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Landing Strip for a Participatory Future?

Living on the edge of what is in sync with the insight that we’re coming from the One and going towards ever increasing diversity, complexity and uniqueness of all the diverse “individuals” and “entities;” and the insight that the original one now manifest as the participation of all things and beings. You cannot not participate, participation evolved from the one that’s prior to the polyverse [the artist formerly known as universe].

Embarking on this narrative, “Because its beauty seduced me,” and because of how this story elucidates our origins and the origins of the polyverse, our habitat, so very well. An auto-poetic story, making itself up as we listen to and participate in its unfolding. So obviously it doesn’t narrate a history, it lays no claims to timelines as does the Big Bang and religious narratives. It does have a sense of prior and anterior, though, of a nonlinear expanse in which the already-given-but-still-being-influenced and the not-yet-here-but-influential-nevertheless is part of the continual reconfiguration and dynamic constellation of what is presencing itself as “what’s going on.”

The trans-planetory polyverse
The trans-planetory polyverse

In this budding story there is no center to the polyverse anywhere, not even as a center that’s everywhere and in everyone. There is no center around which it all revolves, be it only metaphorically, no, there is no center whatsoever. Therefor in this story we have no need for a king, for an emperor and his feudal court, or for a president and a chief of government, or any guiding individual for that matter – because those are the stories that have been told to originally sanctify the bullies that managed to take over the first cities on this planet and build walls around them.

Can we address the question differently? Can we stop seeking for causal stories of “how things came to be this way” with all the attributions of fame and blame to owners of a self with a name. Why go looking for causes? To plot a future course, and to devise a strategy that will make us successful founders of a new empire of the spirit, as so many of my contemporaries hope? Where the inner being, the sanctum of the soul, the enlightened self is a metaphor for what we make manifest in the “outside world?” To realize the non-dual construction of reality? That would be the top of the mountain of the landscape of our present day collective mind-heart. It seems to me that the question really is, “Can we be bold enough to go where the center is not a relevant issue anymore, because wherever we are is always already in the midst of it all?”

What we are embarking upon as humankind, I’m sure, requires something altogether new, something we haven’t done before on any plane, including the one we now call spiritual. A preliminary requirement would at the very least be one that asks us not to get tangled up in linearity, dia-lectics or -logics, the reducibility of phenomena to mathematics, essences, natures, abstracts, spirit energies and meanings. The key word here being: not getting tangled up, because all these strategies worked to create the realities that made humanity the most prolific species to ever inhabit the mothership. But these same strategies nowadays show that they have detrimental consequences for non-people and people alike. We’re required to grow wings and move beyond just walking; to navigate a 3D realm where so far we’ve just plotted paths on level grounds that stay the same most of the time as we creatively ignore the shifting sands. It requires from us to develop a society where we do automate the necessary linear, the causal and the mechanic and the way we all profit from that automation, so that our civilization can take off into the emerging 3-dimensional and possibly 4-dimensional world-spaces. Where we take off into the unpredictable while the predictable realm is being taken care of by “loving machines” and by “caring computers.”

by Kate Powell
by Kate Powell

I pray, and I put my heart-mind-trust on this reality to provide the landing strip for our greater future, our participatory lucid future where we’re contributing our wealth and receive ever expanding insight; we’re giving our richness and receive the treasures of being around while we grow into being a more mature humanity.

How do you participate in reality?

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Participation And The Self

Picture by Gregory Colbert
Picture by Gregory Colbert

I have been saying that we come from the One, from Unity. By that I mean that the One, the unity, is prior to diversity. The unity we emerge from does not have a historic beginning; it didn’t Big Bang into existence. That is why when I say we come from unity I also highlight the fact that we are not going there, and neither are we returning to the One; it is not to be reached, attained through some kind of enlightenment, practice or path[i]. This One is never “lost,” it shows up as participation; all beings and things participate in the whole of everything everywhere, including all beings anywhere in the whole/all.

The participatory process goes on all of the time, for most phenomena and beings as receiving > transforming > giving, which also means that there really is neither matter nor spirit but rather an endless diversity of patterns of participation in continually changing constellations.[ii] These patterns can span several realms – for us those are the sensory, feeling/energy, cultural, and intellectual-conceptual realms[iii]; each one of us having a unique developmental fingerprint of relative clarity in these realms. We’re all different and unique, fundamentally, and as such we participate in all realities all of the time. We’re never not participating.

All this has made it utterly clear to me that any move towards unifying individuals is a power-move, as it is always also attempting to strengthen the position of some humanimals over others. A power-move, because any deliberate move towards unification is always also exclusionary; at the very least it excludes those that do not wish to be unified, maybe because they want to be independent or because they have different views. There’s nothing bad about power-moves like this, really; the move is in synch with what evolution does on a much larger scale.

Picture by Gregory Colbert
Picture by Gregory Colbert

Going for unification always also adds a new differentiation: it creates another us and them, a new difference and maybe even incommensurability. Take any social group you care to think of: if some of the differences “flare up”, and a serious attempt at unification fails, which is bound to happen over time, the group splits apart and we now have at least 2 groups. So power-moves towards unification create diversification, and that is how they – in synch with evolution – add to the growing complexity of ways of living, and of life.

