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- White Cloud Sanctuary Newsletter -

 
One man alone can do nothing...even the enlightened ones.
So.. how a new world begins?
Like the old one: with 2 or more .
 
 
 
 
 
 
Getting Real  About Getting Together
 
from Gnosis Magazine editor, Fall 1992
 
    Centuries ago, when group endeavors were the norm, the solitary spiritual seeker was very much the exception to the rule.
In those days, with Catholic monasteries and churches, Jewish shtetls, Sufi tekkes, as well as indipendent brotherhoods, the notion of a person reaching enlightenment alone was not the norm.
Today, for many in the West, the situation has reversed itself. Now it often seems like the spiritual seeker who has found a good solid group is the exception, while most of us are left with our books, our private meditations, and our dreams.
Moreover, given the bad track record of gurus and cults over the last 25 years, many of us are skeptikal of the whole idea of individuals banding together to support each other with prayer, ritual, or teaching.
     Still, a lot of it goes on, and with good reason. For when all is said and done, there are some aspects of spiritual growth, such as learningto see one's ego in proper perspective, thta benefit greatlyfrom the kind of feedback that only a conscious group can provide. Humans are socila animals, after all, and it's hard to geta handle on the universe at large if you're stuck off by yourself in some fifth-floor walkup.
Thus anyone who is really serious about such growth may sooner or later be faced with group work as a real option. [...]
      Community is one of those words that gets bandied around in reference to all sort of things these days, untill it has almost lost all meaning.
While it is often used to refer to a widespread group of people with common interests and identities who keep at least a nominal touch with each other (perhaps via something as remote as modem or phone), what is often forgotten is that the traditional meaning of community in time past included a geographical rootedness where people were, in effect, stuck with each other. As with the late lamented institutions of marriage and family, social pressure and inertia strongly inflenced people to work things out and find some kind of peace or compromise over their personal conflict. In this way the sense of community, of "us", could survive. [...]
       Two obvious casualties of ever-increasing American mobility have been the very longevity and continuity that made community something hard-won and real. No amount of enthusiasm for the "virtual community" of an online forum can eliminate the fact that "virtual" is the operative word here: an uncanny facsimile of community that people can easily pop into and out of. Alas, as with that other ubiquitos word "movement", what passes for community these days all too often boils down to a few self-appointed spokespersons spinning an ideology of group identity, setting an agenda, and presuming to speak for scores of other people, few of whom may actually know each other by name or face.
      Given this situation, we should all the more priza the concrete attempts at face-to-face community that arise with soem spiritual consciousness. The paradox, of course, is that the very sense of collective identity fostered by groups or wider communities often end up being an even more unwieldly exercise in ego inflation. One is no longer little "me" but has become part of a bigger "us" that vows to save the world by solicitung everyone else to join it (or by eliminating everyone who disagrees). Escaping from the confines of your own ego only to succumb to the illusion of a group ego, you are in a bigger jam than ever.
     To prevent such cultish stagnancy, those of us involved in spiritual groups need to be very aware of our own intentions and behaviour at every moment; we also need to be clear about the role of leadership in the group. It is all too easy to get sidetracked into jockeying for front-row seats or for the feeling of self-importance that comes from gaining the group's approval, all the while thinking that one is growing. By the same token, the group's leader may be seduced by the temptation to cast others as followers, especially when people often seems so willing to take on that role.
    The only way to avoid such traps is continual observation and evaluation.
Groups and Communities has proved to be one of our least abstract topics here, and we suspect it may turn out the same way for you as well.
(Jay Kinney)

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Weeee!!! Saturday morning, Sept 8th  2007
a new element comes into White Cloud:
Shad, the arab mare, gave birth to Majiid.
 
 
 

(BELOW) FADJUR: MAJID'S BROTHER (NOW 1 YEAR)

ON THE RIGHTTHE FATHER PSYCHO, ARAB

Here is an interesting reading from last issue of WIE (What is Enlightenment magazine).

