Transcribed by Chris Lehman from the Council of All Beings workshop at Northern Pines Lodge, Maine, USA, 24–25 October 1992, and reproduced here as the numbered sequence in which John gives them over the course of a workshop (I–VI), to be read in conjunction with the full workshop manual. Reproduced with permission as part of John Seed’s shared process materials — the first section is the fuller companion to the excerpt already published in Despair and Empowerment: Joanna Macy’s Foundational Work and to John’s own essay referencing the same Hopi encounter. Sections II–VI are reproduced with only obvious transcription typos corrected; John’s live, spoken register — asides, digressions, the parenthetical notes he added afterward — is otherwise left as he gave it.

There are as many ways to conduct Councils of All Beings as there are people facilitating this form. Having introduced hundreds of these workshops, lots of people have asked me for a transcript of my typical intro, and here it is.

Introduction to the Workshop

I’m doing this workshop partly because I think that the experience of interconnectedness with nature is the crucial piece of wisdom that’s missing from the environment movement — the piece we need to make us more effective — and partly because I need this kind of thing so badly for myself that I just can’t get enough of it. So although I am facilitating this workshop, you will really see that I am completely a participant.

To introduce the Council of All Beings I’ll start with a little of my own background. I graduated in psychology from the University of Sydney, then became an artist and worked as a sculptor for some years. After that I lived in London for five years and worked as a systems engineer for IBM.

In 1973 I left that job and traveled through Asia for about a year, studying meditation in Nepal and India, before returning to Australia, where I helped create a land-based community. The land we bought was in the bush, surrounded by trees — though we loved the trees, I had no particular interest in ecology at the time. Only five miles’ walk from where I lived was a remnant of The Big Scrub, the last piece of the largest subtropical rainforest in the world, and in five years living nearby I had never visited it.

In Australia in the mid-’70s, rainforest was referred to, rather disparagingly, as “the scrub” — thought to be a recent intruder, not like the “real” Aussie bush. In 1979, my community was invited by our neighbours to help protect the remaining rainforest at Terania Creek, which the Forestry Commission of New South Wales wanted to log. There was a non-violent direct action in defence of that forest, and somehow I found myself part of it. We stood in front of the trees, laid down in front of bulldozers, and I have never been the same since. All that meditation must have made me ripe, and I think the rainforest decided “I’ll have him” — and She did!

At the time it was totally bewildering. How was it that I could hear the forest screaming? The whole of my Buddhist training was to remain cool and somewhat aloof, to watch things rise and pass away — not to become embroiled this way in passion. But it was undeniable.

In later years I learned that, far from being a recent invader, this rainforest was the original flora of Australia — the remnant of the rainforest that once covered the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland, of which I as a human being had evolved a part, during nearly all of that time. It became less surprising that some kind of psychological or spiritual contact with the rainforest was possible, and more surprising that many other people didn’t seem to be experiencing it.

We started the Rainforest Information Centre in 1981. Nonetheless, it soon became clear that for every forest we saved, a hundred were lost — the planet couldn’t be saved one issue at a time. It was then that I began to inquire deeply into the psychological or spiritual disease that allows human beings to destroy the Earth as though it were something other than our very selves.

James Lovelock, the British scientist who popularised the Gaia hypothesis, said that what we are doing to the rainforests is as if the brain were to decide it was the most important organ in the body and started mining the liver.

Merely by naming it “the environment,” we push it “over there” somewhere — we turn it into an object, something outside ourselves. Through language, economics, the very conceptual air we breathe, we have created an incredibly pervasive illusion of separation from nature. That this illusion is entirely illusory can be demonstrated simply by holding your breath for about three minutes. There is no “out there” — it is all “in here.” But we don’t feel that.

