This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from “Building Cultures of Peace: Four Cornerstones,” an essay by author and historian Riane Eisler:

To spread the consciousness that we can, and must, change traditions of domination requires courage. It takes courage to challenge domination and violence in both international relations and intimate relations. It takes courage to actively oppose injustice and cruelty in all spheres of life: not only in the so-called public sphere of politics and business but in the so-called private sphere of parent-child, gender, and sexual relations.

It may not be popular, and may even be dangerous to do so, since domination and violence in intimate and intergroup relations are encoded in some religious and ethnic traditions that are our heritage from a more rigid dominator past. But it must be done.

We are at a time when the mix of high technology and the domination system can take us to an evolutionary dead end. High technology in service of conquest and domination — whether of people or of nature — is not sustainable.

[Riane Eisler will be a featured speaker at the Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives conference in San Francisco this coming Monday, Feb. 15, and at our conference in Washington, D.C., June 11-14. Click here for information and to register]