What could enlightenment mean, for a collective?

I think “collective enlightenment” (or enlightenment across a collective) would involve the following elements or characteristics:

1. Compassion, mutual concern and agape (love-in-action) as the primary driver for all intra- and inter-collective action, with ego taking a distant backseat (where it is present at all).

2. A celebratory cooperation around sustaining the greatest good, for the greatest number for the greatest duration (i.e. the profoundly inclusive good of All).

3. A fairly thorough letting go of judgmental and/or hierarchical differentiation between members.

4. A pronounced attenuation of individual and collective emphasis on ownership, personal status, social capital, economic materialism, self-serving achievement and other I/Me/Mine-orientations.

5. A felt reality of internal and external unity of identity and purpose.

6. A fluid expounding and acceptance of iterative, multiperspectival truth - both in terms of cultural norms and personal beliefs.

7. A marked absence of tribalism, dualistic tension, and Us. vs. Them polemics.

8. A relaxation of acquisitiveness across all arenas (knowledge, wealth, political influence, beauty, abilities, experiences, accomplishments, accolades, etc.)

9. An explosion of individual and collective creative self-expression.

10. Improved skillfulness in actualizing/reifying all-of-the-above.

My 2 cents.

From Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-could-enlightenment-mean-for-a-collective

Comment from Jeff Wright: "Regarding (7), it’s worth thinking about what “consciousness raising” (i.e. a path towards enlightenment) would look like for a specific collective identity / tribe, such as working class conservatives. How could this be formulated as a Quora question?"

Jeff I’m a big proponent of “creating space” for growth — I think the impulse to evolve (individually and collectively) is present in all of us. In fits and starts and easily derailed, to be sure, but it’s there. What happens to undermine it’s natural unfolding is distraction, substitution nourishment, dependencies and addictions — I use an expanded description of The Spectacle to describe this. Once this interference is removed or attenuated, then the door can open to positive growth and change. But unless and until such barriers are removed, humanity will devolve rather than evolve (or at least be held back) in terms of mature moral orientation and unitive/collective thinking. Their moral creativity will be stunted. So disrupting the status quo and alleviating the collective self-medication and deliberate deceptions must — IMO —happen first, before there is any hope of remedy for the group you allude to. Why first (and not just concurrently)? Because higher-order evolutionary memes are too subtle, too gentle, too nuanced and ambiguous to compete with I/Me/Mine or tribalistic fear. They are just too easy to ignore, dismiss or trample as billions is being spent on creating loud, angry, insistent distractions. It’s like a child in a war zone quietly saying “we should just love each other” as bombs are going off all around her. We need to end the war that has been engineered to keep us from hearing that small, delicate voice of compassionate truth. When folks are relieved of fear, crisis and propaganda, they tend to open up to their own higher Selves. So the question then becomes: how can we end the plutocratic, mostly neoliberal choke-hold on media, the political narrative, religion, conceptions of freedom, economics and so on. I think that is the first step in the process.

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

This link is not meant to be clicked. It contains the trackback URI for this entry. You can use this URI to send ping- & trackbacks from your own blog to this entry. To copy the link, right click and select "Copy Shortcut" in Internet Explorer or "Copy Link Location" in Mozilla.

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

The author does not allow comments to this entry