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The Leadership Institute for Global Healing and Transformation
News
The Personal and Planetary Application of Wise Guidance
The vision of LIGHT has grown naturally out of my work, and the knowledge and wisdom gained from 30 years of forging new forms in Medicine. In the 70s, my project was Holistic Medicine and the Mind-Body approach, in the 80s, the large-scale healing potential of Self-Esteem, and in the 90s Deep Healing. My desire now is to apply the principles and techniques of self-healing, using wisdom as a guide, and in a spiritually harmonious way to effect transformation in the larger human sphere.
One key to this expansion is the potential of the World Wide Web. The Internet provides us, for the first time in history, with open and free communication that can facilitate the distribution of wisdom, creative solutions, and high quality information to all. My experience, and that of my students and colleagues, is that the same principles that produce individual healing can produce similar transformation in a family, a community, or even the planet. At all levels of system, when the wise, guiding spirit of humans is love, openness, gratitude, and honesty, healing is the result.
Mission & Vision
To assemble a "Global Think Tank" of the most enlightened and inspired thinkers and leaders, evolve the highest and most appropriate spiritually inspired wisdom, and make it available worldwide to be acted upon by individuals, families, organizations, and governments.
To re-direct our most advanced technologies towards global healing, reversing the direction taken most often by industry and other forces, political and private, with violent, abusive, and human-harming agendas.
To identify and develop, evolve, "package," and distribute, the fundamental concepts that are capable of catalyzing global transformation.
To help develop an open network of trust, using communication technologies such as the Internet to gather information, ideas, creativity, energy, and support.
Looking into that future we can create if enough of us really want it, we see:
Specieswide Self-respect and Self-Esteem: Compassion and authentic respect for the uniqueness, preciousness, spiritual essence, and intrinsic value of each human being. The true meaning of healthy self-esteem has been realized and is so valued that esteeming support has become the norm.
Transformed Healthcare: All human beings have access to Holistic healing tools, (mind, body, emotion, and spirit) and practitioners with a human approach to health care. The collective resources of the world’s wisdom and knowledge are available to every human through purposeful use of modern communication technologies.
Humanity-centered Wedding of Technology and Art: Technology and Art have been brought together to create models, guidance, and rich imagery for deep healing, at all levels of system, in dramatically effective ways.
Unity in Diversity: Widespread awareness of the intrinsic beauty of living beings; social models of control and dominance in human interaction have been replaced. There has been a turning away from things and toward people, and there is a well-developed appreciation of our differences, as well as our similarities.
Love: Love is a positive attractive force that brings people and things together. We have achieved understanding of the experience of Love as an intentional state. We have discovered a love that goes beyond needy, dependence, and dominance to sharing, mutual respect, and deep affection as we appreciate our common essence. Communication is compassionate and caring, sensitive to others’ feelings and needs, supportive and nurturing of the positive and good in others.
Nonviolence: Disagreements are resolved without armed conflict. More subtle forms of violence, like child abuse, child labor, economic sanctions, and crime are disappearing. Unconditional positive regard and respect have become the norm in all human interactions, including individual, family, workplace, community, and government.
Community Values: Values of families, education, nutrition, housing, recreation, wise land use, freedom of information, respect for earth systems, spirituality are widely supported with appropriate action.
- To contribute to personal healing. As Gandhi suggested, personal healing and large scale healing are fundamentally inseparable, ("think globally, act locally"). Our individual suffering is a mirror of the global imbalance.
- To contribute to healing at the Global level: to participate in the growing movement to honestly address the sources (rather than the symptoms) of the maladies and dysfunctions that give rise to those ills that plague us all.
Open Letter: Introducing LIGHT
Dear friends,
Thank you so much for being interested in LIGHT. Looking back, the first part of my life seems to have been a great quest. I was always a rather driven person, and my holy grail was the secret to healing. On a personal level, I certainly needed an enormous amount of healing myself. Who in this world of ours is without fear, anxiety, unwanted habits or physical imbalances?
I also really enjoyed seeing others healed—whether it was seeing a panicked person become calm again, seeing an organ of the body become functional again or simply watching someone have a good time or laugh at a humorous story.
