country was more powerful than their country, I was safe. My alliance, like NATO, was more powerful than their alliance, I was safe. It is no longer the case.”
- If it is the case that we are now locked together in a way that has never been quite the same before, then it is also the case that we share a destiny with each other.
…The advent of interconnectedness and of the weapons of mass destruction means that increasingly, I share a destiny with my enemy.- When I was a diplomat negotiating the disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union, in Geneva in the 1970s, we succeeded because we understood that we shared a destiny with them. Collective security is not enough.
- Peace has come to Northern Ireland because both sides realized that the zero-sum game couldn’t work. they shared a destiny with their enemies.”
- One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides, both Israel, and I think the Palestinians do not understand that they share a collective destiny.”
In the Modern Age, where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do … is what you can do with others.”
Image: Paddy Ashdown, Why the world will never be the same & what should we do about it @paddyashdown by TEDxBrussels on Flickr ©