Category:Spirituality

Can we imagine an open inquiry into spiritual issues, where the experience of every peer is honoured ? That is the promise of 'peer to peer spirituality' and which creates a commons of knowledge and experience.

For more, see: Introduction to the P2P Foundation Wiki Material about Spirituality

Topical Quotes

“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])

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; Therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; Therefore we must be saved by love."

- Reinhold Niebuhr [2]

William Irwin Thompson: Transitions are Catastrophes

"The transition from one World to another is a catastrophe, in the sense of the catastrophe theory of René Thom. Indeed, a catastrophe is the making conscious of an Unconscious Polity; it is the feeling in Being of a domain that is unknown to thinking. Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. When rational knowing and political governance no longer serve to feel the actual life of a World, then consciousness becomes embodied in experience outside the world-picture but still within the invisible meta-domain. The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling. Catastrophes are discontinuous transitions in Culture- Nature through which knowing has an opening to Being. This moment of passing-together through a catastrophe, this occasion of com-passionate participation, presents an opportunity for a shift from karmic activity to Enlightenment. Thus the transition from one World-Structure to another is characterized by catastrophes in which the Unconscious Polities become visible. At such times there can be a rapid flip-over or reversal in which the unthinkable becomes possible.

No governing elite will allow us to think this transition from one World-Structure to another, but imagination and compassion will allow us to feel what we cannot understand. As "Nature" comes to its end in our scientific culture, the relationship between conscious and unconscious will change and the awareness of immanent mind in bacteria and of autopoesis in devices of Artificial Intelligence will give us a new appreciation of the animism of ancient world-picture. The "Man" of the historical set of Culture-Nature will come to his end in a new irrational world of angels and devils, elementals and cyborgs. In this science fiction landscape, this invisible meta-domain in which we already live, the end of Nature as unconscious karma makes of Enlightenment and Compassion a new political possibility."

(https://web.archive.org/web/20050907215906/http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC14/Thompson.htm)

• More quotes here

Topical P2P Writers

• Riane Eisler
• 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
• Recommended book: Revisioning Transpersonal Theory. A participatory vision of human spirituality. By Jorge Ferrer.

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.