Thoughts on Conscious Community

[SL]

Hi

I read a blog several weeks ago about creating community. As ideas and questions of community have been bouncing around in my mind for a while now, I bookmarked it until I had some time to do some more snooping around the internet and to think about how I actually would express myself on the idea. As synchronicity often does, I began to come across articles and interviews and other information not necessarily about community, but all pieces of that puzzle that community is.

Some of the comments I have made in this post are similar to others I have made in other posts and other contexts. I hope it is not redundant for anyone.

I will post some links to interviews at the bottom of my post that I feel are appropriate to a broader contemplation of community. In one of them, the interviewee makes the point that there is a misplaced emphasis on collective creation. This is said from the viewpoint that since we are each a creator, within our own minds and in our own lives, the realities that we each individually manifest for ourselves are therefore what comprises the whole. If we all (and I mean by that, everyone on the planet) are creating from fundamentally different viewpoints, the result of our collectivism should be no surprise: war, apathy, emotional abuse, winners and losers are the repetitive result. The point that the interviewee was making is this:

It is not about how we collectively create together so much as how we individually perceive, that changes the collective reality.

I feel this is a huge statement and deserves much thought. If one takes this idea in combination with the understanding of inherent quantum Oneness, the responsibility one person and their creation has to the rest of the Whole becomes embarrassingly, and at the same time upliftingly, obvious. The disservice to the whole, for instance, made by political commentators on the popular cable television shows with their adamant, derisive and separatist statements - not just about the world but about their fellow countrymen - becomes clear.

So too does our rejection of this hyperbole as 'wrong' no longer serve us. To reject someone like that, or even some fellow family member with whom we do not resonate on whatever matter, is to reject that part of our individual self that perceives them in that way. Acknowledging and taking responsibility that anyone 'out there' that we are perceiving is, in deed and in fact, a construction within our own mind, is part and parcel to the implications of Unity. If being a Sovereign Entity experiencing a self-created reality is the 'truth', then the truth is that before 'Bill O'Reilly' or 'Mom' or 'my boss' can be different in our world, we as individuals have to see them differently in our own minds.

I personally have found in my own work organizing conscious conversations with others that the events I have been fortunate enough to be a part of, were not so much about whatever was spoken about. It was not so much that new ideas were discovered with one another. It was not so much that we even learned anything new intellectually. What is important about these experiences is that we acknowledged one another as one another.

That may not seem like much, however, everyone who has been with us for an event remembers when they said inside, "I'm in. This is how I will live with you." And for all those who participated in those events, that has not changed. We all know individually what we all are, and these people from all walks of life can and do live that consciously. This has changed each of us. It has given a practical expression to all of the books and lectures and seminars. We are able to take that experience and seed that awareness in every situation we move into.

Recognizing another as an aspect of our Self is a liberation for our Self, as well as the other. When we define someone, in our own minds, as a part of our Self, we free the actual person to be who they really are, because that is what we seek for Self. Internally, we have taken away the labels we have previously applied. As this becomes our new 'truth', we have allowed the other to also be liberated.

If we view another as 'enslaved' and we remove that label, we can then divine a larger service that other has been providing, not just for themselves, but for all of us. It will only be from this perspective that those for whom slavery is real, will experience then the liberation and freedom available for All. Because we will then understand on a profound, empathic level how All serve All.

Until I quit treading water in this society we currently share and let go of what kept me attached to the factors that determined my whereabouts and how I spent my time, I had not realized how human God, or the Universe, really is. There have been moments with the participants of the events I referred to, where this palpable human passion from everything for everything all around us became apparent. Why? Because it is our creation and because it truly is born out of Love, Love for Life, in all of its expression.


One thing we all have in common within this shared reality is the experience of time. What do we do with it? How do we 'spend' it? One can have profound, deep, personal clarity and insight and understanding in awakening to this basic reality of Oneness. But after the understanding and clarity have been integrated personally, what do we do 24/7/365 per year?

It seems clear we all begin to think about community at a certain point. We constantly self-evaluate on some level, and so we think about our new role within community with this newly found sense of ownership of the reality we as individuals experience. We think about it with a new sense of responsibility towards the whole. We think about it from the sense of love we have for one another as well as the planet.

