Spirituality – Page 8 – Kosmos Journal

A Dark Night of the Soul and the Discovery of Meaning

I reserve the expression ‘dark night of the soul’ for a dark mood that is truly life-shaking and touches the foundations of experience, the soul itself. But sometimes a seemingly insignificant event can give rise to a dark night. Often a dark night has a strong symbolic quality in that it points to a deeper level of emotion and perhaps a deeper memory that gives it extra meaning. With dark nights you always have to be alert for the invisible memories, narratives, and concerns that may not be apparent on the surface.

Collective Presencing Part Four | The Circle of Creation: Building Capacity for Generative Collective Action in Service of Life

This is Part Four of our Collective Presencing series. The earlier three articles in this series describe the new human capacity we are calling Collective Presencing. This article describes the journey to becoming a Circle of Creation--at least as far as the authors have travelled thus far, knowing that the horizon moves ever ahead as we take the next step.

New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Life in the 21st Century

As we look out at the world today, we take inspiration from what is happening around the globe, from young people participating in movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street; to the new monastic movement among evangelical Christians dedicated to prayer and radical service to the poor; to the conversation among Protestants of an ‘Emerging Church’ (“. . . not a new religion, but a new way of being religious”); to small groups of Muslims who are gathering together, allowing women to lead worship, and reinventing what it means to answer God’s call; to ‘engaged Buddhism,’ blending the sublime practices and compassion of the Buddhist path with social activism; to the ‘spiritual but not religious’ youth who are beginning to take responsibility for their own spiritual lives outside the walls of our traditional religious institutions.

Collective Presencing: Embracing a New Paradigm

In the first two articles in this series, we introduced collective presencing as a new human capacity emerging at this time. The first article described a journey of individual and collective deepening and widening through a set of practices that can, over time, allow us first to achieve collective wisdom and later to become generative of more life. The second article took a more detailed look at the first phase in the process: what it takes to become a Circle of Presence. We promised that the next article would treat the next phase, the Circle of Creation. On deeper reflection we came to see that the transition to the Circle of Creation represents such a paradigm shift that some wider context is needed before we broach that subject. This article offers that.

Collective Presencing: A New Human Capacity

This is the first in a series of articles introducing the phenomenon and practice of Collective Presencing, a new capacity evolving in humanity at this time. Great thinkers have foreseen its coming—we recognise it in Aurobindo’s descent of the supramental and Teil-hard de Chardin’s noosphere. But what exactly do those terms mean? Where these gifted individuals intuited and envisioned the birth of this new collective capacity at the dawn of the last century, we are now starting to be able to describe it from experience. While many might recognise the phenomenon from transpersonal group work and other such practices, so far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to articulate it as a path and a set of capacities that can be intentionally developed.