Enlightened Communcation in Denmark

EC 50

One mind with 50+ people

Enlightened Consciousness
or

The stuff of which postmodern nightmares are made of: Group think?

A Day Seminar in Denmark

I just led a day with 55 participants on intersubjective consciousness and the high point of the day had to be the discussion group which was the culmination of what we had come to from the whole day.

Here's my attempt to put into words the multidimensional nature of that extraordinary occasion. This is what I scribbled down after:

"What was striking right away in this discussion, was the attention and quality of listening. The listening was acute and the mind-bending impression was as if there were only several people instead of over 50. But simultaneously there was a general complete absence of tension and self consciousness that you might expect would be there with such focused attention.

We started speaking at first about the authentic self; though to be accurate, there was much more speaking from or as the authentic self, than about it. In other words it was stunningly real!

Going back to the listening: Really there was One listening. And it was to do with where people were listening from: not from the separate self sense but from the deepest part of our self, the authentic self.

People remarked with wonder at their feeling of dynamic and ecstatic urgency to go forward and simultaneously that they experienced deep deep ease and relaxation.

How can deep ease, rapt attention, and ecstatic urgency all exist together? And yet the actuality of our experience is that it is true. Here we've entered into the dimension of the authentic self and different rules hold here. Paradox is the name of the game here because paradox is natural when we're in the realm of manifest non-duality. It's just that our brains and language don't quite have the structure to be able to neatly and linearly express it. 

            People expressed how they were more deeply and autonomously themselves while they were also not separate. Again this impossible paradox that is the hallmark of enlightened communication, of communication at the level of the authentic self.

This is the heart of the matter: Oneness, non-separation, at the very same time as liberated individuality and creativity.

This is why I'm always so thrilled at the potential of this kind of relationship - because it's radically different and literally rewrites the rules of human society.

To the degree each person feels personally responsible for the evolution of consciousness itself (quite an autonomous stand to be sure!), is the degree that we will feel intimacy and oneness with others who also share this same context of the authentic self.

We talked of the intimacy we were sharing: closer than close, and yet most of us didn't know each other at all, and certainly didn't know each other's backgrounds. The intimacy of the authentic self is impersonal intimacy. But this is an intimacy which is much more deeply human than the personal intimacy which comes from knowing all about each others aspirations, hopes, fears, and history etc."

 A discussion like this didn't come out of the blue, of course, and the earlier part of the day was laying the groundwork to able this to happen seamlessly. (Easy to say in retrospect, as I never really know what's going to happen though I do my damndest to steer it always towards the direction of depth!). The main limitation on how many people can engage like this is in physically being able to hear each other; in this case the circle was pretty huge.