Jeff Carreira: Craig, thank you for talking with us today. I'm excited about our conversation because years ago we lived in a community together where we were part of a group of people who had a very powerful experience of collective awakening that I want to explore with you today. For me, this experience was one of the most powerful experiences of the formative years of my spiritual life. I'm curious if you would say the same about yourself.

Craig Hamilton: I definitely would.

Jeff Carreira: I think there were about a dozen and a half of us in this particular group. Part of that context was that twelve of us were on a two-month-long retreat at the time. That retreat came after about eight months of intensive spiritual preparation all aimed toward something that we often referred to as the emergence of a higher-we. I am not sure that any of us knew exactly what that meant.

Craig Hamilton: Let me ask you a question. Was that your first experience of a higher-we, or was that just the biggest group you had experienced it with?

Jeff Carreira: I would say it was the biggest and the most intense. And it was different in many ways to anything I had ever experienced before.

Craig Hamilton: The very first experience I had of this must have been about six years prior to that. I had recently joined the spiritual community, and I think you got involved around the same time. I was with a group of about 10 men. At the time, we were meeting separately as men and women to explore the Dharma. We were discussing spiritual principles and spiritual awakening. The goal was to speak from our own experience of it, not theoretically about ideas, but to actually speak from our experience in the moment.

I remember something happened one night when about three of us in the group all shifted into a different consciousness together around the same moment. There was one person who shifted into it first, and then a couple of us immediately felt the shift, and we were able to resonate with that person and stretch into it. Suddenly, there were three of us who were in this higher consciousness, and it felt like we were all in it together. It was a very profoundly lucid, awakened state. We all knew that the three of us were in it together because we were speaking from the same place. We were on fire with this energy and this consciousness, and we were trying to figure out how to get the rest of the group to catch fire. At different points, more of the group would move into it. Maybe it was four, then five or so, but it was never even half of the group at once.

This went on for a handful of days in a row. We were meeting every night for hours, and some small group of us was accessing this higher consciousness together and trying to spread it to the rest of the group. At one point, our spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen, heard about it and came to find out what was happening. We described it to him, and he confirmed that this was what he was hoping for. But we couldn't figure out how to make it happen for everybody. After a while, for some reason, it faded. I think maybe we got self-conscious about it, and it faded away.

For me, that was a very distinct experience of the higher we. It was a shared, awakened consciousness coming into being in a group. So years later, when we were in the group you're talking about, I did know what we were aiming for.

Jeff Carreira: I think I had some previous experiences of heightened consciousness in groups, but nothing to the extent that you're describing, which is very similar to what happened later. Initially, there was a small group of people who were clearly in a shared state of consciousness. I remember being on the outside, recognizing that these people were speaking from a perspective and from a depth that I wasn't. There was a lot of effort going into bringing more people into the higher state. This went on for a couple of weeks, and I remember trying everything I could think of to enter that higher state, but it all fell flat.
In retrospect, I see that I was trying to mimic what the others were doing, but I wasn't in the same place. The way that I was speaking didn't have the same depth and ease. I was sincerely trying, but the only thing I knew to do was fake it until I figured out how to do it for real. I was not the very last person to enter into that higher state, but I was one of the last.

Craig Hamilton: What's interesting about that to me is that I remember you were experiencing profound meditation in the retreat.

Jeff Carreira: I was. It was an amazing experience.

Craig Hamilton: We were on a two-month retreat, and I remember that in terms of your own practice, you were radically letting go and really diving into the depths of profound meditation and nondual awakening. It’s intriguing that when you came into the group environment, you had a harder time letting go, while other people were finding it easier to let go in the collective practice.

Jeff Carreira: To be honest, I always found dialogue practices difficult. I would tend to become very self-conscious in groups. In meditation, I could just let go into oblivion. But in the context of a group, a lot of my self-doubting habits would come up and make it difficult to relax.

It's interesting you mentioned that because my memory of the day when I finally did let go in the group was that I had come to the point where I had already tried every way possible to move into the higher space. I was completely discouraged, and I just decided to stop trying to participate. I just listened, and I became very concentrated, as if I were in meditation. I paid attention to what was being said, but I also didn't try to engage at all.

