The Sister Giant conference, founded and organized by Marianne WIlliamson brings together politics and transcendance/spirituality. It's a different kind of spirituality-- not tied to any one religion-- more tied to the transcendance, metaphysics and higher consciousness movement. Most of the attendees-- I'd say 98% are women. These are not people who are generally political. But this conference is pushing. "It's not either or," WIlliamson says. "We address the internal and external."
Check out the conference website to see the speakers. I went, wanting to hear and see Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Alan Grayson, Thom Hartmann, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Jean Houston and Marianne WIlliamson, for starters.
Bernie Sanders opened the conference as the first speaker, telling the audience that when he was mulling running for president, the response he received at the LA Sister Giant conference was a factor in persuading him to go for it.
He spoke for 30 minutes. Some take-aways:
Despair is not an option
We observed the gross failure of the Democratic party
We have to replace the democratic leadership
Donald Trump's views are a minority position
Trumps supporters are not for the most part bigots and racists. They are hard working, decent people asking questions.
As far as Trump taking on the establishment, he says, you don't take on the establishment by appointing billionaires, by appointing a head of the OMB who is on the record calling for ending medicare and medicaid.
We have got to create a democratic party that stands for working people, not for Wall street, that opens doors to working people and young people.
"Every great moment in history came from the bottom up, not from the top-down"
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization (more...)