Hearts close in the small space of self-cherishing, self-indulgence, self-preservation, all the ways we become attached to our separate thoughts. Trungpa Rinpoche called it a neurotic fixation on one’s emotional flux and expressions. We may now include hacking my path through the monstrous jungle of governance and law, its intrusions, control mechanisms, its violence, criminally wielded with impunity. In these dire circumstances, we are finding our way to a clearing beyond the illusion of being solely in charge of our lives. We may act out the illusion of control, but we’re not really in charge, are we?
We seek refuge within the immense contradictions of modernity and its disorienting provocations, but this is not a time to narrow our focus, to dig ourselves deeper into the pursuit of personal ends. Even when we’re smitten by our own brilliance, our passion or certainty, we might ask in what is this tenacious pursuit grounded? As appealing as the messaging of autonomy and agency may be, and as paradoxical as it may sound, the solitary self is an abstraction. It is an accommodation to the greater spiritual and economic accommodation of capital. What are we forgetting? Whose interests are we serving?
Group practices (We-Space, Circling or Collective Presencing) convene with the intention to shed pre-occupation with self and identity, to whittle away at the habit of referencing ourselves and objectifying the world in thought, speech, and action and to investigate the relational field of intention. Rituals of self-affirmation, self-improvement, solidity, independence, and permanence keep us bound in linear time. In collective ritual, to the best of our ability, we put aside such atomizing rituals in favor of building intimacy and relational trust. We sense that this, being present in this way—not in a mythical now—alters our relations with time in a way that feels like a mutual inoculation against the invasive organism of chaos. It is an invitation to a different future. A more open, permissive and accepting atmosphere, swimming in exploration, awakening, attunement and shared vulnerability establishes a new Ground.
If the Middle is a-temporal (or multi-temporal), then the Ground recognizes and accepts a shifting equilibrium of priorities among individuals while at the same time managing the functional asymmetries of needs, gifts and contributions spread across the whole. The development of such intra-subjective depth invites a comparison to individual spiritual practice leveraged to a group setting. Intra-subjectivity implies a shift toward a subtle coherence in which others dissolve into a common field that sees beyond individual identities. We can rest at ease, capable of accessing pre-cognitive wisdom intrinsic to that presence without needing to defend an ego or manipulate what is happening. We enter the liminality of the Middle.
The vulnerability found there becomes shared empowerment. The Middle may feel like an anomaly, or a rehearsal, a gesture toward a different future, but it is not. It is the future, the ground of an integral future in which differences are mere ripples on the surface of a vast ocean. Instead of detracting from collective coherence, they contribute to it. It’s not that differences don’t make a difference, just that it is not our first priority to untangle them. It’s not our job to ‘figure it out,’ but to explore the sensations, to feel the shape of liminality, to rest in its mystery with sustained focus, to notice what distracts us, and to build capacity for this future right now.
If you’re not doing it in the moment, you’re not doing it.
—Doug Rushkoff, Ep 351
Collectively, we are just beginning to engage with the permanence of impermanence, the inevitability of becoming. The core of the Mahayana helps us comprehend this moment by naming the inherent instability of union, interdependence and emptiness as the ground on which we are always standing, which is no ground at all. There is no completion, no arrival. To claim a destination (or certainty) is not relational because the Ground is denied. Nor does arrival promise any true freedom, only an illusory fix. Emptiness and impermanence say there is nothing to seek, nothing to be found. Instead, we rest in open awareness: holding the whole, including our bodies, in a transitional state. Andrew Holocek claims this quality of openness is ‘so obvious we don’t see it, so simple we don’t believe it, so easy we don’t trust it.’
“By every act of pursuit, driven by a sense of incompletion, we are ‘postponing our appointment with reality.” –Andrew Holocek, Dreams of Light
In meditative practice, boundaries (spatial and temporal) soften—or even dissolve. We don’t feel this all the time because most of the time we are contracting…right along with everyone else. This is how we manage our lives. We retreat into a deep and strategic amnesia, cluttering the instant with memory, judgments and plans. Until there is a vivid opening, we don’t even notice how contracted we are. Meanwhile, we are so subliminally attuned to one another we mimic the contraction all around us.
Movement
A field moves. Precisely what moves or what it will become is unpredictable. At some point, finding our way depends on stepping away from any considerations about the future. But as soon as we come into relation, we are changed. We cannot predict exactly how we are changed as even two people together present infinite possibility. Paradoxically, when we give up all fixations on a future, the future we weren’t expecting has room to appear. It appears as the infrastructure of love, inviting us to shed our presumptions about the nature of space, of time, of inquiry or imagination. All are directly challenged as both individualism and the reflexive production of others begin to dissolve.
When we relate to each other as insubstantial representations of space (i.e. compressed time), the illusion of substance has nowhere to go. When I am alone, not immersed in an inter- or intra-subjective field, particularly when meditating, I can relax into the essence nature of what my senses tell me is solid. Relaxing into empty nature and impermanence approaches unconditioned experience because we are stepping back from the grasping nature of default consciousness whose mission is to perpetually reconstitute itself.
The Middle reminds us we are already whole and our wholeness includes everyone and everything. The system that tells us we are solitary is dismantled. Is there risk in holding such a minority position? Again, do our brains reveal or obscure reality? Our conditioned interpretations of experience take over from unvarnished organic perception. The simulations of reality created in the brain based on the past instantaneously assign meaning to raw perception, driving decisions and behavior. The full field of possible interpretations and response narrows.
Eventually, the brain presents a view of the world not so much based on what we are perceiving in that moment, but on what we are predisposed to see. Experience is handed to us before we have even an instant to consider alternative interpretations. That works for survival; we join the collective, managing together the controlled hallucination we call reality. But does it work when systems are disintegrating, when we are called to overcome tribalism and to reconnect in mythic time?
When we start investigating raw experience more closely, the dance of appearance and emptiness unfolds; the creativity and joy and raw potential of living from the Middle inspires. We can relax out of the narratives that drive the perpetual reach formore, the fuzzy values of late capitalism, the slippery facts and negotiable truths, the falsity of personal agency and perpetual urgency, exploitation, the theo-fascist fever dreams of civilizational conflict, the perverse drift that transforms relationships into transactions.
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