Strange Attractors

By Susan Beal

I have had a meditation and spiritual practice for almost 40 years. Mostly it’s been a private thing, central to my sense of self and informing my activities in the outer world, but never overt. In many ways, my experiences of the “inner” and “outer” worlds had felt like very different, if not opposing forces in my life. Two summers ago, I was ordained as Lorian Priest. I saw ordination as a way to reconcile these worlds.

I also have a Master’s degree in Conflict Resolution. Although I have not been in formal practice as a mediator in some time, I still see myself as a mediator in the larger sense of seeing things from multiple perspectives and bridging differences when I can. It wasn’t until after my ordination that I realized that what drew me to ordination was the same thing that drew me into conflict resolution: a desire to be of service in the world, a longing for peace and wholeness, and the need for practical skills to that end. It was also the call to maintain a higher perspective and identify a compass point to guide and inspire me as I moved through my life.

Long before I thought to be a mediator or a priest, I was an artist. I come from a long line of artists and always thought that was the path I would follow. I went to art school to become a professional artist. When my life path took a detour, I didn’t see the common thread linking art, mediation, and, later, ordination. I just thought I was moving between different, unrelated stages of my life. But now, looking back, I see that what connects them is my fascination with what I have come to think of as the Inbetween—the place between places, a zone of high potential, of unformed possibilities, of What Could Be, but isn’t yet.

It’s the mix of excitement and anxiety I feel facing a sheet of good drawing paper, a freshly gessoed canvas, a wedge of soft clay. It’s discovering the small bud of cooperation that can blossom and grow between parents warring over custody or coworkers snarled in office politics. It’s where the friction between the material and subtle worlds can be shaped into useful warmth and illumination. It’s the call to action of the neglected garden, the cluttered house, the dispirited friend. It’s facing the question: Can I help in some way to make something new, meaningful or beautiful out of this? Will it work out? Will it fail? Am I up for this?  

For me, Incarnational Spirituality is a guide through this luminous, promising, confusing, powerful Inbetween, where outcomes are uncertain and hope is tangible. To navigate through it one needs a guiding star, which I.S. provides.

I studied General Systems Theory in college as part of learning about the relationship between conflict and cooperation. One of the most useful things I learned from it, something that helped me immensely as a mediator, was that conflict and cooperation are partners in the movement towards wholeness. It describes the transitional zone between chaos and order as a place of great power and sensitivity, where the least influence can have enormous impact and result in a domino effect for good or ill. The influence that helps a system in flux settle into a new pattern is known as a “strange attractor” or seed crystal. A seed crystal is an anchor, precipitating change in a system wavering between outcomes. The quality of that little crystal can determine the quality of the outcome.

Being a priest, a mediator, or an artist is akin to being a strange attractor, someone who strives to draw out new meaning, order, and beauty that before was only latent. Incarnational Spirituality provided a kind of strange attractor for me, a number of guiding principles and concepts that have oriented me when I come face to face with doubts about the hows, whys and whats of my life and the world.  

Most spiritual paths tell us our true power comes from spiritual sources. Most scientific perspectives insist that reality is physically based and consciousness results from that. We’re left with a gap between spirit and matter, an either/or choice that generates endless conflict. And yet physics demonstrates that all useable power is generated from opposite energies coming together. Differentials in temperature, pressure, direction and flow is what powers thunderstorms, engines, generators, turbines and heat pumps.

So I’m particularly inspired by the concept in Incarnational Spirituality of generative capacity, the power and potential that result from the act of incarnation itself, the coming together of the fiery, cosmic, unbounded nature of spirit and the dense, flesh-and-bones, finite nature of a physical body. We are beneficiaries as well as custodians of the creative light that comes from reconciling seeming opposites. Using that power wisely and well to benefit Earth and all who call her home is what I believe we are here to do. It is the essence of Incarnational Spirituality as I understand it, and it has become a guiding star for me.

The way I see it, we are all mediators, healers and artists by design. We not only have the capacity, but also the responsibility, to be seed crystals and strange attractors for greater love and wholeness on Earth. Understanding and manifesting that potential is, for me, what Incarnational Spirituality is all about.

---

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

Reading Water

Essay and Pastels by Claire Blatchford

 

Mesmerized by a video about water I saw almost two years ago, I knew I wanted to try meeting water by way of pastels. It wasn’t so much the drawing challenge (water, clouds and faces are, for me, the ultimate challenge when drawing) because water is, as the late Theodor Schwenk, German Anthroposophist and pioneering water researcher, says in his wonderful book, Sensitive Chaos, “always on the way somewhere.”  It was the challenge of trying to feel my way into the movements — visible and invisible—of this powerful, vital, elusive and wondrous element. I'm not out to simply record what I see with my physical eyes—I could use a camera if I wanted to do that-- so the results sometimes don’t make sense to viewers.

 

I think of this as my attempt to “read” into water. Put another way: a stream, for example, can be seen as an ongoing sentence or story flowing—or being “uttered”—onwards. When “reading” a stream I might catch a couple of the words passing by. Here follow seven examples of attempts to read water.

 

In this first one I saw, and read, shapes the water made in the sand over which is flowed: 

 

 

In the next one, when looking at the surface of a pond, I was amazed at how just a few inches of water could look like a view of our earth seen from a great height.  

 

In this one —another up close of a spot on a small stream near our home--I was struck by how water has fingers!

  

 

Again and again, what comes home to me in this “reading” is how water, despite the fact that it’s almost always on the move, is not without shape. And it tends to be spherical as I tried to show here (and as if evident too in the one above.)

 

  

As I see it, water is almost always reflecting things above and around it. Or one may see through it to what’s beneath it. In this “reading” other things are enhanced or brought to my attention. I’m always drawn to the moments when water moves with, into and through sunlight. 

  

 

There are also those moments when water is playful —the moments are easy to “read”! It surges, draws back, leaps forward, folds over, pops up again. I'm certain, if I stay attentive, I'll see the water elementals, the undines, whom I saw once years ago.  

 

And so the “reading” continues…..

---

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

A Gaian Potpourri

By Mary Reddy

Lorian’s first Gaianeering conference ended just over a week ago. The gathering grew into a lovely collaboration among new and old friends—both physically visible and subtly present ones. It was like an exercise in midwifery, offering wisdom, support, and sustenance as we humans labor to give birth to an emerging Gaian awareness. To sustain us through the labor pains, let’s celebrate the new.

How to appreciate Gaia, to feel the thrumming resonant life of the planet, to see the spinning globe wrapped in stars, to hear the singing in many tongues? It’s beyond words, right? Yet here I offer a collection of words that have inspired me. See between the lines and let them transport you.

Gaia—the Wild, our heart’s beating

“As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight.” —Thoreau, Walden

Gaia—life within and criss-crossing cities

“Waters infinitely full of life move along the ancient aqueducts into the great city and dance in the many city squares over basins of white stone and spread out in large spacious pools and murmur by day and lift up their murmuring to the night, which is vast here and starry and soft with winds.” 

—Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Gaia—whispering through all life

“A crow 
has settled on a bare branch.
Autumn evening.” —Basho, haiku 

Gaia—love rooted in beauty

“Oh give us pleasure in the flowers today 
And give us not to think so far away …

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard …

For this is love …” —Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring

Gaia—even in sorrow

“You mustn’t be frightened … if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over every thing you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hands.” —Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Gaia—oceanic movement distilled into miniature

“lapping of the little waves
breaking of the little waves
spreading of the little waves
idling of the little waves” —Thomas A. Clark, Coirre Fhionn Lochan

Gaia—home inside

“The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Gaia—home outside

In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines.” —Rene Menard, Le Livres des Arbres

Gaia—us! 

“Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.” —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

---

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

The Art and Craft of Collaborative Fields

By Freya Secrest

The subject of “collaborative fields” came up recently in a conversation I had with Mary Inglis, one of our Gaianeering presenters and a facilitator of the Game of Transformation. Mary defined a collaborative field as a particular ecology of relationship in which one consciously takes steps to foster a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. She described some of the steps they use in the Game process which helps to lead to such a field: “We always start a game with attunement – to ourselves, to each other, to our activity and purpose. We also consciously invite in the “Game Deva”, that overarching presence that works with the game process.” She further outlined that each game is guided by a stated intention that helps to focus the group effort by connecting the participants with a common purpose.