Within ourselves we can see the power-move as the attempt to unify the psyche, the ego being the “personification” of that move. If, on the other hand, we simply accept the diversity inside our brain, mind, soul, spirit[iv], the whole “ego-problem” disappears; it’s not relevant anymore. Now the ego is just one of the psyche’s participants, and obviously at its very best when serving the individual. Grabbing power over an individual, pretending to be the one that unifies the whole person, the whole you, pretending to be the master and as such trying to make all other selves internally, and often also externally, serve this self-ego… that is the disease that has befallen most of humanity.

When I started to deeply see and accept the participatory nature of all existence a deep and lucid peace among the “inhabitants of my psyche” emerged, among the ego and all the other selves or sub-personalities that share this body and for a time or a season believe, “This is me.” And once this peace and lucidity stabilizes to some extent you will rarely find yourself in opposition to unfolding reality, even if at times you may work for a radical change of the way realities habitually unfold nowadays. And you start to discern ways and means how to interact generatively with all individuals, voices, and beings as participators in this mystery in which we’re all embedded. [v]

 

 

Picture by Gregory Colbert
Picture by Gregory Colbert

 

[i] And I’m not speaking about the experience of oneness. That experience is beautiful and deep, and may be useful as a tool of personal verification (although it appears that this experience can be easily replicated by shutting down that region in our brain that continually situates us in 3-D space, tells us where our skin ends and “the world” begins). Please do not confuse the experience of oneness with the unity, or the One, I am speaking about here.

[ii] I am sure that the body, the embryo or the impregnated egg does not get possessed by some disembodied entity, soul or spirit but rather that all beings participate in the whole of all realities to which the domains of memories of past lives, for instance, and so endlessly on also belong; they are not intrinsically other that the so called physical realities.

[iii] What we call physical reality, matter, and what Henry Corbin termed “Mundus Imaginalis”, including the mystical and “psi”-realities as well, is another way to look at these realms.

[iv] And once we truly see that there never is anything in psyche that does not participate in our wholeness as an individual this is almost inescapable.

[v] When first I wrote about this on the roof at Riad Anayela in Marrakesh I added: Ah, the profound and joyful peace that comes from contemplating this! I’ll stay. Here. Where one self hands over the reigns to another self gracefully. Where the deep contraction of a self gives way to the expanse of selves. Where no rule nor ruler is required. Where the deep relaxation that that comes with all this “holds what formerly was known as “I” together with nothing, nothing whatsoever.” Because I’m already home here; we all are…

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Participation – The Bare Bones

Picture by Moebius
Picture by Moebius

Those that have been following my shenanigans may have noticed that my view on reality has turned. I’ll abbreviate the conclusions here in 4 points, and leave explanations to some future post:

  • We are “coming from” the One, from unity; we’re not going towards it
  • Every being and thing, all moves towards greater diversity and complexity; the consequence for humans beings: we’re becoming more and more individuated and unique, and different
  • The prior unity shows up as participation; every being and thing participates in reality
  • The ‘new’ spirituality of the 21st century is conscious, or rather lucid participation, meaning that one is aware of participating (rather than, for instance enacting a ‘neutral observer’ or witness-consciousness) with every movement, however transcendent that movement may be…
  • So participation, in the way I’ve started to understand it, is an expression of the prior unity across all diversity, and it seems like it’s basic process in living beings is one of receiving > transforming > giving.

When lucidly participating in reality it seems there is no more category that would tell you how to measure matters across any kind of good-bad spectrum or true-false gradient. All matters of concern, and even those of no concern to us, are rather constellated in patterns of participation. If a choice happens within that frame it is one of fitness, “How well does this fit with what we’re constellating here, the carpet I am weaving, the poem I’m writing, the arrangement that I’m in favor of? How well does this strengthen the constellation’s connective sinews, their flexibility and strength to hold this together in the space I prefer?”

There are really no rules in lucid participation; there are just patterns and constellations, which means that the usual moral canon doesn’t work. They’re not adequate to this understanding.  What is generative needs to be determined, if indeed it does, every moment afresh. What gives other beings and things greater degrees of freedom needs to be discovered anew every single time.

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Participatory Lucidity – Silver In The Air

By Cory Ench
By Cory Ench

Sometimes, when you’re talking with a friend or even stranger, it feels like “there is silver in the air.” A conversation where time seems to fly; you look on your watch and cannot believe what it shows. You may not even remember, later, what the conversation was about, although you do know it was significant. What makes it stand out is this particular feeling of really being with someone else, of contributing, receiving with open heart-mind what the other said. I’m sure you’ve experienced this.

So imagine this is happening and you’re aware of this. But rather than become self-conscious about it you simply take joyful note, and think or say, “Silver is in the air.” And it keeps on flowing because you both, or maybe you’re even more than two, like to play and are capable to tread lightly and authentically. It’s clear and lucid – let’s call this participatory lucidity, a lucidity in which everyone present participates more or less deeply.[i]

Akin to having a lucid dream, where you know you are dreaming without that knowing stopping the dream from unfolding, participatory lucidity doesn’t interfere or interrupt the game of life – nay, now it can be played with an utterly new and beautiful expansion. The lucidity is adding a whole new level to the game, a level where you say, “Silver is in the air!”

