SOCIAL MYSTICISM: Co-creating healthy social fields

Who are you?

You, this particle in space and time, or everything that is being affected by you? 

The effect that we have in life is much bigger than we often think identifying ourselves with a particle in space and time. Actually, a human being is, on the one hand, a particle, but on the other hand, it’s a field. It’s an effectiveness. It’s an effect that co-creates our culture and co-creates the level of consciousness that our culture vibrates on. 

A social mystic prioritizes awakening, the Divine, in daily life by co-creating healthy social fields, networks, and culture. The skill and dance of the social mystic are to bring awareness and take care of every social interaction: intimate relationships, family, friends, but also the relationships with everybody at work, the waiter and the waitress in the restaurant, and everybody that we meet. If I sit alone in a monastery or a cave, it’s different, but when my spiritual practice is embedded in a social field, if I change, my environment has to change with me. We need to find a new way of relating to create a new cultural sculpture. 

The more we are aware of our subtle connections with everyone around us, the more we can feel how we co-create our reality, how we affect our environment, and how everyone around us affects us in one way or the other. 

Co-creating healthy social fields depends on everybody finding their authentic place in a given system. If we don’t find our place, this will constantly create friction. This place is not fixed, but in a dynamic relationship with our environment, and it is a constant balancing between two main forces that drive us as human beings: the will to become - to express our potential in the world, and the will to belong. 

When we connect to the world through the heart, through that connection we are growing into someone new.

The center of the belonging and the becoming is the heart. When we connect to the world through the heart, through that connection we are growing into someone new. For people who have a healthy relation to their becoming and belonging, that’s easier. If the belonging or the becoming is hurt, that’s difficult, because, in order to stay in relation, I need to either let go of one part of myself or one part of the relation.

If, in our early years, the attachment process didn’t happen properly, this will affect finding our place in life. Our formative parental relationships can either encourage or subdue our drive to become our authentic selves, and our strategies to survive and thrive can strongly shape our path as adults. We want to explore these strategies and fill them with awareness. Otherwise, we will have to experience these throughout our life with all the consequences for our capacity to build healthy social fields and culture around us.

The healthier our upbringing, or the deeper we go on our healing journey, the more we can rest in the vulnerable space of the heart. When we rest in our heart space we can stay related in all circumstances. In beautiful times, in arguments, and conflicts, we can stay in relation and find our appropriate place. From this place, we can commit to relationships and we can also commit to our becoming. Then there can always be a healthy new development. On every new level that I become, I can relate in a new way with my intimate partner, my co-workers, or my friends. It’s not always the same relation. After each step of my development, I need to find out how to relate anew.

When we can move fluidly between our being and belonging we become agents of stability, clarity, and innovation in our networks. We are also free to co-create new networks and social fields that can flow and adapt to the changing and complex reality of our world today. 

Our social contribution is not only the social networks we co-create, but also  what we add to our economical, social, and political, decision-making processes, even if it doesn’t seem evident, at least not on the first glance. We also contribute to a kind of center of consciousness, or gravity, to the cultural process. The quality of our networks has a much bigger implication than what seems obvious. Culture is a constant dance and movement where everything affects everything, a holistic dance. The creation of that cultural network with care, precision, clarity, love, and with the willingness to be in comfort and discomfort is key, because that literally co-creates our world. It co-creates, on the bigger scale, very important decision-making processes. Sometimes it seems that people in governing structures or social structures make decisions for us. But actually there’s a mutual interrelation, inter-dependence, connectivity that is a very important underlying factor. Therefore, our inner work and growth in relating capacity are our best service to humanity.