Am I Ready for Tribe?

Am I ready for Conscious Tribe? Am I ready to unite my life-journey with the life-journeys of other people – people committed to relating consciously, and co-creating a conscious culture for themselves and for the generations to come? Am I spiritually, psychologically, emotionally and intellectually ready?

The short, quick answer is “yes, of course – as long as I am willing to share the learning journey with everyone else – I´m welcome!”

But let´s get more specific – and be more realistic. Let´s imagine I want to join a local tennis club, say. “Can I join your tennis club?” I ask. “Yes, of course, everyone´s welcome!” they reply. “Do you know how to play?” “No” I admit, “I´ve never played before, but I´m keen to learn.” “That´s not a problem” I´m reassured, “you´ll soon learn!”.

So yes, I am welcome. However, clearly, if everyone else was as much of a beginner as me, then there wouldn´t be much of a club!

So let´s put it like this. On the one hand, everyone´s ready for tribe. Everyone´s welcome. But there´s also another level of readiness. Just as at the tennis club there are, we assume, people who know how to play tennis – there is another level of readiness for tribe that we need to acknowledge – a readiness that allows us to enter the tribe seamlessly, to immediately share the tribe´s sense of a shared existential journey, to immediately take pleasure in the depth of intimacy the tribe shares, to immediately appreciate and contribute to the tribe´s local-sustainability projects...

WILLING OR READY?

In fact we could call these two types of readiness “willingness” and “readiness”. I don´t know how to play tennis yet: but I am willing to learn. Or - I come to the club with years of experience of the game: I am ready to play.

So what would make me ready for Conscious Tribe? Conscious Tribes are non-biological extended families that share The Path of Honesty. This honesty has very specific outcomes:

- people are aware they only have their own unique experience of any moment - nobody pretends to know the Absolute Truth about anything - people are aware we are all part of a Great Mystery - people are aware we are all equals - people are aware we are all unique expressions of the Great Mystery - living in this way, people come to share a beautiful, sacred, non-sentimental love - people naturally want to co-create a culture that embodies and perpetuates this way of being What would make me ready (not just willing) to join such a tribe? Are these people able to live this way because they share certain ideas? Or is the way of being they now share the mature fruit of years of spiritual opening, often-painful therapeutic work, and cutting-edge ecological, sociological and political enquiry? Is there preparatory work I need to do to be ready – to be able to genuinely enter, and move comfortably within, the energy field of a Conscious Tribe? Yes, of course there is.

GETTING READY

I am going to divide this preparation into four facets...

Firstly: self-knowledge. We need to give time and attention to recognising and feeling the essence of our being, The Life Force that we all are – that flows through all things. This might be through breathwork, or meditation, or plant medicines, or Tai Chi, or expressive dance – or one of a thousand other spiritual modalities.

Whatever the path - the result is always the same: we come to know ourselves as something invisible, as something that can be seen the way that the wind can be seen when the trees move – but which is in itself invisible. We don´t need to make grand theories about this, or build belief systems about it. We just enjoy the ever-deepening homecoming to ourselves, and feel its rightness, and give thanks.

Secondly: stabilisation in self-knowledge. We need to learn “to live as” The Life Force we are. In other words, we need to become familiar with the personal and collective conditioning we have received – and learn to no longer let ourselves be carried away by it. We need to become “masters of our own psyches”. This means embracing all we judge and reject within ourselves, all we repress within ourselves, all we are ashamed of in ourselves. It is not pleasant work – even if, eventually, the outcome is blissful. If we neglect this aspect of our preparation then we will become “spiritual bypassers” - people whose spirituality is clearly fragile and artificial, too neat and tidy, and far too sweet. Thirdly: relationship in self-knowledge. We need to learn to relate “from essence to essence” - from Life Force to Life Force. Knowing our own indefinable nature, we see ourselves in everybody else´s eyes. “There I am! That´s me! In him, in her – and in that cat, that dog, that bird!” We need to practise talking-from our essence, and talking-to the essence of others – so that we gradually come to see, non-judgmentally, to what extent others are identified with their essence, or identified with their conditioning. And so that we gradually become capable of sustaining, deep, powerful, exquisite intimacy.

Finally, fourthly: action from self-knowledge. We need to examine the way we move through the world – the degree to which the things we do, and the things we use, perpetuate a culture of unconsciousness, dishonouring, numbness and violence - and the degree to which our work and our lifestyle are a contribution to the co-creation of a culture in which every person, and every creature, and every object is honoured as a unique expression of the perhaps-infinite Great Mystery to which we all belong. This might mean making slight changes, or radical changes - or perhaps not changing what we do as much as how we do it. But we cannot exclude our engagement with the physical world from our preparation.

This division into four “facets” is a simple and useful way of describing the preparatory work we need to do, the “work on ourselves” we need to do, in order to be able to “play the game “- to be able to enter the energy field of the tribe, and respect it; to be able to sense its subtlety; to be able to distinguish it from the unconscious energy fields with which we are all so familiar – and “fit in”, and “take our seat in the circle”.

By engaging in this personal, preparatory work we enter the tribe from a place of self-worth, of self-honouring - of honouring of our own uniqueness. We enter the energy field of the tribe from a place of honouring of all others – of honouring every other tribe member´s sacred uniqueness. We are able to speak our own truth without apologising for it, or imposing it. And we are able to hear everyone else´s truth without submitting to it, or entering into conflict with it. We enter the tribe as a sacred equal.

The Conscious Tribe is a tribe committed to consciousness, to present-moment awareness; to relating to each other consciously, to seeing each other and honouring each other; and to conscious action – to action as the creative expression of a shared sacred awareness. This is not a commonplace energy field. It is one thing to be willing, to be eager, to want to be part of the co-creation of a new culture, to understand the need for change. It is another to have become the change.

The energy field of the Conscious Tribe is the energy field of the new culture we seek to co-create. To the extent we have prepared ourselves, individually – to the extent we have ourselves “become the change” - to that extent we will be able to join the tribe and immediately feel at home.

HOW READY IS READY?

Do we need to have become enlightened beings, living in a state of perpetual union with all others, and already be totally ecologically self-sustaining in order to be ready to join a Conscious Tribe - ready, and not just willing – ready and able to immediately resonate with the depth and connectedness of the tribe? Of course not.

Is there, at least, a point at which we could say, definitively “now I am ready!” I don´t think so. In fact, the learning that was preparatory will continue – just as (and please excuse my rather odd example) having joined the tennis club - one´s tennis, one would hope, would continue to improve. The Journey of Tribe is, after all, a shared, lifelong, learning journey.

So what is my point then? That we need to acknowledge the difference between “willing” and “ready”? Yes. That we can prepare ourselves, and become readier? Yes.

And that with awareness of all of the above, and with some preparation, at least - we will form our Conscious Tribes much more realistically. And that they will have a much greater chance of success.

Success? Yes – of enduring, hopefully beyond our own lifetimes; of becoming homes for our souls, and the souls of our children; of becoming places of seeing and being-seen, where love is not something private or occasional, but the atmosphere we move in, naturally - and of becoming places of crazy, unexpected creativity - and places of sacred celebration.

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Mark The Mystic Activist, Sant Celoni, Catalonia, Summer 2023. Website: www.markthemysticactivist.com Menswork: http://hombredigno.elementfx.com/wp/ paperbacks: https://www.lulu.com/searchcontributor=Mark+The+Mystic+Activist&adult_audience_rating=00 Telegram (español): t.me/tribusconscentes

Telegram (english): t.me/conscioustribes