It’s remarkable that we as a species are capable of going to war, dying and killing each other by the millions in defence of one social fiction after another — a country, an ideology, a religion — and yet when the very biological fabric that underpins all of these things is being torn to shreds, somehow sending $25 to Greenpeace is more than most people can manage. It’s like there is a spiritual disease, and unless we can address that, all the other work we’re doing will in the end come to nothing. These were the sort of conclusions I was reaching in the mid-’80s when I had the good fortune to meet Joanna Macy, when she came to Australia doing workshops called Despair & Empowerment.

We had been struggling with sandminers and police to protect ancient forest on a beach we loved, and had lost that action — everything was gone. So we had our despair pretty well together, and decided this would be a good test of the workshop: if empowerment could come from the despair we were feeling, we wanted to know about it. And indeed it did.

I had at this time been steeping myself in the philosophy of Deep Ecology, which sees the root cause of these problems as human centredness — that chauvinism which leads us to prize humanity over everything else, like prizing one part of the body over the rest of the body. Somehow it seemed to me that this wasn’t reflected in the Despair and Empowerment workshop itself: it really encouraged us to feel things we had been denying, but there was still a human centredness to it. When people cried about the threat of nuclear war, it was very much about the effects on one species — humans and their descendants — and only lip service was paid to the ten million other species that would be affected.

Joanna, it seems, had been coming to similar conclusions. We talked afterwards, went for a long walk in the bush, and out of that grew the idea of the Council of All Beings — a synthesis of despair and empowerment and deep ecology. It brought a biocentric flavour to the despair work, and a process to deep ecology, whereby deep ecology wasn’t just ideas passing through the mind but something that could actually change behaviour. These ceremonies and rituals seemed a profound way of moving us to a place where our values can change — where it isn’t necessary to make sacrifices to change our lifestyle, but rather where changes in lifestyle just happen by themselves once values change. It’s like shedding a skin.

Joanna and I went on to do the first Council of All Beings the following weekend — she cancelled a scheduled Despair and Empowerment training and we did the first Council instead. I facilitated another ten or twelve Councils in Australia; Joanna had facilitated many in the States. What we concluded, comparing notes, was that any time a circle meets with a shared intention to heal the Earth and heal that illusion of separation, some kind of miracle always takes place. It is not due to the particular processes used, nor to the skill of the workshop leader — I once threw up under a tree from anxiety in the middle of a Council I was facilitating, and everyone did it without me, and it was still a very powerful workshop.

The book I mentioned is called Thinking Like a Mountain — Towards a Council of All Beings. Joanna and I wrote it with Pat Fleming and Arne Naess, the philosopher who coined the term “deep ecology.” In an essay in the book, Naess concludes that it is not enough to have ecological ideas — we have to have ecological identity, or ecological self. What we need, he proposes, are “community therapies” to develop this ecological self. When I first read this I was very excited: it seemed to me this was exactly what we were doing in the Council of All Beings. It’s a therapy which heals our sense of separation from the living Earth, practiced in circle, in community.

Later I had the good fortune to witness ceremonies the Hopi were doing in one of their villages. It was so like the Council of All Beings, though the masks were far more magnificent. This village was described to me as the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the Western Hemisphere, and for all those thousands of years, they had been doing these ceremonies without stopping. It was then I realised “therapy” was the wrong metaphor to understand the Council. Therapy is supposed to have an end. But the Hopi have been doing this for more than 10,000 years and haven’t come to the end of it yet.

It seems to me, then, that “ritual” is a better word than “therapy” for what we’re doing. Ritual has no end. Such rituals bind human culture to its Earth matrix, and the healing of modern culture is what we are doing here by reclaiming rituals we have lost. It is not individual healing so much as social healing.

To do only this — to confine our work for the Earth to such rituals — isn’t enough either. We have to take the empowerment we receive from our circles and spread it through our lives, working for the protection of nature, and then always come back to these circles for renewal, fellowship and a sense of rootedness. There are really just two defining characteristics of a Council of All Beings: the shared intention that we are here for the healing of the Earth and the separation we feel from Her; and that no one is allowed to make money from it — it is a gift we give each other and the Earth, and all proceeds beyond legitimate expenses go back into nature.

