Adam Blatner

I’ve just been reading a book, The coming interspiritual age, by Kurt Johnson & David Robert Ord (Vancouver: Namaste, 2012—just published!) It explains at length—delightfully!—just why now’s the time! I do sense a shift from spirituality based on content to spirituality based on process—but more about that anon. The books was a Christmas present from my daughter who knew I liked such things. It is a fine text in many respects.

However, I’ve realized that in the last decade I’ve matured to an interesting point where I am caught up with articulating the “how” for what you describe as a goal. Mythically, I suspect I’m not going to sense God’s presence; rather, I work in the office, or on the factory floor. I don’t even desire mystical union. For me, knowing that I’m helping in the process is reward enough.
The tools I’ve been given sprout from several sources—Moreno’s psychodrama being a major one; a little Jung, Whitehead, Adler, Kabbalah, etc. But basically, here is the plan:

Humans have come through a phase of word-mastery, and over-valuation of words and numbers (“logo-centricity”). General shifts tend to over-do it. Anyway, there is yet another mode of co-creativity that includes words but also adds action (simulations, role playing, role training) and psychology (increasing the level of discourse by people daring to empathize with others, play the “double” or voice-over role, and allow themselves to be corrected. This is a more subtle and complex form of improv and empathy-reaching psychotherapy—but the kick is that the one who doubles is morally obligated to try to be open to corrections given by the one who is doubled. This builds in a self-correcting cybernetic system. Instead of helpers presuming they know better, they are bound to be sensitive to working with what the helped require, and they take it over again until the helpee says, “Yes, that’s how I feel.” This is a corrective to “interpretation,” which was vulnerable to getting clients to assent to the power gradient.

The involvement of enactment tends to make all this more vivid. Showing us rather than talking about it generates an immediacy and authenticity that is a little empowering of spontaneity. What I’m getting at is the re-formulation and propagation of a technology for collaborative creativity. Sorry if it isn’t clear: Your feedback may help me to explain it more clearly.