Envisioning Transformation

The act of envisioning, seeing or imagining something allows us to get in touch with what's alive in us, so that we may know more deeply what we need, and what we'd like to create. Can we imagine what political transformation might look like?

How might we transform the way we do politics now into an effective, participatory democracy, where the decision-making process truly reflects our shared needs and values?

When you hear the word transformation, how do you feel? Are you apprehensive, nervous, afraid? Are you curious and excited, or do you feel hesitant and uneasy? Maybe you experience a range of feelings.

Transformation is about changing the form of something—like how, as children, we agree to change the way we play a game. Transforming democracy is our agreeing to change the form of how democracy is done, and because democracy is an arranged social construction, and not naturally occurring, we may decide to change it for our mutual benefit—if we collectively discover the will to do so.

In our disempowerment, much of our willingness has gone to sleep, however, and our needs to participate and to be empowered, for instance, we have either lost touch with, or these needs have been channeled into activities without a lot of relevance to the whole.

In order that we might carry out political transformation, it would appear necessary that some inner transformation first occur—some kind of remembering of who we are. When transformation occurs within us, what changes form is our beliefs, and beliefs are the containers of energy. When we bring attention to our beliefs and feelings, and they open up, then the energy that has stayed stuck underneath our disregarded beliefs, and embedded in our neglected feelings, starts to flow again.

Overcoming disempowerment on the personal level involves the awakening of desire, the shifting of perspective and feeling, the meeting of resistance, and the liberation of energy and will. Empowerment and the liberation of energy on the collective level involves our forming some kind of social movement as a vehicle of our willingness to catalyze change, to help bring us collectively where we want to go.

To create new forms of political engagement would perhaps require a significant investment of energy—as it is the investment of energy that changes form. But we already have that energy right now: it is just tied up in the condition of our disempowerment. That willing energy, trapped within us and often difficult to access, may yet be liberated for our greater well-being.

When I imagine political transformation, I see a gathering of individuals who experience some awakening to the possibility of change, a gathering which eventually flows into a larger movement with a clear purpose, a movement which increases in energy and form until our mutual goals are realized.

Outer transformation may first flow from inner, but we might also imagine how outer transformation will help us catalyze inner change. A social movement with the intent to transform how we do politics would have an enormous, transforming effect on us, and it might show us how the promise of such a movement—perhaps, the enlivening connection and sense of hope, trust and well-being that we'd experience together—would be fulfilled by formal, political transformation.

Inner and outer transformation are involved in the ongoing dance of co-creation, but it is up to us, and our willingness, to create the kind of world we want to see. So, let's imagine what an ideal democracy might look like.

When we imagine, we also call upon the will to create.