Christ is a Collective

I The Next Buddha

I don’t remember when I first read Michael Bauwans’ “The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective: Spiritual Expression in the Peer-to-Peer Era.” It was written in 2007; I doubt I saw it until at least 2012. I liked the title.

Bauwans suggested that society is evolving away from an historic emphasis on the individual and towards an emphasis on “distributed networks with peer-to-peer (P2P) based social relations” (35), such as online communities with a concentrated focus whose members came from all around the world. Bauwans believed this evolution had the potential to create new orders of power based on sharing rather than hoarding. “In a distributed network, the peers are free to connect and act, and organizational characteristics emerge from the choices of individuals” (35), rather than through top-down institutional directives.

For Bauwans, these networks reflect a shared intentional stance that community is at least as fundamental as the individual (35), and that consciousness evolves as an effect of this stance. “Truth, then, becomes a matter of integrating, encountering, and exchanging with others and their worldviews, so as to look at the world and its subjects and objects from a variety of viewpoints, each illuminating reality in a different way” (Bauwans 37). For the individual, reality is always partial but when we join intentionally, the nature of our access to reality expands.

Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them (MT 18:19-20).

Bauwans’ emphasis on the creative potential of new technological modes of communication is less convincing to me than the overarching concept that community-building matters more than individuation (indeed, in some ways, technology has been fracturous for community because of the way it highlights the psychological prerogatives of the individual (see, e.g., literally anything by Wendell Berry, Thoreau, Chellis Glendinning etc)). And the idea that community is more vital than the individual doesn’t feel new so much as familiar-but-distant, like a good idea we’ve forgotten but need to remember now.

Thich Nhat Hanh also pointed out (prior to Bauwans I believe) that the next Buddha might not be an enlightened individual – i.e., the lone spiritual hero under a Bo tree or strangling to death on a cross – but rather a sangha, a discipleship, a collective. Enlightenment not as a personal accomplishment but a “community practicing understanding and lovingkindness [and] . . . mindful living” (Nhat Hanh).

Who or what is the individual with respect to this community?

Bauwans was riffing off of a blog post by Helen Titchen Beeth, also published in 2007, entitled “Why The Next Buddha will be a Collective.” It is Beeth’s framing of the idea (communal rather than individual enlightenment) that I focus on here, the better to understand – to awaken to and make welcome – Christ as a collective, not an individual, experience.

II Reading Helen Titchen Beeth

In her essay, Beeth notices that she is naturally party to many rich and fascinating dialogues, all flowing into and out of one another. In her view, these seemingly separate dialogues together inform, deconstruct and create an ever-spiraling communion with a life of its own that naturally transcends (without effacing or occluding) the individual nodes comprising it. For Beeth, dialogue is inherently unified through relationship. It’s not possible for a dialogue to be separate, no matter how distant or distinct they may appear.

Beeth calls these dialogues – and the collectives out of which they arise – “pattern cohorts.” Pattern cohorts are groups of individuals who coalesce around important questions and ideas (e.g., what is consciousness, what is justice, how do we end conflict, feed the hungry). Each pattern cohort is inevitably incorporated in other larger patterns (regional non-profits, NGOs, religions, countries and so on), all of which eventually cash out in what we call the cosmos, and the limits of both our individual and shared understanding.

Because understanding is limited it cannot be dispositive. So the pattern cohort’s function is less to “answer” a question than to explore the space the question opens up in us. What feelings does it provoke? What arguments? What surprises appear? What new responsibilities? The suggestion is that this exploration helps midwife consciousness from its current emphasis on individuation to collectivism. It is collectivism – the whole remembering itself as the whole – which allows for a deeper and more helpful response to the challenges reflected in the questions and ideas.

“[Pattern cohorts participate in] a conscious return to collectivism where individuated, or self-actualised, individuals . . . pool their consciousness in a search for the elusive collective intelligence which can help us to overcome the stupendous challenges now facing us as a species . . . ” (Beeth).

So Beeth sees an evolution from 1) a whole in which the parts are unaware of wholeness to 2) a whole in which the parts awaken to their individuality in wholeness to 3) the parts together awakening as the whole.

