This comes from the P2P Foundation blog. Andrius Kulikauskas offers a unique values of P2P.

P2P Truth: A Map of Deepest Values by Andrius Kulikauskas

Michel Bauwens

27th September 2014

Today we have something a little different, a very nicely illustrated mapping project reflecting on p2p values and spirituality by Andrius Kulikauskas.

The peer-to-peer movement values relative truth with a passion that is practically absolute. I believe that individual perspectives have the potential to discover the universal truth, at least enough of it so as to make the peer-to-peer movement viable. The path from relative to absolute truth is the subject of my e-book, The Truth, from Relative to Absolute.

I think the most practical concept from my book is a person’s deepest value. In 2004, I wondered how my online laboratory Minciu Sodas might organize a Yahoo! group around Franz Nahrada and openly support his many projects. We needed a single concept that summarized what he cared about. For him, it was Global Villages. He later expressed his deepest value in life as optimal interplay. From 2004 to 2010, I organized more than twenty such discussion groups, including Janet Feldman’s Holistic Helping, Pamela McLean’s Learning From Each Other, Samwel Kongere’s Mendenyo (“men without food”, motivation through sacrifice), John Roger’s Cyfranogi (“participate”, participatory society) and my own group Living by Truth. Here is an excerpt from my book:

Truth is inside of us, deeper than words. Ask people what they know firsthand:

What do they value? What is their deepest value in life which includes all of their other values?

They may not have an answer. Or they may feel it but not yet have words for it. Or they may have already thought it through. As the ancient Greeks would say, they know themselves.

Their values are all uniquely beautiful: Holistic Helping, Learning From Each Other, Participatory Society, Serving Others, Fighting Peacefully, Synergy, Freedom, Faith, Family, Unity, Love…

If two people give the same answer such as Family, and you ask them what they mean by that, they will give you different answers.

Their deepest value is their spiritual name, like a Native American name. They will almost always let you share it.

It is how they hope to think of themselves. In practice, it is their strong point but also their blind spot. It is what we should have them be in charge of.

It is how they are happy to be categorized, how you can empathize with them and hold them accountable.

It is their soul, the essence of their personality, their principle which they substitute for themselves, their name which is written in the Book of Life, what is truly eternal.

They are thus like stars in the sky, seeing the entire sky from their particular position. As Jesus says, they are born again of the Spirit. They are Allah’s holy names.

Their deepest values are all aspects of love, which is surely God’s deepest value. They address what they each think is the problem with this world, the lack of love they feel. It is how they integrate their many values as they clash in daily life.

They invest themselves in their deepest value, which does not change but rather grows ever more clear to them. As they know themselves, they dare to go beyond themselves and ask what they do not know.

What do they seek to know? What is a question that they don’t know the answer to, but wish to answer?

In 10 years, I collected deepest values and investigatory questions from hundreds of people. I think it would be very fruitful to work together to collect many more. They might serve as the basis for appreciating the greatest variety of perspectives and discovering what amongst them might actually be universal. 

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I am working on a map of deepest values and related concepts. I’ve noticed that often a value such as my own “living by absolute truth” breaks do wn into one concept that is given (in my case, “the absolute truth”), and another concept that depends on my choice (“living” that truth). Others value “living by harmony”, “living as a creation of God” and such variations are the basis for my map.

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I’ve noticed that some values presume very little and might make sense from an abstract God’s point of view. Others, however, are psychological and distinguish internal thinking and external actions as with motivations, obstacles and solutions. There are values which presume two or more beings as with empathy and collaboration. Community, education, glory suppose an entire culture. Family, children, technology, democracy, money, making a living, sustainability and the Bible all depend on the details of the world as we know it. I’d love to work together to sort through the underlying presumptions. I’m also interested in related art projects. I share a letter about my research in English and I’m working on it in Lithuanian.

LeveVei - Episode 90: Peer to Peer in Governance, Production and Knowledge Distribution (Michel Bauwens)

This is an older episode of LeveVei with Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation as the guest. I have been a tremendous fan of Bauwens' work for around ten years or so now. Below the introduction to the interview, I have included one of the essays linked to at the end of the post, a personal favorite of mine.

Episode 90: Peer to peer as an approach to governance, production and distribution of knowledge

Posted by James Alexander Arnfinsen (redaktør) × January 6, 2014

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:45 — 44.6MB)

In this episode I´m joined by Michel Bauwens, who is the founder of P2P-foundation which works to promote, research and develop different forms of peer to peer practices. He starts out by describing his engagement with civic entrepreneurship, where the P2P-foundation is one example of this kind of relational dynamic. He then explains in detail what peer to peer actually entails, while also placing this trend in a historical context in relation to how people have organized different forms of transaction and value creation.

An interesting point here, regarding work, is how we have moved from a division of labour to the distribution of tasks. Peer to peer implies a very different method of organizing and controlling how people engage in a project or in the production of complex social artifacts (such as Wikipedia and Linux). He also points to how peer to peer production is codependent on the conventional and existing system today, mainly capitalism, and how this new form of organizing value creation is emerging from within the old system while at the same time transcending many of the constraints found in the the old paradigm. An important distinction is the idea of “the commons”, and Bauwens points out that peer to peer production is often organized around some kind of communally shared value where the participants contribute so as to uphold and maintain the common asset (couchsurfing is only one example)

Another interesting point is how peer to peer can create a space for both cooperation and market-based competition. Further on in our conversation Bauwens describes how it´s possible to upscale the relational dynamics of peer to peer and apply it to larger societal change processes. He is currently engaged in a project in Ecuador and he uses this initiative as a case in point, explaining how Ecuador, through peer to peer practices, is trying to move into an open commons based knowledge society. An interesting point here is how knowledge can be understood as an infinite resource, and with the advent of 3D-printing and local micro production facilities, this could have dramatic effects on how a society sustains itself. We also discuss how innovation often will come from the periphery, and not necessarily from the center stage, so maybe Ecuador can play an important role in global change processes? Another theme we bring up is how to understand peer to peer from an integral perspective, with reference to the work of for instance Ken Wilber and Susan Cook-Greuter. A poignent question here circles around if and how peer to peer presuppose higher stages of consciousness? Towards the last section of the interview Bauwens speaks to his hopes for the future development of peer to peer practice.

If you feel inspired or provoked by our conversation feel free to add your comments after the interview. You can also send in a written piece of work and get it published together with this episode. Further details can be found here.

Episode links:

• Michel Bauwens (bio)
• P2P-foundation
• What is an interesting life in the p2p era?, short article by Michel Bauwens
• Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks, an informative overview of P2P
• P2P and Human Evolution: Peer to peer as the premise of a new mode of civilization, an extensive essay by Michel Bauwens

Here is an excellent and favorite essay by Bauwens, which is linked to above:

Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks

2.1.A. Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks

Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol makes an important and clear distinction between centralized networks (with one central hub where everything must pass and be authorized, as in the old telephone switching systems), decentralized systems, with more than one center, but these subcenters still being authorative (such as the airport system in the U.S. centered around hubs where planes must pass through), from distributed systems, where hubs may exist, but are not obligatory (such as the internet). In distributed networks, participants may freely link with each other, they are fully autonomous agents. Hence the importance to clearly distinguish between our usage of the concepts 'decentralized' vs. 'distributed'. Peer to peer is specifically the relational dynamic that arises in distributed networks.

So: what is peer to peer? Here’s a first tentative definition: It is a specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network. This is of course a strong definition and statement, subject to a lot of refining and caveats.