By Cory Ench
By Cory Ench

And again, very like lucid dreaming, this probably happens spontaneously at first. And you’ll probably get so excited that you wake up. Or are scared. Or have any number of strong feelings. To stay in lucid dreaming states you need to learn to neither weigh into the waking-up side of lucidity too much nor let yourself slip back into non-lucidity. If you’re not too impatient, and can humorously accept failure, this is easier to do; embracing your and everyone’s imperfection helps. Taking your time and being patient, you can learn to set yourself up to be “lucid-dream-prone,” a person that can lucidly participate in her dreams.

There is something very similar about participatory lucidity. You’ll have to, at first, experience it spontaneously: you never saw it coming but now it’s here, wow! Maybe this happens guided by a facilitator that went through the chaos and confusion with you, the 2-dimensionality[ii]  of our usual interpersonal experience. Someone you trusted to know how participatory lucidity looks like; someone you trusted to tell you the truth when she said, “No. We ain’t there yet.” Because going through the chaos and confusion takes time. It takes coming to your wit’s end. Agency won’t help you. Letting go won’t do it. It takes an authentic ending of yourself.  And then it emerges, as if of its own volition – you’re lucid!

Participatory lucidity lets you enjoy life in a much deeper sense. You’ll be experiencing your interbeing in 3-D and duality won’t play much of a role for you, if any. Not that you’re now beyond duality or have non-dual consciousness[iii] or some such, rather what formerly had just two sides,  basic aspects, ying and yang, yes and no, subject and object, now has a whole new dimension to it. There now is a depth that formerly wasn’t there. Or it may have been, but you didn’t know. And it’s not a new state of consciousness either, although it may appear as such; it’s the participatory nature of reality shining through: you’re lucid.

But what can you do?

By Cory Ench
By Cory Ench

Gratefulness makes you lucidity-prone. It will remind you of all the contributions you received, all the good, beautiful and true you’ve participated in. Even though at former times you may have felt it to be bad, ugly and confusing.
Grateful for your body, the “chief gate of the senses in this era,” as William Blake put it.
Grateful for your psyche and energy-body or the Mundus Imaginalis and its many ways and “terrains”, both in consciousness and unconsciousness, both individual and collective, both personality-typical and archetypal.
Grateful for your culture, high and low, as it has become part of your individual character and person, and as it surrounds you in the endless forms culture dresses up as, explicitly and implicitly. The external culture of where you live, how you are housed or tented, dressed and undressed, how you move and in what vehicles, the languages you speak and read and write, and so endlessly on: more and more complex through the ages, and therefore also more and more unique.
And grateful for the concepts you and I can play with, the abstractions and essences you derive or arrive at, the constellations of concepts and how you play with them, and how serious they are and the measure of their gravity, the rhythm of the conceptual interplay and how you play and reflect them, and how they participate in your life.

Exercising your gratefulness, knowing, feeling, expressing your thanks to all who play a role in bringing the reality about that you participate in, will train you in simply being with what may otherwise hit you as a ton of bricks when “the walls come tumbling down” and you find yourself woven into the very fabric of life, naked.

What else can you do to prepare for the experience of participatory lucidity in a diverse collective?[iv] You can dance with someone with an open experimental soul. At first slow and one following the other, taking turns, until you’ve gained enough trust to follow and lead spontaneously… and failed often enough so you’re well versed in the humor of not knowing who’s in charge .

And you can play with regarding yourself to be a dancer with all people, things and circumstances in your life. You can be someone who’s participation with life turns it all into a dance, including your gratitude for the dance and all those who join it.

childrenstorymural-cory_ench

[i] The capacity to enter such a sacred space, for sacred it is in the best possible and heathen meaning of the word, may depend on a person’s developmental level to some extent; therefore more or less deeply.

[ii] I call it 2-D because it is dualistic or dialectic.

[iii] Non-Duality is the goal of the neo-hindu spirituality called Advaita; most of the modern „enlightened ones“ would probably situate themselves in that stream of spirituality.

[iv] At the Alderlore Insight Center you can certainly get a good taste of this. [Disclosure: I’m am involved in that branch of Alderlore, and it’s further development]

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Play and Participation

Picture by Paul D'Amato
Picture by Paul D’Amato

When you’re regarded as tourist by locals, someone who provides them with an income, you’ve certainly become an object[i]. It establishes the rules of conduct. You have to turn a person into an object before you can use them as an instrument that you can play to your own profit, and that person’s loss. That gives us a measure for this behavior. Inasmuch as you can make an object of anyone or even anything, and thereby severe the connection with it/him/her by separating yourself from it as a subject, in that measure you can use others and turn them into your instrument.

As it is with horses: if you turn your horse into an object, an animal-object you know that you need to force it to do your will, and you’ll need a bit and maybe spurs. If, on the other hand, you simply participate in the man-horse relationship where both you are equal, be it with different capacities, than you can play – in peace and clarity.

