Dream without an End: Part Two
The Network of Light
(Read Part One here)
Towards the tail end of the first phase of what was the Diversity and Spirituality Network (DSN), a couple of us conceived of spinoffs.
Rene Molenkamp, a co-founder of DSN and an ex-Jesuit priest started an organization for ex-Catholics called Gabriel House. Mine was something I called the Network of Light. (You can read more about this here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w1nkxqlfshs7m1i/Network%20of%20Light%20-%20Origin%20Story.pdf?dl=0)
I spent a year of my life on this project.
I conceived of mini-groups of three people who’d meet regularly and supported one another unconditionally. Each of these mini-groups was a “node” on the Network of Light, and each node member was not only a member of this particular node, but was a member of a separate node that h/she had created, with a separate personality and mission.
So I conceived of a network of interconnecting nodes that mutually supported one another.
Think of the image interconnected cells that you learned in high school, cells linking with other cells, and you’ll get the idea.
Here’s how I actualized this vision back in the day.
Back in the mid 80s, I went to Japan to participate in a program called Life Encounter. The program lasted 10 weeks and involved living in a dojo and studying the traditional healing arts.
After Life Encounter was over, I traveled to Osaka to visit my friend Frank, an American acupuncturist who had lived in Japan for many years.
When visiting Frank in his clinic he introduced me to his friend, Rachele, and thus began a friendship that continued until her death perh
Ah Rachele!
The thing I most about her was that she seemed to live her life with a degree of trust I’d never witnessed in any other person.
She was the kind of person who might be temporarily homeless and not know where she’d be sleeping the next night.
But it didn’t seem to trouble her: she just knew that things would turn out OK.
And they usually did. She was remarkable in that way.
A couple of other things about her:
She had a rare, life threatening disease, one that eventually would kill her.
The disease was so rare that she had the experience of going to a hospital to be treated, and having physicians assemble an auditorium other physicians could hear her case study.
None of them could help her.
She’d visit many others, both conventional and unconventional, from world renown physicians to Philippine psychic surgeons.
Another thing about her is that she lived on the edge financially. She had a background in doing things like being an executive secretary and personal assistant, but was unable to work because of her illness.
Knowing all this, I had a brainstorm when we both were back in the US a few months later.
Since I knew that at one part of her life, she’d worked as a kind of personal assistant and organizer for holistic practitioners, I’d ask her help me with my healing and workshop practice: I’d get help and she’d earn money.
I planned to talk to her about this ask her about this during her upcoming visit to the East Coast, where she had daughters and planned to visit.
So, I went to the City to meet her and, to extend our time together, I drove her from NYC to the Trenton train station, which was a bit out of my way. The idea was to put her on a train there, which she’d take to Philadelphia to see one of her daughters.
In the car, on the way to Trenton, I planned to approach her about this personal assitant idea.
But just before opening my mouth to talk to her about it, I had a kind of flash.
I didn’t want her to be my personal assistant.
I wanted her instead to join me as a member of a node on the Network of Light.
After I explained the concept to her, I instantly called a friend, Jesse de la Rosa, and ask him to join us and form a node.
That’s what we did.
And that was the start of my “Networks of Light” phase.
A woman I knew made us a beautiful website, which you can probably find on the Internet Archive if you put “Network of Light” in the search engine. I also wrote some articles and taught a live workshop in Princeton about it.
Interestingly, I noticed that people in various parts of the world had a similar vision, even calling their projects the Network of Light.
I wrote to two of these folks, one in France and the other in Canada.
Neither wrote back.
After a year or so of working on this and not getting any traction, I abandoned the idea and shifted my focus towards finding a conventional job.
About a year, I had a revelation, an aha moment.
Neither I nor anyone else needed to create the Network of Light.
That’s because the Network of Light already exists.
So it wasn’t a matter of creating it, it was more about perceiving it, aligning with it, co-creating it.
So I think that’s what we’re doing with Sacred Inclusion Network, which is at it’s heart is a kind of a neural network that exists to help people find their ultimate pathway, and to help create the infrastructure for an emerging peaceful world.
