When I was in Hamburg last week, speaking at a Reconnection conference, when Reconnection healer Dr. Eric Pearl told me about an experience he had in the 1990s when attempting to buy a piece of moldavite, a greenish stone thought to be a meteorite or to have other mysterious cosmic origins.  Pearl, at the time a chiropractor, was having strange healing experiences and had been given some moldavite by a patient. He walked into a gem store, found a piece and brought it to the cash register to pay.
The fellow behind the counter studied Eric for a few moments , taking in his what was then his clean-cut persona – the pressed shirt and tie, the black jeans, the neat ponytail -   before shaking his head.
"You," he said, "are not ready for that stone."
All of us in the spiritual community talk a good game about moving away from the ‘old paradigm’, but in so many instances, we employ the same old tools — the same naked-claw competitiveness, the same need for oneupsmanship   - cloaked beneath the guise of higher purpose.
Not long ago I was speaking to a company that was interested in bolting their work onto What Doctors Don’t Tell You, our sister publication.  They’d done us a favor and we were keen to return the kind gesture.
There seemed to be a great deal of synergy between the two groups, until they put forward the true agenda behind their generosity:  “So when we merge our work, we’ll have our brand be the bannerhead, and we’ll take control of all your web traffic.”
We objected what sounded like a takeover of our business.
“It’s important in this work,” one of the senior managers replied, “not to have any ego about things like ownership.”
It seems, to paraphrase George Orwell, that we are all one, but some are more one than anyone.
If we are to move forward with our new world, we need another set of tools in our relationships, which create a cooperative partnership of every single exchange, and a language that is utterly transparent in its content and motive. Or, to say it with some of the old language: to think of the next guy.