As an “expert intuitive,” I was involved for many years as a staff member with The Center for Applied Intuition in San Francisco. Part of their vision was of a group of intuitives or spiritual teachers who would work together, individually and in teams, to serve private industry and the public. That excited me because I’ve always held a vision of independent, spiritually-oriented colleagues who could collaborate and truly support each other, and whose work was complementary. I was disappointed, though, that many of the people were so caught in a need for recognition that they had trouble cooperating and cocreating. Even though they advocated living by spiritual principles, they were still afraid of losing clients to a colleague. I was let down, but the vision of a truly collaborative group of associates still persists.
As long as I can remember, whenever I access higher levels of information intuitively, I see a council or a collective group consciousness, rather than a single spiritual guide or wise soul at the top of a hierarchy. When I enter a meditative state, I experience merging with the collective knowledge of this group mind. If I soften and expand myself, I encompass more and more of it. Whatever comes through me comes from that pool of knowledge. In this model, knowledge is shared equally, given freely, and there is plenty for all. Perhaps this has contributed to my sense that in this earthly world there should be a similar reflection of that organizational pattern where each person is a unique filter for wisdom. And, of course, I’m disappointed when human fears and ego get in the way.
I’ve had a feeling for a long time that I belong to a group of souls who are parallel to me in development — a soulgroup. This is no doubt the “council” I’ve been seeing in my mind. Many people I work with feel their genetic family is not their “real” family. They sense intuitively that there is another family — a spiritual one — that they belong to. They’re always muttering under their breath, “Where are my people?”
Do you feel you’ve met people you’ve known before, people you inexplicably resonate with, who share similar ideas and a similar life quest? Do these people often seem more like family than your family of origin? I believe we are part of these resonant, morphological fields of groups of souls, these families of like-minded others, and some of them are alive in a body now — some may be in your family of origin, or they may be in your group of friends or colleagues. Others exist nonphysically in higher dimensions and you might connect with them in dreams or meditation. The concept of spiritual family or the soulgroup is entering mass consciousness now. And this relates strongly to the idea of fellowship.
What Is Fellowship?
I think fellowship begins with the “end of contest.” I’d like to make a subtle distinction between contest and competition. Let’s say that contest is where ego is involved, where you are winning for the sake of winning, and the spirit of play, of the game, is not there. In contest you’re caught in polarization; in competition you’re going the same direction. Bit by bit we’re shifting from this oppositional, better-or-worse-than-thou stance to a spirit of cooperative competition.
I remember Tom Peters, the management guru, describing how one company actually gave their secrets to their competitors; they made it into a game to help their competitors so they could all perform more effectively and pleasurably. Teams in their production facility helped each other, but competed with each other at the same time. This way everyone evolved to a higher level. So fellowship has to do with coming together with the idea that everything you do helps further the other person’s growth somehow.
Fellowship really comes from practicing the Golden Rule: you are your brother’s and sister’s keeper and they are your keeper. We care for and protect our “relations.” If we want the best for ourselves, we learn that provision comes from those we tend, so giving them what they need is what motivates them to do the same for us. Yet the Golden Rule can become a hackneyed phrase that we repeat occasionally but don’t take to heart and live as if our life depended on it. The more you practice it, the more you understand that our lives do depend on it. The idea is to treat the other person as though they are you, and to imagine in great detail how you would feel standing in their body. The truth is that hurting another really does hurt you.
When you experience the essence of things in your innermost reality, you find there truly is a one-selfness in all sentient beings, and a one-vitality or livingness in all things. We know it in our head, but it takes some focus to feel it and practice feeling it until we convince ourselves it’s the true reality. We’re currently convinced that we are separate beings, largely because of our old linear, here vs. there, physical vs. nonphysical perceptual reality. Our thought process itself is powerful enough to divide us and cause gaps in time and space. Unless you meditate and practice dropping down inside yourself, underneath form, to what’s in the being realm, you don’t really experience The Golden Rule.
The State of Fellowship: Conscious Communion and Cocreation
Fellowship is actually a state of consciousness, what I often term conscious communion. This is a kind of perception where you experience that one energy connects all living things, moving continually in waves through a unified field of consciousness. Knowledge from one form carries into all others. Everything knows about everything else and shares energy with everything else. Both animate and inanimate things are in communion all the time, but our mind is often not in the communion state with them. Our mind easily separates from the natural interrelatedness of life and nature because we can imagine jumping out of the here-and-now into other times, spaces, and realities. Each time we leave the communion experience, or fellowship state, we feel fear and isolation and begin to suffer.
To experience conscious communion, your mind must be centered inside your body, in the present moment, and you must settle down, become quiet, open to trust, and pay attention to what’s showing up within arm’s reach. Then your attention merges with the world and you experience unity. It is through conscious communion that we learn to understand how fellowship works.
What Cocreation Teaches Us
Cocreation is another concept that helps us understand the experience of fellowship. We know that we create our reality by the thoughts and level of vibration we radiate. I populate my world each day, as do you, with various characters who represent parts of myself I’m interested in becoming aware of. Sometimes our needs, and thus our worlds, overlap and contain similar ideas and frequencies — and it’s then when we appear in each other’s worlds and interact. This is a kind of cocreativity in which I include others in my “bubble” and they include me in theirs—the result being that we cocreate a mutually shared reality from our collective wisdom and need.
