We are all welcomed into the world of individual awareness as we grow in our development. Some of us are called on to serve others in some capacity as aids to our brothers and sisters who are in the process of deepening their own awareness.
As a person who finds himself in such a place of being called on to aid my fellows I look at this as an opportunity to share my own experience and the opportunity before me.
In sharing my experience I am able to engage my peers in ways that I could not have anticipated and can therefore continue to grow and deepen my own awareness and experience.
In the sharing of this occasion I offer you who are reading this and others that you might know the opportunity to share in the building of an understanding or the patterns and ways of relating and the accompanying awareness that goes along with this territory.
As the form of the offer I invite you to begin from where you are at to share your understandings towards the effort of compiling our knowing and learning together and to offer our fellows access to a wider and deeper sense of our and their location in this great mix of relatedness and deepening of understanding of our awareness together.
I have engaged a small group of people in the building of an open system of mindfulness/awareness exercises, activities, and relationships. Would you like to participate?
You can participate by sharing your own development systems with the world through the internet.
By offering up the use of your systems you can allow and engage a network of practitioners who can shed further light and understanding on what you are doing and you can do the same in turn.
In this way I begin work on an Open Meditation system. This system will be designed to accomplish the following outcomes:
Hold space in a physical location
Engage active and conscious awakening of awareness
Engage internal and external practices that support the awakening of awareness
Provide internet accessible documentation of all practices
Provide access to participants to reflect publicly on practices
Provide practitioners with the opportunity to add information and instruction about practices in an effort to deepen understanding of practices
Encourage the use and creation of additional networks for participants to share about practices
Provide potential participants access to a network of active participants for the purpose of exploring the opportunities to practice with specific practitioners
As a practitioner I am not currently aware of systems where these outcomes are all present simultaneously. Through this post I hope to invite and engage other people and the networks of which they are part in understanding how these outcomes can be present in the same system or a combination of systems.
As many a practitioner knows, the local community is a huge opportunity for daily practice. It is assumed that practitioners privilege their local community when it comes to listening to and responding to requests. While this is not always the case, it is understood to be an important aspect of work.
Because the local community is a major focus, it is also expected that systems and information are often most contextually relevant to local conditions. At the same time, it is also true that a great deal of the practices involved in awakening and deepening awareness are similar regardless of their local context.
In the spirit of the OpenSource, while the system itself will serve some people without the need for a local connection or praxis group, or even a conscious mutually interested participant, the system is to be designed to be of use through the provisioning of local services. In this sense, the outcome of the open meditation system is the flowering and spread of local service organizations who continue the work through to the doorsteps of participants in a local community.
The participants in the open meditation system will be able to gain from the networked resources additional information, instruction, and opportunity that might not necessarily have been available locally.
All of this being said, it is of some significant importance to me that it is with the aforementioned understanding and intentions that I begin the process of engaging in the design and operation of an open meditation system.