DISCOVERING HOW TO BE HUMAN NOW….
by CSA Director and Co-Founder Edna Murdoch
DISCOVERING HOW TO BE HUMAN NOW….
On podcasts and posts, I notice our increasing wonder at what happens in coaching and supervision, when we are properly attuned to Self, to the Other and to the Field – ‘the living sea of energy’ of which E László speaks. The phrase ‘heightened awareness’ doesn’t come near to what we sometimes experience together. Magic, mystery, awe are better descriptors for that. The miracle of joint attention and intention - heart/mind wide open - takes practitioner and client into the dance. Here, reciprocal moves come easily, the imagination is on fire and insights flood into the space. We are blessed in these relational professions to know what deep connectedness feels like and what it can ignite. I’m glad that so many practitioners are sharing their own versions of this experience. It is heartening to read them and listen to what we are discovering through our work.
There are many ways to describe what is happening in these moments of profound connection. Remarkable they may seem, but maybe, just maybe, this type of experience simply points to who we actually are: beings that touch the miraculous in everyday life. A species gifted with astounding technologies that light up when we step into full human experiencing. We learn to see with the eye of Horus - the pineal gland celebrated in ancient cultures as the gateway to higher consciousness and understanding. (AI, eat your heart out!).
Perhaps, the awareness of our full humanity, is becoming even more urgent, now that the spectre of a transhuman future is increasingly touted. I think that paradoxically, this ghastly possibility accelerates the shift into our full human capacity; we know that we dare not blindly ‘slouch towards Bethlehem’.
In the poem Three Wise Men, Auden voices thoughts of the wise men as they trundle towards the town of Bethlehem. He wrote that we:
“have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are.
To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star”.
(Three Wise Men)
Auden’s observations seem just as relevant now, as they were in the thirties. Today we endure insane levels of separation, suffering and complexity – all our own creation. The urgent call is ‘to discover how to be human now ‘. Or, as Thomas Berry invites us:
“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human.
It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into
the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.”
(Thomas Berry ‘The Ecological Age’ in The Dream of the Earth, 42)
For millennia, there have been societies rooted in the shamanic mystical traditions. Few of us recognise that western culture emerged out of the ancient tradition of the shaman-mystic-scientist’ The daily experience of energy, love and consciousness, formed the bedrock of communal ritual and experience. Back then, our species celebrated ordinary miracles and enjoyed a rich participation in the Cosmos. We can barely comprehend this now. As Betty Kovács observes:
'Our failure to become conscious of the enormity of who we are is far more
destructive than our culture has been able to acknowledge.’
(B Kovács, Merchants of Light. P 91)
So, I am glad to see that in the midst of 21c chaos, millions of us are waking up again to who we really are. In these modern (yet ancient) professions of coaching and supervision, we ritually sit together, breathe together, imagine together and invite the miracle once more. We are privileged indeed to uncover more of that ‘fully human’ experience through our work. And of course, what is created, flows out into the world.
“We need to know ourselves, not only as individuals, but as co-creators
within a deeply ensouled web of life where all is conscious.”
(Joanna Macy)
Edna Murdoch
Director Coaching Supervision Academy