P2P processes are not structureless, but are characterized by dynamic and changing structures which adapt themselves to phase changes. It rules are not derived from an external authority, as in hierarchical systems, but generated from within. It does not deny ‘authority’, but only fixed forced hierarchy, and therefore accepts authority based on expertise, initiation of the project, etc… P2P may be the first true meritocracy. The threshold for participation is kept as low as possible. Equipotency means that there is no prior formal filtering for participation, but rather that it is the immediate practice of cooperation which determines the expertise and level of participation. Communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system. Techniques of 'participation capture' and other social accounting make automatic cooperation the default scheme of the project. Personal identity becomes partly generated by the contribution to the common project. As we will see, this is part and parcel of a widespread transformation to a mode of being which we call 'cooperative individualism'. P2P is not a return to earlier forms of community, but something new.

P2P is a network, not a pyramidal hierarchy (though it may have elements of it); it is 'distributed', though it may have elements of hierarchy, centralization and 'decentralization'; intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system. Assumed equipotency means that P2P systems start from the premise that ‘it doesn’t know where the needed resource will be located’, it assumes that ‘everybody’ can cooperate, and does not use formal rules in advance to determine its participating members. Acceptance in P2P projects is not based on formal credentials, since it is no longer believed that skills can be reflected in such formal documents, and they are therefore 'anti-credentialist'. Equipotency, i.e. the capacity to cooperate, is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Such an equipotency is widely differentiated, as complex projects need a vastly differentiated skillset. Thus, competition is limited, and replaced by complementarity. This is also why authority is widely distributed and subject to change. Validation of knowledge, acceptance of processes, are determined by the collective. Cooperation must be free, not forced, and not based on neutrality (i.e. the buying of cooperation in a monetary system). It exists to produce something. It enables the widest possible participation. These are a number of characteristics that we can use to describe P2P systems ‘in general’, and in particular as it emerges in the human lifeworld. Whereas participants in hierarchical systems are subject to the panoptism of the select few who control the vast majority, in P2P systems, participants have access to holoptism, the ability for any participant to see the whole. Further on we will examine more in depth characteristics such as de-formalization, de-institutionalization, de-commodification, which are also at the heart of P2P processes.

Whereas hierarchical systems are based on creating homogeneity amongst its 'dependent' members, distributed networks using the P2P dynamic regulate the 'interdependent' participants preserving heterogeneity. It is the 'object of cooperation' itself which creates the temporary unity. Culturally, P2P is about unity-in-diversity, or 'difference-in-unity': it is concrete 'post-Enlightenment' universalism predicated on common goals and projects; while hierarchy is predicated on creating sameness through identification and exclusion, and is associated with the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment.

To have a good understanding of P2P, I suggest the following mental exercise, think about these characteristics, then about their opposites. So doing, the radical innovative nature of P2P springs to mind. Though P2P is related to earlier social modes, those were most in evidence in the early tribal era, and it now emerges in an entirely new context, enabled by technologies that go beyond the barriers of time and space. After the dominance during the last several millennia, of centralized and hierarchical modes of social organization, it is thus in many ways now a radically innovative emergence, and also reflects a very deep change in the epistemological and ontological paradigms that determine behavior and worldviews.

An important clarification is that when we say that peer to peer systems have no hierarchy or are not centralized, we do not necessarily mean the complete absence of such characteristics. But in a P2P system, the use of hierarchy and centralization, serve the goal of participation and many-to-many cooperation, and are not used to prohibit or dominate it. This means that though P2P arises in distributed networks, not all distributed networks exhibit P2P processes. Many distributed bottom-up processes, such as the swarming behavior of insects, of the behavior of buyers and sellers in market, are not true P2P processes, to the degree that they lack holoptism, or do not promote participation. Insects in a swarm, do not have information about the whole, they follow markers that determine their individual behaviour. And a market is not equipotent since it excludes those without purchasing power. P2P, as a uniquely human phenomenon integrates moral and intentional aspects. When distributed meshworks, for example interlinking boards of directors, serve a hierarchy of wealth and power, and are based on exclusion rather than participation, this does not qualify as a full P2P process.

P2P can be a partial element of another process; or it can be a full process. For examples, the technological and collaborative infrastructure build around P2P principles, may enable non-P2P processes. In the example just above, it is the infrastructure of Empire, but it can also enable new types of marketplaces, gift/sharing economy practices. Where P2P is a full process, we will argue that it is a form of communal shareholding producing a new type of Commons.

What Is P2P? Michel Bauwens Interviewed by Julie Tran from MakeChangeTV

Nice interview with Michel Bauwens, and a nice introduction to P2P for those not familiar with the peer-to-peer movement, which now incorporates nearly every human field. Below the video I am including some material from the P2P Foundation website as an additional source of information for those interested in a deeper understanding of P2P - I encourage you to explore the P2P Foundation website, as there is a literal ton of useful information there.

Openness, a necessary revolution into a smarter world

Our current political economy has the weirdest DNA. It considers nature to be a perpetually abundant resource, i.e. it is based on a false notion of material abundance; on the other hand, it believes that intellectual, scientific and technical exchange should be subject to strong proprietary constraints, and subjects innovation to internet restrictions. Thus the paradoxical but also dramatic contradiction of the present system: while it is rapidly overburdening the carrying capacity of the planet, at the same time it inhibits the solutions that humanity might find for it.

Luckily, the emergence of peer producing communities that share knowledge, code and design for the common good of humanity using open licensing arrangements that enable and facilitate universal sharing are showing the way for a fundamental reorganisation into a smarter world.

First, the value is created in global open design communities that easily outcooperate and outcompete single corporations, no matter how big or rich they are, as no isolated can be smarter than a globally networked collective intelligence. Second, this collaborative value creation is enabled and protected by for-benefic organisations, the FLOSS Foundations such as the Apache Foundation and many others. These are mostly democratically run by contributors to the common pool. Thirdly, entrepreneurial coalitions make and sell the products, improving them in the process, which have been designed (and are perpetually and continuously improved) by the contributor communities, creating a vibrant economy around the commons (think of the free software economy, or the Arduino economy as examples).

«Global open communities can outcooperate and outcompete single corporations, as no isolated can be smarter than a globally networked collective intelligence»

This new way does not only enable perpetual sharing of innovation, but also ensures sustainability, as communities do not have vested interests in artificial scarcity. Hence, if you design as a corporation for the market, you design for scarcity, but if you design as a community, you naturally design for sustainability. If you build and sell sustainable designs, then you are becoming a sustainable market players, abandoning the pernicious pursuit of planned obsolescence.

There is one missing player in this picture, the overall society, i.e. the polis. This polis must transform from the current market state — which privileges extractive corporations that deplete the commons, endanger the biosphere and oppose innovation sharing ? into a partner state which enables and empowers the social production of sustainable value by creating civic infrastructures that facilitate its emergence in strong ecosystems. Through public-commons partnerships and the commonification of public services, a new productive matrix is created, which guarantees a smarter planet that combines the recognition of the necessarily sustainability of material resources with the infinite innovation capabilities of global knowledge commons.

So here is some info on P2P for those who are interested.

1.A. What this essay is about

The following essay describes the emergence, or expansion, of a specific type of relational dynamic, which I call peer to peer. It’s a form of human network-based organization which rests upon the free participation of equipotent partners, engaged in the production of common resources, without recourse to monetary compensation as key motivating factor, and not organized according to hierarchical methods of command and control. It creates a Commons, rather than a market or a state, and relies on social relations to allocate resources rather than on pricing mechanisms or managerial commands.

Thus we have three important aspects that are essential for P2P processes to occur in a full-blown manner: 1) peer production as a mode of production; 2) peer governance as a mode of governance; 3) universal common property as a mode of distribution and access. But P2P can also occur in a partial manner wherever resources are distributed.

