Creating Safe Containers for Mind Melds

Please note: We’re including this page for historical reasons only, because parts of have been finalized by the majority of our active group members, although other parts remain recommendations from the Board of Directors.

The finalized standards are listed here: Community Standards for Keeping Each Other Safe. Feel free to make recommendations to the Board of things that you think we should add to our standards page. Thank you.

Cougar

Table of Contents—Historic Proposals Finalized in our Community Standards.

Background—the Organization behind All that I Do—by Cougar

I’m the founder of both the Global Wisdom System, which is an umbrella organization that includes the Joyful Wisdom Community. These are not formal organizations yet, because I haven’t had the money, time, or personnel to create formal organizations. The Global Wisdom System has an informal Board of Directors which doesn’t meet very often, but to whom I turn for advice on occasion. I am one of three members of this Board.

The Global Wisdom System is the computerized curriculum that I’ve been working on when I talk about my computer programming. The written curriculum that will go into the computerized curriculum is over a million words long. I’ve been working on it for decades, counting both research and writing. This online program was the inspiration that I received in February 1976.

Since the organizations are informal, recommendations of the board are never more than guidelines unless ratified by a group. When the Global Wisdom System curriculum goes live, it will belong to the formal organizations that I register with the government at that time. I will work out ways that I might benefit from this with the Board of Directors.

The following guidelines will be formalized at that time as well, if they have not been formally adopted by the groups.

The Relationship between the Global Wisdom System and the Joyful Wisdom Community

According to copyright law, whatever I produce belongs to me unless I transfer the copyright to some other entity. I will be eventually registering the Global Wisdom System as a legal nonprofit, and will ask community groups in the Joyful Wisdom Community to become a subsidiary organization. Then I will transfer my copyright for the Global Wisdom System curriculum to the Joyful Wisdom Community.

As a community, we are not yet equipped to accept this ownership. When the programming for the Global Wisdom System is finished, I will begin using it to grow the number of groups. I will, at that point, be able to devote the time needed to growing new groups and outreach.

My current priority is the programming of the curriculum. Currently, the Apps that I’ve created are prototypes—a student project, you might say, because these apps were how I originally studied programming.

One element of the programming I’m planning to do is to create a web page that contains an automated method whereby people who are not technical can create new apps and integrate them into the Global Wisdom System curriculum. If you have a meditation or practice, you will be guided through an easy, nontechnical process of using the webpage to create an app.

Apps will only be approved by the Board or by an App Approval Committee as formal parts of the Global Wisdom System when the Joyful Wisdom Community volunteers or employees have vetted them. Guidelines for vetting these new elements will follow the guidelines established today. No new apps or materials will act as commercial advertisements or promotions of political positions. As I write the computer programming, I will design a page that will allow commercial or political entities to contribute in ways that serve their interests without interfering with our guidelines.

Our Meetings Are Safe Containers for Mind Melding

Our group policies must be designed to keep everyone safe. It’s not only a top goal of every policy we have or need, but it’s also a primary reason for everything we do in our groups. Our groups are designed to create a deep connection between group members. That deep connection requires a deep sense of safety.

In my experience, that deep sense of safety allows us to experience the most realistic approximation of a mind meld that exists in real life, not just in science fiction. Commercial interests are poison to this deep sense of safety. Therefore, they are also poison to mind melding.

The heart chakra meditation starts by energizing our own chakras and then sharing that energy. This sharing of heart energy is targeted at each of the different individuals in the group—including ourselves. While we might also share our heart energy with the world, the first focus is sharing it with one another. This, by itself, builds a sense of community.

The Chrysalis is designed to turn off the nattering monkey mind with inner silence so that when we listen, we have fewer filters. If you’ve just been inwardly silent, you listen more deeply and tune in more fully. In normal dialog, we plan our answers while we listen. In the Chrysalis, we do not—because of inner silence.

When you speak after inner silence, you speak from a deeper place. This means that what you share is more deeply considered, and it is likely less contentious than normal dialog.

After going around a circle once, we begin the next round from a deeper place than the first round. Inner silence helps us tune into one another more deeply, which sometimes produces a sense of family or deep connection. This practice also builds community.

