Marrying the mystical and the mundane to live the magic of an empowered life!

‘Stay here so that you may acquire a force within you that nothing can destroy…' Gurdjieff

Living beyond the confines of ego in Community

In her book Emergence, renowned author/teacher, Barbara Marx Hubbard, talks of several stages to spiritual maturity. She says it’s extremely rare to find people who have advanced beyond infancy (reading spiritual books) and childhood yet (attending spiritual workshops)! Only the rare few make it to the next stage, which is ‘youth'. She states that this is because so few people have been able to surrender their egos, find their higher life purpose, create even a small community of kindred souls and begin their true work in the world.

She goes on, however, to say that now it is time to do exactly this. We all need safe arenas to test and experience our ideas beyond the confines of ego and to stabilize our emerging spiritual consciousness with others doing the same thing.

Magical things happen when what you think, say and do are in alignment yet it takes powerful self awareness to master this simple concept

Living in community... learning to honour the daily processes and sharing, you will naturally be guided into greater awareness and consciousness of each element in your inner and outer terrain, so you can learn how to create a place to manifest your dreams and to enhance the quality of your life.

Miraculous things really do happen when what you think, what you say and what you do are in alignment. Susie long ago established the necessary daily disciplines that create this evolution to hero-consciousness and make it totally real. Newcomers are provided with powerful guidelines to immediately begin to integrate and live these teachings.

The Inconvenient Truth of Waking Up

Why do most people on the spiritual path, the Hero's Journey, actually resist true awakening and more fully what this actually entails? It’s because generally we lack the organisation and discipline it takes to wake up. We lack organisation in our personal lives and lack meaningful group organisations around us. The only experience of organisation most of us have is our family – and the dysfunctional behaviour of our family has in most cases been the cause of our own imbalance and dysfunction. So we need to create new support groups and new families in community.

Living in spiritual community is not only an opportunity to heal both the dysfunctional family and social systems we have inherited, but to also consciously create new healthy forms based in love and co-operation that will not only sustain life on this planet but will also support a thriving experience for all. Releasing fear of lack that promotes greed and the need to survive at the expense of others and their well-being is an important step. When we co-operate and share our resources with one another there is plenty for all. This is what community is all about.

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of these acts, will be written the history of this generation."
J.F. Kennedy

Living the Lie of Do-Have-Consume

Unfortunately, there are many in the West who regard themselves as ‘saved – awake - aware’, but though they might talk the talk, they do not walk the walk. They have not spent the time exploring and marrying the unconscious, conscious and super-conscious minds. As a result most of us live in a state of unconscious incompetence – not knowing that we do not know. The first step is to move to conscious incompetence – knowing that we don’t know; then conscious competence – knowing that we know; and finally unconscious competence – a state of being so competent that we no longer have to think about it. The western shamanic alchemical map of awakening consciousness that Susie shares, teaches you how to do this in simple stages. The path is simple, yet it’s not easy, because people lack the discipline to stay focused, people are lazy, selfish, hedonistic, self indulgent, and they are just plain terrified of healing their wounds because of the pain involved. It doesn’t have to be painful when you learn to forgive, come from compassion and commit to being defenseless. This is what is practiced daily living in community.

Re-establishing community-consciousness as a new norm

We all need a support system because we are basically group-oriented - and the survival of the individual depends upon the help and co-operation of the rest of the ‘village’, which in ancient times was often populated by relatives.

When we first begin to break away from the original ‘tribe’, because we choose to venture beyond the boundaries of the old beliefs and old ways of doing things, a very real fear is often experienced; a trembling deep down in the subconscious as we remember that we cannot survive without the support of the other village members.

Yet break away we must and break away we do because the urge to evolve becomes far greater than the need to conform, fit in and remain the same, which is stagnation. There will come a time in everyone’s life where it becomes far more painful not to grow – lest we wither much too soon before we blossom. We strike out on our own and eventually, we find a new ‘tribe’ and a new ‘village’ of like-minded souls who become our new family… a ‘spiritual family’ so to speak. Until we find our new ‘tribe’, our new ‘community’ and ‘village’, we often find ourselves alone. And so, the act of walking away from the old is a very powerful act of courage… just as courageous as any hero who faces his challengers.