But somehow, through it all, there was a bigger question that drove me. As an only child, I could never understand the pain that people caused each other in life. I watched my parents battle, and I watched the fights at school. I witnessed domestic violence up and down the street where I lived in New York City, and the fights in the schoolyard. I watched the gangs battle it out on the street, and I felt the anxiety of walking through the "turf" of a warlike street gang. (In those days, the gangs weren’t like today’s gangs, which are about selling drugs. In those days, they just liked to beat people up, to see them bleed and thereby enhance their "rep").
Meanwhile, I could never figure out why people didn’t want to be closer to each other. It always seemed to me that if I simply had a brother (and I must admit I had a very idealized image of what a "brother" is) …, just having someone who was very much like me, who loved the same things I loved, and was almost the same age, a permanent playmate—that seemed like heaven.
But all around me people didn’t treat each other the way I thought brothers ought to treat each other. And the shock of discovering the slaughter and destruction of World Wars I and II, and the creepy, inhuman genocide machine of Adolf Hitler, is one from which I still have not fully recovered.
So whether it was the kids, the adults, or even the way the nations of the world treated each other, it was always baffling to me.
Curiously enough, helping individuals heal, I soon found out that many illnesses would respond briefly, and then when a person returned to their family or workplace, their illness would return. I thus found myself having to figure out how to heal these higher levels of system. I was able to adapt those healing techniques at various levels of system, and soon began to realize that the same thing that was being missed in individual healing by modern medicine was missing on a global scale because of the way people and countries thought about each other. I was later to discover that the reason these international faults were allowed to persist was that the people of the planet simply had not discovered the secret of healing.
In the same way, I had the opportunity to "see the universe in a grain of sand, and heaven in a flower, to hold infinity in my hand and eternity in an hour." There it was, such a clear representation of life energy from the cell up through all other living things through the human being. I could see the oneness of life and the interrelatedness of all living things and could perceive that the healing system used by life was similar at all these levels, thus giving rise to the basic principles of deep healing. Healing could be attained by attuning ourselves to spirit and letting this attunement flow through the mind as congruent mental images, through the emotions and finally into the body. (And discovering that this can happen all the way to the cellular level.)
In an analogous way, I was soon able to see how the individual person is much like an individual cell, in relation to the community. Multicellular organisms must have the cells systematically arranged and integrated into a whole, with a nervous system, under the control of some intelligent "overmind" (the cerebral cortex) in order to have a functional animal. In the same way, each of us is like a cell, each is part of an "organ", and these organs can be balanced by a consciousness that is great enough to include the whole of the community.
The problem is that far too many people have been led to feel separate, alone, either thinking that they are much better than everyone else or much worse, or, at any rate, very different. They fight with each other, avoid each other and find it much easier to break up than to stay together.
Even those who do get together in groups tend to consider themselves as separate entities with no connection to the whole, and they fight for their individual survival. It would be like your liver deciding it wanted to concentrate all of its energy on its own growth and, as a result, decided to stop detoxifying the blood. Or if the kidneys decided to put their energy into becoming bigger and having more power than to continue to eliminate urea, the products of metabolism from the body.
I was also dumbfounded to discover that the same thing that injures us at the personal level, thus leaving us stressed out, in pain, sick and tired of being sick and tired, lost, and a slave to our behavior patterns—the same principle applied to families, communities, and the world as a whole. These are the basic principles of healing and LIGHT is the institute for sharing these principles with the rest of humanity.
Primarily there is love and violence.
Just as in working with individuals, what we needed to do was to make certain that the person has the ability to consciously focus and control their awareness, and then learn the internal messages to send to the deeper mind, the emotions and the body so as to produce. In effect, this was taking the highest level of human awareness, that part that can do the wisest balancing, of diet (energy in), exercise (energy out), to create a pathway so that this higher level can determine thoughts, images, emotions and behavior.
From out of this grew LIGHT (Leadership Institute for Global Healing and Transformation). After decades of working on these theories, concepts and practices procedures, the Institute is designed to give everyone an opportunity to participate.
