What Happened in Wuerzburg

Carl H. Flygt

May 2006

In the spring of 1945 a British air raid dropped a series of incendiary bombs on the medieval city of Wuerzburg in Bavaria. The temperatures near the ground rose to extreme levels, on the order of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the resulting fire completely destroyed the old city. Six thousand men, women and children were killed. Some weeks later Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, and Germany embarked on a new phase in its history as internationally responsible actor, economic powerhouse and exemplar of European unity.

Wuerzburg has been nicely rebuilt, and remains a city of great charm and aesthetic appeal. Prosperous business abound, the city streets are clean and walkable, the great buildings handsome and well-maintained, the would-be pigeon perches lined with rows of wire bristles or screened by mesh nets. The city has much to recommend it, and little to fault.

In this city last month Albrecht and Brigitta Mahr convened a number of delegates (about 800 people) on a Conference on Collective Intelligence (http://www.congress06.collective-wisdom.org/), the idea of psycho-social unity in human groups devolving from psychic fields in and near the human body, and expressed in the phenomena of mind, consciousness, perception, emotion, intentionality, psychopathology and spiritual aspiration. What the Conference achieved as a matter of actual fact in working toward the great outcomes of German-Jewish reconciliation and of political power accruing to telepathically organized groups of individuals is not for me to speculate about here. Indeed, the scope of the Conference was too great for any single individual to embrace, unless perhaps he (she) had had a role in organizing it. But one thing did occur to which I was witness that merits notation, and here I propose to record that observation.

Rupert Sheldrake set the standard for the proceedings by outlining and then empirically demonstrating the function of psychic fields in social relationships and interactions. Sheldrake’s idea, of course, is that these fields are probably what is responsible for the development of biological morphology generally, and that this process of morphic development is ongoing in human society and culture as well as in ontogenesis and individual psychology. The human world, on Sheldrake’s hypothesis, is probably a social organism of some sort, bound up in the cosmic scales and rhythms that impinge upon the Earth from within and from without. These scales and rhythms have everything to do with individual competence for experience, and with the motivation to plan, to evaluate and to act as an individual. Human life, on Sheldrake’s hypothesis, is largely a psycho-social and spiritual phenomenon caused and made possible by a system of physics in the living tissue that both sculpts its form and animates its self-conscious memory.

Although after Sheldrake’s keynote a plethora of offerings immediately became available to the Conference attendees, ranging from Hellinger-style Constellation work to discussions of Jewish and Rwandan genocide to theories of non-violent and body-language communication, the most promising approach, for my money, was offered by the American Craig Hamilton, a freelance speaker and journalist and the former Managing Editor of Andrew Cohen’s New Age periodical What is Enlightenment? Craig’s idea was that conversation, properly framed and correctly executed, is sufficient not only to draw the underlying morphic fields of the Lebenwelt into conscious salience and functional unity, but also to push human experience and human freedom in an evolutionary direction, toward a future and radically new form of life in which thoughts and emotions supply material conditions for a planetary economy and a necessary rapprochement among the great cosmic spheres of mineral, plant, animal and human nature.

This idea is significant because Sheldrake’s demonstration on the previous day had shown in no uncertain terms a strong disjunction between individuals’ self-conscious interpretation of psychic fields and psychic causes and their reflexive or objective responses to those causes. Sheldrake’s experiment showed that in general people’s conscious minds are not well adapted at all to the realities of the morphic field. It is their subconscious, autonomic and reflexive intelligence that is well-adapted to these fields, and it is this intelligence that has played a pervasive role in the evolution of all animal life throughout the eons both on this planet and even beyond it. The trick of conscious evolution appears to be to get human self-consciousness, which is clearly an adaptive mechanism of great evolutionary advantage but substantial short-sightedness, to cohere more exactly with this pre-conscious, ancient and cosmic intelligence which contains all the real wisdom and cosmic signification available to biological life in general.

The thing is that Craig Hamilton’s little experiment worked. He was given a self-selected group of individuals with a varying and diverse background, although by no means as diverse as could be imagined, interested in the general idea of conscious conversation. He then proceeded to outline a system of principles (he gave seven) according to which the conversation could be expected to succeed as a self-conscious and intentional harmonization with the Radiant, Transcendental Unity of the morphic field. He divided  the attendees into two groups, those who preferred to use English and those who preferred German, and he sat down with the English-speakers. Within a few minutes, everyone in that group was unambiguously aware of a supra-personal field underlying and guiding the self-conscious responses of the free conversationists. Sometimes the thread would appear to recede a little from the general consciousness, but then someone would say something sufficiently focused and sufficiently directed to rekindle the flame and to cause everyone to reestablish his (her) intention to keep the conversation alive and living in a mode that depended for its existence on each individual’s spiritual sensitivity and spiritual activity. The collective essay was not hurt, and was probably considerably abetted by my own participation, who as author of an independently conceived and executed theoretical work on Ideal Conversation, knew exactly what to do to intensify the conversational experience, how to do it and when.

The experience for the German speakers at the other end of the room was less felicitous. Here people had no ongoing guidance, and none had prior experience with the New Age model that was being applied. Or perhaps more accurately, none had prior theoretical and self-conscious acquaintance with that model. This group struggled with uncertainty, doubt and misinformation. Craig was duly apologetic for the misery they had to endure, but when we returned from a break, those who still had sufficient interest to do so, the transcendental conversation was resumed in the company of everyone and to everyone’s satisfaction. The experience was concluded spontaneously by some clear and resonant overtone singing by Sabine Schulte, a New Age healer from Kiel. Everyone was impressed with what had happened, if uncertain about what it signified.

What happened in Wuerzburg was an initial stirring of something that in the future will pervade all progressive world society. What happened was the beginning of Man’s exit from the solipsism of bodily egocentrism and freedom, and His (Her) emergence into a universalistic out-of-body consciousness in which He (She) takes up a position as an Angel in a Hierarchy of cosmic spirits responsible for world evolution and extending all the way up, back or through to the prime Unity and Intensity of God. What happened was the beginning of a new form of life on earth. Such beginnings, to be sure, are infrequent enough today to be notable when they occur, but they are occurring in California, in New England, in Europe and probably elsewhere. But in the future, as the principles underwriting self-conscious and psychic conversation become known and accepted, all of human experience, from the most profound cultural rituals to the most commonplace interactions in society and with nature, will be pervaded and guided by a tangible psychic intelligence, a living causal field that extends into human experience out of the cosmos itself, out of the domain prior to individual birth and death, prior to creation and evolution and prior to all thought, emotion and human self-consciousness.