Mirror To The Universe

—Community Spirituality

By Rob Mohr

 

“Alone, we can do little – Together we can do so much.”
—Helen Keller

 

As early as 100,000 years before the common era, Paleolithic and Neolithic hominid communities lived in both the spiritual and physical worlds. Their dominant art and architecture were the stage and setting for communal spiritual rituals. Myths, rituals, gods, ancestors, and anthropomorphic beings dominated human focus. Stone markers defined sacred ground, portals between worlds, and sites where the gods and goddesses visited humanity. Magical rituals opened the spiritual realm and revealed its treasures to humanity. 

But today, ego-centered spirituality has become personal, a commodity sold by competing spiritual guides and shamans. Even within major religions, spiritual tourism to sacred sites and “thin places” is a goal of many believers. The impact of internally idealized commercial forms of individual spirituality promotes “a light hidden under a basket,” which enables formation of an interior wall blocking access to the creative dimensions of communal spiritual practices. Narrowly defined individual spirituality, which comforts and supports the individual, has little impact on communal life. 

Negative energy, created by self-indulgence, greed, and the absence of compassion, remain a primary cause of divisions and violence in the world, and limits communal access to the positive energy embedded in the spiritual field. Evaluation of human societies and the human psyche reveals the many ways ego-centric life, with its privileged perspective, works against unity and goodness and keeps humanity divided into aggressive nation states.

In contrast, when a small group collectively explores infinite spiritual fields of the cosmos, members’ visions and awareness are enriched through inclusive spiritual discourse. Members of small groups roam the spiritual cosmos encouraged by the compassionate embrace and shared love of their spiritual community. 

Contemporary scientific evidence adds additional support for this spiritual adventure. Physicists have concluded that within our cosmos, the nonphysical (spiritual) field, unbound by time or distance, is in control of the physical field of the cosmos subtended by an all-knowing universal mind. Plato called this mind the “cosmic soul,” and the Judeo-Christian world says this mind is an “all-knowing god.” This new scientific understanding has opened a window on the spiritual world that has been closing over the past fifteen hundred years. 

Spiritual communities explore their spiritual roots through Taizé services, where simple music becomes the medium for human transformation. Other new practices like sharing spiritual experiences and community rituals, within and outside of organized religions, also enable entry and engagement with the spiritual world. When groups collectively engage the guiding spiritual field, participants awaken to vast new possibilities previously unimagined, and their perspective changes. Awake, participants are able to engage the transformative power of new insights and awakened abilities as they begin this new adventure into the unknown.    

Today, when small groups gather in their sacred spaces and share communal narratives in preparation for external performance, they expand the ways we spiritually relate to the natural world and seek communion with all sentient life. They enter dimensions where the “all-knowing soul of creation” will be present, not with a long white beard, but as an information flow into our souls which participants will convert to knowledge as they once again play beyond the surface of the physical world. Our spiritual curiosity, that was tied up when we were children, will be released, and our shared thoughts will combine as they open spiritually into a textured, holistic life.

Humanity, as an evolutionary, enlightened community of explorers, will reconnect with the vast foundational reality of the cosmos. An adventure you may want to participate in.

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