OUR
VISION
- what we see:
Our vision is to teach teachers who we will
then sponsor or assist in finding employment
in the public
school system, or in non-profit run after-school
programs. 10 teachers could reach 750
children per year.
100 teachers could reach 7,500 children thus
empowering a new wave of social and cultural
change.
We
see our work as the beginning of a
multi-generational movement whose leaders are
empowered
to preserve cultural beauty and diversity; to
strive for human rights and gender equality; and
also to
embrace personal responsibility in a global
context.
Over the next forty years we envision a community
transformed to one that cares deeply about finding
sustainable solutions to its own problems and also
one that understands that any act of compassionate
service also affects the future of humanity as a
whole.
OUR MODEL -
 Nourish, Socialize, Learn, Transform
The Integral Heart
Foundation collaborates with a number of
social organizations in and around the city
of Antigua Guatemala. These organizations
work in the areas of education, health-care
and community
development, day care centers, and
construction of housing, schools and
clinics. We
select beneficiary
families and individuals in co-operation
with these local partner
organizations.
Integral
Heart is constantly evolving our model to
support sustainable solutions in the
resource-poor
environments in which we work. Our model is
currently based on these four simple
ideas:
1.
Nourish
- families who have an adequate diet are more likely to
value education over child labor.
2.
Socialize
- in our kindergartens and classrooms in a context of safety and
cleanliness.
3.
Learn
- to think
critically allowing for original and emergent solutions
to existing and new issues.
4.
Transform
- by entering their adult lives with vastly
expanded views of their own potential.
OUR
MANDATE
- why we do what
we do:
Excerpted from: Up From Eden
by Ken Wilber;
91-96-2002
(page
356). Ken Wilber is an
American philosopher whose first book was
published in 1976. He has since published 25
books that have been translated into over 50
different languages.
'It is
the exclusive boundaries in and to awareness that
constitute the primal unfreedom, and not any
specific actions taken within or across those
boundaries.
As long as the soul separates itself
from the All, it will feel both fear and desire,
Thanatos and Eros,
terror and thirst. The
boundary between self and other is the terror of
living; the boundary between
being and non-being
is the terror of dying.
As long as men and women
are slaves to their boundaries, they will be
caught in battles, for, as
any military expert will
testify, wherever there is a boundary there is a
potential war (i.e., samsara).
And the
aim of the mystic is to deliver men and women from
their battles by delivering them from
their
boundaries. Not manipulate the subject, and not
manipulate the object, but transcend both in
nondual consciousness. The discovery of
the ultimate Whole is the only cure for unfreedom,
and it
is the only prescription offered by the mystics.
At the
same time, the mystic does not ignore the reforms that
can be made in the lower levels.
The mystic
transcends but includes the lower levels, and no true mystic would ever seek
enlightenment for himself while neglecting the
reforms that can and must be made on the
lower
levels of exchange.
In fact, this is the
difference between the Arhat, who neglects others
in his pursuit of self-
enlightenment, and the
Bodhisattva, who refuses enlightenment until all others can be
charitably ministered to and then uplifted to
enlightenment.
The point is rather that the
Bodhisattva is not lured into the illusion that
the separate self
can be made ultimately
comfortable through any isolated activities or
reforms in the subjective
or objective realms. The mystic solution is an ultimate one, not an
intermediate one.
Nonetheless, while rightly claiming
absolute liberation, it would never shun the
relative liberations
to be effected in the
interim. That, again, is the beauty of the
Bodhisattva ideal. While transcending
the subject
and the object, it neglects neither, includes both,
and finds therein a consummate unity.'
Italics are author's; bolding inserted
for reading emphasis on this page.
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