The Hunger Project is not an agreement of people who consider themselves to be part of it. It is an alignment of wholes or Selves, each of whom takes total responsibility for the outcome.
“The Hunger Project is not you doing your part. It is a transformation from you doing your part, to you being the source of it all.”
Werner asserts that this form of participation calls forth the Self in us.
Werner Erhard, The End of Starvation: Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come. 1977, at http://www.wernererhard.net/thpsource.html
An Alignment of Wholes
The second generating principle is that the project is an alignment of wholes, not a sum of parts. In this project you do not do your “part.” There is no “part” for you
to do. This is a project in which you are the whole project.
If you enroll yourself in the project you become the source of the project. It becomes your project and anyone working to eliminate hunger and starvation around the world will be working for you because you have taken the responsibility to create the context of the end of hunger and starvation on the planet. When you do that, anybody doing anything is working for you.
Let me give you an analogy. If you take a transparency, a photographic slide, and you cut the transparency in half and you project one half on a screen, what you see is half a picture. On the other hand, if you take a holographic transparency and you cut it in half and you project it, what you see is the whole picture. In a holographic transparency, each part is not a part. Each part is a whole that contains the entire picture.
Similarly, The Hunger Project is not you doing your part. It is a transformation from you doing your part, to you being the source of it all. The Hunger Project is an alignment of sources, an alignment of wholes. You are the source of The Hunger Project. You make the project completely yours in a way that allows others to make it completely theirs. No one gets credit for the project, and each of us is allowed to own the project completely.
This is not a movement. This is not a bandwagon. There is no movement or bandwagon to join. You can’t be a part of something here. You can only be the whole thing, aligned with other people who also are the whole thing.
Alignment is the spontaneous cooperation of wholes coming from a context or common purpose. Agreement, on the other hand, is a banding together of parts in support of a position or point of view. You don’t need anyone’s agreement to create a context. You don’t need anything from anybody.
All you need to create a context is your Self. The Hunger Project is an alignment of Selves taking responsibility for creating a context.
Context, not Content
The third generating principle of The Hunger Project is the one I’ve already discussed with you: the creation of a context, to cause the end of hunger and starvation on this planet in two decades to be an idea whose time has come. It can be done only within your Self.
And you create a context from what? From nothing. Within your Self and from nothing you create the space, “The end of hunger and starvation on the planet in two decades,” and in that space you put all content and all process, and within the space, process is generated, which reorganizes and realigns the process and content. In that context, everything that happens in every moment is really the end of starvation manifesting itself. Each position that used to contribute to the pea soup now becomes a position manifesting itself as contributing to the end of starvation.
An idea transformed from content to context is an idea whose time has come. Create a context and you have mastery. I promise you that at the point in this project when you actually experience the context, “The end of hunger and starvation on the planet in two decades,” you will experience a transformation in the quality of your own life. You will experience a kind of mastery that you have never experienced before.
I said mastery, not force. Many of us have a lot of force. Mastery requires no force. If everything is going vertically, what do you have to do to get something to go vertically? Nothing, just do whatever you’re doing.
Out of the context, “The end of hunger and starvation on the planet in two decades,” sometime in the next month some opportunity to do something to make real the end of hunger and starvation on the planet will cross your path. Instead of interacting with it out of a position, you will be able to interact with the opportunity out of this context. Then, what you do will be wholly appropriate to the end of hunger and starvation.
(To be continued tomorrow)