1.
Not
the Center But the Growing Edge – David Spangler
SUN
TO STAR: Reimagining the
Center
by David
Spangler
|
NOTE:
can look at this as each of us becoming our own living
authority, our own living star / planet -- we as expereincers
... the spiritual science / Rhea's way of Experience / EHE ===
look at this within context of 'centered on the edge' below !! |
Once
while shopping at the
Science
Center
gift store in
Seattle
, I found a t-shirt that showed a picture of the Milky Way
galaxy, to which our sun and solar system belong. An arrow pointed to a
point way out on the periphery of one of the spiral arms of this galaxy
and said, "You are Here!" Another arrow pointed to the center
of the galaxy and said, "All the Good Stuff is Here!"
We
are a society that privileges the center. The center is where we assign
the Good Stuff, whatever that may be. The center is where the power is.
It is the source of nourishment and energy for the system as a whole.
The center is where we find the ruler; it is where we find the king, the
high priest, or God. It is where we find the vital nexus of control.
We
say things like, "Center yourself," or "Find your
center." If we are feeling out of sorts and not very coherent or
coordinated, we say we are "off-center." In his famous poem,
"The Second Coming," the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote,
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world..." The center is the source of stability,
coherency, integrity; without it, things fall apart. The center is vital
to the wholeness and survival of the entity, whether that entity is a
person, a fortress, a city, a corporation, or a nation.
What
might be called the cult of the center finds metaphoric expression in
the idea of the sun and its planets. The sun is the dominating presence
in the daytime sky.
It is the single source of light and heat and thus of life upon the
earth. It is the center of the solar system, around which the planets
revolve. This astronomical reality, though, becomes a metaphorical
one through the image of the wise one, the strong one, the smart one,
the powerful one around whom others revolve.
The
cult of the center,
represented by a sun/satellite metaphor, becomes an expression of singularity.
One person, one place, or one idea is at the center.
Everyone and
everything else is secondary, revolving like satellites around that
singular being, basking in his or her energy, wisdom, or rulership.
The
periphery around the center, on the other hand, is often seen as a
line of defense to protect the center. It is where we build the walls,
the fences, the moats, and other boundaries to keep the unwanted out and
the desired in. In addition, the periphery is not seen as the place
where the "good stuff" is: the enlightenment, the wisdom, the
power, the energy and so forth. The job of the periphery is to protect,
to reflect the glory of the center, and to obey the center.
The
sun shines in the sky, and all else must find meaning and value in
relationship to it, rather than autonomously within themselves.
This
privileging of the center creates
hierarchies that extend out from that center, with the periphery
being the point farthest away and thus lowest in a hierarchy where the
center is at the top.
In a spiritual context, such an
image has led us to give more value to what is transcendent and
transpersonal than to what is incarnate and personal. Reality, truth,
spirit are seen as being close to the center, which is the sacred or the
void, and distant from the periphery, which is us. In an extreme form we
see our personal, incarnate selves and all the world around us just as a
dream or an illusion, while reality is somewhere else in some spiritual
realm where God, the Christ, Masters, Angels, and so forth live.
In
this manner, the privileging of
the center not only creates singularity but also duality and separation:
the center and the periphery.
Why, for instance, call places of spiritual learning and activity, such
as the Findhorn community in
Scotland
, "spiritual centers"? If the task is to engage the world at
our boundaries where we can give and receive, offer and learn, then why
not call them "spiritual peripheries"? This is even more
evident when we realize that the impact of a place like Findhorn is
really found in the lives of the people who go there and then return to
the larger world, taking back with them the fruits of their experiences
and living a more holistic and inspired life. They are not at the
"center" any more; they are the periphery where the spirit of
Findhorn actually encounters the world beyond its boundaries.
In
recent years, though, a counter-image has been appearing in a variety of fields.
For instance, for years
the nucleus at the center of a cell was seen as the ruler and
coordinator of the life of the cell. Modern biological research has
proven this conception wrong. Most of the regulatory and control
elements in a cell exist in the cell membrane at the periphery. After
all, it's the membrane that is directly in touch with the world with
which the cell must engage. The nucleus can be removed from a cell and
it will go on happily and efficiently managing its life. What it cannot
do is heal itself by replicating damaged protein molecules. It appears
that the nucleus, oversimplifying it a bit, is a master library or
archive that holds the blueprints for the protein molecules within the
body of the cell. If the nucleus is removed, the blueprints are lost,
and without the blueprints to compare to, new proteins cannot be
manufactured to replace those that are damaged.
But the point is, the
nucleus is not the center of cellular life in the way that we usually
think of centers and what they do; instead, it is the periphery that
controls and manages the life.
An
even better shift of perspective arises from the study of ecology.
