Jeff Carreira: Hello Elizabeth, and thank you for speaking with me today. Our current issue is dedicated to the phenomenon of collective awakening, which is a term you and I used back when we lived in a spiritual community together. I would love to get started by asking you to speak about the term “collective awakening”, and how you relate to it today.

Elizabeth Debold: It's funny because when I heard you use the term collective awakening, I thought, “What are we awakening to?” That's a really important question. When you and I were together in a spiritual community, awakening meant becoming enlightened. But I find “enlightenment” to be unclear, frankly. The question, “What is enlightenment?” became the title of the magazine that the community you and I were in produced – and for a good reason. Really, what is enlightenment? When we use the term “awakening,” everyone can relate to the experience of waking up, going from one state, sleep, to another. Awakening suggests a change in perception to perceiving something meaningful, bright, fresh, and, in a spiritual context, to perceive the whole that we are each part of. Oh! Now I see!

So, what is collective awakening? It is simultaneously many things at once. First, it is the embodied realization that those of us in the collective are connected by a field that is alive and lives in, between, and beyond those present. There is a collective presence, something more than the individuals in the dialogue. And that is another aspect: this form of awakening happens in language. We re-discover the magic of language to evoke new, shared dimensions of depth and the real. Collective awakening is also an awakening to an intelligence that is intrinsic to the fabric of existence. We are awakening to a shared intelligence together. It's a shared way of being, knowing, and loving through which one experiences non-separation from others in the group and the life process itself. We realize that living intelligence isn’t only happening in our bodies; it’s happening within, between, and beyond us.

In collective awakening we are discovering the experience of being present in life together, not as separate beings who have to come together, but as individuals who are already united in a dimension that exists beyond separation. There's a way of knowing that transcends the individual mind and creates a collective learning and sense-making that synthesizes difference into a new whole. This awakening also reveals a dimension of love that one experiences as the fabric of the Cosmos itself. We see that we are actively participating in that love, and feel responsible for it. So going back to the question of spiritual awakening or enlightenment, this is not a special spiritual thing. The qualities that become available to us through this collective awakening are new human potentials that lead us into a transformed future.

Jeff Carreira: You're describing a deep connection to a universal source of love and wisdom as what we collectively awaken to. We might say that we are realizing that there is a vast source of consciousness, love, and being woven into the fabric of existence. Most often historically that kind of awakening is something we associate with enlightened individuals. The idea of collective awakening implies multiple people having that recognition. My experience is that this recognition opens up differently in a collective context than in an individual one. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about the difference between an individual's awakening and this collective awakening?

Elizabeth Debold: I'm sure many of your readers have had deep experiences in meditation. I find it fascinating that in those experiences we wake up to non-separation, and realize there's a dimension of who we are that is connected to a source that is Absolute and underlies everything. In individual awakening, a person could be sitting on their meditation cushion in a state of oneness with their hearts blown out, but rarely does that experience extend to a sense of unity with the person sitting next to them. Often in a context of an individual’s awakening, the unity experience is a unity of one. I'm one with the Cosmos, with the universe, with the Absolute. But somehow that doesn't always transfer to the experiential recognition that we are together at the most fundamental level.

Collective awakening opens up a dimension of reality that exists between the physical and the Absolute. The practice of engaging in this Interbeing (which is the term we use) is done through language, which is neither physical nor pure consciousness. And the language is alchemical – it generates depth and meaning; it’s evocative and creative. It opens a space between us that actually changes the way we have been taught to perceive reality. A depth is revealed that is subtle and active – again, neither physical nor the Absolute, which is pure spirit or emptiness. There are worlds of subtlety in-between, and when we focus on what’s between us we start to get access to these worlds and their capacities. This in-between has been called the mundus imaginalis – the imaginal world. “Imaginal” not in the sense of imaginary but in recognition of the creative force of perception. So another thing we discover in this Interbeing work is that there is a creative dimension that becomes available to us together. That is a synergetic intelligence, an intelligence that wants to integrate and wants to create wholeness out of diversity, not in ways that flatten out the diversity, but that brings it together into a new whole. That's different from an individual's awakening.

Jeff Carreira: What I’ve heard you say so far is that Interbeing work opens up and enlivens the relational space between us, and in that opening we awaken to a higher source of being together. Earlier you asked, “What are we waking up to?” and I think the other question we could ask is, “Who's waking up?” Because in my experience of that inter-subjective space, there is a sense that a collective consciousness or a collective being is coming to life. It's actually a different order of being that emerges between us. I would love to hear you speak more about that in relation to the work you do with Interbeing.

Elizabeth Debold: Yes, Beatrice Bruteau called it the “New Being”. This new Interbeing gives us a new way of being through shared presence, a new way of knowing through co-conscious creativity, and a new way of loving through the experience of this space itself – an embodied unity. We are working to develop the ability as practitioners to surrender and care enough to allow the autopoiesis – the self-organizing – of Interbeing as an intelligent organism to take over. Perhaps like an octopus with a brain in each arm.

We often focus on co-conscious creativity. That’s when one begins to experience a shared awareness, a shared creative intelligence. I was part of a meeting with some of our closest practitioners just the other night where this happened. And when in a dialogue like that, a field of Interbeing opens in which one experiences a force coming through the group as a whole that is synergizing the perspectives in the dialogue. And after, the individuals are often not able to recall the conversation until they come together again. It’s not available through their usual ways of knowing. Through our willingness and intention and depth of curiosity, we become a vehicle for something to come through the group, but it's not about the group or the individuals in it. Each individual becomes a vehicle for their own experience and knowledge to be synergistically orchestrated with the experience and knowledge of the others. There's a way in which the life force living in the Interbeing space with its intention to create wholeness works through the individuals, in such a way that a wholeness is created that the individuals don't control or guide.

