The Unified Field, by David Anderson

The expression “the social field” is gaining parlance, especially in group processes. As a community of human beings striving to evolve the world and develop ourselves, this makes sense. We are beginning to recognize the opportunity and potential we have as creative, spiritual beings to cultivate the social climate, soil, and growth of what happens in our collective spaces. We see that what happens in our social settings impacts the wider world. Of course, this brings a sense of responsibility as well.

Rudolf Steiner describes the social art as the highest of arts. In the social setting we don’t normally think of ourselves as artists. It is usually a place where we experience our habits, where familiar thoughts, the me-story or inner narrative, and comfortable feelings emerge, where our likes and dislikes find expression.

Like all the arts, the social art has earthly elements and transcendent elements. Meaning, there are tangible and intangible aspects. There are levels of human experience that go beyond what my body, mind, or soul can register. In artistic processes we raise up what strengths we have in the body, mind, and soul as an offering toward a kind of divine intervention. Sometimes in our artistic practices we might seem to be hovering on the earthly plane with our talents (rehearsing our scene, moving our brush around, playing with the clay, chatting), and sometimes we might feel “kissed” by something eternal or evolutionary. We then feel inspired by another source that transcends body, mind, and soul.

In the social field many intentions can work. We unite with others around visions or plans or experiences. We seek to understand each other and sometimes to come to common ground. We make agreements. We bring all individuals under one umbrella or picture, seeking to call upon the creative engagement of each one present. “Do we all feel good about this?” “Can we stand behind it?” We strive to unite on a soul level.

In recent decades we have spent a lot of time understanding the laws and best practices for social processes. Techniques have even developed for how to interact and speak and listen to each other. We have learned to follow these social protocols and hope for the best outcomes. However, we have all been in meetings where we felt inspired on a soul level—maybe it even felt like “a moment” or “a happening”—but the reality of that experience did not extend behind that encounter. The inspiration was born and lived out its life within the time we were together—but did not live beyond that moment.

However, if we wish to work with the social process as an art, the social field can become an offering toward another level of an emerging and sustainable future. How do we lift it up for something more enduring to speak into it?

There are other dimensions of presences in any given social situation that transcend what may be perceptible in the social field. This spiritual level may be called the unified field. It unifies the social field with another dimension of experience. As it is less tangible than other dimensions, it may not be tangible on the physical “sensible” plane or even in our soul experience. And yet, when we expand our awareness and our “sensing” further into the social field, this unified field may be experienced as an inversion of the space. As our sense of space moves out and expands, there appears a corresponding leaning in from the archetypal world.

We do have “senses” to perceive the laws and leanings in of this more archetypal world, but these senses are not body, mind, or soul based (in the ordinary sense of soul as being my personal self with all of its habits, emotions, and preferences).

When we are touched by something beautiful, there is a physical, outer experience and something behind it that whispers in or shines through. We often struggle to find words to express what is happening to us, as the experience seems beyond words. In such moments we see how our labeling the experience (which can filter it), how our understanding or enthusiasm for what is happening, may get in the way of truly perceiving what is there. When we are moved in this way, beyond the purely soul experience, we recognize how, on a certain level, our familiar soul sets itself aside. An experience lights up in us that might feel more connected to the world soul or to an archetypal experience. Although it is happening to me, and registers in the soul on a certain level, the experience is larger than me. It has a universal character.

The way our senses alight upon these experiences can feel like a grace or revelation. Something inside us seems to resonate with something more than itself. For a moment we go beyond our personal selves. We transcend the purely social field. Something comes to flower in the field which we did not expect. Perhaps we didn’t even see it coming. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the intention that brought us together. Our plan or stated goal was merely the physical body for what incarnated through it. The rich field we have tilled together suddenly reveals a seed from another place.

In such moments, though it is hard to describe what happened to us, and we may not even talk about it with the others (or we say “what was that?”), we sense something has changed. This change goes with us. It unites us. We may even have the experience that this was not for us but for the earth itself, or for the wider world. When we later see the people who shared the experience with us, the atmosphere or presence of the experience may still be perceptible. We meet a kind of knowing in the other’s eyes. It is still present, and perhaps even growing, in the social field.

To cultivate the potential for such experiences, we would need to develop the senses through which we experience such phenomena. A sense of beauty is one gateway. There are others. In our research we explore different, mostly will-based, exercises for connecting to the laws and processes of the unified field, this dimension that interpenetrates the social field but also works above, beneath, and around it.

This level of presences is seeking us as much as we may be seeking it. Our interest in it helps to build the relationship. Out of this interest we can look at what kind of practices invite these presences to work, what gets in their way, and what sacrifices and/or inner activities we can engage in to open this unified field.

A healthy, open social field supports us to make this connection, but it is not an absolute prerequisite. Grace can blow through any door, but we can’t count on it.

We often start with a few core senses. With all of these senses we begin with a physical experience of them, and through the physical we listen into the soul experience, then from a soul experience, for a more transcendent, universal, or archetypal experience.

A sense of upright came for most of us around our first year. Our whole being engaged with this process until the eternal presence of upright came to consciousness within us. Once we mastered it, it became unconscious, and we slowly put our own personal signature on it. Our habit upright developed. When we began walking, the archetype of walking walked us. We developed enough balance and strength and coordination and then the universal principle of walking could take up these developments and unfold itself.

These archetypal steps of human development are the training ground for archetypal sensation, as in them we recognize an eternal presence or principle. Rekindling a conscious relationship to them helps us to reconnect to the laws and principles behind them.

The senses of movement, speech, balance in space, impulse, and connection (among others) follow closely behind. A sense of circle—the forming of a circle of people in space, once developed as a sensation, becomes a source of strength, a resource and holding vessel for the unified field. To experience a sense of circle I have to give up enough self-awareness that my awareness can extend beyond me to all the members in the circle with me. At the same time, I perceive their awareness extending into me. The circle then is sealed. This sealed vessel, to borrow from Shakespeare’s Boatswain in The Tempest, becomes “tight and yare and bravely rigg’d.”

We begin awakening senses by physically orienting ourselves under the star of the sense we want to cultivate and, when we do this with enough sense of form in our body, our soul comes into alignment with the forces behind it. Michael Chekhov calls this the psycho-physical connection. Our physical presence tunes into the psychology or soul sensation that lives within it. This soul sensation becomes the seedbed for archetypal experience.

If we develop these senses as inner muscles, they become available to our social spaces and can become the perceiving organs for what transpires there. Am I speaking or listening from my upright? What’s the quality of movement within the conversation? What’s its color, shape, sense of gravity or levity, its musicality? My sensing starts to transcend the more personal soul experience and becomes attuned to dimensions that may also want to speak through the vessel we have created. Then, through our awakened senses, the social field can become a space—a unified field—for universal principles to grow on the earth. We can manifest our highest ideals. “As above, so below.”

David Anderson is a co-founder and the Executive Artistic Director of Walking the dog Theater (wtd.hawthornevalley.org) in Hudson, NY. He facilitates courses and workshops in Drama and Inner Development throughout Asia. He lives in Taiwan with his family.