Essays

The Singular Place of Dual Blessing

Andrew MacDonald Belonging, Essays , , ,
The Singular Place of Dual Blessing

The conscious meeting of the “I” and the “We”

When the “I” and the “We” co-inhabit the room, a striking new evolutionary possibility opens up. I call it The Singular Place of Dual Blessing.

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Though the word “we-space” has been around for a little while now, it turns out, as many have seen and as you’ll see here too, that the implications of it are as vast as the discovery of the Americas was 500 years ago. It’s a new world in here.

My own consciousness explorations, like those of many of you no doubt, are unorthodox. I spent thousands of hours in men’s groups hearing individual stories and noticing, with relaxation and delight, the groupness, the extra “we-factor” presence that came from being together. I also, after a dissolute youth as a hippy, spent decades meditating mostly outside of the traditions, not being part of a sangha or with a given view of the world. I say mostly outside because I did have some teachers, well-known and not, and was deeply instructed by the way of some non-dual teachers. I learned to work with what was true for me deep down in a bodily sense. I also spent a great deal of time and energy feeling deeply like an outsider, anxious and afraid and self-recriminating, while maintaining a slender tap root down into a non-dual consciousness through my meditation and group pursuits.

All our ways are unique and worthy of a deep “yes.” For me the persistent sense of exclusion and dispossession, gave me a deep feeling for the invisible rules that govern “we-spaces.” It helps to be an outsider to see what inside looks like!

I sought and fought for groups that an “us” with no “them,” where our common humanity was the bond, even if we seldom used such lofty language. Intellectually and personally, I came to see the world as moving toward, and needing to move toward, a common “us,” one with no “them.”   

The biggest turnaround is one that is really at the heart of this essay. I’ll point to it quickly here and outline it in some detail later because I really do think it significantly alters the view of the “I-space We-space” landscape and I think it’s generally not seen. (In this case, the fact that it’s usually overlooked is an indicator of its centrality.)

It’s that the groups we belong to, including family, work and spiritual communities, put invisible pressure on us to behave, think and feel in a certain way. We conform to this pressure invisibly and seamlessly out of love and loyalty to the group members.

The trouble is, this out-of-consciousness conformity to group norms creates a conflict with the depth of the self. Now the “I” must suppress its own knowing so as not to jeopardize its good standing in the group. While out of awareness, this dynamic is active nonetheless.

We can’t resolve the conflict while the loyalty to the group remains unseen.

When it is in awareness, a new possibility arises. I call it The Singular Place of Dual Blessing.

Let’s look at the we-space and the I-space separately, and see just how it works that we miss a crucial piece of each . . . ongoingly. Adding in the missing piece profoundly shifts the experience of both self and group. But let’s look at them one by one, starting with the group.

THE INVISIBLE COMMAND OF THE WE-SPACE

What we don’t notice as we go about our lives is that one of the many things that spiritual life or consciousness, is, is a system. It’s a “field.” (A “field” is analogous to a physical terrain; it’s a living space or theatre where our relational life takes place, especially when this is being noticed.)

No, we don’t notice that we live in a system or field. Instead we tend to live in a private ego world!

For example, we think that it’s us and our god and our meditation and our mindfulness. And it is all of these things! But all of these are first part of a system, a field.

It’s evident that we don’t think it’s a system because the literally millions of books and articles on all aspects of individual-self development and personal psychology that have emerged since the dawning of the science of psychology have virtually all assumed the individual perspective.

The result is we tend to think that development is self-development and the spiritual work is personal work. As I hope to make clear though, that’s only partially true and that limited perspective dooms our efforts to failure or limited success.

Here’s why this is so important and so little understood!

Each of us already belongs to many circles of greater or lesser personal importance. These circles include our family (both of origin and destiny), our workmates, our church perhaps, our schoolmates, people of our color, sex, ethnicity or language . . . and more. We’re already in relationship everywhere and flow in a sea of these multiple relationships!

So my friends, here’s the kicker!

Each of our we-space circles has a consciousness of its own . . . and unspoken rules of behavior and attitude for belonging. 

And these unspoken rules determine what membership in that group obligates us to act like and to feel like inside ourselves.

This is as true in higher consciousness circles as it is in the bowling league.

One of the reasons we don’t see this happening is that we’re blinded by a root assumption that’s below consciousness it’s so taken for granted. It’s the assumption, deep in our psyche and deep in the historic experience of being human, that there is an “us” and a “them.” Each group or circle we’re in forms itself as a little “us” that’s distinct from “them.” Members become an “us” because we agree that this is “us” and that’s “them.” 

“Us” and “them” are foundational assumptions of the present level of evolutionary development for almost everybody[1]. Moving past that unconscious assumption is one way of describing what the worldwide awakening now possible for us, is about. We’re moving toward a world where there’s only us.

 (Are you with me so far, at least in a checking out way, because a major point is coming? If you’re not, please write and tell me where I lost you – or where I got it wrong!  I’d really like to know!)

All the preceding was a setup to tell you this:

Our membership in circles and networks puts a powerful pressure on us to conform uncritically and automatically to the consensus worldview, internally and externally, moment to moment, as the condition of our membership.

I’m talking about an unconscious pressure to think, feel, and behave in a certain way. Group members are under an invisible pressure to think of and behave toward the leader and members in a specific way and to treat group habits in a certain highly proscribed way. Moreover, a part of us (a watching part of the ego) is delegated to continually watch that we “do it right” by the group. And we hate to get it wrong! This pressure looks and feels like loyalty to the group and as I mentioned, it’s more or less entirely invisible and out of awareness.

When we look at a scene of long-term conflict in the world, we easily see the systemic aspect: the Irish “troubles” between Catholics and Protestants, for example; or Sunni and Shia stresses or Balkan enmities.

What we seldom see though is that we’re all in just the same evolutionary position as these conflict areas when we’re locked into the “us” and “them” space.

The more important the group is to us personally the harder it is for us to see our acquiescence to its worldview. (The more we’re identified with it.) [2]

Moreover we’re very likely to be already in the “us” and “them” space because that’s the inherited evolutionary consciousness. We’re very prone to think it’s “us” who have it right and “them” who don’t.

And the unconscious rule of belonging to “us” is to not question that. What’s conscious is that loyalty, etiquette, breeding and politeness demand no less of us!

What we don’t see, because it’s a group rule to not talk about it, is that our own culture has placed powerful systemic pressures on us to conform to a specific way of seeing the world.

And conscious evolution and “awakening” are not a part of that way!

This makes awakening really difficult for us! But is awakening really difficult, or is simply that it’s hard when we’re identified with a system that forbids it? In a system that makes awakening and conscious evolution its mandate, it could be that not awakening is difficult.

But I get ahead of myself!

WHAT WE’RE NOTICING INSTEAD

How do we miss seeing the systemic connection if it’s so common?

What is in awareness around this is our conscience. A “good conscience” is what strengthens our sense of belonging to the groups we belong to. A “bad conscience” threatens our belonging.

