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COMPASSION RESPONSE NETWORK CIRCULAR No 8
By David Keane, 26/April/2002
PO Box 582, Gosnells WA 6110, Australia
Email address: keane@nw.com.au
Healing site address: http://www.nw.com.au/~keane/healing/
Our Inner Planning Circle has now concluded a lengthy and at times difficult email meeting, in which we have decided the Vision, Mission and immediate main Aim for the Compassion Response Network. Let us begin by sharing the concise statements we have agreed upon for each of these items. Then we shall discuss the implications of the definitions chosen, and the considerations that were involved in the process of our Inner Planning Circle discussion.
Compassion Response Network Vision:
"The only way to guarantee a future of peace and progress for the whole human race is for enough men and women of goodwill to accept responsibility for the establishing of right relations, and to work actively with the principles of unity and goodwill."
Compassion Response Network Mission:
"To facilitate the emergence of a goodwill network in which the hands of men and women of goodwill are strengthened so that they become enabled to directly provide a meaningful compassionate response to the most urgent needs of humanity."
Compassion Response Network Immediate Main Aim:
"To facilitate treatment and testing and publication of results with comparative assessment for about half a dozen affordable, safe and reputably effective alternative treatments for AIDS over a six month period, involving regular PCR, immunity and other blood tests as required.
This Aim is to be reviewed in 6 months, to include discussion for an Aim for Future Development".
Discussion over the Vision Statement
According to sociocracy theory, our Vision provides
What has been the guiding principle that has inspired the development of the "Compassion Response Network"? I personally am very clear about the guiding principle that had in 1993 inspired East West Network and later my healing website in which the idea of forming a Compassion Response Network was first proposed. It has been embraced within this paragraph;
"The only way to guarantee a future of peace and progress for the whole human race is for enough men and women of goodwill to accept responsibility for the establishing of right relations, and to work actively with the principles of unity and goodwill."
The very first East West Newsletter was in fact an invitation, using this central inspiring thought, for men and women of goodwill to get together and turn their dreams into practice by linking together in practical projects of common endeavour. That was in 1993-4. We have grown a long way since then.
This quotation is in fact the central paragraph in the "Affirmation of Goodwill", found in the Alice Bailey literature and used widely in the Goodwill Movement. Let us therefore consider the full text for the Affirmation of Goodwill.
AFFIRMATION OF GOODWILL
" We, the people of goodwill, convinced:
Recognising that:
Affirm out intention:
This vision was readily accepted by the whole group, and there was a suggested variation of the wording. The original wording as in the affirmation was however finally agreed upon, as this wording is recognised by and has inspired many goodwill workers all over the world. Also, it seemed appropriate to remain true to the wording of the vision that had inspired the foundational work of East West Network.
As a group, we feel subjectively one with the Goodwill Movement, though formally and legally we are a separate entity. We draw from the esoteric and build upon the foundations provided for us through the Goodwill Movement. So we consider it important to acknowledge this source, and our unity with the Goodwill Movement.
We wish therefore to acknowledge the foundational work of Lucis Trust and World Goodwill which has done such fine work in disseminating the Affirmation of Goodwill. World Goodwill and Lucis Trust may be contacted at:
3 Whitehall Court, Suite 54, London SW1A 2EF, U.K.
1Rue de Varembe (3e), Case Postale 31, 1211 Geneva 20, Switzerland
120 Wall Street, 24th Floor, New York NY10005, U.S.A.
web address: http://www.worldgoodwill.org/
World Goodwill is an educational organisation that distributes an excellent quarterly newsletter, and provides information about many goodwill subjects. It is associated with the Arcane School that provides esoteric training.
The Mission Statement
The Mission provides the way to bring about envisaged changes.
It is a way of realising the vision. It explains our identity. It provides the
motivating factor for those working in the Inner Planning Circle, and those
who will join our work in the future.
Our Inner Planning Circle had previously decided (see Circular No 6 for
the full story) that the Main Objective for the Compassion Response Network
should be;
"To facilitate the emergence of a goodwill network in which the hands of men and women of goodwill are strengthened so that they become enabled to directly provide a meaningful compassionate response to the most urgent needs of humanity."
We needed to consider our "Main Objective" because this was the term used in registration as an association in Australia. In this most recent meeting, we considered how to define "Vision, Mission, Aim", three terms regularly used in sociocracy.
When considering "Mission", we quickly agreed that our "Mission" was identical to our previously agreed "Main Objective". In order to read the various considerations in choosing this wording for our Main Objective, please refer back to Circular No 6.
Delay in Deciding Our Aim
On 24/February, the following proposal was presented for our main Aim;
"To provide a direct compassion response to the AIDS pandemic. A sub-aim would be;
It was quickly agreed that this definition was close to what we wanted, and indeed, if we compare it with the final result, it was indeed close.