These are important group building processes, but I wondered what is the “magic” or “zing” that ignites attunement and shared purpose into a new wholeness? That seems harder to pin down. Mary used the results of her experiences in the Game to point to possibilities: “You know how sometimes you look at what you have been doing and you see it is more than you thought it was? This happens in a game when we have created a collaborative field.” She pointed to the magic that leads to a new wholeness as emerging out of the attitude each person held and brought to their participation in a game. In her work she noticed that the willingness of participants to engage all parts of themselves, energetic, physical, mental, emotion, subtle, spirit and soul made a difference. It was when each person brought their full selves forward with commitment to the ecology of the process that new “whole-making” would most often happen.

I was intrigued by the thought that I might nurture a similar collaborative field in my own daily life and activities and curious about how to foster and encourage its development. I didn’t want to just wait and hope it would “happen.” First, in considering my own experiences, I began by looking at the moments when I noticed synchronicities or connections with others or the world around. Those are my first thoughts of a collaborative energy at work. What I noticed about the synchronicities is that they can happen at a meeting or around a shared creative project, and sometimes even when I am alone in a reflective, quiet state where an answer or idea that solves some daily issue pops to mind. Upon further reflection, I realized that at those times I am in a loving state, not a head over heels “in love” but a resilient, at peace and “in tune” loving. In that state of love I generate an energy or “field” of connectedness within myself that flows out and links with the world around me.

Magic Step #1: Love is the foundation for a collaborative field.

This loving state needs a place where it can land and grow. My reflections jumped to the interaction of the Four Incarnational Principles of Identity (Standing), Boundary (Holding), Relationship (Energizing), and Emergence (Co-Creating). Each of these ideas hold a different signature or element of connection for me and together they shape a balanced place where I engage, integrate and grow through my life events. Going back to Mary’s definition of collaborative fields as attunement to ourselves, to each other, to the subtle ecology of life and to our activity and purpose, it is through being able to bring my love into the diversity of my everyday life that I bring about the possibility of new “wholeness”.

Magic step #2 : Engaging in our own life and incarnation is the place where collaborative wholeness can root and grow.

Coming to appreciate the different essences of the Four Incarnational Principles has been a process that is evolving for me. Using these principles helps me to better understand the magical wholeness that emerges out of my life. But I can’t do it only from the level of thinking or even feeling; I must embody these qualities with a physical stance or action that encapsulates their energy. Sovereignty fits with the uprightness of standing, connected through head and feet to the stars and earth, and through my skin with the world around. So I often physically stand to create a link to this element. Boundary creates a place of connection where differences meet — a lap that can hold or arms that encircle and define the space of inside and outside. When I sit or hold something I link with the energy of boundary by the very shape I take. Relationship I see as an activity of exchange where differences can meet “eye to eye” with respect and recognition of the value of self and other. When I look at someone or something I try to bring that attitude of respect into my gaze and approach to our relationship. The idea of Emergence has evolved in me to be the stance of the open hand. It requires a strong energy of standing and balance in order to hold an openness to other. It is something I try to explore through developing my capacity for invitation and welcome.

Although each principle is involved with the others, it is emergence that is particularly connected to the idea of collaborative fields for me because it is a place where we discover and are surprised by newness. What fosters emergence is that sense of loving invitation – the open hand. I imagine I am offering a treat to a shy deer and feel how still, strong and at peace I need to be in myself to give the other “room” to come forward. When this is hard, it is usually because I am turned inward, closely focused in my own life. But when I turn toward the life around me in the spirit of love, welcome and open-handedness, then my energy and imagination can begin to foster collaborative possibilities. This to me is the art and the craft of a collaborative field.

---

Click here to listen to Freya's interview with Mary Inglis and recordings of other Gaineering Conference presenters. For more information about The Game of Transformation, please click here.

Four Faces of Gaia

By David Spangler*

In 1979, the British scientist James Lovelock published a book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. In it, he presented evidence that through the auto-regulatory systems of the biosphere, the Earth acted as a living organism. On the suggestion of this friend, the author William Golding, he proposed to call this organism by the Greek name for the goddess of the earth and the mother of all life, Gaia. This was the beginning of what was called the “Gaia Hypothesis,” co-formulated by Lovelock and the American microbiologist, Dr. Lyn Margulis. Although initially met with skepticism by their scientific colleagues, further research generated enough evidence in support of this hypothesis that it became accepted and graduated to becoming the “Gaia Theory.”

Since then, the term “Gaia” has come to mean not only the interactive systems of the living biosphere but also the spirit of the planet, its soul, if you wish. This is fully in line with the experience and thinking of our forebears who knew the planet as a living being and treated it as such. Gaia has become shorthand for total web of life on earth and its collective spirit.

The word Gaianeering was coined by Jeremy Berg, author of The Gathering Light and co-designer and illustrator of the Sidhe Card Deck. It means the art of thinking and acting as if we ourselves are an embodiment of this spirit of the Earth—the spirit of Gaia—and not only just our separate, human selves. As our power to affect the planet has grown exponentially over the past century, so has grown our need to become skilled and wise practitioners of this art in loving collaboration with the life of the world.

However, we are not entirely clueless. After many years of expanding ecological awareness, we do know what some of the art of Gaianeering looks like. Add to this the insights of Incarnational Spirituality and research into the subtle realms, and a preliminary overview of suggested activity and practice is possible.

THE FOUR FACES OF GAIA

Gaianeering is the art of working with Gaia in our lives. Just what this means depends on how we define “Gaia.” To clarify this ma"er, I offer four definitions, the Four Faces of Gaia, each of which can be represented by a key word. These are:

• Gaia as self-regulating biosphere; the keyword is PARTICIPATION.
• Gaia as a way of seeing and understanding the world; the keyword is PERCEPTION.
• Gaia as a subtle being, the World Soul, plus the collective spirit and energy of all the lives that participate with it to form the Earth; the keyword is PARTNERSHIP.
• Gaia as a new consciousness within individuals; the keyword is PRESENCE.

Gaianeering is the art of bringing these four perceptions or aspects of Gaia into expression as a living wholeness within us and within our world. Let’s look at these four more closely.

First, there is Gaia as proposed and explained in the Gaia Theory, initially proposed as a hypothesis by James Lovelock and later elaborated in collaboration with microbiologist Dr. Lyn Margulis. Here, Gaia is a codeword for the synergistic relationships and interconnections between the organic and inorganic parts of the planet. These relationships, developed over millennia, create systems that regulate weather, temperature, and other environmental factors to create conditions favorable to life. Taken as a whole, these self-regulating systems and their interconnections suggest the biosphere is acting as a single organism, a living planetary being: Gaia, in Lovelock’s term.

I knew both Lovelock and Margulis. In conversations with them, it was apparent that Dr. Margulis doubted Gaia was a true organism; she saw it more as an emergent “system of systems” acting in complex ways to maintain an environment that would sustain life. In a way, Gaia was a homeostatic loop of life sustaining life. If “Gaia” possessed any consciousness at all, she said to me once, it would be something equivalent to that of a single-celled organism.

Lovelock, however, championed the idea that Gaia was indeed a planetary being, a true organism, though he agreed with Margulis that if it did possess consciousness of some nature—and my impression was that he felt that it did—it would be at a rudimentary level.

What both scientists agreed on was the sensitivity of Gaia’s internal systems—the interrelationships between organisms, weather, temperature, and so on. Both agreed that human activity was coming dangerously close to disrupting some of these systems or causing them to fluctuate towards extreme and unstable behavior. Climate change and global warming were indications of this, though there were others. In their view, it was possible to “kill” Gaia by so altering environmental conditions that the homeostatic stability—the capacity of Gaia to self- regulate in favor of life—could be lost with catastrophic results.

For Lovelock and Margulis, the importance of the Gaia Theory was not that earth was itself a living organism but that whatever it was, its balanced systems could be upset by human activity. Gaia for them was a call to change how we interacted with the earth and to realize that we could not continue to act as if the planet were somehow separate from us. We were an integral part of the web of Gaian life, and if that web were destroyed, we would be lost with it.

The act of Gaianeering with respect to this “Face” of Gaia is to participate in maintaining and nurturing the many environmental systems that sustain the balance of life on earth. It is to act in a “Green” and ecological manner.

---

*This blog post, excerpted from the essay "Gaineering", will be presented to attendees of our upcoming Gaineering Conference. Click here for more information.

"Hey! Tell Me Before You Tear Down My House!"

By Julie Spangler

On a lovely spring day in the early days of the Findhorn community in Northern Scotland, sometime around 1970, a visitor handy in the ways of the bulldozer was helping clear the land for the construction of the community's new building to house their printing endeavors. It was an innocent enough task as these things go, but as this earth moving was taking place, Peter Caddy, founder of Findhorn, received an emergency phone call.  On the other end of the line was his friend and colleague Ogilvy Crombe — ROC to his friends — calling from Edinburgh where he lived. "What are you doing?!?" he asked in his soft Scottish accent. "I have an apartment full of angry nature spirits carrying suitcases saying they are leaving your community. They say that you have broken your promises of cooperation."