Community life accelerating the evolution to Super HERO consciousness

It takes great courage to live in spiritual community. To the fainthearted, authentic spiritual community is a terrible place. It is the place where our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us. When we begin to live full-time with others, we discover our poverty and our weakness, our inability to get on with people, our mental and emotional blocks – our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. However, when we identify this ego behaviour we can dis-identify from it. We are not our behaviour. We can change our behaviour and this is the quest of the hero.

‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away’.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

In community we learn how to transcend our own ego behaviour.  As we evolve, we can then lovingly, gently or sometimes even sternly confront the other so that they can keep taking away that which no longer serves the new hero self emerging. It’s fast-track spiritual enlightenment.  I highly recommend it. In our community we have found our spiritual ‘kin’ and companions of destiny. We always find those who – just like us – took the risk of walking a different path along the road less travelled... And then we know that it was all well worth the courage it took to walk alone for a while.

Community life - a powerful solution to environmental challenges and key to personal transformation

From the film 'The Matrix' Agent Smith talks of human activity in ego blindly pursuing the lie of do have consume:

'I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re
not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.’

Is humanity behaving like a virus? If so, then now is the time for the hero in us all to go beyond striving for comfort, profit and greed. Living in community is key to achieving this and returning to higher ideals of love... strength and balance.

It’s not just us as individuals living a lie, being fooled by the matrix - we’re all part of it. We’ve collectively put humanity on a collision course with environmental disaster, industrial collapse and social chaos. You and I were put on the planet as caretakers. All we have done is taken and not cared.

Whether the governments of the industrialized nations will realize the danger and act soon enough to avoid environmental collapse and the
consequent collapse of civilization as we know it is still unknown. We may well be heading for a new kind of Dark Ages with mass starvation, collapse of industry, plagues, looting and collapse of governments.

If these dark predictions become reality, survival will depend upon doing what the Hopis recommend:

‘Where is your water?
Know your garden.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.’

If we choose to create peace on earth, then it must start in our own hearts with reconnection to the hero self. It’s vital that we understand that all of life is an initiation to reconnect to this powerful part of ourselves.   

Modern day teachings on Community from Star Trek Voyager

A couple of years ago, I heard about a Star Trek Voyager episode that brilliantly demonstrated the powerful potential of engaging co-operation with each other including different races and even different species of intelligent life.

The story begins when Voyager is accidentally pulled into a Void, where it turns out other lost ships were struggling to survive. When Voyager first arrived they were instantly attacked by one of the other ships and 90% of their food and supplies were stolen. Voyager’s crew soon discovered the other ships already in the Void survived by stealing supplies from each other and whenever possible stealing from new unsuspecting ships the moment they stumbled into the Void.

When Voyager’s crew discovered they did not have enough power to leave the Void on their own Captain Janeway asked the other ships to form an alliance where each ship would pool their resources and technologies with the other ships in the alliance and thus they would all find a way out of the Void together. It was difficult to convince the other ships this was a good idea, but eventually several ships did join the alliance, shared their resources and technology, and made it possible for all the ships that were working co-operatively to leave the Void together. Those who refused to join the alliance due to their entrenched patterns of fear and lack were left in the Void to continue as they had before.

This story demonstrates the power of co-operation and working in community to achieve what otherwise might seem impossible… Some of the ships had been in the Void for years, barely surviving by competing for the limited supplies and resources that might wander in through other lost ships.

Living from competition had created separation, distrust, hatred and loss of resources that could have benefited everyone if they had chosen to live in co-operation with one another.

The ships that chose to co-operate and share resources ultimately changed their lives, moving their existence from the experience of lack in the Void into an expansive and abundant world. Co-operation unifies and strengthens the greater whole, moving our experience from struggle to survival, into a whole new more abundant world of possibilities.