What kind of religious / spiritual revival can we expect at the end of this civilizational cycle ?

Revisiting the premises for a participatory spirituality: The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective

Part One: Reviewing Macro-Historical Insights about the Civilizational Evolution of Spirituality and Religion

I’ll have to admit that I do not know the answer to that question, but allow me to make some informed speculations , based on some potential ‘macro-historical’ insights.

From Oswald Spengler, we get a streamlined evolutionary account of civilization, which points to the advent of a new religiosity at the end of the life-cycle of civilization.

In short, the life-cycle can be described as follows:

• Civilization starts with the encounter of a conquered and a conquering people, which means tribal custom ceases functioning and a new order must make common life possible.

• This expresses itself through the emergence of two leading caste groups: the warriors (proceeding from the conquerors) and the spiritual (proceeding from the conquered) caste, which ‘civilizes’ the warriors through a higher ethos of the common good

• As this convergence is successful, cities emerge, creating the third cast: the merchants or ‘city-zens’. Eventually, as they get stronger, they will ally with the monarchy, and eliminate the caste system.

• As the cities grow, they create the fourth estate: the working class, for whose pacification some form of democracy is needed. But democracy eventually succumbs to oligarchy and Caesarism, signaling both an expansion into the Empire but also prefiguring its end.

• Spirituality and religion inform the first stages, but they gradually lose power; however, as civilization declines and eventually collapses, a new religiosity will emerge, but without the innovative capacity of the early spiritual convergence. That will have to wait for a new emerging civilizational cycle. Late imperial religions are mere coping mechanisms.

Arnold Toynbee stresses the role of religion at the end of the civilizational lifecycle as well. In his account, as the Empire declines in its ability to protect and service core populations, this reinforces the alienation of the proletariat, and they will in response form transformative religions; eventually these new religions will ally themselves with the invading barbarians, who cannot rule a civilization on their own, creating a new civilizational order and a new empire. This is of course modelled on the role of the Christian Church at the end of the Roman Empire, but he finds plenty of examples in other Eurasian late imperial settings.

Pitirim Sorokin stresses the cyclic succession of ‘Ideate’ vs ‘Sensate’ types of civilizations, i.e. idealist, ascetic, religious phases vs materialist phases of civilizational life. Think of early Christianity or ascetic Buddhism vs the hedonism of the late Roman Empire. Think of a possible reaction to the downfall of the current materialist world order. For Sorokin, we would be overdue for such a powerful anti-materialist reaction.

Let me mention, last but not least, the insights from Kojin Karatani. In his account, we have four modes of value exchange; Mode A, the tribal, kinship based models of gifting and commoning; the civilizational Mode B (state) and Mode C (market), but also the permanent attempts by the people to recreate Mode A at a higher level of (civilizational) complexity, i.e. what he calls ‘Mode D’. First, this was attempted through the ‘Axial’ world religions, then through the utopian mass movements such as socialism, and finally, this is my own thesis, through prefigurative constructionist movements based on network-building.

Vincent Citot, in his comparison of the intellectual cycles in eight different civilizations, comes to the following scheme:

• Civilizations indeed start with a spiritual and mythological phase: the pre-classical phase

• As they mature, an independent rationality emerges, trying to make sense of the spiritual basis of civilization, through philosophy; this is the Classic Age.

• However, at some point, reason detaches itself from its civilizational spirituality, and this post-classic phase also is the end stage of a cycle.

Some civilizations, like the Indic and the Chinese, are old enough to have gone through two or three such cycles, each time interrupted by a dark age, in which literacy collapses, but at the same time, new religions are born which will form the basis of a new such cycle.

Notice that none of these macro-historians believe civilizations can exist without spiritual, mythological, or religious basis, they are the axiomatic ground on which a civilization can evolve, but without it, there is no civilization. Reasons need a a-rational basis, just like mathematics cannot exist without a priori axioms.

Note also the peculiar formative role of the Dark Ages. This brings us to the last thinker we want to mention in this introduction, William Irving Thompson:

• Thesis : only in Dark Ages, do new forms of human consciousness emerge, creating the basis for new spiritual systems, and thus, new civilizational forms

He explains:

“In the loss that is characteristic of a transition to novelty, the dark age seems to, paradoxically, open up a new possibility: the loss of the magical in the shift from sacrificial, matristic cultures to militaristic, patriarchal cultures, or the loss of the mythical in the shift to the mental in Greek philosophy, or now the loss of literate civilization in the shift to the electronic noetic polities of a decultured planetization. Naturally, this shift is opposed by traditional and reactionary forces, from Islamic jihads to Aryan nation attacks; but as enemies adopt the electronic technologies of their opponents in order to fight them, they are inevitably pulled into the culture they abhor. Televangelists like Reverend Jimmy Swaggert may hold the good book in one hand while they gesticulate against rock music with the other, but to the degree that they use television to promote themselves, they become isomorphic to rock stars and become just another sports star or celebrity.

