TRANSFORMING CONSCIENCE INTO CONSCIOUSNESS

By Sadhana Kay Needham (December 2010)

INTRODUCTION- Part 1

Man Made Belonging Or Sovereign Human Right to Belong?

A Systemic integral approach to belonging contains elements to

transform conscience into consciousness.

An integral worldview of “beyond belonging” is presently emerging within the fields

of systemic therapy. It emerges as an equal and opposite response to man made social
networks, norms and values that have defined the significance of boundaries of
belonging since man first believed in god as father. That is, a god as father outside of
the human self; a god as some omnipotent presence higher than being human, that
reduces human dignity and divinity to that of a child. This alone has robbed humanity
of responsibility, the ability to respond as an independent, integrated and whole adult.
Instead god responded on the child’s behalf, and a consequence was that humans
followed with a multiplicity of mostly covert, secret, hidden childish reactions and
agendas. Modern day chaos and disorder is demanding that we now bear and carry
the consequences of failing to act in accordance with our very own higher nature: not
a nature borrowed from definitions of belonging. A new ability to respond is
emerging out of that. It was O’Hara (2006) that commented, “We now have the kind
of responsibility for the future of the planet that was once thought to belong to beings
of a higher order- and thus it seems to me urgent that we consider what kind of
education this unprecedented level of responsibility requires” (1.a.P. 111) That
responsibility includes and transcends past perspectives that God is father. This
inclusion however has no duty of care or loyalty to any distorted theology or image
with an inherent man made fallacy rooted in its foundation. This inclusive
responsibility carries and transfers sovereignty of people and their country worldwide.
It does that above and beyond illusions of grandeur upholding conscience to govern
belonging. This response-ability places orders of love and life first, and beings
follow, to higher levels of consciousness, leaving conscience behind.

SOVEREIGNITY

Sovereignty is an interesting word. In this essay it refers to the autonomy,

independence and absolute freedom of every human being to be master of their own
fate or destiny: to not only belong to the universe but to belong to themselves. It is
the manifest, unqualified, unmitigated and unconditional right to action that freedom
in accordance with ones birthright. It heralds a dawn of self mastery. It holds the true
seed of belonging that has been hidden in barren sterile land and forgotten for
generations. Sovereignty governs a hidden dimension of existential morphogenesis
(see footnote definition below) in action, affecting every cell of life every moment of

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the day. This sovereign belonging seeds solidarity, trust, commitment and mutuality
in the territory of life called nature, both inner and outer. It breeds tolerance and
reciprocity and creates communities of meaning based upon truth and life’s organic
harmony.

This inner wealth of sovereign belonging however, has for thousands of years, been
excluded and looked upon as an ideology which is out of order. Its essence has been
dominated by another type of belonging; a man made definition of belonging
concocted by conscience itself. This conscience manufactured mind itself and
attempted to call it home. This home became the world in which we belong. It has
been a safe and comfortable home for generations. However the significance of
mental boundaries of belonging is fast losing solidarity in our present. Walls of
belonging have cracks in them, and the aging stones of loyalty and agreement are
beginning to crumble. The protected inner territories of man made excuses for
perpetrating inequality in the name of belonging are now open territories. Open to the
slow and steady infiltration of realization that man made belonging co-exists with
inequality and exclusion. Belonging and exclusion are no longer symbiotic behind
closed walls; as inclusion engages awareness of a growing majority of community.
Sovereignty emerges out of that personal awareness, insight and intuition, and
functions as a new centre of gravity within the collective conscience of guilt and
innocence. It provides a new locus of control pivotal to transformative practice
evolving towards higher states of consciousness. Higher states of consciousness that
are dependent upon new transformative learning education.

TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING EDUCATION

“Transformative learning is the kind of learning that shifts the definition or locus of the
self, from content; i.e., having to have a position or a fixed point of view, to context;
i.e., not having to have a position, - an ability to hold multiple points of view, having a
systemic or integral worldview (1.b.Elias, 1997). Education that is transformative
provides learning distinctions that shift who a learner considers themselves to ‘be’
from identifying one's self as a point of view, a story or history, a personality, an ego,
or a body, to recognizing one's self as context - as an observer and participant, and a
‘clearing’ in which a different order of thought, feeling, conversation or action, etc.
can take place. The individual’s capacities ‘reach beyond’ any narrowly personal and
individual perspective (1.c.Wilber, 1998, p. 72).”

Paradigms of belonging up until now have had a basic intelligence that has been
misused and misunderstood by masculine principles of survival in men and women.
The locus of self has been preoccupied with content, having a fixed point of view.
That fixed point of view has been systemically entwined with a deep will to survive
and annihilate the other. In the name of serving survival, belonging has represented a
gross displacement of the will to destroy. An example of this displacement was
demonstrated in our very own constellation family in 2009, in a statement by 40 Jews
that went world wide. (See footnotes below to original statement and my reply.)