At some point, I started to feel an impulse arising in me that wanted to be shared, but I ignored it until the impulse got strong enough that words just started coming out of me. It wasn't anything I had premeditated. It was something that wanted to be spoken, and it wanted to be spoken through me. It just came out, and it felt completely different to me. It sounded different. It wasn't anything I was aware of beforehand. It wasn't even incredibly profound, but it fit perfectly into the flow of conversation at that moment. It was the right thing to say at that moment to move the conversation forward. I felt myself click into engagement, and I knew I was on the other side. I was seeing what everybody else was seeing about what's possible and what we were surrendering to together. It was a night-and-day difference from my inner point of view.

Craig Hamilton: What we're talking about is a singular consciousness in which the participation of those who are in it feels completely right and organic. It's where you're speaking from that is the noticeable thing. To put a word on it, you're speaking from a place that's beyond ego and beyond identification with the mind. And so there’s not a person there premeditating what they're going to say. You've gotten out of the way, and a higher consciousness is now doing the talking, and everyone who's in that consciousness resonates with it, feels it, and feels each other in it. The quality, when each person speaks, is like adding a log onto a fire that's burning.

Whatever you're saying, and as you said it might not even be that profound, but it is coming from that place, and it's adding to the fire. Once you click in, everything you say adds to the momentum, and you can hear it from everyone else who's in it. You now have the same eyes and the same ears.

Everyone who is in that higher state is contributing to this flow, and it's as though you get out of the way so that a deeper and higher self can have access to your mouth and can speak wisdom into the space. The more people who are allowing this deeper, wiser, more enlightened consciousness to come through, the more powerful the whole event gets because more vessels, more human organisms, are activated and giving voice to the higher self. And all of the unique ways that each of us might articulate it adds dimensionality to it.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, that is the feeling. It is like the higher consciousness is circulating through the conversation and using each individual's experience in unique ways to add another log to the fire. And you feel like your uniqueness and your individuality are being drawn from.

Craig Hamilton: That's very cool. Because we talk about things like a higher we, but that doesn’t mean we're losing our individuality and merging into some amorphous universal consciousness. This is not like the Borg from Star Trek, which is just one universal entity that takes over other bodies that lose their individual expression. It was very clear in our experience that individuality doesn't go away. But like you said, your individual experience, intelligence, and unique perspective are being drawn upon by this higher consciousness. It is all becoming part of a vessel for something greater.

Jeff Carreira: Absolutely. And you can feel the energy of the conversation accelerating each time a log is added. I remember very distinctly when the last person managed to jump in and suddenly everybody was in. At that moment, it was like the top of my head blew off. Later, I spoke about this with a Kundalini awakening teacher named Dorothy Walters, and she described it as a group Kundalini experience, and that fit what I experienced. I felt the energy go up through the roof. After that, for weeks, we were in this incredible state of a higher we. We would come together every night, we would sit, and it would just happen. It was truly amazing.

Craig Hamilton: Yeah, there was something that shifted when everybody got on board the train, so to speak. In a group where some people are accessing higher consciousness and speaking from it together and some aren't, there's a tension present because that higher consciousness wants everybody on board and is trying to pull everyone into it. Everyone who's embodying it and speaking from it is trying to help uplift others, and there’s a tension around it. Then suddenly, when it's everyone, all that effort and tension is liberated. Every word that's being spoken is adding to the energy. The momentum can take off exponentially and accelerate.

I remember the quality feeling like the roof blew off the building. I remember thinking, “Wow, there's no ceiling anymore on this. We're just flying. We're just out in free, open, expansive consciousness.”

And there's no ego in it. There's no one identifying with what they're saying. There's no one identifying with their mind. There's no one identifying with their experience. There's just a group of passionate, engaged individuals surfing a wave of expanded consciousness together. Everyone is very interested in what others have to say because each piece adds more momentum.

Jeff Carreira: I remember there was no fear and no hesitation. There was just the desire to explore as deeply as we could whatever it was we were talking about. There was no self-concern, no holding back, and no pretense. We were deeply surrendered to the engagement that wanted to happen.
We talked about the incredible potential of this for human life because even though we didn't always see things the same way, we all wanted to find out what was true. No one was concerned about being right. We all knew that if we could see what the other person was seeing, we would add that perspective to our own view.

