Michel Bouwens, founder of the p2p foundation (whose blog is really a must follow, I think), has written a short commentary on one of the most influential books in my life: John Heron’s “Participatory Spirituality”, a book that I would recommend to everybody who believes that we need to go from a teacher-student relationship to one I’d call “mutual apprenticeship”.
And it is a very practical kind of spirituality John Heron is all about; by practical I mean, for instance, this:
“You are also invited to appropriate and adapt any of the author’s ideas and integrate them in any way into any form of expression of your own spiritual vision. The author lays no claim to intellectual property rights with regard to the content of this book. ” (Now if we talk about conscious capitalism: Is this it?)
Anyway, here is Michel’s commentary:
I have followed John Heron’s development for the last few years, after reading the earlier Sacred Science. After the period of state-supported mono-religions, after the Reformation, after the era of the mixing of world religions and the emergence of authoritarian cults, we needed something completely different.A bottom-up, peer to peer, way to search for truth together. Jorge Ferrer provided some of the theology, Heron provided the practice of cooperative inquiry, but here in this volume we finally have both elements together, a theory and a practice. I therefore have no hesitation in calling this a landmark book. What could be more important for an individual than the spiritual search for meaning? What could be more important for a civilization than the ability to do this in a democratic and participative way. The demand was there, but until reading this book, we were largely groping in the dark. No more.