When we acknowledge one another and then ourselves, we’re also building community. After practicing acknowledgment together, we’ve all noticed how little people acknowledge one another in normal society. It’s a small practice, but it also builds deep connections and eventually bleeds through into our other relationships.

When we boost each other, we invoke our chi energy to support our intentions and the intentions of the other participants. This can only work if we are operating in a clear, open, and safe mental space. When everyone else is using their chi to build your intention, and when you use your chi to support the intentions of everyone else, community grows like a flower that has been watered, fertilized, and placed in the sun.

The sensation of a mind meld does not happen in an average online chat forum. Online chat forums may have basic rules of etiquette to protect members from vicious attacks and personal put-downs. But they do not provide the safe container that we seek to provide, nor do they attempt to go as deep as we seek to go.

Participants in our online chat lists should be people who experience and understand the depth and connections that we create in our meetings. When we create online chat rooms for our groups, we expect it to be deeper, safer, and more meaningful than the average chatroom.

Current Guidelines from the Board

The Global Wisdom System board recommends that in a general group setting, members refrain from promoting political points of view and selling anything for any purpose. Our groups are not a place for selling or pushing an agenda. This includes promoting supplements, MLMs, insurance, and services, such as coaching, computer support. (Please read the previous section, Our Meetings Are Safe Containers for Mind Melding, to understand this policy more deeply.)

This guideline also excludes promoting causes, such as fighting global warming, peace, other  social and environmental problems, political issues, and personal health needs—no matter how important and positive they are.

In sharing from the heart, all of these issues will come up, which is entirely expected. When you’re sharing from the heart, you might say something along the lines of “This is my experience.” And, “I’m really working hard to change X by doing Y…” In this kind of sharing, you’re not trying to change anyone’s mind or get them to buy into something, no matter how good you think it is.

In other words, when you share, there should be no intention to get someone else to do something that they haven’t chosen independently. If you’re sharing and hoping that someone will buy or join or become active, then you’re not really sharing.

You’re recruiting. Please don’t do anything with the goal of recruiting, convincing, or changing anyone else. Our groups are for changing ourselves only.

Pushing an Agenda Is Different from Sharing

When one person is successful in losing weight, getting organized, or creating political change, there will certainly be others who are interested in how it was done. A group may even choose to make a successful strategy the topic of a Chrysalis.

When such a technique is a topic of a Chrysalis, the technique may be shared before the Chrysalis, but once the Chrysalis starts, the technique that was used is not considered the “one right way of doing things.” The dialog  in the Chrysalis is open to all perspectives, brainstorms of others ways to move forward, variations in implementing such a technique, or replacing it all together.

In other words, in the Chrysalis, nothing is shoved down anyone’s throat, and there is no one right way. When operating with this distinction, any resistance that anyone feels to any suggestion is cherished as a means to understanding more deeply.

If we’re operating by these guidelines, no one will try to overcome your reactions. What you feel is part of the truth that the group will embrace.

However, you should understand that our groups are not appropriate places to work through personal issues involving strong feelings of bias against any person or any group of people.

Differences in Standards Inside and Outside the Mind Meld

The standards outlined here are recommendations of the Board and will remain as recommendations unless ratified by the ongoing groups in the Joyful Wisdom Community. Even if they’re ratified, I think that they should be called “standards,” rather than “rules,” because they’re not likely to be applied uniformly in every situation. In addition, I believe that within the mind-meld groups, we have greater trust for one another and therefore greater tolerance for variations from the norms.

This is not because we’re hypocrites. It’s because our overall intention is to protect the safe container that allows us to approximate the “mind-meld” experience that our groups build.

We all know that we have a much higher trust for family members do than we do for that weird stranger who pesters us on the sidewalk to join his cause. With family members, we’re much more likely to make ground rules that enable us to share Thanksgiving dinner; whereas with the weird stranger, we’ll do whatever we can to just get away from him.

The same distinction applies to group members who meet regularly in real time (whether in person or over Skype or Zoom) versus people who only interact with us in an online chat group. As humans, it is natural for us to have more trust in people who share in real-time interaction—especially when they are targeted at creating the level of closeness that we create with our mind-meld techniques.

It’s especially crucial that you follow these standards or guidelines if you’re new to one of our in-person groups or if you only interact with a group online in a chat. These guidelines exist for a reason. Please do not be the bull in the china shop that we would rather exclude than to damage our safe container.

