Let it Be--Let it Flow--Let it Yield

Dear All:

This is the video of the sunrise ritual.  It was offered to ground the CCC, seeding the earth, air, and sea with the spirit of our collective intentions to provide the kind of leadership that will enable the emerging world to be...Now on to the constructive action to make it so...

love,

Zachary

Peace

Here is another video of our event, providing a different tone and expression than the first.  A "final" video that documents the sunrise ritual offered to ground the CCC experience will be posted in the near future...

Peace,

Zachary

Theory, Praxis and Experiencing

Hello Conscious Collective

From the stream of emails flows that are happening, it is indeed confirming that a collective has been seeded and is continuing in its work and awareness to facilitate a new leadership focusing on constructive action for and within the world.

I have been struck by how the emails from Aliki, Laura and Gouranga that we have received in the space of 24 hours, as we have been manifesting our ritual of intention and constructive action in the world have materialized. With these connections in mind, am drawn to our poem Conscious Collective – first and last lines in particular.

‘Seeing through to the essence that is ever present. . .

. . The encounter seeing beyond’

And so I hear a wonderfully powerful invitation to the ‘joy of being’ from Aliki Nicolaides for us each to dance in our own way, be in our own essence and go with it and prepare to be amazed. .

‘something fresh that brought tears of joy to my eyes - Happy Spring'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq6b9bMBXpg&eurl=http%253A%252F%252Fwww%252Etowleroad%252Ecom%252F2009%252F04%252Fthe%252Dsound%252Dof%252Dspontaneous%252Dmusical%252Dtheatre%252Ehtml&feature=player_embedded

Another connection and movement that I am noticing is from dancing to travelling – linking up with our recent blog post, with the dancing in a train station and also with the emergent strap line relating to flying, ‘fasten your seatbelts’ which has emerged in the same timeframe too – feels like we are all journeying and co-creating as we go somehow?

Am sensing that the music, dance, movement, pure energy and universal love is rippling out now in ways beyond our imaginations. I sense a quickening within me and so within us about what our Connective Collective could enable when the ‘flickering flow' gathers and moves. .

It feels important somehow to recognize how Matthieu Daum has played a catalytic role in our waves of connection – no co-incidence then that his organization is called ‘NEXUS’ – meaning connection – whose purpose is ‘ au croisement des cultures. . .’

Matthieu was also in the Constructive Action group and has voiced and made visible messages from those that could not get through the technology or the systems. .

One of those was Gouranga Chattopadhyay – he has shared with our collective his recent experiences of working with a Shaman friend in Australia where he describes:

‘After that we returned. Any time I want to see my horse friend, he appears inside my forehead where I can clearly see him. Till now I haven't understood the meaning of his quizzical look. But he remains my friend and I feel at peace in his company.

The whole experience was about being at one with all the worlds that the cosmos contains. My name for what I call cosmos is cosmic continuum -no boundary. The invitation is to encounter that at-one state more and more often.

After the workshop I went out to have coffee in a small restaurant on the Great Ocean Road. Soon the Shaman joined me there. She had bought some stuff in a shop that was having a closing down sale a few blocks away. She presented me with two mini wraparounds! One blue and one brown. She did it with such a nice smile that I didn't ask her what I was expected to do with two mini wraparounds! I use those as eiderdowns in my workroom in Kolkata!
Love.
GC

Maybe our universal love and wraparound for each other offers us some insight for reflection and constructive action as we travel. .

And over the Easter weekend – I had some time and space to reflect on what CCC had been about – a dear friend turned up with a book for me that she had just found that morning by Susan Greenwood called ‘The Nature of Magic – an Anthropology of Consciousness’. At once so many of the jigsaw pieces of the diverse theories and practical and lived experiences in Leiden fell into place for me. Susan writes about the concept of ‘magical consciousness’. .it comprises a ‘holistic’ awareness of the spirituality of the everyday, the earth, the body with all its attendant thoughts, feelings and emotions, a sense of the interconnectedness of it all. This is magical consciousness, the conception that has the capability of ‘re-enchanting the world’ for those who experience it.
Cariad
Christine
x

Dear travellers,

Our invitation to join a co-creative and connective collective offered a beginning, an opportunity for recognising our shared responsibility for how we co-create ourselves, each other and the worlds in which we live. 'In this new space, what if we discovered something beyond - where we can touch, embrace, hold and make meaning of our senses and different forms of knowing. One where we can cradle each other as we grow in our capacity to give and receive? Dare we explore this dimension within ourseves and others?'

And in the space, we danced alone and together and with co-creative loving intention. And since, the dancing and waves of movements, the ebb and flow of life has continued. Our co-created collective is deepening its connection with each wave. As hosts, convenors and guides, we have been profoundly humbled and awed by the sacred gifts that have been offered to the collective, by the courage that has been shown and how the generosity of the human spirit is revealing itself. We have each individually and as a group of four, and no doubt as a whole, been experiencing the challenges of grounding these new energetic waves of 'knowing' and 'being' within ourselves.