In chaos dynamical theory in mathematics, it is the accumulation of noise that pulls a system from one attractor to another. So in our transition from industrialization to planetization, it is the accumulation of noise that is pulling civilization apart. In industrialization, the global marketplace was the phase-space of human culture that defined the value of all human transactions. The new phase-space, however, is not the marketplace but the catastrophe, for it is the catastrophe that brings us together in a condition that now defines all our human transactions. This evolutionary catastrophe bifurcation of "up or out" compels us to look at human culture with a new, deeper, and more compassionately spiritual level of understanding. Those who are oriented to the marketplace will resist this transformation of world view^, so the accumulation of noise will have to be great indeed before they are pulled into the basin of a new attractor. Nevertheless, noise is the transition to the noetic polity; it destroys the solitude necessary for the philosophical reflection characteristic of the mental epoch. But before we can effect the transition to the integral to stabilize our condition in the angelic musical polities of the future we will have to learn how to make our way through the demonic states of possession of our present. My contribution to this effort is to offer —in the face of the disliterate, electronic world of MTV — this study of specific works of literature as expressing the true markers along the way of the evolution of human consciousness."

I am now going to offer my own contribution, and I will do this through a streamlined vision of the process of civilizational change:

• At some point in their evolution, civilizational systems lose their integrative capacity: this creates a crisis of institutional trust

• The loss of integrative narrative leads to fragmentation, and fragmentation leads to polarization: Christians vs pagans, Taoists vs Confucians, Catholics against Protestants, etc. …

• In the first phase of Exit, anticipatory pioneers leave the dying system to experiment with new logics: these are the seed forms, that when successful, create sub-systems, and eventually grow in capacity to form the new constitutive paradigm.

• In a second phase of Exit, a successful ‘jurisdictional alliance’ is formed between parts of the bottom, middle and top sectors of the population, through a compromise that sets the stage for a new stage of human civilization, informed by the seed forms and the new spiritual consensus

So to understand ‘where we are going’, it is imperative to closely look at the dynamics inspiring seed forms today! This also applies to the new forms of religion which may emerge.

And let's not forget: markets and state forms, typical for the growth phase of a civilization, weaken the commons-based practices of the population; but when civilization weakens and declines, the commons returns: this is what I have called the Pulsation of the Commons. This also means that in Dark Ages, commons-based, i.e. mutualistic, institutions become hegemonic. So think of the role of monks and monasteries in China, Japan, post-Roman Europe.

So today, we are at the very least in a transitional phase, between different forms of human civilization; we are at a period in which we can expect a new religiosity to emerge, but also in a period where we have to be attentive to seed forms, which, as we have explained in our Substack, are centered around the two major pillars of

1. Peer to peer dynamics: the capacity for trans-local self-organization at global scale

2. Commons-based institutions, which are also scaling cosmo-locally.

With this, we have a good background to speculate about the potential direction of new spiritual and religious forms.

I has written a substantial essay on this in 2006, entitled,

• The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective

I hope you can read that essay in full, and here were its conclusions, in which I anticipated the emergence of a new form of ‘Contributory Spirituality’.

Quoting myself:

“The examples above show that the 3 paradigm shifts, although emerging at this stage, are letting themselves be felt through contemporary spiritual practices. It suggests a new approach to spirituality which I would like to call a contributory spirituality. This approach would consider that each tradition is a set of injunctions set from within a specific framework, and which can disclose different facets of reality. This framework may be influenced by a set of values (patriarchy, exclusive truth doctrines, etc…), which might be rejected today, but also contains psycho-spiritual practices which disclose particular truths about our relationship with the universe. Discovering spiritual truth then, requires at least a partial exposure to these differential methods of truth discovery, within a comparative framework, but it also requires inter-subjective feedback, so it is a quest that cannot be undertaken alone, but along with others on the same path. Tradition is thereby not rejected, but critically experienced and evaluated. The modern spiritual practitioner can hold himself beholden to such a particular tradition, but need not feel confined to it. He/she can create spiritual inquiry circles that approach the different traditions with an open mind, experience them individually and collectively, and where the different individual experiences can be exchanged. 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.”

Part Two: Developments in ‘spiritual’ theory: the participatory and relational spirituality approaches by Jorge Ferrer and John Heron

In the second part of this article, I present two crucial thinkers, who are not as known enough as they should be, as pioneers in developing such relational and participatory spiritual practices. John Heron is no longer amongst us, but I had the honor to visit him in New Zealand.