To conclude this introduction, I’d like us all to get comfortable. Then I’ll read an invocation from Thinking Like a Mountain, and we’ll spend about five minutes in silence, looking at our intention for being here, trying to make it as solid and palpable as we can. The depth of our shared intention will determine the quality of the workshop.

Introduction to the Mourning

This process was derived from Joanna Macy’s Despair and Empowerment work, and its development is instructive in the organic way these processes evolve. In the early Councils our Mourning consisted of reading Joanna’s Bestiary or Chief Seattle’s Message and encouraging participants to feel and express the sorrow, rage and despair that naturally arises when we open ourselves to such material.

In 1988, at a Council of All Beings in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Stella Reed came up with a new process which I have been using ever since.

As a bit of background to this I’d like to talk to you about the nature of feelings, about the way our culture teaches us to deny and suppress our feelings. This rave is very much indebted to Joanna Macy.

We live in a culture of denial, where we learn very early that we can’t trust our feelings — in fact we hardly even know what they are, we are very, very unfamiliar with them.

We want to feel “good,” and we learn that in order to feel “good” we have to avoid other, “bad,” feelings like anger, sorrow and despair.

Our society is steeped in these attitudes, and there is a powerful taboo against acknowledging and expressing such feelings. If we ever express emotions such as the horror we feel at what is happening to our world, it makes our friends uncomfortable. They want us to “lighten up.” If we persist, perhaps they’ll suggest we take some medication or seek psychiatric help.

Should we take this advice and speak frankly to a professional about the pain we feel when, for example, we hear the trees screaming, they will almost certainly fail to validate these perceptions and feelings, and instead will define them as an illness, will reduce them to being a personal pathology. If we feel such things, then something is wrong with us.

The state of our world is ignored. We may make our way to the psychiatrist’s office stepping over the homeless people and junkies lying in the street, and when we mention our depression, he will want to talk to us about our childhood.

We deny our feelings — but how did we survive, and all our ancestors, before this amazing intellectual part of our brain developed?

(Extra notes. We live in a culture of denial, or rather we learn to choose that some emotions are OK while others are not. We are full beings; our full range of emotions is a significant part of our intelligence, our bodies experience them all whether we like it or not, and it takes tremendous life energy to repress the emotions we think will hurt us — like anger and despair. Our life is basically what is left after we expend our energy repressing the emotions we don’t want.)

Suppressing the wave.

Any feelings we might have about things like this, and especially about the pain that the Earth may be experiencing at this time, are reduced into a purely personal pathology. So if you feel that you can hear the trees screaming, then there is something wrong with you — maybe you need to take a pill, or talk about your childhood at some length. But no one would seriously consider that it might just be that you have rather sensitive ears. The taboo is not only against sharing deep and profound feelings about the state of the world and what is happening — you wouldn’t expect to go to a party and have someone start talking to you about the intense fear they feel about the destruction of the world; if you were to speak like that, people would feel very uncomfortable and ask you to lighten up, or take a pill, or go see a psychiatrist. There is something wrong with you if you feel that way. So it is reduced to a problem with you (my words). But the thing about these feelings is that they are really a very deep part of us, deeper than our intellect. If you look at any mammal you can see that they share these kinds of feelings with us — I am thinking in particular of a particular dog. I happened to be looking at this dog’s face when she heard someone approaching and started to wake from sound sleep. In a series of two or three seconds, from sound sleep to fully awake, alert, ears pointed, about twenty different feelings went across her face in a very short space of time. It was those feelings that were her decision as to what was going on, what was approaching — a cat? to run away? to ignore? All of those decisions were being made on that level of feeling; she didn’t really think about it at all, there was no “who is this?” or anything like that. It was all done with feeling. And when you consider that each of us is descended from four thousand million years of ancestors who all survived from birth, at least long enough to reproduce, before they were consumed — some scientists estimate only 0.1% of all species that have ever come into being have survived to today, 99.9% have gone by the wayside — it is a pretty incredible lineage. Every step along the way, millions of others fell by the wayside before they could reproduce. What we all have in common is that every one of our ancestors was able to do this, because if just one of them had failed we would not be here. That is undeniable, and it was all done very, very recently without the benefit of the intellect. So how was this done? How did they know what to eat? How did they know what to do? How did they know what was safe, and what was dangerous?