You can back out of it, of course. You can decide not to participate. This work only happens in a context of freedom of choice. But that awakening requires us to give ourselves in trust to that which is beyond us. You notice more and more that someone else will refer to things that just came up in your consciousness. We begin to find more and more coherence in this intelligence and more and more capacity to allow it to come in through us and resolve differences. Not so that everyone agrees – and this is really important, it's not about agreement. It's about a resolution of paradox that allows things that may be very polarizing to be held collectively in a deeper field of consciousness.

Jeff Carreira: What you're calling Interbeing we spoke about in our previous work as inter-subjectivity or a higher we-space. Today I tend to use the term betweenness when I'm speaking of this space. There's tremendous value in this type of work, and part of it is a kind of alchemical effect in which we as individuals are opened up to new vistas of possibility in the presence of others. These gatherings create space for us to have individual realizations that fuel our individual growth.

Elizabeth Debold: Definitely.

Jeff Carreira: On the other hand, as you've been saying, this work makes things possible between people. This makes me wonder what this could mean for our world. What could happen if this became a way of being that was utilized widely and could be brought into various contexts? I know that is an important part of your work, especially with One World Bearing Witness. I'm wondering if you could speak to what you see as the bigger human possibilities and advances that could come from this awakening.

Elizabeth Debold: If you look at what some people call the polycrisis, which is the hydra-headed problems we're in the midst of as a species, others talk about the meta-crisis, or the meaning crisis, but they all arise out of a profound sense of separation. They rest on a foundational insistence that the physical is the only reality, and yet matter or material is not even valued that much. The bleakness of this view, combined with our isolation and alienation from life, has triggered epidemics of addiction, depression, and simple, heartbreaking loneliness. Opening to a different dimension of reality that we’re talking about reveals a space that is non-separate while maintaining individuality and the preciousness of our individual experience and lives. This is what allows us to meet human-to-human in a connection that is prior to separation. So we meet in the reality that none of us is separate, that we are all interdependent, intertwined, and entangled. We find a space of belonging that is inherently meaningful, and is often experienced as sacred.

When the community that you and I were part of collapsed, a few of us met in India and asked, “How can others benefit from what we've learned?” That's part of what spurred our interest in doing One World Bearing Witness, which was a global 24-hour practice event featuring spiritual leaders from different traditions. We wanted to create global events where spiritual leaders and activists and people who are working for change could come together in spaces that held this depth and recognition. If we start from non-separation, the conversation becomes a different conversation.

In an Interbeing context, you feel more like yourself and you appreciate the other people as the mystery that they are to you. At the same time the ground between you is non-separation. At a cultural level, change always happens with small groups of people who are doing radical practices of love until the spaces for practice permeate our world-space. If you look at Christianity, regardless of what you might think about it, that is how it ended up bringing down the Romans. Perhaps that is the potential here today.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, I would agree. The level of vulnerability and undefendedness is extraordinary in these gatherings. When you look at the world we live in, it is not hard to wonder what would be possible if people were regularly doing practices that could support them to enter these states of vulnerable, undefended interest in the truth. I can't think of anything we need more in the world.

Elizabeth Debold: Yes, and along those lines, we've started something recently called Interbeing Tea Dialogues. They combine the formality and ritual aspect of a tea ceremony to create a sacred context with an experience of Interbeing. People bring up issues that they are struggling with or are fascinated by. It can be anything positive or negative, and every member of the group brings an issue or brings a question that is alive for them. Then the group selects one of those as being the most appropriate question for the group as a whole to explore. That in itself takes vulnerability.

Once the questions are opened up we pierce through to the most existential level. So it's not about finding out the truth or what's going on with only one person. We want to discover something in that question that we all have a deep connection to, because it is profoundly human. When looked from an existential point of view, we realize that we're not separate from the person who brought it up. In that recognition there's a healing that happens. There's a wholeness that comes from that. And wholeness and healing have the same root. We don’t give advice in these groups. It's about exploring and sharing the experience or the question that's been brought up as deeply as possible together. It's something we use to introduce people to Interbeing work.

Jeff Carreira: I would love you to say a little bit about the continued growth and advancement of Interbeing work.

Elizabeth Debold: We're living in potentially transformative and definitely dangerous times. You could even say we're living in times of increasing darkness, if you want to use that metaphor. And that makes me think back to the end of the Roman Empire. What happened after the collapse of the civilization of Rome was that the Christian church formed monasteries. Regardless of what you might think about the Christian faith and its history, these monasteries were incubators of a certain consciousness. They were incubators for the development of the individual, they held the practices of prayer and contemplation aimed at creating deeper self-responsibility and self-reflection, and the capacity to be a moral agent. This supported the emergence of the culture that we're part of today. It was a powerful shift in human consciousness. We see now that it certainly had its downsides, and we're dealing with that now. But today we don't have structures where people can come together in practice.

We need new incubators for a new consciousness that begins with the recognition of the peace that exists beyond the mind that we discover in meditation, but adds the collective capacities of Interbeing and what we call Emergent Dialogue. We need spaces that will incubate a new consciousness for humanity. Right now, we have the technology that allows us to connect across the entire planet, and we need to “awaken” this technology through making these connections in practice. So we have created an online space called the Interbeing Monastery where these practices are being done. We want to make it possible for people to develop and create together – and to contribute to the development of this Interbeing. Ultimately, we want to discover a different response to being human that is not rooted in separation and domination.