THE HERRINGBONE PROJECT: Laboratory for Reality Creation

Conversation re how good previous evening was in big group with Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson, who are on book tour for Spiritual Politics: "High spiritual knowledge and training in a performing art form," "skill in action," "likeable," "modern esotericists," "valuable people," "can go anyplace: board rooms, different communities, White House."

Conversation re no diversity in large or small group: age, ethnic. Los Angeles extraordinarily ghettoized.

Lex Hixon: "Now that there is a tremendously strong feeling and meditative commitment, we should really try to work on diversification of our circle."

Dark forces are discussed. According to whom? "Ageless wisdom," says Tom. "Alice Bailey and Lucis Trust," says Lex, meaning that to be synonymous with "ageless wisdom." Beginning of running disagreement between Tom and Lex as to whether Bailey and Lucis Trust are the ageless wisdom, in a circumscribed way (box), or if what is called the ageless wisdom, even heavily permeated by Bailey, etc., is the goods beneath everything.

As we gather for good, who says no gatherings for evil? Marx as dark. Utopia is "nowhere" in Greek. Utopias don't exist as physical possibility. Utopian thinking is nihilism. Ideals could be said to be Utopian -- ideas, too -- with word used as adjective.

Lex: "Paradise does exist, but Paradise is a spiritual state. It's not realistic to think you can institutionalize Paradise on earth by a form of economic system or political system. No mature spiritual person would mislead people to think they could institutionalize Paradise on earth...Right now we can taste Paradise. It's one of the things that a spiritual circle like this can do."

If the body of information of the ageless wisdom is its own thing, as Buddhism and Christianity are, it would be a separate filter for coming to conclusions. (Or maybe none of them are separate...??) Lex says the ageless wisdom is "a certain fundamental religious formulation and foundation." Question as to whether we're all in boxes, with limited points of view. Maybe -- and that's not bad. Good to come together -- alchemy of circle -- to see beyond each.

Lex: "I don't accept the ageless wisdom being this circle. It's just one particular perspective." Tom: "Not in my mind, it's not." Defines it as what runs beneath most disciplines if we dig deeply. Talks about two flavors to reality: "One is out of the desire path, the previous system before mind was even developed, when humans felt things and did very little thinking about anything;" the other is the underlying principles in sets of teachings in Bailey books and Agna Yoga books, which he tells Lex "are the same principles I find in the poetry of your translations."

Lex: "That's because of your visionary quality."

Tom: "The principles that underlie Christianity are identical to the principles that underlie Sufism. When you lose sight of the principles and start getting into the forms, now you're in maya." Question of whether acknowledgement of the ageless wisdom as a body of thought is more honest/better than Gordon and Corinne, who "weren't totally honest about where their insights were coming from." (Listening to tape, I heard them acknowledge Blavatsky, Bailey, Agna Yoga. Not enough?)

Lex: "We're here as a circle of people who have totally different formulations and backgrounds, to come up with a new language. I think it's a language of meditation (not of rays): using what comes up in our meditation as material, and discussing it, each from our own unique perspective."

Talk about reaching "across" to young people to connect. Maybe should set up a specific event.

Do we need to define ourselves first?

Suzanne: "Coming up with some defining group statement would be part of the process of this becoming."

Tom: "What pulls us together is our common love of humanity...and we're all going to work tirelessly for no money, for no praise, to help humanity. What a group can coalesce around is some kind of purpose within that larger purpose. We don't have one of those yet...This is a whole new way to approach group-building. Usually when you try to build a group, you get a purpose and the purpose attracts people to it. That's what Corinne and Gordon were about...This circle really cares about the planet and where we're going. We're working at building the group from an angle I've never done before, and it might be very interesting."

David Langer: "It may be we don't need to define that purpose before adding diversity into the group, as long as the common thread is known and made explicit and people are welcome in who share that. The emergence of purpose then becomes a function of everybody who's here."

Tom: "The other thing you need in a group is trust and love. I trust and love everybody in the group totally, without any reservation. That doesn't mean somebody won't say something off the wall. If somebody says something I think is off the wall, I trust and love that person enough to say that I think it's off the wall. It isn't that I think anybody is trying to manipulate or control or use -- I think the people in this circle are sophisticated enough to recognize even the slightest attempt at that." Lex: "I wouldn't want the circle to be a group, according to his definition of spirituality. I'd like to see genuine total diversity coming together as a circle. Of course, I think people should have trust and love and concern for humanity. If that's what you mean by defining a group, OK. I don't want a tighter type of thing where we're all totally in tune with each other."

Tom: "We're not disagreeing."

Lex: "The uniqueness of this is that it's a non-group. There are so many groups out there that the beautiful thing about this is it's a circle and not a group. A circle is just open at any time. We can all be here without ever having to make a vision statement -- we have different visions, so how can you make a vision statement?" Tom: "The statement you can make is that the vision statement you can make includes all the visions...As long as we dwell on forms, we'll be at loggerheads. It's not a form we're after; it's much more subtle than that. It's a kind of consciousness. I call it group consciousness; you may want to call it circle consciousness -- that would be OK with me. It is not self-consciousness. It is a completely higher development of consciousness than self-consciousness that we're trying to work with in this circle of loving friends."

David says that in the spiritual work he is doing, "We call it a space of unconditionality. As soon as there is psychic stuff in the space, it's palpable; we can feel it. There's a cleanliness here -- an openness that we all perceive." Re making the circle racially diverse, perhaps what we'd be dealing with would set us back -- the difference that we would be dealing with could consume us.

