Come Together

A spiritual community dissolves the sense of separateness that causes so much of our suffering. With a few friends, create one of your own.

By Sally Kempton

Best Friends

It's a lot to ask of a group that it carry the wisdom and conviction of an enlightened teacher. On the other hand, when you spend time with people committed to seeing each other's intrinsic greatness, you might be amazed to discover how enlightened we ordinary, garden-variety humans can be. In the past few years, I've had, and read about, so many powerful experiences of peer satsang that I'm beginning to accept that we bozos on the bus—to quote activist Wavy Gravy—do have the power to create situations that will support mutual awakening, much as the "official" wisdom teachers have historically done. In traditional Buddhist lore, the Buddha is supposed to make one more appearance in the form of a teacher called Maitreya. Maitreya means friendly or benevolent. Several contemporary writers have suggested that the Maitreya Buddha may have already appeared—in the form of the spiritual friends who come together to help enlighten one another.

Here's a small example of what I mean: Last year, meeting with three other teachers who'd never worked together before, I was awed to see our group shift in 30 minutes from mutual misunderstanding and chaos to a state of inspired synergy that let us put on a spontaneous program without a glitch. I'd often had this experience working with members of my own spiritual community. To have it with virtual strangers amazed me.

But friends who do organizational development tell me that this is not uncommon once a group agrees to put away egoic agendas in favor of finding solutions that truly serve the situation. One result, I'm told, of the infusion of spiritual values into mainstream culture has been a phenomenon called "the magic in the middle," where in the midst of a discussion, wisdom begins to surface spontaneously and people find that the group can make quantum leaps of insight.

Longtime spiritual practitioners committed to making their spiritual insights part of their secular lives have seeded a yeasty mix of contemplative practices, group dynamics, and basic yogic principles into the culture. As veterans of countless meditation or yoga-based workshops and retreats, they've come to see that satsang is both life changing and portable—that it can become a vehicle to transform the workplace as well as the family.

So, I suspect that we may be experiencing a time when the kind of deep satsang the sages referred to—the wise company that we have historically associated only with enlightened teachers—may be available in any group of practitioners who are willing to be true to their intention to grow toward a truly awake, Self-less, or God-centered state. I say this with a few strong caveats: Such peer satsangs work best when they're formed around an awake teaching—that is, around the insights of the truly wise. They work even better when there are elders in the group, people who've done enough practice and study to be able to tell the difference between group wisdom and group autosuggestion. The elders don't necessarily have to be teachers or obvious leaders. They do need to be willing to stand in what they've learned, and to speak from that wisdom.

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