I claim no authorship of this amazing and very powerful idea. The role of conscience is a central insight of Bert Hellinger, founder of modern Family Constellations.

Just like our balance orients us to what standing straight feels like in the moment, our conscience orients us to what feeling and acting right are in the moment.

We align to the we-space’s hidden rules seamlessly, much like we catch our balance automatically when walking. The system’s rules for behaviour define normal and right in every way and our conscience orients to them unerringly.

This orientating to consensus reality is a social agreement that we have only limited control over because it’s invisible and outside of conscious awareness. The rules for membership are shared intuitively within “the field” of all the members and individuals. In fact, the invisible perception of the membership rules and the related lines of cooperation and agreement between members is what a group field is.

The rules are unconscious unless spelled out

In a usual group, the operating rules are entirely unconscious. They didn’t arise because we thought them through and decided they were a good idea. They came because they’re the consensus reality in the group and we wanted to be in the group. Like the side-effects of a drug, they invisibly attend the group reality we adopt.

Without working directly with our human propensity to adapt to systems, we’re at only limited choice in any particular group we’re part of.

Unless we’re consciously noticing the group’s unconscious system, we’ll tend to subvert our individuality to it.

THE PLACE OF THE UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL

So far we’ve been talking about the power of the group. What we haven’t talked about is the equally important contribution and gift of our individuality to the whole. Western culture is very clear on the centrality of the individual and celebrates it continually. What it misses entirely is the vital context that individuality nest in: the group or community.  

Our individuality is the necessary other pole to the group. But let’s acknowledge our individuality here:

You are a unique one-of-a-kind individual and your particular gift is needed for our awakening! That’s literally true: your particular gift, the you of you is a vital key we need.

If you don’t give it, we’ll have to get there another way. Nonetheless, you have a way into the heart of the matter that is unique to you.

For all our culture’s lip service to individuality, it’s much more invested in “us” and “them” thinking.  A mature individual recognizes that others are individuals too, something more than “them.” To the extent that we buy into there being a “them” that’s not also “us” we sell out the magnificent uniqueness that we are.

It’s a paradox but only the true individual, only the individualized individual who knows her uniqueness, can know that we’re all the same in that each of us is utterly unique. And not only unique but uniquely needed in this awakening game.

But if we’ve given up our individual depth in order to belong to the limited group, we’re unable to awaken. The group consensus reality acts as a limiter we defer to without realizing it.

And conversely, the awakening world needs the unique depth of each of us to know itself!

When we can entertain both of these at the same time, we’re at the Singular Place of Dual Blessing.

THE SINGULAR PLACE OF DUAL BLESSING

Now we’ve come to the place when both our individual perspective and feeling, and the larger whole are in awareness at the same time. Now we start to see that the “them” we were keeping out is also our own depth.

Now we see more deeply that the profound problems of the interconnected world – pandemics and social control, war, poverty, resource depletion, environmental system decay – can’t be excluded or made into “them” in any way.

They too are “us.”

We see that in a real way, the future is up to us.

Frail, human, uncertain, unfinished, unheroic us!

Welcome to the privilege of starting again in this moment! Welcome to conscious evolution! Welcome to the Singular Place of Dual Blessing!

You’re fully you, you’re fully in relationship with a larger whole that is all of us. There’s no escaping, not really.

It’s true that one way or another, your ass is going to get kicked. Like the biblical truth that will “set you free,” the Singular Place of Dual Blessing will set you free but sometimes it might piss you off a little. 

We don’t really get to go back to sleep. But then sleep wasn’t so much fun anyway, was it?

We don’t get a manual or a roadmap. But the good news is we don’t need a roadmap. The good news is we get to discover that who and what we have are enough.

Road maps are for sissies who think that someone else’s way is good enough. It’s not! There’s somewhere to go that only you can go. And the whole needs you if it’s to get where it needs to go!

From the Singular Place of Dual Blessing you realize that there’s something to do that only you can do and that there’s no real choice except to do it. The fact you still don’t know how to do it and never will doesn’t lessen the call. None of us do but that doesn’t change a thing. The Singular Place doesn’t need you to know.

The Singular Place of Dual Blessing is beautiful beyond description. It’s a bitch. It’s gonna kick your ass.

But deep down you know you wouldn’t want it any other way!

[1] As many of you “evolutionaries” and integralistas know, the perception of “us” and “them” is  related to the evolutionary development or “altitude” of the perceiver and is primarily visible at “first tier”(the relatively low levels of) consciousness. This is true but nonetheless, I contend that not specifically seeing the pressure to conform created by the group is a major impediment to moving into second tier consciousness.

[2] All we-spaces based on “us” and “them” have as a prime directive that it’s rude or worse, to draw attention to the group rules for belonging. They pretend to be talking about reality not about their pre-judgment. They imagine there are no rules.

The Surprising Visitor

Andrew MacDonald Activism, Enlightenment, Essays, Presencing

What do you need to move through this time well, something more than just getting through it still standing. Could we actually use this time to emerge stronger and more resilient?

The question may seem crazy when we’re struggling to keep our head above water, when people close to us and maybe we ourselves are feeling anxious or afraid, gripped by something bigger than themselves and not knowing how to cope. I’ll return to that good and practical concern in a moment

But for now, what would a best experience be like for us?

A natural and healthy first impulse is to want to see and hear each other. There are beautiful and elegant ways to do this, active listening, Empathy Circles for example. (You can google Empathy Circles if you’d like to try them.) For me though, these tend to reinforce where we already are, and constrain what’s possible. They have the side-effect of keeping us within our bubble.

Empathy and listening are part of the foundation but there’s something in addition to them that makes everything come alive. I’ll use the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes which most of us in a western tradition have heard a version of, as a way to make the distinction.

As Wikipedia describes the story:

“The Emperor’s New Clothes (Danish: Kejserens nye klæder) is a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent – while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new “clothes”, no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally a child cries out, ‘But he isn’t wearing anything at all!‘”

Beautiful is it not? The emperor was naked but no one could admit it, even to themselves. If the people in the story were practicing empathy together they would each pretend to see the clothes and no one would say that the Emperor was naked. The reason for that is that our perception is very much based in social norms and what can be said and seen, rather than what we actually think, feel and see. (Getting past that is the subject of my book Evolutionary YOU.)

However, the Covid-19 coronavirus is presenting us with a situation that, in order to fully respond, we have to move out beyond social conformity. It invites us beyond our isolating personal performance of being intelligent and competent and handling it well. To rise to meet it, something more like what the spiritual traditions call “waking up” is required, something beyond our conditioning.

We’d need a way, or more likely ways, to allow the mysterious “other” that we don’t know yet to enter the closed system of our conditioning. Although all of us have the hardware capacity for these ways, they usually take practice and development to be more available. What’s needed is something like Socratic dialogues in which conversation, and especially questions that arise in dialogue, flush out unacknowledged assumptions and errors in thinking.  David Bohm, the nuclear physicist whose passion was the underlying unity of things was trying to do something similar with his group Dialogue process.