Peter invited us to also think about how our intentions, for the world and our collective leadership of it, might be consummated. In order to enable that process to continue, we are offering our intentions (the paper cards) in a small ceremony to the fire and the water on Katwijk beach at 0630 am tomorrow morning. We will know ourselves held by your intentions, as we (Peter, Zachary, Ankie and Anjet on our collective behalf) will also offer something that symbolizes for us what we may need to let go of in order to make space inside ourselves to walk the path that follows … knowing that the path already is, and that we are it and that we also, as a collective and as unique individuals with a purpose shape it while we walk.

Parts of the CCC process included 'stillness' and 'silence' - space for reflection, contemplation and integration. So with this loving intention - we invite you into a space of sanctuary, to 'be' and reflect with us. This is a poem and a construct that has emerged from our reflective dialogues since CCC.

CONSCIOUS COLLECTIVE
Seeing through to the essence that is ever present
To the other end of the spectrum
The dying of ego which will never entirely die
Not entirely disappear---unique spark in deep darkness

Transforming the tradition so that it also
Expresses the emergence

The gems within and around to be polished.

At once is the individual and the collective
Where we are and are not
The nature and beauty of the dance

Where strange paradox is a truth
That in any moment
Changes form and becomes
Another truth…

A flickering flow of woven movements

Let it be
Let it wash
Let it yield

As the flame to the winds
As the waves to the shore
As the wheat to the earth

Recognizing and being recognized
without having seen each other before.
The encounter seeing beyond...

With much love as we continue to be held and nurtured in our connectively woven web.
Zachary, Anjet, Rene and Christine

Silent Reflections

Most of our posts to date have been from those who were able to attend the Leiden gathering in person.  David McCallum has been on a 30-day silent retreat before, during, and since the Conversation.  He was first to respond to the invitation and has held the collective in consciousness and prayer from the beginning.  He offers a view from silence on how what appears to be death may yield life—and life more abundant..,

Love,

Zachary

-------------------------

The Leiden gathering coincided with the phase of the retreat focused on purification... suffice to say, it was both dark and painful, yet punctuated by moments of insight, liberation, and a deep sense of being loved even as I am a sinner. I think this paradox of being loved even as we are, imperfect and occasionally even working at cross purposes with Life... this sounds a little like the experience several of you have described. So, while we have been engaging the grace and grief of our maturation as a collective of consciousness, these movements of spirit resonate so deeply for me/with you. A line from the New Testament scriptures came to mind just now, "that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears fruit beyond measure." May our love and labor bear fruit and at the same time, may we be free from concern for the outcomes...

Thank you for including me in this experience... it encourages my heart in the silence. And I continue to keep each of you in prayer by name throughout the retreat.

Fondly,
David 

Making Meaning of Our Worlds

Our Constructive Action cohort, this time through John Bazalgette, invites us to make meaning of our experience and begin to document our co-created processes.  What follows are an adaptation of his notes from the “Our Worlds” experience.  John outlines the steps that we used and offers a first glance hypothesis about what we may have sought to represent.  As always, your own comments and reflections are welcomed.

I'm with my notes now.  They're not very substantial but form a preliminary sketch of my analytic thinking as I surveyed the different 'worlds' that people created.   

For the record the proposal had the following steps:

·      Take time to let go as far as you can of all presuppositions, images, memories.

·      Go out into the town and be open to receiving the message that the world out there is wan ting to give you

·      Return and in self selected groups build a representation of the world that has been communicating with you

·      Reflect on what we have created of the message the world has  communicated to us.  

All this is rough and ready, but I feel there is something that might grow from this small seed.

I asked myself:  What is the message that has been collectively received from the world that it has been wanting to give the participants in the conversation?  I wondered whether each cluster of participants would unconsciously begin to assemble coherent but differing aspects of our collective sense of what the world of Leiden had said to us. looking at each of them and listening to the conversations that were taking place I tentatively formulated the following hypothesis.

·      The Red Group created something the expressed an underlying concern about the world's need for governance and structure

·      The Green Group created an expression of the world's need for spirituality 

·      The Blue Group expressed world's need for a sense of continuity, succession and family

·      The Yellow Group expressed the world's need for a sense of health and wellbeing.

I don't want to be held too closely to those categories.  However, what I realised was that we had designed the first steps of an exercise which, if given sufficient time (say a day and a half) could provide some stunning disclosures about collective consciousness.

With love,

John

Other Worlds

Kathleen Pogue White, who recently celebrated a milestone birthday and was not at our gathering, sent out the following video in the flow of our most recent wave of connections.  It is like a song we actually played and many of us sung at the gathering. While consistent with the theme of our work, the video also evokes the presence of another world often left unseen.  Indeed just on the other side of the glass from us in Leiden were homeless men and women, many from cultures and circumstances different from those assembled to “dance.”  As hosts we sought but did not make this level of connection happen. May this offering be a reminder to us of the more, the many, and the forgotten in our midst who are also we.  As the song says, we all need someone to stand by me…

Here is the link:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2539741