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transformation
discussion forum
background
In this discussion you could introduce your ideas about
impermanence and change. A cornerstone of Buddhism addressed
the impermanence of all things. How does transformation occur?
Does a change of heart lead to social change? Is everything
on the planet in a constant state of flux? Perhaps our ideas
about change have changed. Does change need a catalyst, as
in alchemy and chemistry, or does it just happen?
What are your ideas about transformation? Here are some
ideas about transformation from others.
My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed
into shapes of a different kind ... Before there was any earth
or sea, before the canopy of heave stretched overhead, Nature
presented the same aspect the world over, that to which men
have given the name of Chaos. This was a shapeless uncoordinated
mass, nothing but a weight of lifeless matter, whose ill-assorted
elements were indiscriminately heaped together in one place
... This strife was finally resolved by a god, a natural force
of a higher kind, who separated the earth from heaven, and
the waters from earth, and set the clear air apart from the
cloudy atmosphere.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Penguin, London,
1955, p 2 NB Ovid lived 43BC - AD17
We haven't really changed the culture. Nobody has ever offered
me a position on a board. I'm perfectly capable of reading
a balance sheet - but I would ask all those awkward questions.
They will only put women on boards who do what they are told,
or who act like the men do, and that's why they don't change
things. That's why it's hard to change things.
Eva Cox in Jan Bowen (ed.), Feminists
Fatale, Harper Collins, Sydney, 1998, p 125
We are thus witnessing transformations coming through the
new technologies, through the world view of non-western civilizations,
through the women's movement, and through spiritual and Gaian
perspectives. All these taken together point to the possibility
but not certainty of a new world shaping ... This is however
a long term process and part of the undoing of capitalism.
All these connect to create a new world, which is potentially
the grandest shift in human history. We are in the midst of
galloping time, plastic time, in which the system is unstable
and thus can dramatically transform. The good news is that
transformation is quite possible. The bad news is that previous
efforts to transform inequitable, unjust, unbalanced systems
have often failed since change-oriented movements can be easily
accommodated, or in the process of evolutionary change, agents
tire, or the system provides incremental change by exporting
structural problems to others. We can no longer export problems
to the ‘Other’, victims are becoming scarce. Our
problems have become global, knowledge of them is shared and
the interactions between events known - the famous butterfly
affect. While traditional systems were stable since heredity
and status kept the system afloat, modern systems are growth
oriented and thus to survive export problems: to nature, to
the periphery, to rural, to women, to children.
Sohail Inayatullah, Global Transformations,
http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/globaltransformations.htm
Nothing takes the credit - or the blame - for either the
runaway tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them.
Political struggles and ideologies have not been incidental
to these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo
are far too complex to be attributed to attempts to make them
happen or hold them back. This is not because some other determination
has come into play. If anything does emerge from the complexity
of current shifts, it is the realisation that cultures cannot
be shaped or determined by any single hand or determining
factor. Even conceptions of change have changed. Revolution
has been revolutionised.
Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital
Women and Technoculture, Fourth Estate, London, 1997, p 45
All change is not growth; all movement is not progress.
Ellen Glasgow
At the feast there were six stone water jars that were used
by the people for washing themselves in the way that their
religion said they must. Each jar held about twenty or thirty
gallons. Jesus told the servants to fill them to the top with
water. Then after the jars had been filled, he said, “Now
take some water and give it to the man in charge of the feast.”
The servants did as Jesus told them, and the man in charge
drank some of the water that had now turned into wine. He
did not know where the wine had come from, but the servants
did. He called the bridegroom over and said, “The best
wine is always served first. Then after the guests have had
plenty, the other wine is served. But you have kept the best
until last!” This was Jesus’ first miracle, and
he did it in the village of Cana in Galilee. There Jesus showed
his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.
John 2:6-11
Transformation is the ubiquitous condition of the worlds,
and their evolution from mineral to plant to animal, kingdom
emerging out of kingdom, volume forming itself out of the
converging vector extensions of a preceding volume ... This
is the genesis of sequential appearances, but the moment itself
of transformation, from one state to another, from one quality
of being to another, from one form or level of consciousness
to another, is always a leap, a jump, an incomprehensible
velocity, as it were, outside of time, as when one cell divides
into two.
Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, Thames
and Hudson, London, 1982, p 31
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