(Part 1)
The unfolding of a sacred order
The process of reshaping in God, as Meister Eckhart says, is the unfolding of sacred order on all levels of human existence. It expresses itself as a wordless insight in the mental, as pure clarity in feeling, as sanctification in will, and as a structural transformation in being. The inner ending of knowledge in vital not-knowing thus resembles the opening of a door for the blossoming of a new quality, likewise in the individual, in the group and beyond.
The work and unity of such a group lies in the inner freedom of narratives, whose place is taken by a vital perception-action. Such a group does no longer inwardly tell things what or how they are; but it provides a space for the constantly unfolding movement of creation to reveal for itself what is. And through the individual, through the group of individuals, the nature of the creative is unfolding to the consciousness of humanity in ever more profound and ample ways.
The quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) addressed this potentiality which lies in a community of people in 1982 in an interview with the German theosophist Renée Weber: [1]
Bohm: […] Every individual is his own particular contact [to the cosmic totality]. Every individual is in total contact with the implicate order, with all that is around us. Therefore, in some sense he is part of the whole of mankind and in another sense, he can get beyond it. […]
What I propose is that it is possible now for a number of individuals who are in close relation and who have gone through this and can trust each other to establish a one-mind of that whole set of individuals. In other words, that that consciousness is one, acting as one. If you had as many as ten people, or a hundred people, who could really be that way, they would have a power immensely beyond one.
Weber: Because it is not mathematically additive.
B: No.
W: It’s some other heightening altogether.
Bohm: An intense heightening, yes. And I think that would begin to ignite, really, this whole consciousness of mankind. It would have such an effect. […]. I am merely saying that taking this view, consciousness, deep down, is one, the whole of mankind. But then any part of mankind may establish a one-ness within that part of consciousness. And if ten people can have their part of consciousness all one, that is an energy which begins to spread into the whole.
Weber: And changes it; it’s bound to change some of it.
B: Yes. Some of it – or perhaps deeply.
Ascending to the truth
The Indian philosopher and friend of Bohm’s Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) addressed this aspect of the group as early as 1929 in one of his first independent speeches:
Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. […] Organizations cannot make you free. […] You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it. But that is what you are doing when organizations become your chief concern. […] But those who really desire to understand, who are looking to find that which is eternal, without beginning and without an end, will walk together with a greater intensity, will be a danger to everything that is unessential, to unrealities, to shadows. And they will concentrate, they will become the flame, because they understand.2]
Linking to the beginning of the article, a spiritual group in the present day has thus the following new characteristics:
Their main task in the outer is not “explaining the world”, but by inquiring together to reveal the limitations which knowledge brings with it inwardly. In the age of an infinite flow of information and content, it thus points the way from a content-related consciousness which is growingly losing itself to a consciousness of perception-action.[3] In showing this path, which leads inwardly to the ground of not-knowing, parables can be useful, however, narratives form an obstacle. Human narratives of impending hopelessness, for example, are not answered with an encouraging narrative, because this would only be a form of distraction, an inner escape from the fact of hopelessness. In this process, the root of hopelessness always remains unseen in the unconscious, far from the affection of choiceless awareness. The answer to this lies, rather, in revealing that only in the unmoved awareness of this very hopelessness in the now, there lies a possibility for a fundamental structural transformation in the consciousness of man.
Thus, such a group always lives in the inner state of perception-action which knows no authority, except the truth of what is. In this manner, it stands on a scientific ground, which goes hand in hand with the art of immediate realization. Through its being, the group gives testimony of the power that comes along with that. By its constant return to the inner emptiness of not-knowing, illusions find no breeding ground, and the group turns into a focal point for continuous spiritual renewal.
[1] Ken Wilber (Ed.), “The enfolding-unfolding universe” in The holographic paradigm and other paradoxes, Shambhala, 1982, ISBN-13: 978-0877732389
[2] Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ommen, Netherlands, 1929, Truth is a pathless land: Dissolution speech of the „Order of the Star in the East“
[3] See also a previous article in LOGON „What we think, what we are, we are not”, https://www.logon.media/en/what-we-think-what-we-are-we-are-not
