Third and central panel of the painting

THE WORLD-VISION

By Rosie Jackson

100 QUALITIES: THE KEYS TO TRANSFORMATION

What qualities must we develop to ensure peace and become “one”? The UNITY TAROT offers 100 “positive” qualities which can serve as a point of orientation. The more we voluntarily and conscientiously adhere to them out of love for ourselves and our fellow humans, the faster we will move towards harmonious living. The transformation of the 100 global villagers does not lie in increased material wealth but in increased demonstration of these positive qualities, and we the readers are invited to manifest them also.

IF THE WORLD WAS A VILLAGE

Imagine a tiny village of 100 people where the demographics of the village mirror the demographics of the world’s global population. This is what the village would look like:

NATIONALITY AND RELIGION

60 Asians, 12 Europeans

14 Americans (North and South), 13 Africans, 1 Oceanian

34 Christians, 22 Moslems, 15 Hindus, 14 non-religious,

6 Buddhists, 9 other religions

AGE, HEALTH, LIVING CONDITIONS

51 women, 49 men, 50 are under 26

75 live below the poverty line, 50 are undernourished

3 children are deformed

17 have unsafe water

16 women have been sexually abused

WEALTH

18 are overweight, 20 smoke, 10 drink

6 own 59% of the world`s entire wealth

HOUSING AND EDUCATION

80 have inadequate housing

1 is a refugee

21 cannot read

1 has studied at university level

1 woman is a teacher

GLOBAL POPULATION

1 will soon die. 2 will soon be born

MAIN LANGUAGES

14 speak Mandarin

6 speak Hindi

6 speak Spanish

6 speak English

3 speak Bengali

3 speak Portuguese

3 speak Russian

2 speak Japanese

2 speak German

(Original text, State of the Village Report by Donella Meadows, Sustainability Institute, USA, c. 2005)

GLOBAL VILLAGER 1: CLARITY

Woman aged 24 from Chongqing, China. Non-religious,

lives in poverty and is undernourished, literate,

speaks Mandarin, is sexually abused

A thin woman is brushing her teeth in a women’s labour camp. She shares the toothbrush she is using with twenty-three other women prisoners. As so often, her mind is crowded with harrowing memories which circle endlessly in a spiral of painful humiliation. A sense of dread grips her heart when she remembers the weekly political meeting of her work unit. She recalls her name being called out and officials denouncing her as a practitioner of a forbidden school of Buddhist thought.

She is flooded with memories of utter desolation and helplessness in face of this accusation. Following deportation, she now finds herself with hundreds of other women in a rehabilitation camp which is ruled by leering armed guards. She has no religious beliefs and has been wrongly accused. Some of her fellow inmates are tortured on a regular basis. She herself has been raped and lives in fear of it happening again.

Astonishingly, the woman is suddenly released from one moment to the next. When she asks why, the prison warden states that her arrest was a mistake, a case of mistaken identity. The woman receives no apology. Now, back home, she is eternally grateful every time she is allowed to use her own toothbrush, although she has no running water or private basin. Instead, she spits into the gutters of Chongqing, her home and one of China’s largest cities. She is not complaining, as she previously did, about the stench of the open sewers, the polluted air or the dim, damp room with the tiny barred window where she works for a pittance as a seamstress. Instead, she feels gratitude for her freedom, for every mouthful of rice, for the fresh tangy taste of a lemon. She is thinking about the barred windows and doors which still incarcerate her new friends. Despite their imprisonment, they were always kind and radiated inner strength.

At the end of the day, the seamstress closes her eyes in secret meditation and prayer, trying intuitively to see what steps to take next – steps which become clearer and clearer the more she connects with divine energy. As she progresses along this path, it becomes more and more obvious what is actually unimportant or peripheral. Slowly, she overcomes her fear of the obstacles in her path, recognizing them as agents of ‘good’, forcing her to reassess where she wants to go. Like her friends, she is able to create an oasis of calm for herself, irrespective of outward circumstances. She experiments regularly, going to places where chaos rules, in order to practise how to remain focused. Eventually she comes to the understanding that it is possible to exist anywhere if one knows how to build an oasis.