“Annihilation, by definition, is the complete eradication of something or someone. As

a rule, the goal is not just to kill others; and fight means, attempting to annihilate; it is
also in any possible way, to upsurp the place of those others and take what belongs to
them – physically or spiritually, their goods, their homes, their land, their skills, their
cultures, the totality of their lives.

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 Yes, this is also in the service of survival, to kill and take what belongs to others.
It appears we shun cannibalism, but this is a thin veneer. For there are many
situations in which human beings safeguard their survival at other people’s cost, even
at the cost of their lives. Often absorbing what we just destroyed is necessary to
our own survival. We may get our nourishment from what nature gives to us, like
fruit and nuts, but for meat, fish, and even vegetables we have to kill before we can
take it.
Are all life-and death- conflicts inhumane? When we are in dire need, we cannot
escape them.
Large scale conflicts only serve survival on the one hand; on the other hand they
endanger survival.” (2.Hellinger, 2008 p. 182)

Humanity is now is dire need. Belonging now hurts enough to expose the deeper
fundamental layers of investment in power politics and greed that has motivated the
human psyches search for belonging. Superiority and inferiority no longer feel
comfortable, justified or even relevant to many who are experiencing a panoramic
view of histories events over generations. Looking through an existential integral lens,
wars are now being seen as little more than wars between different levels of
development in human consciousness. Collective conscious vision is now looking at
evolution of events and beginning to measure and identify merging perspectives
embedded in and emerging out of human culture. That looking is powerful, open,
absorbing and transformative. That looking is all that is needed to reorientate,
redirect, restructure and reform an ancient battleground of belonging clinging to
remnants of survival psyche. In that look the observer is able to become one with the
observed. Is this how we absorb “what we just destroyed, that is necessary to our own
survival?”

If we look we are able to see that there has also been a war between belonging and
beyond belonging for thousands of years. Repeated patterns of dominion and
domination of tribal, mystical and archaic cultures V’s industrial, technical and
pluralistic cultures, have contributed to present day levels of multiple intelligences
beginning to co-exist in a life friendly biosphere. For many it is no longer about
“Despair V’s Integrity” but Despair AND integrity (Erikson.) In the same way it is no
longer about belonging V’s beyond belonging, it is about belonging AND non-
belonging. It is about respect for the living organic complementariness of different
levels and layers of human psyche and the inherent emergent properties of those
levels. It is the recognition that each of these levels and systems are interdependent,
collative and cumulative and affecting each other.

Systemic understanding and intervention needs a new way to bond and balance
relationships beyond belonging. Past identification of belonging to father above, has
uprooted and disconnected humanity from roots into earth, mother country and life
itself. It seems ridiculous to say that a new way for people to move beyond belonging
would be to connect to the physical aspects of their very own body, mind and spirit,
and the matter that surrounds them; and yet it is true. Belonging for and belonging to,
something outside the physical self first, renounces the physical realm of being human
and attempts to push that reality into a second position. Our man made ideas of
belonging are out of order. They were politically engineered to gain mental
satisfaction, emotional and spiritual profit at the cost of life itself. We have however

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discovered in the journey of belonging that we have no way of being able to ensure
profit any longer. Our earth, country and physical surroundings scream their losses
into our ears as we are tossed around in a self made ocean of false prophet and profit.

BELONGING SERVING LIFE OR DEATH?

Belonging has missed awareness of its very own interiority. Belonging simply to have
power over another, to survive, has not created a conscious being yet. It has failed to
recognise that spirituality is not separate; that every eco system of life from the tiniest
atom or cell is neither above nor below another. In nature each organism or system
affects the other in a totally organic way, in a very life friendly way. Belonging to
date has not been life friendly; it has not allowed itself to become a vehicle for higher
transpersonal realms of reality. It remains embedded in, and distracted by, personal
and collective good conscience. Man made belonging is an outgrowth of a good
conscience. It is horizontal, lateral and linear.

Sovereign belonging, on the other hand is not an outgrowth, it is an “upgrowth”, and

it is vertical. It is a transcendence of conscience itself, not an extension of conscience.
It is a mirror image of man made belonging, it is the opposite. It is helpful to reflect
upon the nature of sovereign belonging’s service. It too has a will to survive. This
will to survive serves the will to destroy. Is this in a right order for love to move
forward and for life to thrive? Does order of service matter? Let me put it more
clearly.

MANMADE BELONGING = will to destroy (DEATH) serves will to survive (LIFE.)

“Life is the nourishment that this God feeds on through human sacrifices. These
sacrifices, huge numbers of human beings thrown into utmost suffering, are needed to
keep this god in an exalted position among his followers and to guarantee his
dominion over them.” (2.a.Hellinger P 186.)

