I recently heard the activist Paul Cienfuegos on Alternative Radio promoting a bottom up, grassroots approach to building a more just society through challenging corporate ”rights.”  He made the point that on the basic issue of democracy and the people’s right to self-determination, progressives can find common cause with people across the political spectrum. He said as progressives it’s time to step out of our comfort zones and start to talk with our more conservative brothers and sisters in order to build a stronger, bigger democracy movement. I like that message.

Obama’s reelection also seems to suggest that the time is right for such an expansion of heart, mind, and organizing. And of course people are always talking about the need for bigger, broader social change movements. This reminded me immediately, however, of a limiting factor that gets little air time: immaturity.

Ceinfuegos didn’t talk about the Great Turning but I will. And in talking about the Great Turning, success is hard to define and measure. What is clear is that deep healing and growth at the personal, interpersonal, and societal levels is needed. Ultimately this means an expanded sense of self and that boils down to maturity. We enter a period where we will either grow up together or continue the devastation and desecration of the world.

Here again it has to be said that I believe the root cause of the crisis we face is the worldview based on separateness – the materialistic, mechanistic, and ultimately life-denying worldview. It’s a worldview that reflects spiritual and psychological immaturity, and it’s a wound we all share. One of its manifestations is the difficulty of sustaining and deepening the kind of interpersonal relationships the Great Turning requires.

In her book, Creating a Life Together, Diana Leafe Christian found that decades of experience with communal living experiments shows that 90% of theses initiatives fail because the people involved can’t get along. These are people with many shared values and they still can’t make it work. How can we expect to build meaningful relationships and movements with people we may share only a few core values with and are not used to talking to? This is a key issue because the work before us is imagining and creating an entirely different society, one that is just, peaceful, and environmentally sane. It won’t be easy, will probably take a long time, and things will get worse before they get better.

One starting point is admitting that we have growing up to do and lack useful tools that can help guide us when the going gets tough in our interactions with other people. In order to get specific, I want to present one tool that I work with called Above the Line (and I credit the peacemaker and Buddhist priest Fleet Maull with introducing me to it). Outlined as a simple diagram, Above The Line can be a kind of map or compass that helps us orient toward adult thinking and behavior.

Above the Line:

Personal Responsibility

Accountability (to self and others)

Prioritize Relationships

Be in the Present Moment

______________________

Below the Line:

Blame, Justification,

Resentment, Need to Be Right

Being above the line is the adult way of being. It means taking personal responsibility and prioritizing relationships. The more responsibility we accept for ourselves and our relationships, the more power we have to take effective action. In doing this we shift out of patterns of blame, justification, resentment, and the need to be right.

Relationship is not 50/50, it’s 100/100. You are 100% responsible for your experience in relationships – for your own emotions, needs, actions – everything having to do with your experience. Others may trigger you but how you respond is always your responsibility. When you take 100% responsibility for yourself you are living in the present moment and coming from a true adult perspective. It requires honesty and integrity.

You know you are responding below the line when either blame, justification, resentment, or the need to be right are present. If you get below the line with somebody, you can take action. You can say, “Hey, you know, I wasn’t taking responsibility there and that’s not how I want to be. I want to own my part and not blame you.”  If you take action to clean it up, that gets you above the line. That’s accountability. Accountability also means holding others accountable in a peaceful, loving way.

Above the line behavior changes the whole relationship dynamic. The other person may look at you funny and who knows what they’ll do. It doesn’t matter – you are only responsible for you. The hard part is staying above the line unconditionally – regardless of what they say or do. No one is above the line all the time but you can make a commitment to do your best.

I think tools such as Above the Line and the commitment to using them will be invaluable for guiding us through the difficult work and the growing up inherent in the Great Turning. It does boil down to relationship and nothing puts us on the spot like our relationships with other people.