Now Peter was puzzled. The work at Findhorn was all about cooperation with nature and with the subtle beings who work with tending plants among other things. As far as he was concerned, he had done nothing to offend them. Peter did mention the bulldozer, however. That was the culprit. It turns out that while it is recognized by the nature spirits that humans do at times need to clear land, it is how we do it that is important to them. ROC told Peter that clearing the land is okay as long as it is done in love and in partnership with the beings who live and work there. The bulldozer is a tool which can be used with love and do no harm. But alerting the beings who live on that land is important. Why? So those associated with the plant can begin to withdraw the energetic patterns they work with to allow the removal to be done in harmony with the land.

Working the land with love and communicating with the spirits attending it has been a key note of the work at Findhorn. In using the bulldozer, the visitor had not been instructed to inform the nature spirits that this activity was planned so it came as a shock to them when this monster came along and began tearing up their homes. To them, the bulldozer had no life and thus it was not visible to them until it began to impose itself into their domain.  

Nature clears land all of the time through storms, fires, floods, etc.... The difference is that a natural event is part of the world of these subtle beings and they can see it coming and prepare themselves; in fact they can work with it. Human tools are not visible to them and cannot be anticipated without the humans themselves being in communion with the land.

Peter apologized through ROC, promising that the humans would behave better in the future if the nature spirits would come back home. And in fact it became protocol at the community that whenever any changes were planned for the land, respect for the lives living there would be offered through communicating what was to happen, when, and why.

Human tools abound in our world. Technologies currently exist which would be considered miracles 1000 years ago. Even 100 years ago, many were unimagined. Dick Tracy's wrist phone, once a cartoon character's silliness is now a reality. Communications are fast and global. Robots are doing work people used to do, and artificial intelligence is becoming a reality. It seems that whatever a human can imagine we can create. We are more and more detached from the land we depend on and rarely is the intent communicated to the land or the subtle forces associated with it.

This point was brought home to me last week when I saw a video of a farmer, part of an agribusiness, plowing his vast fields by sitting in his office in front of multiple screens monitoring the work of his huge automated combines! Amazing! So much back-breaking work which used to be done by human hands is being done by these robotic semi-intelligent machines. What a labor saver! And yet, I found myself feeling chilled by the sight.

How easy it is to disconnect from the land, treating it as a tool rather than as a living partner in growing food for life. It used to be that a farmer was directly on the land, feet and hands in the soil, out in the weather, feeding the land in order to grow healthy crops. Often there was love of that land entwined with the hopes for fruitful harvest. But one doesn't need to work the land with hand tools in order to treat it with love.

How does this relate to the farmer with the combines on screens? He could be operating those machines unconsciously, allowing them to cut and chew the land without any awareness of how cut off from the land he is. Or he could be seeing those machines as extensions of himself as he loves his land, opening the soil to receive the love with the seeds. The machines could also be seen as part of a living team with their own cooperative intelligence. People often name their machines, giving recognition to the partnership that is offered. In this way, humanity can maintain a communion with the land, with Gaia, and still create new miracles of technology, miracles of connection and participation rather than of disconnection and alienation.

To me, that is one aspect of Gaianeering. Staying in touch with the life all around us, natural or man made, and engaging in partnership through love and communication no matter what work we are doing. We can harvest plants and still be honoring them, full of gratitude for what they are giving us, for the sustenance, for the tools to create and build and for the capacity thrive on the earth. And in return we give back our love, our energy and intent, our knowledge of how to enhance the environment, how to nurture, how to consciously partner.

---

At our upcoming Gaineering conference, from July 28-30, we will focus on the pioneering work of forming partnerships with the multiple dimensions of Earth’s living ecologies. There’s still time to join us. Click here for more information and to register.

The Body Realm

Essay and Sketch By Mary Reddy

As we prepare for Lorian’s summer conference, many of us are exploring our relationship with Gaia, how to “think like a planet,” and what it means to be a loving and conscious member of the web of life that is our earth. David Spangler describes relating to Gaia as more than viewing the planet as a living organism. It’s about “a more holistic, ecological, systems-oriented way of viewing reality, seeing things in terms of interconnections, patterns, networks, relationships, integration, and interacting wholes rather than as collection of discrete but separate entities.”

But it can be daunting at times to think about the enormity of beings and relationships within Gaia. How can I possibly stretch that far and wide? It helps to start with what’s right at hand. I go to what surrounds me, knowing it is a fractal slice of the broader and more complex relationships and energies within which my little life nests. What is closest to me as an expression of Gaian life is my own body. Our bodies, on levels both physical and subtle, interconnect with the earth and tie us to it.

Many of us have experienced trauma in our lives and have unwittingly frozen into defensive physical stances. Or perhaps we have followed the siren call of our culture and learned to live as disembodied mental beings, addressing physical needs as perfunctory tasks to perform on our way to the next great online experience. Even athletes and yoga experts can fall prey to a central-command model of authority over muscles, joints, and nerves. Despite our ignorance and inattention, a multitude of cells, organisms, subtle energies, and networks carry on the workings of our physical life—mirroring what happens on the broader Gaian level. Imagine what changes if we respect the innate intelligence within our bodies?

I once had an opportunity to try Hakomi therapy, a somatic approach to healing. As I lay on a massage table, fully clothed, the therapist invited me to tune into my body and simply mention what I sensed and where I felt it. I was drawn to my abdomen and noted a certain tension there. The therapist hovered her fingers over an area and said, “Do you mean here?” Without warning, I began to tremble in that spot. I experienced several minutes of spontaneous tremors within the tissues of my abdomen, as though a hundred butterflies had taken wing. Peter Levine describes this trembling in his books on healing from trauma. It’s the body’s mechanism to release the build-up of adrenaline after a traumatic event. (It’s amazing that the body can hold this tension for years after the initial trauma.) Even though I began the session with no preconceptions, I was thoroughly surprised by this deep energetic release.

Since that experience I have explored a number of somatic healing modalities and I’ve learned to relate to my body with open attentiveness. Experience in meditation and a good imagination have helped me feel into parts of my body. Sometimes I sense every bone, cell, and pore. Other times, I may connect with my left hip joint or the back of my neck and listen to what’s going on there, observing sensations when they arise. (I’ve developed a solid respect for the work done by my joints, fascia, and bone marrow.) I began to knit together these felt-sense meditations on various parts and reached a point where I can light up with an energetic sensation of the whole. This deepening relationship with my body allows me to move more fluidly into daily activities. It feels like I am part of a village.

Now when I move into the surrounding realms of life and Gaia, I begin with this open and loving partnership with my body. And my body has taught me how to stand confidently and extend that loving relationship outward. Ron Kurtz, the man who developed Hakomi therapy, drew the name from the Hopi Indian language. Hakomi is a Hopi word which means "How do you stand in relation to these many realms?” What a wonderful way to invite contemplation of Gaia and all the networks and alliances we participate in as members of her Body. Let us stand in beautiful relationship to these many realms.

---

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

What is Gaianeering?

By Jeremy Berg

When I used the term Gaianeering to describe the upcoming Lorian conference obviously Gaia was on my mind. Ever since James Lovelock used the title The Gaian Hypothesis to describe his theory that the world was indeed a whole, living system, the term has been growing in use. For many the word Gaia now coveys the sense of a conscious, sentient planetary being that hearkens back to the primordial deity the ancient Greeks revered; the ancestral primal Mother Earth goddess.

But Gaianeering has echoes of engineering, a human activity. I had this also in mind. We are now seeing the negative consequences of human technology uncoupled from natural ecologies and unfettered by ethical concerns for the environment. It is now time to change that approach and put our creative energy towards a loving collaboration with the life and lives of our world.

Organizations like the "Bioneers" and many others are promoting new and ancient ways that move us towards ecological sustainability. But life extends well beyond biology. Countless other conscious beings occupy niches of size, scale and dimension. These beings: angels, fairies, post mortems, elementals, nature forces, animal powers, gods and goddesses and many other "spiritual entities" appear regularly throughout humanity's many religious and cultural systems. All are evolving with new potentials constantly emerging. Over the centuries, a lineage of seers have kept communication flowing between the various streams of earthly life — seen and unseen.

We tend to think of these unseen "otherworlds" if we acknowledge them at all as completely separate realms. But of course, as we have learned from ecological science, this is one intertwined world. It may not be possible for a new wholesome culture to emerge without engaging other dimensions of life that are being affected by our careless, world-altering actions.

