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, but contemporary spirituality is often looked for and found outside any establishment.

In this category, we are dealing with spirituality from a peer-to-peer perspective, so we leave aside hierarchical institutions and values and narratives imposed from the top down.

Key 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 [1]

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.

Useful learning resources

Introductory

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

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

Deeper Study

• The Next Buddha Will Be A Collective: spiritual expression in the peer to peer era, by Michel Bauwens
• Relational Spirituality and other Heresies in New Age Transpersonalism by Gregg Lahood
• 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.