Consciousness, the self and the spiritual

Consciousness, the self and the spiritual

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He [sic] experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. (Einstein, 1950, cited in Calaprice, 2005: 206)

While thinking in ecosystems terms helps us begin to understand how participatory our world is, it is not sufficient. The relational also includes our inner world and its relationship with the outer world, as well as our relationship with the intangible, that which we cannot see and measure. There is a dynamic relationship between the inner and outer. As Macy and Johnstone (2012) argue:

The distinction often made between selfishness and altruism is misleading. It is based on a split between self and other, presenting us with a choice between helping ourselves (selfishness) and helping others (altruism). When we consider the connected self, we recognize this choice as nonsense. It is from our connected selves that much of what people most value in life emerges, including love, friendship, loyalty, trust, relationship, belonging, purpose, gratitude, spirituality, mutual aid, and meaning.

Our ideas, thoughts and visions of the future affect what kind of future emerges.

Our intentions become the way we contribute to the design of the world through our collective unconscious. This requires paying more attention to our intuition, our feelings, our perceptions and experiences: listening to our inner world to make more sense of our outer world. Heron (1996) calls this ‘in the presence of something’, a process of engaging all the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, experiencing it with attention and intention, like when you engage in mindfulness practice. As Scharmer and Kaufer (2013: 31) point out, the role of this inner knowing is rarely talked about by activists but is reflected in the way they speak truth to power: ‘They are connected to deep sources of knowing, sensing the future that wants to emerge.’ Senge et al (2005), in their book Presence, see such a participative experience as that point before which transformation takes place, and draw on the analogy of the experience as one of being ‘at one with nature’. Such presencing does not just happen automatically but requires us to commit to paying attention to the underlying source of our actions in the world, our intentions and our habituated thought patterns.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) argued that the experience of perception is our presence in a single moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us. For him, perception is a nascent logo, it teaches us outside all dogmatism, and in his sense

‘perception’ is knowledge being born. Such perception is holistic and almost pre-thought. Much of the time we do not engage in such a ‘perception’ of the world: perception in everyday life is second-order perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). In other words, we look at the world through a prism of habitually established meanings rather than engaging with the experience itself. However, when our experience creates meaning, this results in a more participative mode of experience and knowledge creation. Moreover, anything we experience is interrelational, interdependent and correlative. Indeed, as soon as we try to describe an experience in words, a linear exercise which in itself is an abstraction, we often lose its essence. Even when we tell a story, the telling in itself changes the perception of the experience, and is limited by the very nature of language. This is why images are so powerful and account for the success of communicating through multi-sensory media, like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, to name but a few social media platforms.

Among the developments that have been part of new scientific thought in physics, ecology and neurobiology, and which have been taken up and developed in transpersonal psychology, deep ecology and soft mathematics, has been a reinterpretation of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the material/ natural world. These ideas find resonance with the work of Dewey (1925a), and Merleau-Ponty (1962), referred to earlier. Consciousness, it is argued, creates physical reality. So, although there is a widely held belief that there is a separation between inner and outer worlds, there is a growing body of thought that sees both as part of an underlying, unseen energy system, what Bohm (1996) has called the ‘implicate order’. When we start to think in these terms, we see how important patterns of thinking are in creating the world around us, and vice versa. It also puts a new slant on the feminist adage that the personal is political. Within this view, any of us working with or in communities are co-creating realities through our thoughts and beliefs, conscious and unconscious. It requires us to be critically conscious: that is, not only to be self-aware but also to realise that in any transformation process we are part of that transformation and that it needs to proceed both within ourselves and in the outer world. Everyone thinks about changing humanity out there, but few think about changing themselves (Murphy, 1999). Thus, at any point in time, everyone, whatever their background, is engaged in an act of developing consciousness and in generating meaning. Furthermore, if we see this relationship between the inner and outer worlds as a complex energy system and therefore connected to the wider ecosystem, then we can see how the same characteristics of complex adaptive systems that we talked about earlier provide us with useful metaphors for understanding transformation and change.

In seeking to understand reality, the mind actively transforms reality. We are sentient beings, however, and thinking is only one of the many threads with which the tapestry of our sensitivities is woven. All the senses and the emotions are part of the process. Things become what our consciousness makes them.

