Beyond Interconnectedness: A Call to Interbeing and Existential Intelligence

It’s hard not to be chronically overwhelmed by the relentless compounding of current crises facing us all. There’s no need to make a list here. They’re in our faces, our ears, our whole bodies and minds, every day.

First published in a mailing my wife and partner Linda Groves-Bonder and I sent out in mid-May 2022, this article offers some thoughts for your consideration. I’ve edited and updated it a couple of times since, including in early to mid-February, 2023. Please set aside a little time, if need be, to work with it in yourself.?

It's also worth emphasizing: while we’re looking into deep matters here, this is intended for people living everyday lives who may not consider themselves either intellectuals or spiritual seekers or practitioners. In fact, people who primarily rely on thinking and significantly mind-generated will to make their way in life?and folks desperate to find spiritual refuge from the heightened pains and anguish of living may not find this helpful. They might not be receptive to the transformation of our basic sense of being alive that these considerations propose.

Which is not to make anyone wrong, it’s not a dismissive judgment. It’s just to say, theses reflections and suggestions likely won’t resonate for everyone.

Here we go...

A fundamental question tugs on many of us in our hearts and souls: “I'm just a single human individual with little power to change things on any major scale. What difference can I possibly make in the midst of all this?”

The realm?of doing.?Yes, we can donate to humanitarian relief in Ukraine, Turkey and Syria, and elsewhere, do things to get out the vote, contribute to environmental protection projects, promote tolerance, peace, and mutual respect in the face of hate, violence, and bigotry, and volunteer our services to causes that mean a lot to us personally.

We can also make our work a form of conscious service to the greater Good, whether or not we're doing things we love, making a living aligned to our deeper purpose, or, as Ben Franklin is quoted as saying, "doing well by doing good."

Even if the “bigger picture” differences we can make in these ways are small, they are meaningful. They’re good for our world and good for us, too.

Of course, there are also random and not-so-random acts of kindness and care that we can make a point to practice in our local, here-and-now lives. In our families, relationships, and communities, our jobs and everyday activities, for the benefit of other people, creatures of all kinds, and our living biosphere itself.

All this is in the realm of doing.

The realm of being and becoming.?There's an additional question we might ask ourselves. It leads to a different way of answering that fundamental question about how and even whether we can make a difference. It can open us to a different kind of answer, one that operates not in the realm of doing but rather in that of being and becoming. Here it is:

"How much of my total potential identity, my ‘I,’ is consciously asking that fundamental question?”

A simpler way to put it might be, “Who’s asking?”?In other words, “What is the nature of the 'I' who’s asking that question and referring to itself?"

In our fraught, crisis-shocked time, a deep realization of our primal identification with all others, life, and the world itself, may be necessary. This condition is sometimes called "non-separation." It's already manifesting in many ways and forms in people around the globe. From its perspective the seemingly endless crescendo of existential crises and calamitous disintegrations in and around us all is a symptom of the old breaking up and making way for the new.

Interconnectedness and oneness—themes of our time.?In some circles, “interconnectedness” has become a popular meme. “We’re all interconnected—despite our differences, we’re all one.” “ONE FAMILY,” meaning all humanity, was even projected in lights at the closing night ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

The language, values, and importance of recognizing this interconnected “oneness” is coming into increasing prominence, along with many ways of cultivating it. A couple of great books of recent years, among many others, advocate and exemplify this emerging focus—Thomas Merton’s 2015 centenary celebration,?We Are Already One,?and Dr. Larry Dossey’s 2014?One Mind.

The limitations of interconnectedness.?That kind of appreciation of what’s underway in our world is widely shared, at least in certain circles. But it doesn’t necessarily discern the limitations of interconnectedness as a conceptual, imagined, or even deeply felt unity. What if such unity is governed and overshadowed by a stubborn, entrenched knowing of ourselves as distinct units, individual egos or souls?

