Why Have You Formed a Spiritual Community?

Q: Why have you formed a spiritual community?

A: The actual emergence of a new level of consciousness is unlikely to occur outside of a very focused environment. Indeed, whenever an individual or group of individuals has seriously tried to reach a higher stage of development, the odds have always been stacked against them. Success in such a bold, demanding, and infinitely delicate endeavor, if it has any chance at all, will only occur in and through a committed group of mature human beings who are willing to pay the price and make the nothing-less-than-heroic effort necessary.

My own experience has convinced me that the enlightenment of the future is not going to be an individual event, as it has been in the past, but rather will be a collective or what could be called intersubjective emergence. This is really the core of what I'm trying to accomplish—the birth of a new level of consciousness in which the enlightened mind emerges through a collective. I started having intuitions about this possibility early on in my teaching career, and then a few years ago it suddenly started to reveal itself, in brief flashes, when groups of committed students would come together.

Q: How can enlightenment emerge through a collective?

A: When a group of committed individuals come together beyond ego for this purpose alone, then what has traditionally been called the enlightened mind can emerge between them. Because they meet in the authentic self, the difference between the one and the many disappears, and the enlightened mind becomes the one voice speaking to itself. In this profoundly awakened context where higher consciousness has emerged as the intersubjective ground, a truly revolutionary potential reveals itself. And I really believe that it is here that we can find our individual and collective salvation. It's a window into a completely new order of human relationship in which we not only awaken to this higher level of consciousness together but, even more importantly, begin to engage with it in order to find out how to create the future.