The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging by Charles Vogl

Author:Charles Vogl [Vogl, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Customs & Traditions, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Business & Economics, Organizational Development, General, Language Arts & Disciplines, Communication Studies, Sociology, Library & Information Science, Administration & Management
ISBN: 9781626568433
Google: LJHxCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2016-09-11T22:00:00+00:00

Eight

The Inner Rings Principle

We all want to be special to someone or several someones. We all want to be valued and valuable. This could look like joining the elite club of Academy Award winners, Olympic athletes, or Nobel Prize winners. There are formal inner rings with official membership, and there are many more informal inner rings. We all aspire to belong to prestigious inner rings, perhaps not just for authority and respect but for new ways to participate and contribute. This desire is so powerful that we’re rarely satisfied with the rings we already inhabit. We simply differ on the inner rings we aspire to join and what we’re willing to do for admission.

I’ve not yet discovered a single spiritual tradition without some sort of inner-ring organization. The most beautiful description I’ve heard was by my friend and Tibetan Buddhist teacher Lama Surya Das. He explained that in his tradition these rings can be mapped on a mandala, a circular figure or diagram that represents wholeness and the universe with material and nonmaterial parts. As one travels deeper into the community, it can be described as a journey from the outer part to the inner part and then to the secret or subtler part. The journey from the periphery into the inner rings can be described in this way:1

Interested Seekers

Students

Joining Members

Practitioners

Lay Vowed

Acolyte or Neophyte Vowed

Monastic Vowed

Mystics and Sages

The progression may look like a hierarchy, but it’s not. Every part of the mandala is the center, and every part is connected to every other part. The heart center, or the mandala’s center, “is bigger than the space outside.” In other words, for those who enter the smallest inner ring, they’ll find that in the center there is oneness where all are linked. New members are concerned about what they can get out of the tradition. The mystics and sages in the center are concerned for all beings in the universe.

Almost everyone aspires to join inner rings (if you are normal). When I lived in New York City as a young documentary filmmaker, I aspired to join an inner ring of professional documentary filmmakers. It was an informal ring that socialized at particular locations in the city, meeting up at filmmaking events including certain workshops, festivals, and panels. But when I succeeded in joining this group, I realized that the ring I really wanted to join was the ring of PBS filmmakers, then a ring of filmmakers whose work was funded by a particular list of funders, then a ring of international award-winning filmmakers, then a ring of filmmakers whose work was distributed internationally on television and via other media, then the ring of filmmakers who won an Academy Award.

The members of each progressive ring, I believed, could teach me more, have better wisdom, have access to more power, better understand how to accomplish goals, and maybe even have more fun. Obviously this was not always true. These were informal rings. There were no group presidents, selection committees, membership cards, or annual meetings.

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