Hi all,
I was happy to see Harrison referred to in this message.
Greetings from a wintery Sweden
Agneta Falk
----- Original Message -----
From: Lorian Association
To: skaparl...@swipnet.se
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 4:02 AM
Subject: David's Desk #11
David's Desk #11
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David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the
spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do
not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in
Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others,
please feel free to do so; however the material is ©2008 by David Spangler. If
you no longer wish to receive these letters please let us know at
i...@lorian.org. Previous issues of "David's Desk" are posted on www.lorian.org.
LANGUAGES
The other day I heard a woman say, “I have to get rid of my ego.” She
said it in much the same way that President Bush says we have to get rid of
terrorists. In her life, she is a loving, inclusive person, dedicated to
spiritual development. Given her general orientation towards creating
wholeness around her, I wondered why she didn’t say, “There is that in me that
gets in my way of being as loving and free as I would like. I need to
understand why this is so and what this is. Perhaps I can discover how to
partner with it to create wholeness within me.”
However, like many of us, her language of spirituality tends
towards words and images better suited for a military campaign. We learn this
from our culture. Thus, she talks about “overcoming” and “defeating” the parts
of her she dislikes or has been told are bad for her. She “surrenders” to
spirit as if it were an invading army before whom she must wave a white flag.
Dedicated to a holistic outlook in her work and relationships, she abandons it
in favor of a “divide and conquer” mentality when it comes to herself and her
own spirituality.
This is unfortunate. Language shapes how we think and how we
act. It also influences what we think is possible. If I think of myself as
divided into good and bad parts, “friends” and “enemies,” and of inner work as
a battle to protect the former and get rid of or destroy the latter, then I
make myself a divided being, one whose energy is consumed by inner conflict.
Spiritual progress becomes seen as a series of conquests over myself. But who
is the victor and who the defeated?
Here’s another example. Many years ago I heard a lecturer say
that the relationship of the soul to the personality and body was like that of
a driver to a car. This is certainly a compelling image and a common one. It
draws its power from its simplicity; it is metaphorically appealing. On the
other hand, it also has the effect of dividing us into at least two parts, soul
and personality or spirit and body and making one subordinate to the other.
After all, a car is an unthinking thing that we use, not a partner or part of
our wholeness. If this is the basis of our thinking about ourselves, then it
creates a foundation for the kind of inner conflict I mentioned above.
Let’s call this the language of separation. It’s pervasive
throughout human culture. It is the language of “us” vs. “them,” at the root
of so much violence and suffering in our world today, and not just between
people. It colors much of our thinking about our relationship to the
environment was well. Not that all separative language and thinking is bad.
There are times when the ability to draw clear distinctions and boundaries is
important. To say that all separative thinking is wrong is itself an example of
separative thinking. But there is no doubt that when such language and
thinking are carried to an extreme and are not balanced by equally compelling
images of our unity and connectedness, we end up with horrors like the
Holocaust.
When I began my work as a spiritual teacher in 1965, I also
began an association with a group of inner beings who ever since have been my
colleagues. They are part of a much larger attempt within the spiritual worlds
to give us a new language, one more in keeping with the needs of the world that
is emerging. I remember my principle mentor at that time, a being whom I
called “John,” saying that the way human beings thought and spoke about
themselves and spirit was itself a barrier to closer collaboration and
co-creation between the physical and non-physical worlds. “You either don’t
believe in us or you believe too much in us, putting us on a pedestal and
diminishing yourselves in the process,” John said. “We seek partnership, but
partnership cannot be based on one side telling the other what to do or the
other submitting because it feels unworthy and unspiritual.” We had a good
language for discernment and separation, but we didn’t have a good language for
connectedness and wholeness.
This began to change in the Sixties and Seventies. Science,
mathematics, and environmental research began giving us a new language to talk
about ourselves and the world around us. It is a language of concepts like
“holism,” “systems,” “interconnectedness,” “interdependency,” and “ecology.”
It is a language that sees ourselves and the world as emergent wholes.
My friend the cultural historian and poet, William Irwin
Thompson, calls the holistic thinking that understands and uses such a language
a “Gaian way of knowing.” It represents a significant shift in the
perspectives and attitudes that prevail in our civilization, even in
civilization in general. Though there have been societies in the past that have
certainly honored nature and the planet, we have not had a culture that sees
humanity and the world as spiritual and physical co-creators, partners, and
collaborators in shaping wholeness. We have not had a civilization that
teaches us to “think like a planet,” which is to say, in systemic, holistic and
ecological ways. To imagine the possibility that such a civilization can
develop and that we can be agents of its emergence and actually begin creating
it is the calling of our time.
This is so because there is no question that the language of
division is insufficient as we confront planetary challenges such as climate
change and a global economy, terrorism and war. We need a language of
wholeness. We need a language for holopoiesis, the art of “wholeness-making.”
