My answer is yes. Spirituality consists of socially-constructed worldviews that may no longer be appropriate to the time and space in which we live. In this context, newly emerging spiritual viewpoints and practices can be seen as necessary ‘upgrades of consciousness’ that can help us deal with new social and cultural complexities. The implications are profound.

Spirituality and religion always bear the hallmark of the social structures in which they were born and become embedded. Emerging religions often represent a partial transformation of these social structures because they represent new forms of consciousness, but they can never become hegemonic if they are not rooted in, and accepted by, the mainstream social logic.

For example, it’s not difficult to see that the Catholic Church and Buddhist Sangha have strong feudal elements in their organisational structures and ideas; or that Protestant churches are strongly linked to emerging capitalist and/or democratic forms; or that what has been called “New Age spirituality” is often geared towards a marketplace of commodified spiritual experiences that are available for sale. There is little doubt that the Catholic Church and the Buddhist Sangha would not have grown as they did had they not accepted the Roman political order and slavery respectively.

Therefore, it’s logical to expect that the emergence of peer production as a new model of value creation and distribution should also lead to new forms of spiritual organization and experience.

Peer production or ‘p2p’ is defined as any process that allows for open input, participatory processing, and where the output is universally available as a commons to all. This definition includes a number of elements that might also apply to peer to peer spirituality.

First, the spiritual community needs to be open to everyone who accepts its basic rules and injunctions. Second, there must be no pre-defined hierarchies capable of imposing centralized roadmaps or beliefs. And third, spiritual knowledge cannot be copyrighted or privatised, as, for example, occurs in Scientology.

The key positive ethical value of a peer to peer spirituality – and what distinguishes it from all older forms – is rooted in what has been called “equipotentiality:” the capacity of every human being to develop their own qualities, which are all necessary as contributions to common projects. We all have the capacity to develop different skills which are complementary to each other.

Equipotentiality is the necessary antidote to the ranking methodologies that infect authoritarian and hierarchical spiritual forms. According to the Spanish transpersonal psychologist Jorge Ferrer, the “comparing mind” is an essential underpinning of hierarchy, constantly engaged in ranking individuals as higher or lower to each other.

By contrast, “An integrative and embodied spirituality,” says Ferrer, “would effectively undermine the current model of human relations based on comparison, which easily leads to competition, rivalry, envy, jealousy, conflict, and hatred. When individuals develop in harmony with their most genuine vital potentials, human relationships characterized by mutual exchange and enrichment would naturally emerge because people would not need to project their own needs and lacks onto others. More specifically, the turning off of the comparing mind would dismantle the prevalent hierarchical mode of social interaction—paradoxically so extended in spiritual circles—in which people automatically look upon others as being either superior or inferior, as a whole or in some privileged respect.”

Instead, each and every individual should be considered as a set of many different attributes, strengths and weaknesses, and in each of them they can be worse or better than others. The key is to build a social system that allows every individual to contribute their best skills and qualities to a common project, and to be recognized for it.

This is exactly what happens in peer production, and the same would be true for p2p spiritual projects. What is important here is not to see spiritual achievements like ‘enlightenment’ as transcendent qualities that trump all others and infer an unchallengeable authority on one person, but rather as particular skills that deserve respect, just as we respect great musicians or artists without giving them any special power.

That means no more gurus, just skillful teachers with a particular job to do. Such teachers are technical facilitators – nothing more and nothing less. They are equipotential peers who serve a specific function.

Of necessity, the methodology of spiritual inquiry in this approach is radically different. The “cooperative spiritual inquiry groups” developed by John Heron are a good example of this methodology in practice. In these groups, the spiritual search starts by collectively accepting certain experiments and injunctions in order to facilitate the emergence of spiritual experience, but there is no pre-ordained path.

For example, an experienced Zen teacher might be invited to lead a meditation exercise, but all the participating individuals would share their experiences with others in the group in order to enhance mutual understanding and learning. Unlike the spiritual practices of hierarchical groups, there is no a priori validation of certain experiences, nor condemnation of others. Every experience is honoured, and forms part of the collective meaning-making experience.

In the past, spiritual seekers faced a choice between traditional religious structures whose horizontal or communal aspects were usually embedded in hierarchies; and more individualist New Age versions which were often quite narcissistic – based on the acquisition of spiritual experience (often in exchange for money) and only weakly rooted in horizontal relationships. By contrast, a p2p spirituality would honour community and co-production above all else.

All this suggests a new approach to spirituality which I call ‘contributory.’ This approach considers each spiritual tradition as a set of injunctions within a specific social framework that’s influenced by epoch-specific values such as patriarchy and doctrines of exclusive truth. At the same time, each tradition also contains a body of psycho-spiritual practices which disclose particular truths about our relationship with the universe. Discovering these spiritual truths requires at least a partial exposure to these practices, but it also requires ‘inter-subjective’ feedback from other people, so it’s a quest that cannot be undertaken alone. It has to be shared with others on the same path.

In this approach, tradition is not rejected but critically experienced and evaluated. The contributory spiritual practitioner can hold themselves beholden to a particular tradition, but need not feel confined to it. He or she can create spiritual inquiry circles that approach different traditions with an open mind, experience them individually and collectively, and exchange experiences with others.

Through these circles, a new collective body of spiritual experience can be continuously co-created by inquiring spiritual communities and individuals. By adding p2p governance and p2p property relations to the peer production of spirituality, we can also create pre-figurative practices that can help to construct a different future. Like the Catholic monks who created a new Christian subjectivity that would become the root of the newly emerging Christian civilization, peer to peer spiritual practitioners are co-creating an emerging p2p-based, commons-oriented society.