SOVEREIGN BELONGING = will to survive (LIFE) serves will to destroy(DEATH)

“Life is an adventure. Life is a constant enquiry. Life is not a belief but a deep
exploration of truth. And life knows no confinement, no limitation. It constantly goes
on beyond. It breaks all the boundaries and all the limitations.” (Osho 1)

Perhaps order is life serving death and disorder or chaos is death serving life. Has our
past lived a loyal and “"longer allegiance to the dead than to the living"? (Robert
Graves.) Perhaps our only contribution to the creative future is in the hands of not life
and death itself, but the human SERVICE, HONOUR and the ORDER involved in
these existential movements. Perhaps that’s where consciousness moves, right in the
gap, in the middle of life and death? Are service, honouring and adhering to order our
only ways of being absorbed into higher levels of consciousness? Most of us, as
family constellation workers take pride in the fact that we serve life. How many
acknowledge, honour and respect that in this, we also serve death?

Man made belonging although unconsciously in service of death for thousands of

years, has simultaneously and unconsciously continued to dishonour it, by excluding

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consequences, and displacing the integrity inherent in systemic transformation and
death process. Personal and collective conscience governing belonging, has bound
every human action to survive or destroy, to guilt and innocence. What would happen
if we renounced belonging to personal and collective conscience? Is that even
possible? What exactly is conscience? Is there a higher level of conscience governing
a higher level of belonging that allows love to move forward? Perhaps that means to
be in unison: “to be in unison means to be in resonance with many, and ultimately,
with everyone, and therefore, no one’s enemy.” (2. b.Hellinger P. 189.) However can
being no one’s enemy include life serving destruction or death? Do we have to
become skilful at being able to destroy in order to create? Is this the true self-mastery
of sovereignty? Even to suggest this resounds loudly up against the hypocrisy of
ancient christian idealism and western fundamentalism. Let it resound loudly, so loud
that its vibration of fact and truth is able to help the walls of exclusive man made
belonging to disintegrate. Let the sound of YES life can serve death; and YES life
can positively destroy in order to recreate, be heard. This too is in service of life. Can
we allow this insight to be fully realized and actioned in our present? How do we do
that? What are the orders and boundaries, laws, keys and maps that transformation
needs to follow in relation to this? These are some of the issues that will be explored
in part two of this series examining the movement from conscience to consciousness
and belonging to non belonging.

One thing we can do starting from right now is to practice upholding a creative image
of positive anticipation. When we look at each other we look to the beyond. We not
only look at the person but we look at their family, their country their culture and their
long line of ancestors. We engage a wide and loving look that includes them all into
our heart. We do not lose sight, of all that this look encompasses, and all that it serves.
In doing so, we look beyond belonging; beyond ourselves to something greater that
guides us. We allow fate to unfold, to flower. In this the observer and the observed
become one.

“BEYOND Just to visualize the beyond is enough because in visualizing it you

become it. So whenever you have time sit silently, go beyond words, beyond mind,
beyond body, beyond the world of objects. Leave everything behind. Go on moving
till you can find a place, a space where only your consciousness exists and there is
nothing to be conscious about; where there is no content but your consciousness, a
mirror mirroring nothing. That is our real home.” (Osho – 2)

“Jesus described this way for us: ‘be merciful like my father in heaven. He let’s the
sun shine above the good and the bad, and he lets the rain come down on the just and
the unjust.’
This love for all as they are is the great love, the love that is beyond the reach of good
and bad, and beyond the concept of large-scale conflict.”(2.c. Hellinger P189.)

REFERENCES
1. Systemic, Integral Education: Transformative Education

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By Anne Adams, Ph.D.

.1.a. O’Hara, M. (2006). In search of the next enlightenment? The challenge of

education in uncertain times, Journal of Transformative Education, (4) 2, 105-117.

1.b. Elias, D. G. (1997). It’s time to change our minds. Revision, 20, 2-6

1.c. Wilber, K. (1998). The marriage of sense and soul. New York: Random House

2. a,b,c: Hellinger Bert (2008) Rising In Love. Hellinger Publications Berchtesgaden

Germany

3. Osho – 1, Just Around The Corner

4. Osho - Even Bein’ Gawd Ain’t A Bed Of Roses

5. Graves Robert. The Greek Myths: 2 (London: Penguin, 1960).p. 380

FOOTNOTE

Morphogenesis– definition of: taken from The Free dictionary by Farlex.

Differentiation and growth of the structure of an organism (or a part of an organism)

Organism, being – a living thing that has (or can develop) the ability to act or function
independently.
Growing, growth, ontogenesis, ontogeny, maturation, development – (biology) the
process of an individual organism growing organically; a purely biological unfolding.

Statement of Jewish Systemic Constellation Facilitators - Feb. 2009

http://www.jcfstatement.com/english.htm

Reply to Statement – Sadhana Kay Needham 18th Feb. 2010

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Hellinger_Controversies/message/5