SGM Dec.2013 Weekly Message Three: “Healing Our Global Community”

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Welcome back to the December 2013 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM.

This month, we are exploring the multiple layers of community in which we live. In Week One, we began with creating a positive environment for the community of 100 trillion cells that make up our bodies, our vessel for journeying through this life. In Week Two, we explored the keys to thriving in our primary relationships, those close ties of family, friends, and co-workers that give us the opportunity to love and be loved for who we are.

This week, we’ll explore our connection within the larger communities in which we participate. We’ll learn how a distorted view of reality has led to environmental and social crises that dramatically affect us all—and what we can do to thrive personally and collectively now and in the future on this planet. At the end of this message, you’ll discover a simple practice to give you a felt experience of connection with all beings that share our One Life.

Now, as someone who has been alive for the past few decades on this planet, you’ve witnessed a plethora of environmental and social crises. Life seems to come at us faster and harder these days, and with that pace and intensity, we seem to be having more and more intense crises to manage as well. Personally, I believe this is part of a critical turning point on our planet—where we realize that much of what we’ve thought up to now is proven to be either “false” or “extremely limited” and much of what we have not seen before is coming to light. We are coming to decision points in our individual lives and collectively that will make the difference between thriving and struggling.

In his book, The 12 Stages of Healing, Dr. Donald Epstein cites a shift in worldview that is being called forth by the environmental and social crises of our times. The dominant cultural view, especially in Western Civilization has brought us to a point where we feel isolated and disconnected from each other and from our planet. We have lost our connection to the Life Force and our sense of participation in the One Life that we all share. Yet, we’re so embedded in our dominant cultural worldview that we don’t see it. We don’t question the way we look at life or the fact that how we are looking at life is causing feelings of alienation and precipitating the crises we are facing.

So, what is this dominant cultural worldview?

In broad strokes, you could call our worldview The Mechanistic Model of the Universe. The Mechanistic Model sees life as a collection of individual material objects relating to each other according to mechanical forces, such as gravity. These forces explain how billiard balls bounce off each other and fall into their pockets, how combustion engines generate power, and how the cycles of weather circle our planet. In other words, this view of the Universe has its basis in classical physics as discovered by Newton and others hundreds of years ago.

Interestingly, physics has moved beyond this oversimplified view of reality, yet it is still pervasive as our dominant cultural outlook on the way things work. We use it to explain physical processes like those listed above, as well as all phenomena that we experience, even if they are less obviously physical, such as our thoughts and feelings. Under this model, thoughts and feelings are reduced to chemical signals, pressure waves, and electrical impulses in the body and brain. Everything is reduced to physical forces.
In the Mechanistic Model, if you have thoughts that pester you, there’s a prescription for that. If feelings are getting you down, pop another pill. If you have a pain that can’t be explained, it’s all in your mind—yet your mind is just a chemistry experiment, so take another drug.

When we view our lives in purely mechanistic terms, we end up feeling that we are impersonal parts in the machine of the Universe. When this mechanistic model is married to a “Consumer Mindset” we see everything and everyone as commodities to be bought and sold. Life becomes all about earning money and getting stuff and people become interchangeable parts in large corporate enterprises ruled by the bottom line

It’s only a short step from the “Mechanistic Consumer Model” to treating each other without dignity, respect, and intrinsic value. It’s a short step to view the planet as a goldmine of raw materials to be bought, sold, and consumed. It’s a short step to wars over resources and human rights violations. It’s a short step to indiscriminate pollution, global warming, and environmental crises. It’s a short step to be stressed out of our minds because we can’t keep up the pace demanded by consumerism and the demand for ever higher corporate profits that rule.

Yet, fortunately, at the same time, most people also hold that there is something more, something “spiritual” about life. Deep down we know that the Mechanistic Consumer Model doesn’t really cut it. There is something more that can’t be explained in material terms or money. There is a Loving Intelligence beyond all this physical stuff that somehow interacts with the material world and enlivens it. There is a mysterious Universal Life Force that permeates reality and guides our way—at least when we are open to experiencing that.

