Driving up the steep and windy road of the 200 acre campus of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, you feel the world drop away. Discreet, low profile, redwood buildings surrounded by massive trees, hug the top of the hill. At the organic garden, blue-jeaned gardeners discuss permaculture and the latest addition to the cob structure greenhouse. Nearby a fountain burbles gently. People stop and chat as they meet in the shaded drive winding past the buildings. Whether headed to seminars and workshops or on business errands, the talk is animated and broad range.
Although the setting is quietly spectacular, it is the business of IONS that is truly unique. Its mission to “ explore the frontiers of consciousness to advance individual, social, and global transformation,” draws thousands of people from around the world to participate in seminars concerned with such issues as the science of consciousness, the creation of sustainable community, health and healing, and a viable, evolutionary future for mankind. (For background information on IONS see this article)
It was the three-day breakthrough seminar on Individual, Social and Global Transformation that caught my eye, scrolling through the extensive events and activities calendar on the IONS’ website. Personally, global transformation is an important buzz phrase; as editor of The Bleeping Herald, a constant background determinant for issues and organizations to cover from month to month. Backtracking along the title, I realized how important the words individual and social were as precursors to the word global for this retreat.
As IONS president, James O’Dea, writes in the co-authored article, Social Healing for a Fractured World: “Some psychologists have suggested that human culture as a whole has been saturated by unhealed wounding, which, if unchecked, will continue on a downward spiral toward inevitable violent disintegration. …
“Social wounds involve multiple dimensions of societies and individuals. Many now believe that to truly heal the greater social body requires addressing the healing needs of individuals and the transformation of social institutions concurrently. Truth, justice, compassion and peace all appear necessary elements in social healing. …
“The primary element that makes the emerging discipline of social healing unique is its intrinsic holism. It understands both humans and societies as complicated systems. It sees the importance of structural reform in tandem with more personal work around trauma, shame and violence. Social health, it claims, must take into account all dimensions, from the personal to the political, from the biological to the spiritual.”
“Ok,” I thought, “forget global for a moment. How about looking more closely in the mirror?”
If, as science now validates, we are all entangled in a field of consciousness which comprises “reality,” what subtle and possibly less-than-constructive “contributions” was I making to the global mind and its health? How pre-selective was my vision? What was it that I didn’t know that I didn’t know? How could I expand the boundaries of my vision if I didn’t know where the boundaries lay? Petaluma, California, here I come.
Boundaries smacked me in the face an hour after I pulled up to the rustic chalet to unpack my bags, as I noted the usual awkwardness of almost 50 strangers meeting and eating together before the opening Thursday evening session. “And what do you do?” saved me from more intimate introductions. Working for What the BLEEP!? proved an international ice-breaker for comfortable yet meaty chit-chat. But what would it be like to be able to walk up to a stranger and not ask anything? Just reach out palm to palm like Mr. Spock in Star Trek, look into each other’s eyes and simply know the other and then transcend other altogether?
I was not alone with these questions. Forty-six people from all over the world, including Iran and Australia, came to this three-day intensive searching for answers - and probably more importantly - the questions to ask themselves that would direct their lives into a more sustainable, loving and effective way of being in the world. It was a seriously self-responsible group; nurses, businessmen and women, physicians, filmmakers, artists, retirees … all willing to start with changing the “I” to help advance the “we.”
View of the land at the IONS
retreat center
During the course of the three days, we listened to excellent presentations geared respectively to individual, social and global transformation. Marilyn Schlitz, IONS Vice President of Research & Education, Dean Radin, Senior Scientist at IONS, James O’Dea, President and others, spoke on such topics as the Nexus of Change, Essential Noetic Concepts (noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the "inner cosmos" of the mind - consciousness, soul, spirit - and how it relates to the "outer cosmos" of the physical world. The institute, as a whole, explores consciousness from three perspectives: individual subjective consciousness; transformative relationships and intersubjective consciousness; and scientific understanding). Additional presentations were held on the Personal Path of Transformation; Relational Healing; Entangled Minds and Collective Dreaming.
If there were any lingering doubts as to the importance of getting one’s personal act together, Dean Radin’s presentation on Entangled Minds, (which happens to be the title of his new book being released by Simon & Schuster next month) eradicated them. “And what is it that you’re going to do with your one precious life?” he quoted from American poet, Mary Oliver. Perhaps create loving coherence in thought and action as, he points out, “The creation of a new form of order or manifestation stems from coherence.”
By the end of day two, forty-six strangers had bonded into a coherent group. Then, during an experiential Community Ritual, into our midst walked a stranger. A lean, quiet man, Micheal Eller motioned us to stand around the walls of the dining hall, and then paced inside the circle of our eyes, unremarkable, seeking no remark. “I am walking until the words come,” he said quietly, looking at the floor as he gently paced. “I did not prepare for this, for preparation is impossible. There is only the present moment. I am walking and praying that the words come and I am given what it is I need to do with you today.”
It seemed he walked for hours. No cocky, group leader assuredness here. Naked under our stares, humbly he spurned the cloak of empty words and actions. Even as he made me uncomfortable he inspired awe. I glanced around and watched the eyes of others around me.
Some stared in fascination, other looked glazed with boredom. Some could not bear to watch. Time stretched and stretched…. Until he finally asked us to walk around the room, eyes closed, experiencing ourselves in the energy field of ourselves.
After wandering into each other and bumping furniture, excusing ourselves and laughing for awhile, he guided us to the main lecture hall. There was a palpable level of greater intimacy in the group now. I wondered how different UN sessions and mighty international peace talks and other political forums would be, were the political powers asked to wander, eyes-closed around a small room together for an hour before the sessions began.
The drum making ceremony he embarked upon was a study in contrast. We had been listening to lectures and embracing the science of mental entanglement. Now we got to experience it. Watching a man, head bowed in intense ritual focus as sage smoke curled around his kneeling form, laboring with deer hide and sinew, pebbles and an old kettle to create a drum that he would play for us to place our dreams and desires into its rhythm that they be moved out into the universe to create a better world….
We moved into Oneness with him, our Humanity beautiful as sweat dripped from his face, and his arms and hands strained, holding the tension perfectly across the drum face. Here was Us. Here was Earth. Here was Sky. Here were the Four Directions. Here was Blessing. Here was Hope. Here was the Sacred. Here was Healing.
It was hard listening to James O’Dea’s talk on Social Healing that evening, for he spoke of the horrors of humanity and the wounding that has occurred. I was in a place of peace and expansion. Surely this was not the time to listen to a former president of Amnesty International speak of genocide and torture and man’s inhumanity to man. Never one to want to face this at the worst of times, I surely did not want to face it at the best. But gradually the strength of the bond created earlier in ritual made it possible. This too, was me. Not just the sacred spiral of sage smoke and the intricate throbbing beat and timbre of the drum. Not just hope, but also despair. Not just the sacred, but also the profane. There could not be one without the other. In order to be whole I had to open myself to both. In order for global transformation to occur, I had to be transformed; able to embrace the globe and all it contained. Only from there could lasting changes come.