None of Us Are Doctors, but Even if We Were…

If you’ve ever been involved with an MLM, you’ll remember that MLM’s love to quote “Dr. This” and “Professor That” to support the health claims that they make about their particular brands of snake oil. Yet, what they sell is still just snake oil.

Please remember that there are plenty of quacks in the medical fields, doctors who graduated at the bottom of their class, and researchers who conducted studies to prove their preexisting biases. Our groups and organizations are not equipped to vet scientific claims of what’s best and what’s worst. In addition, none of us is credentialed to prescribe health regimens for anyone else.

We all know stuff, and especially if we are in special interest groups in the future, sharing our links and practices within those specialized areas will be more extensive. Guidelines for specialized groups may be somewhat different than guidelines for general groups.

None of us is equipped to prescribe health regimens, no matter what our personal experience is. Remember that even if we ask for information from other people, all anyone is doing is providing what they personally know. What any one of us personally believes may not be a universal truth—including about health.

We have many different goals and we support growth in many different areas. We also have many different types of experience and many different opinions. Our goal is to be proactive in defending differences of opinion. If you project the energy of being an expert, you are out of step with our goals and purpose.

If you’re a trained specialist in some area, it may be difficult to embrace the equality of all members of the group you might belong to. Even if you’re a trained specialist, for the purpose of interacting in a Joyful Wisdom group, you’re an equal, not an authority.

Equality Is Key to Both General and Specialized Groups

Currently, both of our groups are general groups. Our groups are in-person groups, and not just online communities. In our groups, we share chi energy through our heart chakra meditations, meditate together in our other practices, and dialog while using inner silence to deepen the level of wisdom in the dialog. Our online groups—such as WhatsApp—only exist to support our in-person groups. They are never a substitute for attending to share chi energy and inner silence.

WhatsApp is never a substitute for the mind meld.

At present, I don’t have time or energy to increase the number of groups, and without the online training program of the Global Wisdom System, there’s not a growing number of members to support. This is not my interest, anyway. I like the community as it is, and I feel supported by it.

When the Global Wisdom System curriculum programming is complete and all 350 online apps are active, I will begin developing specialized courses that use the 350 apps for specialized purposes. There will be health groups, political action groups, writers’ groups, and many other things. Within each specialty, I will research and create specialized apps and information pages for that purpose. We have, in fact, had specialized groups in the past.

When the curriculum is live and online, if someone else wants to develop a specialized group, there will be an automated system to create apps that support that specialty. These specialized apps will automatically be integrated into the Global Wisdom System curriculum, and the best ones will support multiple special interests.

But even with specialized groups, no one should project themselves as the expert that everyone else should listen to.  Even if you’re a doctor, do not attempt to prescribe any course of action in our groups.

Walking Our Talk Regarding Donations and Fees

Some of our supporters think that making the Global Wisdom System and the Joyful Wisdom Community completely non-profit is a mistake that we’ll regret. There’s a lot of real work involved in writing and producing the curriculum online and in programming computerized apps to present it. It  also takes both time and energy required to lead groups and support members in other ways.

However, we want to stay focused and clear about our mission to work to unite people who want to grow together, no matter how different their points of view. We want to provide unlimited access to opportunities to grow and tools to assist in that growth to as many people as possible.

The Global Wisdom System and the Joyful Wisdom Community are places to grow deeply and spiritually, not a place for advertising or being a commercial enterprise. If the Global Wisdom System and the Joyful Wisdom Community became commercial, it would damage both our mission and our message to the world.

I don’t know how to create an economically viable organization that supports ongoing work, while also staying clean of inappropriate economic messaging. When we are larger, I’ll ask the Board of Directors to hold Chrysalis meetings with me and other interested parties to address this question. I personally don’t feel that I can ask for a fee and stay in integrity, and even raising the topic makes me uncomfortable.

I consider the work I do to be sacred. I’ve created a donation page, but I’ve kept that process as a donation, and not a fee. Eventually the organization will have to deal with money realistically, but I don’t know the right way to do so or how to evolve an appropriate standard.

What I do know is that if I’m living to this standard, I don’t want my work to be used as a vehicle for others to advertise or push political agendas.