The Community of The Mystic Heart (CMH) was formed in 2010 as Bro. Wayne Teasdale’s” Universal Order of Sannyasa (UOS)”. It is a “Participating Community” in the Order of Universal Interfaith (OUnI). Sometime after the founding, the reasons explained at the CMH website, the name was changed. However, the purpose of CMH is to further a realistic vision of Bro. Wayne’s vision for the UOS. There are currently several hundred members and the website is at www.communityofthemysticheart.org. Generally, the visions and activities of CMH are gathered around Bro. Wayne’s “Nine Elements of a Universal Spirituality” (around which he structured his classic book The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions).
Since the founding of CMH two functional realities have become obvious. The first is that CMH almost inevitably became a “catch-all” association of everyone interested in the vision of interspirituality and Bro. Wayne. This was because so many people inevitably and naturally had different ideas of what a “Universal Order of Sannyasa” meant of would look like. CMH, as the larger “catch-all” association actually needed to exist to “field” this further conversation. A major result in the last year has been the realization the second point.
The second point is that it became apparent that it was within smaller constituencies within CMH, “soul groups” if you like– places where there is a natural homogeneity of vision and inter-relationships– that deeper and more detailed manifestations of the UOS vision could actually unfold. From this point on CMH has welcomed “petri-dishing” various ways that the UOS vision might unfold, as developed by different central figures and central soul groups. The “New Monasticism Conversation” has been one of those petri-dishes.
Given the reality of these two threads, CMH itself then went on to employ “Four Kinds of Membership” each defined around Bro. Wayne’s “Nine Elements”. Briefly, these include (1) exploring interspirituality, (2) utilizing the “Nine Elements” as Aspirations, (3) employing the “Nine Elements” as personal practice vows and (4) declaring a more detailed “Personal Covenant” which spells out in more detail the particular life of spiritual life and activism that a CMH member wants to live. So, CMH members have any of these four points of entry, and are also then free to step up, and into, one of the more robust experiments being developed in and around CMH through its more particular spin-off communities and experiments.
We anticipate that CMH may grow further with the publication of The Coming Interspiritual Age (see Books) and will, hopefully, continue to serve this innovative role regarding how Bro. Wayne’s and the interspiritual vision continues to develop and unfold.
