Self-Empowered Spirituality

(This is the non illustrated version; after I get proper permission, I will have some beautiful pictures alongside this blog)

I have been writing about what I consider true 21st Century Spirituality before (on my zaadz blog), about Open Source Spirituality (here & on zaadz), and now I’ve had the opportunity to test some of the principles in the first free seminar I facilitated in over a year (I did work with managers etc.; but that was all a set agenda - this was not).

Looking back to the times when I was still a guru, more or less,
there is a remarkable difference in how I felt during this seminar;
there was none of the very subtle tension, the subtle
power-game that was always there in the back-ground for me in the past.
(Just to be clear: I perceive that subtle tension in retrospect - if you would have asked me then, I would have most probably denied its existence.)

Let me explain: When you are guiding people towards a higher
spiritual realization on a vertical ladder of ascent to a spiritual
‘highest goal’ you must be both, at least one step further than they
are (so as to also provide for the ‘transmission’ of the energy from a
higher altitude), and you need to have ways and means at your disposal
to help them move upwards. This is possibly one factor for that subtle
tension.

Another one is that, when there are other men present, there is a basic
masculine principle at work - you have to ‘prove your status’. Since
the spiritual leader, guru, master, or whatever you want to call him,
is also the alpha-male, and this also always translates as status, it
is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) under attack. Hence, tension.

The spiritual path understood, as it almost always is, as a path of
acention (Wilber, Cohen, others love to talk about altitude; a
higher/lower hierarchy where higher is regarded as ‘more enlightened’)
you quite naturally needs leaders, gurus, masters, ’spiritual
teachers’. If you are called to play that role, as I felt I was for
some 6-7 years, then quite naturally you always stretch to the ceiling,
do your very, very best to stay within the higher reaches of your
realization all the times (at least when you’re not in the realm of sahaj samadhi,
spontaneously going on, which nobody is as I know from being personally
with some ‘enlightened teachers’ in their private life beyond the need
to ‘perform their role/service’).

People who have been following this blog know that I quit my
’spiritual career’ a year or two ago, and have - to my own satisfaction
at least - deconstructed the myth of the spiritual authority
significantly, and I’ve also shown the patriarchal, authoritarian,
gender-biased and abuse-prone tendencies in what I call ‘vertical
spirituality’. So I won’t go into that here now. I just mention it to
explain why I - in retrospect - know that I was under tension before,
and now I’m not. The whole drama of that type of spirituality seems to
have dropped off from me, and I’m very happy that I took that long a
break from conducting or facilitating free and open-2-all seminars.

Since some of the participants in this seminar used to participate
in my seminars in former time, in the beginning of this one I firmly
deconstructed my leader’s role and our tendency to look for expertise
and leadership in areas which belong to our heart of hearts, our
innermost being. And as that was well taken, the beauty and joy of
mutual empowerment and support, the mutual apprenticeship that flowered
where incomparable and a source of a ‘group love-affair’ without the
collusion that very easily crops up under such circumstance.

Creating Dynamic Presencing
constellations, doing a constellation (Hellinger style) on
helplessness, anger and sadness, and using all kinds of other methods
to both, look at issues that challenge us, and freely explore the
deeper spiritual and mystical dimensions - the seminar revolved around
self-empowerment, finding and expressing what we really and truly want,
and gaining trust in our indwelling authority on all things that
concern our deeper life and higher meaning.

Being truly and effortlessly at peace with myself as a malleable,
fallible, imperfect human crossroad of being and becoming; championing
mutual empowerment and mutual apprenticeship; understanding that it is
a most joyful activity to be true to myself and others; doing and
not-doing what I truly want and thus being an encouragement to others
to do likewise, it has become visible, clear and obvious (in a
real-time situation, in the experiment of this 5 day seminar) that the
vertical energies and powers (the light that streams down on us from
‘on high’; the angelic forces that can ‘overshadow’ people; the healing
that emerges from deep sources of being; etc.) are truly natural to
us and therefor naturally unfold in a field of people that move to a
more authentic space, that are courageously being whoever they find
themselves to be, in a field without a leader claiming or (subtly)
expressing higher authority, revelation or enlightenment in word or
behavior…

I’m well aware of the ambivalence and paradoxical nature of an
endeavor where I was clearly facilitating the process and leading in
some manner, yet, as a servant of people re-claiming their own spiritual
authority and power. And when someone said, “What you have been
expressing these days - I already knew it inside of me; maybe it wasn’t
as clear, but it was there…” I was very, very happy.

So what have I learnt?