Thus underlying our description of P2P processes, it will be useful to distinguish between four different levels.
- One level is the phenomenological level, i.e. the different ways in which the P2P forms emerges in different social fields. Here we get the peer to peer relational dynamic in distributed systems, and how it expresses itself in the internet structure, the writeable Web 2.0, peer circles or what have you. This I propose to call ‘diffuse P2P’. Such P2P emergence is easy to integrate within the existing system, and can be instrumentalised by authoritarian social forces, as in Al Qaeda using the internet. It is ‘immanent’ to the system.

- The second level is when integration occurs. The different P2P forms in this case do not exist independently, but start reinforcing one another. This ‘integrated P2P’ involving such social processes as peer production, peer governance, and universal common property regimes, become transcendent to the system, because they cannot be contained within the current production schemes (market pricing and corporate hierarchy), governance schemes (corporate hierarchy or state bureaucracy or even representational democracy), or property regimes. They create an emerging new social reality, which is today dominated by the existing social economy, but that is a contingent situation which could change in the future. I’m not saying “it will happen", but definitely “it can happen" and whether it happens also depends on our human intentionality.

- Now, why is all this happening. Because, before social practices and technological artifacts are invented or emerge, it must be conceived in the human mind, and it must become acceptable as a social practice. Thus P2P emerges out of changes in the ‘ground state’ of humanity, i.e. deep changes in the ontology/epistemology/axiology, or in easier words: new ways of feeling and being, of knowing, and new constellations of values. That is the third level which occurs as a spontaneous social process, not directed, not necessarily consciously desired but part of the evolution of the ‘social imaginary’. It is this level which has been so beautifully captured by John Heron’s recapitulation of the evolution of participation, which I have cited on occasion. Broadly conceived, such a deep level of human change is also outside the scope of recuperation.

- The fourth level occurs when we become conscious of these changes, and make it an object of our human intentionality: in other words, we not only see it happening (level 1 to 3), but we want it to happen and seek out others with similar values in the hope of interconnecting our efforts. This is the object of my own work, and I hope it can become the basis of a broad social and political movement as more and more people, from their own particular perspective, come to their own conclusions. At this point, P2P becomes a normative ethos for a new kind of life on earth, and definitely outside the scope of any recuperation, though there is no guarantee of its success.

At the diffuse format of level 1, the P2P format is emerging throughout the social field: as a format of technology (the point to point internet, filesharing, grid computing, the Writeable Web initiatives, blogs), as a third mode of production which is also called Commons-based peer production (neither centrally planned nor profit-driven), producing hardware, software (often called Free Libre Open Sources Software or FLOSS) and intellectual and cultural resources (wetware) that are of great value to humanity (Wikipedia), and as a general mode of knowledge exchange and collective learning which is massively practiced on the internet. It also emerges as new organizational formats in politics, spirituality; as a new ‘culture of work’. This essay thus traces the expansion of this format, seen as a “isomorphism" (= having the same format), in as many fields as possible. The common format in which the peer to peer dynamic emerges is the format of the "distributed network", which, according to the definition of A. Galloway in his book Protocol, differs both from the centralized network (all nodes have to pass through one single hub), and from the decentralized network (all nodes have to pass through hubs). In a distributed network the nodes, as autonomous agents, can connect through any number of links. Hubs may exist, but are not obligatory.

The essay tries not only to describe, but attempts to provide an explanatory framework of why it is emerging now, and how it fits in a wider evolutionary framework (not in the sense of an inevitable natural evolution, but as an intentional moral breakthrough).

The underlying logic of development in which the emergence of P2P is best understood, may be by viewing 'participation' as the key variable, seeing how it intensifies historically in various social formations.

This idea was best expressed by John Heron in a personal communication:

"There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight and not in an evolutionary logic:

(1) autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;

(2) narrow democratic cultures which practice political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;

(3) wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;

(4) commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavour".

Note that within the first four sections, the organization is as follows: the first subsection is descriptive, the second is explanatory, and the third is historical. In the latter, I use the triune distinction premodernity/modernity/postmodernity, well aware that it is a simplification, and that it collapses many important distinctions, say between the tribal and the agrarian era. But as an orienting generalization that allows the contrasting of the changes occurring after the emergence of modernity, it remains useful. Thus, the concept of ‘premodern’, means the societies based on tradition, before the advent of industrial capitalism, with fixed social roles and a social organization inspired by what it believes to be a divine order; modern means essentially the era of industrial capitalism; finally, the choice of the term postmodern does not denote any specific preference in the ‘wars of interpretation’ between concepts such as postmodernity, liquid modernity, reflexive modernity, transmodernity etc.. It simple means the contemporary period, more or less starting after 1968, which is marked by the emergence of the informational mode of capitalism. I will use the term cognitive capitalism most frequently in my characterization of the current regime, as it corresponds to the interpretation, which is the most convincing in my view. The French magazine Multitudes is my main source for such interpretations. It's essential meaning is the replacement of an older 'regime of accumulation', centered on machines and the division of labor corresponding to them; and one centered on being part of a process of accumulation of knowledge and creativity, as the new mainspring of power and profit. Finally, note that in the accompanying graphs of figures, I sometimes use the "early modern/late modern/P2P era" framework. In this way, the current time frame can be distinguished from a hypothetical coming situation where P2P is more dominant than it is today, and what that would change in the characteristics of such a society.

I will conclude my essay with the conclusion that P2P is nothing else than a premise of a new type of civilization that is not exclusively geared towards the profit motive. 

What I have to convince the user of is that

- 1) a particular type of human relational dynamic is growing very fast across the social fields, and that such combined occurrence is the result of a deep shift in ways of feeling and being (ontology), of knowing (epistemology), and of core value constellations (axiology)

- 2) That it has a coherent logic that cannot be fully contained within the present ‘regime’ of society.

- 3) that it is not an utopia, but, as ‘an already existing social practice’, the seed of a likely major transformation to come. I will not be arguing that there is an 'inevitable evolutionary logic at work', but rather that a new and intentional moral vision, holds the potential for a major breakthrough in social evolution, leading to the possibility of a new political, economic, and cultural 'formation' with a new coherent logic.

Implicit in my interpretation of peer to peer as a social formation, is that it is accompanied by a nascent socio-political movement, much as industrial class relations triggered a labor movement. In the case of the 'peer to peer movement' this movement concerns itself with the promotion and defense of the Commons, i.e. the existence of a common-property regime that exists alongside the state and the market, but which is also under threat by a frenetic movement to privately appropriate common resources. This P2P movement has three components: first, the participatory movement, which is not necessarily political in the old sense, and includes all efforts to widen participation in human processes (for example Web 2.0 engineering efforts); second, the "open" movement in its various guises: open sources, open access, open money. This movement works on the conditions necessary for P2P processes to occur: without free access to information, i.e. the distribution of information, no P2P can occur; third, the Commons movement, which is concerned by protecting and developing the institutional format for P2P to thrive in: by avoiding private appropriation of commonly produced knowledge products, the motivation for P2P behaviour is strengthened. These are the explicit P2P movements in my mind, respectively focusing on peer governance, peer production, and peer property modes, but the movement is larger than that, as I will argue in the political section.

Such a large overview will inevitably bring errors of interpretation concerning detailed fields. I would appreciate if readers could bring them to my attention. But apart from these errors, the essay should stand or fall in the context of its most general interpretative point: that there is indeed a isomorphic emergence of peer to peer throughout the social field, that despite the differences in expression, it is the same phenomena, and that it is not a marginal, but a 'fundamental' development. It is on this score that my effort should be judged. If the effort is indeed judged to be successful, I then would hope that this essay inspires people from these different fields to connect, aware that they are sharing a set of values, and that these values have potential in creating a better, but not perfect or ideal, society.

