Love and Peace
Put the Inner Development Goals together with enlightenment, awakening and love! Really. Around sustainability there's a tendency to go small, to try and fit in. How about having it all instead?
Sustainability is confounding. It is in our individual and collective interests to make this happen fast. Synergistically it delivers profits, purpose for people, passion and is profound for our planet. However, delivery seems stuck and we are all, consciously or unconsciously, experiencing difficulties, empathy with everything in trouble and from the strain on our interconnected systems. I feel this, we all do, we’re all connected. Consequently, to paraphrase Eisenhower, let’s make the problem bigger, much bigger and include our experiences of oneness!1
Awakening
40% of the population, by most estimates, has anomalous experiences, visionary experiences, mystical experiences. One of the problems of the meaning crisis is they don't have a framework to integrate those experiences.
John Vervaeke
Forty percent is extraordinary: we are responding to our times, remembering and feeling a truth that we are all part of a whole as well as unique individuals.2
We experience this as states of oneness: interpenetrating and pulsating. We may describe energy and vibrations, senses of entireness, bliss, radiance, as well as sensations, movement, visions and experiences of unique entities and/or presences.3
Which is mind-bending. However, there are other realities4 and when I treat these as if they are true a simple framework is love and peace.
The peace part is more conventional. We’ve traditionally sought out awakened states through various spiritual traditions: Nothingness, emptiness—it’s masculine in nature and becoming accepted in organisations and western society through mindfulness.5
Then there’s feminine energy of awakening, love, and as a starting point it can be challenging, not the least as we privilege masculine frameworks in our society.
Love
There's nothin' you can know that isn't known
Nothin' you can see that isn't shown
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy
All you need is love
The Beatles
We tried this recently at the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) summit in Stockholm.6 Our task: take one of two positions “I love the IDGs” or “I am sceptical about IDGs” and then inquire with a partner into the other’s perspective.
I took love. It’s our natural state, it’s what we are awakening to. Why would I not ‘love’ anything that is helping this transition?
I asked my partner about this, about helping us to shift, about loving frameworks and structures that help us to do this.
And… well she became more sceptical. By asking questions about love I was reinforcing scepticism. What a delightful gift she gave me!
Unexpected places
Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.
Kahlil Gibran
We debriefed the role play together. What would work and avoid reverse psychological polarisation? I could have asked:
what would make it safer to ‘love’ the IDGs? And next,
how could we be courageous with this ‘love’? Then,
what do you need to lead with this ‘love’?
This is developmental, feeling and connecting with the other person to sense what’s needed.7 We’re asking and allowing scepticism to come along for the ride. Not to bland it over or deny difficulty. However, to ensure it is not driving the car.
A developmental love story
You can feel the pulse
First there was star dust
And now there's us
All I ever was
All I'll ever be
Connected Luke Dick
There’s a meta move here. We’re letting both feminine and masculine awakening energy be part of our stories. It’s asking us to be there with our multiple intelligence so that we sense and feel:
Because I am with you I am different, co-creative. Let each other in and let each other change us.
The wholeness of all of our emotions enabling leaders as a force for good.
What moves me from me to we and accelerates trust.8
In one way or another, at varying levels of intensity, so many of us are aware we are so much more, way more than transactional individuals.
Meaning
What’s meaning for you: Contributing to a kinder, sustainable and wiser world? One where all of your needs are fully met? All needs are met? Letting yourself fully embrace integration, feeling into all, one and entireness?!
The power here is to help us all step into our biggest selfs. We can practice this e.g. sense into the connections and consciousness all around us: Try this is collaboration here>
When I do practices like this it helps to wire my higher state experiences. In the love and scepticism role play, it makes it more likely for me to ask connecting questions and attune to other’s needs in the moment.
This is the call to have it all, there is so much more to us. We are wanting to be loved for who we are, wanting to contribute with all of our experiences. A framework for making sense of this, having more of it, is love and peace alongside the developmental, non-naive forms of that.
Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except #1 Hugo Klip photography (I am one of the two people in this photo).
"Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” credited to Dwight D. Eisenhower
Steve Taylor, Waking From Sleep: Why Awakening Experiences Occur and How to Make Them Permanent and Andrew Newberg, Mark Robert Waldman, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation and listen to:
In interviews with me people commonly talk about their peak experiences. This is across multiple realms, physical and subtle. It includes in nature, with animals, forests, rivers and feeling as if they are part of the other, the whole of what’s around them extending through or as them, and expanding out limitlessly beyond the horizon, including across time. Psychedelics sometimes feature (less than you might think). People recount peaks too with their children, babies and birth. ‘Flow like’ states are described in work contexts, exercise, sport, over mountains and with groups. Limitless, boundless experiences in meditative states feature too as well as through satori presence. The red pill describes a bit of how I experience this here>
I ask about this particularly when scoring people (usually with The Core Teresa Zimmermann ‘s beautiful model). This gives us actionable clarity on our personal development at a depth nothing else I know of does. Please reach out email> for more.
Down the cognitive-reality-ontological wormholes try Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Our Wild Kosmos (ontological indeterminacy). Or, extend the definition of yourself and people around you to embrace your interactions and experiences of “beings in the more-than-human world– and indeed the cosmos itself– as sentient and responsive”: Peter Reason, Extending co-operative inquiry beyond the human, Action Research Journal. And try on an “altogether alternative mode of cognition, a strategic and synergistic mode cultivated not via abstract theorizing but by visceral, sensory, agentically engaged practices of responsive attunement to one’s immediate environment”: Freya Mathews, The Dao of Civilization.
In my body, other realities for me can feel like all of my cells opening. A void like universe, from the planet beneath my feet through my body, my cells resonating just like the singularities of light in that void. A sense of my boundary—however that is ‘right’ in the particular moment of now—defining myself as the void and distinct being filled by this and merging through it. It’s a timeless place, peaceful and super sensuous. Often sharp and clear, like tuning into the smell of air on a pristine winter morning’s exquisite, spectre-light, breeze.
“The funny thing about emptiness is that it’s not about an inner experience of being nothing, but it’s the bottom of separateness falling out. When you investigate one thing, you find everything else.” Adyashanti, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Embodying the Relative and Absolute Dimensions of Being
And on mindfulness see Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out, Jamie Bristow, Rosie Bell and Professor Christine Wamsler for both peace, capacity and awareness and love, compassion and connection.
For more see the IDG framework, co-created (I am part of the science panel) by 1000+ scientists, experts and HR & Sustainability professionals here>. Plus see the Inner Development Goals summit>
The developmental steps shift from a self-centric viewpoint, safety, through self-questioning (courage) to hosting simultaneity and abundance. For most people those later ‘bigger selves’ are peak states. This is part of why it’s so important to recognise the reality that many of us experience ourselves from such states and higher states. We can regard such experiences as anomalous. However (to paraphrase Michael Beckwith) I don’t call them altered states anymore, I just call them expanded awareness.