Making Global Sense

Overview of Making Global Sense

Part I. Our Global Awakening
Where Paine explained the nature of government and the rule of law, I explain that the way we make sense of life governs our lives. A billion of us now see our oneness as a fact; we’re building a global sense movement.

Part II. Kings and Other Masters
Where Paine blamed tyranny on kings and hereditary succession, I name alpha male rule and authority addiction, hidden by split perceptions, for the wealth and power abuses now menacing life and liberty on earth

Part III. Thoughts on the State of World Affairs
Where Paine surveyed the state of colonial American affairs. I survey the state of modern world affairs, the dire threats to democracy and the planet, the dangers of tyranny in our lands and in our minds.

Part IV. Our Ability to Change the World
Where Paine proposed how to win a revolutionary war and create a republic, I propose how to wage an evolutionary campaign for world enlightenment, perhaps with direct republics someday, if we do the inner and outer work,

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again“

Thomas Paine

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Thomas Paine makes sense today

Common Sense offers grounded hope for our urgent evolution in these modern times that try our souls.

Thomas Paine’s pivotal 1776 essay swung public opinion in favor of the the American Revolution, which likely would have failed without his writings. He used logic and reason to argue for freedom from kings.

In our troubled century, as climate change persists and tyrants insist, we again need such an inspirational call for liberation from all wannabe kings. We need sound reasons for evolving into mature self-government, both in society and within ourselves. We need mindful self rule.

Common Sense shifted the course of human events. Paine was blessed to write the right book at the right time. He voiced in plain terms for his day the big ideas of The Enlightenment, a social and cultural movement in Europe and America. Rejecting excuses for absolute despotism, such Enlightenment writers as Locke and Rousseau and Paine mapped out the rational basis f0r freedom and democracy.

Paine’s Age of Enlightenment human values were shared by Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and others in Europe and America. Their views on natural rights and natural law are the original ideas and ideals of democracy without monarchy behind the American Revolution, the French Revelation and republican revolutions ever since around the world.

Thomas’s Paine’s Common Sense was crucial in changing how we make sense of governing ourselves. Monarchy gave way to democracy. Centuries later, we risk democracy backsliding into autocracy, The ancient habits of tyranny are cunning and powerful. We need to swing popular opinion back toward freedom.

Making Global Sense applies Paine’s reasoning to our world’s problems. As reality bites, it makes global sense for global thinkers to unite and act, alone and together, while we can.

For healing our planet and maturing into sensible liberty, we need hope, rooted in reason, that gives us the courage and faith to do the inner work and outer work of personal and global transformation.  Unfounded hope is helpless. Seeing our global reach gives us power to get up, stand up.

By reviving insights and inspiration from Thomas Paine and the 18th century Enlightenment, Making Global Sense encourages our 21st century enlightenment. Giving us hope, more than a billion global thinkers on earth are getting organized. What happens next is up to us.

“Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight most often, are within.”

Thomas Paine

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Changing what makes sense

As we face massive climate change, humanity is at a global tipping point between autocracy or democracy.

We live in rare pivotal age. Globalization and climate upheavals are disrupting civilizations worldwide. Massive waves of change are hitting humanity as deeply as when we shifted from agrarian to industrial societies. Life on earth will never be the same.

Future shock stuns many of us. Life changes faster than we can cope. We feel confused, unsafe and victimized. Hate mongers prey on our fear and anger, turn our grievances against us. We give away our right of consent and dissent to lying leaders promising to save us from ourselves.

Imagine humanity making global sense of life on earth. An awareness of our planetary oneness, unity, interdependence, connectivity, coherence (said in any ling0) leads us to balance freedom and responsibility, so we enjoy both liberty and safety. Mindful self rule guided by global sense sustains freedom and democracy.

Changing how we make sense of life changes our lives and our world. We can choose to adopt a preset awareness of our universal oneness. Reasoning starts from a premise that everything is part of everything else. We can choose to accept evidence that all existence is light, so we each are light being us in all of our forms. We each are unique while one with all, innately equal and naturally free.

When alertness to our natural unity in diversity goes from slogan to reality, the shift in mindset changes the way we make sense of life on earth. The shift in our worldview makes freedom and democracy doable.

In scary times that test our faith and our will to carry on, culminating decades of work, I wrote a book to offer grounds for hope, so more of us choose to unite and take action for the climate and democracy, while we can. I want to help create critical mass for a quantum leap of humanity into world enlightenment.

Making Global Sense aims to help shift how we make since of life on earth. Paine speaks for me in his introduction to Common Sense:

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

Thomas Paine

Why My Story

A book of ideas needs to balance head and heart. Framing my ideas within my life story, writing in present tense to stay real, I’m telling the tale behind the book’s creation.

My life lessons may be useful to you. For instance, fleeing a cult in my twenties taught me about alpha male rule, authority addiction and split perceptions. Four decades as a media and politics journalist taught me the hard ways of the world. Handling media for global thinkers like R. Buckminster Fuller and John Denver taught me the power of vision to create reality. A lifetime of spiritual seeking taught me about opening to oneness. Nearly dying from cancer as an elder taught me the futility of ego and value of mindfulness.

My model for interweaving essay and narrative is Zen and the Art of Motor­cycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig. His adept union of theory and memoir helped me rediscover my true self when I felt the most lost. As a writer, I like what he did there. I’m emulating his approach and hoping you benefit by the blending.

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