“Dream without an End” and the mission of the Sacred Inclusion Network
I had this dream that’s evolved over time that you’re sharing by being here with me.
In the spring of 1995, I and three colleagues started what was then called The Diversity and Spirituality Network.
We were a community of people who wanted to explore what we called “the nexus between diversity and spirituality.”
Zachary Gabriel Green helped me establish the Network.
The Diversity and Spirituality Network or DSN, as we called it, was a mix of people from two overlapping demographics: people who were concerned with identity issues, and a collection of trainers and organization development people who liked to create experiential exercises.
Our major activity was facilitating live member-led events called Explorations in Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York City. Members created experiential events on themes of interest to our community. These alternated between private, member-only events and public ones. We used the best of the exercises in 3-day public events, in venues such as the Organizational Development Network and Temple University.
For a number of reasons, the organization disbanded In 1999, only to have me reestablish it in 2016 and some years after that re-christening it, the Sacred Inclusion Network.
During this time, the organization’s mission changed.
We were no longer focused as much on identity or diversity issues and more interested in spirituality (a word I’ve never liked, but that’s another story).
We wanted to create community for unaffiliated spiritually-oriented people, many of whom didn’t experience community in their lives.
And that mission more recently evolved to giving people in that group tools and techniques to support the needs of the changing planet, and to support their desire to “change the world”.
The principal tool and technique for this was a workshop I created and taught early this spring (2023) in Latin America called Leading the Change or Lidera el Cambio.
By sharing this workshop, my dream was to create an interconnected network of social changemakers. and establish communities of practice all over the world.
Coming back to the US early this year, I began to question this dream and to think that on some level I’d failed.
I wondered — and continue to wonder — how realistic I was being.
More precisely, I wondered if I had the capacity to make it happen.
Having been back in the US for two months now. I am still wondering.
While I question my idea, I’m simultaneously in the process of listening more deeply, allowing my plan be fine-tuned.
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Many, many years ago (1970s?), I attended a lecture by the late Michio Kushi (Read about Michio here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_Kushi)
One of the things Michio said made a big impression on me.
He told us that he was living his dream, which he described as a “dream without an end.”
“Michio, I simply can’t imagine a dream without an end!” someone in the audience responded,
“There ARE such dreams,” he said. “You must find them!”
In my life, realistic or not, I have found my dream without an end.
I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see it come true, but that doesn’t matter.
It’s more about aligning myself to it, being a midwife to its natural birth.
My dream is really a subset of the overtone of Michio’s dream.
The establishment of “One Peaceful World.”
Although my way of going about it is a bit unique, I have to believe I’m sharing this overtone dream with many people, all over the world.
Read Part Two here: https://angelojohnlewis.medium.com/dream-without-an-end-part-two-7696b4760ca7