Ecologies are systems of interrelationship and interdependency between
various organisms. While made up of thousands and millions of organic and
inorganic elements, an ecology also has an emergent character or
identity of its own. The ecology of a desert is not the same as the
ecology of a rainforest, and the felt sense of the presence of life in
an
Arizona
desert is not the same as that same felt sense in the midst of a forest
in the Cascade Mountains near
Seattle
.
The
nature of an ecology is that it is an interactive, self-regulating,
holistic system that doesn't have a center. Walk out into a forest and
ask yourself, "Where is the center that is organizing and
controlling this forest?" Or walk into the desert and ask the same
question. Obviously, the question is meaningless. Forests and deserts,
and all other kinds of ecologies, just don't act like that. They are
structured as holisms, not as centers and peripheries or suns and
satellites.
Think
of this in a spiritual context. In the normal Judeo-Christian context,
God is seen as the universal and absolute Center around which all
creation revolves. The sacred is the ultimate "Sun," and
throughout history has often been represented as a sun (or even as our
sun specifically). We are all peripheral to this Center, and our
relationship with it is often characterized as one of obedience.
But in Eastern
religious philosophy, the sense of the sacred is more diffused. It is
the "center without a circumference," the center that is
everywhere and nowhere, the center that is equally within all things.
This
is not quite the same as seeing the sacred as an ecology, but this may
be one direction in which contemporary spirituality is moving. My own
spiritual mentor, a non-physical being whom I called "John,"
once said in the late Eighties that "the spirituality
of the future will include a spirituality of boundaries [the
periphery]." We have had spiritualities of the
center. But what about a spirituality of the periphery, a spirituality
of edges and boundaries?
To John, the boundary is where co-creativity takes
place. It is the place of engagement and emergence. It is the place of
generosity and love, not as a radiance from a single center but as a
relationship, a partnering, or an alliance that honors all involved and
is generated by all involved. To John, generosity was not just a one-way
flow from one person to another, but something that my friend Freya
Secrest, President of the Lorian Association, calls "shared
gifting," a concept pioneered in the administration of Waldorf
Schools. It is a mutually created condition reflecting openness and
exchange at the boundaries.
In
a new kind of spirituality based on ecological principles, which might
be called an incarnational spirituality, the periphery or boundary is not the
place of walls and protection but the place of bridges and interfaces,
the place of communication and communion, the place of discovery and
emergence.
Likewise,
a
spirituality of the whole system, the whole ecology, is very
incarnational as it moves away from traditional center/periphery
hierarchies and distinctions. The non-physical realms, the spiritual
realms and beings, are no longer seen as the sole resources for truth,
light, love, and so forth. Such "good stuff" can now be found
in the incarnational periphery, in the presence and expression of matter
and the life of the embodied person.
[[[i.e., we are Awakening and BEing the MORE of who and what we
are as spirit right where we are, everywhere.]]]
Reimagining
the center has been one of the historical tasks of the United States. There has always
been a tension in our country between center and periphery.
This shows up, for example, in the tension between having a strong central government and having an ecology
of independent States acting in a coordinated way, the primary issue
that precipitated our Civil War. It shows up in the continual
balancing act between centralized federal and state governments and the
rights of the individual. The American
Constitution is one of the great world documents that articulates this
reimagination of the center by juxtaposing the rights of the sovereign
individual against the rights of the state as embodying the collectivity
of all individuals within its boundaries.
But
this struggle
of reimagination
continues. How much should we look to the Federal government as the
center of national life to do for us? How much should we do for
ourselves? Politicians and pundits sometimes speak derisively of
"life within the Beltway," meaning those who live and work in
Washington, D.C. inside the freeways that circle the city, with the
implication that here is a center that is divorced from the periphery,
which represents the rest of the country. The implication is that real
life goes on in the country, out in the periphery, a life from which
politicians and bureaucrats are isolated. Is
America
found in
Washington
, or is
America
found in the States? Where is the real
America
, in its capitals or in its cities or in its rural areas?
Put
this way, we can see how silly this dichotomy can be. If
America
is anywhere, it is in all these places, in all the centers and
peripheries we create, and most especially, in the hearts, minds, and
lives of each of its citizens.
In
reimagining the center, we must be careful not to create a mirror image
of the separation and singularity that this concept can foster by
implicitly assigning a "center-like" role to the periphery or
the boundaries. A healthy cell
needs both its membrane and its nucleus. The idea here is not to
privilege one over the other but to honor how they work as part of a
larger holistic system, as part of an ecology.
What
kind of ecology do we form with the government? What kind of ecology do
we form with the sacred? Our
power is that individually we can be either a center or a boundary, and
we can go beyond them as well into a form of co-created, shared
wholeness that I feel is our evolutionary edge at the moment.
