In challenging times like this, we need rich mutual connection at least as much as analysis.
Analysis is interesting but not powerful. Connection shows us what’s possible – possible for us personally and together. We need participation more than greater ideological clarification and purity. We need to hear and be heard, to build ideas together. It helps greatly to feel part of something bigger than ourselves.
I’m starting a free bi-weekly small groupto do this Collective SenseMaking starting November 11. Call it Final Participation More below. Check if you’d like to join in.
Often we relegate the entire psycho-spiritual side of ourselves to our private meditations. It’s a cultural norm. The benefit of spiritual and human connection is much amplified when it’s brought out into the open in a shared spirit of collaboration. .
Again heartfelt connection is more beneficial for us, individually and collectively, than more refining of our ideological purity.
Connection includes the recognition that we’re in this together.
There’s a price for thinking someone’s not in it with us. They feel we’re not in it with them. We miss the good and necessary things that come from mutual connection and support. Disconnection means that advantageous things fail to happen and pass by unnoticed. Disconnection is a symptom of the breakdown of community and it’s community that’s supports us.
“When you break up the individuals from a community into individual units, they become disempowered because it’s the collective consciousness and the collective energy of the group from which power comes.” – Bruce Lipton
We’re a long way from community at present. I often am! We’re a little like plants growing in an impoverished soil. The important community nutrients are not in wild abundance.
The strong emphasis that we place on the correct analysis of what’s happening in the world around us – the vaccines and passports, the Great Reset, corruption and deception – all these tend to reinforce a sense of scarcity and alarm. The resulting effects on the individual and the community promote a Pre-traumatic Stress Disorder I don’t mean that we’re helpless before it, only that there’s a pressure in that direction that the less well resourced among us are vulnerable to. Social distancing on the street, persistent isolation, long-term fear and alarm, concern over livelihood, anticipation of worsening future are all part of a common pattern. They weaken and threaten the social bonds of connection.
It becomes harder to connect to the deeper meaning of our lives, the potentially limitless spiritual reserves that surround us and the human community. Hope dims at moments and we can’t see it. Connection is stretched. When we try and reach out to another it may not be well received, not because the impulse wasn’t good but because the sense of disconnection was stronger than the reach in that moment.
A powerful antidote is what can happen in small groups – the being-together, the synchronicity, the surprise. Pre-Covid I hosted hundreds of hours of zoom calls, often with my friend Vihra Dincheva, to explore the mysterious more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thing that’s been so valuable. When Covid struck, I keenly felt the intrusion of an alien and socially disruptive force in the collective social field. My sensitive BS antennae were abuzz and they still are.
It feels important to plant new small group seeds now. What’s possible for us, individually and collectively?
I invite you to
No promises in this experiment. Sometimes it’s gold and sometimes tin but I welcome you to come on in!
Thursday, November 11th at 11am Eastern time (4pm UK etc.)
Conversation time is Come join in – register here! .Andrew