In the distant past, we are told, there was a conscious connection between the life of nature, the evolving species of humanity and a parallel race of  humanity, the Sidhe (or Faerie). We are now entering an era when it is imperative that these "pathways of peace" be widened for new planetary partnerships to once again blossom. In addition we now bring our emerging technologies to this gathering of life-streams which must be incorporated into a whole new system.

So Gaianeering to me is the attempt to reweave the matrix of our world at a new turn of the spiral. It assumes that the Sidhe have something vital to offer humanity as we evolve towards a new understanding of our role as caretakers of Gaian life. And it assumes that we have something to offer in our exploration and manipulation of matter. Together, Sidhe and Human, working in concert with the Intelligences of Nature and Planetary Beings ,we plant the seeds of hope for a new tomorrow.

The Lorian Association "Gaianeering" conference is an exploration of these potentials. As David Spangler puts it:

"Now we enter a time when understanding Gaia and, more importantly, learning to live in collaboration and harmony with this planetary life, becomes more essential than ever. In the face of climate change, it may even be a key to our survival as a civilization. We need to know the Gaian life in which we are immersed. We need, in the words of the forthcoming Lorian conference, to become Gaianeers."

Seeing Being: The Power of Images to Hold Multiple Levels of Meaning

Image and Essay By Deborah Koff-Chapin

I created this image a couple of weeks ago during a guided practice lead by David Spangler. He offered it as part of a recent Forum that explored the deeper impulses guiding the emergence of the United States of America. In this exercise we were integrating the deeper, visionary ideals upon which the founding of America was based into our personal selves.

The process that I use is called Touch Drawing. It is a simple yet profound way of making images through the touch of fingertips on paper that is laid over a layer of ink. The pressure of their touch leaves an impression on the underside. As I listened to the guided meditation, I focused on my felt sense to bring images into form. There is something about the full-bodied process of translating content into images that enables me to fully engage and internalize what I am hearing. I created about 9 drawings during the hour long session. This one was the last to emerge. I posted it in the Forum and left it at that.

Earlier this week, as the summer solstice approach, I began scanning my memory for an image to share with my online network. (I love to send images out into cyberspace for seasonal moments and holidays.)

The above drawing came into my mind. My first awareness was that is had a strong solar presence, which seemed fitting for the solstice. I began to look at it on a more universal level, dissociated from the content of the class. I noticed that this being radiated a strong and knowing presence within its body. The flame-like pattern was repeated in the eye. I wondered what this image might be saying — the person in this drawing is BEING solar, radiating light. In its eye, it is also conveying a sense that it is SEEING that radiance in the world. I played with the words SEEING and BEING and finally settled on connecting the two — SEEING BEING. I like the way these words interact and communicate a different message one way or another.

After choosing the image and title, I took the time to add more color and refine the form. This drawing now stands on its own for you to interact with. I encourage you to spend a few minutes just taking the image in visually. Imagine how it would feel to have these shapes within your self. Be open to your own insights. Trying some poetic writing. You can even ask this Seeing Being to speak to you!

---

Deborah Koff-Chapin will be creating Interpretive Touch Drawings at our upcoming Gaineering Conference, taking place from July 28-30. Click here for more information or to register. For more information about Deborah and Touch Drawing, please visit her website.

First Language

By Freya Secrest

A friend and I were talking recently about the many ways we perceive and interpret the world through our subtle senses. She shared a conversation in which someone made the statement, “My ‘first’ language is intuition.” That statement got me thinking about what I would consider as my “first language”. How do I first connect with and hear the world? How did it first speak in return? How might I widen my perception in order to better understand and communicate with others?

As I slow down and tune into my personal process of communication, it is clear to me that I perceive the world through patterns of movement. I notice the way a person holds their body, how upright they stand, where their shoulders fall. I gather impressions from their rhythm of walking. These impressions are my first forms of meaning-making and connection building. Next I might listen to their tone of voice or the speed of their conversation. Only then do I register the words they are saying.

Following this track, I find that I need to widen my definition of languages beyond the verbal. When my children were small I remember asking them to “use their words” rather than grabbing or crying to get something they wanted. It was an important step to help them understand their feelings and gain more direction and control of their energy. As I consider it now, I see that my instruction in itself recognizes that an exchange of information includes verbal, emotional and energetic communication. Our familiarity with all three elements influences our ability to interpret and “language” our experience.

A language helps us to receive information, interpret it, and communicate to others. A language builds connection. Words can build those bridges and they are certainly the form most consciously used for exchange in our culture. But they are only one way to communicate an experience. Emotional and energetic languages also are tools of communication when we learn how to access them.

Once I was walking in the woods and I passed by a small grove of cedar trees. Focused on the path I was walking, I unexpectedly had the sensation of being called out to. “Hey! Over here!” It was as if I had walked by a group of people and had ignored them. When I looked around I became aware that the trees were calling out to me. As I turned towards them, I felt a warm fellowship. It was a palpable feeling of walking through a field of communion.

But multi-sensory information is not new to the subtle realms of our world. While we humans have privileged spoken language and only recently have come to recognize auditory, visual and kinesthetic senses as part of our communication platform, other realms communicate fluently through all these and a more formative language — the language of love and shared being. It is not specifically auditory, kinesthetic or visual, though it can use any and all of those forms. Love communicates through qualities such as respect, honor and joy and the energy of our intention in action. It is with these languages that we build our fluency for communicating in Gaia’s subtle ecology of life.

To widen into a deeper framework for communication, we need to be able to articulate our felt energies as well as connect feeling with our mental concepts and subtle experiences. Like light coming into a room from several windows, using multiple streams of information gives a wider perspective of what we are sensing. It is possible that when we are rooted more deeply into our natural form of connecting with the world that we will be better able to navigate other forms of expression and build bridges of understanding with each other.

There are so many languages I might like to learn. I have friends who speak Portuguese, French, science and honey bee. Our world can speak wind and storm and drought and warm rain, but I think under it all our first language, love, shines light through all of our windows.

---

Join Freya Secrest for A Touch of Love, a Summer Discovery Course, from June 25-July 1. For more information or to register, click here.

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

Pathways

Essay and Pastels by Claire Blatchford

I’m an avid walker and hiker and love the sweet and reassuring familiarity of old pathways and the lure and promise of new, unexplored ones. This winter when the wind was knife-sharp and the earth was snowy and icy, too icy for a brisk stroll or an easy saunter, I turned instead to pastels. I used my fingers, rather than my feet, to retrace some old pathways and try out some new ones. Come along... let me show you where I went...

I headed towards the morning sun, all bundled up.

Then recalled a hike in the Smokey Mountains in North Carolina.

Next a cousin sent a Christmas letter from California with a gorgeous photo, so I went into it.

The light and shadows of California took me, in turn, down a straight golden-white road lined with tall trees.

Next I went to a beloved spot, clad in autumn colors, on the Franconia Ridge Trail in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Back in my imagination, I chambered up a stone stairway.

 Then, as the days began to lengthen, out into the sun along a poppy path.

Art shows me again and again how our beautiful earth is not only beneath, above and about us— it is within us!

---

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org

 

 

 

Working Together To Change the World: An Interview with David Nicol (Part 2)

Interview By Susan Beal

SUSAN: What strikes me is that much of what we’ve been taught about the spiritual path is that it’s about personal, individual discipline and study— a solitary climb toward God— and you’re saying no, it’s actually more that we’re all in this ocean of wisdom. Instead of struggling to swim against the currents on our own, if we intentionally link together we’re buoyed up and float far better as a result of our collaboration.

DAVID: Right, it’s not the heroic path, the spiritual hero. It’s more like we can help each other in profound ways. In the places we tend to be weak, somebody else will be strong. Through being together in that very profound, group spiritual intelligence, the field is acting on all of us in nuanced ways, and we’re all getting uplifted while we’re also co-creating the thing that’s uplifting us.

In all honesty, I’m so excited about this stuff! What excites me the most is that people are connecting at a really deep level to the unity and coherence of the group field, and intentionally expressing that in simple, sort of tribal dance forms that ground those energies in an embodied, ecstatic way. I think it is tapping back into ancient wisdom, states of consciousness that are powerful and quite magical, maybe especially because we have been such an individualistic culture and when we enter into these forms, something comes into the group field that is clearly beyond it. It’s like the group becomes a portal for higher dimensional consciousness to come through. It’s more than the rational mind can comprehend.