Does all of this sounds difficult and arcane and kind of impossible? I think it’s better than that.

We’re in a time of “cracking open” when reality reveals itself to ordinary people inquiring together. As long as we’ve been humans we’ve been sitting around the campfire under the starry skies contemplating the nature of what it means to be here, trying to come to a greater understanding. This sense-making is what we humans do, all of us, and something we care about deeply.

Right now, because what we knew for certain is no longer certain, there’s a renaissance of meaning-making. It’s easier for us to step out of knowing all the answers. We’re all shook up already. From an ordinary seeker’s perspective, someone looking for the deeper meaning or the Holy Grail, this is a golden age. Though we have different capacities by training, we’re all ordinary people, little Frodos on a journey if we dare to be and care. More is available than we think.

The Biblical saying has it that the devil goes about like a roaring lion seeking to devour you. That may have a certain truth but we could also say that Taoist-like masters are also going about in unassuming garb, entering into your meaning conversations and playfully show you simplicity itself. Both poles arise together.

Approaching new conversations that may serve us now requires qualities that no one of us has perfectly – but that we may have in the collective when we come together on purpose. Truth may be like rocks scattered everywhere in the field of consciousness but perceptually unavailable to us while we’re in our “isolating personal performance.” But when we we come together to purposefully explore, we stumble over the rocks continually.

Some things worth doing are worth doing even in a small and miserably humble way; they have their own beauty for that reason. I know that I don’t have all the pieces and sometimes am very stupid indeed – wanting to run away for example – but I am hearing that a few people are interested in exploring together and so would I.

Some elements of group exploration would be 1) empathy, 2) some ways of letting the unexpected in 3) an explicit request to not do it perfectly (perhaps including the willingness and the “ability” to make public mistakes) , and 4) a time for reflection about what worked well and what didn’t so we can learn to learn together.

This last part is important. Few people realize that they, that we, have the capacity to create forms and structures that can be helpful to others. Moreover, this is one of the most creative and satisfying things we can do. I believe it to be a natural human capacity. We are not just recipients of meaning’s hand-me-downs from an earlier generation.

Our emerging capacity to care for each other is the surprising visitor.

Back to the beginning again, being involved in this pursuit with others helps take us out of the worry zone into a place where our own problems seem less interesting. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest and early evolutionary said it beautifully, “There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.”

Change is a shift in consciousness

Andrew MacDonald Activism, Belonging, climate change, deep adaptation, Enlightenment, Essays, Presence, Uncategorized
Change is a shift in consciousness

​My friend John Heney has referred to our normal experience of the world as an “isolating personal performance.”​ This seems to me a telling phrase, one I can certainly relate to ​from personal experience.

In this essay, I want to take this experience of ​isolating performance and place it beside the experience of Presence or non-​performance and ​offer some ideas about ​moving from one to the other.​ Along the way this I’ll show ​the relevance of this to our moment, to climate change and ​adapting to a future we may ​not be able to “fix.” 

​Warning: 1. Along the way there will be ​​bad cartoons. ​2. When I say that “we experience … [this or that],” I’m referring to the usual mindset, the everyday sleep the spiritual literature speaks to. ​That’s not all we are, of course. The everyday sleep IS the personal  performance.

​The purpose of the performance of an isolated self is to maintain or improve our ​right to belong well in the human community.​ ​The social norm is to want ​very much be on the good side of the status measurement​s that indicate worth: rich-poor, succeeding-failing, enough-not enough, blame-forgiveness, high-low, ​valuable-​not valuable​ ​. . .  ​​​Most of us, most of the time are involved with this. ​​

So when we experience stress and difficulty, which we inevitably do, ​the natural thing to do is to look to that solitary self to understand ​what went wrong. ​Most therapy and most healing modalities presuppose this solitary self. It’s been with us throughout evolutionary history; it’s what we know. Yet the solitary self​ has a limited understanding of what’s going on. It sleeps or it wouldn’t experience itself as solitary and separate ​the way it does.

​​In a crude characterization a caveman might raise his eyebrows at, ​the world of the solitary self looks like this:

​​The normal sleep of everyday life is one of continual judgement and evaluation, trying to find a good place relative to others. The wider context isn’t in awareness. 

Where​ is the wider context, you ask? Where is the deep love we ​know in all this? 

​It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s all around. We’re inside it and we intuit it and ​sometimes experience it. But what’s in the foreground of normal awareness is our relationship to others, high and low. Compared to ​the immediacy of this normal perception, ​talk of love comes across as an abstraction, ​secondary. 

​The reality may be that we’re bathing in ​the greater reality, held by it continually. But ​we usually don’t see it. We’re spellbound by the drama of the world. There ​may indeed be a “divine comedy,” but usually we see something closer to the Jerry Springer show. 

If we manage to move past or forget about the judgemental and evaluative mind, what’s ​already there shows up.

A second cave man drawing might ​show it like this:

​We’re immersed in a greater whole, represented by the yellow​. ​We’re touching everything through it since the ​wholeness is undivided. High and low, big and small don’t matter much. 

​Underneath and around the dramas where we protect our fragile self-sense and try ​and get by, we’re connected to others and made of the same stuff as them.​

We’re each in ​exactly the same relationship to the whole as everybody else. This is the great leveler. The commonality ​sits underneath our seeming world of differences, the one in which the norm is to perform to prove our right to belong​. ​When ​we’re noticing this greater whole, others appear not​ as other but as expressions of the same thing we are. Status and judgement ​are not very relevant or interesting. ​Uniqueness is valued because it ​gives us scope for creative partnerships. 

​”What is greatest in human beings is what makes them  equal to everyone else. Everything else that deviates higher ​or lower from what is common to all human beings makes us less. If we know this we can develop a deep respect for every human being.”

​(Bert Hellinger observed this, while/ after reading the Taoist source book, 

Tao te Ching.)

​The world of struggle for higher and lower ​status is ​easy to see when we look out at the entire world​. It’s less visible to us at the local level but the ​same dynamic applies there​.

If we’re able to move past it and see each other inside a larger whole, a different dynamic comes into view. The individual characteristics and experiences of others, represented below by the letters, are seen as values that each person in “the field’ has access to.

​When the individuality of each person is ​genuinely welcomed, then the qualities of each become available to the others in the field. This sense of ​collective intelligence can be very palpable​. It’s not a rare or difficult experience. 

We’re in a different relationship to the whole and everything changes. Rather than holding on to some truth, what is is emerging in the moment.

This wholeness has many names and none. “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” Presence is a word for it that resonates with me but whatever we call it, the thing ​the word refers to is​n’t a word. It’s what is and a direct experience of what is. ​Presence isn’t inert and doing nothing. It’s full of energy. It is energy. ​​It’s effortlessly doing, wu wei, as some ancient Chinese called it.

To be an effective change agent, we’ll do well to be aligned with Presence, by whatever name. Otherwise we’ll project the game of opposites onto our enemies and​ their problems will become ours. Presence tends to integrate problems.

