Participatory Spirituality

Based on the emerging, decentralized, commons-based "third mode of production" - described in an essay by Michel Bauwens (see introduction and links).

The Noosphere Website "aims at developing a thesaurus of integrative knowledge, especially on psychological, social and philosophical topics, i.e. the sciences where the integrative method is essential for their scientifical plausibilty. The expectation is that by a process of intellectual and factual integration the last stage of the social/universal evolution will be realised, labeled with terms including Socialization, Noosphere and Tertiary Society. " Participation is welcome. The webmaster, Michel Bauwens, has recently completed an important essay on Peer to Peer and Human Evolution. Thus the Teilhard-inspired Noosphere website gives way to The Foundation for P2P Alternatives. See especially The Foundation's Blog where many links, comments, and quotes from many different websites and initiatives are posted.

Cooperative Spirituality - see resources page for many useful links - blog by Mushin J. Schilling, a very spiritual individual and true gnostic who I know originally from his comments on Visser's Wilber Watch, more recently he has commented on my Integral Transformations blog; he has a blog and cyberspace presence on Zaadz too.

The following very insightful observations by John Heron on Cultural development and moral insight give a good overview of the spiritual quality of a society or civilization, based on the consensus morality of that particular society (hyperlinks not in the original)

Evolution as a concept seems best left to natural processes. Otherwise intellectual bids to know what evolution is up to culturally and what is coming next culturally, rapidly convert into hegemonic arrogance and attempts at social and intellectual control. Cultural development is a different category and is very close in my view to the way in which human realization of a doctrine of rights, in theory and practice, unfolds.

There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight and not in an evolutionary logic:

1. Autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation.
2. Narrow democratic cultures which practise political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.
3. Wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation.
4. Commons peer-to-peer cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human edeavour.

These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

1. Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy.
2. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only.
3. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres.
4. The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavour.