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 “Socially-Engaged Spirituality” was the name of a five-day course that I recently participated in at the Rudolf Steiner Institute in Vermont. I went as a part of Think OutWord, a new peer-led training in social entrepreneurship, which as a group attended this course led by the Philippino activist Nicanor Perlas. Not only was it my first time at RSI but it was also my first time experiencing Nicanor, and yes, working with Nicanor is truly an EXPERIENCE!
The participants were a mixed group of young adults and older, youthfully-spirited individuals. RSI itself is a model for socially-engaged and spiritually-conscious institutions. There was a feeling of equality and warmth between everyone and a transparency in the running of the institute that gave me, in the very act of participation, a sense of community. I highly recommend RSI to anyone interested in a rejuvenating summer experience.
The best part of Nicanor’s course, for me, was experiencing the man himself and witnessing how this class was conducted. In some workshops that I’ve attended an instructor will stand at one end of the room and open his or her mouth at regular intervals in order to divulge the content, hopefully, into the hearts and minds of the people who paid to be there. Nicanor, on the other hand, began by asking everyone to give a self-introduction, and as they did he wrote their name and a synthesis of what they expressed onto the blackboard. His ability to synthesize, as he demonstrated throughout the week, proved to be a highly developed capacity. Immediately we began to see and hear the individualities of the group, and to listen to the questions living in the constellation of the class itself. This made me suddenly realize the depth of knowledge and experience that permeated an already packed room. The high degree of both diversity and commonality was humbling.
What concerns us about the world?
Early on, Nicanor asked everyone to write down his or her top three concerns about the world. Then we formed small groups in order to share and discuss them. Each group selected one person to distil them down and present, and once again Nicanor filled the board with our thoughts and ideas, sometimes jumping in to clarify complex issues, to connect and synthesize. For the first part of the course he hardly added anything new but worked from what was coming directly from the participants. While I can’t say that all of humanity’s concerns were represented, what appeared on the board did seem to reflect a truly global set of issues facing the human being today. All had some relation to a larger societal picture, usually falling under one of the headings of culture, polity, or economy. And all had varying degrees of inwardness – spanning from ‘I’ to ‘we’ to ‘world’. Gradually we found that what was at the center of all our concerns was humanity’s current view of the human being which, from my own observation and by many other accounts, is of a predominately materialistic or mechanistic nature.
How does this view shape our identity and determine our actions? Here we find all the societal structures – institutions, businesses, companies, schools, etc. – made up, in the end, of individuals like you and me who have adopted the accepted view of the human being. This in turn creates a repetitive cycle in “forming” each successive generation. The action of each individual towards another, or in the world at large, is thus greatly affected by this view of the human being. In this way we find a direct link between local and world happenings “out there” and the person I seem to think of as being “in here.” Where, then, in myself can I find unresolved knots and obstacles such as the ones I hope to see overcome in the world at large? (Here, Steiner’s Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is a helpful resource, the first part of which deals with knowledge, and especially self-knowledge, and the second part with free will.)
Due to this informed identity that we willingly inherit, it is difficult to imagine making any progress if we are constantly revolving upon the same type of thinking that caused the problems in the first place. This notion raises two questions for me: 1) who am I, apart from this identity imposed from without? And 2) from where else, then, can I receive insight for acting in the world?
No world-transformation without self-transformation
A second question Nicanor put to the group was: what was your most creative moment in life, and, what was the quality of your experience in that moment? As people pondered over this question there was a tangible silence in the room. Then, like the first question, we gathered into our smaller groups, shared our observations, and marveled at the commonality of all our different experiences. Some of what was shared had to do with an experience of wholeness and completion, being in balanced harmony, being no longer separate but in a state of non-duality or unity, being free, having a constant flow of energy, experiencing something higher coming into expression, etc. In the creative process something new, something that is not merely our old informed identity, is able to enter the world.
