In this interview, Claire Milne, Inner Transition Coordinator for the Transition Network, discusses the addictive qualities of digital technologies, how we can make peace with them in our own lives, and how to repurpose these technologies for the transition to a more just, caring and ecological future.

On 20th November, Claire will join Gaia Trustee Philippe Sibaud at 42 Acres Shoreditch in London to launch Gaia’s new report Wh@t on Earth: How digital technologies are severing our relationship from ourselves, each other and our living planet. Book now!

Tell us about  your role at the Transition Network?

The Transition movement is about celebrating the wealth of our communities; it is a community-led global initiative to achieve spiritual growth and ecological, social and political change. I am both the Inner Transition Coordinator and I hold a role called Nurturing Collaboration. My roles are basically around the inner dimension of Transition and designing for collaborative culture.

Your work is in large part collaborative and reaching out to external organisations. Is there a place for digital technology in your work in Inner Transition?

I feel like although it [digital technology] plays a role in eroding deeper relationships I also feel like it’s playing, in some respects, very positive roles in connecting people at levels of scale that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible. So being able to collaborate beyond the local level – at the regional, national and international levels – is very helpful.

Like with anything, if we are able to be in full choice we can have a healthy relationship with digital technology and it can play a healthy role in our life. Then it starts to get more complicated because, you could equally say that hard-core Class A drugs are not wrong, because at the end of the day it’s about our relationship with them. But what we know about Class A drugs or even technology is that the way they interact with our neurobiology [has] the potential to be hurtful at the physiological and psychological level. Then it becomes more complicated because what we’re being asked to do is recover from addiction.

What part does technology play in the Transition Network’s ideal envisioned future?

I find it really helpful to ask the question: ‘is the world that I’m longing for and that my life is dedicated to in part creating screen based?’ The answer is really clearly no.

But another a part of me recognises that at the stage that we’re at, there is a need for some degree of that relationship with digital technology to enable that scale of change that is required in order to bring about transformation. And at the same time to have the depth of psychological and spiritual transformation that’s needed for us as a species, to survive, there is equal need for us to have times in our lives that are free from digital technology.

That comes back to the reality that technology has this addictive quality and therefore the creative tension that we’re all being asked to navigate at this point in history is how can we relate something that is so crucial to the transformation of our world in a way that doesn’t fall into encouraging that addiction.

And the degree to which we’re addicted to technology is seriously high, and plays out to the identity politics that were already there. The degree to which we are addicted and to what we are addicted to is correlated to the ideas we hold about what will make us lovable and feel like we belong and feel like we’re good enough. Technology just completely feeds into that, and that’s why at a psychological level it’s addictive.

In identity politics at the moment, there are certain aspects like the ‘work ethic’ that plays a big role in burn out. This core belief within us, seen as the capitalist protestant belief, that for us to be good enough – for us to be accepted by the tribe, for us to be loved – we need to be productive and we need to be good at stuff. It’s very clear that technology feeds that. It feeds this idea that we can be superhuman, we can get even more done, we can work 24/7. Social media feeds into identity politics, around what we look like and celebrity status and all the phenomena around getting likes. This is all about that addiction to looking good that feeds into these identity politics.

And I say this with compassion because it’s very easy to slip into a sort of persecutory tone, but the reality is that these are deep wounds and they’re painful and we develop behavioural strategies to protect us from feeling the wounding of believing we’re not lovable and don’t belong. These behavioural strategies have been really amplified and codified by technology.

We are at a tipping point in terms of the ecological damage that humans are causing to our living planet. We have so much knowledge about our impacts, but are arguably more disconnected from Earth than ever. Do you think digital tech is playing a role in that? Can we revive that important connection with the Earth in time before our crises totally overwhelm us?

On a good day I’ll feel like that’s possible and on a bad day I think that that’s just an absolute joke. And I don’t think anyone has the answer.

It comes back to that question: is the life I’m longing for screen-based? And I realise that’s not answering your question. I think that maybe what is important is being able to sit with the not knowing. Too much is unknown to know whether that depth of inner change is possible.