What has been interesting to me is to see where this language
has been emerging and where it lagged. Over the past thirty years, some of the
most pioneering thinking and experimentation in what might be called ‘Gaian
consciousness” has been in business, economics, in organizational development
and new theories of governance, as well as in the sciences, particularly
biology, ecology and systems theory. For some examples, see the books of
Harrison Owen on Open Space Technology (one of many websites is
http://openspaceworld.com), Margaret Wheatley’s classic book Leadership and the
New Science (http://www.margaretwheatley.com/), the techniques of non-violent
communication taught by Marshall Rosenberg (http://www.cnvc.org/), Arnold
Mindell’s process psychology (http://www.aamindell.net/), or Mark Satin’s
political blog on the Radical Middle (http://www.radicalmiddle.com/). Where,
it seems to me, it has been slowest to take hold is in the spiritual field (a
notable exception to this has been the work of William Bloom—check out his
website, http://www.williambloom.com/ or his book Soulutions.)
It’s not that concepts of wholeness aren’t found in spiritual
teachings and traditions; they are. But it’s more common, I think, to find
ideas of unity than of wholeness. These are not identical concepts, and the
two can be turned against each other in curious ways. Thus the woman I
mentioned at the beginning felt that to achieve a state of unity, she had to
become less whole, dividing herself into bits, getting rid of some while
keeping the others. What she lacked was a way of thinking and speaking about
herself as a whole being. Her spiritual language didn’t give her tools for
holopoiesis.
We need such tools. It is hard to be agents of creating
wholeness in the world if we cannot create it in ourselves, and it’s hard to
create it in ourselves if we believe that it’s fundamentally lacking in us,
that the very nature of who and what we are arises from separation and
division. Yet when we speak of our incarnations as journeys away from God and
spirit, when we think of life as a kind of exile from our real home, when we
think of ourselves as divided into souls and personalities, when we think of
the physical world as simply an illusion from which we must awaken, we may well
be speaking (and thinking) in a language of separation rather than connection
and wholeness-making.
It was for this reason, I believe, that a number of years ago
the inner beings with whom I work suggested I focus my attention on incarnation
itself. What I call incarnational spirituality has grown out of that research,
which is ongoing. I’ve gained numerous insights in this process, but one of
the most important has been to see incarnation itself as an act of
wholeness-making.
Various traditions and schools of spirituality identify
different reasons why we may come to this world: to work out past karma, to
learn lessons, to evolve, to perform some specific task, and so on. But deeper
than any of these reasons, we are gifts of love to enhance the connections
between the physical and non-physical dimensions and to build the wholeness of
the earth.
We cannot build wholeness if we do not feel whole within
ourselves, but we cannot feel whole in ourselves if we cannot speak of who we
are in a language of connection and wholeness. It’s this language that is
striving to develop and unfold in our midst. It’s not an easy birth, even when
we desire it, for we have spoken for so long in languages of separation and
conflict that they insinuate themselves into our thinking even when we are
talking about wholeness. “My ego is the source of my problems; I must get rid
of it to be whole.” But once we get rid of it—if we can get rid of it—then
what takes its place? What new part of ourselves shall we identify as the new
culprit and the next target for removal? How much self-division and
self-amputation does wholeness demand? The correct answer is none at all, but
to understand that, we must learn to see, to think, and to speak in a different
way, in the language of Gaia rather than the language of a fragmented—and
fragmenting--humanity.
The elements of this language are emerging. This is the most
exciting thing about our time. It is a language that has the power to create a
new world because it can enable us to see a new us. Incarnational spirituality
is part of this language, the part that focuses on incarnation, self,
sovereignty, generativity, relationships and even boundaries as elements and
acts of wholeness-making. But other parts are emerging as well, in holistic
spirituality itself and in science, business, politics, indeed in many walks of
life as individuals respond to the possibilities of a new world and a new
vision.
Is this possible? Can we learn a new language to heal our
world and heal ourselves? I believe so. It’s why I do what I do and teach
what I teach. It’s why Lorian exists. More importantly, I believe it’s why
we’re all here, to make this shift. The language of wholeness may be new in
some ways but in reality it is our native tongue. It may not be a matter of
learning something new but of remembering something basic within us, the deep
language of our souls, the grammar of love and the vocabulary of being human.
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In my next David’s Desk, I will explore more fully what a new
language of wholeness-making might sound like in the context of dealing with
ego. If “ego” is something we need to confront, then how might we do so in a
holistic and not a separative way?
*Also, for those who would like to interact with me online, I'm offering
a three-week seminar called "Initiation and Election" beginning on May 12th,
2008. I want to lead a non-partisan exploration of the inner side of the
current Presidential campaign and its relationship to the destiny of the United
States, with exercises and suggestions for how we may participate spiritually.
For more information, please go to our website, www.Lorian.org.
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Please Note: If you are having difficulty reading David's Desk in this
format you may visit our website to read it there. Click on the link below to
visit the David's Desk library and scroll down to #11.
David's Desk Library online
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