Collective Consciousness and the need for the Flowplace

My dear friends,

I wrote the following piece last year (the last save date on the file was 5 Sept. ’08) long before I found The Transitioner. Since I joined in July, I have been serenely confident that I’ve found my spiritual home. I have since discovered the flowplace, an amazing solution to the problems I see facing humanity with far-reaching ramifications. I have found a community where I can share and give freely of myself and in doing so enrich the entire community.

Thank you for taking the time to read my musings.
Maggie

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My mind has been grappling with a host of things for quite a while, and sometimes I feel like I’m going in circles thinking the same things out over and over again, trying to make some real sense of the world. I’m now writing them down so that I can possibly create some clarity and/or order so that I can progress further, and so I can share them with others who might be of like mind. I have no credentials which would, in the world as we know it, give any credibility to my musings but I’ve decided to at least put them down in the hopes that someone else might see what I see and be able to contribute further understanding either by building on these concepts or by pointing out flaws in my thought processes. Perhaps having no educational credentials upon which to hang my thoughts, I can bring a radically different perspective as I have had minimal exposure to the standardized thinking which stems from this existing paradigm.

I realize that much of what I am doing is taking individual concepts from a wide variety of sources and putting them together into a philosophy that I have not yet seen expressed as a whole anywhere else. In doing so, I am acting out of my conviction that everything is truly interconnected – spiritually – and that my interpretation, such as it is at present, is in its infancy and a continual state of growth and change, as is any thought process. I do not claim to be the first or only one to see any of the individual concepts I have been working through, but I do believe that I might have an unique perspective on the integration and interconnection of them. I know that these first attempts to write down this philosophy are not a final answer, indeed, that there is no “final” answer. They are but part of the process of a spiritual exploration of humanity as a whole. I do believe that there are questions that are not being asked or answered which are critical to the survival of humanity.

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If one steps back, mentally, from looking at the world from a standpoint of being controlled by outside forces such as money/scarcity, social isolation, fear (fear of being judged by others and found wanting; fear of violence – be it physical, mental, emotional, spiritual; fear of exposure, etc.) then the world suddenly is a totally different place with unlimited potential.

The thing that makes each of us valuable within creation is the unique mixture of qualities and interests that make each one of us an individual, thinking, emotional being. Each individual’s particular mix of qualities, interests and capabilities - which they contribute to humanity as a whole - enriches the whole. Mass media and current economic policies perpetuate and disseminate the paradigm of value coming from outside the individual instead of from the only place it can truly come from – the inside – and by doing so serves, to maximum capacity, to separate us from each other and completely dulls the mind and emotions to the shining allure of spiritual growth. Thus humanity is trapped in the vicious circle of working just to earn money so that we believe that we have some small value in life and that what we have to offer is of no value unless it can be bought or sold or stolen.

We are so busy, as a species, running around in circles chasing self-worth from without that we don’t have the time, energy or desire to get to truly know ourselves and find our true value – who we are and what we have to offer to the world to enrich the fabric of all life. We no longer allow ourselves the time, energy and resources to raise our children with the time together to explore and share the fullness of our love, compassion, and understanding. We no longer allow ourselves the time to appreciate the wisdom and value of the elderly and treat them with the respect and reverence they deserve. We do not allow ourselves the spiritual freedom to explore who we truly are, and therefore cannot truly interact with others in a deeply meaningful way. The current socio-economic paradigm demands that we let everything truly important fall by the wayside, just to survive.

We live in a world of abundance, yet there are countless people homeless, starving and isolated. We are so busy running around trying to keep up in this world that we don’t realize that we are all bankrupt – disconnected from any true meaning and value. We substitute sex for true intimacy; commitment and loyalty for love; possessions and/or celebrity for personal value. I am not saying that there is anything intrinsically wrong with any of those things. We actually devalue them by trying to make them more than they are – just a few of the unlimited experiences available in the larger concept of creation. Nor am I inferring that there is no intimacy, love or personal value expressed in the world as it seems to be, but it must be explored how deeply or shallowly we allow ourselves to experience these.

What would happen if people valued themselves, and others, for what they could give instead of what they could get? What if people valued each other for who they are instead of what they possessed (be that money, fame, fortune, possessions etc.). Unfortunately, this must come from within and cannot be imposed, from without, on any individual. The world as we know it is falling apart. Governments fail to serve the people they are purported to represent, and charge more than the market can bear for their inefficient and greedy non-service. However, in the current paradigm, humanity would not survive without the appearance of government. Anarchy, communism, socialism, theocracy, monarchy, democracy – none of these or any other form of government (or lack thereof) can truly work and yet we must, at present, rely on these structures to control, or at least keep order in, our lives. How can we achieve control of anything external when we cannot even control ourselves as individuals? How can we govern humanity when we cannot govern our own individuality?

Humanity cannot survive as a species if we continue with our current behaviour patterns. In this climate of unchecked consumption, where we use and discard not only our world our culture and our environment, but each other as well, there is no chance for long term sustainability. We see daily, through news and media, how easy it is for people (and they’re getting younger and younger) to kill or abuse others just to gain what we have been told we should want – and told so often, from so many different sources, that we think that it’s truly our own desire, not externally imposed. We have created amazing and wondrous methods of communicating with each other and have made it possible for any individual to communicate with any other individual – globally – without having to leave home, and yet we do not achieve any true communication and are becoming more and more isolated and insulated from the world.

Why do we choose to experience a world and then choose to not interact in truly meaningful or constructive ways? Why is discovering and sharing who we truly are seen to be so dangerous? Why are we becoming more and more frightened to take any type of risk? Why do we aspire to earn an afterlife, which we cannot experience in this life, at the expense of truly living the life we do have right now? Even if this life is just an experience in a larger life/thought process, why should we throw away all the good and wonderful experiences to be shared in the here and now to try and earn a better life in the hereafter? If there is an “afterlife”, then what better proof that we never needed material bodies in the first place. If we are purely spiritual beings, then matter must be a manifestation of thought and therefore subject to the control of the thinkers – us. Thus there is, in truth, no “afterlife” – just a continuation of life from a different viewpoint.

Even physical science seems to be pointing toward the mental creation and control of matter. Physicists have discovered smaller and smaller particles of matter to the point where they have shown that there are particles of matter that seem to only appear when they are actively looking for them, and to not exist otherwise. They go on to state that although these particles are the building blocks of all matter, they cannot explain why they only appear when someone is actively trying to perceive them. The most simple and straightforward answer to this is that mind, thought, spiritual perception – call it what you will – is the creator of matter in its most basic forms and the only cause. By the act of searching, we create – however unconsciously – the material existence, which we currently experience as life. Science also now indicates the possibility – even the probability - of alternate universes where everything that does not seem to happen or exist in this universe does exist and thrive. We are told that although we “know” that matter exists, we cannot yet determine what organizes it into the world we experience, or the bodies and individualities with which we experience this universe. I cannot see any other explanation for the existence and experience of matter than Thought. Therefore, to truly evolve, we must learn to take this creative process from the unconscious to the conscious and unleash the unlimited potential of thought and experience.