SUSAN: It sounds like you’re saying there’s a difference between the newness of what is emerging with these group subtle fields and rituals, versus an attempt to return to tribal culture or recreate “tribal consciousness” in some kind of reaction against our individualistic culture.

DAVID: Yes, I do feel what we’re discovering here is an integration rather than a regression. We’re coming from a place of honoring the preciousness of the sovereign, human individual, which I think is an evolutionary development that we all prize, very much—our autonomy, our freedom, our ability to make our own choices. That has been an achievement of the whole Western journey. I don’t just have to do what my father did, or what my tribe tells me to do. It has led to an incredible flowering of creativity as well. So these group field practices are not a diminishment of that, but a voluntary, temporary entering into these states of collective awareness, with a clear, conscious recognition that we’re doing this so that we can find and experience something greater than any one of us can have alone. It’s definitely not just trying to get back into some sort of ancient wisdom. It’s more of an integration of ancient and modern, past and present.

SUSAN: Getting back to the topic of the shadow—as far as these emergent group organisms or entities, if we really realized we’re contained within this higher, collective wisdom and healing capacity, maybe there’s no need to disown parts of ourselves because they’re represented there in everyone else anyway. Maybe it’s a way for our shadows to be integrated through this collective embrace. It sounds like you’re talking about the possibility for the healing of the individual and society by drawing on the combined healing capacity of everybody within the group.

DAVID: Yes, and as part of that, a coherent group has the ability to witness and hold more suffering and trauma than an individual can. It’s very difficult, in fact I think it’s inappropriate to ask an individual to open up to the collective traumas of humanity and to try to process that themselves. It can actually lead to health problems and more trauma. It’s a mismatch of levels. But groups are inherently a social space that can hold more than an individual. And so a coherent, skillful group can open up to, say, the suffering of the Holocaust, or racism, or large scale suffering of any kind, because it’s got a much larger capacity.

SUSAN: In your book you refer to Christopher Bache’s work in which he says it was opening up to collective suffering that allowed him to access his sacred identity, but I think it can also destroy you to do that.

DAVID: And he came close to losing it. So not everyone can go there. It’s a very high risk method. But I think groups can take us there and hold us safely.

SUSAN: That’s part of what I love about your work, that it works with this grounded, powerful group intention that acts like a boost to get you into states of collective consciousness and wisdom that a lot of people think you can only access via clairvoyant skills or psychedelic drugs and entheogens.

DAVID: And the experiences people seem to be having in these group explorations of subtle realms is amazingly vivid. I think there’s something significant about the inter-subjective validation. We’re in there together, so it’s harder for that inner skeptic to come in and say, “You’re just imagining things,” because we’re all imagining it together!

The other thing that has been sort of revolutionary is this approach of co-creating and entering together into these subtle realms not just with visualization or imagination, but through our presence, our actual essence. It’s a key element to how I work. There’s a difference between saying, “Imagine there’s a green diamond coming into your crown chakra,” for example, and saying, “Connect with the part of your being that is inherently compassionate and kind,” and then, when everyone has connected with that familiar quality within themselves, saying, “Let’s start to envision that presence of compassion within us as a green light.” The visualization simply gives form to the felt sense we’re all having. It has a different ontological status than a thought-form suggested from outside oneself. It’s actually something within us.  

SUSAN: That’s lovely, because I know a lot of folks feel shy and uncertain about their ability to visualize things or “see” subtle energies, and this approach draws on a familiar, felt sense of things and our natural capacity to access that presence within.

DAVID: And then we all share an experience of a tangible phenomenon, which then becomes a tangible subtle world that we’re all in together. It goes a long way toward dissolving the usual barriers and doubts we have about the subtle realms, because firstly, it’s very tangible— we can feel it with our bodies and presence— and secondly because it’s got the social, inter-subjective aspect to it.

SUSAN:  So are you developing new courses from this? What are you up to at this point in terms of teaching and research?

DAVID: I’ve been building foundations for this work since about 2005, when it was clear to me this is what I was meant to do. That’s when I started writing my dissertation and formed the Gaiafield Project. This path is still revealing all kinds of things about its direction, so I’ve been in a real R & D phase, just trying things out. Right now I’m playing with an approach with a smaller group process in which we’re setting up the group field to focus on individual healing and each person in the group gets a turn to be in the center and bring in a particular issue they want healing for, or a particular project they want support for. And then they get this amazing, multi-dimensional, powerful group field that offers a profound healing.

SUSAN: Do you have an identifiable group of inner colleagues or guides that you work with, or is it more intuitive hits and that kind of thing?

DAVID: I don’t have a corresponding experience to what David Spangler has as far as his inner colleagues. For me, I feel guidance from Gaia, itself, and more specifically, trees. In particular I am inspired by the forest of redwoods in Montgomery Grove. I went there with a prayer some time ago, because it’s such a sacred place, and I asked for help turning this seed of an idea into a forest. I came back from time to time and would check in. I thought it would be metaphoric, but about 9 months ago we found a place to move right down the road so it was a tangible result. Now my wife and I live right near there and our back yard is this massive redwood forest. Suddenly it’s as if the forest is literally speaking to me and guiding me in my life and work. And beyond that there’s this sense of a cosmic dimension as well. I’m connected to a group of beings whose culture, if you will, is oriented around tapping the energy of ecstasy and celebration. I feel they’re in communication with me about that frequency of ecstasy, and that’s what I want to bring in on a big scale.

SUSAN: So how can people learn more about your work or get more involved in what you’re doing?

DAVID: The best thing is to go to the website (http://gaiafield.net/) for information about our online community and offerings, or get on the mailing list. I’ve also just launched an online course— https://gaiafield-community.thinkific.com/courses/introduction-to-subtle-activism.  I’m offering a 50% discount to Lorian blog readers who enroll. Just enter the code gn5O when you check out.

SUSAN: Well, thank you so much, David. I’m really grateful to you for talking to me and for the work you’re doing in the world!

DAVID: Thank you, Susan. It’s been an enjoyable conversation.

---

Click here to read Part 1 of this interview.

Working Together to Change the World: An Interview with David Nicol (Part 1)

Interview by Susan Beal

David Nicol’s research into group subtle fields and their potential for healing and transformation on both the individual and collective level is an exciting example of the basic principles of Incarnational Spirituality in action. My introduction to Nicol’s work was through his book Subtle Activism: The Inner Dimension of Social and Planetary Activism. The book, based on Nicol’s PhD dissertation on subtle activism, was recommended by David Spangler, a member of Nicol’s dissertation committee. Intrigued by the book, I enrolled in Nicol’s 6-week online course, "Building Group Subtle Fields". Since then, I have been sharing what I learned with my local subtle energy study group. We have found the process to be uplifting, powerful, and a perfect complement to our study of David Spangler’s book Working with Subtle Energies.

Last month I had the delightful opportunity to chat with David Nicol about his ongoing work, including his discoveries about the higher wisdom that is available to us when we engage in intentional, collaborative approaches to subtle energy activism.--Susan Beal

SUSAN: Thanks so much for agreeing to chat with me about your work and research with group subtle fields. The Lorian Blog recently focused on the topic of the shadow, so if we might, I’d like to focus on that topic relative to the work you’re doing with group subtle fields and subtle activism.

DAVID: That sounds great.

SUSAN: The work you’re doing with group subtle fields and their application to subtle activism is incredibly exciting. I’m enchanted by the blend of practicality and magic that characterize your work. Yet there’s a darker aspect to the power of groups that can play out in the pressure to conform, the dangers of groupthink and herd mentality and the tendency for some groups to become exclusionary or to ostracize people who don’t fit in. And there are a lot of different agendas people might have for joining a group, some of which may not be all that positive. Even within groups that are consciously working to be welcoming or open, it’s inevitable that conflicts will arise or individuals within the group will use it as an arena to act out their own shadow stuff, consciously or not. Have you found this to be a problem?

DAVID: My general sense and my experience is that the power of the coherence of the group field cancels out individual scattered energies and influences. They don’t have much of an effect on the group coherence or power. But someone actively seeking to influence things in a negative way, that’s another level. That’s why we build in a number of protective elements designed to create as clean, grounded and safe a field as possible— like connecting with the Earth, with the light, with our deepest Self, creating a membrane of light and filter inside the circumference of the group field, and having people help hold space. That said, I do think the more determined practitioner of the dark arts could find a way to influence the field.

SUSAN: I wondered about that, because in terms of the quality of coherence, some question if it is a neutral energy that can go either direction, or if it is intrinsically benevolent. Is there anything built into your approach that recognizes and has a way to respond to that?

