Here’s what I think of as the landscape of what now, the view from here.
It’s pretty simple really. Three interconnected themes weave back and forth and are part of each other.
- We’re more than the sum of our parts. We’re richer, stronger, smarter when we’re together. We’re funnier too! There’s not much humor without another to share it with.But it’s even more basic than that!
When we’re in relationship we see something about the way reality is that we don’t see when we’re on our own. Reality is relational from the top to the bottom. And yes, we remain our sovereign selves too at every point!
When we’re together in a coherent, clear and focused way more starts to be noticed. We’re not likely to really see it solo, even when we’re meditating or being intentional and looking for it. We simply don’t grasp the reality of relationship or personhood outside of being connected to others.
And the more directly and clearly we’re together the more we tend to notice this relational dimension that gives us the extra boost. This relational dimension of things, the “field,” is the bigger picture. It’s the context in which the content of our life falls into its natural place.
All the group opportunities we’re initiating at SoulWork Commons are attempts to evoke the conditions in which the “more than the sum of our parts” becomes more accessible to us. To the extent that happens, it’ll be because of the creativity, insight and courage of readers and members. The needed learning comes out of the relational field if it comes at all.
So the blog will share what we’re learning together about how to do this. Each time you contribute in a group or in a reflection on the site you contribute to the group learning. There are some very cool discoveries to be learned. Reality is very generous with its gifts.
- There’s an evolutionary current alive in the world. This “evolutionary current” is shaking things up and down, ending the old order and setting the stage for a new one. Our crisis is a birth and just like for the baby, everything will change.Change itself is changing and evolving. Change is accelerating and the complex interactions from existing complex interactions mean ever more creativity and development.
My intuition, shared in one way or another by a vast legion of world-centric people and likely by you, is that there’s a subtle intelligence and purpose discernible behind all of this change. I sense and we sense that the movement of our time is connected to the impulse that’s always driven evolution.
For example take a mess of hydrogen gas, leave it for hundreds of millions of years and you get giraffes, youtube and whatever you see outside your window. Change happens and it proceeds in immeasurable and brilliant directions if it’s allowed to fulfill itself. However, when a planet reaches limits as ours has that fulfillment is not longer a given and that’s part of the challenge too, and part of what we’re about.
This same “evolutionary current” is also alive in we humans, driving us onward to fulfill an individual and a collective destiny. We can feel it in ourselves, this desire to grow and become more, to finally recognize ourselves as not different from the divine impulse that’s created everything.
The evolutionary current is breaking down the walls of isolated self-identity and inviting each of us into a new role for ourselves that we don’t know yet. That role is evolving; we’re evolving! The groundwork for that new role-finding has been laid down by countless explorers alive and past. In the blog we’ll share some of what they’ve laid down, how our own experiments with it are doing as we move it one small step forward. Your participation at every level will determine the degree of success. Which brings us to the third theme.
- No one can do it alone. We might like to do it alone but that hasn’t been working so well. It’s becoming clear that out massive interconnected problems are far beyond solving from within individual or organizational silos.No one can offer an edict that others will follow. No one has a plan that will resonate automatically with other world views. Yet isolated we’re lost.
If humans are going to create a livable future we’ll do it as we work together across our silos. We’ll do it because we recognize that our differences and uniqueness are the creative drivers we need and especially because we fall in love with them.
And in terms of method, we’ll do it if we create a world in which no one is left out. The reality is that everyone belongs and has an equal humanity and equal right to be fully valued and have a good place.
The equal right to belong is at the philosophical root of the method we’re practicing
here. - As an important mentor of mine, Bert Hellinger, puts it: What is greatest in human beings is what makes them equal to everybody 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.”Of course, this respect extends to you as well. So those are the three core interconnected themes. I hope you’ll be around to explore them because it’s time for “all hands on deck.”