What is common throughout that evolution is “the whole,” which I am going to call God. The “stupendous challenges” I am going to call separation and its effects. And collectivism I am going to call a holy relationship giving rise to a happy dream in which we see in the other – and offer to and accept from the other – “perfect freedom from all forms of lack” (T-30.VIII.2:5).

III A Tiny Mad Idea

Every ACIM student knows the story. Into eternity, where all was one, crept a tiny mad idea – “I’m me! I’m not you!” – at which Creation, instead of laughing away, took seriously (T-27.VIII.6:2). “I really am me – I really am separate from you.”

Shocked and scared at the sudden appearance of separation, and wracked with guilt at having apparently brought it about, we fall asleep and dream a dream so dense, complex and all-encompassing that it stops seeming like a dream at all. For all intents and purposes, death and suffering, war and famine, rape and torture – our self-imposed nightmare penalty for daring even to imagine separation – become real.

And all along God – the Unindividuated One, the Creator Itself, the One with No Other to Whom to Compare Itself – goes on unchanged and unchanging, uninterrupted and unbroken.

This is fiction! It is a story designed to help us “see” our separation from one another and the cosmos. It contextualizes the psychology of guilt and fear in a way that makes clear they are distortions of our actual nature. It reflects Beeth’s “whole in which the parts are unaware of the whole” transitioning to – separating into – “parts awakening to their individuality within the whole.”

So the work becomes – our ACIM practice becomes – realizing the next step in which the parts awaken together as the whole.

Heal your brothers simply by accepting God for them. Your minds are not separate . . . He is always accepted for all, and when your mind receives Him the remembrance of Him awakens throughout the Sonship” (T-10.III.2:4-5, 3).

This means remembering that our perception of the world and our lives in it are predicated on a misunderstanding. We really are asleep in the sense that our perception is distorted by our insistence that what we perceive is objectively real and our interpretation (our stance) beyond question. The effect of this distortion is a continual self-dissociation which sustains and expands the original confusion or separation. We have not only forgotten the Whole, we have forgotten that we forgot the Whole. In that sense, the separation is as real as anything ever can be.

Imagine you are lost but you don’t know you’re lost. All the things you’d do if you knew you were lost, you don’t do. You can’t do them because you don’t know you should do them. You sort of sense something’s wrong but you can’t say what, and so everything you do makes what is wrong worse, and you never – except once in a while by accident – do anything that actually helps.

That is the separation. That is how you and I live. And that is the situation into which A Course in Miracles appears and says, “there is another way. Let me show it to you.”

IV Holy Relationship

The other way offered by A Course in Miracles has to do with remembering what we are in truth which, in turn, has to do with undoing the internal blocks to that remembering. It is a process, not an event. Critically, it cannot be done alone.

In the framework of A Course in Miracles, “remembering” is not about recollecting or recalling some lost fact from the deep past. It’s closer to the ancient human framework of teaching and learning how to live together in harmony. The Holy Spirit teaches us what peace and happiness are by showing us how to share peace and happiness with our brothers and sisters.

Most of us are quite skilled in sharing with conditions – I’ll give you X if you give me Y. But that’s just bargaining with power. The Holy Spirit is teaching us actual giving, which means “without qualification or condition of any kind.” Actual power is naturally shared – Creation will not have it any other way (T-30.III.4:9).

The thoughts you think are in your mind, as you are in the Mind which thought of you. And so there are no separate parts in what exists within God’s Mind. It is forever One, eternally united and at peace (T-30.III.6:7-9).

Sharing also means having something to give – and knowing what that something is.

Sharing in this way – living together in this way – is an art (knowing merging with craft in and as creation) that we do not know how to do. Or rather, have forgotten how to do. That is why the course symbolizes the Holy Spirit as a Teacher. He teaches us to remember what we have forgotten. We have to learn how to share happiness and peace, in all the many settings and relationships that comprise our lives in the world. It takes time, attention and commitment. It is a practice that by necessity we share. 

