Reflections on the Social and Ecological Impacts of Religious Patriarchy

Vol. 2, No. 7, July 2006

Luis T. Gutierrez, Editor

Newsletter Home Page

INVITED ARTICLE

The Sustainable Theory of Communication:
A New Epistemological Perspective for Solidarity and Sustainability
in the Essentially Patriarchal and Emblematic Crisis
of the Western Mindset 1

Dr. Evandro Vieira Ouriques 2
Professor of Communications and Culture
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

To Rosa Alegria, with gratitude.

“What may appear as Truth to one person, will often appear as untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker. When there is an honest effort it will be realised that what appears to be different truths are like different countless leaves of the same tree.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.”
Vaclav Havel 3

“Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”
Islam. Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi 13.

“We are members one of another.”
Christianism. Bible, New Testament, Ephesians 4.25

“When he [a certain heathen] went to Hillel, he said to him, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; all the rest of it is commentary; go and learn."
Judaism. Talmud, Shabbat 31a

Abstract

This article shows why solidarity and sustainability demand an epistemological change that is possible only through educational, therapeutical, and media multilevel strategic actions based on the re-valorization of the Feminine Principle. The construction of solidarity and sustainability -and planning for such construction- becomes more pragmatic with the use of the occidental participatory epistemology, connected with the non-dualist philosophies of India, especially the epistemology of the advaita philosophy and the political theory of Gandhian’s Satyagraha and Sarvodaya. The author exposes some theoretical fundamentals of his Sustainable Theory of Communication.


We must change our epistemological fundamentals to attain solidarity and sustainability. Both require unity in diversity. For this we need to recognize universal values such as truth, nonviolence, and the unity (total interdependence) of all forms of life. The Prince of Wales, president of The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum, has stated that “the free market will not on its own build a society free of hunger, ill health and insecurity.” And he recommends the “building [of] a sense of partnerships within society (…) and [to] bond people together in a common endeavour” 4.

But how we can do this if the Western hegemonic deconstructivist epistemology keeps insisting on knowing more about fragments and assuming the impossibility of growing in the knowledge of totalities in which truth entails both with unity and diversity? This is the reason that epistemology is always 5, and specially now, the central question to understand the fundamentals of solidarity and sustainability and to define the strategic planning of the institutional actions required for their construction. UNESCO understands that XXI century education must begin with learning how to learn or, in other words, knowing what knowledge is 6. Many people and institutions are becoming increasingly aware that the current global crisis is an epistemological crisis.

Edgar Morin said that “la connaissance ne peut être considérée comme un outil ready made, que l’on peut utiliser sans examiner sa nature. (…) la connaissance de la connaissance doit-elle apparaître comme une nécessité première qui servirait de préparation à l’affrontement des risques [psychiques et culturelles] permanents d’erreur et d’illusion, qui ne cessent de parasiter l’esprit humain” 7.

According to UNESCO, education “shall be directed to the full development of the human person8. The mounting empirical evidence gathered by sociological and psychological research clearly shows the consequences of mental and emotional perturbations (or noises of Communication) 9.

When Middle East people engage in emblematic dialogue, they do so with their unconscious epistemological infrastructure, and with the emotional consequences of their mindset, their mental asana in the Hindu sense. So, we need special educational and therapeutical integrative methods to facilitate the process when we are institutionally constructing solidarity. The specific case of Middle East is excellent to understand the human problem with solidarity and sustainability because it is emblematic. For example, the groups that discuss the supply of water available there, the actions of the religious leaders to solve the Jerusalem problem, and the spreading of the grass roots peace movement, were tragically traumatized by their individual, educational, and social histories.

We must to consider this when we plan our actions. As Humberto Maturana says, “all that a human being does, takes place in a relational ground defined by his or her emotional state in the moment of doing it; this is also the case in the act of reflection” 10. So, the best sustainable action is to change the mindset. Retaliatory acts must stop, for example. But how? To promote solidarity and sustainability we are always talking about pardon and self-pardon, comprehension, compassion, vidya 11, the most difficult human achievement. But, as Hegel suggested, “a civilization [and I would say the same applies to a person] cannot become conscious of itself, cannot recognize its own significance, until it is so mature that it is approaching its own death [or the death of a phase of the own individual life]” 12. The Middle East is the emblematic signal of the death of the present civilization, of the present epistemological fundamental of our personalities, movements, institutions, corporations and organizations of all kinds.