Here I reproduce the part of the article dedicated to their insights:

John Heron makes a very strong case for a relational approach to spirituality, for which he defines 8 characteristics:

“The spirituality of persons is developed and revealed primarily in their relations with other persons. If you regard spirituality primarily as the fruit of individual practices, such as meditative attainment, then you can have the gross anomaly of a “spiritual" person who is an interpersonal oppressor, and the possibility of “spiritual" traditions that are oppression-prone. If you regard spirituality as centrally about liberating relations between people, then a new era of participative religion opens up, and this calls for a radical restructuring and reappraisal of traditional spiritual maps and routes. Certainly there are important individualistic modes of development that do not necessarily directly involve engagement with other people, such as contemplative competence, and physical fitness. But these are secondary and supportive of those that do, and are in turn enhanced by co-inquiry with others.

On this overall view, spirituality is located in the interpersonal heart of the human condition where people co-operate to explore meaning, build relationship and manifest creativity through collaborative action inquiry into multi-modal integration and consummation.”

Amongst the characteristics of such relational spirituality, Heron outlines how related it in fact is to the peer to peer forms cited above.

“(5) It is focused on worthwhile practical purposes that promote a flourishing humanity-cum-ecosystem; that is, it is rooted in an extended doctrine of rights with regard to social and ecological liberation.

(6) It embraces peer-to-peer, participatory forms of decision-making. The latter in particular can be seen as a core discipline in relational spirituality, burning up a lot of the privatized ego. Participatory decision-making involves the integration of autonomy (deciding for oneself), co-operation (deciding with others) and hierarchy (deciding for others). As the bedrock of relational spirituality, I return to it at the end of the paper.

(7) It honours the gradual emergence and development of peer-to-peer forms of association and practice, in every walk of life, in industry, in knowledge generation, in religion, and many more.

(8) It affirms the role of both initiating hierarchy, and spontaneously surfacing and rotating hierarchy among the peers, in such emergence.”

Heron does not deny the individual aspects of spirituality, but stresses that they are secondary to their expression in the first form, i.e. the relational expression of it.

The eight characteristic listed above, merits development, as it more precisely defines the relationship between autonomy, hierarchy, and cooperation:

“Living spirit manifests as a dynamic interplay between autonomy, hierarchy and co-operation. It emerges through autonomous people each of whom who can identify their own idiosyncratic true needs and interests; each of whom can also think hierarchically in terms of what values promote the true needs and interests of the whole community; and each of whom can co-operate with – that is, listen to, engage with, and negotiate agreed decisions with - their peers, celebrating diversity and difference as integral to genuine unity. Hierarchy here is the creative leadership which seeks to promote the values of autonomy and co-operation in a peer to peer association. Such leadership, as in the free software movement mentioned earlier, is exercised in two ways. First, by the one or more people who take initiatives to set up such an association. And second, once the association is up and running, as spontaneous rotating leadership among the peers, when anyone takes initiatives that further enhance the autonomy and co-operation of other participating members.”

Jorge Ferrer’s landmark book, Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology, is the key classic to have reformulated a participatory vision of spirituality from out of the transpersonal psychology tradition. The first part deconstructs the non-relational biases of transpersonal psychology, while the second part attempts to reconstruct a new vision based on participation. However, the relational aspects of participatory spirituality were not emphasized in that book. The importance of relational spiritual work is stressed in his later writings, however, that deal with more practical, less philosophical issues than RTT (Revisioning Transpersonal Theory?).

In his talks and conferences, Ferrer has introduced the notion of participatory spirituality in terms of three forms of co-creation:

(1) intrapersonal co-creation, i.e., of the various human dimensions working together creatively as a team;

(2) interpersonal co-creation, i.e., of human beings working together as peers in solidarity and mutual respect; and

(3) transpersonal co-creation, i.e., of both human dimensions and collaborative human beings interacting with the Mystery in the co-creation of spiritual insights, practices, expanded forms of liberation, and spiritual worlds.

Note again the congruence between Heron’s points and Ferrer’s second aspect of co-creation. J. Kripal has already noted the important political implications of Ferrer’s influential ideas:

“Ferrer's participatory vision and its turn from subjective "experience" to processual "event" possesses some fairly radical political implications. Within it, a perennialist hierarchical monarchy (the "rule of the One" through the "great chain of Being") that locates all real truth in the feudal past (or, at the very least, in some present hierarchical culture) has been superseded by a quite radical participatory democracy in which the Real reveals itself not in the Great Man, Perfect Saint or God-King (or the Perennialist Scholar) but in radical relation and the sacred present. Consequently, the religious life is not about returning to some golden age of scripture or metaphysical absolute; it is about co-creating new revelations in the present, always, of course, in critical interaction with the past. Such a practice is dynamic, uncertain, and yet hopeful—a tikkun-like theurgical healing of the world and of God."

I would now like to quote extensively from a critique of Ferrer by J. Kripal in Tikkun magazine, because, even if he uses different concepts, he confirms the equipotentiality principle that we explained above. This principle affirms that mystical skills are just one set of skills amongst other, they do not position that person as being absolutely above another, and spiritual skills do not equate with other skills, such as the ethical ones.