Another person’s difference is another way to experience how the wholeness is expressing. ​The possibilities for collaboration are literally infinite. Every person can combine with every other in any way. Basically, ​everything comes clear in Presence.

​By ​definition the direct experience of this “beyond the opposites” noticing is neither hard not easy because ​. . . it’s beyond the opposites. The opposites are inside it. It’s a spontaneous manifestation like happiness or laughter and it’s not further away than them or more foreign than them.

​But like them it can’t be ​”accomplished” directly or by intention. 

Presencing Practice, because of its simplicity, helps bypass some of the ways we get in the way and ​subscribers are welcome to join in a practice session. ​(Click on Groups above.)

Climate change as celebration of consciousness

Andrew MacDonald climate change, Enlightenment, Essays, Presence, Uncategorized 0 Comment
Climate change as celebration of consciousness

Few of us talk about the inner side of climate change, surfacing the inner angst, sense of pressure or despair we may feel. But when we do we see it as a burden and a problem. It shows up as, “Oh my god, how am I going to be with this?” A hundred, a thousand questions arise: how will our families understand it, how real is the science, Green New Deal?, how does Climate Change fit in with Focusing or other practices, what are the implications for counseling, political considerations. The list is endless. We don’t know where to start. The point is we experience climate change as burden and we talk about it in those terms, a problem to be fixed. In short we wish it would go away.

I don’t deny the sense of burden at all. An underlying dynamic there is that the burden shouldn’t be there and that climate change shouldn’t be there. We frame it as a problem. We treat it much like our world generally treats death, as a consummation to be avoided at all costs. But as we know, many experience the spiritual acceptance, peace and love they’ve never experienced before as they approach their  deaths. And many who witness others in this process do too.

I’m not saying by this comparison that climate change means we’re all going to die. I truly don’t know that and am not invested in it. But it seems very sure that much of what we’re identified with isn’t going to survive. It seems clear that some parts of our identity based on our lifestyle are going to “die,” metaphorically speaking. (I like Jem Bendell’s formulation that collapse is inevitable, catastrophe probable, and extinction possible.) As a simple example, we’re quickly depleting  a limited resource base – but you know that.

Climate change as problem is rooted in the same mind that sees death, whether literal or figurative, a problem. It’s the problem of denial. But never before have we collectively faced the problem of denial, or of death. We’ve just quietly gone on our way out the door into the great  beyond, single file and one by one. But we’re not dead yet. We’re still here and we’re here in the same room.

So what is this that we’re confronting, here together. And there’s that confronting word, a problem again.

We’re in this together and we’re in this as individual consciousness.

But here’s the rub. Climate change is not an individual problem primarily. Actually, none of our problems are individual problems primarily. Treating climate change as an individual problem gets off on the wrong foot by missing the crucial context, that we’re in this together.

Desperately, intimately, we’re thrown together in this situation where what it means to be human and alive is right there in the middle of the room with us. The question we never asked is being asked now.

I’m reminded of Mary Oliver’s question, “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”. But here together the question becomes “What are we  going to do with our wild and precious life?”  What are we going to do with our wild and precious common life? Which is our consciousness, our one mind. “Consciousness” is in no way an abstraction. It’s a lived experience. We’ve always lived in consciousness but are usually distracted by the getting and losing that are the concerns of the usual day. (The word I like for it is Presence because it reflects the intimacy and relationship more clearly. I don’t use the word because people have no idea what it means.)

The ability to tune into Presence with each other is natural to us, very like what it is to be human. But it’s usually unnoticed and is eagerly practiced even less. I find it highly useful to turn my attention into this common space, rather than pre-select working on my worry or private issue, though that’s there too. My private issue often opens up into the common space, releases and lets go. Symbolically it “dies” into the greater life. Then we become curious about whatever-you-call-it after that surrender. It’s not a word.  

It’s celebrating our moment-to-moment experience of consciousness or Presence. And it’s celebrating how each one of us is experiencing it differently, growing our collective learning, helping us rise to new understandings. All of this is a far cry from the lonely, though entirely understandable bewailing of our outcast fates.

(If you like, come join a simple exercise in group exploration this Sunday, July 14th. Details here.

You in the Climate Change Ecosystem

Andrew MacDonald Activism, Belonging, climate change, deep adaptation, Essays, What I learned today 0 Comment
You in the Climate Change Ecosystem

A reality I’ve been slow to see is that the social contract we grew up with is connected to vast pools of loneliness and isolation . . . and that these are central drivers of our climate predicament. This social isolation is particularly difficult to see because in order to see it, you (we/I) have to step outside of it, witness it. Only then can you see where we were, where we came from. Otherwise, like the oft-cited fish in the water, we can’t see or feel where we are. And where we are is in a social system that, to a great degree, is organized around tokens of worth and status, represented by money. And this underlying structure affects us deeply and intimately. Our lives easily become about fitting into it. The economic system and the social system are inseparable like the chicken and the egg, parts of each other. 

Here’s a chunk to digest, unless you’d rather spit it out because it’s not too tasty. Or maybe you know it already. It’s that we can’t meet the intense targets for CO2 reductions  without changing the economic system we have. And we can’t change the economic system without changing the social system because they’re really different views of the same thing. And further, we can’t change the social system without changing ourselves. Everything that’s made us us has come about within the structure of the society that is currently failing and that needs to change.

The economic system, the social system, and little ole us are all parts of the very same thing. As this slowly starts to come into focus for us, and even when snippets of it do, we more or less immediately start to gravitate toward a new way of being together. The ones who feel the same disenfranchisement / reinfranchisement start to drift together. They’re hearing the same music.

Of the three systems, economic, social and personal, the social system  is, perhaps the easiest to work with, the most amenable to change. For one thing it almost immediately makes demands on us as individuals to treat each other differently and in a way that’s often engaging and fun. The economic system is more deeply buried and so  it’s easier to ignore and keep it out of sight for a while. But it’s there. I’ve been going to a wonderful festival in the woods near where I live near Ottawa, Canada for almost 40 years (Blue Skies). Much of the festival could have been part of a fair from the middle-ages. It’s a wonderful fantasy. But you go down the laneway past the gate and scattered in the woods are fields of cars from all over the world and a great deal of money underwriting the freedom festivities.

So activism’s effectiveness is tied into an ecosystem that contains social, personal, and economic aspects, none of which can be left out. It seems to me that to the extent we don’t know that, then under pressure activism will tend to become reactive, which is basically where the revolutions of the past started and ended.

In short, if we’re to reach our CO2 reduction goals, which radically change the economic structure, we’ll also have to invest deeply, and perhaps personally in the social structure. That basically means paying attention to the aspirations and gifts of activists, their individuality, rather than assuming these will take care of themselves or  be nobly overridden for “the cause.”

And we can’t do all this en masse or all at once either, just the little part of it we have in front of us. And that we can do.

Your comments are a kind of love and are very welcome.