To solve this challenge we must engage in a personal and institutional multileveled action through Education and Therapy, based in the immanent intelligence of Nature 13, as it is understood by the integrative tendency of Western philosophy and by ancestral wisdom, as we shall see here. This is very difficult because it demands a psychological change, be it an inner change of the person or an internal change of the personality of an institution, organization, or corporation 14. Only through this process can we overcome the pervasive sense of a separate ego (secondary narcissism) irrevocably divided from the encompassing world and the consequent unresolved psychological and social trauma of violence.

The Middle East is the emblematic tragedy of a globalized perspective based on the epistemological divorce between Subject and Object, Culture and Nature, Masculine Principle and Feminine Principle, Competition and Solidarity. This is the main reason for the tragedy: the dominant dualism of the modern and post-modern mind: man and nature, mind and matter, self and other, experience and reality, man and woman, rich and poor, whites and blacks, groups and others, society and market, Israelis and Palestinians. In religious terms, this situation is directly related with the patriarchal point of view of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is the reason I am doing research and development on a complex of integrative educational and therapeutical actions to re-valorize the feminine aspect of divinity in the human imaginary 15.


THE WORLD AS A MENTAL CONSTRUCT
AND CULTURE AS AN EXPRESSION OF NATURE

To better understand this complex subject, let us remember the figures of Copernicus, Descartes, and Kant. As Richard Tarnas states, “the cosmological estrangement of modern consciousness initiated by Copernicus and the ontological estrangement initiated by Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement initiated by Kant: a threefold mutually enforced prison of modern alienation”.

When Copernicus displaced the human being from the cosmic center and Darwin relativized it in the flux of evolution, the human species started to spin adrift. Once the axis mundi of the cosmos, the human being became, through his own consciousness, “an insignificant inhabitant of a tiny planet revolving around an undistinguished star at the edge of one galaxy among billions, in an indifferent and ultimately hostile universe”. Nature “is” hostile, so we must to fight against it, control it, dominates it inside or outside us: Culture against Nature.

Descartes and the subsequent scientific developments reinforced this trend. The advent of the scientific method produced a schism between the personal and conscious human subject and the impersonal and unconscious material universe, “revealing a world devoid of spiritual purpose, opaque, ruled by chance and necessity, without intrinsic meaning.”

That is what we observe in the archetypical structure of the media’s language and daily common sense. Humanity lives a tragic paradox: at the same time it lives in a world that it conceives intrinsically hostile, where “its soul has not felt at home”; and, all the same time, and in all products and services that it consumes, it looks for the qualities of love , trust, friendship, tenderness, solidarity, poetry, ecstasy, transcendence, sustainability. One by one, the subjective experimental nature of human epistemology ceases to be part of the objective foundation of the empirical universe.

In this scenario, Kant's recognition of the human mind's subjective ordering of reality emerges like the central argument of the shift from the modern to the postmodern conception of reality. This epistemological position will be, since Kant, the host of all subsequent philosophical, scientific, political, economical and social developments.

As Tarnas brilliantly synthesized for us, “the consensus is decisive: The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground as an independent reality” 17.

This epistemological position has dominated the XX Century and our Western universities until today. Then, all the explanations of the universe, life and political, economical and social organization have been systematically "cleansed" of all spiritual qualities, deconstructing all the great traditional explanations. This is the epistemology that for the past three centuries the Western mind has considered intellectually justifiable. “In Ernest Gellner's words, ‘It was Kant's merit to see that this compulsion [for mechanistic impersonal explanations] is in us, not in things’." And "it was Weber's to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, that is subject to this compulsion." In brief, homo sapiens is more, much more than homo mecanicus.