DAVID: We are starting to discover a real power in this work to influence things. I’ve wondered how public to be about this potential, given that some people out there may want to learn the technology but have different intentions than using it for healing. On the other hand there’s a collective awakening in these times, and it’s not a time to keep esoteric knowledge locked away anymore. So I wrestle with the question of how to walk with responsibility knowing there’s real power in this process and it shouldn’t be used in the wrong way or get into the in the wrong hands.

But I think about how in Dion Fortune’s book Magical Battle of Britain, she mentions her perception that the Nazis were engaging with occult knowledge and it explains in part why they were so effective in the early stages of the war, working on the subtle planes to weaken the morale of the nations they were targeting. She said although they had a certain power by working with subtle energies that way they didn’t have access to the frequency of Love, so they weren’t operating on the full spectrum. The force her group opened to was ultimately greater because they were working with much higher frequencies and dimensions.

SUSAN: In your book and in the class "Developing Group Subtle Fields", you said that the deeper in meditation an individual goes, the wider and higher the impact they can have on the collective.

DAVID: I think people like the Beatles, or J. R.R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis had such widespread appeal because they worked at a deep, universal layer of consciousness that everyone can resonate with. And the great teachers like Christ and Buddha hit these deep layers we all resonate with. Jung talked about the layers of the unconscious and how as you go deeper you go from the personal layer into more collective layers—family, tribal, national, then universal archetypes. The idea is that if you go that deep you are actually bringing in healing to that level so that everyone connected to that level will share in that healing in some way.

SUSAN: Because these are the levels of consciousness where we’re connected. But of course there are collective fields of fear, rage and alienation, too, and the undercurrents that Trump tapped into and that some political figures can use to manipulate people. But like you were saying before, those lower frequencies don’t have the power of Love, which is like white light that contains or encompasses all the others. Fear and anger aren’t bad in themselves, just problematic when they’re isolated and misused.  

DAVID: Right. I think too that when you have a high enough perspective with the Trump phenomenon, you can see it as part of an evolution toward full unity of consciousness. The consciousness Trump is expressing has an aspect of truth in it. He’s saying something about the story of our culture that hasn’t really been able to be said, that needs to come forward. It’s happening in a primitive and unconscious, even damaging way, but you can see the logic of it needing to be integrated.

And there’s an energetic truth that Trump is speaking to in which we know the system needs to go through a fundamental change in order to heal. There’s a need for some sort of revolution. We didn’t think it would take this form, but there’s instinctual recognition that things need to shift radically, so there’s support in the system for that to happen—even though it’s playing out in a distorted way.

SUSAN: I think a number of people don’t want to hear that. A dear friend forwarded me an email about a grassroots campaign urging thousands of people to send hate mail to Trump. I was appalled. It’s the negative aspect of building group subtle fields—using a group to express hatred in a big way. But how do you honor collective fear and rage in a way that heals it rather than colludes with or gives in to it?

DAVID: It’s very tricky. This is where I’m encouraged by something we’re discovering in working with group subtle fields, which is the development of what seem to be emergent organisms that have intelligence and spiritual capacities greater than any one of us individually. It’s something I’m very interested in, because for any one of us as individuals it is very difficult to know how best to respond to evil, if you want to call it that, or just dark or fanatical forces. It can be confusing. Am I supposed to find some kind of profound compassion where I’m able to understand these forces on the deepest level, or am I supposed to summon some sort of fierce strength where I’m able to act as some kind of warrior for the truth? It’s not always clear how to respond.

But my intuition and my actual experience is that there’s a knowing within the group field about just the right combination of qualities called for to respond in an appropriate and healing way. It can be a mix of kindness, sensitivity, firmness, pity, strength and love, for example. It can contain these paradoxical and complementary truths, because it’s a complex organism.

SUSAN: So if I understand what you’re saying, there are these intelligences, or even beings, that result from these groups fields and have a greater wisdom and a higher perspective than we have as individuals, and we can invoke this collective intelligence for aide. In other words, we don’t have to know how to respond on our own because we can ask for help from these group fields that will have a capacity drawn from our collective wisdom and strength.

DAVID: Yes. That is my experience. It’s our collective wisdom and we participate in creating it—we’re part of these organisms. And yet there are qualities within these group fields that are more complex and of a higher order than any one of us as individuals. It’s like a bridge between the individual human and higher frequency beings like angels. These group field organisms are closer to us because they actually are us, in addition to being an opening to wisdom and intelligent forces from the Earth and the subtle realms. And so it’s a potent channel for this collective wisdom and intelligence from all sides to come together.

SUSAN: So there’s less lost in translation and less difficulty in accessing that assistance and information?

DAVID: That’s right. And there’s also an inter-subjective validation of the reality of the experience. It’s not like having to translate a personal visionary state into social reality, because you’re having it together. It creates a shared experience that transcends the individual ego.

SUSAN: Yes, it gets to the heart of what it means to be collaborative. It’s akin to what David Spangler refers to as the Gaian perspective, thinking like a planet, in terms of the whole rather than an individual. There’s a synergy generated from working intentionally with subtle energy as a group that you don’t achieve independently.

DAVID:  Yes. And in particular, I’m fascinated by what we’re discovering together in our collective capacities for healing, awakening, and transformation. When spiritually sovereign individuals who already have a connection themselves to Source consciousness, link together in these states, they co-create these emergent, collective organisms—I think of them as subtle ecosystems—with exponentially increasing wisdom. Each time we connect, more and more comes in and we collectively have access to higher and higher levels of wisdom and increasing realizations about what’s possible.

---

The second part of this interview will be published next week. Click here to read recent blog posts on the shadow and an interview with David Spangler on subtle activism.

Subtle Activism: An Interview with David Spangler (Part 4)

Interview By Annabel Chiarelli

ANNABEL: Can you elaborate on the difference between “spiritual bypassing” and true subtle activism?

DAVID: There is no question that people can use ideas like subtle activism, prayer, “sending Light and Love,” and so on as a way to bypass the reality of a situation or to avoid having to take any kind of physical action while still feeling good about themselves for having done something positive. The problem here is the same as with those who are materialists and only see physical actions as having any value. Neither one, the denier and the bypasser, is fully accepting, much less understanding, the reality of the subtle worlds or of subtle energies. And given the nature of our culture and what is considered normative, I can understand why.

If you walk into a room where there has been emotional or physical abuse and violence, you can feel the tension in the atmosphere even if there is no physical evidence of anything that’s taken place there. Something in you tightens up and constricts. Conversely, if you walk into a room that has been filled with love and grace and goodwill, you can feel that as well. You enjoy being in that room; something in you relaxes and opens up. These are common experiences, often overlooked because we don’t pay attention to them or just shrug them off. But the fact is, we all experience subtle environments and energies even if we don’t talk about them or understand them.

Here’s a little story. A friend of mine decided to try an experiment. She had a small office in a large office building that was headquarters to a corporation.  Each morning when she came to work, she would take time to do a simple ritual in her office, blessing everything in it and asking that this room be a haven of peace and love throughout the day for anyone entering it. She did this faithfully each day. Soon she discovered, to her secret amusement, that people were coming into her office who had no reason to be there or to see her. They were even coming from different floors of the office building.  When she asked them what she could do for them, they often couldn’t say why they had dropped in. One man said, “I’m not sure why, but I suddenly felt like I wanted to come in here.  It feels so good in your office, it makes my day!” They were all responding to the subtle energies she was consistently invoking into this room, but none of her co-workers understood what was happening. They just knew they liked the “feel” of the place and that they felt better through the day afterward for having visited her.

I know others who have done similar things. Another friend, put in charge of the dairy section of a supermarket, also made a point of blessing everything in that part of the store for which he was responsible. He said he would discover customers just standing amidst the displays of milk and cheese, not buying anything, but just bemusedly enjoying the atmosphere they felt there.

In both of these cases, these individuals were doing a kind of subtle activism. They were deliberately shaping and informing the subtle environment where they worked so that it would be a blessing to anyone entering it. And they did this not by thinking to themselves, “Oh, I want this room to be filled with Light and love,” but by exercising a discipline of daily invocation, mindfulness, and a loving attention to the physical surroundings. In other words, they worked at it, and the effect built up over time.

Another important element that separates a true subtle activist from a spiritual bypasser is that he or she is not doing the work to help themselves feel better.  One doesn’t enter into or walk away from an act of subtle outreach thinking, “Oh, how wonderful of me to send these blessings,” or “I feel good for having done something positive for the world.” There’s no ego involved in the process. It’s not about you, it’s about the other; the emphasis is on the service. It’s about holding in oneself, in a disciplined way that involves mind, emotions, and body, the qualities you want to pass on to a specific subtle environment or to the energy field of another person.  And because a true subtle activist recognizes that the world is a whole--not a physical world and a subtle world, but one world with physical and subtle aspects—they are open to physical actions they can take as well, even if it’s only making a financial donation to help a cause connected to their subtle work.

