A Collective Emergence

The purpose of collective practice and inquiry in the context of evolutionary enlightenment is to engage directly with the development of consciousness. Consciousness is not an individual; it is the intersubjective field that we all share. So when a group of individuals comes together in this context, that collective represents consciousness itself.

When you come together with others to inquire into the most fundamental spiritual and philosophical principles, you should begin to ask yourself: What is it that captivates your attention? Is it any of the other individuals or is it what emerges between the individuals? What you will discover, if you are authentically engaging with the process, is that it is not any individual or even the collective that is so thrilling. It is the quality of consciousness that each and every individual is manifesting—a deeper part of the self that expresses itself through the individual but is fundamentally not limited to the individual. This is a radically different orientation to the way we are accustomed to relating to each other, because now we are relating primarily to the intersubjective field of consciousness itself. At a certain point, even the concepts you may be exploring and understanding become secondary, however profound they may be. The concepts are just what you use to manipulate the field. You find that you are one step ahead of even what you understand, and you discover that you are spontaneously acting and responding from a much more intuitive dimension of yourself.

Evolution beyond ego occurs when those who have come together in this way begin to become conscious of and concerned with the emerging intersubjective field rather than any individual. As we progress in our engagement with spiritual evolution, we will notice that our attention gradually moves from being focused only on the individual to becoming attuned to the collective, until finally it is drawn directly to the field of consciousness itself.

While this process infinitely transcends the individual, paradoxically it is completely dependent upon the individual. Personal enlightenment is an individual attainment; radical impersonal evolutionary enlightenment is a collective emergence. But if it is to be more than a short-lived foray into the glory of our higher potentials, the stability of that collective emergence is entirely dependent upon the individuals upholding a very high standard. If a group of people has met in this extraordinary shared revelation, what happens when they leave that intersubjective context and go their separate ways? Will they each honor and uphold the higher level that they reached together? This is the moral imperative inherent in the evolutionary process at the leading edge. If the individual feels obligated to sustain his or her own highest attainment, which has occurred in an intersubjective context, then individual transformation becomes the only moral response to the collective emergence. In an ideal world, each individual would spontaneously feel that because of what had occurred collectively, he or she was obligated to uphold a higher standard individually.

Coming together in this way is much more than a mere exercise or an ecstatic experience—it is a creative act of the highest significance. What is actually coming into being, at the level of consciousness, is that which compels each individual to rise up and meet the very potential that he or she is participating in creating. That’s emergence; that’s conscious evolution. The individual, in relationship with others, is literally creating that which will demand his or her transformation. That’s nondual evolutionary enlightenment at the most subtle and profound level. The moral obligation is not imposed from without; it is spontaneously generated within each individual by the intersubjectively revealed higher potential itself.

That is the beauty in the process of conscious evolution: together we generate this miraculous higher potential and then we each find ourselves obligated by our own development. Could there be a greater challenge for the ego? And yet it’s not coming from an external authority. In Evolutionary Enlightenment, the true teacher is the Authentic Self. When the Authentic Self begins to awaken in and through the individual and the collective, the guru principle starts operating directly through the field of consciousness itself, fueling and guiding the dynamic surge of intersubjectively self-generating evolution beyond ego.