HOW, WHEN AND WHERE THERE IS
NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DIFFERENTS

But the important conquest of the deconstructivism finishes when it assumes itself as the absolute and the "realistic" perspective. As the only “real” experience of the world, in which the original consciousness of undifferentiated organic unity with the Feminine Principle -a participation mystique with Nature- has been outgrown, disrupted, and lost. That is no more non-human laws. Today, even the human laws are disrespected as we saw in Kosovo, in Irak, in ours daily lives. The only law is the law of power, the desire for power, which talks about itself as the absolute nature of man.

But when one really practices the deconstructivist method he needs to deconstruct the deconstructivism itself, as a logical consequence of itself. And one can find, for example, the epistemological system of the integrative Western philosophy and the advaita (non-dualistic) philosophies of India. This is another epistemology which operates with diversity and unity at the same time.

For the original Tantra (not the tantra of California), for example, there is only consciousness. The life we live is the direct result of the level and kind of our consciousness. That is the same that Kant and Nietzsche said -the world is a construct. But with an essential difference. The individual making decision’s process has in this epistemology, a reference: the ultimate reality. Then, the tantric social group tends to have an accurate sense of partnership, solidarity and sustainability: Brahman and its ethics, the Dharma that re-unifies the individuals through their liberty. The individual process of re-connection with the matrix of being is the process of the conquest of freedom. Freedom, in this epistemological context, is to do the best that you can. The quality of the “best you can do” becomes part of you, your family, friends, work, groups, societies, media, humanity.

This is a complete paradox for Western hegemonic philosophy: a primordial no-human law that lives within the human liberty, because it is all, it is the Unity. This epistemology allows an entrance in time and history coherent with the enchantment of the cosmos. A total immersion in an ethical world, in which there is no contradiction between the individual liberty and the ultimate reality, between individual liberty and solidarity.

Western deconstructivism has been looking for the experience of complete liberty for many centuries. In this sense, the Sri Vidya philosophy of the South of India is very important. The goddess Lalita Mahatripurasundari is the central one of this tradition -the School of Auspicious Wisdom- a branch of Sakta Tantrism. This tradition is prominent in the South of India, and has many variants but (and this is absolutely decisive to epistemology and so to the construction of peace) none claim to be different (let alone better) than the others.

In this epistemological context we have, all the time, the union of the multi-differences, of the multi-apparent, of the n opposites. Diversity reveals itself only as singularity. The goddess Lalita is everything, including the Trimurti, the triple quality of ultimate reality symbolized in Hindu tradition by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva -all of them created by Brahman- and she is too the interdependence and the union of Shiva (Masculine Principle) and Shakti (Feminine Principle) 18. She is too, at the same time, one of the wives of Shiva, the own Shiva, everything and the dissolution of everything.

The goddess Lalita's physical appearance completely changes with the cycle of her fifteen Nityas (the complete lunar cycle) or eternities. For each phase of the moon (Nitya), the goddess has a different appearance, a different name, a different mantra and a different yantra, but through all the Nityas -as the moon remains itself- she remains ever faithful to her true self.

This is another, certainly more sophisticated and much more comprehensive epistemological perspective for the relation between diversity and unity, subject and object. The goddess Lalita is, at once, (1) the knower, (2) the process of knowing, and (3) the object of knowledge. To the Sri Vidya tradition these three categories do not differ from one another but are all one and the same. Once the knower begins the process of knowing, that knower becomes the object of knowledge: when one recognizes the epistemological perspective of non-duality of this triad, and that She/He is the knowledge for which She/He is searching, She/He gains a glimpse of the Absolute through the dissolution, the deconstruction of herself.


PARTICIPATORY EPISTEMOLOGY AND
THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOLIDARITY AND SUSTAINABILITY

“At the same time that the Enlightenment reached its philosophical climax with Kant, the integrative epistemological perspective began to emerge in the West with Goethe and was developed by Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, and articulated within the past century by Rudolf Steiner. All these thinkers haven a fundamental conviction that the relation of the human mind to the world was ultimately not dualistic, but participatory”, says Tarnas 12. That is the appropriate epistemology to construct solidarity and sustainability.

If we study the ancient Western cultures, like the indigenous perspectives, we find the same epistemology, lato sensu. Like Kantian epistemology, these perspectives organize themselves in the same way: all human knowledge of the world is, in some sense, determined by subjective principles. For the advaita philosophy of India, (as for the quantum physics) reality does not exist: only consciousness exists.

