WEEKLY HARANGUE #215 – Beyond Interfaith

Let’s talk about local, organic, intersubjective spiritual reality:

LOCAL = your city or region

ORGANIC = naturally complex, alive, open-ended

INTERSUBJECTIVE = we-space, us-consciousness, shared being, common experience

SPIRITUAL = sacred or self-developmental depth in a human being

The Beyond Interfaith movement believes every city should regularly update itself about whatever is really going on in the spiritual lives, inner journeys & existential conclusions of its citizens.  We have a pretty shallow culture if we are not doing things like that!

Much good work has been done over the years by the Interfaith Movement that works to establish mutual recognition and friendly relations between people of different faiths.  We salute them.  However, Beyond Interfaith is interested in going beyond.  We want the faithful and the faithless.  We are searching not only for our commonalities but also for whatever living, surprising and emerging intelligence might be waiting within and between all of us.

Whether you belong to one or many “traditions,” or whether you find yourself in a more casual or idiosyncratic relationship to your own most transcendental parts, we think the community needs to hear from you.  Any success, difficulty, ambiguity, paradox, epiphanies, insight or conclusions that are coming up for you form a valid part of the living field of local spirituality in the present moment.

We no longer live in an age when it is simply tolerable to receive wisdom from expert.  Your participation is needed.  Other people need to hear what you are going through on your ‘inner journey’ (whatever that might look like) and you could probably learn something from them.  Or least you might hear some very interesting things.  And collectively we might be able to call forth and attune ourselves to whatever invisible spirit is really alive between and within the sensitive members of community.

Maybe you have heard that many different mushrooms grow upward from a single “mycelial network” living hidden under the soil.  Our local community is also a kind of soil.  Our experiences of what is most valuable in our subjective experience (and the way we language that and act upon it with like-minded others) are mushrooms.

So what is that living network that is expressing itself in all these superficially separate forms?  How can we find out more about it?  Can we contact it?

The first step is to actually get together (in bodies, not online) with other people are are alive inside in our area.  Then we have to speak from that part of ourselves that is still growing, changing, seeking, finding, intuiting the profound.  And we have to hear each other speak from that part of ourselves.  Then we can collective sense whatever all those voices have in common.

You know, we have a lot of official and unofficial holidays.  There are shopping festivals and dietary awareness days.  Earth week and flag day and history month.  We have all kinds of regular public events to mark our social values — but shouldn’t we have one where we put aside aside our ideas about the spirit and strive to really check-in with whatever is actually going on for everyone?

TO SET UP A BEYOND FAITH EVENT

1. Find an accommodating location in your areas and select a date.
2. Propagandize the event and try to reach a diverse group of people.
3. Hold the event according to the meeting protocol.
4. Plan the next one.

What is the meeting protocol?  What should you do at a Beyond Interfaith event?  The proper “ritual” for local, organic, intersubjective spirituality is experimental. We are all just figuring it out. At the moment we are using a three question format led by a moderator:

MEETING PROTOCOL

1. Each person speaks a little part of “wherever they’re at” with their inner life right now.
2. Each person gets to say whatever they wish they had said the first time.
3. Each person gets to say anything they heard, half-heard, sensed or thought about whatever everyone’s remarks had in common.

This is not a debate.  People should not be answering back or commenting on each other.  Tangentially discussion should be curbed in favor of listening and sharing.

Aren’t you curious about what’s going on with everyone?

PS – If you live in the Victoria region of Southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia we will holding our first session Friday, October 30th 630-730pm @ The James Bay Community Centre on 140 Oswego Street.  Entrance by donation.