Collective Enlightenment

Recently I came across a very interesting thread “The Next Buddha Will Be Collective”. The essay is long and I would suggest that anyone who resonates with the quotes read the article in full.

“In this essay, we will claim that contemporary society is evolving towards a dominance of distributed networks, with peer to peer based social relations, and that this will affect spiritual expression in fundamental ways.”

“If we accept the new ontological and epistemological convictions that there are no absolute reference points or frameworks, no objective reality out there on their own, can we still accept fixed cosmologies and religions? If we accept that knowing is a matter of co-creation with other humans, holding different frameworks, and that approaching truth is a matter of confronting those differences in frameworks, and how they illuminate realities in different ways, can we still accept fixed methodologies and pathways, leading to inevitable conclusions about the truth? Or would we expect co-created truth to be open-ended? If we want to act and live according to the peer principle of equal worth of all persons, can we accept the deep-seated rankism that is part and parcel of traditional approaches to religion? The questions are suggesting the answer, and the answer is that in all likelihood, the forms of spirituality that we are striving will have the open and free, participatory, and commons-oriented aspects which the emerging p2p forms of consciousness are desiring to appear in the world.”

The important point elaborated is that peer-to-peer spirituality may not accept proprietary modes of knowledge transference. In other words, master to student transmission is abolished for student-to-student creation of enlightenment (he doesn’t employ the term “enlightenment” but I do). P2P refuses copyright restrictions impeding alteration of the ancient ‘bibles’ or great books. There is no secret knowledge as it’s all dumped into the pot and cooked up together.

“A commons-oriented approach would lead to co-created knowledge to be available in a common pool, for others to build on and to be confronted with.”

The master is demoted and now becomes part of a network of truth seekers none holding credentials above another in an equality of understanding in creation of truth. Everything is “communally validated.”

“Equipotentiality suggests that we should not judge a person according to one purported essence, say, as a spiritual master or an enlightened being, but as a wide mixture of different skills and abilities, none of which by itself elevates that person to a higher human status.”
"Individuals are free to explore this guidance, but the individual, and the communities, are still in charge of building collective spiritual freedom, without a priori fixed path."

“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.”

This peer to peer sharing is already happening and the author identifies the elaborate sharing of knowledge through Wikipedia and other share-tools. Yet, it is also happening within spiritual forums scattered throughout the cyber world.

The last quote encapsulates my thoughts on this matter quite nicely and has even defined for me the reasoning behind my starting this blog, as well as defining my distrust of proprietary "masters" and their modern equivalent's resistance to sharing without a fee.

Enlightenment is not a linear extension of finite knowledge master to student, but an infinite relational creation requiring a high magnitude of collective participation for that sharing to build upon itself and create truth.

Therefore, the “Great Masters” are dead and we need bury them, since no more are needed. However, we can and will use the information, but it is no longer proprietary nor is it sacred.

Time to shatter some myths!