I am not saying that thinking doesn’t have its uses, but the way thinking has decided that it is the only intelligence we have — there is something very arrogant about that. Because life is a web, we are like a leaf on a tree. To say the leaf is the only intelligent part is ridiculous — how could the leaf be more intelligent than the tree? The tree as a complete being is the greater intelligence; in this way we can see that Gaia is a greater intelligence, that no matter what intelligence we possess, we do so at the behest of our mother Earth. We have disconnected ourselves from this intelligence of the Earth; we only need to look at the kind of world we are creating to see that maybe we need to go back to an older way.

(Extra notes. These feelings of despair, rage and confusion are the sort of feelings any sensitive mammal would feel as it faced the possibility of its own extinction. We have made it here via the feelings/intuition/instincts of our ancestors over four billion years. They did not intellectualise a lot; they lived by nature, with nature, not separated from nature.)

(Extra. In the Council, we make a gesture to the Earth and she responds to us.) Through our thinking, and through the definition we have made of ourselves, we deny our feelings, and one of the effects of this is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy. I mean our life-force — one of the modes it manifests as is these feelings, and it keeps pushing up with a great deal of force, trying to attract our attention. If the first tap on the shoulder doesn’t do it, then it might start tapping a bit harder to attract our attention, and we’re busily trying to look the other way to shield ourselves from this. We are quite good at this, and one part of ourselves is pushing with great force while the other part is pushing to keep that down with great force, and very little energy is left at the end of that for our lives. Joanna would say that this is what leads to disempowerment, apathy, the feeling that it is all too hard and there is nothing we can do — and that once we invite all of our feelings, and trust them, and invite each other’s feelings, just see what happens in this safe environment, then a tremendous amount of energy is released, and the nature of that energy is empowerment, and the nature of that energy is joy. The kind of joy that we feel in a context of denial is a fragile kind of joy, because if we are saying “it’s all OK, there’s nothing wrong,” and obviously that’s not true, then any joy built on that kind of foundation has the feeling that it can’t be trusted, that it could disappear at any moment. This fear that we have — that if we were to really invite these feelings, we would be crushed, we would become terribly depressed, maybe even suicidal — what Joanna promised in this workshop, and what I have found to be true, is that this is not true. In fact, our feelings are kind of like a wave, and when we try to depress the bottom of the wave, we also depress the top of the wave — we can’t deny certain feelings without making ourselves numb.

It is just not true that we can find joy through denial. Whereas when we trust these feelings, and allow them, in a safe circle like this, no harm can befall you. No harm has ever come to anyone; I’ve never lost anyone through this process. So I just encourage you to go as deeply as you can. Search for your boundaries, and go through them, and what will happen is that you’ll carve out a space inside yourself, and this space will spontaneously become filled with the very feelings you desire — elation, upliftment, ecstasy. We make ourselves capable of containing these feelings once we begin to realise that we can’t choose between our feelings, that we want these and not those — we can just bring feeling into our life. I am not saying that at the end of this process we are going to neatly tuck away any feelings that come up and just go on unchanged. This is a powerful process, and it can unleash energies that won’t tuck away without some change in our lives. I feel utter conviction that this is the direction to go — that we have to learn to trust these feelings again, and seek their guidance, if we want to have motivation strong enough to change things out there. It is our feelings that move us; it is not thoughts that move us. We are not going to think our way out of this mess. This is probably what the Dalai Lama meant when he said, “Ultimately the decision to save the environment must come from the heart.” But if these feelings provide us with strength, with compassion, then we have something that can create change.

