Beloved Community Becoming
ICN Foundational Identities – Part 4
When we are considering our identity, how do we choose to define ourselves? What are the indicators that we decide to name and offer as the primary symbols that try to point toward who we are?
On a collective level, for groups and organizations, this can become even a little more complicated. What is the commonality that brings us all together? Sometimes it’s just a paycheck. Sometimes it’s a hobby or interest. For many religious and spiritual groups, it has so often been defined by a shared system of beliefs. At times, it can also be about shared practice and a way of life together.
So far, our first three foundational identities—Christian, Integral, and Mystic—have been descriptors of spiritual and philosophical traditions. They are orienting generalizations, the emanations of ideas and ways of being that can draw us together and come into a living and breathing community. This descriptor, community, is a foundational identity marker just as much as the others—maybe even more so, as it is the alive, collective organism that gives flesh to these concepts, theories, and practices. And then becomes something more.
On the one hand, identity markers serve as delineators to distinguish, to recognize ourselves as different from and set apart from others. In another way, they also help us come together in finding our people. To bring us into a place of commonality that can create the conditions for connection.
Too often community is seen more as a byproduct of our conceptual markers and mental orientations of what we believe or why we’re together “in the first place.” A secondary result of sharing in common process and/or practice—rather than a fundamental element of why we’re here and who we are. This is a shadow effect of individualism, that community is about being around others who like to do what I do. Think the way I think. Or are the way I am.
This self-referentialism is so deeply ingrained in our culture of consumerism and entertainment that we can totally miss one of the deepest gifts of deep community—that it can take us beyond ourselves. It invites us to really come into experiential participation in the spiritual reality of our oneness, of our deeper unified field. To live into the liberating and bonding truth of our interbeing.
I am
because
we are.
Personal Identity & Communal Interbeing
To be taken beyond ourselves, we need to hold ourselves with a certain degree of freedom, maybe even playfulness. If we’re too serious, too locked into our ideas and our rigid sense of who we are as we define ourselves individually (or collectively), we’ll just continue to bounce off one another when our edges confront—often with a little painful chipping off as a result.
In truth, our borders are not quite as firm as we often like to think. And sometimes, somewhere deep inside, we not only know this to be the case, but we long to experience it more fully. This is the heart and soul’s longing to re-mind us of our fundamental interconnection and enduring interbeing. We are not separate.
Our mental categories that split the field are often in place to protect us, acting as a survival reflex to assess threat and danger. Our gut instincts can also help us in this way. And we still need these faculties in our lives. We need them to help us discern and individuate, to step back and rely on healthy boundaries and barriers. Yet, it’s so easy for that fear to take over and completely run the show. And it’s an incomplete truth and way of living.
We need the shared understandings to be resonant enough to bring us into the same field, but also broad enough so that we can hold them loosely in the safe and loving context of the community. To not use them to sequester ourselves off and create further divisions whenever we encounter disagreement, conflict, and tension. To not retreat back into the story of separation.
A common error of modern society and especially in religion is the faulty belief that this could be avoided if we all simply believe the same thing, or if we were all educated well enough so as to know all that we need to know in order to ____. This thing that we put in the blank is nearly always something that we already believe and know and just want others to agree with. Self-referentialism again in the guise of communal growth and action: bringing the others to where I am.
Practicing Generative Community
Generative community is not about “being on the same page” but co-dwelling in the same heart of love.
It is entering the shared WeSpace of our interbeing and our collective becoming. To be open with one another for the possibility of emergence—the blossoming of something new coming through us together. Of new ways of being and loving transformation coming forth in the here and now.
We might even understand this as our participation in the resurrected body of Christ—alive and awakened in the resurrected collective form of divine incarnation in this day and age.
This happens most fully in generative community, integrated with the fully embodied interflow of our whole being: mind, heart, womb, and feet/body. Personally and collectively.
To do this we need to experience it in a place of safety, trust, and deep love.
Which is why we practice community.
This goes back to community not just being a byproduct of other shared activity, but a key element of who we are and what we do together. We are a loving community. A global community of dedicated mystical practitioners, which we become through more than just sharing spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation, but also through the spiritual practice of practicing community.
So how do we foster and seek to cultivate healthy community? How do we choose to engage in ways that are life-giving and lead us into more generative intimacy? How do we handle the stickiness, the stepping on of toes, the wounding? What do we do with resonance and dissonance? With busy life schedules and various other limitations?
I’ll have a whole series on practicing community after the next one from Paul, so we’ll directly be engaging those questions and more. But for the time being, here are some of the qualities that have emerged in our community now.
Qualities of an Integral Christian Mystical Community
Every healthy community needs compelling gathering energies and generative value. Community in and of itself, for itself, is not enough. In generative community, the ties that bind/bond us are not solely the mental agreements and commonalities of individual preference, but the experiential qualities that mark the field among us each time with gather. These are the deeper lived values and ways of being together that have a collective life and can be felt when we enter the field—which is not bound to particular individuals, leaders, or abstract ideals.
Here are some of those qualities commonly experienced in our community gatherings and groups.