Being effective in this bewildering moment

Andrew MacDonald Belonging, Enlightenment, Essays, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Martin Buber wrote an amazing book in 1923 that has endured and perhaps will endure as a classic. It was called I-Thou. In vivid poetic language that is as fresh today as it was then, he spoke a timeless truth. (Here are excerpts that give the flavor of his writing.) Humans have two modes, I-Thou or I-It. I-Thou is relational and we speak to and from the whole of ourselves. I-It is transactional (my word) and the It can refer to He or She. I-It makes the world and the other an object outside of ourselves.

This is a vital distinction but not one we’re taught or conditioned to notice. Yet everything flows from whether we’re approaching the world as I meeting Thou, or I meeting It in every moment. “On how one orients himself to the moment, depends the failure or fruitfulness of it” wrote Henry Miller.

Activists are trying to change something in the world. If  we do activism from an I-it perspective – an ideology – we’ll try and change what we don’t like, not seeing we’re part of it. We’ll not be plugged into the entire ecosystem of the problem, whatever it is. We’ll just see some of it, a part that we or someone else, has judged as bad. And we’ll try and change that bad thing. Unaware of the whole system and not present enough to notice the exquisite feedback present in the system, our actions become part of the problem.

I-Thou mode, approaches the issue reverently, nakedly. Recognizing we’re part of that field we get feedback immediately from ourselves. We get immediate feedback from others too: We can look at them and see immediately if life is being served here.

Recently I was with a friend and we both became aware of the I-Thou dimension. We’d been sharing what we were experiencing in the moment and we noticed the strong sense of immediacy. What I thought was that this relational connection – which was palpable and alive, like a current – is always going on. But I usually don’t notice it.

I-It is safer, easier to inhabit. I-Thou is always present, but usually I’m not.

There’s a practical application to this. We want to be effective in this bewildering moment. We want to help. Yet only I-Thou is able to help. Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti said it like this: Action has meaning only in relationship and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.

Understanding relationship doesn’t mean having a theory about connection; it means being directly present to it. We can also be directly connected to not being present. That’s I-Thou connection too because it’s being real with what is.

It feels good to acknowledge that I-Thou connection is there, a part of us, even though we may not know. Much of life is like that! Electricity was there before Tesla or Edison stumbled upon it. It was always there but we didn’t know about it. Everyone’s experienced I-Thou, the sense of reverence in the presence of another, and forgotten, again and again. Yet when we’re not tapped into the dimension of I and Thou, we’re in a world of our plans and fantasy outcomes and nothing real can result.

 

How to get from breakfast to lunch without losing your mind

Andrew MacDonald Belonging, Enlightenment, Essays, Story, Uncategorized 1 Comment
How to get from breakfast to lunch without losing your mind

The world is well on its way to waking up.

If it doesn’t blow itself up first, which it’s also well on its way to doing. It’s the best of times, the worst of times.

But do we have to choose, good reader? Old Aristotle suggested no: “The mark of the truly educated is being able to entertain an idea without accepting it.”

But how do we do that?

I’m not talking about abstract notions of truth here. It’s about getting from breakfast to lunch without losing your mind.

This hopped-up world just begs us to take positions. It screams at us that we’re right and they’re wrong. (Or for masochistic contrarians,  I’m wrong and they’re right.) It presents us an epic drama of good guys and bad guys and provides you with a full set of stickers to paste on the other. Many of the stickers you wouldn’t want your mother  to read! Mighty magnets seem buried in the poles of every argument to pull us to one side or the other.

Well, my truth is I’m not doing it!

I’m not playing.

And I don’t want to (as we say in Canada) just take my hockey puck and go home.

I want a different game!

So bring on the differences! Because you know we have them. Deep down, any two of us see the world differently. We may see the color red the same (though who knows). But for sure we don’t see the core human issues at the heart of our lives the same way. We each come stamped with a unique edition of being human  that came through our family and our culture and our biology and the fluttering of butterfly wings in the Amazon.

Maybe the simplest language to understand this is this: We each have an embodied story through which we understand the world. Our stories are very different, much more different than a common language would have us believe. They’re unique! We each are shaped into a one-of-a-kind understanding of the world by it. From the inside it’s experienced as a story that is our identity. The stories are truly different.

But we share the fact of being one-of-a-kind.

And that’s as important as the uniqueness. It’s as Mary Lou Kownaci says: Engrave this upon your heart: there isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you heard their story. I hear in this that to understand another’s story is to recognize that it’s also our  story.

Our unique stories are also universal. And the more truthfully they’re expressed, the more unique they are and the more universal.

Each time I step back a little, I see that my story has a deeper meaning than the one I self-servingly tell. And what I see/think/feel/imagine/know is that the deeper story still lives. Not only is it not complete, it’s not been told yet. And as Mary Lou suggests, it’s not my deeper story only. We’re all in the same existential position. Our  story has a further meaning for us that can come in a growth step or a series of them. It doesn’t require a step because that would mean it makes demands. Which would mean that it has a preference. (I imagine the Great Artist and Architect of Freedom has more fun things to do than worry about whether the universe is turning out the right way down here.)

But “it” makes no demands and has no preferences. It leaves next steps completely up to dumb me. It simply shows me what justice and beauty would look like if I wanted them.

It just shows me my heart’s desire and leaves me to it.

I hate that! Talk about having you by the short and curlies, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Now I/you/we are in trouble because we hold onto our cover story for dear life. We think it is our dear life, so occupied are we – or at least so intent is the world we live in – with keeping that cover story fresh and in good shape.

Even as we prepare for a final examination that only has one question in it. And the final exam question has nothing to do with the cover story.

How can we study for a damn exam like that?

My own strategy, or rather my unstrategy, is to minimize my natural preference for one story over another by exploring them with others. If I prefer one version, what I get is a fancy improvement on the cover story. (But only every time.) If I refrain from preferring, I see a little more of the real story. It’s humbling. But sometimes we see it’s a bigger story than we thought.  It’s fully mine and fully yours and fully ours.

As Ram Dass said, paraphrasing the third Zen patriarch,”The great way is not difficult,” and here he pauses for the punch line, “for those who have no preference.”

Good luck!

Together with the excellent Vihra Dincheva, we hold drop-in sessions on second and fourth Thursday’s. You can read about UNPLANNING, aka WE-SPACE Open Space here. If you’re on my mailing list you’ll get the link and extra goodies. I’m doing a registration-only Small-group Intensive starting the end of October. It’s for a deeper practice than can be available with a drop-in.  Please apply to join us!

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And do leave a comment and connect our stories further!

Beyond social control is authenticity, but it takes a tribe to find it

Andrew MacDonald Activism, Belonging, Driver's seat, Essays, Groups, social control 0 Comment
Beyond social control is authenticity, but it takes a tribe to find it

Social control, political correctness, group think are all ways of describing the pressure to act or feel a certain “correct” way in order to be accepted and loved by the people that are important to us. Usually we think of these as negatives. But they’re  part of life. Handling them can be a genuine life-changer for us, putting us in the driver’s seat of our own life as never before.