The deeper realization that's now emerging is a?lived?singularity at the root of our distinct and in many ways separate individualities. The word "radical," meaning "at or from the roots," is relevant here. In its most radical forms, this singularity is an “onlyness” deeper than an imagined or even perceived and felt connectedness or oneness uniting multiple distinct units.?

Thomas Merton, as one notable example, clearly radiated and voiced that radical singularity with all Being while also participating in many forms of interconnectedness. For instance, as a devout Christian he engaged in apparently dualistic forms of ardent prayer while also animating a "non-dual" quality of what we might call Christ-conscious, singular identity in Being. In other words, he was happy to worship God and Christ as divine "Others" while also feeling, knowing, living, and being in a deep, intuitively felt sameness with—"non-difference" from—those otherwise "Other" objects of his worship.

Those who live in such ways embody a liberating, depressurizing non-difference from everyone and everything that is also paradoxically “other” and “else.”

They see and participate with and as those “othernesses” and “elsenesses”; they’re not trying to eliminate duality and multiplicity.

They appreciate that a cellular, intuitive confidence in a radical sameness with all that exists both coincides with and transcends all our obvious differences and all our ever-intensifying pressures and challenges.

It also eases the stress of those forces while in some ways mysteriously making us, if anything, more sensitive to them than we could have been before.

Interbeing.?The late, revered Zen master and mindfulness champion Thich Nhat Hahn coined a term for this emerging, paradoxical realization late in the last century: “interbeing.”

What makes interbeing emergent today is not its nature. Great sages have been realizing and proclaiming this potential human attribute, or at least precursors of it, since time immemorial. They’ve passed beyond concepts and symbols and even temporary, illuminating experiences into a foundational sense of identification with and as that interbeing. An identification that could not be shaken, diminished, or lost.

What does make this realization of interbeing new may be its?necessity. In these catastrophizing times, our optimal, total wellness and our most helpful contributions, personal and collective, may require us to embody this awakened wholeness and transparency of being with confident clarity.

Also new is its increasing?accessibility?to great numbers of us. Since primordial times, cultural norms of tradition and practice have stewarded it as a both precious and rare. When I was a young man, a rather desperate spiritual seeker, the disheartening lore, frequently repeated in many schools and traditions, was that "very few in any generation can ever achieve enlightenment."

The norms and forms, doctrines and assumptions supporting this lore have come to assume the status of necessary cultural trappings.

Historically, those who could not fulfill the criteria of presence and participation dictated by norm and tradition were often disqualified for realization and even barred from instruction on that basis. Many of them of course were simply not qualified candidates.

But for others, it may be that the cultural trappings became traps. For those reasons, and for millennia, despite their earnest longing many seekers were never able to become finders. Until, perhaps, now or very soon.

The crescendoing disruptions of our era may serve as a call to those of us who hunger for such realization. They may impel us to find our ways to deepen into lived interbeing—beyond all doubt, and right in the midst of our everyday lives and our many kinds of angst and stress.

Interbeing is not a buffer or escape valve.?This brings up a crucial point. It's alluded to in our introductory paragraphs. Interbeing is not a buffer against one’s own pain and distress or that of others and the world. On the contrary, and this is a big paradox, it renders us more vulnerable to human and other species’ suffering. It opens us to an intensified empathic immediacy, a felt identification with so much real trauma and shock. Yet at the same time it anchors us in a primary ground of being that frees us from being overwhelmed by all the crises and pain, our own and others'.

So cultivating and living this interbeing has qualities of an ordeal. Spiritual seekers of escape from pain, distress, and trauma?aren't likely to find solace here. Hyper-rationalists can’t give themselves permission to fall out of their previously hyper-developed mindsets. Interbeing nails us to the here and now.?Paradoxically, it also opens many of us to multidimensional sensitivities we may not have had before.