I think this is the reason why the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, said “the most important thing that we can do is to hear inside ourselves the sounds of the Earth crying.” I think the reason he said this is that it is only to the extent that we are prepared to feel the pain that we can heal the pain (my words). Joanna has said that if everyone could hear the cries of the Earth in themselves, the whole system of denial would disappear immediately. Before I talk about the process we are about to do here, I’d like to talk about two things. One is that we did the same process last weekend in West Virginia — it was outside, in a grove of trees, and it was so strong that it actually took me about thirty-six hours before I felt I had regained my equilibrium, and it wasn’t exactly the same equilibrium; I think I am still finding it. As a result of that, I want to spend long periods of time alone processing feelings that come up, and I really value that. It doesn’t matter if I have done this a hundred times — it is never automatic, it is a profoundly moving experience every time. The other thing is that, the weekend before that, I did another Mourning in Boston, and that time it took a different tone: that process came to me in a dream. I was in Kyoto, at a Zen temple, doing a Council of All Beings. I woke up on the Saturday morning as we were going into the Mourning, having dreamed that we had just done an entirely different Mourning process. So I just tried it — I didn’t tell them it had come to me in a dream — and it was really powerful. It just occurred to me again that it doesn’t matter where these processes come from, whether from a dream or from the Hopi: just start to gather a little medicine bag of your own processes, and somehow spread ritual, spread ceremony, spread feeling, in our lives wherever we go.

(Extra notes. Re Thich Nhat Hanh: without feeling totally with the Earth — her joys and her pain — we can’t access the full wisdom and beauty of the Earth, we cannot fulfil the healing. How can the leaf be more intelligent than the tree on which it grows?)

There was a woman who came to a Council of All Beings outside Washington DC a couple of years ago, and in the last sharing of the Council she said, “I don’t work for the Navy, I work in the Navy, but I work for the ocean!” I thought that was great, because it is not that we want anyone to leave the Navy — in fact if she stayed there it would be fantastic, it is really important that there are people in the Navy who know about this. My view is that we use these circles to build up a great stock of power and determination and passion, and then find appropriate ways for these things to manifest in our lives and our relationships. I don’t mean that we should all facilitate Councils of All Beings, but that somehow we use this precious time and energy together to do this — and in my opinion the Mourning is the key to the whole thing.

So, now go outside, by yourself, for about five minutes, and find some object to represent something that is being lost from our lives, that you can genuinely mourn the loss of. It might be an animal that is becoming extinct or endangered; it might be some landscape from your life, maybe a very special place you lived as a child that, when you went back as an adult, had turned into a highway or a shopping centre; it might be some quality of the human spirit that is disappearing, or that you regret; it might be something more personal, like a pet or a relative who has died and whose loss you haven’t finished grieving. It is something you can genuinely mourn the loss of. Then we bring our object in — one at a time, in no particular order, just as we feel — and go to the centre of the circle and place our object there, building a Cairn of Mourning, and say goodbye, describe what it is we are grieving, and invite our feelings as much as we can, as much as we dare. So if you start weeping, that is OK. Know that you are doing that for all of us. If you feel angry, it is OK to yell, it is OK to raise your voice, it is OK to pound the floor. Everything is OK. We will support you. Those of us on the outside will have our energy supporting the person in the middle, and if something resonates with us that is happening in the middle, we say “Yes!” or “Ho!” — let the person know they are being supported, if you feel the need to do that.

Some people find it very easy to get in touch with their feelings; many people nowadays have worked with their feelings in order to free them up, for many reasons. Women in particular find it easier to cry than men do, and men find it easier to rage than many women do — we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. Some people have shared afterwards that they haven’t cried since they were a child. That is fine. It is not a competition. It is not about being dramatic, it is not about who can yell the loudest. It is about each of us genuinely searching for the place in ourselves that feels strongly the loss of the things we are losing, and expressing that. For one person that might be accompanied by tears; for another, to look at them you would not know what they are feeling — you can’t tell by looking at a person how strong their feelings are. And in any case, even if when you go out there it is too difficult and it doesn’t come, that is fine too — a lot of the work is done merely by witnessing and sharing the whole process together. I have never been in one of these circles where everyone was not touched in some way or another. But if you are the one who can unleash the feelings, then it is great to do so, because it is you who gives someone else the courage to share theirs.

