Seeds for a happy planet

Just for dinner, on the second day, this clear message came through one of us. It made us all silent and we all knew the words were true. We offer it as a gift to others and hope you treat it with the same respect as we did.

“Be aware that what we do here is important. The new groove of consciousness is a collective one. Be aware that this is very important for the world. Although you might not know where it leads you, please follow the track. Stay tuned with your bodies, or your senses and your womb. It is a sensing organ because there is space, emptiness to receive. This is what makes you special as women, not in a way special as better. But special as this certain capacity that is needed in this being, this living organism.

(more…)

Last weekend I was part of a most remarkable gathering at De Heerlijckyt in Belgium. This specific constellation of people emerged from an Art of Hosting training, which happened at the same venue early October ‘06. Before this gathering there were a lot of friendships build over the last years and months. Somehow we sensed we all hold a piece of work and competence that will be necessary for the future of Europe.

We don’t hold any official autority, not at all, but we feel called to how we can put ourselves into service for the best of the world to come. We called ourselves a Jedi Council or Circle.
A little harvest:
“We are all holding some kind of pain, struggle or conflict. We often carry it away to the side to be with it on our own. It builds a sense of isolation, and we creep into it – it becomes bigger than we are.

We have here, together, a container that transcends and embraces our struggles and our hopes and joys, our present and our future. It is made up of the consciousness that we all partake of and participate in. What we individually bring is our unique personal perspectives. That struggle between what we aspire to and what we perceive as present and real is arising inside that vast field of consciousness. We are big enough to hold it ALL and still have room to seed the future with what emerges from the centre of our circle.”

One of us wrote: “I’m still digesting what happened. I would not hesitate to call it a peak experience.”

These last years a lot has been said about bringing balance between left and right hemisphere, between knowing and feeling, between mental and inner knowing.

Lots of people use the word intuition as opposed to or as counterbalance for the mental knowing. But what is intuition really?

I think it is useful to make a differentiation between intuition and felt sense. The latter is a concept introduced by E.Gendlin, within his philosofical/therapeutic work of Focussing.
I understand intuition as recieving some information: this can be a thought, a feeling, an image… If we want this more feminine side of knowing to take its full place to balance the mental knowing, then this ‘recieving information’ needs refining, and widening.

As Gendlin states: Felt Sense is a “body sensation that has meaning”. “A felt sense is often subtle and as you pay attention to it you discover that it is intricate. It has more to it.” So it is not only a thought, or only an image, but a “….dimension of experience which is not emotion and not thought, which is subtle yet concretely felt, absolutelty physically real”. This I see as the refinement of the concept of intuition.
The broadening exist in the relationship of this Felt Sense with the world around, the context. If the mutual influence between my intuition and the context I am in is not taken into account it can still be (very) useless.

Yesterday evening, I was listening to Yasuhiko Kimura on WIE Unbound and he is talking about thinking; not only the remembering of information and shuffle it around, but real new thinking. It is his life’s mission to teach people how to really think.

It reminds me of something I read in the book of Satprem on Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo states that it is not us who think, but that we receive thoughts (and also emotions) from outside. These last few days I was meditating – contemplating on this and I guess it is true. In meditation I can reach this Ground of Being where I am totally still and at the same time there is a high energy ‘happening’. Like how I envision the wood or metal of the table, which is still, but I know the electrons are spinning around at high speed. In these moments of true meditation I’m able to leave all thoughts – old and new – outside. The next thing is, that I can choose to open the door, so to speak, for new thoughts to come in. Probably this is what Andrew Cohen is calling ‘the edge of not-knowing’.

Another line of new thinking that I came across recently is called Thinking at the edge ; a term and a process invented by Eugene Gendlin. This resonates deep in myself as it refers to a process that integrates, or even better: access the bodily wisdom and makes real new thoughts possible.

If we could once integrate all this what new territories of knowing could we discover??!!