Purpose, Values, and Attitudes of our Community Group
Our New Options Group supports the stated mission of the Institute of Noetic Sciences: To explore the frontiers of consciousness to advance individual, social and global transformation [toward an integrally conscious, healthful, empatheti, full functioning state of being].
Accordingly, our intent is to provide a forum for people who are free thinkers (or want to be) and enjoy participating in a group which expands their consciousness of integrally healthful options. We do this through exploring the pros and cons of a wide variety of ideas -- for more healthful and enjoyable living, aging, dying, and thereafter -- as they newly emerge from scientific, humanistic, and spiritual communities world-wide. We are not a cult or political partisan group.
Certain values and attitudes manifested within our group enhance the quality of our relationships and discussions:
The Value of a Global Health-Oriented Wisdom Society — We value expanding consciousness, an evolving living universe perspective, all-inclusiveness, respect for the worth and dignity of every soul, mutual empathy, resonance, integral health, full functioning, multiple ways of knowing, and mutually healthful ways of coping with challenges..
The Value of Identifying With Timeless Awareness — We value psychospiritual identification with pure, transparent, transtemporal cosmic consciousness as the freest, most aware, centered, balanced, integrative, healthful, empathetic, inner ‘seat’ of self-managing. Accordingly, we value disidentification with all temporal values and behaviors. Thus liberated, we can freely own and view every response to each life situation as a possible option.
A Spirit of Inquiry — We have an attitude of openness to new ideas and research findings — scientific, humanistic, and intuitional — and a willingness to consider them, combined with a feeling of tentativeness and caution until they are proven reliable and valid, or our intuition is such that we are confident enough step out in faith and reality-test them in the laboratory of everyday living.
The Value of Awareness — We often transcend tradition, inhibition, involuntarily conditioned beliefs, values, attitudes, motives, behaviors, and other limiting forces in order to expand our awareness of a wider, higher, deeper range of possibilities and options within and around us.
A Spirit of Collaboration — We share a belief that more effective results come from collaborative relationships than those based on the authority-obedience or “rugged individualist��? models, although those, too, may be useful in emergency situations. Also, we believe that no one person in our group is “the authority��? on everything — we each are the authorities about our own experience. Accordingly, we draw on group resources and learn from each other.
The Value of a Whole Perspective — We are keenly aware and concerned for the needs and interests of our whole selves: spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, social, fun-loving, vocational, economic, esthetic, and ecological. This concern includes such matters as consciousness, conditioning, identity, personality, and self-managing, liberally spiced with a keen sense of humor — all oriented toward the actualization and realization of each participant’s integral consciousness, health, full functioning, wisdom, and self-perceived potential.
An Attitude of Receptiveness — We recognize the importance of accepting healthful constructive feedback about our ideas and opinions (not about one’s personality unless requested) without taking the feedback personally, and/or being a slave to the opinions of others.
The Value of Empathy Blended With Candor — We recognize that but for the luck of the draw, each of us could have been the other soul, and the other us. Recognition of that tends to spawn empathy and delay of judgment until the other’s situation and point of view are more fully understood. Together with this ability to empathize, we often express our convictions to others in a compassionate, candid, and constructive way.
An Attitude of Openness — We are usually sensitive to interpersonal conflict and try to work through issues with an open, empathetic, direct, positive, win-win problem-solving approach, rather than with win-lose approaches, such as denial, suppression, ridicule, shunning, or power plays.
Qs & As
What are Noetic Sciences? The word “noetic��? is derived from “nous��? — the Greek word for ‘inner knowing,’ a kind of intuitive consciousness — beyond our normal senses and the power of reason.��? The Noetic Sciences include the scholarly, scientific study of consciousness, the mind, and human potential, as well as intuitive, instinctive, and spiritual knowing.
How Does New Options Define Spirituality? Our “working definition��? of spirituality is the awareness, courage, and ability to look within and around oneself to trust. What is seen and trusted is a sense of seamless oneness with infinite timeless awareness within and around oneself, and interdependence with our biological bodies and all other beings. Our spirituality includes acceptance of one’s “delegated��? responsibility for conscious co-creative self-managing in harmony with Nature’s laws of centering, balancing, moderation, health, empathy, resonance, full functioning, and recycling.
Joint Affiliation. Our New Options Group enjoys joint affiliation with the Amherst Council on Aging, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, OmniMind Constituents. . . for empathetic and healthy self, social and global systems, and the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst.
When Does the New Options Group Meet? Coordinated by Bob Johnston, meetings are on Wednesdays 2:00 to 4:00 PM in Bangs Community Center, Room 101, Amherst, Masssachusetts. While our discussions are limited to twenty people, if a chair in the discussion group is not available when you arrive you may sit on the periphery and listen.
For a calendar of meeting topics call . . .
Bob Johnston
413-665-8920
or write to him either via
Email: omnimind@admin.umass.edu
or P.O. Box 195
Sunderland, MA 01375-0195