On 20/April, our Inner Planning Circle decided upon the final wording of the Aim for the Compassion Response Network, as follows;
"To facilitate treatment and testing and publication of results with comparative assessment for about half a dozen affordable, safe and reputably effective alternative treatments for AIDS over a six month period, involving regular PCR, immunity and other blood tests as required.
This Aim is to be reviewed in 6 months, to include discussion for an Aim for Future Development".
Why did it take two months for our Inner Planning Circle to move from "close" to its final choice? The delay is clearly recognised by us as not satisfactory. Albert Mananga, who is most closely related to the more practical aspect of our work in Africa, expressed his concern in this way,
"Let’s proceed quickly. Here people are suffering so much. If we take a long time, we will appear as a people speaking philosophy near a people who are hungry. I say this as a person who lives every day with these dramatic realities."
Another consideration, is whether the men and women of goodwill who support our work and want to contribute, will understand such lengthy delays.
We have all agreed that the delay was not good, and in future our Inner Planning Circle will have to do better, but there were reasons for the delay and a full explanation is I think warranted.
To begin with our Inner Planning Circle comprises four members, each busy in other projects and organisations, and each living far from the others. Our only communication is by Email which has about a day's delay from sending to receiving. On a few occasions our members had to travel, and there was an occasion of temporary computer breakdown. Being such a small group we would need to wait until all members responded to each round (in a single round an email is sent out from the meeting facilitator, and responses are received back from everyone). When in future our Inner Planning Circle expands in numbers we can deem temporary absence of a single member as providing "approval through consent and no objection lodged". But as our group is so small, we presently have no such luxury. We need to await everyone's participation.
But the main reason for delay was for a quite different reason. Two of our four members, John and Marielle, have a background in sociocracy, and their natural primary consideration was for objective procedure. Albert and David (myself) have a background of active participation in East West Network, in which decisions were made quickly on the basis of intuited perceived need, but often without much debate or rationalisation of why we did things. Our emphasis had been to respond to the intuitively perceived inner guiding purpose.
We understand that the purpose of Compassion Response Network is to anchor subjective theory for compassionate response through practical action of service. In other words, our work is to link the subjective and objective workers in one spiritual undertaking. This is an immense challenge that has not been done in this way before, through an organisation.
As Albert and I discovered, our work with East West Network was limited, as we could never get practical responsibilities shared sufficiently through an organised group. All our East West Network activities were successful because we had each accepted a great portion of personal responsibilities. And so we were at a point of not being able to expand until we developed an approach for objective group procedures.
John and Marielle had been confronted with the reverse problem. Many times, with many very idealistically motivated groups, they had tried to help them adopt sociocracy principles, frequently using email. Always, they would get into bottlenecks of disputation and diversion from the main agenda. When it comes to truly idealistic service work, it is really difficult to anchor that work onto the practical level, even when using the powerful tools of sociocracy.
And so in trying to define clearly the Compassion Response Network Main Aim, all these old problems arose again. And yet we persisted and finally found the common ground. We had entered the cauldron of our group experience, and we emerged with a result that has many potent qualities that will in years to come justify the effort we had to make to reach it. Let us now consider more closely the progress that the debate over our Aim took, and why the end result is so significant.
The Debate Over Aim
The Aim provides the way of realising the Mission. Aims can vary over time. They depend on what a group wants to achieve at any given time.
An Aim describes a product or service. Those receiving the service (in the case of Compassion Response Network, we agreed this would be men and women of goodwill) must be able to understand the Aim.
Vision and Mission provide identity and motivation, whereas the Aim provides an overlap with those receiving the service.
The Mission statement that we had accepted was so vast!
"To facilitate the emergence of a goodwill network in which the hands of men and women of goodwill are strengthened so that they become enabled to directly provide a meaningful compassionate response to the most urgent needs of humanity."
How could we now develop this concept so to strengthen and enable men and women in practice, so that this theory becomes embraced within very real projects of compassionate response to need? Such is the question we had to ponder.
A Compassion Response to AIDS
Our initial suggestion was to look at those areas of our present goodwill networking that has inspired positive responses from men and women of goodwill, and for which they have eagerly offered to participate through service. Thus the initial proposal for our Aim was;
"To provide a direct compassion response to the AIDS pandemic. A sub-aim would be; to provide free treatment to the poor,
to facilitate scientific/medical assessment of results,
and
to openly publish results."
The Vastness of Opportunity for Compassionate Service
Compassion Response Network has concerns for other areas besides a compassion response to AIDS. We are involved in distributing healing technology and knowledge for free treatment of other diseases, and for educational outreach in true values and principles for right relations. If we focus only upon AIDS, then are we not cutting ourselves off from these many other "most urgent needs of humanity"? There was concern that our Aim needed to be inclusive of all such opportunities for service. We needed to define opportunities for group compassion projects now and in the future. We were able to list four broad areas that would provide opportunity to actively engage men and women of goodwill in group service activity along practical lines;
Finding a Central Aim
Developing one Aim is difficult enough, but to develop four quite different Aims would be a massive undertaking, and would scatter our energies and would lead to confusion that gets us nowhere. We felt the need first to focus our efforts through one single, carefully worded Aim, and then work out how we can actualise or manifest that Aim.