The critical element of this learning is our relationship with our brothers and sisters. We do not wake up alone. As Beeth observes, the individual must voluntarily join with others in service of the whole. Only together can we realize the fullness of peace and happiness.

That sounds lovely in theory but can easily become confusing and even dangerous in application. It’s easy to dismiss as impossible or Utopian; it’s easy to scapegoat and abuse. There’s a reason Jesus was executed on a cross outside Jerusalem and it wasn’t to fulfill a divine promise. Before Love looks salvational, it looks scary and dangerous. Hence (in the context of the dream) the necessity of understanding and application. Understanding without application is sterile, and application without understanding loses direction. But together they become a light that makes clear our identity in and as Love.

It is in the context of embodiment that we have to learn – and teach – that we are not bodies, and it is in the context of a world, broadly defined to include the cosmos, that we have to learn – and teach – that there is no world.

But how?

Beeth points to the work of Morel Fourman on soul families in order to deepen our understanding of what it means to join in the sacred way implied by knowing each other as “brother” and “sister” (language that is fundamental to ACIM even as its application is regrettably sexist).

The soul family . . . is here to steward creation of a new form of civilisation. This new form of civilisation mirrors the most divine aspects of human consciousness in the larger systems and structures of human community and society . . . it reflects timeless values of love, cooperation, stewardship, a society which fulfils the promise in the words ‘as above, so below’ (Fourman).

This is the work that Jesus instantiated two thousand some odd years ago and which we – together, in the ways that we can be together – continue. The historical shift from Jesus pointing to the practice to a practice pointing at Jesus is unfortunate. Our work is to up-end and recreate the original practice.

Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing . . . Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W-189.7:2-3, 5).

In ACIM terms, this means giving attention to whether our relationships are holy or special. For me, for a long time, that boiled down to a simple question: is the relationship about you or about me? If it is about me – what I can get, how I can benefit – then it is special. But if it is about you – what I can give you, share with you, relieve for you – then it is holy.

There are good and valid reasons to make my living about you. There’s more flow in your life, and I let go a lot of egocentrism, which brings more flow to my life.

However, the emphasis on you – as helpful as it is – still leaves the separation intact. It’s definitely more loving and service-oriented – it definitely aligns with our “happy wakening and joy of life” (T-27.VII.9:4) – but it does not undo our mistaken belief in separation.

What undoes our belief in separation is realizing that relationship is not about the individual but the collective. The relationship itself is the point. What can we give to it rather than what we can we, individually, extract or gain from it? On this view, the relationship naturally subsumes our separate interests which makes it possible to set aside the high stakes nature of the personal, and thus experience from a new – a more open and holistic, a more holy – place our natural communion with God.

Blessed are you who learn that to hear the Will of your Father is to know your own. For it is your will to be like Him, Whose Will it is that it be so. God’s Will is that His Son be one, and united with Him in His Oneness (T-11.I.11:6-8).

The suggestion is that holy relationships are about co-creation – specifically, the co-creation of holiness, in order to produce circumstances in which what is One might perfectly remember Itself as Itself.

I accepted the binary paradigm of me-and-you for a long time. I worked very hard to shift from me-centered to you-centered thinking. But Beeth intimates an interesting and helpful evolution. What if it is no longer about me or you? What if the tired duality of self and other – of and/or altogether – can just be set aside?

What if it is about us? About what we are together? And what therefore comes forth through us? What grace awaits our union in order to make itself manifest?

V Happy Dreams

In any coherent sense, each one of our relationships (with a person, a flower, a lake, a principle) reflects – is a fractal of – our relationship with God. In turn, our relationship with God reflects – is a fractal of – our relationship with the Whole (even as it exceeds (even as it must exceed) our human understanding). To be in relationship at all means being aware of ourselves in all our humanness and being aware of the divinity that our humanness reveals when it joins with others (broadly defined to include places, animals, ideas, et cetera).

Wholeness, says Beeth, can be “approached only when we can simultaneously hold the paradoxical perspectives at both ends of the spectrum.” That is, it seems like the individual is not the whole, and that the whole cannot be divided into many parts. But put “seems” aside. Loving both (the whole and the part) – neither resisting nor favoring either – is what gently translates our nightmares into happy dreams. It sugars out in a form of living together that “gently translates our nightmares into happy dreams.”

