DISCUSS AVAAZ: support your community, your country, your planet

Form a group of 3-5 people. Take turns to present your ideas and listen respectfully to those of others. This is your “Insight Group”. Meet regularly. Each person should in turn form a separate group. This ‘other group’ is the “Plain Pair Group”. During discussion, collect good ideas to bring back to your Insight Group.

‘Creative discussion’ in a small "Insight Group" can produce a regular ‘flash of insight’ through presentation of ideas aimed at stimulating insight, followed by attentive listening with a silent mind.

Insights arising among members of the Insight Group can be shared with other groups and throughout a community or organisation by each group member also belonging to a separate group - the "Plain Pair Group".

Tell your group members to sign this campaign on Avaaz – also sign on the Australian site GetUp:

<www.communityrun.org/p/creativediscussion>

I am a member of Avaaz and GetUp and support the causes they champion. They provide an effective yet easy way of taking action and making a difference on issues that I consider important. This can be done by simply signing a petition, emailing a member of parliament, telling others about important petitions.

Avaaz gets results! But our society, our planet, needs much more. How can I, how can we do more?

One way is to form a small Creative Discussion group <www.creativediscussion.org> to meet and discuss Avaaz proposals – and any other good ideas you may have.

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I often find that I can’t share ideas about issues raised in these campaigns. Generally, conversation is limited: a bit of this, a bit of that, making a point, disagreeing, getting a laugh. With some people, I wouldn’t even dare raise certain issues, we are poles apart.

In Creative Discussion, you don’t try to convince others that your ideas are right, you don’t have to agree or disagree, you don’t even have to amuse your listeners.

Presenting my ideas in some detail, to a respectful audience – of 2, 3 or 4 people – who can then present their ideas knowing I in turn will listen attentively, non-judgementally and silently, results in a new way of seeing things which, shared with others, can bring its own change.

When listening, you are silent in word, and silent in thought. This means you are attentive, to the speaker, while aware of one’s inner ‘space’, where a flash of insight can bring a sudden understanding, a new idea, an ‘ah-ha’ that puts things together.

In Creative Discussion you are presenting interesting ideas – to encourage a flash of insight in your listeners; and listening attentively – to discover something new yourself.

All this means you can invite your family, friends, colleagues, other people where you live, work or study, even people who have totally different ideas to you. Creative discussion is a neutral, non-confrontational and ‘safe’ setting where you can discuss issues without arguing, without convincing or being convinced and without converting or being converted.

Look around <www.creativediscussion.org> for suggestions about how to organise a successful Creative Discussion group depending on your personal context.

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Through Creative Discussion, you recognise that your own ideas have come from elsewhere, society, education, etc, and you may not in fact agree with all of them. In Creative Discussion, you respect the ideas of others, knowing that they are not responsible for all of their ideas, and they also can change.

How? How can others change, and more importantly, how can I change?

Everything I think, everything I know, is part of the human conditioning. It is also clear that our species has enormous problems of living with itself, with other species and with the planet. Therefore, I need to go beyond the limitations of collective experience for new ideas. It seems this occurs – spontaneously – when the brain is totally silent, yet totally attentive, fully awake. The “flash of insight” that can be experienced by every individual occurs in this moment of freedom, and brings an understanding that is appropriate to this moment and this situation – to ‘here and now’.

Insight unveils the ‘unknown’.

‘Superintelligence’ is equally available to each person.

“Creative Discussion using Plain Pair Groups” is designed to maximise the opportunity for insight, where each person can be free of human conditioning, if just for an instant.

These ideas are developed further in:

<www.creativediscussion.org/PlainPairGroups/Developing_Creativity/The_Awakeness_Paradigm.htm>

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Is all this important? Is Avaaz important, and can Creative Discussion be a useful way of interacting with Avaaz campaigns, getting others involved, doing a bit more?

Do an Internet search for: “runaway global warming and arctic methane”. “My” species is responsible, which means “I” am responsible – for this and so many other things that are happening.

Experiment! See for yourself! Form a small Creative Discussion group! Let’s reach 10 million signatures: a significant proportion of the population responding to their creative potential – and acting! At this point, this will be a different place, where community, country and planet are respected, where we may have a future.
Explore <www.creativediscussion.org> for details of how to organise Creative Discussion.
See especially:

<www.creativediscussion.org/PlainPairGroups/Plain_PGD/Creative_Discussion_Groups.htm>

and

<www.creativediscussion.org/PlainPairGroups/Collective_deliberation/Wisdom_in_Planetary_Leadership.html>

Note: the “Insight Group” is the group you are in ‘now’, and the “Plain Pair Group” is your ‘other group’ where you collect ‘good ideas’ from others, who in turn have brought ideas from their Plain Pair Group. If a group gets to 6 people, divide into 2 groups (with one person a member of both groups) and keep expanding.

Remember to get each person to and sign this campaign on Avaaz. Also sign the same campaign on the Australian site GetUp:

<www.communityrun.org/p/creativediscussion>

Thanks,
William Plain