Questions

What is not yet clear?

How are you torturing yourself?

How can you improve the next day?

What if you always followed your intuition?

How often do you create an oasis of calm?

Do you take time daily to contemplate your purpose?

Which small daily pleasures can you be thankful for?

How seriously do you see meditation as a means to clarify?

What prevents you from defining your wishes more precisely?

Given that it is possible to view any situation from a different perspective, who have you ‘wrongly’ accused? Yourself?

What obstacles have restricted your freedom to show you that you have freedom to act?

Have you understood that you must be clear about your starting point if you are to progress in any direction?

Supposing everyone focussed less on the material and more on their relationships to their fellow human beings?

GLOBAL VILLAGER 2: HELPFULNESS

Girl aged 13 from Hebei Province, China.

Christian, literate, speaks Mandarin

A single candle burns in the grey light of early morning. It is five o’clock, and a young girl is already awake, studying English alone by candlelight at a simple wooden bench. She attends a middle school in the depths of the Chinese countryside, but she dreams of escape. Learning English – and later studying abroad – is the vision which drives her on, which helps her bear the overwhelming feeling of loneliness which pervades her daily life.

For her, this is the ticket to freedom, far away from her irritating family and spoilt brother, far away from the suffocating rules of her community and from her life of rural deprivation. There is no water except for a river nearby, and one set of filthy communal toilets. Most of the 600 pupils are boarders and sleep ten to a room, but she sleeps at home because her family lives and works within the school compound. An hour later, when the six o’clock reveille is played over the loudspeakers, she crams her books back into her shabby green army bag, content that she will be well ahead of her classmates in the next lesson.

When she returns home from school one afternoon, she notices that her small brother is hiding under the quilt on his bed. The girl is so used to being ignored by him that she assumes this is just another variation of turning away. But she gradually realizes that he is actually crying – something which has never happened before. Suddenly, the girl’s heart softens towards him and she asks him what is troubling him. Slowly, the boy calms down and opens up towards his sister. As a second child under the “one child one family” policy, he has no right to go to school, and now he desperately wants to learn to read. The girl is astonished to hear that he is so unhappy and offers to teach him. Together they sit in the meadow by the river, sometimes learning new Chinese characters, sometimes just watching the fluorescent green insects and butterflies of brilliant blue. As time passes, the girl realises that she herself was the cause of her own loneliness, and that this dissipates when she embraces her family and classmates.

Now she no longer uses her knowledge to show her superiority, but shares it with others. The lessons she gives her brother by the river are followed by play. They throw stones into the water which ripples and glints in the sunlight, and she knows that she too is sending out ripples of positive energy into her surroundings. The girl treasures the clarity and fluidity of water, trying to emanate it in her behaviour, watching it flow effortlessly and unhesitatingly into every hollow. In the midst of nature, she has no long-term plans or distractions: she can just ‘be’. And at night she listens to the gentle frog chorus – a sound so familiar, but a sound to which she never paid much attention before. She recognises its beauty and it lulls her into a long, peaceful sleep.

Questions

What if everyone lived in the present?

To what extent is your loneliness self-imposed?

Which misleading ticket to freedom are you pursuing?

Is your focus on the future blinding you to present issues?

What if you were as clear, fluid and unhesitating as water?

What if everyone realized that it is in giving that we receive?

Could you go into the countryside more often to gain solace?

What sort of ripples do you intend to send out into the world?

What if everyone worldwide were prepared to release their ego?

If you achieve this freedom, can you be sure that you will be completely content?

What if everyone honestly addressed their own needs and those of others?

Do the demands of your ego lead you to overlook the needs of your colleagues or family?

GLOBAL VILLAGER 3: SELF EXPRESSION

Boy aged 8 from Hebei Province, China.