On the other hand, we were agreed that our work with a compassion response to AIDS was vitally important, but we are already engaged in the other three areas, and we cannot now ignore them. Would it be possible to integrate these four Aims into one all-inclusive Aim?
It was generally agreed that the Aim of "development of a compassion response centre" embraced the other three.
Understanding the Nature of Compassion Response Centres.
We are at this stage only moving towards the development of a compassion response centre in its true spiritual meaning. It remains for us a beautiful ideal, yet to become manifested. In essence, it is a centre in which the ideal as embraced in our Mission statement, becomes manifest through an active centre involved in many diverse compassion projects, and in which the subjective and objective work becomes integrated in the one spiritual undertaking. We in the Inner Planning Circle all seemed to agree on the importance and meaning of this concept. But how could we explain this idea in a way that would provide understanding and inspiration to men and women of goodwill?
We experimented with different names; compassion response centre, compassionate response centre, compassion-goodwill centre. But none of these terms explained clearly what such a centre actually is. So we tried to define what such a centre was.
"In a compassion-goodwill centre, a goodwill server or goodwill service group acts as a focal point for inviting men and women of goodwill to join together in common group endeavour to engage in goodwill projects of compassionate response to human need."
This still did not provide sufficient clarity, so the various facets of such a centre were discussed;
And yet even with such attempts to define what a compassion-goodwill centre is, the concept still seems rather hazy. This concept seems still for the future to work out properly.
The Zimbabwe Challenge
In Circular No 7, we share about the extraordinary situation in Zimbabwe, where the PNI Empowerment Trust is an amazingly well developed organisation providing an educational, support and treatment program for AIDS sufferers. Their organisation has representation in all the major urban areas of Zimbabwe. About a third of the people in Zimbabwe are on medical aid, by which they are provided with free regular blood testing. If we are able to provide PNI with various alternative treatments, and support them in various ways, then collaboration with this organisation may provide the best way to establish a scientific/medical verification of the degree of effectiveness in treating AIDS through various treatments.
Without such verification through a comparative treatment project, our work in distributing devices and forms of treatment will remain hindered by skepticism from goodwill workers and doctors alike.
Refugees
The thought was shared that there are many areas of compassionate response that men and women of goodwill are engaged in. Take for example the environmental crisis or the plight of refugees in Australian detention camps.
The question then arises, how do we select projects for Compassion Response Network to adopt? Our work in its essence is demonstrating how to transform theory into reality. We must choose a project that
Let us then follow a selected project through to completion, to demonstrate, using the principles of sociocracy, the scientific technique of manifestation. We must choose one central project that captivates the interest of disciples and men and women of goodwill alike, and then follow the process step by step until the ultimate goal is attained. Sociocracy provides us with the key to taking those individual steps of anchoring ideas into reality. Let us then choose a project that if followed through to the end, will inspire humanity about the pathways of manifestation, and show them that all things are possible. The most important thing is to develop and then educate about that pathway of manifesting our most heart-felt dreams.
Comparative Treatment and Testing for AIDS Project
In the end, we were motivated by that project that resonates with the heart-felt desire of our group, to contribute in that vast group endeavour by which eventually there will be proven to humanity that there is a cure for AIDS. It is not for us to talk about cures; we can leave such discussion to the doctors and scientists. But our small group surely can, with sufficient sacrifice and commitment, facilitate a treatment and testing project in which AIDS patients are provided with a dozen different types of alternative treatment, and blood tests are provided for about 6 months, to assess and compare the results. Thus our selected Aim became,
"To facilitate treatment and testing and publication of results with comparative assessment for about half a dozen affordable, safe and reputably effective alternative treatments for AIDS over a six month period, involving regular PCR, immunity and other blood tests as required.
This Aim is to be reviewed in 6 months, to include discussion for an Aim for Future Development".
We saw the need to focus on one central project, and develop the science of manifesting that project step by step, inviting men and women of goodwill to participate through diverse areas of service. We needed to anchor our ideals and demonstrate how group cooperative endeavour can really work when motivated by a common sense of compassion for humanity.
Over the past six months, since the invitation was launched to participate in a Compassion Response Network, we have formed our Inner Planning Circle and we have laid the subjective basis for our future work.
Now with the clear definition of our immediate main Aim, we must discover the process, using the science of sociocracy, to actualise this Aim. Now comes the time when our work must become truly anchored, and we must actively engage men and women of goodwill. Over the next few months, we must clearly establish the process for how this is to be done. We must design the process, identify how to steer the process, and then find and assign men and women of goodwill to participate in the various roles of service.
Sociocracy provides the tools for developing our Aim. The next few Compassion Response Network circulars will discuss how this will be done in practice. The development of a truly effective international organisation needs careful step by step planning. We rejoice that those steps are now beginning to focus on actualising our dreams on the practical level.