How does the explanatory framework which I will provide for P2P, differ from the use of the earlier metaphor of the network society, described by Manuel Castells and many others, and lately in particular by the network sociality concept proposed by Andreas Wittel? The best way to differentiate the approaches is to see P2P as a subset of network conceptions.

If you would have been a social scientist during the lifetime of Marx and witnessed the emergence and growth of the factory-based industrial model, and you would then have arrived at the equivalent of what social network theory is today, i.e. an analysis of mainstream society and sociality. This is what the network sociality model of Andreas Wittel provides. But at the same time that the factory system was developing, a reaction was created as well. Workers were creating cooperatives and mutualities, unions and new political parties and movements, which would go on to fundamentally alter the world. Today, this is what happens with peer to peer. Whereas Castells and Wittel focus on the general emergence of network society and society, and describes the networks overall and the dominant features of it, I want and tend to focus on the birth of a counter-movement, centered around a particular format of sociality based in distributed networks, where the focus is on creating participation for all, and not the buttressing of the 'meshworks of exploitation'. As the dominant forces of society are mutating to networked forms of organizing the political economy (called Empire by Toni Negri), a bottom-up reaction against this new alienation is occurring (alienated, because in Empire, the meshwork are at the service of creating ever more inequality), by the forces of what Negri and Hardt call the multitude(s). These forces are using peer to peer processes, and a peer to peer ethos, to create new forms of social life, and this is what I want to document in this essay. 

* * * *

2.1.A. Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks

Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol makes an important and clear distinction between centralized networks (with one central hub where everything must pass and be authorized, as in the old telephone switching systems), decentralized systems, with more than one center, but these subcenters still being authorative (such as the airport system in the U.S. centered around hubs where planes must pass through), from distributed systems, where hubs may exist, but are not obligatory (such as the internet). In distributed networks, participants may freely link with each other, they are fully autonomous agents. Hence the importance to clearly distinguish between our usage of the concepts 'decentralized' vs. 'distributed'. Peer to peer is specifically the relational dynamic that arises in distributed networks.

So: what is peer to peer? Here’s a first tentative definition: It is a specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network. This is of course a strong definition and statement, subject to a lot of refining and caveats.

P2P processes are not structureless, but are characterized by dynamic and changing structures which adapt themselves to phase changes. It rules are not derived from an external authority, as in hierarchical systems, but generated from within. It does not deny ‘authority’, but only fixed forced hierarchy, and therefore accepts authority based on expertise, initiation of the project, etc… P2P may be the first true meritocracy. The threshold for participation is kept as low as possible. Equipotency means that there is no prior formal filtering for participation, but rather that it is the immediate practice of cooperation which determines the expertise and level of participation. Communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system. Techniques of 'participation capture' and other social accounting make automatic cooperation the default scheme of the project. Personal identity becomes partly generated by the contribution to the common project. As we will see, this is part and parcel of a widespread transformation to a mode of being which we call 'cooperative individualism'. P2P is not a return to earlier forms of community, but something new.

P2P is a network, not a pyramidal hierarchy (though it may have elements of it); it is 'distributed', though it may have elements of hierarchy, centralization and 'decentralization'; intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system. Assumed equipotency means that P2P systems start from the premise that ‘it doesn’t know where the needed resource will be located’, it assumes that ‘everybody’ can cooperate, and does not use formal rules in advance to determine its participating members. Acceptance in P2P projects is not based on formal credentials, since it is no longer believed that skills can be reflected in such formal documents, and they are therefore 'anti-credentialist'. Equipotency, i.e. the capacity to cooperate, is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Such an equipotency is widely differentiated, as complex projects need a vastly differentiated skillset. Thus, competition is limited, and replaced by complementarity. This is also why authority is widely distributed and subject to change. Validation of knowledge, acceptance of processes, are determined by the collective. Cooperation must be free, not forced, and not based on neutrality (i.e. the buying of cooperation in a monetary system). It exists to produce something. It enables the widest possible participation. These are a number of characteristics that we can use to describe P2P systems ‘in general’, and in particular as it emerges in the human lifeworld. Whereas participants in hierarchical systems are subject to the panoptism of the select few who control the vast majority, in P2P systems, participants have access to holoptism, the ability for any participant to see the whole. Further on we will examine more in depth characteristics such as de-formalization, de-institutionalization, de-commodification, which are also at the heart of P2P processes.

Whereas hierarchical systems are based on creating homogeneity amongst its 'dependent' members, distributed networks using the P2P dynamic regulate the 'interdependent' participants preserving heterogeneity. It is the 'object of cooperation' itself which creates the temporary unity. Culturally, P2P is about unity-in-diversity, or 'difference-in-unity': it is concrete 'post-Enlightenment' universalism predicated on common goals and projects; while hierarchy is predicated on creating sameness through identification and exclusion, and is associated with the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment.

To have a good understanding of P2P, I suggest the following mental exercise, think about these characteristics, then about their opposites. So doing, the radical innovative nature of P2P springs to mind. Though P2P is related to earlier social modes, those were most in evidence in the early tribal era, and it now emerges in an entirely new context, enabled by technologies that go beyond the barriers of time and space. After the dominance during the last several millennia, of centralized and hierarchical modes of social organization, it is thus in many ways now a radically innovative emergence, and also reflects a very deep change in the epistemological and ontological paradigms that determine behavior and worldviews.

An important clarification is that when we say that peer to peer systems have no hierarchy or are not centralized, we do not necessarily mean the complete absence of such characteristics. But in a P2P system, the use of hierarchy and centralization, serve the goal of participation and many-to-many cooperation, and are not used to prohibit or dominate it. This means that though P2P arises in distributed networks, not all distributed networks exhibit P2P processes. Many distributed bottom-up processes, such as the swarming behavior of insects, of the behavior of buyers and sellers in market, are not true P2P processes, to the degree that they lack holoptism, or do not promote participation. Insects in a swarm, do not have information about the whole, they follow markers that determine their individual behaviour. And a market is not equipotent since it excludes those without purchasing power. P2P, as a uniquely human phenomenon integrates moral and intentional aspects. When distributed meshworks, for example interlinking boards of directors, serve a hierarchy of wealth and power, and are based on exclusion rather than participation, this does not qualify as a full P2P process.

P2P can be a partial element of another process; or it can be a full process. For examples, the technological and collaborative infrastructure build around P2P principles, may enable non-P2P processes. In the example just above, it is the infrastructure of Empire, but it can also enable new types of marketplaces, gift/sharing economy practices. Where P2P is a full process, we will argue that it is a form of communal shareholding producing a new type of Commons.
* * * *

3.3.C. Beyond Formalization, Institutionalization, Commodification

Observation of commons-based peer production and knowledge exchange, unveils a further number of important elements, which can be added to our earlier definition and has to be added to the characteristic of holoptism just discussed in 3.4.B.

In premodern societies, knowledge is ‘guarded’, it is part of what constitutes power. Guilds are based on secrets, the Church does not translate the Bible, and it guards its monopoly of interpretation. Knowledge is obtained through imitation and initiation in closed circles.