There is one other quotation I would like to share, an ancient Buddhist saying attributed to Shantideva: “may all sorrows ripen in me.” This is really interesting because, first, it suggests that it is not just our own personal sorrows that we can feel; and second, “may” our sorrows ripen is almost an invitation to these feelings — in other words, it’s not something that is going to harm us, but rather it suggests there is some healing I can do by inviting these sorrows to ripen within me that otherwise might not occur. I don’t think I can frame it very well, but my intuition resonates with this idea (my words): not only does our motivation move us to act for the Earth, our actions following our feelings, but also the very act of crying for the Earth is healing for the Earth. So it is not just the actions that follow this process, but the act itself that is a healing we create. I can’t really prove that, or even justify it — all I can say is that I keep coming back for more.

(Extra notes. Shantideva. Suggests that we are capable of feeling for the Earth, for others, for the greater self — that our boundaries are not limited by our flesh. Also suggests that our tears are healing for ourselves, for the being whose pain we are feeling, and for the one who gave us birth, mother Earth. Can’t prove this statement, but it makes a lot of sense to me.)

Does anyone have any questions about the process? OK — so bring back an object for the cairn in five minutes.

Mourning Completion

We sang a couple of chants to complete the process.

John also thanked everyone for their courage after the Mourning, for putting so much into the process and the beauty of their sharing.

Asked all to respect, and just watch, what happens for them. If feelings come up, don’t just stuff them away — and be aware of the way we sometimes stuff feelings with food, or noise, or other distraction.

Finding an Ally

One of the things that people more grounded in the Earth than ourselves have always known, and continue to know, is that it is not difficult for us to be the voices of nature, or to allow other beings to speak through us — that we can become a medium for their truth. This is the basis of the Council of All Beings, which is the ritual we’ll be doing tomorrow morning; what we’ll do this afternoon is the beginning of that. The first thing we need for the Council of All Beings is an ally, and that ally is a non-human being, because the Council, for the moment, consists of non-human beings only.

There was a time when human beings were part of the Council, and we pray for a time when human beings again come to the Council. They chose to leave the Council, and we have heard plenty from them since — it is time for the voiceless to be heard. So for tomorrow there’ll be no humans in the Council, but any non-human beings are welcome — these may be animals, or plants, or features of the landscape, lakes, rivers, rain, clouds, or worms, you name it. Each of us is going to find an ally, or more accurately we are going to be found by an ally, because this is not done in a direct and purposeful way, but in a way where we just be in nature and invite something to come to us. The spirit of something will come. It may be that if a moose comes and licks you on the face, that could be a sign — but more usually it comes to us as an inspiration. It is a very childlike space you’re going into, and it’s hard to give an example exactly, it’s different every time, but it might go like this.

You go out into the woods and begin a walking meditation, and just meander, just amble, and then you might suddenly feel you need to defocus your vision, allow things to blur — you just want to see enough not to fall over — and then you might feel a certain tree pulling you towards it. At first you think, “Aha, this tree is my ally,” but when you get there, you discover that the tree is not your ally, but the tree is an antenna, allowing your ally — which is the African Elephant — to come all that distance and enter your heart. It’s like a fairy tale, a little story, and it’s something you do by yourself.

Now, the thing about it is that no one has ever failed to find an ally. Some people may already know who their ally is, because it leapt into their mind the moment I started speaking. It’s no big deal — the process of finding your ally, of surrendering to your ally, is an important part of really letting go of our usual boundaries, our identification with our sense of what’s real, our sense of what’s dignified, our sense of what’s nonsense. Just letting go, back into a childlike readiness — maybe I’m going to learn something new today, tomorrow, maybe something is going to happen that hasn’t happened before. So we are looking for that place of readiness for something new, because it’s really important.