Now, one of the characteristics of the subtle realms is how responsive they are to thought.  So it’s entirely possible that a simple, selfless thought of goodwill and compassion for someone else can set into motion a cascade of subtle energies that indeed end up blessing and energizing that person. Subtle activism need not always be a “project” requiring focused time and attention. But there’s nothing facile about it, either. Generally speaking, I need to invest time, energy, disciplined and clear intention, and sometimes even physical actions to make it work. At its most basic, I have to be—in my mind, my emotions, and in the felt sense in my body—the qualities I wish to offer to a specific subtle environment or to a person. And that can take work. You can’t just “send” love. You have to be love in that moment. You can’t just “send” peace. You have to be peaceful in that moment. You are what you “send,” and to come to the proper or appropriate inner state can take work on your part.

I cannot stress enough, or repeat enough, that the world is woven out of both subtle and physical elements, and that we live in both and are ourselves made of both. We always act in the world as both physical and subtle beings, even though we may not be aware of it because our attention gets so focused on the material side of things. The best subtle activism understands this and acts in both realms; it really should be called “holistic activism” incorporating both physical and subtle actions as appropriate. And a skilled holistic activist knows what can and cannot be accomplished in both realms. Subtle work of thought, subtle energy, and spirit cannot move the rubble off a little girl buried when her house was hit by an artillery shell. Someone has to physically move the stones.  But physical work can’t bring a burst of hope into the mind and heart of a Syrian doctor laboring under the most primitive conditions, without proper medicine or equipment; it cannot energize his spirit so that he can continue working without being burdened by a debilitating cloud of depression and negative energies. Each kind of activity, physical and subtle, has its proper place, and in a whole world, they operate best when blended together.

[David’s subtle colleague offers another contribution:]

SUBTLE COLLEAGUE: I’d like to add a word here to complement what you’ve said. What an incarnate person calls thought is to us on our level only partial thought. It is incomplete, especially when you define thought as something that goes on in your brain alone. Thought is much more than a mental activity.  Imagine your mind, your emotions, and your body as three aspects of a unified field. Thought to us is what is produced by this whole field, not simply by the mental portion of it. A thought is an expression of your whole being; if it originates only from your head, from your mind, it is incomplete. You might say it is one-third of a thought from our perspective.

This is why simply thinking about love or healing is often insufficient to make any difference in the etheric or subtle environment. This is especially true if this thinking has its origins not in compassion but in self-concern and self-aggrandizement, a desire to feel good about oneself for thinking in loving ways.  From our perspective it’s clear why this is so. The thought may be noble and worthy, but the emotional component moves in the opposite direction, away from the other who is in need and towards the neediness of the one doing the thinking.  And the body may not be involved at all; that is, there is no felt sense or sensation of the qualities represented by the thought.

For effective engagement with the subtle environment, you need to remember that you are a whole person and that you wish your “thought” to come from your unified field. You wish mind, emotion and body to all participate, each in its own way. And the body’s participation may be through sensation, through a felt sense of quality, or through actual movement and action, as dictated by the circumstances. However you do so, the body must be seen as being involved along with the mind and the feelings.

But there is another element which often goes unremarked. There is a fourth part to you that may be called “environmental.” This is the relationship you have with the world outside yourself. This relationship—the field of energy you form between yourself and the world—is as much part of your incarnation as your body or your mind.  So you might ask, how does the world think through me? How is my thought unfolded and shaped by my connection to the world around me?

So, if you are sending a thought of love and healing to a benighted part of the world, be aware of how that situation as a presence or as a force helping to draw that thought and its power out from you. To tap that force, you need to be connected as a field of energy with that situation, which means accepting it for the condition it’s in. You must see and accept the reality if you are to engage with it and if it is to “think through you,” so to speak, enhancing the thought-form from you that bears the qualities you wish to give.

To use a metaphor, if you had a friend who was injured and bears the scars of that injury, you cannot recoil from the scars if you are to embrace your friend with love. You cannot allow the sight of the scars to separate you from your friend. You have to accept him as he is now, scars and all, and then love can flow without obstruction. If you are going to use subtle energies to bring help to places that are filled with violence and darkness, you cannot deny or turn away from that darkness. It is part of what calls out the power and shape of your unified thought, do you see? If you can accept the tragedy inherent in a situation, then that situation can “think through you”  or join your thought to manifest the healing that it needs.

So, for us, thought is a product of mind, emotion, body, and environment all acting as a symbiotic and unified field of presence.

I leave you with my blessings.

DAVID: There’s one other thing. Not all of us are in a position to take physical actions or to make a physical contribution in a particular situation. I’m not in Aleppo, so I can’t physically move rubble or tend to the injured. Does this mean I am helpless or can’t make any kind of positive contribution?  No. If I understand the nature of subtle energies, which are not restricted by physical distance, then there are positive things I can do. Will they make a difference?  Maybe. I can’t guarantee it as there are too many variables, but I know that any energy of love or grace I can bring to a place like Aleppo, even from a distance using thought and spirit as the focusing and transmitting mechanisms, will not be wasted. It’s better than not offering any kind of blessing or prayer. After all, lifting the rubble off a little girl is not going to guarantee she will live, but it’s certainly better than leaving her buried. People in places like Aleppo can be buried under negative subtle energies; subtle activism, properly performed, can help lift this subtle rubble and give their spirits some breathing room for healing and re-energizing. Will it help?  It’s better than leaving them buried.

Subtle activism is not for the lazy or the spiritual bypassers, but it can be for people who have no other way of helping. Not everyone has the physical courage or the aptitude to wade into a dangerous situation, putting their lives at risk for the sake of others. We can’t all be “white hats” in Aleppo. But we can be “white hats” in the world we inhabit, which brings me to the final thing I want to say.

When we think of subtle activism, the word “activism” draws our minds to dangerous, challenging, or difficult situations in the world. But really, the greater challenge lies in the brokenness of our human way of doing things. The violence and suffering in a place like Aleppo exists because violence is endemic in the ways we approach our world; it permeates our thinking and ways of behavior. It doesn’t always have to take physical form. Emotional and mental abuse is everywhere. There is a tendency in modern society to treat people like things, and things can be discarded when they are of no further use or destroyed if they become an obstacle.

So opportunities for holistic activism—activism that draws on both our physical and subtle (i.e. our spiritual, mental, and emotional) aspects—are all around us. They are in our homes, in our jobs, in our places of shopping and entertainment. How much love, how much grace, how much blessing, how much compassion, how much goodwill and open-hearted listening and attentiveness do we bring to the others we meet, the others we work with, the others we live with? We are everyday through our physical and subtle actions shaping the subtle environments that affect us all. What world are we creating in our own backyards?

The true holistic activist knows that every day the world presents him or her with opportunities to heal, to mend, to bless, and to help, either physically or subtly, or best of all, in both ways. This is a discipline of daily awareness. It’s work, but it’s the only kind of work that will truly transform the world.

---

Click on the links to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this interview.

Subtle Activism: An Interview with David Spangler (Part 3)

Interview By Annabel Chiarelli

ANNABEL: David, can you elaborate on the energetic quality of love that is distinct from how we experience it as an emotional and psychological state?

DAVID: Love as an energy is an affirmation of being and identity. At least, this is how I experience it. It affirms and reaffirms existence, like a part of God recognizing and greeting another part of God. Love is God saying, “You are Mine. You are part of me.” Yet, there is no sense of being absorbed into something larger. Rather, love enhances the sense of freedom, the freedom to be what you are and to explore and unfold your unique potentials.

When I feel love for my wife Julia, there is a sense of warmth, of security, of attraction, of appreciation, of bonding. All of these I experience as emotions within myself. Yet when I feel love from a being in the spiritual realms—from an Angel, say—there is none of this emotional response. Instead, I feel affirmed in my beingness and also affirmed as part of the whole community of divine life that permeates the cosmos. There is a sense of celebrating who I am. Of course, in my love for Julia, there is also this same celebration of her unique identity and beingness. In loving her, I want to affirm her identity and her freedom to be herself and to unfold her unique potentials.

On all levels, love is an act of blending. In our human sphere, this is often experienced as a sense of togetherness, a melding of mind and heart. In the spiritual realms, the energy of love becomes, as I said, a celebration of the other and through that celebration, a participation in the other’s beingness. In this sense, love is a portal into an experience of unity and wholeness.