With the advent of modernity, and let’s think about Diderot’s project of the Encyclopedia as an example, knowledge is from now on regarded as a public resource which should flow freely. But at the same time, modernity, as described by Foucault in particular, starts a process of regulating the flow of knowledge through a series of formal rules, which aim to distinguish valid knowledge from invalid one. The academic peer review method, the setting up of universities which regulate discourse, the birth of professional bodies as guardians of expertise, the scientific method, are but a few of such regulations. An intellectual property rights regime also regulates the legitimate use one can make of such knowledge, and which is responsible for a re-privatization of knowledge. If original copyright served to stimulate creation by balancing the rights of authors and the public, the recent strengthening of intellectual property rights can be more properly understood as an attempt at ‘enclosure’ of the information commons, which has to serve to create monopolies based on rent obtained through licenses. Thus at the end of modernity, in a similar process to what we described in the field of work culture, there is an exacerbation of the most negative aspects of the privatization of knowledge: IP legislation is incredibly tightened, information sharing becomes punishable, the market invades the public sphere of universities and academic peer review and the scientific commons are being severely damaged.

Again, peer to peer appears as a radical shift. In the new emergent practices of knowledge exchange, equipotency is assumed from the start. There are no formal rules to prohibit anyone from participation, a characteristic that could be called 'anti-credentialism' . (unlike academic peer review, where formal degrees are required ). Validation is a communal intersubjective process. It often takes place through a process akin to swarming, whereby large number of participants will tug at the mistakes in a piece of software or text, the so-called 'piranha effect', and so perfect it better than an individual genius could. Many examples of this kind are described in the book 'The Wisdom of Crowds', by James Surowiecki. Though there are constraints in this process, depending on the type of governance chosen by various P2P projects, what stands out compared to previous modes of production is the self-selection aspect. Production is granular and modular, and only the individuals themselves know exactly if their exact mix of expertise fits the problem at hand. We have autonomous selection instead of heteronomous selection.

If there are formal rules, they have to be accepted by the community, and they are ad hoc for particular projects. In the Slashdot online publishing system which serves the open source community, a large group of editors combs through the postings, and there’s a complex system of ratings of the editors themselves; in other systems every article is rated creating a hierarchy of interest which pushes the lesser-rated articles down the list. As we explained above, in the context of knowledge classification, there is a move away from institutional categorization using hierarchical trees of knowledge, such as the bibliographic formats (Dewey, UDC, etc..), to informal communal ‘tagging’, what some people have termed folksonomies. In blogging, news and commentary are democratized and open to any participant, and it is the reputation of trustworthiness, acquired over time, by the individual in question, which will lead to the viral diffusion of particular ‘memes’. Power and influence are determined by the quality of the contribution, and have to be accepted and constantly renewed by the community of participants. All this can be termed the de-formalization of knowledge.

A second important aspect is de-institutionalization. In premodernity, knowledge is transmitted through tradition, through initiation by experienced masters to those who are validated to participate in the chain mostly through birth. In modernity, as we said, validation and the legitimation of knowledge is processed through institutions. It is assumed that the autonomous individual needs socialization, ‘disciplining’, through such institutions. Knowledge has to be mediated. Thus, whether a news item is trustworthy is determined largely by its source, say the Wall Street Journal, or the Encyclopedia Brittanica, who are supposed to have formal methodologies and expertise. P2P processes are de-institutionalized, in the sense that it is the collective itself which validates the knowledge.

Please note my semantic difficulty here. Indeed, it can be argued that P2P is just another form of institution, another institutional framework, in the sense of a self-perpetuating organizational format. And that would be correct: P2P processes are not structureless, but most often flexible structures that follow internally generated rules. In previous social forms, institutions got detached from the functions and objectives they had to play, became 'autonomous'. In turn because of the class structure of society, and the need to maintain domination, and because of 'bureaucratization' and self-interest of the institutional leaderships, those institutions turn 'against society' and even against their own functions and objectives. Such institutions become a factor of alienation. It is this type of institutionalization that is potentially overcome by P2P processes. The mediating layer between participation and the result of that participation, is much thinner, dependent on protocol rather controlled by hierarchy.

A good example of P2P principles at work can be found in the complex of solutions instituted by the University of Openness. UO is a set of free-form ‘universities’, where anyone who wants to learn or to share his expertise can form teams with the explicit purpose of collective learning. There are no entry exams and no final exams. The constitution of teams is not determined by any prior disciplinary categorization. The library of UO is distributed, i.e. all participating individuals can contribute their own books to a collective distributed library . The categorization of the books is explicitly ‘anti-systemic’, i.e. any individual can build his own personal ontologies of information, and semantic web principles are set to work to uncover similarities between the various categorizations .

All this prefigures a profound shift in our epistemologies. In modernity, with the subject-object dichotomy, the autonomous individual is supposed to gaze objectively at the external world, and to use formalized methodologies, which will be intersubjectively verified through academic peer review. Post-modernity has caused strong doubts about this scenario. The individual is no longer considered autonomous, but always-already part of various fields, of power, of psychic forces, of social relations, molded by ideologies, etc.. Rather than in need of socialization, the presumption of modernity, he is seen to be in need of individuation. But he is no longer an ‘indivisible atom’, but rather a singularity, a unique and ever-evolving composite. His gaze cannot be truly objective, but is always partial, as part of a system can never comprehend the system as a whole. The individual has a single set of perspectives on things reflecting his own history and limitations. Truth can therefore only be apprehended collectively by combining a multiplicity of other perspectives, from other singularities, other unique points of integration, which are put in ‘common’. It is this profound change in epistemologies which P2P-based knowledge exchange reflects.

A third important aspect of P2P is the process of de-commodification. In traditional societies, commodification, and ‘market pricing’ was only a relative phenomenon. Economic exchange depended on a set of mutual obligations, and even were monetary equivalents were used, the price rarely reflected an open market. It is only with industrial capitalism that the core of the economic exchanges started to be determined by market pricing, and both products and labor became commodities. But still, there was a public culture and education system, and immaterial exchanges largely fell outside this system. With cognitive capitalism, the owners of information assets are no longer content to live any immaterial process outside the purview of commodification and market pricing, and there is a strong drive to ‘privatize everything’, education included, our love lives included Any immaterial process can be resold as commodities. Thus again, in the recent era the characteristics of capitalism are exacerbated, with P2P representing the counter-reaction. With ‘commons-based peer production’ or P2P-based knowledge exchange more generally, the production does not result in commodities sold to consumers, but in use value made for users. Because of the GPL license, no copyrighted monopoly can arise. GPL products can eventually be sold, but such sale is usually only a credible alternative (since it can most often be downloaded for free), if it is associated with a service model. It is in fact mostly around such services that commercial open source companies found their model (example: Red Hat). Since the producers of commons-based products are rarely paid, their main motivation is not the exchange value for the eventually resulting commodity, but the increase in use value, their own learning and reputation. Motivation can be polyvalent, but will generally be anything but monetary.

One of the reasons of the emergence of the commodity-based economy, capitalism, is that a market is an efficient means to distribute ‘information’ about supply and demand, with the concrete price determining value as a synthesis of these various pressures. In the P2P environment we see the invention of alternative ways of determining value, through software algorhythms. In search engines, value is determined by algorhythms that determine pointers to documents, the more pointers, and the more value these pointers themselves have, the higher the value accorded to a document. This can be done either in a general matter, or for specialized interests, by looking at the rankings within the specific community, or even on a individual level, through collaborative filtering, by looking at what similar individuals have rated and used well. So in a similar but alternative way to the reputation-based schemes, we have a set of solutions to go beyond pricing, and beyond monetarisation, to determine value. The value that is determined in this case is of course an indication of potential use value, rather than ‘exchange value’ for the market.

P2P Foundation - Participatory and Relational Spirituality: Ending the Guru Age

The P2P Foundation has a wiki that offers a lot of useful material on the variations of participatory and relational spirituality that are emerging as an alternative to the traditional guru model of spiritual teaching.