Participatory reality is situated far, far away from the subject/object world. It is a reality full of play following a basic pattern mentioned earlier: receive > transform > give. And every being in this reality is involved and engaged, and the closer they are to humanimals the more ways to play they find. Many interspecies’ games on YouTube recently: Dogs and birds, cats and mice, dogs and cats playing with each other having fun, clearly.

Play requires participation. To stand aloof, to remark and comment on the game from the outside, on players and their moves as a spectator may be tolerated or celebrated by the players of competitive games played in front of crowds of paying guests, but really it is cowardly behavior. It turns games and players into objects and makes it very easy to celebrate using, abusing them with comments that know it all better, and suggestions whose only purpose is to show off your knowledge. But in the games of life all of this is without any merit. These games have no outside; no one can escape participation. Those that refuse to play are nevertheless fulfilling their roles as irritators or obstructers. Even those that do not appear to make a move serve life’s games, as orientation mark in a continual flow.

The real joyful moves are made by those participators that play with real abandon; those that dare to risk themselves and/or their safety and lose themselves in the game. These players are a surprise and will be in wonder, maybe by something really new, maybe by inspiration, maybe by a rattling insight, or maybe they fall in love, find best friends or simply celebrate the unknown.

There is an art to relaxing into the games of life, to trust the game and your own capacity to stay afloat if needed. There is a deep joy to loosening up the self-position without awareness subsiding, the self transforming from witness to withness. What first positioned itself outside and above all matter, as witness to it all, now becomes a participator, someone with a lot of capacity for withness…


[i] And as a man you may finally understand what it feels like to be a pretty woman anywhere on the planet
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The Movement of Participation

woman-holding-mirror-on-grass-reflection by LAURA WILLIAMS
Picture by LAURA WILLIAMS

Reality is participatory in nature… just look at breathing: you take a breath – receive the air, you transform the air in your body, and you give back what you have transformed. Receive > transform > give, that seems to be the general dynamics of a humanimal’s participation in reality.

The same goes for our mind: Take in a concept, transform it into an understanding, and give that back in any form you like. And with every participatory transformation cycle our reality grows more diverse: out of one concept a never ending number of other, and very different concepts can and do arise. Our nature is participatory: no wonder that many of us feel such elation when we have authentic conversations in which we creatively play with our mutual concepts.

Participation is most intense when it is in the mode of transformation. This is why detachment via the cognitive self, the mind, by saying for instance, “I am not this body, not these feelings, not this mind” etc., feels so at odds with our nature. It is a process of singling yourself out until there is nothing left but the Self. And the Self is an emptiness, a void in which all in all plays. Yet, the Self is neither in it nor of it. For sure, this method will, if followed radically enough, land you in some non-duality that reveals the interdependence of all beings and becomings – or so I’m told – but there is a basic bias towards self and awareness that is almost imperialist; it claims “Tat Tvam Asi”, thou art that, meaning that the Self is supreme and that you are aware of that, and this very awareness enlightens you.

Maybe you think I’m picking on that path; if so then because while on that path it causes an amazing amount of suffering, even though I’m told that the result, finally, is utterly supreme. But maybe that’s a justification, and I’m so picky because this path has disappointed me in every way possible. It first dawned on me when it became clear that the “Witness”, the detached neutral observer of reality is a construction that puts a distance between witness-me and everything else, a distance that aggravates the dreadful consumerist, media-guided situation we find ourselves in. Exercising witness-consciousness turns us into a spectator of life making it harder and harder to just be the feeling, breathing, engaged and involved participator of reality that we always also are. It blinds us to what we always do, even in death.

Exercising ourselves in this or similar transcending ways will surely confuse us enough to actually think that we are an independent agent, an essentially disembodied awareness that is not of this endless and boundlessly deep world. And also, and paradoxically, whatever detaches us or moves us into avoidant and evasive spaces, what numbs us…  is still a way to participate in it all, only very confusedly and chaotically so.

We’re one in the beginning, and ever since we differentiate, diversify and become more and more unique. And the primordial unity is not broken; it just manifests as participation of everything/one with everyone/thing. Our differences are real, are authentic. Glossing it over in a civilized manner won’t help. Pretending that we’re one won’t help. Trying to make it go away won’t help. Trying to transcend it won’t help. Actually there is nothing that can be done about it: the chaos we live in is authentic, it’s real and it is the ground out of which we weave the story of life and civilizations. But maybe for the first time in history actually being able to radically accept this chaos, opens up the possibility for something new to emerge. May it help us through the next phase of our development.

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Peace, Neutrality & Clarity

Selfie on my 60th birthday
Selfie on my 60th birthday

When you’re at peace you experience a „roundness“ in the way you are, there is no conflict with anything that arises even if it is tension. Everything that meanders through inner space can form, reform, transform in whichever way it pleases. That may be because peace comes with great clarity, allowing you to be with whatever happens to be and, if you focus, to see clearly what you focus on without disturbing you peace.