• Dynamic Presencing works just as wonderful when I hardly ‘do’
  anything; it is self-generating significant experiences for its
  participants which shows as:
  
  - streams of light pouring down from ‘on high’
  
  - waves of spiritual & also simple joy
  
  - feeling to be one with all creation
  
  - feeling human closeness / intimacy
  
  - liberation of ancient sadness
  
  - being “overshadowed by” and eventually becoming an angel
  
  - seeing the factuality of the beauty of all things
  
  - participating in divine ecstasy
  
  - seeing deep into the soul of an other
• I’m relaxed utterly, being whatever it is I am; feeling whatever I feel
• I don’t have to do anything
• Not having a spiritual goal in mind I freely surf the waves as they appear on the shore of my awareness
• Deconstructing external authority, and reconstructing one’s inner guidedness relaxes everyone
• It’s very, very easy to truly listen; not as a method to get anywhere but as a  natural happening
• Affirming my fallibility and imperfection is joyous and relaxing
• I have a new gusto for spiritual experiment and research.

So I’m happy to embark on the path of doing more of these seminars -
and the organizer of this one already booked me for next year (to do a
whole series; among others a training in “Dynamic Presencing
Constellations”). And I feel I’ve reached a milestone on my mission to:

Co-create a society and culture that supports and
empowers individuals and groups to live according to their innermost
values and insights, and that can make their living with what they
really, really want to do.

Open Source Spirituality & The Emerging Spiritual Commons

Over at the P2P Foundations blog we are having a conversation about the principles of open source spirituality instigated by Michel Bauwens. In the course of this conversation some things have become clear to me and I hope to show here a draft of what an Open Source Spirituality could be, and how that could lead to something that might be called Spiritual Commons.

According to the Wikipedia, "Open source is a development methodology, which offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge)... The open source model of operation and decision making allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, and differs from the more closed, centralized models of development." And for spirituality Wikipedia offers us this meaning, "Spirituality, in a narrow sense, concerns itself with matters of the spirit, a concept closely tied to religious belief and faith, a transcendent reality, and one or more deities. Spiritual matters are thus those matters regarding humankind's ultimate nature and purpose, not only as material biological organisms, but as beings with a unique relationship to that which is perceived to be beyond both time and the material world."

The aim of an Open Source Spirituality (OSS) is the aim of any spirituality, to develop a relationship to what can be called our ultimate nature and purpose, our deepest root, or the ever-present origin (TEPO) as John Heron calls it in his longer critique of what gave rise to the above mentioned conversation. So if we follow the Wikipedia's open source definition and take the product to mean spirituality then in order to move towards an OSS a "practical accessibility to its source" is required. Which means that we need to first get clear on what exactly is our personal spirituality's source code. If I were a practicing Buddhist, for instance, my source code would encompass the 4 Noble Truths, awakening from the "sleep of ignorance", the Noble Eightfold Path, and what is most important, what I personally believe and act according to.

So taking a First Step in OSS entails to figure out and openly state what is the Spiritual Source Code (SSC) that the person participating in this endeavor is using.That in itself might already be a challenge, as different people have different talents, and for some it might be hard to verbalize and/or state their spiritual source code in written form to be shared in the Emerging Spiritual Commons (ESC), but there are other ways: a movie of a dance that expresses it, for instance, or a mind map, or a sculpture, or a hyper-textual mesh-work or whatever might be possible in this regard.

Taking John Heron's ideas into account I would think the purpose of Open Source Spirituality to be "to support an Emerging Spiritual Commons." I moreover envision this ESC to be composed of people practicing their basic beliefs - what John Heron calls Code 1: one's basic beliefs and practices. The principles that guide the emergence of the spiritual commons, it's Prime Directive can therefor not be about the "content" of some Code 1; it's Prime Directive must be about the socio-cultural ecology needed to create enough trust amongst participants so that they can be open about both the content of their Code 1 and share how they practice it.

The Prime Directive of the ESC is in all likelihood also an expression of the insight that any real-life practice of spiritual principles (sense-co-creating, meaning-guiding principles) is worth sharing and learning from. Since the Prime Directive helps to co-create the ecology that fosters flourishing relationships between people implementing their Code 1, and since creating an ecology is a process of/in mutuality, most likely the Prime Directive incorporates encouraging people to find out and live according to what is true and authentic for them, and to share this in an atmosphere of deep respect.
I refrain from formulating the Prime Directive so that it is wide enough to take in anybody of 'good will', and at the same time I write what it is about to indicate where its boundaries might be.