Speaking for myself, what I notice in 'the community' that is talking about community, is the stickiness of the old paradigm. People write essays and dialogue with one another about their various individual ideas. They meet and they form groups to construct new sustainable living models.

Frustration sometimes follows.

What seems to happen - even for those within whom Oneness is the motivator, understanding and reality - is that the expression of these attempts utilizes a vocabulary that is still coming from the old paradigm, the dualistic world view. As a woman is unable to be a 'little bit' pregnant, so too will any experience of a shift in human consciousness not be born, lived and experienced with a foot still in the womb of the old paradigm.

On a personal level, to take that step into living my authenticity, living in my personal responsibility requires an inner determination and a constant vigilance within my own mind. I must live with mindfulness for conflicted language, both the inner language and the language one takes in from external sources. In doing so, I begin to see those areas in my own life that are not pure expressions of that inner experience of truth. I can connect the dots within my own experience to find out where I am still attached to fear-based and good-vs-evil dynamics. And I can then also much more easily see the conflict inherent to ideas born out of a compromise with the old paradigm.

To me, community really seems to define itself as our interaction with one another. I say that because from my experience, we become unbalanced, become myopic, perpetuate dualism, etc - in every instance that we label a thing, or an idea, or a perspective, or one another, in any way that limits the potential of that thing. Our labeling of the world as a means of description is exactly reflective of how we perceive it. If our perception has been dualistic and has now grown to be monistic, then we have to re-think how we label things. To say that there is a community where there are a bunch of buildings built close together is obviously a tad too simplistic. So too, is it unnecessarily reductive to say that 'community' is a group of like-minded people. It should be clear, if only from our personal relationships, that divergent perspectives provide us with contrast, depth and diversity of experience within the Experience. Therefore, like-mindedness, even when it comes to our unity with one another in this experience, is relative.

However, nothing is static. Even like-minded people experience uniqueness among one another. Everything is moving energetically, everything is blinking on and off and all that we as individuals experience is our personal interpretations of these wave patterns of energy moving about us and through us. Thus, in the physical reality, things change and shit happens.

Discussions about conscious community therefore must be cognizant of this basic physical fact. Awareness of it requires us to develop models that are not afraid of change, nor dependent on stability. In the old paradigm, the drive for stable never-ending growth comes from business based on debt-based economic entities. And so we have control freaks who hold back the tides of the universe with pinkies in the dikes of their fragile economic constructs, attempting to make fear-based economic ideologies laws of the universe. They are not.

We have collectively been observing the collapse of these structures for several years now. It is ongoing and there is little doubt that it will not stabilize. It seems we are giving ourselves fair warning that any new paradigm can have none of this that has been so demonstrably corrupt and of service, in the end, only to comparatively very few people.

My reason for sharing these thoughts is to point out some ways for us as individuals to discern what is new paradigm and what is old paradigm. No one else will determine this. The onus is on us, as individuals. Civic-mindedness begins in our own head. We change our communities as we change our inner realities.

When we are considering information from sources external to us, I feel we need to consider whether the language is fear-based, or even fear-tinged. ("follow the fear") If it feels energetically clear to you, one should then look at the money. If it is beyond a reasonable amount for you to be able to pay for access to that information, allow yourself to let it go. If it is a reasonable price and empowering in its message, but there is a lack of transparency about what the money is for, look around for other sources. If it truly is valid information that is love-based in its nature, somewhere, someone will make it available as a gesture of service-to-others either for free, or for an amount suitable for that purpose within that context. ("follow the money")

I have consistently found these guidelines about information on these matters to be consistently true.

Take inventory of everyone around you. Recognize what is as you do so. It is foolish to think that you can be surrounded by people locked in dualistic thinking and believe that you will be uninfluenced by them. Please note that I am not saying to leave them, I am not saying to run away from them or to isolate your Self. I say: note them and find at least a person or a book or a group that resonates with Oneness that you can reflect with and upon. Be wary - that is, be skeptical of the 'common sense' of the crowd, even if you are in a crowd of two... Live the truth as you experience it and let the energetic impact of your experience do what it does for all concerned. You do not have to name it, count it or qualify it. It is. You are. That justifies everything.

