Category:Spirituality

The spirit is often contrasted with the mind and the body, so here we are dealing with questions that go beyond mere survival and sanity, and include the meanings and purposes of life, human values and perhaps religion. Religious movements, organisations and traditions differ greatly in the extent of how they fit in with the Commons and Peer-to-Peer philosophy and practice, and even within established spiritual traditions there are often leads and pointers towards a peer-to-peer approach. However, contemporary spirituality is often looked for and found outside organisational structures.

Topical Quote

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (quoted e.g. in [1])

Topical P2P Writers

• Charles Eisenstein
• John Heron
• Jorge Ferrer

Key Concepts of This Category

Participatory Spirituality means both that spirituality is being thought of not simply in terms of objective reality, but also subjective and inter-subjective; and that it is not mediated through a hierarchy. It has three basic principles:

1. Equipotentiality: everyone can potentially be an equal player in spiritual matters;
2. Equiplurality: different spiritual approaches can be equally holistic and liberating;
3. Equiprimacy: no human spiritual attribute is superior or morally more evolved than any other.

The idea of Collective Presencing, while not being explicitly spiritual, is about what happens when people come together related through the 'heart' or the 'source' of being. The peer-to-peer practice of being together in a circle (both in dialogue and in silence) enables people to relate more readily at a spiritual level. People are able to get beyond the individual, purely self-interested rational 'mind', or ego, and turn their attention to 'higher' things. These spiritually related ideas, from outside spiritual traditions, institutions or established thinking, are also to be found in Theory U from Otto Scharmer.

Concepts such as the Quaker ones of 'inner light' and "answering that of God in every one" are also very much in tune with a P2P approach to spirituality.

Useful learning resources

Introductory

• P2P Interpretation of Soul as Intersubjective Reality and Spirit as Interobjective Reality by Joe Corbett, 2014
• Collective Spiritual Leadership, from the writing of Charles Eisenstein, 2011

• John Heron on the concept and history of relational spirituality (John Heron, 2006)

Deeper Study

• The Next Buddha Will Be A Collective: spiritual expression in the peer to peer era, by Michel Bauwens, 2007
• Relational Spirituality and other Heresies in New Age Transpersonalism by Gregg Lahood, 2010
• Introduction to the P2P Foundation Wiki Material about Spirituality compiled by Michel Bauwens

Related Categories

• Our Category: Relational is broader, dealing with all peer-to-peer relations, not just on a spiritual plane.
• Our Category: Participation is related through Participatory Spirituality
• Much religion is rooted in tradition, so Category: Neotraditional overlaps with traditional approaches to spirituality.