The Collective Field of Love

By Monica Mody

http://www.realitysandwich.com

Excerpted from the article:- Love as the Force of Revolution: The Occupy Movement and Beyond

The Occupy movement is the most recent example of how, as a species and as a society, the collective mind we have been developing over the last several centuries — the morphic field that surrounds us — is beginning to center on love-consciousness.

The energetic vibration of thousands of years of spiritual, heart-centered practices by members of the human species and society, including those carried out in the face of brutality and repression, adding up in the collective memory and vibration, are beginning to influence current spiritual, heart-centered patterns of activity. Transformative activities are spontaneously spreading among contemporary generations. Mystical, metaphysical, and spiritual teachings, principles, and methods are becoming more easily available, learned, accepted, and known.

When the first thought the Dalai Lama has upon waking, is a prayer of love and compassion (Salzberg, 1985, p. 84); when Buddhist monks in Burma chant the Metta Sutta against the military in Burma; when Mother Teresa does “small things with love” (Kornfield, 1993, p. 14); when Mohandas Gandhi says love is the key (Williamson, 2011); when Pancho, Adelaja, and their friends meditate and hold the space for peace and love knowing that the police is about to raid their camp; when “we” who are the 99 percent consciously facilitate the healing of the 100 percent (Loftis, 2011): each experience is synthesized by the collective mind of the human species and society — the psyche — the whole; influencing the healing and transformation of the whole, and also the healing and transformation of every individual embedded in psyche.

For these activities, “which [seek] to indirectly affect events in the social and political realm through exerting a non-local influence on the collective mindset of a community, nation, or even the whole human species,” David Nichol (2008) has used the term “subtle activism”.

Radical Love

We are just beginning to learn that, and how, love can function as an instrument of radical critique: through releasing the energy of acceptance; through recasting hierarchies as participatory communities formed by individuating members; through its visionary creativity; through its willingness to take concrete actions; through allowing itself to be embodied in different forms.

Vimala Thakar (1984) discussed this brilliantly a few years ago: “The force of love is the force of total revolution. It is the unreleased force, unknown and unexplored as a dynamic for change.” Williamson has also championed love as a transformative force: “Love taken seriously is a radical outlook, a major orientation from the psychological orientation that rules the world. It is threatening not because it is a small idea, but because it is so huge” (1992, p. 17).

The Occupy movement, in taking love seriously, is attempting to forge new dimensions to our cultural and political definitions of reality. Here are some statements that have emerged from people involved in the movement:

Ultimately, we want to create a money system, and an economy, that is the ally not the enemy of love. We don’t want to forever fight the money power to create good in the world; we want to change the money power so that we don’t need to fight it. (Eisenstein, 2011)

I think the ultimate purpose of Occupy Wall Street, or the great archetype it taps into, is the revolution of love. (Eisenstein, 2011)

We are the early adopters of a (r)evolution of values. We are the evidence that this system is broken. (Ramos Stierle, 2010)

We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” (Solnit, 2011)

…turning love into a broad-scale social force….seeking to change the world from the inside-out. (Williamson, 2011)

Moreover, love is being ritualized within the Occupy movement through symbolic actions such as creating human installations that look like the heart-symbol from above, and dancing flash-mobs. “Occupy Love” and “Occupy Compassion” are today memetic entities as well as actual groups that exist on the interweb and sometimes in physical spaces.

As Sheldrake has pointed out, “rituals enable the current participants to reconnect with their ancestors (in some sense) through morphic resonance” (1987b). On the one hand, this kind of communing strengthens the collective field; on the other hand it signals an eruption, a surfacing, of the collective mind in group contexts. Rituals also provide a language to express the transpersonal experience of love that is really, “not of the realm of ‘experiencer-perceiver’ and ‘experienced-perceived.’ Rather, it is a noumenal, unitive space within which the phenomenal world and intentional consciousness manifest” (Valle, 1989, p. 259).

Such experiences can be awe-inducing, sometimes almost to an unbearable extent (see Sovatsky, 2004), making the presence of a language to express and contain them vital. The instinctive quality of such expressions points to the archetypal dimensions of nonlocal, transpersonal love.

In Conclusion

As love becomes a part of our collective learning, sacred and societal transformation are beginning to go hand in hand. The ideals of direct democracy, freedom, and a society based on principles of human solidarity are beginning to get articulated alongside a love-consciousness. We are beginning to realize that, in fact, there is no “alongside” or “outside”: rather, the nature of love is ontological, and that love is the true nature of psyche or our collective morphic field.

As Tillich put it, “Love is being in actuality and love is the moving power of life” (1960, p. 25).

Or Kornfield: “Our love is the source of all energy to create and connect” (1993, p. 17).

Or Salzberg: “Love can go anywhere. Nothing can obstruct it” (1995, p. 23).

Or Williamson: “Love is energy, an infinite continuum. Your mind extends into mine and into everyone else’s. It doesn’t stay enclosed within your body” (1992, p. 29).

We could say the collective mind is rediscovering and relearning its true nature. Or we could say we are. We are growing into a critical mass. We are remembering that we are not separate from each other. We are remembering our interconnected beingness and our interconnected ways of being. The organizing models of our society are just beginning to reflect this love-consciousness.

Soon, love and compassion could become viable alternatives and then, we could say, ours is a paradigm of love.

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