Of the many ways that we hope to arrive at this peace I’ll be looking at attachment/detachment for a moment. A very common conviction about these matters is that detachment will bring the peace I talk about. Detachment can create clarity, but it’s clarity without peace. You clearly can see or see more clearly what you’ve detached from; it has become an object for you (to see an object or to see something objectively suggests that it is independent of you, the subject seeing it). But strangely enough this way of seeing things and matters does not bring peace: it brings neutrality at best. But peace is not and never will be neutral. Peace has an important feeling quality without which it is not peace but equilibrium, maybe, or equipoise. So detachment, or its modern version of “transcend and include”, will give you neutrality – which you may need to get some of the conflicts and tensions above board so that you can work them out and make them operational, meaning that now whatever these conflicts and tensions embodied works for you and that now you find your peace with them.

Being at peace with what is and becomes, and what fades as well, may be a touchstone for participatory lucidity. In participatory lucidity your clarity has not been manufactured or made up but is arrived at through participatory processing of all the confusion and chaos in you and between you and everyone present to you. Your clarity is peaceful and participatory instead of neutral and detached.

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The Living Field, Participatory Design & Collaboration Ecology

field1Physics has discussed fields for quite some time but the term can very well be used in the context of the noosphere, our ‘inner’ landscape, the dimension inside and between living beings. Then there is the so called ‘knowing field,’a concept to explain the remarkable phenomena that happen in family-constellations; these phenomena are also explained using the ‘morphogenetic field’ theory as popularized by Rupert Sheldrake. Shall I mention the “Buddha-field”, a realm existing in the primordial universe outside of space time, produced by the Buddha’s merit? Hmmm, maybe. But surely I’ll acknowledge the ‘energy-field’  as I have been using the term in the “energy-work” I do since 1987, a term that later, upon leaving my role as a guru behind I’ve dropped to use “dynamic presencing” instead because it is a method, really, a way to create a greatly coherent region within the Living Field that connects, informs and enlivens living beings.

A field in physics is an intrinsic part of each point in space-time; we could say it informs that point and/or expresses it’s forces or properties and how it interacts with other points in space-time. A physical field can be measured by the proper gadgets.
field31A knowing field, as we encounter it in systemic constellations can not be measured with physical gadgets because it is not a physical property as we know them at this moment in history. But whoever has participated in a constellation and ‘all of a sudden’ knew things about the person s/he was representing will attest to its informative reality. Having both facilitated and participated in hundreds of systemic constellations I can affirm, “The knowing field is as real as the understanding you get by reading this constellation of letters, these paragraphs.” In some way a well facilitated constellation makes implicit knowledge, emotions, tendencies etc. explicit – deep, often transforming understanding surfaces through the dynamically located presence of representatives in a constellation.
The morphogenetic field [derived from Greek: morphe=form, and genese=create] as Rupert Sheldrake uses the term is also not (yet?) measurable by any means we know of but it gives us an elegant explanation of what helps form such sophisticated ‘things’ as plants or bodies. Genes act upon fields, which then act upon the developing organism, goes the thought. Ever since Sheldrake has experimented and written elequently about these fields they also are taken to be essentially non-local, and the theory also can explain why after, for instance, a substance has crystallized for the first time in one laboratory the next crystallization in a different laboratory far away happens both in a similar way and a tidbit faster; as if the field informs the substance of the ‘best way’ to form a crystal. In a very interesting way it is Plato’s theory of forms all over again.

With the Buddha-field we explicitly enter the dimension of spirituality. In essence, similar to a morphogenetic field, a Buddha-field would inform the aspirants on the Buddhist path by surfacing as enlightening experience or insight within the inner ecology of mind, the personal noosphere. A Buddha-field would differ from, for instance, a “Christ-field” as what it causes to surface in the inner ecology has different forms and different associations attached to these, but both fields (and other such as the “Aura” or “Subtle body field“, for instance) are surely part of the “Spirit-field” as it unfolds within and between conscious beings.

field5The Living Field that I have been accessing for the first time some 35 years ago but more systematically and consciously the last 25 years mostly through dynamic presencing and systemic constellations, and in the last 5+ years increasingly with circles of the heart and spontaneously in other contexts as well… the Living Field, in my view embraces all non-physical fields mentioned above in as much as they express within and between living beings. It surfaces as meaning, inner depth, beauty, healing, empowerment, solidarity, mutuality, to name but a few way that it comes to light. If we consider the effects a coherent living field can have on participation, engagement and collaboration and its consequences in social or financial benefits we might even arrive at quantifiable effects and eventually measurements in the future.

Most if not all of us have experiences of the living field. Remember the last time you were talking with someone and time faded away? You got so involved in the conversation, being absorbed in both listening and speaking, following the thread of the conversation, open, authentic, in full sympathy-mode… It was a “silver hour”. And when you remember it you don’t necessarily remember the exact content of that conversation; but it’s spirit still turns you on when you think about it. This is what a coherent living field can feel like.

