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The Value of Collective Effervescence


History and anthropology reveal the human desire for gathering, expressed throughout the ages in ecstatic celebrations of worshipping, conversing, feasting, consuming, and dancing. It is intriguing how many well-known secular festivals were birthed from their sacred roots of “danced religion” with Carnival being the best known.

When people ask me what’s different between doing an online program and an in-person workshop, I often offer two words, “collective effervescence,” an experience that doesn’t work alone. Praying apart is not the same thing as praying together. This effervescence can only be achieved by being physically present within a group and surrendering to its greater energy, ethos, actions. You suddenly find yourself being lifted and carried by a wave greater than you. In that moment, your feet leave the ground, gravity unmoors, and you are transformed, twirling and hurling, into a new way of being, a new possibility. You surrender your “self” and your life becomes an atom in the great rippling life force of humanity.

It’s part of the reason why the MEA magic is so potent. It’s almost like one’s sense of ego separation dissolves and what emerges is a communal joy. It used to be that people were born as part of a community, and had to find their place as individuals. Now people are born as individuals, and have to find their community. The flip side of our heroic rugged individualism, that has been represented as one of the great achievements of the modern era, is radical isolation, and, with it, depression and sometimes death. If ever there was a time for us to shed our sense of individuality and embrace this involuntary global transition in a collective way, this is it.

Our brains are wired to connect and it may be a need as fundamental as food or shelter, but much more abstract. The contagious nature of our emotions mean that we seek social connection through gathering especially in our most distressing times. The capacity for collective effervescence is encoded in us. When we’re denied it, we are at risk of succumbing to a potential solitary nightmare. It is time to reclaim what makes us human and feel connected. 

-Chip

P.S. Twelve years ago, I made the pilgrimage to the sacred Maha Kumbh Mela festival in India which was full of collective effervescence with more than 100 million devotees meeting over the course of nearly two months at the confluence of two rivers (and a mythical third river). I wrote about this awe-filled experience in this series of festival blog posts I wrote back then. Well, this every-12-year celebration is back and while it was filled with some recent tragedy with 30 people being stampeded to death on the most auspicious bathing day, our MEA friend Sudha Dev captured much of the festivity of the Kumbh in this video. There’s not much collective effervescence after a stampede as I discovered when I ended up at the train station (on my way to Delhi after five days at the Kumbh) two hours after more than 40 people died in a stampede. I also ended up as a human pancake with one person below me and three on top of me in a brief stampede at the festival 12 years ago as I held the hand of an 80-year-old woman who was stuck next to me. Maha Kumbh Mela taught me that life is an equal measure of joy and grief. 

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