Here’s why that’s so. We humans have a deep and primary need to belong, to be accepted and valued. But on the other hand we also have a powerful need, a primary value if you like, to be our unique and individual selves. These two forces – social acceptance and individual authenticity – are in a balancing act, if not an outright conflict, every hour of the day. If you’re not aware of this balancing act, it’s very likely that it’s in your life but you can’t easily see it.

Getting clear about the conflict and knowing how to navigate it, because it’ll never go away, is one of the most powerful things we can do to find our own unique way. It puts us right in the driver’s seat of our own lives – if we’re prepared to take the responsibility. Let’s isolate this important slice of our life and have a clear look at it. See if you recognize it in your own life.

As in all conflicts or tensions, there are two opposite poles. One is we fear being kicked out, disapproved of, ostracized by those who are important to us. We fear this will be our fate if we’re too much out of sync with group consensus, if we fail to fit in enough. Often we respond to this by not allowing ourselves to say what it is we really believe or want. At other times, we may not even be able to think it, to admit it to ourselves. We might censor ourselves in front  of our work mates, people we’re with in workshops and growth communities, our neighbours, and not uncommonly, our partners and families. The people that are important to us, in other words. These ties that bind can exercise a social control and this social control can be stronger or more effective than any army in limiting what we say or think.

So that’s one pole, the social control!

The other side of the tension kicks is the pressure to stand up for our values and what we really believe, group be damned. If we experience ourselves as not valuing or standing up for ourselves as an individual, we feel we’ve failed and can get down on ourselves. This is a primary source of high levels of anxiety and depression. But it can also be the shrinking before taking the next step in our work or career, because we don’t want to screw up.

Please remember, especially if you think I’m making this up or overstating it, social control is, by definition, not easy to see. It’s invisibility is the source of its control. And in the modern world with its shifting cultural values and memes it’s very difficult to know which group to be loyal too.

To get a better sense of what I’m speaking about here, how ubiquitous it is, take a look in the rear view mirror at how it showed up in history. Think of the church for example. Everyone took it for granted that the definition of reality as set forth by the church was simply right and correct. No one spoke out in dissent, not for long anyway, and few even thought anything different than the orthodoxy. This was not conscious social control on the part of the church or the priests. Even the ones who lit the fires to burn the Inquisition’s heretics thought they were doing God’s will. Either they didn’t question what they were doing or they hid their questions from themselves quickly, because that’s how social control works. It shows up as normal, as “just  the  way it is.”

Social control is a special kind of invisible because it’s not easy to see even when it’s pointed to. That’s because we’re invested in things being true or that way and to doubt it can cost us heavily. But we can take back what we’ve given over to social control and group think and chart our own way.

Taking it back will affect us in all parts of our life. It’ll change the way we show up as agents and doers. It helps us clean up our emotional life and take back our projections. It’ll directly affect the way we’re able to mature and develop our ideas. It even affects the way we wake up spiritually to the one life the mystic’s talk about.

All of this is possible, none of it is easy.

Here’s a visual metaphor for how human culture moves forward or evolves. Think of it like a giant amoeba, a blob made up of millions of individuals that finds its way forward over time, in response to the prompts of history. No individual can exist outside of the blob, and the blob exerts a tremendous conforming pressure on each of the individuals to stay inside it.

No one is coercing us overtly, of course. It’s just that we naturally and seamlessly conform to the dictates of “reality,” to what everyone knows to be true. We conform in other words, to life in the blob. And we do it continually. The fact that what the culture offers may not be true, or may not be what we as an individual need now, or even that the culture needs now, is seldom examined or discussed. New ideas and advancements come through individuals as creative leaps.

There is a way out of this, an amazing and powerful and beautiful way that gives unending gifts. It’s simple but not easy. The way is to examine our own individuality, what we really think, and really feel – what we’re really doing – in a dedicated space with others who are doing that too.

We can’t look at a relational problem all by ourselves. You can’t do it all on your own. I can’t do it on my own either. None of us can. But we can do it with others. It’s a group venture, a “red pill” to take that changes everything.

Comment below and make the energy go round!

 

What’s “Too Much Information” ?

Andrew MacDonald Essays, Uncategorized , , , 3 Comments
TMI OR TLI

Sitting in a sun-dappled parlour a while ago, some friends and I were talking about TMI and TLI. Too Much and Too Little information. We discovered that we definitely wanted to know more.

Where do we look foolish sharing too much – and what does it matter if we do? We all have a private side. Patricia Sun said that we’d do well to decrease the gap between our public selves and private selves. And Dylan said,  “If my thought dreams could be seen / they’d probably put my head, in a guillotine.” Could that be your head too? If we don’t have thoughts that are out of the box then we’re thoroughly in the box, creatures of convention.

What if this border between the inner and the outer started to disappear? And why is it there in the first place? A picture of this came up in a conversation I had with my friend Rainer Leoprechting a few weeks ago as we had lunch outside the Hotel Dubrovnik in Zagreb at the ISCA constellation conference. It’s as if we carrying a little filing cabinet around with us that contains the answers, our identity, our little package to present to the world. Like bureaucrats we reach into this filing cabinet to find proper responses and present it to the world with a flourish. There you go!

But Rainer was saying that the answers are there in the cloud. They are made up in the moment and present themselves directly. I know the idea but received it as a fresh transmission that we really do have the capacity to bring forth whatever we want, in the moment, and it’s richer and better than the canned answer from the filing cabinet. What comes makes use of whatever’s in the filing cabinet anyway.

We usually use this ability because we don’t trust the unknown. We really don’t know what our spontaneous response is going to be. We censor it to keep it under wraps so it doesn’t make us look foolish. Even here in Berlin where I am now, where I don’t know a soul in this city, I’m loathe to act funny or sound stupid with my execrable German. Does my self-cut hair look stupid the way it rises to a little pointed nub at the top like a mini-Mohawk? Does anyone notice the mud on my shoes from the farm in this city of beautifully shod people. Of course, which people, is a question too. The beggar in the subway and the one outside in the cold (he was there when I passed again hours later) were kneeling. Kneeling, paper cups out. I couldn’t see their shoes. I don’t know the story of either of these men but I know there’s a story and one that would be deeply instructive.

I’ve never seen a beggar on his knees before and was pained to see this misery on display. It felt like walking past a crucifixion. I want to be not like him, to not catch his eye. My first response is to feel like an arrogant prick and ignore him. I remember how I felt when I was a student hitchhiker and the priest rolled by in his big car. I despised what I felt was his fat arrogance.

A priest is the very  battleground of TMI and TLI. The priest is on his knees, he and his priestly brethren wherever they might be, praying to the Lord, that advocate of humility and earthiness, while living in a world that more or less worships success and prosperity. (I don’t make the world or the church wrong for this and not only because I’m not out on a lonesome highway. We’re the descendants of tribes for whom survival wasn’t assured over hundreds of thousands of years. We come from a world of our kind and their kind and it’s a hard habit to break.)

