On 4 October, another regional Spirit of Humanity Forum event in collaboration with The Schumacher Institute took place in Bristol, UK, on the initiative of Tom Stedall with the support of Jenneth Parker.
The Spirit Of Humanity Forum encourages leaders and change-makers at all levels to explore what it means to live from the ‘inside-out’. We are inviting people from a variety of sectors to contribute their thoughts on this theme. This is an article by Dr Scilla Elworthy.
An excerpt from 'Peacefulness: Being Peace and Making Peace'. In chapter eight of the book Steve Killelea looks at 'Positive Peace, systems thinking and the problems of our age'. You can purchase the book on Amazon.
Even if Peace is primarily a spiritual or psychological state, nevertheless, we also need to conceive of peacefulness as a set of social relations, including those that a person has with him/herself. In other words, if peacefulness is an inner state, then it will necessarily express itself relationally.
By Marianne Marstrand. Women can play a significant part in the global peace building process. In fact, women, when enabled and empowered, can be true peacemakers and there are many examples from around the world that demonstrate the importance of applying the feminine principle to peacemaking, which itself is nourished by all faith traditions.
By Joseph Milne: "One must also consider in which of the two ways the nature of the whole contains what is good and what is best, whether as something separate, itself by itself, or as the order of the whole of things.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a
A creative inner curriculum by Dr Neil Hawkes: “Real change will happen when enough school communities are values-based and the benefits are clearly seen by parents and the community.”
An extract from 'Peacefulness: Being Peace and Making Peace', chapter four from Scherto Gill. "In this chapter I explore a different way of understanding community – community as communing and focus the discussion on those conceptions of community that stress the relational nature of our being."
Although this lakota word, WOLOKOLKICIAPI, might be defined by the title of this chapter, the translation is insufficient to capture what it truly means to the people whose language stems from the landscape of their ancestors. Nonetheless, it serves here as a guide for understanding the idea of inner peacefulness. It helps teach us about what conditions can bring us to it and then how to breathe it into all our relations.
By Maureen Goodman: "Asked to consider the connection between inner and outer peacefulness, I have reflected on that which I know best – my own work within the Brahma Kumaris and the work of my sisters and brothers."
