Description
of a five-day spiritual inquiry workshop with John Heron
(Note:
This description was sent out to applicants, unfamiliar with this kind of
spiritual inquiry, for a workshop in San Francisco, California, USA, in August
2002. In our current series of workshops, where the participants have prior
experience, the journey of opening may be reduced or omitted altogether, and the
co-operative inquiry methodology will have strong Dionysian elements interwoven
with the Apollonian format given below.)
The workshop starts with spiritually radical 2-day journey of
opening. This leads into
a 3-day co-operative inquiry. The topic for the inquiry arises collaboratively
out of the journey of opening. The inquiry includes, at its close, a
discussion about setting up long-term inquiry groups.
The workshop runs on two levels: the basic level of the
opening and the inquiry; and a facilitator-training meta-level, at which I
regularly raise issues about what I am doing at the basic level. This is so that
people can leave the workshop empowered to reproduce their own distinctive
version of it with future groups.
The journey of opening is a guided theoretical
overview, and primarily a lived exploration, of the field of spiritual
transformation. It covers a comprehensive range of individual and relational
forms of spiritual practice. The purpose of the journey is to:
- Raise consciousness about the range of options available as possible
themes for the subsequent inquiry.
- Provide a provisional, co-evolved and shared vocabulary for discussing the
options in the inquiry.
- Offer a preparatory training in the sort of discriminating awareness and
critical subjectivity needed in the inquiry.
- Present the options in a dogma-free zone, and take the negative charge off
those items associated with oppressive forms of religion or new age
dogmatism.
- Create a shared attitude - a spirit of inquiry about the spiritual and
subtle - to replace traditional forms of authoritarian spiritual
pronouncement.
- Empower us to have faith in:
- The accessibility to us of spiritual and subtle transformations, no matter
how apparently arcane.
- Our own know-how, our competence to open to such transformations.
- Our ability to make sense of our experiences according to our own lights.
- Our own implicit spiritual path and our ability to make it explicit.
- Our ability to heal from past spiritual oppression and wounding.
- And, underlying all, our openness to the discriminating spiritual
authority immanent within our own being.
The co-operative inquiry explores in greater
depth one or more individual and/or interactive and relational forms of
spiritual practice. It will start with a brief overview of the simple and
challenging methodology of a co-operative inquiry. We then:
- Choose the focal practice(s) of the inquiry, whether the same practice to
be explored in the large group, or different practices in several small
groups. And choose ways of recording what we learn about, and through, the
practice(s).
- Do our chosen practice for an agreed time, reflect on it, and record our
data about it.
- Share the data in the small groups and the large groups, and reflect
together on it; and in the light of this refine, modify or radically change
the forms of practice and ways of recording.
- Do our modified practice for an agreed time, reflect on it, and record our
data about it.
- Continue to move in this way between reflection and action for an agreed
number of cycles, working awarely with convergent and divergent themes
within the group.
- Use a variety of validity and quality control procedures throughout the
inquiry process.
- Draw together the threads of the inquiry in a final reflection phase, and
assess its overall quality.
The long-term inquiry group discussion suggests some procedural guidelines for setting up and sustaining such groups and
will debate the primacy of relational spirituality.
Who should apply? This is a workshop for people
who are out there in the self-generating spiritual culture that is emerging
across our planet. If you are one of these people, you:
- Affirm your own original relation to the presence of creation, find
spiritual authority within and do not project it outward onto teachers,
traditions or texts.
- Are alert to the hazards of defensive and offensive spirituality, in which
unprocessed emotional distress distorts spiritual development, either by
denying parts of one’s nature, or by making inflated claims in order to
manipulate others.
- Are open to genuine dialogue about spiritual beliefs and to collaborative
decision-making about spiritual practices undertaken together.
Background reading
For a recent comprehensive overview of co-operative inquiry:
For a brief introduction to spiritual inquiry and a report of
one:
For an in-depth study of spiritual inquiry, including the map
on which the journey of opening is based, and several inquiry reports:
- Heron, J., Sacred Science:
Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle, Ross-on-Wye,
PCCS Books, 1998.
For a summary and an update of my views on human
spirituality:
Heron, J., 'Spiritual inquiry as divine becoming', ReVision, Fall,
2001.
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