Does the priest have to navigate the terrain of showing or not showing what’s in his heart each day? Is he anxious about what’s God and what’s mammon? On his deathbed does he regret where he spent his time and wonder whether they’ll let him into heaven? The aforementioned Rainer did a workshop for Catholic priests and they were starved for real conversation about being individuals under the muting authority of the church. Starved for what the church labeled TMI. As a young man I remember Catholic books with Imprimatur written in the front matter. “It may be printed.”

Examples spin off in all directions but consider, as I know you do, the secrecy and the information that we’re getting and not getting from our governments. The US government is a visible example but it’s little different in Canada or Germany or wherever you are. The secret life of government is more or less diametrically opposed to the cover story about our altruistic intervention in other lands for example, our sweet talk of bringing democracy or equal rights for women. Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, have credibly destroyed key illusions for those who care to know. And of course, they’re most thoroughly vilified for revealing too much information. On the other hand the powers that be have a great deal of information about you, maybe enough to hang you with your private thoughts if they should wish to.

I love it when I see or hear about someone who has nothing to hide. You can taste the freedom. Because what can “they” do to you then? What’s to fear when you’re already out of your own closet. Everyone recognizes this free human when they see him or her and says someday they’ll be there too.

 

—

The Singular Place of Dual Blessing ORIGINAL

Tracy Essays
The Singular Place of Dual Blessing ORIGINAL

This essay points to what I feel is a powerful point of leverage in individual and group awakening . . . the place where the two overlap. Have a look, feel free to share and to contact me with any thoughts or observations.

It’s an exploration into the “I” and the “we-space” (the inside experience of being a member of a group) and the astonishing astonishing evolutionary possibilities that open up if we can make simultaneous room for both.

I call it The Singular Place of Dual Blessing.

the_singular

Though the word “we-space” has been around for a little while now, it turns out, as many have seen and as you’ll see here too, that the implications of it are as vast as the discovery of the Americas was 500 years ago. It’s a new world in here.

My own explorations, perhaps like your own, are unorthodox. I spent hundreds of hours in men’s groups hearing individual stories within a group context and noticing, with relaxation and delight, the groupness, the extra “we-factor” presence that came from being together. I also, after a dissolute youth as a hippy, spent decades meditating mostly outside of the traditions, not being part of a sangha or with a given view of the world. I say mostly outside because I did have some teachers, well-known and not, and was deeply influenced by the way of some non-dual teachers. I learned to work with what was true for me deep down in a bodily sense. I also spent a great deal of time and energy feeling like an outsider, anxious and afraid and self-recriminating, while maintaining a slender taproot down into a non-dual consciousness through my meditation and group pursuits.

All our ways are unique and worthy of a deep “yes.” For me, the persistent sense of exclusion and dispossession, it turns out, gave me a deep feeling for the invisible rules that govern “we-spaces.” It helps to be an outsider to see what inside looks like!

I sought and fought for groups with an “us” with no “them,” where our common humanity was the bond, even if we seldom used such lofty language. Intellectually and personally, I came to see the world as moving toward, and needing to move toward, a common “us,” one with no “them.”

The biggest turnaround is one that is really at the heart of this piece. I’ll point to it quickly here and outline it in some detail later because I really do think it significantly alters the view of the “I-space We-space” landscape, and I think it’s generally not seen. (In this case, the fact that it’s usually overlooked is an indicator of its centrality.)

It’s that the groups we belong to, including family, work, and spiritual communities, put invisible pressure on us to behave, think, and feel in a certain way, and that we conform to this pressure invisibly and seamlessly out of love and loyalty to the group members.

This out-of-consciousness conformity creates a conflict with the depth of the self, the “I”, which now must mask its own perception so as not to jeopardize its good standing in the group.

The conflict between the individual deep self (let’s call it “soul”) and the group’s demand for loyalty is the root of the “ego.“ Ego is the experience of the conflict between the demands of the groups we’re loyal to and the individual soul.

This ego will persist short of full permission for the “I” to have its unique and free expression and the we-space “rules” to be fully transparent and on the table. The first we-space rule is that the individual “I” be radically free to be itself.

When these two conditions are met, there’s a particular consciousness that’s felt. It’s relaxed, defenceless, grounded, aware of option at every moment, power-filled, subtle. I call it the Singular Space of Dual Blessing.

One of the blessings is that the individual soul becomes fully present and available because for the first time, it doesn’t have to hide or defer. The other is that we recognize with clarity and certainty that we are this “one without a second.”

These are awesome blessings indeed!

Here’s to I, you, and all people knowing this singular space.

Let’s look at the we-space and the I-space separately and see just how it works that we miss a crucial piece of each . . . on an ongoing basis. A certain part of each is out of awareness, and really, it’s what I call the Singular Space. But let’s look at them one by one.

THE INVISIBLE COMMAND OF THE WE-SPACE

What we don’t notice as we go about our lives is that one of the many things that spiritual life or consciousness is, is a system. It’s a “field.” (A “field” is analogous to a physical terrain; it’s a living space or theatre where our relational life takes place, especially when this is being noticed.)

No, we don’t notice that we live in a system or field. Instead we tend to live in a private ego world!

For example, we think that it’s us and our god and our meditation and our mindfulness that’s important. And it is all of these things! But all of these are first part of a system, a field.

It’s evident that we don’t think it’s a system because the literally millions of books and articles on all aspects of individual self-development and personal psychology that have emerged since the dawning of the science of psychology have virtually all assumed the individual perspective.

The result is we tend to think that development is self-development and that spiritual work is personal work. As I hope to make clear, though, that’s only partially true, and that limited perspective dooms our efforts to failure or limited success.

Here’s why this is so important and so little understood!

Each of us already belongs to many circles of greater or lesser personal importance. These circles include our family (both of origin and destiny); our workmates; our church perhaps; our schoolmates; people of our color, sex, ethnicity, or language . . . and more. We’re already in relationships everywhere and flow in a sea of these multiple relationships!

So, my friends, here’s the kicker!

Each of our we-space circles has a consciousness of its own . . . and unspoken rules of behavior and attitude for belonging. 

And these unspoken rules determine what membership in that group obligates us to act like and to feel like inside.

I hope to demonstrate this in a moment, but consider how central this is if true! And as we’ll see, unspoken rules can determine obligations in higher consciousness circles just as easily as they can in the bowling league.

One of the reasons we don’t see this happening is that we’re blinded by a root assumption that’s below consciousness so it’s taken for granted. It’s the assumption, deep in our psyche and deep in the historic experience of being human, that there is an “us” and a “them.” Each group or circle we’re in forms itself as a little “us” that’s distinct from “them.” Members become an “us” because we agree that this is “us”, and that’s “them.”

“Us” and “them” are foundational assumptions of the present level of evolutionary development for almost everybody[1]. Moving past that unconscious assumption is one way of describing what the worldwide awakening now possible for us, is about.

(Are you with me so far, at least in a checking-out way, because a major point is coming? If you’re not, please write and tell me where I lost you – or where I got it wrong!  I’d really like to know!)