One thing we learn in practicing mind-body medicine, holistic medicine, is that a symptom is simply a flag that is waving which, like a warning light on your dashboard, indicates that something is amiss. Simply covering up the symptom is like covering up the warning light on your dashboard—that’s the problem with symptomatic treatment. I found that what people most needed was deep healing—tools to address the source of the symptoms and bring balance at that level of system.
Similarly, LIGHT reveals that the many symptoms that we see—the Columbine High School shootings, and the violence in schools that doesn’t even make the news anymore, the Arab-Israeli conflict, September 11, Ruby Ridge, the Oklahoma City bombing, the anthrax terrorism, our burgeoning prison population—all these are symptoms of a fundamental imbalance that filters throughout our society, throughout our culture, and weaves its way through most of the cultures on the planet (with the possible exception of the Tibetans).
Just as covering up the symptoms of smallpox or cancer can allow the deeper issue to destroy the patient’s life, health or happiness, so too if we simply attack the symptoms and not the source. It’s like trimming weeds down to the ground; the roots simply grow deeper and the weeds return stronger than before.
If we do not learn the lessons of history, we are forced to repeat them. And every time the price goes up!
So LIGHT endeavors to look beyond the symptoms at the source. This means developing the tools to see deeper.
Every living system has a built-in healing potential. Our goal is to discover that healing potential in larger elements of system, like families, communities, organizations, in relationships.
Ideas Can Be Contagious
Just as a sentence can be broken down into its smallest meaningful units—words—and a chromosome strand can be broken into individual units called genes, human knowledge can be broken down into individual units of learning. Some of these ideas, though simple, can be profound, ("the source of all suffering is desire"), contagious, (a catchy melody), and world-changing, (the wheel, the bow and arrow, or the computer).
Certain ideas have such survival potential that they act like viruses or genes—it’s almost like they intentionally self-propagate. Such ideas were given the name "memes", by Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene". Memes propagate through communication networks and face-to-face contacts between people. The term is the root of the word "memetics," a field of study that postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements, cliches, and phrases. The quote at the start of this section is a meme; that’s why we have all heard it.
Life-changing Ideas
Imagine you come out to your car in the parking lot with an armload of groceries. You fumble around trying to open your front door and, for some reason, you can’t seem to get the key to work, struggle as you might, while trying to avoid eggs falling out of the top of the bag. After about 30 seconds of struggle, you happen to notice a green hat in the back seat of the car. You know that that hat was not there when you got in the car this morning, nor was it there when you got out to go shopping, and that you’ve never seen a hat like that. Almost simultaneously, you glimpse another car that looks exactly like the one you’re jamming your key in, parked just on the other side of the car you’re trying to get into.
Your entire universe changes at that moment. There’s absolutely no reason for you to continue trying to get into the other person’s car, and the obvious and only logical response is to withdraw your key, walk around to your own car and drive away.
In other words, just as the alteration of a single gene can make a profound change in a living being, this tiny bit of information irrevocably alters everything. It moves your consciousness onto a one-way road.
Shift Happens
Beyond such trivial examples, certain ideas may have much more profound and far-reaching consequences. These are profound truths about life, learning experiences that fundamentally transform the way you think, perceive the world, and behave. The messages of Jesus (Agape-Love), Buddha (The Source of All Suffering), for example, represent examples of clear, fundamental ideas which, when their power and truth is fully understood, result in a powerful shift in how you see yourself and live your life. Further, when you understand their value, you are eager to share these ideas with others—they are "contagious."
Each of these examples was known at first to only a few disciples, then took hundreds of years to spread through the many millions who ultimately were to adopt them, both as guides for living their own lives, and as vital truths to pass on to the next generation.
Healing the Planet, One Mind at a Time
Though the world, snug in its handbasket, seems to be hurtling toward certain disaster, I believe we have the power to change the course of history. The growth of the Web affords an unprecedented opportunity for profound ideas (as well as harmful ones) to spread exceedingly rapidly. What remains to be done is for the pieces of this technology to be drawn together to work as a harmonious whole, dedicated to a healing mission, and guided by wise guides/leaders.
What is needed is for a certain number of us (a la "The Hundredth Monkey"), especially those who have power (financial, social, creative, or spiritual) to join forces to transform the entire system.