Because we cannot control what is happening, we can make a difference and make interventions. So whatever happens, we need to learn how to navigate challenging, precarious situations in the physical world. So the greatest privilege, and I think human right, is access to support around inner resilience: education around emotional intelligence, and inner resilience.

If we can be in choice around how we respond to things and in choice around how we respond to addictive substances like technology, then we have freedom. For me, the inner dimension of change and the inner dimension of transition are all about liberation from the ego and the superego, and the destruction of patriarchy and capitalism.

So ultimately, the future of the Earth and our interdependence with the other-than-human world is dependent on us liberating our egos from patriarchy and the conditions that then leads to the destruction of the Earth and other beings, because it is leading us to this state of disconnection, disillusionment and separation.

Do you see a correlation between technology and patriarchy?

I think it’s really important to look at the role that our relationship with technology is playing in coping with trauma. Because I think for a lot of people, connecting via technology enables us not to have to feel that trauma.

Connecting through technology really colludes with that dissociated state that comes with trauma. If we’re not in our bodies and in our hearts, then we can’t meet other beings from that heart-felt, emotional place, we’re just two heads meeting.

That dissociated state is what is very characteristic of a lot of society because there’s this sort of low-level trauma that’s just across the board, and I think that technology really speaks to that. A lot of the population are sort of drawn to connecting via technology because it protects us from feeling the pain and limitations around relationships.

Is there any practice that you employ to feel that reconnection with the Earth?

Well, an interesting one for me is the sit spot. And I work with the sit spot in two ways. There’s the kind of well-known sit spot where you go out and you find your spot in nature and take your attention 50% with yourself and 50% with your peripheral vision, which as a regular practice just allows this deepening of connection to the other-than-human world.

But the tune-up on that would be the inner sit spot. So bound out into the world to find your sit spot, and then practice the inner sit spot, whereby you go in to your inner world. It could take the form of a body scan or all sorts of mindfulness practices, but there’s something really beautiful about the combination of that classic sit spot out in the world and then combining that with an inner sit spot to make sure you are in connection with yourself as well.

Join Claire Milne, Philippe Sibaud and Gaia to launch the Wh@t on Earth Report and delve deeper into these reflections on 20th November, at 42 Acres Shoreditch, London.

Photo by docoverachiever

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AL: Firstly, I want to express my deep gratitude for Tamera, for the pioneering research you are doing here, and for doing this work for so long, in the face of a slow-moving, defensive culture. This is my third time here and every time I’m back, I feel more immersed in the field that you’ve co-created. There are two related questions that I want to start with: (1) how do we expand this field of healing and solidarity, both vertically and horizontally (2) and what do you think needs to happen globally in order for these ideas to become widely accepted?

Dieter Duhm during an interview.

DD: Thank you for being here. What has to be done to spread the ideas for an intact Earth are two things: first, the proper utilization of our global information system – the Internet and other media – for spreading basic information in service of human liberation from the existing systems of political power. That is one global track we need to establish everywhere, in a language that can be understood everywhere. At the same time, there is another level where certain groups on Earth transform their inner system of life, where the inner issues of sex, love, partnership, community, authority, power are being solved. These are groups that find this place of truth within themselves and between each other, where all those interpersonal struggles are being worked on. We need both, the two levels – the new groups for this inner anchor and a global information field for the anchor in the world.

AL: Is it possible that this can happen in the next twenty years? Are you hopeful?

DD: I only know that this is absolutely necessary. I personally am hopeful but I realize how long this kind of change takes. Building the global field for the new information has so far always failed due to the conflicts within the groups. I have for many years been active in the Marxist movement, in the German student movement. I realized we can never establish the Marxist struggle against the imperialist economy so long as people in the movement fight each other. It’s been the same for fifty years.

Sculpture shows the sign for Tamera and the Healing Biotopes Plan at the shore of Tamera’s big lake.

I believe that we, as humanity, are at a place in our evolution where the shift can happen really quickly. We are in the midst of a transformational process that is accelerating exponentially. Many people are already experiencing this transformation. We are reaching the point where we can start to communicate about this and share wisdom among these new nodal points of change. In that sense, I am hopeful.