All the preceding was a setup to tell you this:

Our membership in circles and networks puts a powerful pressure on us to conform uncritically and automatically to the consensus worldview, internally and externally, moment to moment, as the condition of our membership.

I’m talking about an unconscious pressure to think, feel, and behave in a certain way. Group members are under an invisible pressure to think of and behave toward the leader and members in a specific way and to treat group habits in a certain highly proscribed way. Moreover, a part of us (a watching part of the ego) is delegated to continually watch that we “do it right” by the group. And we hate to get it wrong! This pressure looks and feels like loyalty to the group, and as I mentioned, it’s more or less entirely invisible and out of awareness.

When we look at a scene of long-term conflict in the world, we easily see the systemic aspect: the Irish “troubles” between Catholics and Protestants, for example, or Sunni and Shia stresses, or Balkan enmities.

What we seldom see, though, is that we’re all in just the same evolutionary position as these conflict areas when we’re locked into the “us” and “them” space.

The more important the group is to us personally, the harder it is for us to see our acquiescence to its worldview. (The more we’re identified with it.) [2]

Moreover we’re very likely to be already in the “us” and “them” space because that’s the inherited evolutionary consciousness. We’re very prone to think it’s “us” who have it right and “them” who don’t.

And the unconscious rule of belonging to “us” is to not question that. What’s conscious is that loyalty, etiquette, breeding, and politeness demand no less of us!

What we don’t see, because it’s a group rule to not talk about it, is that our own culture has placed powerful systemic pressures on us to conform to a specific way of seeing the world.

And conscious evolution and “awakening” are not a part of that way!

This makes awakening really difficult for us! But is awakening really difficult, or is it simply that it’s hard when we’re identified with a system that forbids it? In a system that makes awakening and conscious evolution its mandate, it could be that not awakening is difficult.

But I get ahead of myself!

WHAT WE’RE NOTICING INSTEAD

How do we miss seeing the systemic connection if it’s so common?

What is in awareness around this is our conscience. A “good conscience” is what strengthens our sense of belonging to the groups we belong to. A “bad conscience” threatens our belonging.

I claim no authorship of this amazing and very powerful idea. The role of conscience is a central insight of Bert Hellinger, founder of modern Family Constellations.

Just like our balance orients us to what standing straight feels like in the moment, our conscience orients us to what feeling and acting right are in the moment.

We align to the we-space’s hidden rules seamlessly, much like we catch our balance automatically when walking. The system’s rules for behaviour define normal and right in every way, and our conscience orients to them unerringly.

This orientating to consensus reality is a social agreement that we have only limited control over because it’s invisible and outside of conscious awareness. The rules for membership are shared intuitively within “the field” of all the members and individuals. In fact, the invisible perception of the membership rules and the related lines of cooperation and agreement between members is what a group field is.

The rules are unconscious unless spelled out

In a usual group, the operating rules are entirely unconscious. They didn’t come because we thought them through and decided they were a good idea. They came because they’re the consensus reality in the group, and we wanted to be in the group. Like the side effects of a drug, they invisibly attend the group reality we adopt.

Without working directly with our human propensity to adapt to systems, we’re at only limited choice in any particular group we’re part of.

Unless we’re consciously noticing the group system (the group mind), we’ll tend to subvert our individuality to it.

THE PLACE OF THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL

So far we’ve been talking about the power of the group. What we haven’t talked about overtly is the equally important contribution and gift of our individuality to the whole. We haven’t been talking about it because our culture is very clear on the centrality of the individual and celebrates it continually. What it misses is the hidden side of individuality: the vital context it nests in. That we have been looking at!

Our individuality is the necessary other pole to the group. But let’s acknowledge our individuality here:

You are a unique, one-of-a-kind individual, and your particular gift is needed for our awakening! That’s literally true; your particular gift, the you of you, is a vital key we need.

If you don’t give it, we’ll have to get there another way. Nonetheless, you have a way into the heart of the matter that is unique to you.

For all our culture’s lip service to individuality, it’s much more invested in “us” and “them” thinking.  A mature individual recognizes that others are individuals too, something more than “them.” To the extent that we buy into there being a “them” that’s not also “us”, we sell out the magnificent uniqueness that we are.

It’s a paradox, but only the true individual, only the individualized individual who knows her uniqueness, can know that we’re all the same in that each of us is utterly unique. And not only unique but uniquely needed in this awakening game.

But if we’ve given up our individual depth in order to belong to the limited group, we’re unable to awaken. The group consensus reality acts as a limiter we defer to without realizing it.

And conversely, the awakening world needs the unique depth of each of us to know itself!

When we can entertain both of these at the same time, we’re at what I call the Singular Place of Dual Blessing. Everyone experiences it their own way, of course, yet the rules for participating apply to all.

 

THE SINGULAR SPACE OF DUAL BLESSING

Now we’ve come to the place when both our individual perspective and feeling, and the larger whole are in awareness at the same time. Now we start to see that the “them” we were keeping out is also our own depth.

Now we see more deeply that the profound problems of the interconnected world – climate change, war, poverty, resource depletion, environmental system decay – can’t be excluded or made into “them” in any way.

They, too, are “us.”

We see that in a real way, the future is up to us.

Frail, human, uncertain, unfinished, unheroic us!

Welcome to the privilege of starting again in this moment! Welcome to conscious evolution!

Welcome to The Singular Space of Dual Blessing!

You’re fully you, you’re fully in relationship with a larger whole that is all of us. There’s no escaping, not really.

It’s true that one way or another, your ass is going to get kicked. Like the biblical truth that will “set you free,” The Singular Space of Dual Blessing will set you free, but first it might really piss you off!

We don’t really get to go back to sleep. But then sleep wasn’t so much fun anyway, was it?

We don’t get a manual or a roadmap. But the good news is, we don’t need a roadmap. The good news is, we get to discover that who and what we have are enough.

Road maps are for sissies who think that someone else’s way is good enough. It’s not! There’s somewhere to go that only you can go. And the whole needs you if it’s to get where it needs to go!

From The Singular Space of Dual Blessing you realize that there’s something to do that only you can do, and that there’s no real choice except to do it. The fact you still don’t know how to do it and never will doesn’t lessen the call. None of us do, but that doesn’t change a thing. The Singular Space doesn’t need you to know.

The Singular Place of Dual Blessing is beautiful beyond description. It’s a bitch. It’s gonna kick your ass.

But deep down, you know you wouldn’t want it any other way!

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[1] As many of you “evolutionaries” and integralistas know, the perception of “us” and “them” is  related to the evolutionary development or “altitude” of the perceiver and is primarily visible at “first tier”(the relatively low levels of) consciousness. This is true, but nonetheless, I contend that not specifically seeing the pressure to conform created by the group is a major impediment to moving into second-tier consciousness.

[2] All we-spaces based on “us” and “them” have as a prime directive that it’s rude, or worse, to draw attention to the group rules for belonging. They pretend to be talking about reality, not about their pre-judgment. They imagine there are no rules.