Reconnect with the Genuine: A Visual Journey of Collective Transformation
Interwoven with the breathtaking words of visionary civil rights leader Howard Thurman, this visual journey captures the real faces, social movements, and issues that call us back to the genuine.
Despite all the gifts that technology has brought to our lives, our hyper-connected digital world has numbed us to the sound of the genuine. In today’s attention economy, the voices who polarize, provoke, and hijack emotions are the ones who get heard. Yet our failure to listen to the sound of the genuine is destroying community, weakening our health, and eroding our sense of safety and trust in life. In times like these, we need MORE viewpoint diversity, not less.
Interwoven with the breathtaking words of visionary theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman’s 1980 sermon at Spelman College, this 9-minute visual journey captures the real faces, social movements, and societal issues that call us back to the genuine. What does it mean to truly listen to ourselves and each other beneath all the societal noise and the dehumanizing, distorted narratives dominating our media systems?
We are biologically wired for resonance and shared meaning. This video is made to awaken your mirror neurons—specialized brain cells that activate not just when we act or feel, but when we see others doing the same. When we witness someone’s raw, authentic emotion, something incredible happens: our neurons fire as if the experience were happening to us. This isn’t imagination or metaphor, it’s straight up biology. We’re constantly shaping and being shaped by each other’s presence.
We can't shift the chaos we're in until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what's really pushing us—in our personal lives and as a society—we already have a degree of freedom from it. The more grounded and united we are, the harder it becomes for the powerful to distract, manipulate, polarize, and exploit our disconnection from ourselves, each other, and all life on Earth.
If this touches something genuine in you, share this widely. Help awaken this innate knowing in others.
There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. Nobody like you has ever been born and no one like you will ever be born again—you are the only one.
There is something in you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people. And if you can't hear it, then you are reduced by that much. If I were to ask you what is the thing that you desire most in life, you would say ... things that I thought you ought to think that you should say. But I think that if you were stripped to whatever there is in you that is literal and irreducible, and you tried to answer that question, the answer may be something like this:
I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.That I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me.
Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible then for me to go down in me, and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes, having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me. And the wall that separates and divides will disappear. And we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.
—Howard Thurman (listen to full speech here or read full text here)
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