Christian, literate, speaks Mandarin

A small Chinese woman stands somewhat helplessly in front of her son. His behaviour is often confusing: he is excited and then subdued, hyperactive then listless, friendly and then suddenly aggressive. Now he refuses to answer any of her questions and she has no idea why he is angry. In the end, she offers him a piece of sugar cane and the boy runs off to a field near the river to eat it in peace. He often plays there by himself, churning up the sandy soil with a stick, and if anyone disturbs him they are lucky not to get hit.

The boy knows that no one can understand how confused he feels. He is made to feel special because he is the son his parents always longed for, but as the second child under the “one child one family” policy, he is also ‘illegal’ and somehow wrong. Perhaps, if he tries to do enough good deeds during his lifetime, the yellow crane will fly him up to heaven, but he does not know how to start. Perhaps he should try and take a bus to the famous Yellow Crane Pagoda in Wuhan to ask for help? Perhaps the yellow crane will be angry if he does not stop being bad?

The boy also wants to learn to read, but he cannot. He is not allowed to go to school like his elder sister. When she ignores him, he feels upset and runs away whenever she comes home. The next time the boy refuses to answer her questions, his mother suddenly explodes with rage and leaves him alone. The boy runs to his bed, hides under his quilt and starts to cry for the very first time. To his great surprise, his sister comes up to him and speaks to him softly, asking him what the matter is. Gradually, he finds words to express the confusion he feels, and confides his secret desire to read.

When she offers to teach him, he can hardly believe it. Could she really be so very different from what he had always thought? When he worries about the yellow crane, he tells his mother. She cradles him in her arms and says that the yellow crane temple is not something to be afraid of. If a god exists, she thinks that he cannot be angry. Probably he or she is a caring and generous person who doesn’t have any rigid or confining rules.

The young boy realizes that the more he expresses his fears and desires, the more content he becomes. The sudden explosions of anger which shocked his playmates are on the decrease. When the boy is happy, his enthusiasm is infectious and he dances around with the other children in the compound. He realises that he is special and that everyone else is special too.

Questions

Are you aware of how special you are?

Do you regard other people as special?

What if the ‘divine’ or ‘god’ never punishes?

Suppose it is impossible to make mistakes?

Which feelings have you not fully expressed?

What makes you feel ‘wrong’? Are you wrong?

What would you do next if everything was ‘allowed’?

In what way could your behaviour be judged as confusing?

Is there anyone you are ignoring or not fully acknowledging?

What fear causes a dreadful feeling whenever you ask for help?

How often does your judgment of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ determine your behaviour?

Supposing you voice your emotions the moment you feel them?

What if ‘punishment’ is a result of negative individual and collective energy?

How would the world change if our decisions were not based on

what we personally consider ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but on what ‘works’ for us and what ‘works’ for the world?

GLOBAL VILLAGER 4: COMMUNICATION

Girl aged 9 from Qinghai, China. Non-religious, lives in poverty and is undernourished, literate, speaks Mandarin

On the banks of a wide river in western China, a huge Buddha has been carved out of a cliff. Sitting on the Buddha’s toe, a small girl crouches with her knees pulled up tightly to her chin. She lives with her parents in one dark room with a small window.

In the afternoons, when her schoolwork is done, she is allowed to go out by herself for an hour. Rushing down the crumbling brick stairway, she escapes from the old, musty building into the light and on towards the river where the stone Buddha towers above the water.

She watches boats bringing new tourists. Their clothes and language are strange to her. Their voices seem loud and coarse, and she resents the way they swarm over the Buddha’s feet.

When foreign tourists want to take a picture of her sitting on the Buddha’s toe, she turns away, indicating that the sun is too strong for her eyes. Scowling, she covers her face with her hands and wishes they would stop interfering and leave her favourite place alone for ever.

One day, the girl takes her usual afternoon walk to the Buddha to find her path blocked by a fence: as an important historical site, it requires some renovation. The child is devastated. It seems that her favourite place is not actually hers at all.

