John Natoli

“We are like a man lost in a maze. He runs around frantically, hitting the same dead ends again and again, repeatedly circling back to his starting point. Finally he pauses to rest, to breath, to ponder. Then in a flash he understands the logic of the maze. Now it is time to begin walking. Imagine if instead he says, “No, I cannot pause to rest. Only by moving my feet will I ever get anywhere. So I must not stop moving my feet.” We tend to devalue those periods of pause, emptiness, silence, and integration. How to get out of a maze? Yes, it does help to wander around and explore, but at some point one must stop and reflect. Is there a pattern to my wanderings? What do I remember about how I got lost here in the first place? What is this maze for, anyway? Perhaps the earlier stage of panicked, frantic running around, or of increasingly futile action, is necessary, but many of us are now ready to try another way. The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void; it comes from inaction. When we see it, we realize it was right in front of us all along. It is never far away; yet at the same time it is in a different universe—a different Story of the World. A Chinese saying describes it well: “As far away as the horizon, and right in front of your face.” You can run toward it forever, run faster and faster, and never get any closer. Only when you stop do you realize you are already there. That is exactly our collective situation right now. All of the solutions to the global crisis are sitting right in front of us, but they are invisible to our collective seeing, existing, as it were, in a different universe.”
― Anonymous

“choose the story you will stand in. How to choose? What will you believe, given how easily reason, logic, and evidence are conscripted to the service of a story? Here is an alternative: Choose the story that best embodies who you really are, who you wish to be, and who you are in fact becoming. Behind the fog of helplessness of the question “Will we make it?” is a gateway to our power to choose and to create. Because written on its threshold is another question, the real question: “Who am I?” The despair is only as valid as the story beneath it that generates what we believe possible. The story beneath it is the Story of Self. So who are you? Are you a discrete and separate individual in a world of other? Or are you the totality of all relationships, converging at a particular locus of attention? Get over the fantasy that you can answer this question by finding proof. Reading one more book on psi phenomena or past-life regression won’t satisfy your inner skeptic. No amount of evidence will be enough. You are just going to have to choose, without proof. Who are you?”
― Anonymous

“money, in our current system, generally comes through our participation in the conversion of nature into products, communities into markets, citizens into consumers, and relationships into services.”
― Anonymous

“as human beings, we are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness