Groups and Group Consciousness

Wisdom Teachings
Groups and Service

During long ages humanity very slowly has severed from the universal consciousness and learned to live as individual units. The development of individualisation was a great process, in which we have cultivated our mind and our personality. Today we have reached the next task to re-integrate into the greater whole and to raise ourselves from self-consciousness to group consciousness and to universal consciousness.

Through the step towards the group we are liberated from the cocoon of individual life and we begin to unite with the one consciousness acting through many. Groups form very naturally, around ourselves, at home, at work. There are most various kinds of groups – political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual groups. Actually a group is nothing but a grouping of some individual souls around a concept. We must not have a too narrow understanding of groups and group consciousness. Group consciousness does not relate only to the so-called spiritual groups. The entire life is spiritual; the family life, professional life and social life take place within the spiritual life and not outside. Each work, be it at home, at the office or in the hospital includes working with other people. Therefore we cannot conceive our group as the few persons who gather around us and then speak about wisdom concepts. We have to broaden the definition of the group – as our family, our friends, the colleagues at work, the colleagues at social activities, and as the co-workers at the spiritual activity. Often more work in the direction of group consciousness is done outside the spiritual group than inside.

From the standpoint of an enlightened consciousness everything is a group. A master of wisdom can see the one group working as many, or he can see many individual groups. For us it is important to realise the fundamental unity of all groups, irrespective of name, place and quality. To this also belong all groupings on the planet – of minerals, plants or animals, even all groupings of planets or of solar systems. The wisdom teachings help us to keep this perspective in our minds. Hence let us feel the unity not only with our group, but also with other groups as well as with groups which are not spiritual, because it is one consciousness.

If we understand our spiritual group like a club with its members, we have crystallized in concepts. We suffer from fancying ourselves something special. Individuals, groups, races and nation who feel themselves to be something special, thus cut themselves off from the general stream of life. For as much as we exclude, that much we separate and get excluded. In the present age all separatist attitudes are forced open. The keynote is: “Integrate, do not disintegrate.” When we reject group members, synthesis is missing in our group. If we detest somebody, we feel how a feeling of unease starts working in our stomach. We lose our balance and our health is affected. The family life is a good training camp for learning how to make compromises and include others.

Today the personalities and individual views are very strong. Individual pride won’t allow people to become part of a group. Groups split up, because opinions and interests are more important than the love for the whole. The cooperation within a group presents a great challenge: It is a matter of performing one’s own work in accordance with the totality and in doing so not to meet others in an aggressive way. Thus we learn to adjust ourselves to the others, to include their views and also to express our own views in a way that they don’t hurt anybody. Cordiality builds up right group relations. Master E.K. used to say: “The group is the Master. Don’t do anything which cuts across the interest of the group.”

Esteem and respect towards the program of the others is of essential importance. When we want to help somebody, we have to carefully think if we really help or rather harm the other. This calls for a most delicate way of dealing with the others and letting them live the way they want to live. It is a basic spiritual law not to teach or advise others without being asked, and not to impose on them what we follow. It might be that their program doesn’t contain what is in our program. We must not think to know what is the program of the other soul. Normally some people also like to stand out in a group, to lead and control it; this results from personal desire and represents a problem for the integration of the group.

If we love our fellow souls, we respect their free will and give them the freedom to make their own experiences. And if somebody wants to make his experiences somewhere else, he can decide for himself, if and when he goes away. In civilized groups we keep the entrance and the exit free and open, we don’t hold anybody. There is only a going together of people who have a similar way of thinking: With a river flowing its way to the ocean other waters can join and continue to stream together or also to flow away again.

In each group there are persons who just remain participants and others who take responsibility. By getting involved and taking responsibility we begin to work with a group. There is always something which we can take charge of, if we are mindful. We should try to do something which is helpful for others, without expecting recognition for it. We shouldn’t wait to be asked to do a job. A normal, well-balanced person doesn’t attract neither too much nor too little work. And if we make a mistake, we take the responsibility for it – here also neither too little nor too much. We try to give our best, with a pure intention, and to eliminate our self-centred motives in action. The work of a group shouldn’t remain locked up within itself but cause a tangible manifestation in the outer and to spread into social activity. The measure of service to the surrounding life decides the measure of depth we attain. We should ponder upon this deeply.

For our meditation the group energy is of great help. A flow of energy is created and we get recharged. We can experience a higher consciousness and a greater presence of the spirit more easily. We gather for group livings in order to commune in consciousness and to connect with the inner light. Once the taste for subjective life grows, the spirit of being together becomes stronger than the other things of personality and the power of the lower nature decreases. In group life there happens a grouping of personalities – not through logic and argumentation, but through the combined alignment. It is not a meeting of heads, but of hearts. Then a grouping of groups must follow. If each of us adds his brick to the structure, a temple is built in the group life, where the One can reside. Then the utterance of Christ applies to us: “Where there are two or three gathered in My name, meet with their hearts and a loving understanding prevails, I AM in their very midst. I manifest at the point where the hearts meet.”

Sources used: K.P. Kumar: Hercules. The Man and the Symbol / The Aquarian Cross / seminar notes. The World Teacher Trust / Dhanishta, Visakhapatnam, India. - A. A. Bailey: White Magic, Lucis-Trust, London. (www.netnews.org / www.lucistrust.org ).