AL: Yes, hope seems to be the only path. Despair is a luxury for the privileged. There’s the old Buckminster Fuller line: we have a choice between utopia or oblivion. Do you think our option set is this binary?

DD: Buckminster Fuller was totally right in this place. Either we come to utopia or we will perish. There is no third way. A large part of our intellectual culture tries to find a third path, like the Social Democratic parties. They neither want concrete utopia nor to perish, but there is no other way. We are globally at the place of total decision. Humanity is unequivocally at this decision-making point.

AL: In some ways, the reformists and the liberals are more the problem than the Rightwing reactionaries. I’m sure you’re familiar with Oscar Wilde’s line from The Soul of Man Under Socialism where he said that the worst slave owners were the ones who treated their slaves well because they actually removed their conditions for emancipation.

DD: Intelligent, violent rule uses sugar, and only afterwards the whip. First, they feed you sugar so you will obey; however, if you don’t obey, you will be eliminated. In that regard, the statement is true but only partially so. I am still glad that slaves aren’t treated as brutally. Sometimes I’m happy that there is still a liberal system in Germany. It’s difficult to accept, but in some ways, those are the buffers that still save us from the worst at the moment. It doesn’t matter how hypocritical they are. This is still a buffer for the existing society so that not everything falls into catastrophe right away.

AL: What were the key moments that allowed you to arrive at your personal philosophy? How did you become free – intellectually, spiritually, etc.?

DD: My childhood was difficult. After the Second World War, my family had to flee from Berlin to Southern Germany, and when we got there, near Lake Constance, the parents told their children, “Drive out those refugee children.” The parents had nothing to eat and the neighbors vented their anger against us. And the neighbor’s children persecuted us. They treated us in an incredibly terrible way. They undressed us and threw us into the nettles and put tar on us. They tied us to a pole and threw shit at us, and such things. There wasn’t the possibility for a refugee child to get out of this situation. And at the same time, I kept going back to these strawberries, and the flowers in the fields. And the little Viola flowers at the side of the cereal fields. This was my home, in Nature, and this is where I encountered God. And through these experiences I knew, in addition to the cruelty of this world, there is healing, there is this higher power, and I followed it.

I always wanted to go back to Nature, to the places where there were no people so I could find this connection with God again. Until God told me, “Now you need to go to the people”. And so, I learned to do that too.

AL: This connection between struggle and liberation and politics and spirituality, how do you see this playing out in the global political field? What needs to happen?

DD: We need to enter into the universal field of healing, of life, in which all living beings are interconnected. We call this field the “sacred matrix.” We need to know that. We need to know that, for example, the peace community of San José de Apartadó [based in Colombia], are connected with this healing field. And then we need a group of people here that comes together in that knowledge and sends them a message. A message that reminds the people over there, telling them, “You are part of this healing field.”

Healing also consists of connecting with this healing field itself. That is the miracle of Life. What we need to do is to globalize the miracle of Life. Yes, we need to globalize the miracle of life. The original power field of Life has to be opened to the whole planet. It is of course there anyway, but we need to connect with it consciously. We need to activate it by manifesting it in real communities. That’s a political task of a new kind. If a small but critical mass does this, then the global healing field will be activated. It’s very simple and very possible, and of course, we have no other choice but to make this happen.

AL: In some ways, this is the message for the ones who want to listen, but what would you say to the power elites, the one percenters?

DD:  We don’t need to tell them anything special. We want to create a global morphogenetic field based on the sacred matrix that’s capable of overcoming the existing system. The other thing is – the members of the “one percent” are also just humans. Some of them will realize early enough that it’s good to change sides and support the new system. In the gatherings we are hosting in Portugal, Colombia and the United States, we often have high-ranking representatives of the existing system who know very well that global capitalism has become untenable. We have to build a public lobby that can be heard, a lobby that’s a bit stronger than the NGO complex and is focused on supporting Life.

We need to set an example in the public conscience for an efficient political power which is no longer an opposition, neither inside nor outside of parliament. This belongs to the past. Le Corbusier, the famous architect, said, “We make the revolution by offering the solution.” So, lets find a group of influential people that collaborate in the solution.

AL: I’d like to pivot to a more controversial question: what do you think the role of psychedelics are in the revolution?

DD: Humanity has had a culture of sacraments, medicines and drugs throughout history. We need a sensible continuation of the global traditions of medicine that we’ve had all over the Earth. The question is: which plants, and under which circumstances?

I think that groups that want to reconnect with the universal consciousness should work with the helping agents in a very conscious and ritualistic way. This is how it’s always been. In most cultures, a symbiotic relationship with medical plants is normal. What is abnormal is the life we are leading in the West, the mental sickness of our times, and the collective abuse of the sacred plants.

We now need to translate the experiential content of the medicine work and shamanic practices into real social structures and continuous Life practices, into genuine spirituality.

AL: Let’s transition to what might seem a more banal question in a place like Tamera. I know you spend a lot of time exploring the role of Eros here. Why do you think that the Left resists it so much?

DD: This may sound like I’m avoiding the question but bear with me. It could be related to the biography of certain key characters in the historical trajectory of the Left. For example, Karl Marx had a housekeeper, a woman, where he lived in Trier, that he desired for years.  As he was walking up and down his carpet, developing his thoughts, he was probably deeply repressed [laughter]. He couldn’t deal with his own sexuality. And he’s just one of many unembodied men who transposed their pathologies into their writings, in the cannon of Leftist thought.

Leftist dogma has been so limited by Dialectical Materialism. The theory didn’t leave any space for the woman, for the body, for Eros. They really believed that with their concept of political economy, they would be able to change the world. But it was written by a sexually repressed young Marx in Trier, to the foibles and limitations of human experience. It’s incredible how much global movements or ideas can be bound to a single person.

AL: I can only imagine what it must have been like in post-World War II Germany, being as liberated as you were, to hold these types of ideas. Now, forty years later, do you feel like the world is catching up or do you feel a mounting sense of frustration?

DD: I didn’t know that it would take so much time. I was totally frustrated for many years, yes.I couldn’t relate to most of my comrades in Germany, and I don’t think they understood my ideas. When I wrote the book Fear in Capitalism in 1972, it became a best-seller, and was widely read among Leftist circles in Germany. I thought that was an opening to a broader discourse. But all of the books that followed were just rejected. It was a collective rejection. It was a defense against specific insights in the realm of sexuality and our inner driving powers. They were based on a different emphasis than simply rational economics.

My thoughts didn’t fit with the thoughts of consensus culture. I felt like a singularity. I was a lone rider, a crazy. Year after year, I needed to see how I could stay faithful to my path, how I could continue. And Sabine helped me [Sabine Lichtenfelds is Dieter’s life partner and the co-founder of Tamera].

I was never just simply frustrated though. It was more complex than that. I knew at some point there would be a change and now the shift is happening, there is a lot of work to be done. And it’s exciting. There are many co-workers here who look forward to this work. Tamera and I are in a new situation. The next generation is taking the reins – they understand the critique of the existing system and they are embodying the solutions.

AL: Do you have any sense of regret, or lessons, in the way you’ve lived your political life?

DD: No, I don’t have regrets in a linear sense. Perhaps I wasn’t courageous enough in some ways. I regret that I had such a thin skin, that I didn’t have enough power to accelerate the process. I made so many mistakes that I don’t regret [laughter]. You know, if you’ve been misunderstood and harvest negative projections all the time, you get angry. You condemn other people, you go in this hostility state. I wish I didn’t treat anyone unjustly on this path. And if I did, well sometimes, there was no other way and I am sorry.

AL: For me and many activists of this next generation, we see what you’ve done as the hugely courageous and radical, especially in the context and era that you did it in.

DD: It’s hard to say.

At some point, I realized, my life is guided. I no longer needed to do the exercise of courage, but I needed to agree to what was required of me, the decisions that were required of me. The decision to step out of my profession, to give away my possessions, to let go of my marriage, and to do all these things at once was a decision I had to make. But I didn’t need courage. It was just like it was.

AL: So the courage to be carried and the courage to choose Life is the ultimate courage?

DD: Yes, if you want to say that. We do need that kind of courage, yes.

International peace pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine in 2007, initiated by Tamera.

DD: To help establish the new infrastructure, the new systems. To help establish the network according to where your talents are and your joys. To help build communities around the world. The new system consists of these two tracks: the upper and the lower, the spiritual and the political. We must help create communication between these two tracks. We must create a new language that brings these two tracks together. And we must show our solidarity for the various resistances that are actively protecting the sacred. When communities in places like Standing Rock start to see that we are standing with them, they will see that they are embedded in an international community. Together we can reconnect with the original power field of Life. If we can start to believe again in this planetary community then a global field will arise in which Indigenous knowledge can come together with a futurological perspective. And that is a great vision to serve.

AL: Deep gratitude to you and Sabine, and thank you for blazing the trail for all of us.

Cross-posted from Kosmos Online

All images courtesy Tamera

About the Author

Alnoor Ladha, Co-founder, Executive Director – The Rules (www.therules.org)

Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, storytelling and technology. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of /The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.

Photo by RAM DAIRY

The post The Deschooling Dialogues: An Interview with Dr. Dieter Duhm appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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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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Michel Bauwens points out in his article ‘If we can have p2p economics, why not p2p spirituality?’ that the dominant spiritual and economic models of a particular age often mirror each other:

“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.”

So his idea is that the emerging P2P economic forms should have a corresponding spiritual analogue:

“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.”

He defines ‘Peer Production’ as:

“…any process that allows for open input, participatory processing, and where the output is universally available as a commons to all.”

As far as I am concerned, this all makes perfect sense and I rejoice in his next point which is that a truly P2P spirituality would be the end of the ‘guru’ as we know it, and the whole need to join hierarchical organisations in order to explore one’s own inner being:

“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 skilful 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.”

I have been fortunate enough to have experienced this kind of participatory spirituality myself, in the context of Holotropic Breathwork therapy, created by the transpersonal psychologist Dr. Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina Grof. The therapy has at its core the doctrine of the ‘inner healer’, a personal power unique to each individual which guides them to the material they most need to access in any given session. The leaders of the session are called ‘facilitators’ and they are apparently instructed that their main task is to keep the participants safe and focussed on the process – they will never second-guess or add any of their own opinions about anything which comes out in the session unless expressly asked, and even if they do give advice they will emphasise that it is only a personal opinion.

In other words, there is no dogma in this form of spiritual practice (and even though it calls itself a therapy, I can testify to the fact that very deep spiritual experiences are possible using this method of accessing the unconscious levels of mind). At the end of the day’s session, everyone shares their experience, with the suggestion being given that all the participants listen to each other in the spirit of an open mind and an open heart, and without judgement.

To me, this seems to be an ideal methodology of entering into serious spiritual practice, and is in line with Bauwens’ concept of “equipotentiality:”, defined as:

“…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.”

The facilitators are not ‘above’ the participants, in fact in some sense they are ‘below’ them, acting as a support, and can truly be said to be in service to those people taking part in the session. Each person’s own inner wisdom is the trusted guide, rather than an external person who ‘knows best’. This system has clearly been designed by the Grofs specifically in order to remove ‘the guru principle’ from the equation, and I have found that it works extremely well, giving one a sense of being supported by a community but at the same time allowing one to enter into one’s own inner worlds.

This brings me to a point where I slightly take issue with Michel Bauwens on the subject of P2P spirituality – in his article he makes the claim that:

“…a p2p spirituality would honour community and co-production above all else.”

I would beg to differ with this statement in that surely any kind of spiritual practice honours what is referred to as the ‘spirit’ above all else, and the community, while it may be vitally important, is not the be-all-and-end-all of the practice itself. The Buddha emphasised the importance of the Sangha, but meditation itself, where one sits entirely cut off from communication with other beings (in the outer world at least), would seem to be more central to Buddhist teachings than the role of the other practitioners, who after all, from the perspective of the individual meditator, are part of the ephemeral world which must necessarily always be in constant flux.