A Deep Field of Love
When we come together, we are participating in a shared field of love. By “field,” we simply mean a common space, not defined or limited to a particular place or time, that has certain shared energetic qualities in the environment—felt and experienced by degrees of our conscious awareness.
The more we have opened our hearts and learned to flow into these sorts of fields, the more we will feel it. Many of us are used to coming together in the shared mental field, discerning ideas, agreements and disagreements, and commonality of thought. Often learning from one another, the mental field has its benefits but also its limitations.
In the field of love deep calls to deep. We learn to speak with the vernacular of the heart. We find among us a community that is present with one another in genuine care. With deep listening that doesn’t just hear the other, but feels with them. Participating in the mutual flow rather than the individual filter of self-absorption and evaluation from the place of separation.
Brought into the common space, unbound from the cage of individualism, we can be with one another in ways our soul longs for—with spiritual intimacy, authentic vulnerability, honest trust, and more.
Perhaps we are not used to being together with others in such a way. Non-sexual intimacy is often scarce in our culture. We have been hurt before, finding ourselves on the outside of belonging. We can have trouble being our most authentic selves with one another.
In the loving field, we can find the space to further become who we long to be—who we know we are. We can hold the tensions and oppositions within ourselves and one another through the process and into something more. In this way we can come into genuine transformation, which is never just a function of the mind learning, but the heart and body becoming. We get there together.
Integrative & Applied Spirituality
Our collective identities of Christian, Integral, and Mystic give us a shared language and context of experience in which to be with one another. These give us gravitational centers of ways of being that affect commonality and create the conditions for resonance and cohesion.
But they are not hard boundary markers that divide the field firmly or demand conformity. It is not by conceptual agreements that we find our connection, and therefore disagreements and variety of experience are not breaking points. And diversity of thought and expression, rather than strains on community built on uniformity, are gifts and invitations to further evolution and growth.
This is post-tribal community. Where folks are not ostracized because of differing beliefs and experiences. It all belongs in the field, following the collective flow and reality of the life of the larger collective organism. In this way, the healthy boundaries are not built by gate-keepers, but by the energy of integrating that which serves the life of the whole. That which feels dissonant or runs counter to the flow is welcomed for a time as invitation, with trust that we are all seeking to find our way and find our place.
It’s not perfect of course—there is always struggle in community—but in a more open field of integration we can be together with one another in the way of love that does not divide in the manner we have so often experienced before.
This is directly related to the personal empowerment and ownership that each of us brings to this integrated approach. We all take ownership for our place in the field, in the community. As part of the life of the whole. As such we have a harder time setting ourselves up against the institution, guru, or leadership.
We are integrated into the life of the community and the movement of who we are together. We don’t need to constantly look to a guru/teacher for direction. We don’t need a program handed to us in order to take action. We can be that which we seek, for we are all in it together. We can apply and be affecting in what we feel deeply and strongly about. We can step into it ourselves—but not alone. For generative community in this way gives us the opportunity to come together around the organic arisings where life is calling forth and springing up among us.
Companionship and Entanglement
We are in this together. We can walk together as long as our paths are following the same way, with freedom to come and go as spirit leads.
But we also become initiated into a way of deeper connection that means that we are never truly apart. The laws of entanglement do not allow for test drives or take-backs. When we come together in deep ways, we are always connected and a part of one another for eternity.
That can feel a little scary. I grew up pretty independent in many ways and am more introverted by nature. But the reality is that this is happening all the time already. The story of our separation is a fable in service to a false world. We can only go so far alone because we are never truly alone.
Our external interconnection is always affecting us in the world of systems and inter-dependent structures of living. Interiorly, our interbeing is constantly affecting and playing the harmony of a song that we don’t write or sing alone.
And so we might as well consciously choose who we most want to play with. Sharing in the concerts of our deepest longings and truest identities—which are not limited to only that which we encapsulate personally. For in our mutual indwelling, we are becoming much more than we can identify of ourselves individually. We are the music of the symphony.
We are invited to be taken beyond our individualism, which was never really real in the first place. We are opened up to the freedom of no longer being stuck and confined to our narrow preferences and limited personal experiences.
Don’t those just feel too small? Isn’t there something tiring in just staying in the algorithm of our limited mind and will?
The invitation to something more is found in what we can call the divine reality of the body of Christ. This is the original vision of the church that could be the living presence and energy of God in a collective life. An organism of love and generativity for the transformation of the world. The resurrection of Christ today. Christ in all of us.
Why We Gather
All of these qualities and more are not just descriptive aspects of what we’ve found by coming together but are also the aspirations of that which we want to still be even more.
They are present and still becoming.
And they become even more by our mutual participation and intentional giving among us. A community dedicated to the mystical practice of consciously evolving and participating in the work of God—the loving evolution of Christianity and the world. The becoming of heaven in earth. Embodied and enacted in our very bodies and being, personally and collectively.
To learn together and practice in these new ways of being together. There is no way we can learn them alone. We cannot become them individually. We deeply need the “We” to be all of that which we are and are becoming.
If this calls to you and you feel the potential of resonance. If your song is feeling the harmony of this beloved community, we invite you to join a WeSpace group to come more deeply into these realities through mystical practice and generative community.