The answers differ from person to person, but mystical enlightenment itself provides the best answer because it is, by its very nature, a unifying experience: an experience of Unity with our creative Source, and with everyone and everything. Though individually unique, mystical experience is a Union and communion with everyone and everything, and manifests itself in Unitive Love and a strong desire for community.
In my opinion, a commonly held set of core beliefs is essential for a spiritual community to function well. A voluntary association of rugged individualist seekers does not really constitute a spiritual community. This leaves the problem of bridging the gap between privately held and commonly shared beliefs.
As I said, the biggest consensus builder is the unitive nature of the mystical experience itself. Despite that, some bridging needs to be done, ideally by consensus. How do we achieve consensus?
Our Okanagan Natives have a concept called “Enow’kin,” which means collective or tribal creation. Anything created by the tribe, for the tribe, is Enow’kin. This can be something as simple as a communal building, or as complex as a moral code or a spiritual belief system. The necessary consensus for Enow’kin is not obtained by majority vote or by a grudging compromise. It is the tribe acting in concert, as a whole, from the tribal consciousness of being an inseparable whole. I other words, where Enow’kin is concerned, each tribal member foregoes their individuality and thinks and acts on behalf of the whole, from the unitive viewpoint of the tribal whole.
Times do change, and Enow’kin adapts to the changing times by being a constant creative process. When the tribe decides that a tribal creation should be altered or amended, or scrapped entirely and newly created, then this is done by the same process of Enow’kin.
The principle of Enow’kin could be applied to any religious community such as a congregation, and even an entire denomination or religion. It could be applied to municipalities, districts, provinces, countries and ultimately to the entire planet. It is contingent, however, on everyone attaining a spiritual Awakening.
For our Natives this is easy. They have not only a deeply mystical religion but were – and in many places still are – a deeply spiritual and mystical culture. Their quest for mystical experience, the so called “Vision Quest,” is an integral part of their culture. In traditional Native society, there are no atheists or agnostics; everyone is a mystic. No one questions the existence of a spiritual reality, and everyone experiences the implicit unity that underlies all explicit diversity. The Native benison “All My Relations,” which is spoken at the end and/or beginning of every solemn speech, is an expression of their mystical feeling of universal at-one-ment.
To experience this unity, to believe in it and teach and practice it, is of crucial importance, not only from a spiritual and social but also from an environmental perspective. In our day and age, when environmental devastation threatens our entire species, it is more important than ever to discover that everything is one. To discover this for oneself, through a powerful mystical experience, is far more compelling than any teaching or preaching. In environmentalism as in religion, mysticism beats idealism simply because mysticism compels one to act for the benefit of the whole without cumbersome and potentially divisive ideals. Best of all, consensus comes easy within a community of mystics.
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Hermann Harlos recently wrote “The Awakening – A letter-guided Quest for mystical experience” This Quest is pure in the aforementioned sense of the word, and is available on-line at www.hharlos.com or http://ca.msnusers.com/TheQuest Anyone who reads it and wants to contact him personally can do so by email at hharlos@live.com
By Hermann Harlos
Assuming we’ve tread the mystical path, had our Awakening and experienced our own personal truth. Is it enough to have our private belief alone at home?
If not, will my spiritual community reject me and my newfound belief? Do I forget about community? Do I need a spiritual community at all? Is it necessary to have commonly agreed on truths in a spiritual community, or is it enough to just belong to a community of seekers, where everyone searches for their own truth? And if we do find it necessary to have commonly agreed on truths, how do we bridge the gap between personal belief and common belief? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves after we have attained mystical enlightenment.