Our Zen Buddhist brothers and sisters are very skillful with this understanding and practice. Roshi Philip Kapleau said that “everything is One” that is of course “not a numerical one.”

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness . . . The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms . . . (Thich Nhat Hanh Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life).

In happy dreams, we accept the end of separation and all its effects by becoming responsible for creating together the conditions in which we can accept the end of separation. In another essay, Beeth calls co-creation a form of cooperation with the Divine that necessarily begins with cooperation at the level of the world and the body.

When we say ‘co-creation’, we aren’t talking about just humans co-creating together, but an enlightened human collective consciously co-creating with the powers and intelligences of the cosmos. It is a numinous experience of our evolutionary potential as a species (Beeth).

Thus, it is not our personal responsibility to end war and famine, undo racism, bring forth universal healthcare and basic income, and stabilize the climate or whatever. But it is our responsibility, together, to become coherent, to unify in ways that facilitate the extension of happiness which must include safety, wellness, abundance and freedom. The larger problems will be undone when we realize whatever next steps and connections our relationship exists to bring forth. The form coherence takes is always intimately personal and it cannot be divined in advance.

Your special function is the special form in which the fact that God is not insane appears most sensible and meaningful to you. The content is the same. The form is suited to your special needs, and to the special time and place in which you think you find yourself, and where you can be free of place and time, and all that you believe must limit you (T-25.VII.7:1-3).

Peter Maurin, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker, suggested that together we can create “a new society in the shell of the old,” a society that excludes nobody and provides equally for all. But we have to let the old one go! And we have to join with those who will work with us to risk the vision and application inherent in creating a new one.

“Letting go of the old one” doesn’t mean (does not have to mean) calamity and crisis. It doesn’t have to mean destruction. It can also mean – Beeth argues that in fact it does mean – the restoration of peaceful and happy cooperation with what is. We can collaborate with one another and, in doing so, collaborate with God to restore to awareness our identity in and as the Undifferentiated Whole. What else could cooperation mean?

When that is the case, the new world – the happy dream – appears naturally and effortlessly.

VI Christ is a Collective: The Happiest Dream of All

Beeth calls her essay an “attempt to hold space” for all the “awakening collective Buddhas.”

I love and revere the Buddha. I have loved and revered him since tenth grade when a friend shared The Gospel According to Zen with me. Reading it was a hurricane wind that blew away my childish perceptions of God as an Old Man In Charge of Everything, leaving an open vista in which to imagine something new and expansive, formless and creative, and loving in ways barely imaginable. Buddha pointed to the potential for joy and harmony in that vista, which I wanted and needed very much. I still want and need that. But, for me, Jesus pointed to justice through disciplined creativity and a willingness to take risks in a zero-sum, winner-take-all game that for him ended on a cross outside Jerusalem.

I didn’t want the cross but I absolutely wanted the justice. It was (and still is) very clear to me that justice and love are not separate (e.g., T-25.VIII.8:3).

So a big part of my life story has been about seeking a way to realize the radical justice envisioned by Jesus without losing the joyful generative stillness of Buddha. In a lot of ways, that search led me to A Course in Miracles which – by opening my eyes to mind/body dualism and forcing me to take a stand with respect to it – dissolved (that is the verb) the search.

Beeth teaches me that I don’t need to resolve the apparently disparate ideals represented by Jesus and Buddha. Rather, I need to learn how to be in relationship with you. Together, we will co-create a new world in which joy and nonviolence unite to transform the Place of the Skull into a Bo tree, and the Bo tree into the present moment presently constellated. Peace and happines are our inheritance. The question is, are we ready to claim it?

The next Christ will be – indeed is already waking up to itself as – a collective. Salvation rests in realizing every relationship as Christ awakening to Christ. Our apparently personal and invidual lives will transform accordingly. What must we do to be Christ together? What has to change in us personally and collectively? What has to be our practice?

Most important of all: will you help me find it?