Spiritual expression, and the religious organizational formats in which context it will take place, is always embedded in a social structure. For example, we could say that the tribal forms of religion, such as animism and shamanism, do not have elaborate hierarchical structures as they arose in societal structures that had fairly egalitarian kinship based relations. But the great organized religions, which arose in hierarchically-based societies, have intricate hierarchical structures, monological conceptions of truth, and expectations of obedience from its members. The Protestant Reformation and its offshoots took on the many democratic aspects which corresponded to the rise of a new urban class under merchant and industrial capitalism, and the many offshoots of the new age movements have clearly adopted contemporary capitalist practices of paid workshops, trainings, etc … (i.e. taking the form of spiritual experience as a consumable commodity).In this essay, we will claim that contemporary society is evolving towards a dominance of distributed networks, with peer to peer based social relations, and that this will affect spiritual expression in fundamental ways.
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An open and free approach to spirituality would not likely accept proprietary approaches to spiritual knowledge. It would expect that the code and texts are freely approachable, even modifiable. It will not accept the copyright protections of spiritual texts, nor their unavailability. The pathways to spiritual experiencing would not be hidden from sight, but publicly available. The methodologies would be available for trial and experimentation.
A participatory approach would mean that everyone would be invited to participate in the spiritual search, without a priori selection, and that the threshold of such participation would be kept as low as possible. Appropriate methodologies would be available for different levels of experience.
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Equipotentiality suggests that we should not judge a person according to one purported essence, say, as a spiritual master or an enlightened being, but as a wide mixture of different skills and abilities, none of which by itself elevates that person to a higher human status. Rather, the skill of any social system is to draw out the best out of each individual, so that he can engage his skills and passion to a task of his own choosing. One of the possible interpretations of this principle is that enlightenment or spiritual mastery is just one particular skill, a particular technique of consciousness. It is important, it deserves respect, others can learn from it.
However, just as a great sportsperson or great artist is not necessarily overall a better human being, neither is a spiritual master, as the history of the last view decades has elaborately shown. Furthermore, guidance from such a master must be specific, an invitation for practice and experience, a witnessing on his part, but not in any way a fixed authority on the lives of any followers. Individuals are free to explore this guidance, but the individual, and the communities, are still in charge of building collective spiritual freedom, without a priori fixed path. The corollary of self-selection and communal validation are also clear. No spiritual path can be imposed, the individual freely chooses the particular injunctions he wants to follow or experiment with. Nor are individuals or communities bound to any particular tradition, though they can still choose to work with such a particular framework.
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In this way, a new collective body of spiritual experiences is created, which is continuously co-created by the inquiring spiritual communities and individuals. The outcome of that process will be a co-created reality that is unpredictable and will create new, as yet unpredictable spiritual formats. But one thing is sure: it will be an open, participatory, approach leading to a commons of spiritual knowledge, from which all humanity can draw from.
Tags: open source, religion