In this participatory conception, as Tarnas has shown, these subjective principles -subjectivity as the ground of liberty- are an expression of the world's own being, and “the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world's own process of self-revelation. In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can examine it "objectively" and register it from without. Rather, nature's unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. Nature's reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind” 12.

That is the epistemological reason for Nature pervades everything, and the human mind in all its fullness is itself an expression of Nature's essential being. Culture is an expression of Nature. Rather, “the world's truth realizes itself within and through the human mind”. Tarnas reminds us that “this participatory epistemology is not a regression to naive participation mystique, but it is the dialectical synthesis of the long evolution from the primordial undifferentiated consciousness through the dualistic alienation. It incorporates the postmodern understanding of knowledge and yet goes beyond it” 12.

Since 1969 I have been constructing conceptual and operational instruments to go beyond this epistemological crisis. Since 1992, I have been using methods to surpass it through the re-valorization of the Feminine Principle. This must be done because Western Philosophy has been, archetypically, a masculine phenomenon that affected with its male perspectives all human thought, feeling, behavior, relationship, sexuality, religion, science, and social theory.

Since the barbarians invasions about circa 4000 BC, when the matrifocal 19 organization was destroyed, all the major languages of the Western tradition have personified our species, as we know, with words that are masculine in gender: anthropos, homo, l'homme, el hombre, l'uomo, o homem, chelovek, der Mensch, man, humanity. As Tarnas points out, “the ‘man’ of the Western tradition has been a questing masculine hero, a Promethean biological and metaphysical rebel who has constantly sought freedom and progress for himself, and who has thus constantly striven to differentiate himself from and control the matrix out of which he emerged. This masculine predisposition in the evolution of the Western mind, though largely unconscious, has been not only characteristic of that evolution, but essential to it.” 12

This is the origin of all the current global crises, and, of course, the origin of the emblematic sustainability crisis: the Western impulse to create an autonomous rational human self, separated from the primordial unity with Nature, from the Mother Principle. This has been a disaster for humanity because, when we murdered our Archetypical Mother, it became acceptable to murder our brothers and sisters in many different ways: with physical weapons, with subtle psychological manipulations, and with political and economic policies that lead to widespread poverty, hunger, and the destruction of the human habitat.

The failure of the series of United Nations conferences during the 90’s, and the failure of other international meetings such as the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey (January 2004), have anticipated the present escalation of terrorism in all forms: psychical, economical, political and social. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are endangered, and available estimates suggest that for all countries to meet the MDGs by 2015, at least US$ 50 billion in additional annual funding would be needed. But the last report of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, established by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in February 2002, noted that perhaps there will be only US$ 16 billion per year by 2006 -this still leaves over two-thirds of the total to be met, even if all commitments are honored. 21

Our crisis is, in fact, the result of the great patriarchal nomadic conquests over the ancient matrifocal cultures, and is perfectly visible in the Western patriarchal religions beginning from Judaism as we can see, for example, in the Judeo-Christian and Babilonic denial of the Great Mother Goddesses. To obtain the independent individual ego (secondary narcissism) and the self-determining human being, the masculine epistemology has repressed the Feminine Principle: only man is a conscious intelligent being. The woman, the body, the “no-civilized”, the Nature and the Cosmos are blind, non-intelligent, non-living and, therefore, purely mechanistic. “God is dead” and we live in absolute isolation. Like enemies in the field of battle, such as it is now the Middle East. Atomized, soulless and self-destructive, projectively identified as “other”.

So, the crisis is an essentially masculine crisis. Its resolution is been constructed in the great emergence of the feminine in our culture, in the re-emergence of the integrative tendency of Western philosophy and of the ancient wisdom, in the deconstruction of deconstrutivism, in the emergence of the right hemisphere of the brain and in the recognition of emotional and spiritual intelligence. I demonstrated systematically 22 how the media virtually uses all the values of the feminine to qualify its products because the human being needs unconsciously to rediscover and re-unite itself with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul: rediscover the Sacred Unity, as Gregory Bateson shows in a pioneer way.