Many of us hold this other worldview in an uneasy tension with the Mechanistic Consumer Model.

One conception of this alternative worldview is that “everything is energy,” everything is a part of One Universal Life Force, One Universal Field. There is a vital principle that enlivens our world.

Interestingly, modern physics has come around to see this as well. As physics dove deeper and deeper into subatomic structures it revealed that even solid hard matter is created by fields of energy and mostly empty space. Reality is much less solid and much more fluid and interactive than our five senses tell us.

As Dr. Willis Harman, president of the Institute for Noetic Sciences says, “life is a seamless whole. Rocks, trees, rivers and clouds are wondrous and alive; the world is enchanted, infused with spirit. Human beings feel at home in nature; the cosmos is a place of belonging. . .The universe is alive and imbued with purpose; all creatures are part of a Great Chain of Being” (p.202, 12SOH).

Rather than life being a collection of physical objects and beings competing with each other, life is unimaginably cooperative, interconnected, interdependent, and interactive. Consider just one simple action that is the basis of your physical life—breathing. Each molecule of air you breathe in has been breathed by an infinite number of beings throughout the course of history. The energy you breathe in was sent forth in that Big Bang moment at the initiation of this cycle of Universal Energy. You interact with that energy in the air you breathe in now and expel it for it to be taken up by plants, trees, and other living beings, who also interact with it and give it back into the infinite web of life. We all share Life Energy through our breath.

And, our life is unexplainably, intricately, energetically interconnected, interdependent, and interactive in many other ways. Take for instance the fact that you can often feel what another person is feeling, or that you can sense when something has happened even when you have not seen it happen, or that you go to call your spouse just at the moment when he or she is calling you. Notice how a shift in thinking can change how you feel. How a word you speak can change how someone else feels. And, how a shift in consciousness can change how your body and another’s body functions. I witness this all the time in meditation groups and Reiki sessions.

Our social crises of alienation, disempowerment, depression, loneliness, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and stress are a result of the Mechanistic Consumer Model. This model tells us that we are separate, that there are scarce resources, and that we have fight to survive. Yet, this model is based on false information. In reality, you are a part of everyone and everything—inextricably linked to the One Life we all share. And the more you experience that fact, the more you discover how we are all in this together and we all share responsibility for everyone and everything. We are in a participatory Universe in which we each play our purposeful roles.

Now, that may feel like a philosophy that makes sense or doesn’t make sense, based on your personal life history, education, and experiences. So, how do you crossover to make that a personal felt experience? When something is a personal felt experience, you know it for yourself, regardless of whether it’s a convincing philosophy or not. For me, the key lies in experiencing yourself as life energy–feeling the life energy flowing through your own body.

Once you feel that magical sensation, you have a Core sense that this energy is your “essence.” You feel in touch with who you are in your deepest center. You feel alive and inspired. And you naturally honor the Universal Life Energy in others as well.

That’s why I’m such a proponent of inner energetic practices such as Qigong and Core Energy Meditation. They give you a powerful felt experience of the life energy that we all share. Because of that, they are a strong basis for living life in larger communities in which we honor the common spark of life in all of us.

So, if you would, try a simple breathing practice with me. I call it Connected Breathing:

1. Find a comfortable position, either sitting or lying down, and lightly close your eyes.

2. Breathe in and out through your nose and pay attention to the sensations of breathing inside your body.

3. As you inhale, imagine that you are breathing in Universal energy that was sent forth at the Big Bang. Imagine that you are breathing in energy that has been shared by all beings throughout history up to now. Feel your connection to all those who have come before you.

4. As you exhale, imagine that you are breathing out energy to all beings who are presently alive and all beings yet to be in the future. Imagine that you are sharing life energy with them. Feel your connection to all beings alive now and yet to be.

5. Breathe in and out with the awareness of your connection to all beings through your breath for a minute or two.

6. Take the feeling of connection, of shared energy, with you and see how it shifts your experience of the communities in which you live.

I would love to hear your experiences with this exercise or any other comments you have in our Discussion below.

Until next time,
Remember your connection with all beings,
Kevin