The Parallel Community is a Parallel Community linking network and a platform where people can express and develop their positive Newsletter contribution for change - human, social, ecological, creative and December 2014 spiritual. International Parallel Community Gathering 2015 TTiiimmeellleessss WWiiissddoomm ffoorr aa CChhaannggiiinngg WWoorrllldd Friday 19th June to Sunday 21st June 2015 - Marazion Community Hall, Marazion near Penzance, Cornwall, UK We are excited to announce the first dedicated gathering of Parallel Community members, Core Team members, and guest speakers. This event will take place during the Summer Solstice Weekend 2015 in Cornwall UK and is shaping up to offer some inspiring ways to integrate ancient knowledge with a positive and practical future outlook. For the first time Parallel Community members and their guests will have a chance to connect together, with talks and presentations from a fascinating variety of speakers, workshops, ceremonies, storytelling, meditations, exhibitions, stalls, nature experiences and more; and plenty of opportunity to connect informally with other members too. Learning from the past to create a better future sounds easy enough but we all know how difficult this can be to put into practice. Hear from some of the people who have found workable solutions to these age-old problems and drawn upon ancient mysteries and wisdom to create a new and better story for their lives. Experience what it might be like to permanently bring the heart back into your life. As we share the web of understanding, we restore humanity's true power and recalibrate our future. This shift of awareness creates the kind of world we all want to see and be a part of. Early in the New Year we will be launching a dedicated website which will give full details of speakers, events, prices, how to book tickets, and so on. This will be a non-residential event, starting at 3pm on the Friday, through to the Sunday closing ceremony at 5pm. As soon as we have firm details on speakers and workshops, we will pass these on to you. And all this will be taking place in the beautiful setting of West Cornwall, beside St Michael’s Mount, at the height of summer. Don’t miss it! 1 Parallel Community and Trencrom Dowsers proudly announce: “In-to-greating Heaven & Earth, Spirit & Science” An interactive afternoon with Dr. Jude Currivan exploring Consciousness and the Healing of our People & Earth This event is taking place on Saturday March 28th 2015, from 1-4.30pm, at Marazion Community Hall, Gwallon Lane, Marazion, Cornwall, TR17 0HW. Tickets are £30 per person or £50 per couple; please book your tickets in advance from Parallel Community: [email protected] This event will be experiential, participative and empowering! Jude will be offering insights and understanding, which will enable you to take away practical 'tools' too. Dr Jude Currivan is a cosmologist, planetary healer and author, and previously one of the most senior businesswomen in the UK. Having grown up as the daughter of a coal miner in the north of England, she has since journeyed to nearly seventy countries around the world and for the last nearly twenty years has lived in the sacred landscape of Avebury. She has experienced multidimensional realities since early childhood and worked with the wisdom keepers, both incarnate and discarnate, of many traditions. Jude integrates leading-edge science, research into consciousness and universal wisdom teachings into a wholistic whole- worldview. This underpins her work aimed at enabling transformational and emergent resolutions to our collective planetary issues, raising awareness and empowering fundamental change and sustainable solutions to global problems. She holds a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Reading in the UK researching ancient cosmologies, and a Masters Degree in Physics from Oxford University specialising in cosmology and quantum physics. She is the author of five non- fiction books currently available in 15 languages and 25 countries including CosMos – a co-creator’s guide to the whole- world co-authored with Dr Ervin Laszlo. Her first fictionalised e-book Legacy is recently available at Amazon. Her international corporate career culminated in her being the Group Finance Director of two major international businesses. She has extensive experience and knowledge of world events, international politics and global economic and financial systems and has spoken on transformational reforms in the UK, US, Europe, Japan and South Korea. For the last sixteen years she has travelled around the world in service to planetary and collective healing, some of which is described in her books The 8th Chakra, The 13th Step and most recently HOPE – Healing Our People and Earth. In 2014 she was invited to become a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle which includes Deepak