As human beings we are super-social animals. The Living Field has evolved with and through all our ways of being together, and feeds back into it. We all know it immediately; it feels good, nourishing. It is most likely the main cause of the happiness a rich social life brings – and the suffering a lonely, disconnected life causes. It is connected with our emotions and most likely our highest ethical values that guide our every day actions (giving us ‘negative’ feelings when we do not move in the direction our ‘highest values’ indicate). We could regard the life-orienting values as ‘attractors’ in the living field, and because we are super-social we can very easily feel what moves the person we meet. A resonance in the living field between people creates some coherence that strengthens that particular constellation of values. A “silver hour” then is an event when a good conversation moves into higher and higher resonance: values are aligning, meaning is apparent and shared on the fly, empathic flows meander into blissful estuaries.

field6The Living Field spans the whole spectrum from the experience of being one with a Supreme Being, or Nature to the instant spark of sympathy upon seeing a stranger, from communication with disembodied entities to sitting in a circle with friends, from intuiting where the person sitting opposite you comes from to inspired teamwork. Yet, for the purposes of this post I refer to the Living Filed most of all in the practical context of participative design and the ecology fostering collaboration.

I have worked a lot on the concept but most of all on the practise of Collaboration Ecology in these last 2 years, co-creating social networking software and practices for community managers, community builders or whatever you want to call these new professionals serving the community and giving it a strong voice in the top-management of a social network. Getting to know Jascha Rohr recently and discovering how close our ideas on many of these issues come I’ve come to understand many of the principles underlying the creation of an ecology of collaboration as participatory design.

Imagine you have to create something that will be used by many people. Let’s, for example take the product to be a little park in a new neighborhood. Ordinarily the local government calls on some expert park planners or landscape architects, lets them draft some plans, presents these plans to the population through some bureaucratic procedure and then decides what it’s going to be. It then has this plan implemented by a company making the cheapest offer on tender. After a very long time, usually some years, the park is finalized and within a year or two it looks quite ugly because the city doesn’t have enough money to keep it in a beautiful state (if indeed it was that in the beginning), and since it’s not theirs but the government’s park the citizens do not take care.

park2Now imagine you involve many people from this neighborhood by using a process of participatory design. This means the citizens, maybe supported by a professional or two, don’t get to vote on 2 or 3 plans but actually collaboratively create the plan themselves in a participatory process. Because the facilitators of the participatory design process know of the power of a coherent living field they take much care for it to unfold its power; they create the beginnings of an ecology of collaboration. Making the plans within a coherent living field deepens the connection between people so that it is often amazing how fast and smooth the collection of ideas and wishes and the deciding on what is best for the common good goes. Obviously such a process turns all participants into stakeholders of the end-result, the park. And since it is not just communal property but has turned into a common good the likelihood that it will be received and kept beautiful for decades by the neighborhood is great. Actually it is most likely that it will be a focus of a coherent living field in the neighborhood much beyond clear psychological and social factors introduced by the participatory design process.

Grassroot-movements, since their first big bloom in the Sixties, have grown so much that this way of organizing is very much a standard among “concerned citizens”. When grassroot-movements have to deal with more traditional power structures (businesses, governmental organisations, etc.) the top-down approach of these organisations and the bottom-up structures of grassroot-organisations can cause very challenging situations.
Yet, looking at a situation like this as a living field that could well do with some more resonance allows us to look for ways that both types of organizations can connect maybe more harmonious. This is exactly, what a Collaboration Ecologist does – he’ll be looking for some kind of process that everybody would be willing to engage in, a process that would bring everybody together for some hours so that a sense of “We’re in this together” can unfold. From the point of view of the living field this means that a higher coherence and first level alignment of forces within the field can happen.

One of the first steps of a collaboration ecologist will always be to create a process (involving as many stakeholders as possible) where everybody will listen to each other and deepen their understanding of a) what ‘we’ are talking about and b) who is involved. Next this is deepened and reflected upon. If this is done by talented people and there aren’t too many ‘prickly plants’ in the collaboration ecology a coherent living field starts to form. If this can be pointed out a quantum jump towards community and mutual understanding can happen that greatly enhaces the richness and will very fast lead to strong results of “what we’re talking about.” Whoever has participated in a process like this that led to a high coherence in the living field will be deeply touched by the experience and motivated to engage much more strongly.

Knowing about, but most of all having been immersed knowingly in the living field lots of times helps. And at the same time the challenge for the facilitator of these participatory processes remains the same: You need to put yourself at a point where you are willing to change, willing to surrender to what emerges in the process itself, trusting that what human beings – often almost in spite of themselves – tend towards is strengthening the resonance of a living field. Understanding this and helping to orient the field towards practical collaboration is the fine art.

I see participatory design and it’s implementation as something that naturally emerges from a coherent living field that is looked at with the purpose to create an optimum ecology for collaboration.