If the ideas of P2P (peer-to-peer) are not familiar, check out the Manifesto: Peer to Peer and Human Evolution.

I've been following Michel Bauwens' work in the P2P realm for several years. More recently, as I have become familiar with Robert Stolorow's Intersubjective Systems Theory in psychoanalysis, a model he has developed in association with George Atwood, Donna Orange, and Bernard Brandchaft (among others) - see The Intersubjective Perspective for a nice collection of essays introducing the topic).

In Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality, selections of text by John Heron, there is a good definition of the guru phenomenon and why its dominance is coming to an end. [See also an entry on Spiritual Authoritarianism.]

The guru phenomenon

The traditional oriental guru represents a form of spiritual leadership in which so-called advanced spiritual states of being are transmitted from guru to disciple. This requires the disciple to be present with the guru, physically or psychically, to project onto the guru the disciple’s latent divine nature, to be obedient and devoted to the guru, and to practise the disciplines he prescribes. There is a hierarchical, charismatic relationship to effect the disciple’s shift from an ordinary to an extraordinary state of being ‘enlightened’. A favourite candidate for ‘enlightenment’ is the so-called nondual state, in which spirit and any kind of form are known to be not two.

There seem to have been four phases of the guru phenomenon in the West.

(1) In the late decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, there was just a small guru-invasion from the East with key players like Vivekananda and the spread of the Vedanta movement in the West.

(2) Then post-war from 1945 with the publication of Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, there started a major guru-invasion from the East　including the dramatic spread through the 60s and the 70s of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism in the USA and Europe.

(3)　In the third phase, over the last thirty years or so, alongside the guru-invasion from the East there has been the growing phenomenon of home-grown Western gurus and spiritual teachers claiming the special status of 'enlightenment'.

(4) The fourth phase is just getting under way. It seems to be distinguished by four features.

(a) The erosion of guru status as a result of a continuous stream of sexual and financial abuse and bullying scandals among both Eastern and home-grown Western gurus and spiritual teachers.

(b) The erosion of 'enlightenment' claims by the proliferation of the number of people, especially in the West, making the claim: the more people who make the claim, the more its narcissistic inflation stands revealed. For the 'enlightenment' claim is also an　authority-claim to have　followers, a recruiting drive to gather in spiritual projections. The more claims that are made, the stronger the competition among claimants in the market-place for attention.

(c) A growing awareness that spiritual authority is within and that to project it outward onto teacher, tradition or text is an early, adolescent phase of spiritual development in the one projecting, and counter-spiritual manipulative abuse in　any guru/teacher who seeks to　elicit, to appropriate and to sustain the projection.

(d) The emergence of peer to peer spirituality, which democratizes charismatic, enlightened leadership, and realizes that it is a role which different persons assume at different times, either in the initiation of a peer group or in the continuous unfolding of its process. 

In a section called The fallacy of nondual individualism, Heron dismantles Ken Wilber's version of nondual enlightenment that is based on individual development of lines (kinds of knowing, such as cognitive, psychosexuality, socio-emotional capacity, communicative competence, creativity, and many others) through stages (from pre-personal, through personal, to transpersonal). Heron concludes:

Wilber tries to argue that the basic categories for integrating all the lines in higher unfoldment have been uncovered on a single line that has no experience whatsoever of such multi-line integration. The way out of this tangle is gently and radically to propose that the contemplative line is not a spirituality line, that spirituality is not about states, however remarkable and extraordinary, that people get into by a lifetime of individual meditation. 

As an alternative, Heron offers Relational Spirituality:

Relational spirituality

A more convincing account of spirituality is that it is about multi-line integral development explored by persons in relation. This is because many basic developmental lines - e.g. those to do with gender, psychosexuality, emotional and interpersonal skills, communicative competence, morality, to name but a few - unfold through engagement with other people. A person cannot develop these lines on their own, but through mutual co-inquiry. The spirituality that is the highest development of these lines can only be achieved through relational forms of practice that unveil the spirituality implicit in them (Heron 1998, 2005).

In short, the spirituality of persons is developed and revealed primarily in their relations with other persons. If you regard spirituality primarily as the fruit of individual meditative attainment, then you can have the gross anomaly of a "spiritual" person who is an interpersonal oppressor, and the possibility of "spiritual" traditions that are oppression-prone (Heron, 1998; Kramer and Alstad, 1993; Trimondi and Trimondi, 2003). If you regard spirituality as centrally about liberating relations between people, then a new era of participative religion opens up, and this calls for a radical restructuring and reappraisal of traditional spiritual maps and routes.

Certainly there are important individualistic developmental lines that do not necessarily directly involve engagement with other people, such as contemplative development, and physical fitness. But these are secondary and supportive of those that do, and are in turn enhanced by co-inquiry with others.

On this overall view, spirituality is located in the interpersonal heart of the human condition where people co-operate to explore meaning, build relationship and manifest creativity through collaborative action inquiry into multi-line integration and consummation. I propose one possible model of such collegial applied spirituality with at least eight distinguishing characteristics.

(1) It is developmentally holistic, involving diverse major lines of human development; and the holism is both within each line and as between the lines. Prime value is put on relational lines, such as gender, psychosexuality, emotional and interpersonal skills, communicative competence, peer communion, morality, human ecology, supported by the individualistic, such as contemplative competence, physical fitness.

(2) It is psychosomatically holistic, embracing a fully embodied and vitalized expression of spirit. Spirituality is found not just at the ‘top end’ of a developmental line, but in the ground, the living root of its embodied form, in the relational heart of its current level of unfolding, and in the transcendent awareness embracing it.

(3) It is epistemologically holistic, embracing many ways of knowing: knowing by presence with, by intuiting significant form and process, by conceptualizing, by practising. Such holistic knowing is intrinsically dialogic, action- and inquiry-oriented. It is fulfilled in peer-to-peer participative inquiry, and the participation is both epistemic and political.

(4) It is ontologically holistic, open to the manifest as nature, culture and the subtle, and to spirit as immanent life, the situational present, and transcendent mind. It sees our relational, social process in this present situation as the immediate locus of the unfolding integration of immanent and transcendent spirit (Heron, 1998, 2004, 2005).

(5) It is focused on worthwhile practical purposes that promote a flourishing humanity-cum-ecosystem; that is, it is rooted in an extended doctrine of rights with regard to social and ecological liberation.

(6) It embraces peer-to-peer relations and participatory forms of decision-making. The latter in particular can be seen as a radical discipline in relational spirituality, burning up a lot of the privatized ego.

(7) It honours the gradual emergence and development of peer-to-peer forms of association and practice.

(8) It affirms the role of both initiating hierarchy, and spontaneously surfacing and rotating hierarchy among the peers, in such emergence.

In a separate P2P Wiki entry on Relational Spirituality, there are two additional definitions of this topic offered by John Heron in his various writings.

Relational spirituality as primary in dipolar spiritual development By John Heron: (Adapted from pp. 99-101 of Heron, J. Sacred Science: Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle, Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books, 1998.)
 
“My own view of spiritual development is:

(1) That it is dipolar, to do (a) with moral life committed to the empowerment of ourselves and other people in relationship, to the full flowering of our immanent life, in community embracing diversity in free unity, and (b) with the inner transformation of consciousness.

(2) That (a) is primary and the consummation of (b).

The tendency of the eastern mystic has been to reduce his involvement with other people to directing the vertical transformation of their consciousness. His commitment to his own transformation as an end-in-itself overflows into guiding other people to do the same. His moral goal has been to enable the unenlightened to become enlightened and so attain moksha, release from the treadmill of reincarnation in the phenomenal world, regarded for the most part as an illusion grounded on ignorance, want of discrimination. However, I regard the phenomenal world as an innovative process of divine becoming, within which we humans are co-creators of global transformation, a planetary civilization.

