NEW DEVELOPMENTS   from Research by Coen van Houten

 

Night Learning

This is how it goes:  You live with questions, are busy with courses, conversations, observing phenomena, studying, gathering fragments on various fields… Then one day a synthesis comes about.  The fragments fall together into a whole.  We can call this a fifth stage of night learning, adding to the four stages already discovered.

 

Karma faculties

One example of the above from Coen, whose research path is very often a night process: The question was, how do we school our faculties for the karmic conversation?  Meanwhile he was busy preparing a lecture about creativity.  Then a synthesis dropped into the morning!

 

‘There are 4 steps’, he said, ‘and after each step you have changed. Your attitude has shifted.’  Briefly the four steps he saw are:

 

  1. An understanding, as a leading image, that the whole of humanity is part of my karma We are all created by evolution, have been involved throughout history, have contributed in negative and positive ways creating the environment we now live in.  We are now the end product of this process, built on reincarnation of the human spirit.

 

  1. The above thought stirs a deep feeling for the suffering of humanity.  Out of compassion, suffering with what is happening to people, a fellow-being mood arises. The suffering is also a force for transformation of the soul.

 

  1. The feeling of carrying it together awakens an objective love force.  This is a new kind of relationship, an objective feeling that makes it possible to see the karmic struggle others are going through.  Love becomes a new way of seeing and hearing, a new faculty. 

 

  1. Out of this objective love as a faculty of perception, we are able to encounter the other.  We perceive the karma forces working through the human speaking.  In communicating we create a karma conversation.  This is a new force of social creativity.

 

Thus Coen’s morning research wove into his lecture on creativity – ending his talk with offering the above 4 steps as a seed to becoming socially creative.  It is an ideal for the future Spirit Self culture. But we can begin now with accepting our differences, being one humanity, one suffering, one love force, together on a creative karmic force field.

 

After the lecture, the seed idea worked on further in Coen’s night processes.  So now we can add further insights:

  1. There are two sides to think of.  a )We are one humanity, one creation, yet each person is different. In all incarnations since the Fall of Man we have absorbed experiences and moral principles of various cultures.   b) While pondering the humanity picture, we become more aware of who we really are.  Who ‘I am’ is a hidden element, protected by the Guardian as long as we are not able to stand seeing the full truth of our being. This leading image requires an awakening individualized spirit in the self to be able to think it.

 

  1. The two activities, pondering history and self awareness, creates an infinite compassion between what humanity had to suffer and my own suffering.  Many people experience a sorrow for this humanity suffering, hidden deep in the soul – which we try to cover up as it is unbearable.  However the suffering transforms emotional soul forces.  We may accept that suffering is a necessity also, as a ‘good’ force for soul transformation.  In me is created an objective suffering with the world, and a feeling for what I owe to others and can thank others for.

 

  1. This slowly developing new force of love out of our karma/destiny work makes visible the unique destiny of the other.  You perceive what another is battling with.  It needs an interest and acceptance, a love force, to see this.

 

  1. The love force develops a faculty of hearing and perceiving in the words what works through them, as the individualized unique spiritual path.  These ‘karmic’words are also connected with the cosmic Word out of which all people have been created. 

 

This new research now needs to be translated into practical exercises for training karma conversations.  If colleagues would try to practise the 4 steps and report your concrete experiences as further research material back to Coen, this would be a good shared research process.  Please send your experiences to him, under the heading ‘Academy for New Learning’.

 

Notes by Shirley van Houten, December/January 2006