Let’s listen to J. Kripal on this topic:

"Ferrer … ultimately adopts a very positive assessment of the traditions' ethical status, suggesting in effect that the religions have been more successful in finding common moral ground than doctrinal or metaphysical agreement, and that most traditions have called for (if never faithfully or fully enacted) a transcendence of dualistic self-centeredness or narcissism. It is here that I must become suspicious. Though Ferrer himself is refreshingly free of this particular logic (it is really more of a rhetoric), it is quite easy and quite common in the transpersonal literature to argue for the essential moral nature of mystical experience by being very careful about whom one bestows the (quite modern) title "mystic." It is an entirely circular argument, of course: One simply declares (because one believes) that mysticism is moral, then one lists from literally tens of thousands (millions?) of possible recorded cases a few, maybe a few dozen, exemplars who happen to fit one's moral standards (or better, whose historical description is sketchy enough to hide any and all evidence that would frustrate those standards), and, voilà, one has "proven" that mysticism is indeed moral. Any charismatic figure or saint that violates one's norms—and there will always be a very large, loudly screaming crowd here—one simply labels "not really a mystic" or conveniently ignores altogether. Put differently, it is the constructed category of "mysticism" itself that mutually constructs a "moral mysticism," not the historical evidence, which is always and everywhere immeasurably more ambivalent. Ferrer, as is evident in such moments as his thought experiment with the Theravada retreat, sees right through most of this. He knows perfectly well that perennialism simply does not correspond to the historical data. What he does not perhaps see so clearly is that a moral perennialism sneaks through the back door of his own conclusions. Thus, whereas he rightly rejects all talk of a "common core," he can nevertheless speak of a common "Ocean of Emancipation" that all the contemplative traditions approach from their different ontological shores."

Kripal concludes from this:

“Ferrer argues that we must realize that our goal can never be simply the recovery or reproduction of some past sense of the sacred, for "we cannot ignore that most religious traditions are still beset not only by intolerant exclusivist and absolutist tendencies, but also by patriarchy, authoritarianism, dogmatism, conservatism, transcendentalism, body-denial, sexual repression, and hierarchical institutions." Put simply, the contemplative traditions of the past have too often functioned as elaborate and sacralized techniques for dissociating consciousness.

Once again, I think this is exactly where we need to be, with a privileging of the ethical over the mystical and an insistence on human wholeness as human holiness. I would only want to further radicalize Ferrer's vision by underscoring how hermeneutical it is, that is, how it functions as a creative re-visioning and reforming of the past instead of as a simple reproduction of or fundamentalist fantasy about some nonexistent golden age. Put differently, in my view, there is no shared Ocean of Emancipation in the history of religions. Indeed, from many of our own modern perspectives, the waters of the past are barely potable, as what most of the contemplative traditions have meant by "emancipation" or "salvation" is not at all what we would like to imply by those terms today. It is, after all, frightfully easy to be emancipated from "the world" or to become one with a deity or ontological absolute and leave all the world's grossly unjust social structures and practices (racism, gender injustice, homophobia, religious bigotry, colonialism, caste, class division, environmental degradation, etc.) comfortably in place."

From this important critique by Kripal, I would like to add an important conclusion. That the shift towards relational and participatory spirituality also necessarily has a ‘negative’ moment, i.e. a phase of critique against any and all forms of spiritual authoritarianism.

The ‘theoretical’ evolution towards relational and participatory forms of spirituality has not stood still. Bruce Alderman , in a summary essay on the internet, describes the new trend towards exploring intersubjectivity itself, both through personal and interpersonal forms of inquiry. He describes the work of Christian De Quincey, through his two books (Radical Nature, and: Radical Knowing); the deep mystical intersubjective work of Beatrice Bruteau, and the radical nature of the inquiries by the TSK approach of Tartangh Tulku.”

That is the end of that long excerpt. Now I have a question for you, readers:

Almost 20 years after writing these words, what should I pay attention to now, in this particular context ? I would really welcome suggestions.

Very briefly, as for me, I follow mostly the developments around John Vervaeke, and his response to the Meaning Crisis, the work of integral/metamodern spiritual thinkers like Brendan Graham Dempsey, the attempt at formulating a CosmoErotic Humanism by Zachary Stein, and Marc Gafni, the Sophianic neo-Orthodoxy of Michael Martin, and others. All of these take into account the participatory and relational forms that a contemporary spirituality must represent.

What have you discovered that ‘makes sense’ ?

If you are interested in more,

I follow developments in P2P- and commons-based spirituality here at

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Spirituality

“Integrative” attempts are monitored here at

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Integral_Theory

I am particularly partial to subjective-objective integrations, which I monitor here at

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Cosmobiological