WHEN THE MIND IS DEVELOPED UNTIL REACHING ITS FURTHEST LIMITS,
THEN EPISTEMOLOGY IS THE QUESTION AND
SUSTAINABLE COMMUNICATION IS THE SOLUTION

To solve this paradox in the field of Communication and Culture, I created, in 2001, the Model of Sustainable Communication, having the Being as the reference point -as foundation’s foundation. Instead of emitter and receptor, the human being is, within this new model, a multi-creative channel.

The basis of Communication is complementary duality: Silence and Speech, Presence and Absence, Feminine and Masculine, Black and White, Forms and Colors, Stability and Instability, Immobility and Mobility, Newness and Redundancy. The apparent duality is the language of Nature. So, this new Theory of Communication shows why Communication is much more than media: it is the proper language of Nature, of the Universe, of the Open Totality. It is everyone and everything, and everyone and everything are within it. We are, totally, and only, it. Epistemology is the question, Sustainable Communication is the solution.

The paradigm of the Sustainable Communication is, of course, the integral or integrative paradigm. It is, at the same time, a conceptual and an operational domain that engenders new educational and therapeutical methods and gives occidental epistemological support to the ancient and not yet hegemonic epistemologies of humanity. It also engenders an ethical system that leads to communion, solidarity and sustainability. In this sense, I have demonstrated, in Life, Geometry and Society 23 , the importance to Communication and Politics of the force of the affective field (Psychology) as decisive for the construction of the consciousness (including, of course, the public or collective consciousness). And, overall, how the media constructs its values through Euclidean and chaos geometries, including the written word understood as the design of the oral language, the design of the mind, the design of the world, the concrete totality of human life.

In the Sustainable Theory of Communication the secondary narcissism shows up as the origin of the crisis, marked by the imperium of the desire and struggle for power through the anticipation of the future, instrumented by technology. For Dr. Marcio Tavares d’Amaral, Brazilian philosopher and psychoanalyst, philosophers and thinkers need meditation (Heidegger) when they want to think under the pressure of the globalized philosophy. Such is the importance of meditation. We know that time has been the central question for the great historical spiritual traditions up until very recently 24. We must become aware that eternity is the way out of the tyranny of all forms of violence, the way out of the ethical vacuum that inevitably leads humanity to compulsive competition and disregard for human solidarity and ecological sustainability.

Only with the presence of the Being in our decisions making process can we hope to improve society's future 25. This is to be done starting from universal values. That is the precisely the goal of my work with integrative methods for strategic organizational and personal development. This epistemology, and its educational and therapeutical methods, contributes in a decisive way to dilute resistances to the Being found in people through the development of the mind until reaching its furthest limits (Jnana Yoga, in Hindu terms).

The reunification with the Feminine Principle can now occur on a new and much deeper level from that of the primordial, ancestral unconscious unity. The long evolution of human consciousness has prepared us to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of our own being freely and consciously.

This, as Tarnas summarized so well, “is visible not only in the rise of feminism, the growing empowerment of women, and the widespread opening up to feminine values by both men and women, and not only in the rapid burgeoning of women's scholarship and gender-sensitive perspectives in virtually every intellectual discipline, but also in the increasing sense of unity with the planet and all forms of nature on it, in the increasing awareness of the ecological and the growing reaction against political and corporate policies supporting the domination and exploitation of the environment, in the growing embrace of the human community, in the accelerating collapse of long-standing political and ideological barriers separating the world's peoples, in the deepening recognition of the value and necessity of partnership, pluralism, and the interplay of many perspectives. It is visible also in the widespread urge to reconnect with the body, the emotions, the unconscious, the imagination and intuition, in the new concern with the mystery of childbirth and the dignity of the maternal, in the growing recognition of an immanent intelligence in nature, in the broad popularity of the Gaia hypothesis. It can be seen in the increasing appreciation of indigenous and archaic cultural perspectives such as the Native American, African, and ancient European, in the new awareness of feminine perspectives of the divine, in the archaeological recovery of the Goddess tradition and the contemporary reemergence of Goddess worship, in the rise of Sophia as the focus of Judeo-Christian theology, in the widely noted spontaneous upsurge of feminine archetypal phenomena in individual dreams and psychotherapy. And it is evident as well in the great wave of interest in the mythological perspective, in esoteric disciplines, in Eastern mysticism, in Shamanism, in archetypal and transpersonal psychology, in hermeneutics and other non-objectivist epistemologies, in scientific theories of the holonomic universe, morphogenetic fields, dissipative structures, chaos theory, systems theory, the ecology of mind, the participatory universe -the list could go on and on. As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long-dominant but now alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but now ascending feminine.” 12