For two long weeks, she is not allowed in. When it is finally reopened, she skips over the Buddha’s feet and sings with delight. Visiting Chinese tourists capture her joy on film, and she tells them why she is so happy. In return, they tell her interesting stories about their travels, describing wild birds on a big lake to the west, and telling her about a sprawling Lama monastery an hour away where beams are painted in brilliant colours and where the air is alive with the sound of smiths hammering metal.

The girl listens attentively to these stories. She also attempts to greet foreign visitors with smatterings of English which she has picked up from an old text book. They laugh and sometimes take a picture of her sitting on the Buddha’s feet, holding a large leaf over her head for a sunshade. But instead of sitting on the big toe – a favourite place for taking photographs – she leaves it free for others, preferring to sit on the middle toe instead. When one lady asks for her address and promises to send her a postcard, the girl can hardly contain her excitement. Every morning she rushes to the post-box in feverish anticipation.

Questions

Do you notice others?

How do you approach them?

What fear lies behind your reactions?

What role does your ego play in conflict situations?

Does any place or any person belong entirely to you?

What if you share more of your personal experiences?

What if everyone you meet had a personal message for you?

What prevents you from improving your communication skills?

How would the world change if there were no ‘foreigners’, only sisters and brothers?

How do you react – or overreact – when others encroach on your privacy?

How would the world change if all encounters could be perceived as inspiring and uplifting?

GLOBAL VILLAGER 5: DEEP PERCEPTION

Woman aged 25 from Hunan, China. Non-religious, literate, speaks Mandarin, sexually abused

A pregnant woman is sitting at a simple wooden table opposite her husband. Her defiance of official rules has put her in a dreadful predicament. Her determination to have a child as soon as possible has blinded her to the necessity of applying beforehand for official permission from the family planning bureau.

Every day for the last month, work unit officials have burst into their cramped flat. They have torn the newspaper off the walls, glued on to keep out the damp. They have spat on the concrete floor, used up all the coal and eaten all provisions. Practically nothing is left.

The officials insist that aborting the baby is for the communal good and that everyone must adhere to the “one child one family” policy if the country is to survive. The woman and her husband feel powerless to act and put on a brave face. Finally, the woman admits defeat and goes to the family planning bureau to say that she will undergo an abortion.

Following the operation, the woman gives into her pain. Expression of her torment at losing the child triggers off other memories of unexpressed grief which she has long since buried in the past. She admits to her husband that she was sexually abused in her youth, thus hindering true understanding and communication in their own relationship. In their subsequent long conversations, they learn more deeply about each other’s needs and fears.

They are sad that their plans to have a child have been thwarted in a terrible and inhumane manner, but they also recognise that it has actually improved their own personal development as a couple – and will thus benefit any child they have in the future. They decide to wait a bit longer before starting a family. Much later, they come to the very difficult realisation that the aborted child was an angel who chose them as parents in order to bring them this understanding.

The woman becomes increasingly attuned to her own needs and wishes. She enjoys a new, deep intimacy with her husband and learns to assist others using her increased powers of perception. Later she is able to meet the challenges of raising a child with grace and maturity.

Questions

Are you powerless?

How often do you show your pain?

How often do you put on a ‘brave face’?

How much of your life is already planned?

What choices have you had the power to make?

Supposing we are all gods and goddesses with immense power?

How often do you decide to go ahead with fixed plans without communicating them?

What would happen if you looked deeper, beyond the story to the reason for the story?

Are your actions attuned to your real desires?

Given that everyone has ‘time’, do you use it for what you consider important?

How much time do you consciously set aside for relaxation, meditative rituals or ‘nothing’?

What ‘dreadful’ events have you created to provide yourself with greater insight?

Supposing everyone in the world was fully aware of the fact that every negative action and every negative thought has a negative impact on our environment?

GLOBAL VILLAGER 6: INTEGRITY

Man aged 23 from Inner Mongolia, China.