On this view, my spiritual development has these two interdependent aspects, primary and secondary. The secondary and supportive aspect is that it works to foster and facilitate, with others, the inner transformation of human consciousness, so that we may celebrate the integrated fullness of creation in its physical, subtle and spiritual dimensions (not so that we can get release from it all).

The primary aspect is that it works to release the life-potential of persons-in-relation, to facilitate social empowerment and social justice in every sphere of human activity. For persons to become full co-creators of a planetary civilization, each one has an all-pervasive right to participate in any decision that affects the fulfilment of their needs and interests, the expression of their preferences and values. This universal right has a claim not only within political institutions, but in every sphere of human association where decisions are being taken: in industry, education, ecology, medicine, the family, and, of course, in research and in religion . The fulfilment of this claim throughout our planet in all these spheres has hardly begun. Moreover, the fact that there is so much spiritual authoritarianism in the world, in creeds and cults both old and new, creates a deep attitudinal warp in people which makes them susceptible to oppression by many other kinds of external authority. In reviewing criticisms of the traditional hierarchical model of spiritual reality, promoted by current adherents of the perennial philosophy, Donald Rothberg writes:

Hierarchical ontologies are commonly ideological expressions of social and psychological relations involving domination and exploitation - of most humans (especially women, workers, and tribal people), of nature, and of certain parts of the self. Such domination limits drastically the autonomy and potential of most of the inhabitants of the human and natural worlds, justifying material inequalities and preventing that free and open discourse which is the end of a free society. It distorts psychological life by repressing, albeit in the name of wisdom and sanctity, aspects of ourselves whose full expression is necessary to full psychological health and well-being (Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1986, 18(1): 1-34). 

My spiritual development, then, cannot be measured simply in terms of hours of meditation or number of extended retreats or stabilized attainment of some inner, transcendent state of mind, as I ascend the hierarchical spiritual ladder. On its own, this is vertical flight from full spiritual development, which I believe finds its primary consummation in the unfolding of my immanent spiritual life. And this, fully followed through, involves attention to social change and social justice through promoting participative forms of decision-making in every kind of human association with which I am involved, including the religious.

To summarize and restate the above: spiritual transformation of human beings has two complementary forms. The first form is about how persons realize in their exterior daily lives their immanent spiritual life and its potential. I believe this means developing the fulness of relational living, of expressive personal autonomy-in-connectedness, in terms of:

· Emotional and interpersonal competence: empowering self, the other and the relationship.
· The exercise of self-determination and co-operation in every situation of decision-making.
· The external expression of imaginative, creative skills .
· Commitment to social and planetary transformation.
· The grounding of life-style management in a co-creating relation with immanent spiritual life.

The second form is about how people open to a progressive interior transfiguration by a transcendent spiritual consciousness interdependent with immanent spiritual life. I believe this is secondary to, supportive of, and consummated in, the first form.

The following extract from my keynote talk at an international conference on “Living Spirit – New Dimensions in Work and Learning" at the University of Surrey, UK, in 2002, elaborates further the immanent relational pole of dipolar spiritual development.

Living spirit in the dawn of the age of immanence What I believe all this really shows is the newly emerging power of the human spirit, the dawning age of divine immanence, of the indwelling spirit that is the ground of human motivation. I think that living spirit is active within us, the very deep source of all human aspiration, both the will to live as a distinct individual, and the will to live as a universal participant – the will to be one of the creative Many and to be engaged with the creative One. These profound impulses have for the past 3,000 years been predominantly subordinate to the authoritative control of religious traditions, teachers and texts which have promoted spirit as primarily transcendent. And where these impulses have been emancipated from such control they have been reduced to secular status. Secular modernity has delivered huge gains in terms of relatively autonomous ethics, politics, science, knowledge generally, and art.

Yet it has championed the autonomy of the isolated Cartesian ego, separated off from the world it seeks to categorize, codify and manage. I do think this is the century of the spirit that is living deep within: the self-actualizing tendency of Rogers (1959, 1980), Maslow (1970), Gendlin (1981), embedded within the body-mind; the bio-spiritual experience of grace in the body of McMahon and Campbell (1991); Jean Houston’s entelechy self, the ground of one’s being, the root self whence all our possibilities emerge (Houston, 1987); Washburn’s dynamic ground of libido, psychic energy, numinous power or spirit (Washburn, 1995); Wilber’s ground unconscious, Eros, spirit-in-action (Wilber, 2000a).

Instead of appealing to the spiritual authority of teacher, tradition and text, an increasing number of people respond co-creatively with this divine dynamic moving within. Spiritual authority is found in the exercise of a deep kind of inner discrimination, where human autonomy and divine animation marry.

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), in the great tradition of European personalism, with which I align myself, was on to it with his affirmation of human personhood as manifesting the creative process of spirit. For he defined spirit as self-determining human subjectivity engaged in the realization of value and achieved in true community. He used the excellent Russian word sobornost to name such a community: it means diversity in free unity. Berdyaev also had a wonderful vision of the impending era, which he called the third epoch. The third epoch is the epoch of divine-human co-creation of a transformed planet, transformed persons, transformed social relationships (Berdyaev, 1937). Translated into my conceptual system, Berdyaev’s account means that living spirit manifests as a dynamic interplay between autonomy, hierarchy and co-operation. It emerges through autonomous people each of whom who can identify their own idiosyncratic true needs and interests; each of whom can also think hierarchically in terms of what values promote the true needs and interests of the whole community; and each of whom can co-operate with – that is, listen to, engage with, and negotiate agreed decisions with - their peers, celebrating diversity and difference as integral to genuine unity. Hierarchy here is the creative leadership which seeks to promote the values of autonomy and co-operation in a peer to peer association. Such leadership, as in the free software movement mentioned earlier, is exercised in two ways. First, by the one or more people who take initiatives to set up such an association. And second, once the association is up and running, as spontaneous rotating leadership among the peers, when anyone takes initiatives that further enhance the autonomy and co-operation of other participating members. The autonomy of participants is not that of the old Cartesian ego, isolated and cut off from the world. Descartes sat inside a big stove to get at his cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am – and while his exclusively subjective self provided a necessary leverage against traditional dogmatisms to help found the modern worldview, it left the modern self alienated from the separated world it commands. The autonomy of those who flourish within sobornost, by contrast, is an autonomy that is rounded and enriched by a profound kind of inner animation, that develops and flourishes only in felt interconnectedness, participative engagement, with other persons, and with the biodiversity and integral ecology of our planet (Spretnak, 1995). This is the participatory worldview, expressed also in the extended epistemology I mentioned earlier on: our conceptual knowing of the world is grounded in our experiential knowing – a felt resonance with the world and imaginal participation in it. This epistemic participation is the ground for political participation in social processes that integrate autonomy, hierarchy and co-operation. What we are now about is a whole collaborative regeneration of our world through co-creative engagement with the spirit that animates it and us.

For just a few of the many contributors to the participatory worldview see: Abram (1996); Bateson, 1979; Berman, 1981; Ferrer (2001); Heron, 1992, 1996a, 1998; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Skolimowski (1994); Spretnak, 1991; Reason, 1994; Reason and Rowan, 1981; Tarnas (1991); Varela, Thompson and Rosch, (1991).

See the original entry for a list of references.


There is another excellent entry at the P2P Wiki on Participatory Spirituality, which opens with an excellent definition from Jorge Ferrer, author of Revisioning Transpersonal Theory : A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality and co-editor of The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies.