It’s most certainly not for the faint of heart. Or for those who will do just about anything, take any substance, go on any retreat, to get relief from their ordinary lives once and for all. Some people, of course, do such things with a radically different motivation. They use those resources to dive ever more deeply into the often stark realities in themselves, others, and the world that interbeing or the quest for it exposes them to.

Other names, including "existential?intelligence."?In our own Human Sun Heart-Activation work over the last nearly three decades, focused in our teachings on Waking Down in Mutuality? and The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart?, Linda and I have found it helpful to come up with multiple names for this self-revealing condition: “interidentification,” “quantum wakefulness,” “nirvanic immanence,”?“infinitesimal immensity,”?“conscious embodiment of the one great HEART?we all share.” Its advent in anyone’s life is so wonderfully—and, yes, also weirdly and sometimes shockingly—unprecedented that we’ve referred to it?since?the?earliest years of our work as a “second birth.” (There are also potentially relevant dynamics of embryogenesis leading to our?“first births” as human infants. In our work with people going through?it, those dynamics have prompted an emphasis on this shift as a second birth.)

With respect to the questions we’re considering here, a key new term for this dynamic condition is “existential intelligence.” That name implies a distinct orientation and capacity for active discernment based in the realm of being and becoming, not in mind and thinking organized around doing.?Such insight and the choices we can make on its basis are crucial if we are indeed going to grow beyond the experiential sense of interconnectedness into the conscious, highly paradoxical identity of interbeing.?

(See my?article ?on existential intelligence here on LinkedIn, addressed to a business leadership audience. Among other resonant themes, it quotes major CEOs who were finding a need in the height of the pandemic to “elevate ’to be’ to the same level as ’to do’.")

What if's??What if realizing and abiding in and as that deeper “I”—here’s another phrase, that “totality identity”—comprises the greatest, most continuous, and most virally?transmissive?difference we could ever possibly make? Just by being that “I“ of interidentification and all-inclusive existential intelligence, without effort or even any necessary vigilance to safeguard it? What if this proves true quite apart from all the concrete differences we can and should make in all our doings?

In other words, what if we can be utterly confident that the most essential “I” in us who is asking that hard question—“What difference can I possibly make in the midst of all this?”—is itself the question's ultimate answer?

What if?that?quality of identity spontaneously radiates a wholeness and wellness of Being that has a calming, deepening, de-pressurizing effect on others and the world around us—even if no one seems to notice??Even while, at least at times if not often, it exposes us to extremes of distress in others and/or in ourselves that we never could have endured before with such dignity and equanimity?

What if the most potent and promising answer to that question is more or less hidden in plain sight in the very Heart and most intimate beingness of the one asking—and every other sentient being??But needs to be discovered, felt, known, embodied and lived as openly as possible?

What if coming into enduring confidence in that foundational dimension of our identity is, as pioneering integralist Jean Gebser wrote in the mid-20th century, not about the expansion but rather the intensification of consciousness? Not about altered states but a next-level, fundamental condition of our Being—our inter-Being—right here in the messy, chaotic here and now?

What if that unbounded “I” of interbeing is the most widely effectuating and empowering answer to its own question—appearing in, as, and through each and every one of us who stably realizes and lives it, even with all the other “I” meanings of who we are continuing to be in ourselves and coexist as together?

Put simply, what if “I” is the most universal name of God? The “I AM” that each “I” mysteriously is, or partakes of as both a small, individual part and the unbounded, inconceivable whole?

The “I” of interbeing and existential intelligence!

In conclusion.?It’s been necessary here to respond to that harrowing question so many of us face today with yet other questions. You may find them confusing at first. That’s ok—confusion can be?the first stage in the germination of a whole new quality of understanding.?And, if your confusion is to some degree due to our not expressing all this clearly, our apologies. We'll continue to try to make our communications more accessible.

May we each and all find and live and?BE?this life-changing, world-changing kind of answer to that poignant question in so many of our hearts and souls!

(c) Saniel Bonder and Linda Groves-Bonder 2022. All rights reserved.