To 'open source' something means to put it into a language that is shared with a larger group of peers who can than contribute to this 'project' as they please. So certainly any Open Source Spirituality worth this name needs to co-create a "Meta-Code A" which ensures maximum flexibility and 'space' for different Code 1's. Meta-Code A would be an incarnation of the Prime Directive as guiding principle of research and expression.
And even though there is the Prime Directive it is also clear that, paraphrasing John Heron, "it is neither a prescription, nor even a recommendation, for any other node or person, but a contribution to the commons pool of experiential data, which others may find of interest. Then it is simply up to them whether or not they integrate in any way any part of it or the whole of it, within their own Code 1."

Within the Emerging Spiritual Commons there would be a "library", as a participant in the conversation, Simon, suggested; a library that functions as the main "memory" or maybe even as the DNA of Open Source Spirituality over time.

To conclude, I couldn't agree more with John Heron, when he says, "This allows for varying degrees and kinds of hybridization, cross-fertilization, between different nodes." He seems to be using the terminology of nodes within a network where I would prefer terms coming from the idea of constellations and ecology - all phenomena come in constellations or patterns within an ecology of influences.

And finally it seems important to realize that even using the terms "Open Source" in connection with "Spirituality" is already a language of concepts influenced by recent developments in 'net-culture'.

When time allows me, I hope to come up with some formulation of my personal Code 1. And sketch some of the practises that are rooted within it.

Dancing all over the world

Sonia was the latest to send me a link to this video, and I think it's really great. Put a smile on my face... (and as Stephen Levine says, "I don't know my Original Face but I do know how to smile").

Getting what you want...

"You can't always get what you want", was what Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones sang, concluding "You get what you need."

Well, I can only say, the man is right! (And he needed a Rock'n Roll life, I guess...)

Creating Gaiaspace is my passion, it's what I want - and it is also what I feel called to create. So I'm not only getting what I want, I also get what I - and I feel the leading edge of the world - needs.

So I was quite happy today to find this post at the Think Simple Now blog:

There are many reasons why we don’t always get what we want. One of these reasons is because we focus on the opposite of what we want. Sometimes, we just can’t help it. But, if we are conscious of our thoughts, we can intercept these thoughts and shift our frame of mind towards our desired goals.

Have you ever been particularly annoyed by a person or situation? The more we complain about it, the more we notice it. The more we notice it, the worse it becomes. The next time we interact with that person or situation, we almost expect to be annoyed and thus subconsciously look for those small triggers that’ll make us annoyed.

In a similar example of an opposite scenario: Have you ever shopped for a particular kind of car which you’ve never noticed before? For example, a black SmartCar or a silver Toyota Prius. And suddenly, you see them everywhere? Similarly, have you shopped for a particular piece of clothing, let’s say a blazer style jacket for the spring, and suddenly you notice them everywhere?

Whether we focus on things we want or do not want, the truth is that What we focus on expands.

From my experience, dreams do come true, for the sole reason that the more you focus on something, the more of it you’ll notice and you’ll be particularly sensitive to opportunities that’ll come your way which will allow your dreams to become your reality.

more...

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Happiness

Thank you Brian for pointing me there....

In his book, “Authentic Happiness,” Martin Seligman condenses what it takes to be happy to a very simple statement.

Discover your strengths and use them often.

(If you want to discover your strengths, you can do so with the strengths assessment test)

Want a truly meaningful life?

Discover your strengths, use them often, and give them to something bigger than yourself.

And, if you are curious about my "signature strenghts", they are:

1. Appreciation of beauty and excellence
I notice and appreciate beauty, excellence, and skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.

2. Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
It's important to me to think of new ways to do things. I'm never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible

3. Love of learning
I love learning new things. I have always loved reading, and take every opportunity to learn

4. Curiosity and interest in the world
I'm curious about everything, always asking questions, and you find most subjects and topics fascinating. I like exploration and discovery.

5. Leadership
I excel at the tasks of leadership: encouraging a group to get things done and preserving harmony within the group by making everyone feel included. I do a good job organizing activities and seeing that they happen.

On being Audacious

Originally posted by White Rhino this is an inspiring story by Joe Laur from SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning, friend and systems thinker was recently at 7th Generation with the SoL Sustainability Consortium. SoL's soul purpose is to build the capacity in organizations and society to achieve economic, ecological and social sustainability so that all life can thrive for all time. In the 2-day session the group of SoL companies discussed Climate Change and what companies need to do to make a difference. Here is one of Joe's many stories. This one is about how to think about being as big as the challenge...

Edge of Emergence

26 people - sometimes less, sometimes more - people appearing at sessions very much as & when they like (generally everybody is present, though) - come together and research questions like, "What are we doing here? What wants to emerge here, in the world, in ourselves - now, in general?" (And from the very beginning onward my question is, "What is emerging between-us?")