Through such rare, self-transformative experiences, there is also the opportunity to transform the outer world through action. But our actions are best when we understand the context in which we act. The word context itself is interesting. “Con”, as prefix, means with or together, while “text” has to do with fabric or weaving. It would seem to point to a living space or set of conditions within which something else, a particular situation or phenomena, is able to arise. In that sense it has to do with the activity of beings in relation to one another. When we see the context of a situation we behold the flow that is, itself, the life essence weaving together (which I feel has to do with the etheric). Seeing in context, then, becomes a phenomenological approach to viewing the world, to seeing objects not merely as separate “things”, but entities in constant relational movement.
In our own lives, though it may seem that we are unfree at times – that we are bound within the physical body and material world – our encounter with creative experience shows us another opportunity, where something that is not at first physically based can be manifested on the material plane. How we bring this new and harmonizing quality into the world will depend a great deal on our ability to see “in context,” not only the context of an apparent issue or concern, but also the context of very own self.
The U – what goes down must come up
Throughout the course Nicanor arranged what was written on the board in order to draw out different aspects of the complex relationship between self and world. In the process he created symbolic maps that reflect different levels of reality – the “U” was a major one among these.
The U is an analytical tool that has been developed by the MIT professor C. Otto Scharmer. As a map it describes the process of both individual and organizational transformation. The left side of the U represents the “given world,” those structures and identities that are imposed from without, that inform and determine our experience of the world. Most of the time we are conditioned to see only surfaces, the symptoms of relational activity, without taking any deeper context into account. To descend down the U is to consciously penetrate deeper and deeper strata of causality, to move beyond the phenomena alone to the systems, ideologies, worldviews and states of consciousness that create them. It is also often a process of deconstruction, of shedding dead ideas and old self-perceptions.
Whereas the left side of the U has much to do with self and identity, with going inwards in order to understand, the right side represents how this newly won understanding is transformed into action in the world. As was mentioned earlier, the nature and effectiveness of our actions is intimately tied to the degree of our own self-knowledge. This self-knowledge, along with our view of the world, determines what problems we perceive and what actions we take. One response is to want to immediately jump in and fix it, though, to quote Einstein, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Problems are the result of our actions not aligning with reality – we can’t solve them unless we consciously perceive their roots. Rather than jumping across the U to attempt a quick fix, we can carry our burning question with us as we delve into the deeper causes of outer phenomena and the consciousness from which it springs.
At the deepest level we come to a gap between knowledge and action. What appears at first as empty space, though, can become the bridge of intuition. Here, the qualities of the creative moment come into play; we become free to act autonomously because there is no longer a division between the world and I. This non-dual experience makes us one with the World Process (as Nicanor described it, using, I believe, Steiner’s terminology). In this state we see how the world itself wants to evolve, and in that moment we are given the freedom to choose whether or not to bring that new element into physical existence. This choice has a delicate quality about it. If accepted, the intuition must in turn be given away. In other words, to hold on to what comes in creative moments – to cling to it as the prized solution – in the end fixes it in unhealthy, egotistical ways so that it’s no longer able to do good in the world. An inspiration is a call from the future of something wanting to emerge. When it has come and run its course it should be left to the past. To let go, with trust, allows for a more fluid relation between our intuition and the ever-changing context of our field of action.
Here, at the base of the U, you begin to meet your own identity, only consciously now. You also come up against the free will of others, and no matter what, mistakes are bound to happen. Through these failures we find ourselves once more upon the journey of the U. Nicanor likened this experience to a large U with micro u’s all along its path. These mistakes should not be shirked – they are excellent learning opportunities. In that light he stressed the three R’s, relate (feeling), repeat (willing), and reframe (thinking), a practice that leads to the transformation of your soul.
In looking back over the whole course I can see that, in the way that Nicanor invited us to engage with one another, there were, at every moment, opportunities for spiritual growth and development. Looking again at the word context, I wonder if it can also mean “with word,” and if I could replace the “word” with Logos. If I think back to the beginning of John’s gospel in the New Testament, “In the beginning was the Word,” what would it mean to think of all phenomena as being weavers of the Word, that is to say, of the Creative Word? To see in context, then, perhaps discloses a whole new meaning.
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