How a New World Is Born


by Andrew Cohen
 

 

The ultimate spiritual revelation is that there is no other. There is only One. When any individual goes very deep into a meditative state, momentarily transcending the separate self-sense or narcissistic ego, this profound singularity at the level of consciousness itself is what he or she will find. There is an uncontainable thrill in those moments when the nonrelative nature of consciousness actually becomes apparent. It’s as if the water boils over the edge, and the individual suddenly finds himself or herself overwhelmed by the absolute dimension of Being. That is the revelation that enlightens: Consciousness is One without a second, and I Am That.

The ground, or the foundation, of an enlightened perspective is the direct experience of the nonrelative or absolute nature of consciousness itself. Matter, mind, and time are all relative. Consciousness is not. And it is that interplay between the absolute and the relative, between the revelation of One and the appearance of many, that generates the awakened intensity that is the quality of enlightened awareness. An enlightened human life would be one in which the individual is living right on that edge, in the very heart of that paradox.

The most thrilling discovery I have made in my two decades as a teacher of enlightenment is that if a group of individuals chooses to go beyond ego together, it is possible to experience exactly the same overwhelming revelation of the absolute dimension with our eyes open, in a context that is not one of withdrawal and stillness but one of creativity and engagement. We discover a state of consciousness in which we are each aware that there is only One and yet, simultaneously, we are engaging as many; a state in which we are able to experience unqualified communion and powerful autonomy at the very same time. That’s nonduality—incarnational nonduality. It is experienced in the body, in relationship, not only in the stillness of inner revelation.

In the traditional notion of enlightenment, the egoless state is just consciousness or Being. There is no activity involved, no relationship. It is easy to be egoless when there’s no relationship. Anyone can experience egoless consciousness in the stillness of his or her own meditation. But the real challenge of enlightenment is egoless engagement in an intersubjective, creative context. That, to me, is the call of the future. That’s the new enlightenment that I am endeavoring to bring into being. This new enlightenment is not an individual attainment; it is a collective emergence. And it occurs when all individuals involved awaken simultaneously to what I call the Authentic Self, which is the evolutionary impulse itself, the energy and intelligence that created the universe, experienced directly in the human heart and mind. In that awakening, there is no difference between the deepest spiritual revelation of oneness and a fully embodied, conscious engagement with others and with the life process itself. The timeless paradox of enlightenment enters the stream of time in a collective or intersubjective context and becomes the ground for a higher evolutionary or developmental process. The Authentic Self or evolutionary impulse is the urge toward ever-greater complexity and higher integration. So in this intersubjective nondual or enlightened state, there is the living revelation of the fact that there is only One while simultaneously there is the appearance of the many; and the many, in the knowledge of being One, are ceaselessly striving to realize greater complexity and higher integration.

If each of the individuals in such a gathering is deeply committed to the Authentic Self to such a profound degree that it has displaced the separate ego to become the primary locus of identity, something quite miraculous and dramatic starts to occur. The nature of the Authentic Self is ecstatic urgency and unconditional commitment to creating the future. So when two or more individuals come together and awaken to the Authentic Self, a glorious future is created, at the level of consciousness, right now. Heaven comes to earth now. Heaven is a state of being in which the ego is not necessarily transcended altogether but is defeated. Ego is defeated when an individual’s primary locus of identification shifts to the Authentic Self. Then the future at the level of consciousness does emerge in the present moment, and that’s what a truly new world is. It’s not some vague utopian vision a thousand years from now; it’s a new structure in consciousness that emerges at the deepest level, in the most interior dimension of the Kosmos, in real time, right now. At first it is glimpsed as a new potential, and eventually it becomes an actual structure in consciousness that emerges through the many simultaneously. In this intersubjective egoless field, everyone is relating to each other in a completely different way, from a radically different perspective, for very different reasons. And that is how a new world is born.

A new world means a new level or stage of development, and that’s something we have to build together. Throughout history, there have always been rare and extraordinary individuals who were trailblazers, out ahead of everyone else, but new stages of cultural development are not individuals. They are intersubjective structures that are created in consciousness as human beings come together having transcended old value systems and worldviews and created new ones. So if the shared foundation upon which we build new structures is the transcendence of individual and collective ego, we are going to be consciously creating nothing less than an enlightened culture.


 
 
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White Cloud Sanctuary * Private organization  for the study and development of Consciousness * Costa Rica
www.TheWhiteCloudSanctuary.com