Non-religious, literate, smokes, speaks Mongolian

A pile of ropes and household utensils lies on the ground, spread out on a worn cloth. A man crouches stiffly beside it, hoping that he will sell enough to buy food for the day. His present daily grind is fairly monotonous, making a meagre living from reselling an assortment of items sold to him by an acquaintance. Whereas he suspects that these may be stolen goods, he asks no questions. Every day is the same, squatting placidly at the edge of the street, without much hope for the future. Although he senses that he could make more of his life, he prefers to keep to familiar places and people.

One morning, the man bumps into his supplier who is carrying a large statue of a dragon. He insists that it will bring a lot of money at the market and, although the seller’s first impulse is to refuse, something makes him take the dragon away with him. It triggers memories of a visit to Wudang Monastery as a child. The man relives the sudden sense of wonder he felt when confronted by a huge statue of a dragon in the monastery grounds. As a small boy, he imagined flames shooting out of the dragon's nostrils and turning into a large fire, just as big as the huge uncontrolled coal fires where his father worked in Ningxia Province.

As a small boy, he playfully put his head into the dragon’s mouth and laughed. The man is filled with sorrow at his present lack of youthful energy and daring, and he decides to revisit Wudang to regain inspiration. When he finds the dragon again and puts his head into its mouth, he suddenly knows that he has got to change. He decides to confront his supplier about the stolen goods and discovers that his suspicions are well-founded.

Although he feels strangely ‘empty’ because he has lost his source of income, he realises that everything which is empty is also full of potential and possibility. He starts to regard the world in a more critical way. Buddhism becomes increasingly attractive to him with its emphasis on learning and questioning rather than accepting assertions uncritically. The man is especially attracted to Tibetan Buddhism in which form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Neither is real or unreal. Both are existent and non-existent. Full of optimism and vitality, he turns a new page in his life and is led by the principle of integrity.

Questions

What have you ‘stolen’?

Is it time to take a break?

Who do you need to confront?

How can you light your hidden inner fire?

Have you stolen something from yourself?

How much of your behaviour is controlled?

How can you ignite your own divine energy?

Is it time to take concrete steps in a new direction?

What extraordinary act would lift you out of passivity?

Can you imagine that you are holding on to something which prevents you from experiencing abundance?

What if turning a new page in your life reveals an empty space full of potential?

What would happen next if you lost your fear and started to question critically?

What if no-one simply accepted and became critical?

What if the actions of every member of our planet were governed by integrity and honesty?

GLOBAL VILLAGER 7: MINDFULNESS

Woman aged 25 from Xingiang, China. Muslim, lives in poverty and is undernourished, literate, speaks Kazak

It is dawn on the snowline of the Tien Shan Mountains in northern China, and a woman dashes outside to fill her blackened kettle with snow. Her eyes dart fearfully beneath her green headscarf, and her reddened cheeks are roughened by wind. She carries wood, churns milk, cooks, cleans, sews and breastfeeds, giving continuously without a second thought. She tends the children and the goats, but she hardly ever speaks, resenting her isolation on the mountain.

Late that evening the men return on their horses after successfully selling some of their animals. As they sit cross-legged round the fire drinking, they decide kill the last kid to celebrate the occasion. The woman feels a shudder of terror but covers her face to hide her feelings. She lies motionless under the furs next to her small sleeping son, but she knows that the goat's head is being roasted over the fire in the flickering semi-darkness of the yurt.

When the small boy awakes, he runs outside to greet his pet goat, but he cannot find it. When he asks his mother where it is, she breaks down and cries. This sudden, intense and genuine expression of feeling is the first step towards breaking through the overwhelming numbness and resignation which has governed her life so far. Although the woman's role as helper and provider changes very little, she is now more conscious of what she does and how she does it. She completes her chores in her own time, under no pressure, and she no longer emits an air of surly servility.

Instead of rushing outside quickly to fetch snow for the kettle, she wraps herself up warmly and walks slowly, pausing to wonder at