In many arenas of human activity now, we are as a race, shifting from a dominator model to a co-creative model. One of the people who best articulates this is a woman named Barbara Marx Hubbard who wrote a book called Co-Creation. Two of the people who best embody this live in Nevada City, John and Carol Anderson who are perhaps the world-experts on co-creation.

The idea of co-creation sounds very simple. In the workplace it would be the boss and the employee. In a marriage it would be a man dominating a woman, which is commonplace in most parts of the world. In education it is the teacher who has the knowledge, giving it to the student. In religion it is the priest dominating the congregation. Spiritually we often accept this as a good thing, such as the guru in a higher plane than the devotees/followers, giving them the assumption that they are learning something that they don't already know. That is the dominator model, which has dominated humanity for thousands of years.

There has been an acceptance of a very hierarchal view of human beings, people being more evolved or less evolved. Of course our whole economy is run on the dominator model, rich people taking advantage of poor people to keep them poor and hard working.

Co-creation is actually an exploration of a subtle nuance. It doesn't just mean all out Marxism in every area of life. Co-creation is a very beautiful exploration. The best analogy for co-creation is the human body. The human body is a community of cells. Biologists have demonstrated that the different organs and cells in the body can continue to live outside of the body if they are fed in the right way. The body is really a community of different cells, which have adapted in different ways to perform certain functions. All of those cells, if you trace things back biologically, once behaved in the same way. However, as these cells formed communities, they began to specialize and, in fact, the evolution of biology is that everything begins to specialize. Neurons specialize in sending electro-chemical signals across synapses; the liver specializes in filtering toxins etc.

It's important to realize that within the human body there is no hierarchy. There is no boss. The brain performs a certain function, but without the stomach to digest food the brain would be unable to function. Equally, the brain may have great ideas about where to go, but without the feet it would not be able to get anywhere. Everything needs everything else. The body is such a prime example because there are certain organs in the body that tend to step into the front and appear to be more important. The organs of speech are a good example, because we pay more attention to that. We think that what is coming out of someone mouth may be more important than what his or her spleen is doing. Nevertheless, if you think about it the speech would be impossible without the spleen doing its job properly. The body is a community of co-creative parts.

Spirituality has been operating around a dominator model, sometimes for a good reason. If you sit with a teacher who is very immersed or committed to silence like Eckhart Tolle or Byron Katie, there will be a resonance of that silence. So, it's not always terrible thing to have a hierarchical model. However, what many people are realizing today is that a hierarchy model in spirituality also has a price to pay. A downside to hierarchal spirituality is that many people will experience a feeling of inadequacy. It can be attractive to want our spirituality served to us in a 'from the top, down' way, though many of us are gaining an interest in finding another way.

The challenge of meeting in a co-creative way is that it can easily loose depth, the way that in the body if one organ of the body is diseased or out of balanced, the whole body will become sick. If your kidneys stop working pretty quickly the rest of the body will be ill. It is quite possible that you're whole body could get pretty messed up over one area. The same challenge with co-creative spirituality is that the frequency of the organism will be determined by whatever is the most out of balance. That is the down side of co-creative spirituality. But if one can recognize that and sit with where we are headed as a race there is a possibility for a created act for a group of people to learn to care for each other the way the body does: to create awakening collectively in a circular way, without one individual giving it to the others. This gives way to the abundant benefits of co-creative spirituality by removing the feeling of inadequacy and the dependant feeling of relying on someone else for all the knowledge.

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