Our mind participates in the creation of our world and the nature of that process is important in determining outcomes. We make sense of reality by filtering it through our minds and our emotions, constantly processing and transforming what we experience, and in doing so, co-creating our reality. Skolimowski (1994) argues that our Western traditions have locked us into language, perception and thinking that creates a bias towards being rather than becoming. However, to understand the world is to understand this process of change, for every act of reality-making is an act of change, part of the process of transformation. Hence our emphasis on learning to question as a route to critical consciousness: by so doing, we create an upward spiral of understanding, just as in complex adaptive systems, this encourages regeneration within the system; in other words, learning and new information introduces a new energy. In this way, we expand consciousness and our world by shifting the inner place from which we operate (Peat, 2008).

Skolimowski (1994) talks about the need for a ‘yoga’ of transformation. He uses the word in the sense of a set of strategies and principles that one needs to follow to develop a new mindset. He argues that this is part of the methodology of participation. The gift of transformation is one you give yourself at the end of the long and difficult journey that these principles imply. He identifies ten principles:

1. Become aware of your conditioning. 2. Become aware of deep assumptions which you are subconsciously upholding. 3. Become aware of the most important values that underlie the basic structure of your being and your thinking. 4. Become aware of how these assumptions and values guide and manipulate your behaviour, action and thinking. 5. Become aware of which of your assumptions and values are undesirable because they limit your horizons or arrest your growth. Each of these assumptions may be held at a subconscious level and, from there, may be controlling you. 6. Watch and observe instances of your actions and behaviour while they are manipulated by undesirable assumptions and values. Identify the causes and defects. 7. Articulate the alternative assumptions and values by which you would like to be guided and inspired. 8. Imagine the forms of behaviour, actions and thinking that would follow from these assumptions and values. 9. Deliberately try to bring about the forms of behaviour, thinking and action expressing the new assumptions. Implement these in everyday life and watch the process.

Repeat the process because practice is important. 10.Restructure your being in the image of these assumptions and thereby restructure your spiral of understanding.

At first glance, the yoga of transformation would appear to be an individualistic process. In a participatory world, however, the old dualism between structure and agency, between self and society, no longer pertains. Community integration is as much about the integration of the self, as of the self with other. In order for the self to be integrated, you have to participate in the wider whole. As different perspectives on reality are shared through this process, then a wider reality is co-created. Different ways of knowing create different ways of understanding a particular phenomenon. We need to put the whole together to get the best picture.

What has challenged you in the above?

Some of what we have talked about in this chapter may appear to readers to be far removed from the practical reality of working with communities. Perhaps what has been said seems largely metaphorical or even metaphysical. Yes, in practice, it is difficult to hold a vision of connection in the way described here and to act on that, at the same time as being in a dualistic world where the norm is to think and act in a separated way. Constant critical self-reflection is called for on the long journey to the active embodiment of participatory thinking – that is, its incorporation into the cells of our bodies so that it becomes as natural as eating and breathing. However, it does not require a total shift away from systematic and scientific thought or from sociological and political theory. Just as a mind without emotions is unbalanced and can lead to irrational acts (Damasio, 1994), the alternative is also true. It is all a matter of balance: that point at the edge of chaos where stability exists alongside change, where people’s stories exist alongside statistics and where emotions form part of any analysis. This is the point of paradox encapsulated so well by the symbol of the Tao, the yin and yang.

Nature and our relationship with it cannot be left out of the equation. Poverty, social justice and sustainability, the key themes in this book, cannot be treated as issues in isolation from nature. We are not just talking about relations between ourselves, but with the Universe. This means working with nature rather than on it, just as a participatory approach works with people rather than on them. This means a vision of the world that encompasses heart and head, the soul and the spirit, whereby knowledge is acquired through a coming to knowing. This requires us to stand back from a surface reality to engage with a much deeper knowing in a search for underlying connections at different levels, including consciousness. In the same way, Chinese characters favour a sense of a fuller meaning, deeper than the literal (Ong, 1997), quite unlike the symbolism of the Western alphabet. This is what Heidegger (1963) calls ‘being in the world’, where the world around us is experienced as so much part of us that it is not viewed as an object. This consciousness is at the heart of indigenous knowing based on a world in common, which questions Western notions of personal ownership of land, sea and sky.