Out beyond the ideas of right-doing or wrong-doing there is a field — I’ll meet you there. ~ Jelaluddin Rumi

 

 

 

 

A wordl cloud of the most frequent words in this article
A wordl cloud of the most frequent words in this article
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Into the Polyverse

My twitter-stream has many tweets like these:

ColinUdeLewis “Self-control is strength. Right thought is mastery. Calmness is power.” James Allen

WilliamHarryman “95% of your emotions are determined by the way you talk to yourself.” — Brian Tracy

bfederman A man’s own self is his friend. A man’s own self is his foe. Gita

Good advise, wise words, wonderful and inspirational stuff reflecting, I think, some of what goes on in the larger ‘community’ of world-change agents, spiritually savvy geeks, integralites etc. that I feel part of. Contemplating these and many similar tweets I was inspired to put this statement on twitter:

We might be moving from transpersonal to multipersonal, from transcendence to polysemous diversity, from individual to distinctively plural

Nurturegirls response got me interested to see where this spontaneous tweet takes me when I unwrap what this means for me. So here we go…

Hands1

With “transpersonal” I’m refering to Transpersonal Psychology which put Spirit and metaphysics back into Western psychology. The dean of Integral, Ken Wilber, has expanded it to a much larger system which he calls Integral Psychology – which, in turn, is part of his much larger Theory of Everything. People who have been following this blog probably know that I am critical of Wilber’s views, and most of all his vertical spirituality with an Absolute or Non-dual at it’s pinnacle, implicitly downgrading whatever is ‘below’ – but that’s a different conversation I don’t feel like getting into now except for my tweet’s topic of trancendence, the movement that rises forever up the (spiraling) vertical axis, going beyond body, mind, matter, and endlessly on until it has gone beyond everyone and everything… this is what we’re moving away from and towards polysemous diversity; which I will come to a bit further down.

Vertical spirituality used to be my orientation since I was 14 years old when I first read about yoga and silence (1967) right until the very day I was finally enlightened 33 years later; yep, you’re not supposed to say that, but bear with me. Actually I call this happening Grand Disillusionment because it was basically nilling everything I thought meant anything before this happened. But, silly me, this level-change was just the end of a strand that had been in development since my very young years fuelled by the kind of thought-food one gets as a hippie becoming meditator becoming deep seeker becoming spiritual teacher becoming guru and then, finally, dropping out of that whole game altogether.

You see, my whole journey was fueled by the conviction that a single self or Self actually exists. But the idea of being or having a self/Self is really a nest of meaning and reasoning that very much reflects our cultures’ need for capable individuals (from latin, “non-dividable”) that have a permanence and consistency that can be relied upon and that can be (made to be) responsible. And our type of meaning-making needs a center around which it revolves and to whom it refers, so there you are…

This is very sketchy, and much more can be said about the self/Self, its sources and status – maybe another time; for I also want to mention two basic perspectives in Western, and maybe Eastern, culture:
The ‘scientific’ view which is basically saying that ‘out there’ beyond our skin, and even inside of it, there is just accidental matter that we, our mind and consciousness, project onto. So, for instance, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder; it is not a feature of a flower or a sunset or a person or the galaxy. The same, obviously, goes for truth and everything else. All of this is “in the mind” and not “out there”. (That there are laws governing energy-matter that are objective and not projected is an interesting conondrum most empiricists carefully avoid; this doesn’t take away the basic conviction, though, that really matter is absolutely devoid of spirit, essence or whatever else you can project on it.)
The other perspective is formed by the ‘absolute truth’ that people, things and even processes have an essence, a soul, a spirit in and of themselves. This is taken to mean that beauty is not really, or only in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is actually part of being a flower, a sunset, a person or galaxy. In this view the beauty in us resonates or in some other manner communicates with the beauty out there – we recognize truth, beauty, the Good or God that is there already whether we know it or not. We find it, it is not projected at all.

These perspectives seem very contrary but they have something in common, the idea of a subject, “in here” and an object “out there” – the idea of a singular “me” and plural “other” or “you”. (An idea that Ken Wilber and his Integralites have expanded to a quadriga, “I, we, they, it” – the 4 quadrants). This subject-object orientation system is so pervasive and seems so natural that we do not often question it. No, and aren’t there enough beautiful and deeply meaningful systems of thinking, spiritual practises and day to day life that show subject and object, I and other, inside and outside to be really real and truly true?

2006-03-17-59To unhinge this a little bit and come to a proximation of what polysemous diversity might allude to let’s look at some experiences we probably share.
Remember your last “silver moment.” You were talking with a friend maybe, or even a stranger, and you forgot all about the time and everything else; the flow of the conversation was so wonderful, you even forgot yourself. And now, as you remember this, you might not recall what exactly you were talking about but you do remember the ‘spirit’ of it, the breath, the “silver in the air” or however you want to characterize it.
Do you remember a critical moment in your life with several people involved? Maybe an accident, a fire, a thunderstorm out in the wilds or something similar? How everybody just acted in unison, nobody being in charge, really, but everything got done in no time at all?
Or do you remember a great moment in sports when your team was suddenly “in the zone” and acted as a unity, unstoppable?

What is characteristic of these moments or times is that there is no self-awareness, no individual consciousness to speak of – you’re present, you’re aware of everything that goes on but in no way as a self or self-aware. There is, rather, a polyphony sounding around a melody common to all participating voices, sometimes taking in even some of the more perceptive spectators as in sports. This, I would say, is a very natural way to be; acutually I think this is the way we often are, only we don’t notice it because the flow is not sparkling so bright as in our “silver moments”.