But it is a tremendous challenge to achieve this reintegration of the feminine: we must be willing to sacrifice a lot; we must embrace the death of our own secondary narcissism. And we must be willing to help interested people and organizations do likewise. It is for this reason that I strongly recommend the concentration on programs of Education and Therapy for the construction of solidarity and sustainability. A millenarian tradition of repressed feminine has caused deeply harmful, tragic traumas on the personality of human beings. Such inner trauma is the origin of the circle of retaliatory acts. The Western mind must be helped on its willingness to open itself, because it is incredibly difficult to change the established beliefs and feelings about oneself, the world, and the pseudo enemy. To face and accept such a radical change is the act of a hero.

To go beyond the current situation, a heroic act of imagination is absolutely necessary to see through and overcome our unconscious shadow, epistemologically based, and freely choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality, when the enemy is not an enemy but a brother and a sister, children of the same Mother and the same Father. We need Mother Nature, not objectified like the “other”, controlled, denied, humiliated and exploited, but fully understood and respected, because it is all, it is ourselves, the source and the goal of its ethical immanent presence -Dharma.

This epistemological position can accomplish the great change. With Tarnas, I consider that the “stupendous Western project should be seen as a necessary and noble part of a great dialectic, and not simply rejected as an imperialist-chauvinist plot. Not only has this tradition achieved that fundamental differentiation and autonomy of the human which alone could allow the possibility of such a larger synthesis, it has also painstakingly prepared the way for its own self-transcendence. (…) It brings an unexpected opening to a larger reality that cannot be grasped before it arrives, because this new reality is itself a creative act.” 12In fact, we are living today the death of modern man, the death of Western man. The end of "man" is now at ours consciousness and so at our hands. Man is an epistemological concept that must be overcome, and fulfilled, “in the embrace of the feminine”. Only when humanity can find a way to think of men and women as being human (i.e., genderless) will it be truly free.

As Buddhist tradition reminds us, “this world of men, given over to the idea of "I am the agent," bound up with the idea "another is the agent," understand not truly this thing; they have not seen it as a thorn. For one who looks at this thorn with caution, the idea "I am the agent" exists not, the idea "another is the agent" exists not.” 26

In the emerging strands of Western integrative thought, the relation between truth and action or truth and humanity has become decisive. Action needs to be guided individually and collectively by truth. As Gandhi taught us, “Truth and Love -ahimsa- is the only thing that counts. Where this is present, everything rights itself in the end. This is a law to which there is no exception.” 27


References

1 This article is originally the answer of the author to Round 3 of the study to create normative scenarios depicting how peace may be achieved in the Middle East, developed by the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University.

2 Creator of the Sustainable Theory of Communication and of the methodology Management of the Sustainable Mind: the Quadruple Bottom Line, is Doctor on Communication and Culture by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and organizer of the UNO’s book Dialogue between Civilizations: the Brazilian Experience, UNO/Palas Athena, Center of Transdisciplinary Studies on Communication and Consciousness/FURJ, Viva Rio, MIR/ISER and UNESCO, Rio de Janeiro, 2003 (in Portuguese). Professor since 1979 of the School of Communication/FURJ, member of the Board of the Center for Future Studies-PUC/SP, founder and director of the Center of Transdisciplinary Studies on Communication and Consciousness/School of Communication/FURJ. Political Scientist, therapist, and consultant of Organizational and Personal Development. Member of the ISO 26.000/ABNT Advisory Group of Corporative Social Responsibility, and professor of the LATEC/UFF MBA program.

3 See the contribution of Richard Tarnas to the Symposium on Love, Venice, October 12-15, 2000. In 1996 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice created Guggenheim Public as an endeavour to define and refine the concept of "public" as a shared space of communication.

