Ben Roberts over at Movement Weavers used this phrase today, the movement of movements. It felt like “of course,” as if I both knew it and didn’t. I looked it up quickly and see that it refers to the Social Justice Movement – at least that’s where Wikipedia roots it. But movement of movements aptly describes what many of us are interested in, which includes but is broader than SJ movements.
The “movement of movements” brings a mental picture of many disparate attempts in the same direction. My visual is a million small creatures trying to find their way out of a hole by all manner of different methods – ladders, climbing on each other, pole vaulting. I know! Crazy but a little like how I see my own labors and that of many of my friends. We’re continually reaching out for something bigger than us that we can’t quite grasp yet – that perhaps isn’t even graspable in the usual sense. Reaching into the unknown which maybe is reaching for us.
But what’s pushing us? What’s driving this? Among the many descriptions of this, all true in their own way, is that of an evolutionary impulse. That’s Andrew Cohen’s phrase, and perhaps others, for the intrinsic quality of spirit or evolution to move toward higher, more unified order of life and consciousness. It’s a way of saying that by whatever name, life itself has an innate drive. And one of the thing that that drive is continually doing is networking. The movement of movements is spontaneously networking.
A more embodied form of that spiritual evolutionary impulse is the mysterious “kundalini” famed in esoteric lore (and the practical experience of many). Kundalini is a name for the distilled and concentrated inner force of life and consciousness that flows and courses through the body as a result of an awakening experience. It’s beyond control and courses through the body like a little lamplighter turning everything on as it moves through the “streets” of the city. It seems to know just what to do. Of course, every part of our body system knows what to do: Cuts heal, food is digested, thoughts get thunk and our tongues and mouths know how to say things we never even imagined we were going to say.
In the social body there’s a force in operation that’s behind our social experiments, weaving together each one of us that’s part of them in an emergingly intelligent manner. Our multitudinous individual experiments cooperate with that force automatically. We don’t even have to think about it.
It’s good to jump in and do something in the service of that impulse, to risk making a mistake. The networking nature of it all will tend to correct us. It’s staying apart and isolated from the movement of movements that keeps us in a seeming dead end.
