Jeff Carreira – Spiritual Dialogue
Our online meeting was on: Aug 30, 2022 07:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)
To join in the replay first watch Jeff’s short attunement, and then our experience of it.
On August 30th we had a wonderful Zoom meeting and “dance” where we were talking about talking. Zareen had some difficulties in clicking the right button for Original Sound on and off… so we were broken up a bit. But had a wonderful talk despite technology!
The singing was so fun to share.
One thing that’s been wonderful about our Meetings With Remarkable Beings is that we’ve been meeting with people from the various communities as well as getting to hear from a variety of spiritual teachers around the world. When we met to talk with Vishrant we had several people from his world-wide community, and this time we had a friend from Jeff’s Mystery School.
Enjoy our replay below… and hope to see you in person next time.
Edited transcript of Jeff’s short talk
Jeff: Dialogue plays a very important role in spiritual inquiry. At one level it is an exchange of ideas. There are different levels of dialogue that that need to take place.
There’s the kind of dialogue that one has with someone who has more experience than they do. This has a learning value. You know, if you’ve encountered someone and you recognize that they have some inner spiritual attainment that you feel very drawn to. You can learn an enormous amount by speaking to that person and finding out how they’re relating to their experience that might be different than the way you tend to relate to yours.
And so that’s one level of dialogue that can be very valuable.
The other thing that happens in dialogue is also compelling. I believe in traditional spiritual circles it’s called transmission. The idea is that that someone who has more access to higher perspectives transmits that in a in a way that’s beyond the words spoken.
Sometimes, I think, the words are just the vehicle that holds our attention but the energetic transmission of that perspective is arguably the more important.
Now, more recently, neuroscience has come up with this idea of mirror neurons, which I think is an interesting way to think about spiritual transmission. What they say is if I’m seeing something that you’re not seeing, and I describe it to you, and while I’m describing it, I’m looking at the thing I’m describing, there are neurons in your system that will start to orient themselves in accordance to mine. And so you’ll start to see what I’m seeing through some kind of osmosis. I think that’s a very powerful way to think about what spiritual transmission might be.
Whatever it is, the effect that many people report is that when they speak with someone who has some degree of attainment that they start to see something that they weren’t seeing before. It doesn’t have to do with understanding the words. It doesn’t have to do with learning something.
It has to do with being brought into a view.
Ultimately, in terms of spiritual dialogue, the ultimate value is the capacity to be brought into a higher view.
You know, if you learn something, if you gain information, that’s wonderful, but it’s really not that valuable. What’s valuable is being brought into a higher view. And you want to be brought into a higher view over and over again until it becomes a natural home for you.
So one way you do that is by speaking with people who have more experience than you do. People you recognize as having more attainment.
In another way, when serious interested parties who may be more equivalent in their experience and attainment come together with a passionate desire to evolve we can ratchet each other up through the power of shared perspectives and dialogue and meld into a kind of unity of vision that takes us higher.
So by coming together, whether that’s two or three, or four or five or ten or twelve or more, but we come together. The intensity of our interaction and the dialogue that we have together will actually rise. It’s like we’re all floating in an ocean and by engaging. The level of the ocean is going up and we’re all going up with it.
To me those are the two most profound ways in which dialogue has spiritual value. I’m a big believer in spiritual dialogue.
Zareen: I know that one of the things I experienced at Andrew Cohen retreats was that he would bring people together to have dialogue. And my experience was that people simply needed to be given permission to talk about things more important than just the everyday mundane soon. As soon as the permission to engage was released, it was just amazing what we could do with each other.
Jeff: It’s completely amazing. And the other aspect of dialogue that’s very, very important is that we are social creatures. What that means is our ability to hold truths is partially collective, it’s partially shared.
So the the analogy I like to use is if you were outside and you saw an alien up in a tree, and you talked to the person next to you and said, “Oh my God, look at that!:
And they say, “I don’t see anything.”
But, you turn to the next person, “Look at that!”
And they say, “Oh, I don’t see anything.”
I always like to wonder how many people would have to say they didn’t see it before you would stop saying you saw it.
And then. How many more people would have to say they didn’t see it before you stopped seeing it yourself? Right? Before you are conditioned by the collective.
That’s why I think throughout history spiritual gatherings have been so important, because we need to create a field that is mutually reinforcing. Because otherwise it’s just us against the dominant paradigm.
Besides those rare few beings, Ramana Maharshi, and Eckhart Tolle’s, most people aren’t going to hold that higher view in the face of a whole culture telling you it is wrong.
So we need to come together to bolster up the strength of our conviction.
And as a bonus… here’s a great new video from Eric Putkonen about not being the witness.
A
H