I would encourage all people to let go of the need to trust. To trust anyone is to hold them within a certain space that can, or will, only be limiting. Further, it will create an energetic dynamic that will tear down the box of your trust. If we are truly recognizing our Self in others, we will allow everyone their own process and that is the only thing that we as individuals can trust... The Process. The dynamic of the larger process is larger than any of us can imagine as it is literally about the Universe. No promises made by individuals or institutions will prevent this Process from moving as it will.

There is every reason to like our chances within the process. With greater awareness of what really is, the better we feel. It may be a Pavlovian Universe, but that is encouraging isn't it? The more we relax and enjoy the process our hearts are propelling us through, the more we encourage the expansiveness and spaciousness within the Universe for more potential for all. It becomes larger as our appreciation of it grows.

In that sense, I would like to express my gratitude for the internet. It enables the work of so many beautiful people to be witnessed and shared and learned from. evolver.net is a terrific web site. It is one among many social networking sites allowing an uncountable number of connections to be made.

I would also point you to the web site: www.consciousmedianetwork.com . Regina and Scott Meredith have produced a web site that has hundreds of hours of dialogue and written information from truly sincere, intelligent people with an astounding breadth of knowledge and experience. For free. As a service for all. This is tremendous and cannot be, nor is it, praised enough. It is a clean, simple, undemanding web site.

Through the Merediths' work, I have become aware of several people who have helped me in my thought process about community. Tom Greco is a man who has been working more than 30 years on concepts of economic harmony. His web site is: www.reinventingmoney.com . His work illustrates that there are actual working models of private community currencies and exchange systems. He has compiled and made available for all who visit his web site a huge amount of information and research.

Another person I first learned about through consciousmedianetwork.com was Richard Flyer. His web site is: www.itstimereno.org . He has worked for years on building conscious community concepts in the cities where he's lived. He works to express those principles espoused by Ghandi and Christ of love, integrity, courage, service and respect and has found practical ways for people within a community to begin to bring these virtues into the forefront of their daily lives. I have spoken with Richard at length a couple of times and he is working on a model of how one can do this within their own community to make available for everyone.

Still another beautiful soul interviewed by Regina Meredith is Sonia Barrett, who has a clarity of understanding about how our inner process builds our outer perceptions that is exceptional. Her web site is: http://www.spiritinform.com/ .

As another example of people striving to turn popular perception on its head, I offer this link: http://mises.org/daily/4008 , an essay on how writers can live without copyright protections.

A man who I consider a friend is Dimitri Halley, a Jungian psychologist on the island of Aruba. He and his wife have been producing videos for the last couple of years on exactly these themes of personal responsibility for outward manifestations. His youtube channel is: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=daniela1771#g/u

These are just a handful of examples of people working on all of the various aspects of living consciously, living in this experience we now share, pro-actively manifesting a shift in how the world is being perceived. This can be lived, is being lived, now. Not after the much talked about pole shift. Not after the disclosure of alien involvement on the Earth. Not after the return of Jesus with his army. Living and being in the clarity of Oneness Now.

There is no need to be confrontational with those who do not share this awareness. Nor is there any need to sneak around to have this awareness or live this experience. In Love, with a sense of service and clarity, one can manifest that New Paradigm in one's own life, regardless of circumstance and situation. Now.
It is one of the potentialities we all hold together.
It is up to each of us to decide to own it personally.

I appreciate your interest and tenacity in reading this.

Namaste
Steve Lockhart
eggonalimb.net

Interview links:
http://www.consciousmedianetwork.com/members/tgreco.htm
http://www.consciousmedianetwork.com/members/sbarrett.htm
http://www.consciousmedianetwork.com/members/rflyer.htm

[Grahame]

Thanks Steve. I appreciate many things about your post, not least of all, the amount of effort I know goes into something like that. In many ways that loving effort is the most important part of your post - the good stuff found within is a bonus.

As you know, you are expressing the same view I hold on these matters and yet every moment for me is a balance between oneness and separateness. I am often comforted by the knowledge of my oneness with those things that appear to be happening around me.
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"Problems cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created them" - Einstien