The outcome of this process will be a co-generated reality that is unpredictable, but one thing is sure: it will be an open, participatory approach that leads to a commons of spiritual knowledge from which all humanity can draw.

Originally published in Open Democracy

Photo by Lawrie83

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Curiously, this follows a similar principle to life itself. As we have discussed in past essays, life often defies entropy by coherence at the quantum level. This principle of coherence is likely to be the scientific basis what we call love. So long as it remains, life can expand and become more lively. When it evaporates, the structure rigidifies and becomes stale and ultimately dies.

Religions, even if many of them have started as expositions of this central principle, are equally subject to this same process. Absent the beating heart of their own poetic principles they become mere collections of laws and dogma.

Many of the great myths of humanity started with myths of colliding masculine and feminine beings. For example, masculine sky god pierces a feminine dragon and worlds are born. Whether or not the gendering carries over to physical forms, there is both an inherent violence and, in short, reconciliation that happens in these epic exchanges.

Love songs are a staple of many religious traditions, from David to Rumi to Halevi to Rilke and it often bridges, as it were, the carnal and physical, with divine and transcendent. The cadence of the song might even be described as a quantum principle, that which brings us all together.

Martin Buber discusses something similar in his concept of the I and Thou. At moments, our separation is a useful tool for interacting with our physical reality. At others, our merger takes us back to what might be justly described as the meta-principle for coherence of all physicality which defies entropy.

The dragon herself is entropic and yet, when the sky god descends, worlds are born. Perhaps we find him on his knees in a Cathedral. Perhaps we find him on the peak of a summit. Perhaps we find him in a manger in a forgotten corner of the empire. What matters most, if we value love, is that we find him.

Photo by Julio Ignacio Olivares Soto

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Information is Transforming Religious Institutions: The growth of information and communication technologies will disrupt the historic social structure of religions as self-contained communities.

A brilliant quote from Shaun Bartone, engaged buddhist activist, taking the evolution of Buddhism as an example:

“All the forms of Buddhism that have ever been put into written form (or electronic media) are now simultaneously available to everyone in the world who can read and has a connection to the internet. There are no more boundaries between forms of Buddhism, which were formerly divided and contained by historic period, sect, culture, language, etc. You are free to learn any kind of Buddhist dharma or practice you can lay eyes on. The historical sangha, which was an enclosed society based on “secret” teachings and practices, is gone. There are no secrets anymore. Anyone can learn any kind of Buddhism, anywhere, any time. The Buddhisms we practice now are forms of a global Buddhism that is growing, spreading and intensifying: it is not scarce, it is ubiquitous.”

Shaun then continues his reflections and believes that Buddhism, not as a religion but as a ethical system, is well poised for a role of ‘no religion’:

“As Karatani said, Form D: the Supra-Reciprocal exchange, is based on a moral economy of the communal sharing exchange. Communal sharing economies were instituted at the founding of universal religions. Karatani noted that Buddhism is one of the universal religions that at its founding instituted a communal sharing economy.

Karatani said that Form D: what I call Supra-Reciprocity, will be based on the social structure of universal religions, like Buddhism. Why? Because Buddhism, as a religion of ethics, creates trust, and trust enables sharing. I will share my information, my goods, my home with you because I trust you, because you demonstrate moral integrity.

* Buddhism as a Meta-religion.

Buddhism excels as a medium of sharing exchange because Buddhism is empty. Buddhism is not a typical religion that is tied to particular forms: rituals, gods and beliefs. Buddhism is a meta-religion, a metaphysics that tells you how to understand all religious phenomena, belief systems and ethical systems. As such, Buddhism is a very powerful medium for the information processing and trust-building that takes place within a sharing exchange.

Buddhism is not concerned with believing in a certain God or gods, with life after death or other supernatural esoterica. Rather, it is concerned with pragmatic ethics, with karma, cause and effect, and pratityasamutpada, interdependence. It is a religion of morality, ethics and integrity. As such it is an excellent vehicle for creating a world-wide system of trust that facilitates the sharing exchange. It tells you how to conduct a sharing exchange in a way that builds trust and reciprocity, and how to evaluate the trustworthiness of a sharing exchange.

The demonstration, through the practice of Buddhism, that one is able to overcome greed, hatred and delusion, envy, fear, craving, addiction and selfishness, and a host of other psychological and moral weaknesses, is an excellent medium for generating trust that facilitates sharing and reciprocity. A religion that places the highest value on altruism, compassion, generosity and intention to benefit all others is one that generates trust and facilitates the sharing exchange.

The form of Buddhism that will create this kind of world-wide medium of exchange will not be Buddhist religions per se, but Buddhist ethics and principles that are shared by anyone, regardless of their culture or sect.

Principles such as interdependence, universal compassion, karma, generosity, altruism, non-violence, and the practice of the Five Precepts (not killing, not stealing, not lying, not engaging in sexual misconduct [i.e. not taking advantage of someone’s trust], no intoxication) will serve as an excellent moral medium of exchange.

Mindfulness is currently seen as the form of Buddhism that will integrate with secular culture and make us all ‘cultural buddhists.’ But I see Buddhist metaphysics, ethics and interdependence as the forms of Buddhism that will help create the global sharing exchange.

It is the growth of networked information that will disrupt the current system of Capital-State-Nation and generate in its place the new social structures of the sharing exchange, the Supra-Reciprocity economy. And trust will become the moral medium of exchange of the sharing exchange.”

Photo by murdelta

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