What is the Lily?
A good starting point in answer to that question is to tell what Lily is not. Lily is no organization, and will never be, out of the tenet that all organizations sooner or later becomes infiltrated by power people who will use it for their own purposes.
Lily is a group of people with a common background and common interests that cooperate to reach Lily`s goal on a personal level: Freedom from the chains to the past. An adult human is a product of the genetics and the environment. The genetic inheritance can we do very little about. The cause of human suffering lies in the environmental impact, and the groupwork consists of making up the mental damage caused by more and less incompetent caregivers and traumas.
In parallel with the group-therapy is also role playing as social training on the various trails. After four years the pupil leaves the group to grow their own Lily. Some choose to become a teacher in his/her own group, while others form groups to collaborate on Lily`s political goal: To create a world where love and peace reigns, or as it also can be said: To manifest Edgar Cayce`s vision of "The age of the Lily."
The traditional Lily have young people as their target group. The Lily should be an anchor for young people with a troubled background and make sure it`s students get a healthy balance between love and will before they start a family.
In 1993 I had a creative breakthrough in relation to Lily. Then I was too old to form a group to become a teacher for, so I made up my mind to convert Lily to a web project. It took its time. First I wrote the course in mental training. Over the years, my library of various self-help books
have been quite extensive and I found that the Enneagram would be a useful tool.
John Bradshaw`s book "Homecoming" I had in the library and wanted to test his method to see if it could act as compensation for group therapy. Personally, I had no use for the method, I had already reached the goal. I thought. I got a surprise. The Lily`s method to get rid of shame is best suited for groupwork, and after several years I got a tip about Peter Levine`s books. His method had also to be tested and a new surprise awaited.
In fact, I think now that the job of converting Lily to a network project is done. The syllabus is this:
The course in mental training (In Norwegian. Use google translater)
The book "The Wisdom of the Enneagram" of Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
The book "Homecoming" of John Bradshaw
The book "Healing trauma" of Peter A. Levine.
With this curriculum everyone should be able to do the job to free oneself from the chains to the past on their own. It is my opinion that cooperation in a group where all are each others therapists is unmatched as therapeutic instrument. For those who have opportunity to do so it is certainly advisable to make a study ring with three to five people of the same age and with the same background.
In the traditional Lily there is a teacher and he/she can have up to 9 students, and it is then the teacher's task to put together small groups of students with the same background. Don Richard Riso, Russ Hudson, John Bradshaw and Peter Levine are teachers with considerably greater professional expertise in relation to reaching Lily`s goal on the personal level than a teacher in Lily. But there is another disadvantage of having teachers who are not physically present. In Lily the teacher have the right to manage the progress of the work. A person with right to manage, must also a group that works without physical teachers have. This is best done with letting the function of leadership rotate between the participants. In Lily there is meeting once a week where one of the six paths are theme. In such a Lily light recommended here the themes are: Mental training, The Enneagram, John Bradshaw`s book and Peter Levine`s books. So it is up to the group if the curriculum also should contain something about the spiritual dimension. It is then to choose a leader who is responsible for each of these points and then has the right to manage the progression of the theme.
To really speed up the development can the group consider moving together in a Lily-collective.
The traditional Lily see no point in helping the already successful to become even more successful. The first thing a new student is told is that all Lily`s doctrines, students may accept, modify or reject when he/she leaves the group to grow their own Lily. After over 20 years of work among "Spiritually conscious" people I have found that as a web project, this has been a waste of time. The reason is the wrong audience. Lily has also this doctrine: "Spiritual consciousness is always triggered by repressed suffering". What I did not take into account, was what Gurdjieff formulated as follows: "The Work says that a man is willing to give up anything but his suffering; it is the last thing he wants to lose." As a network project, must the target group be people who know what they want with their lives, and are willing to initiate a process to get the thoughts, feelings, words and actions to serve the goal.
The target group must be young people who have finished compulsory education and has set a goal of what career they want and have started studies to reach that goal. Students in secondary education are familiar with the colloquium groups. About such groups is a lot of information online. But they have purely academic goals where the point is as good exam as possible by cooperating on academic tasks.
By changing the target the social profile will not be changed. It is quite clear that traumatized social winners who act out their traumas in greed and lust for power, are more harmful to society than social losers who act out their traumas in alcoholism and drug addiction.
More info? Send an e-mail: info@wayoflily.com