Heaven is not where the GDP grows – A story of Dubai

Since childhood I had this image of heaven, where people are genuinely happy. They greet each other from the same source of happiness. At the age of ten or eleven, every Friday morning I would tell imaginative stories about heaven to my little sister who had three years of age. In one of the stories that I still remember vividly, the Good Grand Mother sat on a magic carpet at the bottom of the oceans, inviting people to sit around her and have tea. She greeted the guests with love, and with a genuine smile. Aside from me and my little sister there were also other guests present, such as dolphins and mermaids.

Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue on Education – Dubai

In partnership with Open Diversity, Dance of Unity invites the Dubai community to a collective journey of inquiry into the question of education.

WHY?

Education is the mechanism through which a civilization creates it’s future. That is why the question of education has always been one of the most fundamental questions of every era. And it becomes even more important on an era like ours, when the humanity is standing on an evolutionary threshold.

The DNA of a collective field

As Otto Scharmer and many other thought leaders call it, shifting from an Egosystem awareness to Ecosystem awareness is the essence of leadership at this time. For that to happen, we are called to consciously (re-)invent and give shape to the basic patterns of our collective fields.
How do we come together?
How do we think and sense together?
And how do we create together?

It’s not just about coming together in any form, or with the patterns of the past that we are conditioned with. We need to become aware of the level of attention and intention that we bring to our collective fields, and invent the new patterns and processes that will allow us re-align our energies with the larger systems within which we are operating. These core patterns could actually be seen as the DNA of a new species.

Where is the source of happiness?

Last week, at the end of the Presencing Global Classroom, there were a few questions which we had to answer on the spot. A sort of personal reflection. One of the questions was “What in your current work and life are important sources of energy?” We had 30 seconds to write down what ever came to our minds on the spot.

Here is what I wrote down: