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abraham maslow
July 2009 
The collective Buddha inquiry, ctd...
yeshe
I’ve just spent a few hours indulging in reading the current edition of What Is Enlightenment Magazine. Of course I found some gems that feed into my current inquiry into collective intelligence and the evolution of the next stage of human consciousness.
In Everyday Advaita, Tom Huston, talks about two contrasting views of spirituality:
- the ascending path towards transcendence: the idea that we are emptiness, pure consciousness, that sees the body as shackles and the manifest world as a distraction to be overcome.
- the descending path towards embodiment, “learning to integrate our deepest realisations of transcendent Being with our ordinary everyday, fully human lives… by accepting ourselves, warts and all, exactly as we are… “humanity is not the flaw: the flaw is a teaching that forces us to live in shadows and carry secrets”.
Not satisfied by either of these approaches, Huston asks: What is authentic spirituality – or enlightenment – if not a personal commitment to a transcendent ideal? In his personal experience, which closely resonates with my own, it is “the innate, mysterious compulsion to rise up, to change, to grow, to mature, to develop, to evolve and to otherwise transform my oh-so-less-than-ideal human self”.
… “because whether we prefer traditional self-transcendence or postmodern self-acceptance, the resulting spiritual lifestyle is essentially the same: the human self remains fundamentally unaffected by spiritual awakening, either ignored as it is or embraced as it is, but never evolved from what it is into something radically new.”
Now I can hear many voices raised in protest at this – the ancient wisdom traditions contain all the truths, there is nothing new under the sun and we’re just kidding ourselves if we think we’re different from those who came before. I have that conversation again and again, and I must admit it bores me… AND it segways nicely into the conversation between Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen in the Guru and Pandit series, where Andrew evokes the utopian impulse, which he believes to be “part of the human experience at all levels, the minute we evolve beyond mere survival needs… and part of what’s driving humanity forward.
Ken’s take is that human beings have at least two components: one being absolute and the other relative… the utopian impulse comes from “sentient beings intuiting their absolute nature” (See the Atman Project for full details). Andrew responds with “there’s always going to be that kind of ecstatic reaching forward, reaching forth to manifest that utopian urge toward fullness, toward perfect relatedness, toward profound integral interrelatedness at all levels, which, when you’re awake, is simultaneously always already fulfilled and always just about to be”. He calls it enlightened duality.
Ah! That got my attention… those words get my innards whirring. We’re getting warmer here.
Ken: “Enlightened duality: even though you’re aware of the great perfection, you are still driven, not out of a lack but out of an overflowing”. And then he brings in Abraham Maslow: “When he was looking at the hierarchy of human needs, found that there were two different kinds of needs and there was a huge jump between them. The needs that go up from physiological needs to safety needs to belonging to self-esteem to the beginning of self-actualisation are all what he called D-needs, or Deficiency needs, because they are driven by people feeling that they lack something. But then the highest needs are those of self-actualisation and self-transcendence, and those needs are not driven by deficiency but by what he called B or Being values. They are driven out of a sense of fullness, not out of a sense of lack.”
Bingo!! Well isn’t this interesting? Instead of the unsatisfactory “ascending” versus “descending” conflict we started with, we can now see a different dynamic at work, in what Andrew calls “top-down” as opposed to “bottom-up” development. Bottom-up development is driven by deficiency needs, and top-down development comes when an individual has reached that point of overflowing.
So let’s take a closer look at the individual who has reached that point of overflowing. Andrew defines it in these terms: “at least fifty-one percent of whatever the self is must be abiding in that fullness, beyond ego”. The unenlightened seeker has died, and there is a different relationship to development. If you have crossed the 51% threshold, you have to act like it. “One can no longer behave like a hungry ghost – always seeking for fullness. The inherent fullness of one’s being has to be acted out in one’s personal conduct, and also in one’s relationships with other people.”
“One’s relationship to development would begin to express a certain kind of maturity, consistency and self-confidence… Because what I’m interested in is a unique kind of development that can happen between people, which can only occur when each and every one of the individuals involved has reached nothing less than that 51%”.
This is where Andrew’s approach – what Ken calls “intersubjective yoga” – starts to make so much sense to me as a description of the emergent phenomenon of individuated humans choosing to pool their consciousness in a collective. Because I don’t think it’s just happening in the EnlightenNext community. Although that’s perhaps where it’s being most closely documented…
And so, the holons in the Buddha collective will be not desperate seekers, but finders who are interested in higher development. Even more interestingly (and challenging to the all-levelling post-modern mind), “because they have transcended ego, at least to a significant degree, they are able to come together in a context of natural hierarchy, where the inherent hierarchical context of life at all levels is realised, and you admit and acknowledge the hierarchical differences that exist between individuals at different levels.”… (Pause while buttons are triggered across the planet and blood-pressure levels rise…).
“If we can come together in a context with other people where we can admit all this, see all this without being threatened, and have transcended our own egos to a significant degree, then a miraculous capacity for intersubjective creativity emerges… Then individuals come together not merely in a state of harmony or lack of conflict, which is the GREEN or pluralistic ideal of peace, but in a process of creative friction.”
Ahhhh. In my blog on Women Moving the Edge, I mentioned my frustration with the “shadow of feminine green”:
“I can’t believe how stifled I feel by the group’s norms. The monster political correctness in feminine guise. It’s all too nice, it’s all too respectful - paying lip-service to depth. And all the while, consensus prevents anyone from being authentic.”
THIS is what I have been looking for, intuiting and thirsting for. Having once tasted it, I find it addictive and am driven to investigate the conditions for replicating it. “The absence of conflict, in and of itself, is not higher wholeness: it’s death”.
Andrew, again: “Authentic friendship – where human beings are creative partners, lovers of life, God and spirit – requires individuals to be able to come together and conflict with each other in the most creative way possible. It’s not necessarily going to be peaceful, but it will be ecstatic.”
So what are the conditions? According to Andrew, it demands a “very highly developed capacity for autonomy and independence where you’re willing to embrace and dance and argue and fight in the most creative way with other people”. The very memory of my own experiences of this fills me with a fierce joy… For individuals who haven’t taken the leap beyond 51%, this creative friction wouldn’t be very appealing. But I agree with Andrew that it is the “definition of deep, spiritual, psychological and emotional health and vibrancy in a community or intersubjective context.”
It’s so exciting to me to be embarked upon this journey, to be riding this emergent wave, to be awake and alive and seeing these nascent collective buddhas leaping into being like a fleet of spaceships jumping in from hyperspace into some magical formation encircling our beloved planet. What’s still missing, in part, is our ability to see each other and intuit the meta-buddha that we all form together. I see a role there for the Edge of Emergence community – or whatever it metamorphoses into as it gains momentum. Provided that it makes the leap, as a community, to awareness of the vertical dimension of consciousness development and learns to work with that explicitly and competently.
We also need to learn to harvest and interweave our many-layered conversations as skilfully and evocatively as possible, making use of the best of what Web 2.0 and 3.0 have to offer. And once we have learned to do this, we have to teach and serve our fellows. The Art of Hosting and the Art of Harvesting are fields which deserve our sustained collective attention and reverent practice if the movement is to scale up and really evolve into something that is equal to the challenges we face.
Access: Public
Interesting journey we are embarking upon, isn't it Helen?
There's a few things here that I think I want to differentiate a bit further. So let's go immediately into it.
I like very much that you point out that this whole phenomenon is coming out of a sense of fullness.The We - that is the next Buddha - is certainly a phenomenon of fullness. It is a fullness that comes after we've tried everything else and failed.
In all the experiences I had so far in creating the circumstances in which the We - the circle being - could actually and palpably appear there were four steps taken until it manifested, and I will come back to this in another context in just a minute.
These are 1. make-believe community, 2. authenticity/chaos, 3. giving up, 4. silence, and then the We emerges - if we are so blessed.” So with these differentiations in mind I totally agree that the next Buddha comes out of a sense of fullness.
(This comment touch on the main issues here, but I feel I nevertheless had to mention it.
You say that according to Andrew “bottom-up development is driven by deficiency needs, and top-down development comes when an individual has reached that point of overflowing.” But that doesn't mesh very well with what you say in the beginning about ascending and descending … all it is, is the basic understanding of verticality (just 2 directions in 3D space) What, I ask, is the evolutionary aspect here?
In this view of fullness it is not something that naturally develops but it is somehow handed down from some imaginary top - in Andrews case some kind of transcendent sun. Here I would hope that Andrew and Ken would come to a different kind of differentiation…)
I like it very much when the rubber hits the road, and what Andrew says of those that have crossed the 51% threshold, “The inherent fullness of one’s being has to be acted out in one’s personal conduct, and also in one’s relationships with other people.” But he comes to a conclusion that once again has to differentiated a bit more; he says, he is interested in the ”unique kind of development that can happen between people, which can only occur when each and every one of the individuals involved has reached nothing less than that 51%”. From most of the instances that I have experienced in which the We actually became a reality - be it for some time only - I would say that the great majority of the people participating in the We's occurance had not yet crossed that threshold of 51%… On the other hand it is true that the We in my experience only spontaneously came into being - again just for awhile - when I was with people who did pass this threshold (and I'm not very happy with the idea of 51%, but I'll take it as a metaphor that serves here).
(Just a question in between my further comments, do you know of any place where Ken has described what ”intersubjective yoga” could look like in his eyes? I mean the actual practices? As you know I do have a few but I would be very much interested to hear of other practices.)
So now we come to a quote that indeed triggered my buttons, as you predicted - actually just one button and that one only slightly as this method becomes more clear every day. You say that the We's will not be comprised of “desperate seekers but finders interested in higher development.” So far, so good. But then again you echo either Ken or Andrew saying, that this is so, “because they have transcended ego, at least to a significant degree, they are able to come together in a context of natural hierarchy, where the inherent hierarchical context of life at all levels is realised, and you admit and acknowledge the hierarchical differences that exist between individuals at different levels.” And this is where it becomes fuzzy , and because of that one can read it all the wrong way - and by wrong I mean in the hierarchy of power away.
Firstly it is quite unclear by what is meant with the term “ego”; but I let that one go to simply ask, “What the heck is natural hierarchy? The hierarchy in the family with mama or daddy at the helm? Sure parents and children are on a different level of development. But this is an article for adult people by an adult person, so you cannot mean that, can you?
Is it the hierarchy of self-proclaimed enlightened beings over so-called unenlightened ones? Or is it the hierarchy we see in colony of big apes, because it too has various different levels of development? Smart and strong (and older) apes are usually higher in the patriarchal scheme - that goes for chimpanzees and gorillas, with bonobo's its matriarchy.
What is proclaimed here as a natural hierarchy is actually the hierarchy of arbitrary levels, cultural inventions. I very much admit and acknowledge hierarchies of all kinds, but the only hierarchy that I deem natural is one of openness of the heart,, compassionate love for all beings on what ever level I place them arbitrarily, and it is meshed with clear differentiation, thinking and respect.
So nothing against hierarchies it's just that these two top honchos need to learn to differentiate clearer ;-)
So I differ on the way how this can happen but it's clear that some ripeness must have been achieved by the person in their life so that in some kind of stable way the “miraculous capacity for intersubjective creativity emerges”. But I disagree strongly with the idea that “individuals come together not merely in a state of harmony or lack of conflict, which is the GREEN or pluralistic ideal of peace, but in a process of creative friction.” You connect this idea with what you experienced yourself, saying, ”It’s all too nice, it’s all too respectful - paying lip-service to depth. And all the while, consensus prevents anyone from being authentic.”
Things brings us back to the 4 (or 5) stages I mentioned in the beginning. The tool of respectful paying lip service to depth is really only happening in the first phase that I call “make-believe community”. Of course, women are expert in that so you might have hung out in that phase little longer than in a mi´xed group ;). But once the group sees it's doing this it should be passing to the second phase of authenticity, a phase that necessarily leads into chaos. Here there is a lot of friction, and it can be very creative, but still it is a long way from the authentic We.
So here again things are not being differentiated enough in my view. That in itself is not such a problem, the problem appears when the argument is used to look at Green derogatively - and maybe I'm jumping to conclusions but I smell a whiff of that here.
As for Andrew, he seems to love conflict and battle so no wonder that he says, “Authentic friendship – where human beings are creative partners, lovers of life, God and spirit – requires individuals to be able to come together and conflict with each other in the most creative way possible. It’s not necessarily going to be peaceful, but it will be ecstatic.” I do agree that we do need to find ways to conflict with each other in a creative way, and that being together is not necessarily without conflict but it definitely is always peaceful and always overflowing (well, maybe not always, that is such a big word, but I haven't experienced the We in any other way so far), and, yes, that is full of delight. And I also agree that true community will have found ways to conflict creativity. But that's not a characteristic but a consquence.
So I'm quite happy that we are dialoguing along these lines - and you do find me in conflict with some of the ideas of the top honchos. There is so many things that we are learning on this path of emergence, and I'm quite happy that the time is ripe for all of this.
Dear Yeshe & Mushin,
Interrupting this great dialog to say thank you! This peep is deeply enjoying the conversation….
Peace & Joy
PJ
Mushin, I can only echo Peggy - thanks for your great response. I'm totally with you on just about everything - only wishing to respond to your questions.
Thanks for your rigour in pulling me up on the ascending/descending piece. My sense of the top-down is that it's quite different from the ascending - there's nothing that's handed down from on high. So perhaps the term “top-down” is misleading. It is indeed better to talk about that fullness. Because my sense of it is the overflowing upwelling urge, which is not coming from anywhere 'up there' - but it also is not only coming from 'inside'. Instead it comes from the interplay between the inner readiness - itself emerging from an emptiness of self-concern - and an outer call, which isn't either from outside - at least not from outside the big self…
I, too, have experienced the circle being that went through Scott Pecks four stages of community building that you describe. And you're right - there was nothing 51% about it. But I have ALSO experienced very spontaneous community with people whom I sense as pretty evolved, and that doesn't go through phases in the same way. The chaos and the emptiness can still be there, as the circle being grapples with its circle task. But they are held in luminous consciousness, lightly and explicity by the group, in a way which has nothing to do with the precarious and hazardous stumbling of the other type of group.
And this is where the idea of natural hierarchy makes sense to me. I don't take it from someone else that they are more evolved than me. And I would certainly rather choke than thrust my own evolution upon someone else… But I am quite prepared to recognise that someone else is more evolved than I am. A natural hierarchy, for me, is one that is acknowledge by peers recognising those who can teach and guide them. Anything else is a power hierarchy. As you say. But these relations are two-way and it's possible for one party to experience it as a power hierarchy while another doesn't.
I love your distinctions about green, conflict, etc. It's good to have you thinking with me on all of this.
My own take on getting beyond dualism & reality & egocentricity paints the picture of ego according to michael - but refers in brief to the mechanism by which ALL of the issues of which Helen & Mushin have spoken, can be addressed & solutions established innovation IS our ONLY edge - perhaps the TIME has arrived for me to reveal my plans which will most certainly address the concept of, and cater for a hierarchy of collective buddhas ?
a Merchants of LOVE not Merchants of DEATH hierarchy of collectives, needless to say, a collective of individuals united in a common purpose, having had their own experience of the mountains.
The singularity is NEAR - indeed
I am intrigued to say the least. I am greatful for the discourse regarding the relation between ascending/descendig and the top-down/bottom-up. I agree with Helen in that the name is misleading for top-down. It should be something more like “upper pool”. Because if the We is not passing down to less-developed, and We are weaving together in that elevelated or overflowing state of being, then we are swirling and swimming about , welcoming others, and testing the waters.
Helen, I really like your description of natural hierarchy and that you point out that as it is two sided, any relationship can be percieved differrntly by each partner. At first I agreed with Mushin in his exploration of natural hierarchy; often we think of 'natural' we are immediately linked to topics and behaviors in nature that we are familiar with from several past experiences and prior knowledge of the world around us -Natural means animalistic or traditional. I am glad that you (Helen) clarified your menaing behind the term in your sense.
That is apparantly another thing We need to be careful of….I am seeing it throughout this blog and the continued comments. from Helen's original blog and commentary on original sources from “tops” to our conversation here and the frustrations with these sources and their expressions, as well as our own;
As we evolve and create/be creative (in all senses of the word) we must be sensative of words. We apparantly must evolve the language and create/be creative with word choice, connotation, dennotation, etc. (This is very exciting to me as a LOVER of language, as I see in Helen's case as well and probably many others.) We is having to define and re-define much of our language to one another yes, in order to be clear in our explanations and dialogues, but also in our interchages with 'others'/less developed. If participants in the We are consciously or unconsciously linking termonology to past experience and prior knowledge then we can garauntee that people wihtout clarity of the overall concept will be increasingly frustrated by reference to new ideas using old language with seemingly conflicting connotations. no?
This is all exceedingly exciting to me at this stage in my life. After my intrusion into your circle yesterday, I felt overflowing, I had an urge and sense derived from fullness. Lately I have had that more and more and I believe I am breaching into the next level of my existence and actualization. I do not dare say I am close to those of you, or to many in this community, but I am working and learning and practicing (this is the part where I recognize the hierarchy of which Helen speaks; I see it is not a power hierarchy becasue I don't feel less in value in relation to you/the We, I merely feel less developed than I know I can/will be). I feel at home here; at rest and yet with a drive to move on, continue and grow; the enlightened duality mentioned above. I absorb and reflect MUCH of this blog and commentary, it speaks to my core today and I feel blessed.
Lynn, you are a delight - and I cannot agree with your verb “intrusion”! For starters, this is a public space, and explicitly invites all who feel called by the conversation. You are most welcome and well come!
About the language problem, I would like to offer a quote from a paper by Susanne Cook-Greuter called Ego development: the nine levels of increasing embrace. I highly recommend the whole article, but I want to focus here on one specific feature. She is describing one of the higher stages: “construct-aware stage 5/6”, also called the Alchemist. One of the preoccupations at this stage is “intrinsic problems of language and meaning making”.
She writes: “When people see through the filter of the symbolic construction and mapping of reality, their disposition towards the language habit can change profoundly. In general, construct-aware people try to remain aware of the pseudo-reality created by words. They realise that the pursuit of objective self-identification and rational, objective explanations of the universe are futile - artifacts of our need to make permanent and substantive that which is in flux and immaterial. To reiterate a crucial poiont, the language habit works to support the ego's supremacy whenever we make meaning through representations, regardless of the specific tongue, power base, or cultural or personal context. At the same time, construct-aware adults appreciate the vital function language plays in human affairs, in social interaction and development.”
So really, in my experience, we have to hold this whole language thing lightly - there are no right terms. We just need to understand that we are on the shifting sands of human meaning-making and representation and dance with our own shifting understandings of each other's meanings.
Thank you for the insight and the article, I will take you up on the offer to read it.
I linked to this through Mushins blog and loved the title ” a hierarchy of collective Buddhas”
Instantly I heard the word … “lowerarchy” and saw this line of people in robes bowing in servitude to next, each seeking to be lower than the next, each more gentle, more meek, more free from attachment of being than the next.
Of course the result is instant utopia.
Being sheep like in our tendencies, we follow one anothers actions more than their words, and so being all alike the leaders of the collective Buddha's way are merely followers of their hearts truest and purest of desires … to be of service to God.
:-)
The construction of language is always fascinating in itself. I long thought (in English of course, it is my native tongue, strangely enough…) that language does influence-shape thought-perception to such a degree as not to be insingnificant. These blog entries by Helen and Mushin are in themselves written in what I would consider an ecstatic tongue. Michael as always (to plaintive little me) to be as wisely oblique as always, but what do I know? I can only glance through quickly….Have to go work now! Love All, Johann