By Elisa Novick
Back when I was first experimenting with the potential of finely attuned group consciousness, I invited a group, somewhat experienced in the spatially oriented work I now call the Laboratory of Life, to take part in The Spaceship Game. As we each found the spot on the floor we were drawn to that formed the “spaceship,” a remarkable thing happened.
The ship lifted off. The sensation of travel was unmistakable as well as the sense of being freed from the background noise and restrictions of being on Earth. It was not the first time I had gone “off-planet” with others, but this time it happened amazingly fast, simply through the intention we held and the spatial configuration we formed.
What was even more interesting to me was that each person in the group moved into a role as part of the spaceship. One was clearly the pilot, one the navigator, one the gyroscope, one the power plant, one the ship’s library archive, etc. We began perceiving images and sensations about where we were and what was going on in the dimensions in which we were traveling that formed a quite coherent image and understanding of what we were accomplishing. And though I don’t remember exactly what that was (sorry about that) as I’ve now done so many of these kinds of configurations, what I took out of this was an understanding about what I later came to call our cosmic function(s).
We each found ourselves with a natural tendency toward fulfilling a specific specialized function of the formation we had come into, like cells differentiating into various organs and glands in the body. (Pardon my multiple metaphors; I’ve never tried to fully articulate this before.)
The question for me was whether each one might perform the same function in any group or whether one might have an endless multiplicity of roles that might show up depending on the context of the group. And I don’t have a definitive answer to that question. Certainly in that group, some of the roles seemed to reflect familiar aspects of the personality as far as I knew each of the people participating.
Yet I also felt that there were things we were able to do when in the group configuration that we would never have done individually, nor have had had any inkling that we could do. There was information that came forth that no one person could have known just in their own usual thinking process, as if we had to have all the parts of a body-brain functioning as a whole to know what each part was capable of.