--- On Mon, Nov 18, 2013, Bruce Schuman wrote ---

Good morning.

Over the past year or so -- or maybe for much longer, but certainly recently -- emerging new ideas on "community" and the interconnection of souls have tended to dominate my understanding of what really matters in the emerging new spirituality.

I want to concentrate on this theme, and bring a core idea into sharp focus. I am guessing that a good approach would be to use the "group" feature of this Alliance, and post messages and ideas and images into that framework. So -- I have created a group called The Sacred Tree of Community.

If anyone is interested, you can join that group. If I am over there by myself, that's OK too, because it will help me gather these ideas and put them in one place. If one or more people join me, also interested in this theme, that might be very helpful.

**

What I think I am seeing is a complexly integral idea that somehow becomes extremely simple -- though it tends to be massively inclusive, as per that very useful phrase from Ken Wilber -- "transcend and include".

This idea is an interpretation of the concept or practice of "sacred circle" -- and it's about what happen in a sacred circle as the "chakras" of the participants tend to come into alignment.

I think the next move here on this Alliance for me involves working on this idea -- getting it as clear as possible, and showing how hundreds of other related ideas are "nested within it" -- or as KW might say, are "transcended and included" within it -- and maybe not always "transcended" -- but definitely "included".

Some of these issues/themes I want to draw together include:

1. What is a sacred circle? What happens to the energies and spirit and "chakra alignment" of an individual participant in a sacred circle when that circle comes into resonance?

2. What is the "cross-correlation effect" that happens between people, as they tune into one another -- and to the "common center" that emerges at the center of the sacred circle?

3. How does this related to "namaste" -- which might be traditionally understood to mean that "the God in me honors the God in you" -- or perhaps "the God in me becomes One with the God in you."

4. As this process evolves in a sacred circle context -- what does this mean for collective spirituality?

5. What is the relationship between the vertical alignment of chakras in individual participants and the "vertical energy alignment of the entire group as a whole"?

My basic intuition about the emerging new universal spirituality is that this "chakra alignment" occurring within individuals as understood in classical yoga -- is exactly -- perfectly -- replicated at the level of the group when the attunement of the group is truly sacred. It's a perfect fractal -- and the "location" of this alignment is -- "the center of the circle". It's the trunk of the collective tree -- or in the indigenous fire-circle model -- it's like the smoke/heat/flame arising from the fire at the center of the circle. It's the center of the collective attunement, and it rises like a column of energy straight into the divine.

This goes to the strong idea, widely understood in the new-age/new-consciousness movement -- and initially introduced to me through Barbara Marx Hubbard -- that "wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there I AM in the mist of you...."

The energy alignment of the individual human being is like the "trunk of a tree". If you do a google image search for "chakra alignment" -- you can find thousands of images that look something like this. In recent days, this particular image, of the "Hara Line", has tended to become my favorite, because it is so clear and detailed -- but there are floods of alternative versions out there that often illustrate very interesting facets of this "mystery of human energy as it becomes aligned to the divine".

The power of this idea has to do with the converging of these individual Hara Lines (energy alignments) -- individually, straight into the Godhead -- and collectively -- into one another -- and from there -- "straight into the Godhead".

So -- I am seeing this Hara Line as "the trunk of the tree" -- the trunk of the tree of the individual -- AND of the group. This looks to me like a perfect mathematical form that is exactly replicable as a fractal, and can/could be replicated at high scale -- ie, thousands of "independent" circle-groups could come into alignment with one another through this principle.

"I AM the Vine, ye are the branches...."

And all of this is true -- because this form is the perfect expression of Wholeness and Oneness. It is the representation of "Christ" or "Logos" or Oneness/Wholeness at that point. So, maybe we say something like "Christ=Wholeness=Oneness=The Absolute". And this "axial" line -- this "Hara Line" -- this "alignment of chakras" as perfectly straight and perfectly vertical (straight-up") -- becomes the standard of "truth", the standard for "unbiased/non-distorted" interpretation. This axial line interconnecting everything across all levels of social organization -- from the individual to the group -- to the group of groups -- is the perfect "plumb line of truth" by which all comparative/relative human judgment can be tuned to divine judgment. Truth is accurate (non-distorted) judgment in the context of absolute wholeness. Not "partial" wholeness - which is relativistic -- but absolute wholeness, which is the perfect form of the cosmos, the perfect form one One.

This is the general form of "unity". This is how "Oneness" is created. Because this is about "true alignment" -- the "perfectly vertical alignment of the individual energy to the universal divine Godhead", it perfectly tunes the individual, to him/herself, and to God. In a collective context of the circle -- the group forms a single integral collective Hara Line that also points straight into the Godhead.

This is replicable -- and seems to points towards "the perfect organic/natural/divine geometry of collective integration and community" -- something like that.

So -- given all of this -- the next very powerful issue that seems to come into focus through this interpretation -- is the notion of "Discerning the Will of God".

If we say -- that the perfect desired law for human life in all regards -- individually and collectively -- is to perfectly tune to the Will of God -- this approach gives us a powerful way to tune the spirit of the group to the Will of God ("you can't break a divine law; it breaks you").

If this is true, and it works -- this should be the perfect way to attune spirit to the so-called "voice of prophecy" -- and it should be "the perfect way" to guide all human decisions, in the context of "spiritual democracy".

In essence, putting this very simply -- it seems that the energy of "God" is essentially the energy of The Whole -- and that energy is capable of guiding and adjudicating every single possible issue that arises among human beings -- anything that might cause them to disagree on anything -- including politics.

So -- what this method seems to be about -- is defining a so-called "perfect" way to attune a group to the divine intent -- which can be known through balance, and probably some kind of cross-correlated reconciliation of issues/tensions/perspectives within the group/circle.

This approach creates a new model of "universal spiritual law". it contains an ethics. It speaks to everything that concerns human beings. It interconnects everything into one integral energy field. It seems to be a perfect expression of that point of connection between Logos and Oneness -- as the "wordless" unity of being ("the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao") connects to the Logos -- the utterly fluid differentiation of Oneness into the infinite myriad elements of "The Many" -- that we generally know as "duality" -- as mapped by human concepts and language and "words".

**

I want to clarify this idea. I want to bring it into focus. I want to detail it. I want to document it, from a hundred points of view, citing references from spiritual and religious traditions, and from psychologists (like Carl Jung) and philosophers (like Ken Wilber) and theologians (like Matthew Fox or Andrew Harvey) and cultural anthropologists (like Joseph Campbell). I want to cross-correlate the idea with traditional approaches to "collectively discerning the Will of God".

This idea, represented graphically -- is extremely simple. It is absolutely "organic" and intuitive. To me, it feels totally "natural". It is also highly replicable, because it is mathematically perfect and fractal. It can be directly transposed into internet designs for interconnecting groups/circles, individuals, and issues. For me -- not having yet proven this, but feeling my way -- this design concept feels enormously powerful. This is the essence of all spiritual effort. It IS based on the "universal wisdom at the core of all the world's religions", just as Wayne Teasdale calls for in The Mystic Heart.

If this idea is right -- and I/we do need to test and explore and confirm it -- and "run it under load" and all that stuff -- it might be the/an absolutely power-key for releasing the pent-up transformative energy of the new age. Millions of people are experimenting with energy and ideas like this -- and this approach is so simple and so elegant and so organic and so fractal -- maybe -- if we clarify it, and "unpack" it in all its details and implications -- we can release something quite beautiful into the world -- and get into the big issue (laughing) of "defragging" the confused and noisy context of human civilization . . .

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