We
are reimagining the center to being part of an alliance, part of a
community, part of an ecology, a partner in the expression of the whole
system, not just in one aspect of it.
In
this sense, the millennia-old image of the Sun is morphing into a
different image that is that of the Star. Obviously, the celestial
object that is our sun is also a star. As such it is a radiant part of a
larger galactic community. It is part of a cosmic ecology.
Any
of us can be a sun. We are all centers of something in our lives. But we
are also engaged at our boundaries with others who also are centers. We
live in the midst of an ecology of centers, an ecology of suns, a galaxy
of everyday life. In this sense, we can think of ourselves as stars as
well. It is the emergence of our stardom and learning what this implies
in a world of interactive and co-creative partners and systems that is
our next step.
If
we take that step, then my t-shirt will have to be redrawn so that one
arrow points to the entire galaxy with all the star-suns within it and
says, "The Good Stuff is in all of it."
©
2004 by David Spangler
[more
about] Incarnational Spirituality
By David
Spangler
Incarnation
usually means simply being alive on this world in a physical body.
Incarnational spirituality includes this definition but expands upon it. We see incarnation not only as a state of being but as an
ongoing activity. It is the primal act of creation, the fundamental
activity that brings the universe into being and then sustains it in its
evolution and unfoldment. We participate in the process of this activity
by incarnating ourselves every day through our thoughts and feelings,
our choices and actions, our relationships and our work.
Incarnational
spirituality is a study and a practice to make this process of creative
activity conscious and mindful in our daily lives. It is a practice of
recognizing how we participate not only in the unfolding of our own
particular beings but in the manifestation and emergence of all beings
in the world around us, leading to a deeper consciousness of love,
blessing, and co-creativity.
Through
incarnation, we participate in a fundamental process of the act of ‘selfing’,
particularizing in ourselves the presence of universal Identity. We also
participate in supporting this same process in others and in all the
things of this world, even when their manifestation of self is very
different from our own. Incarnation is not just a personal event but our
participation in the process of emergence from which the universe is
unfolding.
In
this manner, incarnational
spirituality is concerned with both our unique particularity--it is
person-centered--and the universal beingness we share with everything
else in creation. It fosters both personal identity and an ecological
awareness of our interconnectedness and co-incarnational relationship
with the rest of the world. It calls us to honor our own individuality
and the individuality inherent in others and stresses the twin
conditions of freedom and compassionate accountability.
Incarnational Spirituality
acknowledges and engages with transpersonal and transcendent levels of
being, but it puts its primary emphasis on the spiritual resources
emerging from our incarnate lives. It sees our embodied, unique,
personal self as a source of spiritual energy and presence,
manifestation and blessing. It seeks to draw out that spirituality
within our everyday lives in a way that honors our personhood, our
individual sovereignty, and the sacredness of physical existence. It
explores in practical ways how our personalities can be the focus of
emergence for our spiritual and co-creative power.
David Spangler, ©
2004
http://lorian.bigmindcatalyst.com/cgi/bmc.pl?page=pubpg1.html&node=1011
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MYTH LIST
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1.
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The
phenomenon of EHEs of this age -- ultimately awakening all of us
to the MORE that we are as Human, transforming us one person and
one experience at a time [Rhea A. White] |
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2.
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The
Universe Story [Thomas Berry and
Brian Swimme; Teilhard de Chardin] |
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3.
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The Caterpillar and the
Butterfly, Generation 2! [Elisabet
Sahtouris]
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4.
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The New Isis Myth [Rudolf
Steiner]
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5.
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Reimagining the Center [David
Spangler]
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6.
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The
Ten Thousand Mirrors [Paul H. Ray and
Sherry Ruth Anderson]
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7.
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Incarnational
Spirituality [David
Spangler]
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8.
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Something
along the lines of Limitless Love and Truth's Revelations? [David
Spangler]
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9.
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We
have much more creative control over our lives and so-called
deaths that we ever imagined! [Mellen
Thomas Benedict] |
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10.
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??
[PMH Atwater]
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11.
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The
Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily--an initiatory myth; how about
a global myth on this theme? [Johann W.
von Goethe]
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12.
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The
Gnostics' story so relevant to NOW!
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13.
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The
Cosmic Christ; the Earth Logos; the Sun Being who incarnated
for our sakes and for the Earth [David Spangler; Rudolf Steiner,
...]
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14.
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Oneness
[Rasha; David Spangler; Rudolf
Steiner, etc.]
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15.
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We
are wakening to our innate creative / co-creative powers as
Self-Aware, divine beings [Abraham-Hicks;
Neville; AK Mozumdar; etc.]
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16.
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Ishtar-Tammuz
[suggested by Joan Borysenko in
The Fabric of the Future]
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