Craig Hamilton: Yes, just think about the potential of a group of any size shifting into a place that's no longer governed by self-consciousness, any need to prove oneself, or any concern over how one is going to look. Imagine a space that is ultimately governed by a desire to serve the evolution of the whole and the awakening of everyone.

Just think about the layers of social consciousness and self-concern that arise in almost any human conversation. How is this going to land? What are they going to think about what I have to say? What do I think of them and what they have to say? Imgine being together without all of that. If enough human beings could start to come together in this way, we would be a different human race. It felt like creating a template for a new humanity, so to speak.

Jeff Carreira: There were two other aspects of that experience I want to ask you about. The whole time we were in these meetings, we were also on retreat. We were meeting every night and doing practice all day. What I found was that my practice during the day was fueling the depth and power of the conversation that night, and our meetings were generating insight and inspiration that fed the practice the next day. The whole thing was an upwardly spiraling feedback loop where the individual fed the collective and the collective fed the individual.

And the last thing I wanted to bring up was the uncanny realization that every time we met, the space between us had developed beyond where it was the day before. It was almost as if the collective space continued to grow even during the time we weren't meeting. And when we did meet again, part of what we were doing was seeing how things had developed. We would be catching up with something that was already in motion.

Craig Hamilton: Yeah. And we have to wonder, what was that? Was it continuing to evolve?

We were individually living our lives from this new place. So in each person it was evolving. And some of us were deep in a retreat and cultivating that consciousness all day long and coming back together with the others to find that the whole thing had advanced from the previous day. I remember the sense that it just kept moving.
And we were just one group within a larger global spiritual community, and other people who were meeting in other group configurations around the world started to pick up on the same frequency and were having similar experiences. It was like a genie was out of the bottle in the higher collective mind of our community, and it started to affect an increasing number of people.

Jeff Carreira: And as you alluded to earlier, there had been various earlier occurrences of this phenomenon in different groups that led up to this one. We were building on those earlier expereinces, but for me, this group in the middle of that two-month long retreat was radically transformative. The depth of meditation I was experiencing was influenced by our meetings, and what I was discovering in practice was being fed back into the group. The person who finished that retreat was not the same person who started it. It was definitely transformational for me. I experienced reality and myself very differently after those two months. I hold that time in reverence because it was just so important to my own growth.

And now I see people in the circles I work with who are inspired to engage with this kind of practice. I want people to know that everybody's growth and development is creating a momentum that we all live in. I think it's important for people to understand that when we practice as part of a group or community, there's always a collective momentum building that each person is contributing to and each person is being carried by. I'm curious how you see that in the teaching work you do.

Craig Hamilton: It was nearly twenty years ago that I started teaching independently, and because collective awakening practice had been so formative for me, I wanted to carry on with it. Initially, I wasn't sure if it would work online. I thought people meeting in small groups over the internet wouldn't have the same experience. My initial belief was that you had to be in physical proximity because the energy in the room was an important part of what was happening. But I decided to try having people meet in groups virtually, giving them precise instructions similar to the ones we had been learning. And people started to have profound collective awakening experiences virtually.

At one point, I wondered what would happen if people brought meditative awareness more directly into dialogue. I created something called co-meditation. People would sit together virtually, go into deep meditation, and start speaking their meditation out loud, describing the awakened relationship to mind that was emerging through their practice. People had the experience of adding to the collective awakening. That was a practice of collective awakening that was different from the one we had been doing because it was more focused on meditative awareness. And people had powerful experiences with it. I even led large in-person retreats where people were organized into small co-meditation groups.

Even during my more traditional meditation retreats, both in person and in the monthly virtual retreats I lead now, I often bring people’s attention to the collective nature of the practice. Invariably, people comment that those are some of the most powerful moments for them on the retreat. When we draw our attention to the collective, it amplifies the power of the practice for the individuals.

Any time we're doing practice in a collective or community, we are contributing something to the awakening evolution of that group. And the one group we’re all a part of is the human race. What that means is that anytime any one of us is doing spiritual practice to elevate our own consciousness, we are actually contributing energy to human consciousness. To the degree that any one of us becomes free and awake, we're helping uplift the whole. And that is what I mean by conscious evolution. Through spiritual practice, we're helping consciousness itself evolve.

Jeff Carreira: That's fantastic.