One’s own inner being is the goal, not in a narcissistic sense of fixating on the mind, but rather in the transcendent sense of realising that one is not separate from the greater Mind, the Spirit, the impersonal being of Life itself, of which all form a part. This surely should be the goal of any spirituality, whether it be in the most hierarchical Roman Catholic monastery (where the ultimate would be referred to as ‘God’, of course – the ‘top man on the pyramid’), or the most P2P spiritual discussion group made up of entirely equipotential peers maybe discussing how quantum physics has transformed our notion of what is meant by ‘spirituality’.

To me, an emphasis on the community of spiritual practitioners as being more important than the practice itself, whatever that might be, is putting the cart before the horse, and in a way could reflect a subtle disillusionment with the fruits of one’s spiritual labours, almost like admitting that true spiritual growth is not possible, but contenting oneself with the ‘consolation prize’ of having a great group of people with whom to not really make much progress.

Of course, dismantling outdated hierarchical spiritual structures is vitally important, because it is this which often either turns people off the spiritual search in the first place, or stunts their potential by forcing a top-down dogma onto them which doesn’t actually tally with their own experience, especially if this dogma was created thousands of years ago and no longer contains much of relevance to the spiritual practice of people in the modern world. In this way they remain stuck in limbo, unable to move forward because the spiritual ‘vehicle’ in which they have chosen to move is so weighed down with hierarchy and outdated concepts that any real wisdom they may come across is realised despite the structure in which they find themselves, rather than due to any potentiality it may hold in itself.

But, here we discover the rabbit hole goes even deeper. Having set up our non-hierarchical P2P spiritual group, and acknowledged that everyone has something to bring to the table, and even that the group is a means to an end and not an end in itself, what would the actual starting point for a P2P spirituality even be? Do we start by criticising an established religion or set of spiritual principles, or do we head for the hills and start our own?

Bauwens suggests:

“In this [contributory]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.”

However at this point I would like to bring in something I read recently from Scott Kiloby, who has been defined as a ‘spiritual teacher’ although I think he would probably take issue with that (or indeed any) definition of what he does:

“What if awareness isn’t real? A recent scientific study found that awareness or consciousness is a construction of the mind like everything else – like the self, our world views, all of it.”

He goes on: “…most of the spiritual community is ignorant of what science is currently saying and what these postmodern explorations have uncovered about how our minds conceive – essentially “make up” – everything, even our most profound metaphysical notions. Even though our spiritual circles are slow to see this, we have all already seen it, yet we often turn a blind eye to it. For example, those who follow certain regional traditions and teachings tend to see what those teachings and traditions teach and nothing more. For example, a Buddhist is not going to find Union with Christ. A Christian is not going to realize nirvana.”

So how does this relate to P2P spirituality? For me, if this is true, it cuts both ways: one, it destroys the notion of ‘one truth’ that we might be able to find, at least in terms of anything we are going to be able to describe to another human being. That is, if we find out that ‘the ultimate’, or ‘awareness itself’ is just another concept, and possibly a concept used to keep an established dogmatic worldview in place, as Kiloby notes:

“If there is one pregiven reality, why is everyone still arguing about it? […] Could it be that the notion of one fundamental truth is just another way the ego wants to be right? If so, that has nothing to do with a pregiven, nonconceptual reality. That is all about self.”

I don’t believe he is negating the notion of a pregiven reality as something to be experienced, more that paradoxically, the ‘pregiven reality’, as experienced, undermines the concept of itself, and shows that even ’emptiness’ itself is ultimately empty.