(My notes. Surrender! It is better if your ally comes to you — be open, be willing to play along, you don’t have to believe anything, just be willing to play.)

So the first part is connecting with our ally. The second part is that we make a mask to represent that ally. The mask doesn’t have to be a likeness at all — it can be an abstract representation. The mask doesn’t have to be beautiful; it’s good if it covers our face, because it makes it easier for all of us to participate if we don’t see human faces — but sometimes people have come back with a mask that was just a fin, which they wore on their back, as a dolphin. You can do anything you like. If you put it over your face, it’s good for the mask to have eyes, to be able to see what’s going on, and it’s great if there’s a hole where the mouth is, so it’s easier for all to hear what you’re saying.

Indicate to people where all the mask-making materials are, and tell them to use anything interesting they find on their journey — feathers, for example — but to be gentle in taking things from nature for the masks. This can be quite fast — a couple of minutes to make the mask is fine, because you are going to introduce yourself in the Council, you’ll say “I am Wolf,” or “I am River,” so everyone will know who you are. The making of the mask is an opportunity to invite a kind of softening of your own boundaries — that is the Council of All Beings. So if you find it’s much more important for you to be out in nature, don’t worry about the mask, just take a few minutes on it. If you already have an ally, and feel that an elaborately decorated mask better suits how you will invite the spirit of your ally to mingle with your own, then go ahead that way. It doesn’t matter how we do it, but one way or another all of us will end up with an ally and a mask by 9:30 tomorrow. In the mask-making, it is not necessary to be totally quiet, but to retain focus, and to respect people’s intention and space with their ally.

Council Beginning

Welcome to this Council of All Beings, my fellow beings. I am “being.”

Ask all to go around the circle once and introduce themselves.

We come to this Council to share matters that are close to our hearts, also to share our strengths, our beauty, our troubles and our wisdom.

(Brief modelling by me.)

Invite any being to speak.

A Council can be all about the beauty of Gaia — it doesn’t have to focus on problems. My advice as facilitator is to be invisible; when it seems needed to do something, wait at least five minutes, but don’t let it get boring or fidgety — put in questions that lead, or prompt, or suggest, and always hook them back to something another being has said, so it’s important to note things said that can be woven into an ending. Allow all the possibilities to be explored; only if there is a conspiracy to deny what the humans are doing should I get in and give humans a real serve — don’t let the Council be falsely protective of human activities.

Council Ending(s)

1. Put on human masks.

Creates great clan/tribe feelings — excellent.

Can come about like this:

We must not forget our wildness. When you see a fellow being, remember this — be heard, speak out, do something every day as ritual to remind us of our true selves. Let us teach the humans the rituals, and make them fun — then lure them back to Council.

We have shared much, surely enough for the humans to change, if only they could hear us.

After all options have been discussed — get into dreams, “kill the lot,” and so on — “but this is really an emergency, we really need powerful ways to get to the humans’ minds. Tell the story of how the Indians would make masks and dance the dance of the spirit of the animal they were to hunt — this was to appease the spirit and ensure success. We could put on human masks, and hunt their spirit, to share our knowledge with them.”

“We must come back to Council to remember the danger of being out in the human world. Come back regularly, and bring some humans along — just tell them it is a workshop.”

How do the beings feel about this? (Listen.)

We must go amongst them, for if we separate ourselves from them, then we are doing just what they have done. We are one — really it is not a human mask, but just a change of perspective.

We also owe it to our brothers and sisters who are enslaved by the humans, and those who are addicted to their garbage heaps.

Could go around and discuss the problems we will face with human masks, share ideas, and allow some time for beings to make the transition.

2. Reveal the human part of me, and ask you all to embrace it. Can lead from the idea of the web, that we have a strand of each thing in each of us. A bit waffly.

3. Ending from Thinking Like a Mountain.