Jeff Genung

One of the things that happened after these early formative experiences is I was filled with other inquiry and curiosity about what this experience of mystery is like from different points of view and frames of reference. That curiosity set me down the path of spending time in monasteries, ashrams, and temples, and working with a Native American elder and chief, not so much as an observer but as a practitioner, to be with them in a humble and receptive way to have some sense of the gift offered through these practices, rites, and rituals.

When I realized that nobody knew, it freed me up to go on my own journey and start inquiring from the universe itself. I grew up in the country, so I spent a lot of time in the woods. I began having a relationship with nature and asking questions, asking questions to the forest, asking questions to the sky, and over time inspiration and ideas, and answers began to emerge from that inquiry, and the inquiry became deeper and deeper over time.

I have spent years in technology and as an entrepreneur, but in the last decade or so, the focus has really been on serving this purpose and integrating both my contemplative life with my life as a business person and entrepreneur, and my experience in technology. Bringing these streams together. The beautiful thing is that everything needed to heal the world, to heal individual and collective trauma, to create a transformed environment in the world, is all here. Everything we need, all of the resources, all of the conditions, are arriving at the right time. It would probably be something we long for and dream of, and something far more than we can even imagine, how beautiful and how wonderful it could be. It will go into dimensions of human experience and possibility that we have never encountered before. I would say it would thrust us into a state of divine wonder.

We believe that to catalyze rapid, positive cultural change we need to recognize our interconnectedness and continuously improve the relationships we have with ourselves, each other and the planet.

The inspiration was, what if we created a hub that brings all these different myriads of practices under one umbrella, where people could go on their own terms, find practices of interest, and connect with others of like mind? That was the inspiration for creating Contemplative Life, the nonprofit. Through Contemplative Life, I came across the work I am doing now with Prosocial World. I was introduced to David Sloan Wilson, my colleague and co-founder of Prosocial World. As I learned more about it, the light bulb came on. Oh my word, this is what so many have been looking for. It is an integrated scientific framework for cooperation. It integrates three sciences: the work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for her work on avoiding the tragedy of the commons, modern evolutionary science, which is the science of cooperation and conscious evolution, and contextual behavioral science. Science and spirituality need each other. Science needs spirituality for the same reason I suggested before, it does not go deep enough. On the other side, spiritual communities are some of the most dysfunctional of any communities, so they need the mechanics of cooperation and the things that science can provide.

Life is peaks and valleys. I reached a peak when I was a teenager, and I reached a deep valley almost a year later. Bright high, deep dark, it was awful. Part of the reason was that when what happened to me as a teenager occurred, I did not have the psychological, emotional, or spiritual framework to orient it. One of the things that was also a wake up call for me was that sometime after those experiences, I went back to some of the adults in my life that I respected and asked them if they had had things like this happen. I got the same recurring response. First, have you been doing drugs, because it probably sounds like a drug experience. Then the second response was, is there something wrong with you, or there must be something wrong with you. I realized that I could not talk openly about these things. I went inward with it. I did not talk much about these things for many, many years to almost anybody. Part of the dark part is I longed and yearned to get back to that state that I was in, and it took some time, some years of work, to finally realize, oh my word, I do not need to get back to the state. The state has never left. It is hiding in plain sight. What I need to do is realize it. It is not about a peak experience. It is about this experience right here, right now, in this moment, in every moment.

An elegantly designed digital hub bringing myriads of transformative practices under one umbrella. Contemplative Life is a non-profit whose mission is to connect people and communities with transformative practices. We make it easy for you to find practices of interest and connect with others of like mind.

I have always had practice in my life - practices in my life as a husband and father, practices in business, bringing it into the boardroom, into company culture, working with young children, pre-teens, teenagers, and Millennials. Working as a hospice volunteer with those who want to die consciously, bringing practices into the end of life, and even into higher education, where those teaching and learning can embody contemplative pedagogy. In that journey, I have worked with a lot of the leaders of the mindfulness movement and the contemplative movement. Part of the contemplative journey is the practice of remembering, so that I can experience the mystery right now, because the mystery is not happening right now. When does it happen.