As defined by Jorge Ferrer: Spiritual knowing is a participatory process. What do I mean by "participatory"? First, "participatory" alludes to the fact that spiritual knowing is not objective, neutral, or merely cognitive. On the contrary, spiritual knowing engages us in a connected, often passionate, activity that can involve not only the opening of the mind, but also of the body, the heart, and the soul. Although particular spiritual events may involve only certain dimensions of our nature, all of them can potentially come into play in the act of spiritual knowing, from somatic transfiguration to the awakening of the heart, from erotic communion to visionary co-creation, and from contemplative knowing to moral insight, to mention only a few (see also Ferrer, 2000a, 2002).

Second, the participatory nature of spiritual knowing refers to the role that our individual consciousness plays during most spiritual and transpersonal events. This relation is not one of appropriation, possession, or passive representation of knowledge, but of communion and co-creative participation.
 
Finally, "participatory" also refers to the fundamental ontological predicament of human beings in relation to spiritual energies and realities. Human beings are - whether we know it or not - always participating in the self-disclosure of Spirit. This participatory predicament is not only the ontological foundation of the other forms of participation, but also the epistemic anchor of spiritual knowledge claims and the moral source of responsible action.

Spiritual phenomena involve participatory ways of knowing that are presential, enactive, and transformative:

1. Spiritual knowing is presential: Spiritual knowing is knowing by presence or by identity. In other words, in most spiritual events, knowing occurs by virtue of being. Spiritual knowing can be lived as the emergence of an embodied presence pregnant with meaning that transforms both self and world. Subject and object, knowing and being, epistemology and ontology are brought together in the very act of spiritual knowing.

2. Spiritual knowing is enactive: Following the groundbreaking work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), my understanding of spiritual knowing embraces an enactive paradigm of cognition: Spiritual knowing is not a mental representation of pregiven, independent spiritual objects, but an enaction, the bringing forth of a world or domain of distinctions co-created by the different elements involved in the participatory event. Some central elements of spiritual participatory events include individual intentions and dispositions; cultural, religious, and historical horizons; archetypal and subtle energies; and, most importantly, a dynamic and indeterminate spiritual power of inexhaustible creativity.

3. Spiritual knowing is transformative: Participatory knowing is transformative at least in the following two senses. First, the participation in a spiritual event brings forth the transformation of self and world. Second, a transformation of self is usually necessary to be able to participate in spiritual knowing, and this knowing, in turn, draws forth the self through its transformative process in order to make possible this participation. (http://www.datadiwan.de/SciMedNet/library/articlesN81+/N83Ferrer_part.htm)

There is also a definition from John Heron:

"The parties involved in a co-creative, enactive, transformative relation reciprocally and dynamically shape and reshape - in and through the process of meeting – how they understand each other, the regard they have for each other, and how they act and interact in relation with each other.

This definition is framed to apply to the central person-to-person relations. It can, with appropriate modifications, be applied to relations between ways of knowing, to relations between persons and their worlds, and, including and transcending all these, to the relation between persons and the divine.

Person-to-person relations are central because they are a precondition for setting the scene for divine self-disclosure and for persons to participate in it. In previous epochs this precondition was met by teacher-disciple hierarchical relations. Today divine self-disclosure can manifest through person-to-person peer relations, serviced from time to time by temporary hierarchical initiatives rotating among the peers.

Person-to-person peer relations are central, in my view, because of the intimate relation between epistemic participation and political participation. Epistemic participation is about the participative relation between the knower and the known. Political participation in this context is to do with participative decision-making among those involved about how we know and what we know. If participative knowing between persons is consummated in fully reciprocal encounter, then co-operative decision-making, both about how to engage in such reciprocal knowing and about what it reveals, is necessary for authentic interpersonal knowing - the realm of the between where divine self-disclosure can manifest."

Spiritual practice: A primary ground for the practice of participatory-relational spirituality can be cultivated by collaborative peer-to-peer relations between persons engaged in fully embodied, multidimensional, transformative flourishing in and with their worlds. See [1]

Finally, here is a Discussion section that presents a brief summary of exchanges between Heron and Ferrer on their slightly differing definitions:

John Heron's critique on the relation between participatory and Relational Spirituality

Ferrer's account of participatory spirituality - in the passage quoted above – fails, from my point of view, to bring out the centrality of co-creative/collaborative relations between persons as central to the meaning and the practice of participatory spirituality. If you read the whole passage very carefully you will find that this is indeed the case. Thus, and crucially, person-to-person collaboration is absent from his account of "some central elements of spiritual participatory events". Elsewhere he refers to "self and world", and nowhere to self and other selves. I think he would argue that person-to-person co-operation is implicit in phrases like "other forms of participation" and "responsible action", but, if so, this buries it in unstated implications and makes it appear very subsidiary - instead of central. A few pages earlier in his book he writes of transpersonal events as multilocal, including the interpersonal and the communal, yet makes no explicit reference to any of this when he comes on to the passage quoted above."

The Relational Dimension of Participatory Spirituality: Reflections by Jorge Ferrer on John Heron’s Critique

1. Although my theorizing has always been grounded in collaborative interpersonal spiritual practice (plus my own personal spiritual inquiry, extensive reading, and dialogue with others), John is correct stating that the relational or interpersonal dimension of participation is not emphasized in Revisioning Transpersonal Theory (RTT, 2002). I see RTT and Sacred Science very complementary in this respect.

2. I stress the importance of relational spiritual work in later writings that deal with more practical, less philosophical issues than RTT. See, for example, my essay on "Integral Transformative Practice: A Participatory Perspective," published in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (2003), my co-authored essay on "Integral Tranformative Education: A Participatory Proposal,‿ published in The Journal of Transformative Education (2005), and, to a lesser extent, my recent essay on “Embodied Spirituality: Now and Then,‿ published in Tikkun. Of related interest, I wrote another essay on spirituality and intimate relationships, whose shorter version will be published in the next issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and the complete one in Tikkun a few months later.

3. In my talks and conferences, I have found very helpful to introduce the notion of participatory spirituality in terms of three forms of co-creation: (1) intrapersonal co-creation, i.e., of the various human dimensions working together creatively as a team; (2) interpersonal co-creation, i.e., of human beings working together as peers in solidarity and mutual respect; and (3) transpersonal co-creation, i.e., of both human dimensions and collaborative human beings interacting with the Mystery in the co-creation of spiritual insights, practices, expanded forms of liberation, and spiritual worlds.

4. On a practical level, many of my courses at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, and the integral transformative work I facilitate, are deeply relational and stress the centrality of interactive embodied meditations, interpersonal and group dynamics, collaborative spiritual inquiry, among other dimensions.

In sum, though I don't see the contrast between my participatory approach and relational approaches to spirituality as sharp as John paints it, it is accurate to say that the presentation of participatory spirituality in RTT did not stress the practical, and strongly relational, dimension of my participatory perspective.

John Heron's account of the relation between participatory spirituality and relational spirituality

The simplest provisional account I can give of this relation is as follows:

Participatory spirituality is inherently relational in four ways:

1. It involves a co-creative, enactive, transformative relation between persons and the divine.

2. This relation transcends and includes the relations between multiple ways of knowing within the person.

3. And centrally the relations between persons and other persons.

4. And the relations between persons and their worlds.


In one sentence:

Participatory spirituality involves a co-creative, enactive, transformative relation between persons and the divine, a relation which transcends and includes: the relations between multiple ways of knowing within the person, centrally the relations between persons and other persons, and the relations between persons and their worlds.

Again, there are links and references at the post.

• A full list of John Heron's publications can be found here - many of them are available online. 
• A list of Jorge Ferrer's publications, without any links.