So in our P2P spiritual explorations, we might be disillusioned to discover that not only are we not correct in our assumptions as to what an ‘underlying reality’ or ‘spirit’ might be, we might discover that everyone else is mistaken as well, even our most treasured teachers, for there is no nameable or even unnameable ‘reality’, for such a ‘thing’ can only ever be a concept, and all along even as we may have been having amazing experiences of inner realms, we have in fact only been promenading down the streets of the mind itself, even as we may have blundered into regional or cultural memes and surprised ourselves to find unexpected material in the subconscious. At the end of the day, the concept of ‘Jesus’ or ‘Buddha’ or ‘awakening’ has exactly the same value as that of ‘chair’ or ‘Big Mac’ or ‘irritation’, in that they are all concepts and ultimately all empty. Not that the ‘things’ they point to are equal, only that they are all equally concepts in the mind.

So secondly, this cuts the other way for P2P spirituality – we can play with all traditions, seeing all as equally empty, but using them as one might use a well-stocked toolbox when appropriate. The more ‘awakened’ of the circle might gently remind another of the ultimate emptiness of all things if they start to take concepts and related experiences too seriously and start to insist on them as the ‘one way’, even of course, the concept of emptiness itself.

I don’t believes this invalidates in a nihilistic way the many spiritual traditions – I am with Scott Kiloby when he says:

“Is this the end of metaphysical notions like awareness? I say “no.” It just means it is time for a change in how we view these things (or non-things). Setting up the notion of awareness can be helpful on one’s path to freedom. It provides a way to identify less with thoughts and other arisings that come and go. But inevitably, many land on that conception as a final realization, still dividing the universe in two, between awareness and all that other stuff that comes and goes.”

This chimes with something I heard recently in an excellent discussion between Orla O’Donovan and Gustavo Esteva on the Commons and the theories of Ivan Illich – Esteva pointed out that if we call a group of people ‘a collective’, we are already heading down the wrong path if we want to speak about true solidarity – because the very notion of a ‘collective’ implies a grouping of disparate and disconnected individuals.

In the same way, to speak about a P2P spirituality may be useful as a sort of signpost on the way, but we are mistaken if we take it too seriously, for the reason that an effective spirituality is the realisation that we are all already One, and what is One does not need to come together, as a true collective does not question its solidarity, and indeed has no need for the words ‘collective’ or ‘community’. These may be difficult ideas to grasp these days when we are so indoctrinated into the mindset of separation, but this only highlights how much our ways of thinking have to change in order for there to be any chance of real evolution on the ‘individual’, ‘collective’, and ‘spiritual’ levels. And of course, even the word ‘levels’ is just another concept born of separation. We can use these concepts as long as we are careful and remember they are only that. To fight and die for a concept or ideal is surely the height of Utopian stupidity.

The post The Emptiness of ‘Emptiness’: P2P Spiritual Knowledge and Community appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Gladwell drew on the work of psychologists such as Stanley Milgram who did experiments testing the social chains between people–what is known today as “six degrees of separation.” Milgram found that “sociometric stars” were a key to shortening the chain of connection to your desired target. But Watts staged his own experiment that updated Milgram’s work, and in doing so, uncovered different findings. … [Watts discovered] that highly connected people–the hubs or influencers–played no significant role. People selected the next person in the chain based on qualities such as living in geographic proximity, sharing occupations, and other factors more so than being heavily connected, or having high status.

Another key point is around the definition and role on this mythical ‘influencer’;

Watts points out we all talk so much about influencers, we’ve accepted the term without knowing its definition. Are influencers ordinary people with extraordinary reach? Are they celebrities or “opinion leaders” as they were named in earlier stages of pr theory? Even if we were to exclude bloggers, media, and Oprah from our definition–how then do we measure how an influencer impacts the opinions of others? Watts says some studies measure an influencer as someone whom at least three people say they would turn to for advice. But that scale — reaching people who are three times better connected than others — does not move the millions of people marketers, political campaigns, and brands need to reach. Stripped of the media spin, an influencer’s clout is limited without the amplifying power of the Internet.

Put simply, influencers are only that because of the media amplification afforded them. Which means it is less about their influence and more about the broadcasting of their ideas. With that definition, then anyone can be an influencer, all you have to do is re-broadcast what they say. This article takes the ideas of trends and places them firmly back in the crowd setting and away from a perceived band of elite people.

(Also published on the P2P Foundation blog, Hat-tip to Michel for the link.)

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