About the age of ten, I had a lot of questions, and I began to ask questions like, why is there something instead of nothing, what is really the meaning, the purpose of life, who is God. I got the catechism, but really, who is God. The answers that I got back from the people, the adults who were important in my life, were very disconcerting, because even at that early age I realized that what they were sharing with me was not coming from the depth of their own experience. It was what they believed, what they heard, what they read, what they were taught. It was really the first moment of liberation for a young mind and heart, because I thought to myself, surely these things can be known. What kind of a creator God would embody us into human existence without having the opportunity of knowing what, why, and how. When I realized that nobody knew, it freed me up to go on my own journey and start inquiring from the universe itself.

What has worked for me is self knowledge, working on self knowledge, working on self observation, and cultivating the skills of witnessing. Part of what happens when we develop skills of observation is that we realize that things we associate with self or I are not really connected all that much. What I mean is that subject object consciousness is, the observer can witness, but the eye cannot see the eye seeing. What you are witnessing cannot be you, because you are the witness. If that is true in the external world, perhaps it is true in the internal world. When I begin to witness thoughts, feelings, and sensations, I am witnessing what is rising. Historically, in the unobserved state, I would associate that with me, with self. In the state of witnessing, realizing that if I am observing it, if I am witnessing it, it really cannot be me. It is not that it is not arising, but I do not have to attach my self sense to it. Developing skills of observation, where what is arising does not have to be identified with as self, we can realize that it is there, but also realize that something is witnessing that. Developing that skill alone will probably change other things. There is a saying that I have found to be true, your level of being attracts your life. Developing those skills of observation and non identification changes perceptions of self, of others, and of the mystery itself. When those perceptions change, our level of being changes with that. As the level of being changes, the life that we are drawing in also changes, and it increases at an increasing rate.

At the age of fifteen, something extraordinary happened. I was having a conversation with a neighbor friend of mine, and the conversation was about the nature of the self and the ego. Something extraordinary happened. The witness consciousness essentially left my body. The I am presence was looking at my body, but it was not in my body. When something like that happens, it changes all your frameworks, all your lenses of perception. There were other things that happened in the room that were visible to both of us at that time. A light suddenly splashed and ran up the wall, and it set off a chain of circumstances that lasted a week, one extraordinary event after another.

I was walking out in the woods, and I saw a fallen log, so I sat down, got quiet, and went into a state of meditation for a very long period of time. In that state, I could feel as if I could feel the sap running through the heartwood of the trees around me, like it was the blood running through my own veins. I could feel the wind as it moved through the trees, both the sound it was making and how it came through in different variations from the trees and the leaves. I could feel when the leaves moved because the canopy above would shift, and little sparkles of light would come through and then disappear. I literally felt one with nature at a profound level. After a period of time, I do not know how long because I was not keeping track, I began to open my eyes. Out in front of me, I saw a white tailed deer looking at me. Then I saw a rabbit, a squirrel, and birds. It seemed so normal, but there was a sense that maybe nature was also experiencing something extraordinary and felt very safe. Then something else happened that was incredibly memorable. As I was sitting there, a shaft of light came out of a small aperture in the canopy above, where leaves had not grown. It was just one little opening where the light came through. All of a sudden, next to me on the bare earth, there was one flower that had sprung up with orange and purple leaves, and the light was shining directly on that flower. It spoke to me about the mystery of the human condition, because I wondered about all the conditions that had to line up for that to happen, that seed, however it got there, maybe a bird, maybe the wind, the moisture that had to be there, how the leaves and the trees grew so that there was just one opening, so that the sun could get through and fall on that flower. It showed me this is the mystery of the human experience, right here. This is the mystery of being alive as human. It was that series of experiences that made me realize that the purpose of life is like the purpose of the flower, to bloom and to love.