Love as an energy gives me a foundation on which to stand by affirming my beingness and existence. From this place of standing, I am free to give and receive love as an emotion, to desire, to connect, to appreciate, to honor, to cherish…all those feelings we associate with loving.

Having said this, I hasten to add that this is one person’s perception. Love as a universal, cosmic force undoubtedly has qualities and manifestations far beyond my ability to perceive or comprehend. And I also want to add that in the energetic fields that correspond to human thought and feeling, the same fields in which “The Scream” can exist, love does manifest its energy as one of attraction, desire, and connection. It’s just that as our consciousness interacts with higher levels of being, we discover it’s much more than just that.
 
ANNABEL: Is it in part a holding of that indestructible potential for redemption?

DAVID: Yes, I think we could say that. After all, redemption is the affirmation and re-claiming of one’s true, sacred identity. It’s an affirmation of who we really are, and that affirmation is certainly an expression of love.

Everything that comes into existence possesses its own unique spiritual identity which then unfolds its potentials along whatever developmental track or tracks become appropriate for it or chosen by it. Love is the energy that recognizes and affirms that identity and empowers its sacred expression, by which I mean the expression of what is true for it as established by the circumstances of its emergence from the Generative Mystery. But along this developmental track, a being or identity may lose sight of who and what it is and become entangled in patterns not true to its nature. It becomes in some way broken, or broken away from its true nature. In a way, this is what evil is, the expression of a broken identity, an identity that has forgotten its basic nature. The redemptive power of love lies in its ability to recall a being to itself, to enable it to remember who it is and thus to become disentangled and whole from what has been limiting or distorting it. No being is ever so lost, so broken, so entangled that love cannot ultimately reach it, enable it to remember, and thus redeem it, though it may take a very long time for this to happen.

ANNABEL: How do we go about cultivating this energy of love within ourselves in our subtle activism work, particularly in the case of dealing with negative energies, people, and situations?

DAVID: Subtle energy work benefits from a clear perception of a situation. I would even say that it requires it. Indulging in wishful thinking or fantasy only makes matters more difficult as it can distort or weaken the subtle energies we wish to work with. So, if I see something that’s negative and that causes me to react, I need to be clear both about what I’m seeing and about my own reaction. I want to name what is happening as accurately as I can.

Let’s take a concrete example. There was a report on the news about the children being hurt and killed by the artillery and air attacks upon Aleppo in Syria. They showed a small girl, maybe three or four years old, being dug out of the rubble of her home and rushed to what passes for a hospital in that benighted city. All the rest of her family had been killed. My reaction was sorrow and grief for this child and for all the children and civilians being injured. I wanted to reach out with subtle energies to bless the little girl and also to bless and hold in love and vitality those “white hat” responders who day after day and night after night go to these piles of rubble that used to be homes and try to dig out survivors.
 
At the same time, there’s a war crime being committed; innocent civilians are the targets of air and artillery strikes for the purposes of generating terror. The people ordering and carrying out these strikes are directly to blame for the suffering they are inflicting, and I’m angry as hell with them. And I felt anger and grief as well that humanity allows such things to happen, fully acknowledging that I am part of this humanity and therefore share in our collective responsibility as a species.

Now, if I’m going to do an act of subtle outreach, I need to accept all these emotions I’m feeling: the grief, the sorrow, the anger. They are part of my energetic reality. And I have to accept the negative energies swirling around Aleppo. At the same time, I know that I don’t want any subtle energies I project to make matters worse.  I want to elevate the vibrations in the subtle environment, not coarsen them. This means I need to respond with love.

Here, I think, is where people get hung up. How can one respond with love unless one denies or suppresses the other emotions that are present, the grief, the anger, and so on? And just what can subtle activism do in this situation anyway? Might it not just be a fantasy I do in my head in order to feel I’m contributing in a positive way?

The last question is easily answered by anyone who knows that we simultaneously inhabit both a physical world and an energetic one. Subtle actions cannot replace physical ones, but the converse is also true: physical actions are enhanced in a supportive subtle environment. Now, if a person is a materialist who denies that anything other than the physical world exists, then none of this will make sense anyway. But for those of us who are aware of the energy environment, we know that its quality impacts its physical counterpart.

Now, it would be the height of arrogance and grandiosity for me to feel that I could change the whole subtle “atmosphere” around Aleppo. That is more than any one person can do. But I can contribute to changing the subtle environment around a person or a group of persons, and I can provide positive energies for other beings, Angelic beings, to use in their work as they do attempt to heal and transform the negativity in that place. So in seeking to bless the little girl and those who are trying to save children like her, I am not wasting my time.

However, I cannot bless her or them, or anyone else, if my own energy field is defined by anger, even though that anger is justified. So my first step is to acknowledge my anger and grief and any other negative emotions I may have, like a sense of helplessness in the face of such tragedy. Then I thank these feelings for heightening my awareness of the situation in Aleppo and connecting me to it emotionally and mentally. In a way, they have been messengers alerting me to trouble. But now they’ve done their job. Now a different set of thoughts and feelings must form the response, and these must be based in love. The reason energetically is very simple: love-based energies cannot be hijacked and co-opted by any negative elements active in the subtle environment around Aleppo. Angry energies could be; fearful or hateful energies could be. But love cannot. It’s like a heavily armored convoy that cannot be attacked and can deliver the goods.

So my next step is to focus on my ability to love, while honoring and appreciating my anger and understanding perfectly why I have it. I need to go to that inner place from which love emerges. Each of us has such a place; we just need to find and acknowledge it and then practice drawing from it. I find the Touch of Love exercise I present in my book very good for doing this.

Once I am in touch with my loving energy, then I fill my being with it. Note that I’m not suppressing my anger or grief in so doing. I’m not denying them or pushing them away, and I’m most certainly not telling myself that I shouldn’t have anger, that somehow it’s not “spiritual.” That’s nonsense. A horrendous act has taken place, and I have every right to be angry about it. But I’m like a surgeon. To do my work, I need to step into a calm, focused place. As I said, the anger has done its job. Now it’s love’s turn.

So I fill myself with love and then I imagine (yes, imagination is very important as a focusing lens) myself in the presence of this little girl. Am I really mystically or psychically with her? Maybe. What is important, though, is that where my mind is focused, there my energy flows whether I’m aware of it or not. So I’m focused on being with her as a presence of love, of calm, of healing, and of compassion.

I hold this for as long as feels comfortable and right. It could be for several minutes, it might be just for a few seconds. Duration is not really important. But when I feel complete or full in my body, then I stop.

But what about those who are committing the war crimes, attacking civilians or ordering it done? I’d like to do some inner work with them, too. And here as well, the energies I work with must be love-based, otherwise they will be rejected or worse, will stimulate an energetic reaction that may make the individuals even more violent, more aggressive, more hurtful. So I have to discern how loving I can be. At what level can I honestly engage with these politicians and soldiers with loving intent? I want to be clear about this in myself. My objective is not to attack them, damage them, take revenge upon them, make them suffer for what they’re doing (however tempting all that might be!). My objective is really two-fold. One is to offer protection and healing to the souls of these individuals, for the actions of their personalities in causing needless pain and suffering to others attacks the vitality and “texture” (I don’t know what else to call it) of the soul. The soul is sickened, and I have compassion for that. So that’s one thing. The other is that I want to place into their energy environment a Light that can awaken in them a resistance to what they’re doing so that they will stop. If I just beam Light at them, it will probably be rejected. But I can gently surround them with a loving Light that a person could absorb and in so doing, become horrified at what they’re doing and make a decision to stop.

So again, remembering that the cardinal rule in subtle activism is not to impose but to respect the sovereignty and integrity of all involved, I again fill myself with love and in my imagination, place myself in the environment of those ordering and committing these acts. Then I ask that the love and the Light I offer become part of their environment in a way that will stimulate awakening and change. And I call upon spiritual allies to help with this, particularly in ways that will ensure the subtle energies I offer will stick around awhile in that environment and have a chance to do their work.

This sounds wimpy and un-warrior-like, but I do not have the power to make these people change, no matter how puffed up I make my self-image or how much I want to "fight evil." However, I can contribute to altering both the energy environment in which these people are working and the probabilities of their success. Does this have any effect? Yes. I’ve seen this work in very difficult situations where on the surface things seemed hopeless, yet within a matter of hours and days amazing transformations took place.

And I’ve seen it not work, as well. Situations and people are complex, and many variables can be at work. But love is never wasted. Its effects can be delayed but never ultimately stopped or denied.

---

Click on the links to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this interview.