4 Nelson, Jane. Building Partnerships. Cooperation between the United Nations system and the private sector. Report Commissioned by the United Nations Global Compact Office and The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum, 2002.

5 The identity of the human is an epistemological activity. The human being is always primordially a philosopher, but is rarely conscious of this intrinsic condition. Frequently the human being is defined by the dominant epistemology. This leads to alienation.

6 See too the work of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco Varela, specially A árvore do conhecimento. As bases biológicas da compreensão humana. Editora Palas Athena, São Paulo, 2001.

7 Morin, Edgar. Les sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur : Avant-propos, Agora 21, UNESCO, 2002.

8 The right to education for all: Towards education for all throughout life. World Education Report, UNESCO, 2000.

9 According to the UNICEF, 500,000 children are dying of hunger per year in Latin America. And, in the United States, 500,000 fat persons are dying per year, for eating excessively.

10 Reflective Domains, Instituto Matriztico, founded by Humberto Maturana and Ximena Dávila Yáñez. Las Urbinas 87, Providencia, Santiago, Chile.

11 Vidya means knowledge, and is used here in the specific sense of female knowledge as in the Sri Vidya tradition.

12 Many times I draw from the brilliant book by Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind. New York: Random House, 1991 New York. See specially the Epilogue.

13 See, for example, the works of Riane Eisler, Rupert Sheldrake, and Stanislav Grof.

14 I have been working on this question since 1966.

15 Imaginary, of course, is not a "maîtresse d'erreur et de fausseté" or a "folle du logis". On the contrary, it is all for the benefit of the human being, understanding the imaginary as the consciousness. See, for example, Gilbert Durand.

16 See the biology of cognition and the biology of love of Humberto Maturana.

17 See Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View. Ballantines, 1993.

18 “All life, all pulsation in creation throbs with the mighty declaration of the truth of Shiva-Shakti, the eternal He and the eternal She at play in manifestation.” Kularnava Tantra, 3.

19 I prefer matrifocal instead of matriarchal, because matriarchal is related with power.

20 Ouriques, Evandro Vieira & Werner, Sandra. For a total ecology: psychological, political, economical, social and ambiental. Authors' edition, 1976 (in Portuguese).

21 The report presents the following principal conclusions: (1) Since 1990, the tax of growth is lesser of that in the previous decades; (2) this growth is concentrated in only 16 developed countries. In this period, 23 developing countries had negative growth; (3) the per capita income difference between the richest countries and poor passed from USS 212 versus USS 11,417 in 1960-1962 for USS 267 versus USS 32,339 in 2000-2002; (4) the 22 industrialized countries that represent only 14% of the world-wide population dominate about the half of the world-wide commerce; (5) the unemployment continue to grow of global form in 2003, with 185 millions dismissed -about 6.2% of the total - the highest tax of unemployment already registered by ILO; (6) the informal economy, that does not guarantee benefits for its workers, grows enormously: 550 million people is living with U$1 or less per day. Source: World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization

22 Op. cit. Ouriques, 2001.

23 Ouriques, Evandro Vieira. Life, Geometry and Society, Master on Communication and Culture/FURJ, 1992. This is the origin of my method of symbolic diagnosis of persons, situations and organizations to changing processes. The foundation of this method, in terms of the philosophies of India, is a certain epistemological conception that Maya (the phenomenic world) is not merely a illusion, but the language of the proper goddess, MayaShakti. So, as the language of Nature, the complex laws of its geometric and aesthetics construction are precisely the Ethics itself.

24 Ouriques, Evandro Vieira. Time and Eternity, the way of the cure. Center of Transdisciplinary Studies on Communication and Consciousness, School of Communication, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 2002. In Portuguese.

25 Ouriques, Evandro Vieira. When sharing the Sacred is the exit. Frater Review, August 2002. Frater Publisher, Rio de Janeiro. In Portuguese.

26 Udana, 70.

27 Articles on Truth by Mahatma Gandhi and Others.

"Humankind is never the victim of God;
God is always the victim of humankind."

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning,
Orbis Books, 1999, page 191

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