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ASHA MOVEMENT
- Asha is a Persian word meaning 'Rightness, Truth, Justice, Harmony, Beauty, Good Order'.
- The Asha Movement is imagined by its participants as a global force to bring the world closer to a state of Asha.
- The Asha Movement is founded on the Persian tradition of Zoroastrianism but is not limited to it.
- Usually the Asha movement considers its cultural roots as threefold: Iranian (or European) Paganism, Zoroastrianism and Sufism
- The Asha Movement is Anglo-Persian in that its official languages are English and Persian, with English being the main language of everyday communication and Persian and other Iranian dialects the main languages of its founding texts.
- The Asha Movement is composed of multiple sub-movements which each have a greater internal consistency than the Asha Movement as a whole. These sub-movements may have the character of ethnic or religiously based denominations of the global Asha movement.
- For the Asha Movement the primary unconditional distinction is between Asha and Dreg - Good Order and Divergence from Good Order. All other distinctions such as ethnicity, religion, class etc are secondary and their importance conditional on how they impact on Asha and Dreg.
- The Asha Movement is inclusive in that all the human beings of the Planet Earth are within its community of concern and none are outside it (none are outlaws) regardless of such factors as ancestry, ethnicity, religion, class or behaviour etc.
- All human beings are considered equally worthy as objects of ultimate concern.
- All living beings on Planet Earth are considered worthy of concern
- The Asha Movement believes that since mankind has the potential with the use of its current technology to easily reach across the planet that thus the Planet Earth must be considered the single primary territorial realm.
- Since the Planet Earth is the primary territorial realm of mankind, there needs to be a way of ordering the activities within the global realm so that there is a tendency to move to a state of Asha. This may involve in different areas of human activity, global anarchic forces such as the asha movement itself, and global archic forces or global government.
- A movement is considered a sub-movement of the Asha movement if it has sufficient commonality with the other sub-movements that there is mutual re-inforcing of each others work, and if the sub-movement is in itself a sufficiently effective force in bringing the world closer to Asha.
February 4011 ZHE , updated April
ASHA MISSION
The Asha Mission seeks to promote forms of religion, philosophy and ways of living to help people cope with changing conditions, improve their quality and life and be a good influence on the wider world.
We have identified two major paradigms for a person's relation to the world which we call the Pagan Paradigm and the Chrestian Paradigm. In the Pagan Paradigm there is a bias to seek out what is of value to our own selves and those immediately around us. In the Chrestian Paradigm there is a bias to seek out on what is of value to what is more remote to us - whether described as the Other or as the Whole.
In the Asha Mission we consider that both these paradigms are valid and necessary, and we promote both of them. However we consider the Pagan Paradigm the more fundamental as it is concerned most directly with survival, while the Chrestian Paradigm is dependent on it. A person cannot be a Chrestian (a 'do-gooder') or anything else unless they actually exist and have strength - and these are the gifts of Pagan activity
February 4011 ZHE, updated June