Chopra, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Jean Houston (www.evolutionaryleaders.net). For more information on Jude Currivan visit her website: www.judecurrivan.com 2 The Journey of Transition By PC Core Team member Michael Baker What does the word “Nature” mean for you? I imagine most newsletter readers have some clear idea and a perspective on nature in a positive and caring way. I would welcome hearing your views about what the word nature means for you. Our personal connection with Nature may be expressed through love of birds and watching their migratory habits and at what time of the year they occur. It may be a butterfly count or helping to protect ancient woodlands from development. For others, it may be proactive badger or fox protection against hunting or extermination. Or yet again, simply capturing that beauty on camera or canvas. Whatever it is, at its core in our thoughts is some deep-rooted recognition of Nature’s value ecologically, culturally, spiritually or aesthetically. It’s hard to determine where these roots are based, but we recognise them beyond any economic value. Were we born with it and our culture knocks it out of us? Have we each come to this planet with different agendas? Whatever the possible answers might be, one thing is pretty certain: the human race, as it has developed as a species, has to redefine its relationship with the intrinsic value of nature, and define it on very different terms, if our children and grandchildren are to experience any quality of life. We collectively are defiling and abusing our Mother upon whom we ultimately depend. It’s a foolish endeavour to explore the galaxy to find another planet to inhabit. Indeed it’s a failed trump card from throw-away society thinking. A different approach to nature is possible. It departs from the utilitarian perspective, and instead recognizes those multiple values of Nature, including ecological, cultural, spiritual, aesthetics. After-all, economic value is just one dimension amongst many; and price is only one indicator amongst many. Nature cannot be measured or valued with only one criterion; rather the valuation should be multidimensional. This approach is not new and has been explored by ecological economists as well as environmentalists. Once we have accepted the need for alternative values, the next step is to understand the intrinsic value of Nature. Intrinsic value is not human-centric and exists in the absence of humans. It existed long before humans “discovered the Garden of Eden” and the nature of the universe suggests it will exist long after the human race finishes playing its part in the greater scheme on our planet Mother Earth. What matters is how we individually and collectively tend the “Garden”. What matters is that we don’t neglect the warning signals. The transition we must make in order to reunite and balance us with Nature is the most pressing issue we have on our collective agenda right now. This is the platform of the Being Nature education initiative which is being launched right now. There is strong hope that collectively the human race is waking up and heading in the right direction with both national and local initiatives. For example Ecuador and Bolivia are writing the Rights of Nature into constitutional laws; and there are local initiatives in U.S.A. In Europe a citizen petition for a law of Ecocide is in the making. Being Nature is being developed to become an interactive tool for both formal and community education, and help is welcome. 3 The Gift of Life – a story of planetary rebirth By PC Core Team member Nathascha Heijen I woke up at 4:44 am with a thought. It was triggered by a question that Michael Baker poses in his Being Nature article (above): 'What do you see as nature?' Upon awakening my inspired thought was: Nature is the collective mind of all organic life-forms originating from and belonging to the planet we know as Earth. I quickly became less sleepy and increasingly more with land. Interestingly, in every cultural variation the inspired to get up and start a quest: which I did. The word earth means 'soil' or 'ground'. quest started with my first question: where does the So who is this 'God' that created the land and the name earth come from? A bit of research showed that it atmosphere on this planet? A supreme being named is the modern name for the Old English word ‘eor(th)e’ or 'God'? Or is it a god from a visiting, terra-forming, space- ‘ertha’. Before that it was the Anglo-Saxon word ‘erda’ faring race sometimes referred to as 'gods'? Or is it all which has strong ties with the word 'erde' used in just the happy result of coincidental natural Germanic tribes. In Norse mythology Erde was a giantess. arrangements? How about 'a carefully crafted The Dutch, whose land was also inhabited by Germanic manifestation of the original omnipresent Source that tribes, call earth 'aarde'.