Next Buddha Will Be A Collective

Title: The next Buddha will be a collective: spiritual expression in the peer to peer era. By Michel Bauwens

Draft on an essay written for ReVision journal. Version without notes and references.

Contents  [hide]  1 Abstract 2 Part One: The Emergence of the P2P principle in Society 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Emergence of the Peer to Peer Format 2.3 Characteristics of Peer Production in Social and Economic Life 3 Part Two: the new Participatory Spirituality, or, The Peer Production of Spiritual Knowledge 3.1 New Value Constellations 3.2 General Characteristics of a Participatory Spirituality 3.3 Developments in theory: the participatory and relational spirituality approaches by Jorge Ferrer and John Heron 3.4 The discovery of the We: the primacy of Relationality and the Collective Field 4 Part Three: Case studies 4.1 Commons-oriented approaches 4.2 Working the we field through peer circles 4.3 The development of intersubjective facilitation 4.4 Chaos religions on the internet 4.5 Open Source Religions 4.6 Towards a contributory spirituality

Abstract

Religious and spiritual expression is always embedded in societal structures. If social structures are moving towards the form of distributed networks, what kind of evolution of spiritual expression can we expect? In this essay, we will first describe the general societal changes that we see emerging, and expect to become more prevalent in the future, then examine to what degree these changes will have an impact on individual and collective spiritual expression. The reader has to bear with us in the first general part, which explains the peer to peer dynamic, in order to understand its application to spirituality, which is the subject of the second part of the essay. Finally, in the third and final part, we will discuss a few concrete examples. Continue reading...