The Nature of Community

What Is Community?

Community is an inherent part of humanity — the creation, building, and maintaining of community takes up the majority of human experience. Every person is concerned at all times with building, creating, maintaining, and living in community. This is the largest part of human experience — without other people, there is no interaction or growth. You learn best through interactions with others, and you do so in various types of community.

Community may be defined as the combined spirit of those involved. Since each of you possesses within you the vastness of the universe, each of you brings this vastness to all the myriad communities of various sizes and composition that you take part in. Therefore, each of you brings a sense of completeness to all the communities in which you participate. However, it is also the nature of being human to experience separateness and isolation.

When You're Disconnected From Community

People often feel a great sense of sadness caused by feeling separate and isolated. This sadness can be pervasive and difficult to see through. Operating within each of you are two seemingly opposing forces. One force is creating, building, and maintaining community. The other force is stark isolation and separation. It is this seemingly constant struggle between forces that occupies many of you for lifetimes.

Community Grows Through Experience

As you gain experience and knowledge through the reincarnational cycle, each time you incarnate you bring with you additional memories of what it is like to exist when not in human form. When not in human form you experience a sublime sense of connection with All That Is, and this dim half-memory accompanies many of you as you incarnate. Because of remembrance, you often resist living life on Earth — you resist immersing yourselves fully in the experience that we are having. While on the one hand this resistance presents you with many unique and often interesting challenges, it can plague you with an accompanying and pervasive sadness.

Perhaps reading these words may help transform your perception to a degree where you can allow yourself to acknowledge the community that already exists around you. There is no need to strive to build community and create something that already exists. You have community because you are human. All of humanity is your community. If you allow yourself the perception of being totally here now, you may sense the completeness and perfection of the community you are already a part of.

In common usage, the word “community” is closer to what could otherwise be called a ”group”, meaning a collection of people. Often these are like-minded people, or people moving along a particular path together with a common goal. However, the basic element of ”community” is to commune, meaning ”to be one with”. Every time you hear or read the word “community”, it will remind you that you already possess a oneness with All That Is, and there is nothing you can do to separate from that oneness. The phrase “warring communities” is rather nonsensical, because since community means a oneness with All That Is, how can a single thing possibly be at war with itself?

Because of your humanity, you are already one with everything else there is.

How To Be More Aware of Community

Question: How do we forge conscious recognition of this state? Group dynamics are a co-creative atmosphere. It is not simply the individual that promotes the recognition of the interconnectedness of all. What are productive ways to promote this connected state as a group consciousness, seeing as that we are already connected and one with each other? How do we live as a connected community?

Answer: If it is your desire to be a part of groups that operate at what can be called a “higher level” of awareness than other groups that you may be involved with, then engage as a group in some energetic exercises.

Any time you get a group of people doing essentially the same thing at the same time will have the effect of creating a connected state of group consciousness, whether it is performing jumping jacks in an empty parking lot, rooting for the same team, ganging up on someone in an online discussion group, or joining a social networking group in order to send ”energetic tendrils” to one another.

The more of these actions that are performed, the more changes are enacted upon the group, and the more intricate the dynamic becomes.

Group Consciousness

Each group of people has its own consciousness that is separate from the individual consciousnesses that make up the group.

This group consciousness changes, evolves, and transforms, just as yours does on an individual basis.

This consciousness can be altered under many conditions. It is most preferable to alter it under a combined group effort, but a group consciousness can be altered by a single member of the group, simply from their desire to enact changes upon the group’s consciousness. You have likely seen this in action.

Changes to a group’s consciousness can also occur as the result of reverberations from situations and occurrences that happen to other groups around the globe. There is a rippling effect throughout all of humanity, from any occurrence anywhere. Certain types of occurrences have a greater degree of effect on different types of groups. The permutations are numerous.

I’ve spent the past ten days in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, far from my present home in the northeast but closer, much closer, to my true spiritual home, and during this time one of my specific goals was to immerse myself into a deeper connection with Nature. Though my home is in a semi-rural area, affording me an opportunity to frequently bike through rolling hills amid cornfields and farmhouses, I really don’t feel all that connected with the nature element of it usually. Perhaps it’s because I don’t connect energetically with the space, or resist a deeper connection; perhaps it’s the human element in a long-inhabited space that has overwritten the elements of nature, but in any case I felt a huge difference in my little cabin in the forest, a short walk from the beach, easily moving into a space of love and appreciation for Nature and my place within it. I spent several hours roaming the trails through the forest, meandering along the beach, and standing in the rain under the trees at night.

And then I upped the ante considerably and spent some time in a different forest last night.

I entered the forest under a nearly-full moon, bright on a cloudless night, and instantly I felt a different sort of welcoming, an embrace, an invitation. Through connecting with the trees who are themselves all connected and always aware of that connection to one another, to the earth, and to All That Is, I could reach back into time and feel roots tapping into the dawning of human consciousness on the planet with such primordial innocence that it took my breath away.

At the same time I was aware of every possibility that continues to stretch before us in time: possibilities for each one of us and all the myriad possibilities available at any given moment, every choice, every road taken and not taken, and I felt vast, knowing that I was a part of everything that ever has been and everything still yet to come. I was as tall as the trees and as bright as the moon, and I turned my face toward her, accepting the spotlight, fully acknowledging my completeness and perfection.

To say this was a joyous and magical experience doesn’t quite do it justice.

But it served as a wonderful reminder, one that I will take back to my home with me and one that I offer you now, that our connection with Nature is an essential of simply being human. It’s part of us, and to deny it is to deny part of Self.

Afterwards, I channeled this:

There is of course value in connecting with animals, trees, and other elements of what you consider to be “nature”. These elements, are of course, part of your home, part of your world, and are as such connected to you, to humans, in a very intimate way. You share space. You share air. You share resources. Not only that, but you share in the creation of your world, the global creation of the reality you know as life on the physical plane. And because of that, there is an undying connection between you as a human and ALL of the so-called “natural” elements of Nature.

Some of you feel this connection more deeply, more emotionally, than others. Some feel a return, when confronted with Nature, especially in her most raw state, to that innocent and childlike state of simply Being, existing, that lies dormant within all of you. And as such, you feel it deeply when one of nature’s children, one element of the intricate tapestry that is constantly being woven and re-created, moves through natural transition into another state. There is, for you, a deep sense of loss, as there is the recognition not only of the timelessness of transformation and the cycles of life on the planet, but also of the transference of human-type connection to an element of nature. You can mostly only experience connection with nature by transferring those feelings to a more human perspective, and when loss of an element of nature, such as a pet or tree, occurs, there is transference to the human state of grief.

We have mentioned the energetic connections between you and your pets and we wish to elaborate. Again, not only is there a very real symbolic connection here (discovery of Self, of Love, of perspective: these things were gained through and with your interaction), but also there HAVE in most cases indeed been some past-life associations. Though most animals live lives in mainly hive-type soul arrangements, there is a constancy of energy that can flow generation after generation through one individual animal to another, and even of course crossing boundaries of species. There has been for many of you, then, a common thread through many lifetimes of connection with various elements of nature, and it is this thread, now running through you and the pets you love, that has touched this present lifetime.

The lessons from connection to Nature are many and varied and often depend on the individual, but regardless of perspective there is ALWAYS growth opportunity through human connection with Nature. After all, it is your home. It is your LIFE. To deny Nature is denying an aspect of Self, and to fully EMBRACE Nature, to ACCEPT it in all its splendor, ugliness, and beauty, is a HUGE step in actually accepting your Self.