David: "I don't know that that would be the case. Obviously who that person is is crucial. That person would have to be able to fit. But if that person would fit, that person and we would be able to bring out into the light and make explicit whatever those differences are -- whatever those cultural, racial, idiosyncrasies are -- and hold them in the space of love and good humor. And as soon as that's done, they will tend to disappear relatively quickly. It's holding them in the dark -- because we're walking on eggshells and we don't want to offend -- whatever those reasons are, that keeps them in place. We have to be able to bring out our diversity, share it, open it, examine it, and love it. It's a part of what makes us whole."

Lex: "This is something that's needed for modern society. We're trying to develop a U.N. concept for modern society. Are we doing anything in our culture that's like the U.N.? No. There's just that U.N. in New York."

Lex: "I feel this circle could be very influential in the country. With the quality of this thing which we already have, if we diversified a little bit we could be recognized as an important center of reflection and energy. I personally feel like we could go right up into influencing spheres of government, just like Corinne and Gordon influence those spheres. They move around with Bill Clinton. I see no reason why we couldn't have some sort of impact like that. I see no reason why we have to remain a humble little circle in the middle of Podunk."

Suzanne: "Already David has gotten Willis's paper into Bill Clinton's hands..."

Lex: "We've got a couple of papers to give you here tonight which came out of pre-circles to our group. Willis Harman's paper is a fascinating thing to send people, but I hope these two things will represent something we can send to friends and distant acquaintances who are people of some substance and influence that will attract them to what we're doing."

Suzanne: "Take these home. There were two different circles we did, two months apart, that Lex facilitated. There was a question and an issue we were dealing with each time. These are well-edited, with some thought that there is something important going on in these conversations. Everybody think about what to do with them."

Lex: "If I got this in the mail from my brother, saying, 'Look at the level of the conversation and interaction going on,' I might be impressed...We ought to consider putting together similar documents of what we're doing here as the newest version of what's coming through."

David asks what the purpose of the two documents is. He understands what Gordon and Corinne are up to being a function of a book and careers involving them in discourse with important people. And that Willis comes from The Institute of Noetic Sciences and Stanford Research Institute, which are concerned with business and the economy, for which there is a lot of interest and which is "pretty hard and solid." We're dealing with ephemeral stuff. Experiential. A way of being. Not things the culture recognizes in form. So what do we do with these transcripts?

Lex: "Krishnamurti's conversations had substantially wide circulation among the intelligentsia of his time. In our time, there's even more of an intelligentsia interested in this sort of thing, so why couldn't we engage some sort of national feeling, without trying to build an organization?" He suggests America Online -- to put these up on a bulletin board for reaction.

Lex was just in Mexico. Had conversation right before the election with the man who became President, who was assembling council of all religions. Lex advised -- suggested council identify all spiritual values held in common by all religions. "I have every reason to believe I influenced the President of Mexico. Why not governors here, and Congresspeople, and the President? Why don't we do some spiritual politics?"

Suzanne: "We live in a world without a Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. We have no body for thinking. We have no place from which thought emanates."

Lex: "This is one of the thinking bodies. This is a citadel of thought."

Tom comments, from esoteric perspective, about the way "the shadow" functions. "Firstly, by definition, the shadow is the sum of all the unregenerated aspects of our personalities." Talk about disowned and unconscious as psychological language; unregenerated is language of esoteric psychology. "The unregenerated aspects of our persona are those parts of us which are still locked in a form and separative -- seeing the separative self as existing. These are the unregenerated parts. Their sole purpose is to maintain their existence, their separate identity and their separate self in the face of what is obviously an interconnected universe. A lot of that is unconscious. Second, there's no need whatsoever to go looking for the shadow. In fact, it's the shadow's game to go looking for the shadow. The shadow will run you into a thousand corners looking for itself. If you want to find the shadow, try to serve humanity. The shadow will do everything in its power to prevent you from doing it. Because when you serve, you sacrifice the shadow. All you need to do is go out and serve and the shadow will be in your face constantly. It's a waste of time and what's more it's an energizing of the shadow to go and try to find it and confront it. The shadow is what will raise up in a group like this and twist your mind and make you say things you shouldn't have said. It will make you separate yourself from the group and will make you put people down. It will make you defensive. That's all shadow stuff. All you need to do is to keep trying to be honest and be straightforward and be loving and be gentle and be compassionate and that'll take care of the shadow. Last thing: the final dealing with the shadow happens at the third initiation, when the shadow faces the soul and is lost in the light of the soul and is totally and finally obliterated. Well, not completely -- the shadow will still raise up occasionally...Don't waste your time messing around with guys and groups looking for the shadow. Just go out there and serve and you'll find the shadow. It'll be sitting right here, saying, 'Don't do that...I'm too lazy...I don't have time for that...I need this.' There's no room in here for shadow, man, the light's too bright. One of the most subtle of the shadow's games is to keep you looking for the right fix. As soon as you find something, then the shadow is going to convince you you need to look for a different one, so you keep looking. As long as you look, you're safe; you don't find. As soon as you find, the rubber hits the road, and you have to start performing."

We do our group meditation. This time we do 20 minutes silent and 10 minutes speaking what comes up.

I pass around astonishing new color pictures of this year's crop circles.

Lex: "Was this experience just a friendly little get-together, or was it more miraculous than the one third of a mile long crop circle that appeared this year? Did this experience extend to the ends of the universe and beyond?

Josie Kelley-Holmes: "Absolutely."