At a deeper level, I realize the decisions I make in my life affect your life, and vice versa. Similarly, my creativity helps you be creative and your creativity feeds mine. I provide you with either more or less permission and space in which to act and create. You do the same for me. Judgment shuts us down. Acceptance opens us up. This is clear with people we’re close to — we obviously impact each other. But even people who are distant from you, the ones you don’t know — their decisions affect your life too, and your decisions affect theirs.
In the inner realms, we are directly interconnected — with no time and space separation — so even someone’s sarcasm can feel like a mini act of violence. Or someone’s kindness to another can feel like a personal rescue. We are affected, even though our left brain tells us it’s “distant, impersonal, and not that important.”
So we are cocreating a shared reality in which we all show up in each other’s imaginations; the outer manifestation of what happens in the world is a result of the collective decisions and actions the entire populace of the globe makes day-by-day, minute-by-minute. It’s a constantly shifting reality and it’s able to change on a dime as the choices of the people change.
What I Learned from Working in Japan
I learned a lot about fellowship from working in Japan for over twenty years. There is such an internal interconnectedness there — everyone knows they affect everyone else, and they can’t just run away when they’re uncomfortable because the country is too small. Taking care of each other’s inner well-being is a core motive in the culture. Because of that, it’s almost impolite to have an opinion, because you might stand out too much and the flow of the group would divert and go your way — and then you’d be embarrassed for being so egotistical. Equal contribution of all group members would not be able to occur. So, group problem-solving proceeds in a mysterious way, where no one says much directly, but a seemingly aimless discussion proceeds for an inordinate amount of time until finally the solution seems to emerge by itself. Everyone wins, no one loses face. We can learn about inner connectedness and the cohesiveness of groups from Asian cultures and they can learn a little more about authenticity and individuality from us.
True, enlightened fellowship needs both a strong, clear, individual consciousness — one not caught up in ego — and a cooperative, empathic group consciousness, to function optimally. Without respect for the personal identity, originality and personal growth suffer. Without respect for the group identity, harmony and nurturing suffer. Without strong individual awareness, self-sacrifice runs rampant. Without strong group sensitivity, alienation and violence abound. So, with true fellowship, the individual is respected as a source of innovation and growth and the collective consciousness is respected as a source of harmonious organization and integration.
Entering the Experience of Fellowship
When I want to shift into a deeper experience of fellowship, I begin by meditating on, and feeling into, the divine presence. I affirm that a higher sanity and orderliness of universal laws is inherent in all the particles of my body. As soon as I’m saturated with that feeling, my awareness spreads out and I notice the environment and how the same presence and light is in the air around my body and in all the atoms of matter. I then notice a homogeneity of energy moving through all things and that there is a kind of personalness suddenly — that because there is no separation between myself and other things, then the air must know me.
The tree must be aware of me because we’re made of the same stuff. There is a familiarity and a cozy family feeling then with all the forms of life. And suddenly there is a flow of joy: Everybody knows me! Nothing is separate from me. I have friends everywhere! It makes me feel safe. And you know how, when a child feels safe and protected, they play and show off unselfconsciously? I feel that way, like I want to play, like I want to move beyond my comfort zone, beyond the little bubble I’ve defined as myself.
So, what used to be impersonal becomes personal. I see I have a personal relationship with life. Conversely, my personal issues and agendas become less personal. Everything I thought was so important, all my identity — I don’t own it alone, but share it. It doesn’t need promotion and protection. Why give my stuff so much attention when I’m in everything! It’s too boring to stay so small all the time.
With fellowship, there is a feeling of mutual containment, like I expand out and contain all of you in my bubble of reality. You are in my awareness, in my field of energy, which is sentient. If you expand and include me in your bubble or body of awareness, and everybody else expands and includes everybody else in their bubble of awareness, we get this one bubble of all our merged selves, and that’s what we call “reality.” It’s a collaboration. All these bubbles, each containing each other out of choice. Doesn’t that feel better than our usual view of an inimical world locked in contest?
ME and US
If I keep paying attention, I have a new experience of ME. There is an US that is me. Actually, I am a “Me-Us.” You and I are this big, collective self, and we’re also still the individual Penney, or Josh, or Megan. We’re like a huge sphere, the Us-ball, with each individual experiencing itself as the central nucleus. To understand fellowship, we must be able to live with this paradox of I’m Penney and I’m the whole. We have to be willing to be authentic, to be loyal to what’s emerging from the Me in the moment.
By doing this, we discover, and quite joyfully, that we are not limited by our past at all, that we are new every second. We experience that the source of our creativity and knowledge is not our own puny, limited past history. We can access insight from our soulgroup, from the entire history of the planet, from all the souls who have ever lived, in all their lifetimes, everywhere, in every time period. Our resources are truly unlimited. So, by trusting the others who are cocreating this world with us, and by being loyal to the divine power that sends consciousness through us all, we become enlightened, both as individuals and as groups, through the power of fellowship.
Fellowship occurs when we are authentic individuals and feel how we belong in the larger scheme of things. It occurs when we are loyal to the creativity that wants to emerge through us, and in the group, and we serve that emergence. Fellowship causes us to become aware of like-minded groups whose members have similar levels of development. And through this we grow in wisdom and kindness.
Copyright by Penney Peirce