Collective Phenomenology
Or: How to Be Human
just think about it
the slightly noticeable, and all too familiar sensation of a hangover. as if gravity were just a tad bit stronger, a feeling of pulling my body through space-time. the crazy part about this: my hangover culprit is the small matcha oat milk latte I had yesterday.
caffeine is MUCH MUCH more potent than most people realize. honestly, i'm surprised that so many people drink it so frequently. it's a pretty gnarly drug. highly addictive, has profound impact on psychology and digestion. very often influences sleep patterns.
funny enough, while you're on it, high on the caffeine, it feels like the inverse of the hangover. as if you're in zero-g, with no impediment to movement. flying through the world. it's mostly a mental experience, but it somehow maps itself onto the physical dimension as well.
there's a kind of dis-embodiment that happens. a movement into the mind. makes perfect sense that coffee is the drug of choice to get the day started in an industrial society. we've almost completely outsourced our minds into machines and systems. so mechanical. so devoid.
fret not, body as sensor is making its returning to the popular culture once again. the zeitgeist of embodiment. of being in tune with yourself. perhaps a burgeoning understanding, or better yet a R E M E M B E R I N G, of what it means to be human. to follow your gut instinct, your intution.
there are ways to follow your nose. this, this can be trained. a sensitivity for the energetics, the spirit that flows through all of us. it's not scientific. it's spiritual. it's something we can subjectively * f e e l * as opposed to something that we can objectively point to.
and as a result, a worldview unfolds before us, a phenomenologist perspective allowing a subjective truth to emerge. a growing awareness of our truths as understood through experience.
and now, let us bring our individual experiences together, and move into a collective mode d’être.
and how?
how do you get a group of people together in the same place, at the same time? how do you rally this group to go through a spiritual experience of convening, to understand who each other are and who they are as a group on an energetic level?
group energetic (spiritual) practices of engagement to reveal perspecival knowing. the creation of spaces for people to share what they think - to externalize the subjective, to share a lived experience. to bring that lived truth into a collectively held and understood experience.
we do not seek consensus or conformity of understanding. we are not endeavoring to get a group of people to agree on some such topic or way of describing an experience or feeling. instead, we endeavor to comprehend through a reciprocal process of grokking what the other is putting out into the shared field.
a way of accepting what someone else has shared because it comes from their lived experience. perhaps some nudging in order to understand more deeply - why do you think this is so? where do you place your confidence in knowing? what experience do you have to know this?
it's all valid, we come to find. all of the different ways we've existed on this planet, with our myriad backgrounds. everyone's unique take on the world mapped onto shared reference points for the purpose of articulation. increased connectivity. enhanced (shared) understanding.
this is what we're seeking, our aspiration. a better grasp on reality, of how things are. which affords an enhanced ability to interact with and co-create reality. there's so many different arenas of exploration we can build and intentionally enter into; different ways of being, of finding agency in these arenas.
we seek nothing less than to manifest our destinies, together.
excerpt from a journal entry 4/23/23