What Inspires a Radical Collaboration?
What inspires a radical collaboration? This is really two questions in one. One is what inspired me to begin a project calling for radical collaboration. The other is what inspires us to participate in a radical collaboration. I will attempt to answer both.
A few days earlier I found Indiegogo on the internet. It was one of those times when one link leads to another and I couldn't really say where it all started, but I was intrigued by what I saw there. Diverse projects. Artsy projects. And a funding system that was a little more relaxed than the all-or-nothing program in Kickstarter (though there are interesting projects there too and I noticed that some people are running concurrent projects using both).
Then I saw the TED video with Ramona Pierson. Let me interject here that I do not have tv. I get TED videos by way of an iTunes subscription. Lately I've been taking one evening a week to watch all the episodes I've downloaded that week. I watched Ramona Pierson tell her story of being hit by a car, being declared dead numerous times, lived in a coma for 1.5 years, was blind and could not speak when she awoke. She stood on a stage, sighted, able to speak, and explained what happened. I'll leave it to you to watch the video for the details.
I am fascinated with these kinds of stories. I think we all go through experiences like this -- not as extreme perhaps, or maybe as extreme -- but we usually miss understanding what we are going through as we go through it. What was different about Ramona's story was that she told not only the story from her own perspective, but also from the perspective of the people around her. She used the term "radical collaboration."
The only way I can think of to describe what happened when I heard this term is to say that the words simply lit up in my mind. I had the sense that radical collaboration could be another term for miracle. It was the way certain things, people, events come together and produce something greater than any one alone could, yet would not be the same if any one was not there. We could think of any number of instances like that, couldn't we? In Ramona's case, she was sent to a senior citizens' home after she regained consciousness, and it was her neighbors who gathered around to put her back together.
Radical collaboration was how A Course in Miracles was published in the first place. Radical collaboration was how A Course in Miracles was placed into the public domain. Both were the right thing to happen at the right time.
With the idea of radical collaboration on my mind, I put the url, indiegogo.com/woom, into the holiday newsletter I was writing, then rushed back online to make sure it was available on indiegogo. I signed up, got the url, and sent the newsletter.
What inspired me to begin a radical collaboration project was hearing about another radical collaboration project: Ramona Pierson's. Do the people in Ramona's senior citizens' home know what they inspired? Does Ramona know that I watched her tell the story? Do the producers of the TED video, or conference, know that I watched the video?
What inspires a radical collaboration? The question almost answers itself. To inspire is to let spirit in.
We come together after natural disasters, and even unnatural disasters. We often don't know at the time we do these things why or what will come of them.
We ask in prayer or meditation for an experience and it comes together in ways we could not plan.
What was it about Ramona's rehabilitation that the world needed? Did anyone plan this? Was it just for Ramona? I would say that it was so she could tell the story and we could see spirit in life, spirit alive in this story. In any case, I saw it and, because my focus is on healing and spirit, it was meaningful to me.
The entire Course in Miracles story is a miraculous event, still happening I believe, including my part in producing The Workbook of One Mind. Will you help make it happen? At each level of help, you receive something of practical value for yourself. Beyond that, together each supporter will be part of something much larger.
Historically, we attributed miracles to one individual per event. Today miracles are for us in collaboration with one another.
Thank you.
