Love & Revolution: forging a shared vision of our free future

“The Dominant Culture encourages spiritual/philosophical and emotional/psychological unconsciousness – distancing us from our own direct experience.

“It promotes industrialised agriculture, plastic and poisonous foods, competitive economics, artificial lifestyles, absurd fashions, junk medicine, information-acquisition rather than education, laws rather than justice, and endless tragic needless wars – all of which alienate us from the Sacred Mystery we inhabit together with the Earth’s other animals, the fish, the insects, the trees and the birds.

“And as if this wasn’t enough, we are now being pushed into even further alienation by the worldwide glorification of technology, Technocracy and Transhumanism!”

So writes Mark the Mystic Activist, whose work will be familiar to long-term Winter Oak readers, in his new book, Love & Revolution: creating conscious tribes.

Mark’s voice is one that sings in complete harmony with mine, with regular contributors to the Winter Oak site such as Walking With Goats, Crow Qu’appelle, Jordan Henderson and Rahul Goswami, with the likes of Derrick Broze, Tessa Lena, The Stirrer and Nowick Gray, as well as with the dozens of thinkers featured on the organic radicals website.

He has no illusions about the degraded nature of the modern world and the size of the task involved in shaking off the many layers of its corruption and control.

He writes: “There’s no quick fix. We have been (in my opinion) brutally conditioned by a superficial, unconscious and violent culture – and to de-condition, or re-condition ourselves, in sacred, conscious, respectful, intimate relating won’t happen overnight”.

And he stresses: “Dominant, modern, global culture has detached itself from reality – from the sacred, indefinable Mystery of which we are all part. It is therefore definably insane.

“And it detaches us from ourselves, from our innate self-worth, from our knowing of ourselves as Unique Expressions of the Great Mystery – creating a spiralling, desperate atmosphere of neuroses and obsessions, fear and conflict.

“It is not enough that we re-organise ecologically, or politically. We need to re-organise our psyches!”

In order to re-shape our thinking on a fundamental level, Mark proposes that we create what he calls Conscious Tribes.

These are extended families not limited to biological bonds, which not only share the vision of a “decentralised, conscious, community culture embedded in nature”, but set out to make it real.

It is a source of permanent frustration for many of us that spirituality and political engagement are so often seen as incompatible: many spiritual folk promote disengagement with ideologies and the material world, while many political activists pour scorn on “airy-fairy” talk of spirituality.

And yet, as was known by everyone from Leo Tolstoy to Emma Goldman, from Ivan Aguéli to Sri Aurobindo, a true embrace of spirituality is inseparable from the acceptance of the duty to fight evil and to put oneself at the service of the Whole.

Mark says that Conscious Tribes need to be active on four levels: the universal or spiritual or existential level of our interconnectedness and belonging; the psycho-emotional level of our individual and collective conditionings; the mental or intellectual level of our understandings and beliefs; and the material or physical level of our action in the world.

He adds: “Conscious Tribes share a united, revolutionary purpose: to contribute to the co-creation of conscious communities – to participate in the co-creation of a new, conscious, close, connected culture – for themselves, for their children, and for the generations to come”.

The new revolutionaries, he says, must abandon dogmatism and hierarchy in favour of a Shared Vision of a free future very different from the criminocracy’s twisted dream of a “digital global gulag”.

Mark comments: “Sometimes this Shared Vision is only implicit, sometimes it’s only understood sentimentally, or intellectually.

“But it’s there, bubbling away, under the surface of our resistance: the intuition that there is only one human heart; that there is only one heart in all of creation; that the earth is erotic and abundant; that to exist is to be blessed…

“Local community. Deep relationships. Responsibility for our locality. Contact with nature – with the trees, the animals, the insects and birds… with the weather, with the waxing and waning moons, with the equinoxes and solstices.

“Time out, down time, holy-days. Celebration, appreciation, gratitude. Local, poison-free food. Poison-free water. Creativity and contribution (as against wage slavery).

“All of these things favour the evolution and transformation of consciousness – and asphalt, street lights, traffic noise, plastic food, work-work-work, and junk, escapist entertainment don’t”.

As well as setting out the theory behind Conscious Tribes, Love & Revolution has some practical suggestions about how we might go about forming and developing such groups, which are well worth considering.

Although Mark does not advocate any political “-ism”, the alternative world he offers us is a recognisable one for those of us who are inspired by the ideals of real anarchism, or the New Anarchism if you prefer.

He writes: “You are your Own Authority. This is crucial. Nobody is above you, nor below.

“And in a Conscious Tribe everyone remains their Own Authority. Why is this an absolute necessity? Because otherwise – how can there be authenticity?

“And without authenticity, how can there be real relationship, and intimacy, and Tribe?”

Download Love & Revolution for free here.