I believe that there is a set of profound ideas that can be gathered and spread in a very effective way. When this set is identified and learned, it will have the power to awaken us all to begin to connect and to act in ways that will create healing and transformation at every level, from the personal to the planetary. I know it can be done. The question is, "Will we do this while there is still time?" LIGHT is an institute dedicated to helping this to happen. See below for ways to stay in touch with this developing idea.
Sincerely,
Emmett Miller, M.D.
Global Network of Trust
Whither Go We
We are all living in extraordinary times! The irreversible energy that has been born upon the planet via advanced communications will, perhaps, produce nearly as profound a change as that created when Homo Sapiens came into being with the capacity not only to "know"—but with that most extraordinary ability—to "know that it knows."
A few years ago, the world was shocked when Time magazine bestowed its coveted "Man of the Year" title on "The Computer." History has certainly proven the wisdom, if not the incongruity, of this choice. Time will, indeed, prove that the interconnectivity of the Internet and the Worldwide Web can produce an even more profound quantum leap. What kind of leap will we end up making, and who will decide? (it could be me and you).
What remains to be seen, however, what is not clear, is just what the nature of the change wrought in the lives of the human and animal inhabitants of the planet will be. Technically, we know much about what will happen—ever more powerful computers for ever less money will bring the vast majority of the planetary decision makers into direct and nearly instantaneous communication with a vast cross-section of humanity. We will have unprecedented access to the collected data, information, knowledge and wisdom of the human race—even down to the most treasured texts and jealously guarded secrets.
If ever there was a two-edged sword, this is one. It represents a power that can devastate culture and even civilization by placing untold power in the hands of a selfish, greedy, foolish, faceless minority, while sapping the last of the human spirit from the unhappy, feckless body of humanity as a whole.
On the other hand, if we wake up and realize the potential power for good, for healing, that is available, we can create a world of extraordinary beauty and human quality. It is, perhaps, too late to recreate a physical Garden of Eden—there are just too many mouths to feed. Yet what we can create is a far more desirable alternative for us, and for our children and great-grandchildren. I can visualize a world that is far more functional, pleasurable, rewarding and joyful than the one we now inhabit. Let us not forget that more than six million men die on battlefields each year, while two million 12-year-old girls are sold into sexual slavery (including nearly a thousand in the US each day). 25% of the world goes to bed hungry every night, and those with the money and power fiddle away their time discussing stock options, Cuban cigars and German sports cars. I relate these statistics (which hardly scratch the surface) not to depress, but because denial never resolved a problem. Indeed, with such a powerful tool now in our hands, it can spur us on to reclaiming our world.
The Metaweb—A Network of Trust and Wisdom
The key to whether we will seize this opportunity, or continue in our intoxicated stupor, I believe, is whether we have the wisdom to put our energy into forming a network of trust—a worldwide "meta"-Web. Each node would be a Web site that delivers wisdom, and that people can trust. Within and between these nodes, a kind of "overbrain" or "overspirit" could circulate and refine knowledge on a scale never before known, and extract the most profound wisdom. And as each of these nodes is connected, through e-mail, to millions of individual Web users, the outcome could be as profound as the invention of the wheel or writing.
All great things begin with a dream, with a vision, and I know of no other more exciting, motivating, even compelling vision. It is my intention to continue to hold this vision as my service, and to refine and expand my Web site, preparing it to be one of the possible nodes in this "meta"Web. And I invite you to do the same.
I know that if I’m open enough, and if I receive the grace, with each refinement the wheat will become more separated from the chaff, the wisdom will be kept and the other surrendered. As "Blaze" was told by her mother, "Never trust anyone who says, ‘Trust me.’" So we won’t ask this. We (or I) ask only that you consider the potential of this kind of vision, and be open to the possibility that there may be something of value for you as you explore this site. And that any wisdom you draw from it you endeavor to keep alive, present, and operative as a continuous guide in your life.
Join the Network
What you can do now
One way of doing this is to sign up on our (private and unpublished) mailing list. You will receive an occasional, polite, unobtrusive e-mail inviting you to re-connect with that spark of wisdom and perhaps log on for an update on the development of this site and of the metaWeb as a whole. Sign up here.
Articles & Links
(More coming soon)
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