The Company of Fellow Adventurers

We can't do it alone

One place you might think that frank conversation could happen about how we’re integrating (or not integrating) what’s happening in the world would be spiritual groups and communities. Not much of that happens though. What often happens instead is that people try to transcend the hard stuff and get beyond it. They don’t do this consciously but it’s as if there’s a quiet group agreement to not go there.

The difficulty with this is that our personal gifts and our deepest truths are not separate from our relationship to what’s happening in the world.

We don’t have a language for such a conversation and we often don’t imagine there’d be a value in having one. That is, it doesn’t come up.

Which is telling.

A striking feature of our world today is that it’s in the throes of a deep transformation, a spiritual crisis and rebirth. Spiritual life includes helping this in some way, protecting the process, supporting it in happening.

Finding our contribution, our gift, and giving it is the task of today. It’s all hands on deck! And connecting with other spiritual adventurers is a central part of this.

I’ll come back to this important point.

In the meantime, an amazing awakening is happening anyway, even if we’re not very aware of it. Something wonderful is happening by itself.

People are speaking out more and more about more and more. New connections and nodes and forks of understanding are spreading throughout the conversational community. These connections not so much viral as fungal, as in fantastic fungi, interconnected networks of awakening. A new reality is there for those with eyes to see. You can see it in the body language of the population recognizing each other, one by one.

A starting point for many may have been the perception that things are not as were told around a certain profound medical intervention. But more generally the perception continues to grow that a great deal about our world is not as we’ve been told. Weekly new voices with deep expertise speak out.

It’s true that individual spiritual practice helps to light pathways and very little bit helps. However, it’s been my experience that the combination of spiritual work AND community connection shifts us more quickly into a transformational space. I think that it’s the combination of the two that will catapault us into the widespread transformational space that’s needed.

The transformational space where the two reside isn’t within the brain of individuals, isn’t in a silo. It’s among and between us. It weaves back and forth between the individual and the social like a mobius strip, emphasizing the yin and yang and making the inner and the outer complementary parts of a whole. It weaves more quickly as the two are aware of each other and as the connection is spoken our loud.

(Mobius strip image from commons.wikimedia.org)

This fungal interconnection happening everywhere is fruitful and has the ability to come above ground and burst into a conflagration. It doesn’t burn down the old so much as it lights up the new.

We want more of that . . . but what does it take.

There’s no single thing that makes this happen, no single group or practice, not great master who can save us. It’s a group phenomenon like a flock of birds in a murmuration that moves and flows together like a single organism. There’s a sense in which it is one organism. Just as there’s a way that fungi are a single organism and as humans are also one family.

Here are some things that I imagine help the interconnectivity to happen. The more of them you have working for you, the more the better. They’re not either-or’s but ANDs.

One’s a regular individual meditation or spiritual practice.

AND

Dyad practices (tightly controlled alterations of speaking and listening personal experience between two people; for example here). Dyads provide an extra dimension to individual practice. They interrupt the human tendency to get stuck in our isolated worlds. They highlight our private silo and help crack it open enough to let the light in. There’s no guarantee that they’ll do this but over time they seem helpful for many people. They have been for me. They’re inherently welcoming and friendly, once you dare to jump into the water.

AND

(This is the one I said I’d come back to.)

As much as possible, a committed group of fellow spiritual adventurers.

It’s where much of what I’m interested in is heading, and is not all here yet.

If we’re looking to find our own role, place, voice within the ecosystem of awakening, a committed group of fellow adventurers is invaluable. The relational way of group exploration has a long history in Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions, among others.

Such a group helps because it’s relational and all this that’s happening IS relational at core. It doesn’t take place within the assumptions of our siloes where we tend to live.

Without the engaged presence of others, the deep habit of assuming that we’re alone and that we need fixing tends to persist. We’re not alone and we don’t need fixing. We’re already in relationship with the world and with the transformation happening on the planet.

I’ll write more on the possibilities for a committed group in a next post. It’s important to me personally.

Andrew

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