Does the transpersonal, evolutionary view help us understand this or, and that’s what we’re approaching here, help us turn into artists of polysemous diverse ecologies of being-together? It does, and doesn’t.
It does in that we have co-evolved as aligned (tuned in) groups of humans. To be synchronised with others is wonderfully adaptive and helps along the continued survival mightily – from multicellular beings to swarming insects, flocks of birds, fish-swarms and herds, the same pattern has been used in nature countless times. So it’s not really amazing that such highly complex beings as humans are polyphoniously connected – a great diversity of voices ‘swarm-creating’ meaning, stories, understandings and yes, identities.
And it doesn’t, because the individualistic view that is part of the fundamentals of transpersonal psychology and vertical spiritualities or religions is operating with the assumption that we are a single subject, residing somehow in a skin-encapsuled cell-ensemble, in the head maybe or the heart.

We are also biased towards clear – simple, singular – meanings. Meaning should not be ambiguous or, since that term is often used in a negative sense, polysemous. This basic assumption has taken progressively hold of our collective psyche since the birth of modern science. But we only need to look at children or people who haven’t (been able to) loose their imaginative powers to see what rich meanings things can have. Who would insist to a child that a heap of sand cannot be a mountain in which dwarfs dig for gold?

If these ideas about ‘swarm-creation’ are right than meanings continually flow-emerge between us, in the polyphony of voices and forces that we are embedded in – the so-called internal ones and the external ones. When we experience a “silver hour” with friends diverse meanings flow polysemously between us, and it is the very flow in which we delight. Were one of us to single out a meaning and individualise it, that would be the end of the silver in the hour…

Don’t get me wrong; I do not believe the silver hour to be better than other not so silvery hour. Rather it’s hinting at an evolutionary possibility for human-kind that I see dawning. The subject-object orientation isn’t wrong or illusory, the transpersonal and integral view that proposes a vertical path of transcendence is a beautifully valid orientation – it is the individualized version of being human. We’ve worked very hard as a species to differentiate enough so that we can actually regard ourselves as seperate individuals with rights and responsibilities. Yet this is no end but rather the stage for the next step, where we use what is natural to us – silver houring – develop it into an art and use it to adapt to the challenges we now face in the exponentially complexifying realities we live in. Being an individual with a transpersonal, trancendent agenda was perfect in the much lesser complex times before massive globalisation, the ‘good old times’.
2006-03-17-60But now we’re in realities were two airplanes hitting the WTC can cause worldwide mourning or were political choices in the US can cause a global financial break-down, for instance. That all is one is not a spiritual statement anymore, it’s stating the obvious. The interconnectedness that goes with this has transformed, though. In a less complex world only a decade or two ago interconnectedness did at most linearly influence other beings, systems or processes; now interconnectedness means is a massive, uncontrollable, exponentially influential process. In this situation meaning is always polysemous, diverse and complex.

Individuals can’t handle this. Teams like we’ve known them in all kinds of organisations cannot find real solutions. Clear meanings cannot connect multifaceted challenges comprising multiple unknowns with the people and resources needed for the emergence of adequate solutions. We need coherently self-organising collaborative and collective intelligences to adapt to this situation. The technical means are either here already or on the verge of becoming available.

The ‘imaginal cells‘ are realizing who they are and starting to align with each other all over the world. You are one of them. So happy we’re connecting…

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Self-Empowered Spirituality

(This is the non illustrated version; after I get proper permission, I will have some beautiful pictures alongside this blog)
I have been writing about what I consider true 21st Century Spirituality before (on my zaadz blog), about Open Source Spirituality (here & on zaadz), and now I’ve had the opportunity to test some of the principles in the first free seminar I facilitated in over a year (I did work with managers etc.; but that was all a set agenda – this was not).
Looking back to the times when I was still a guru, more or less, there is a remarkable difference in how I felt during this seminar; there was none of the very subtle tension, the subtle power-game that was always there in the back-ground for me in the past. (Just to be clear: I perceive that subtle tension in retrospect – if you would have asked me then, I would have most probably denied its existence.)
Let me explain: When you are guiding people towards a higher spiritual realization on a vertical ladder of ascent to a spiritual ‘highest goal’ you must be both, at least one step further than they are (so as to also provide for the ‘transmission’ of the energy from a higher altitude), and you need to have ways and means at your disposal to help them move upwards. This is possibly one factor for that subtle tension.
Another one is that, when there are other men present, there is a basic masculine principle at work – you have to ‘prove your status’. Since the spiritual leader, guru, master, or whatever you want to call him, is also the alpha-male, and this also always translates as status, it is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) under attack. Hence, tension.
The spiritual path understood, as it almost always is, as a path of acention (Wilber, Cohen, others love to talk about altitude; a higher/lower hierarchy where higher is regarded as ‘more enlightened’) you quite naturally needs leaders, gurus, masters, ‘spiritual teachers’. If you are called to play that role, as I felt I was for some 6-7 years, then quite naturally you always stretch to the ceiling, do your very, very best to stay within the higher reaches of your realization all the times (at least when you’re not in the realm of sahaj samadhi, spontaneously going on, which nobody is as I know from being personally with some ‘enlightened teachers’ in their private life beyond the need to ‘perform their role/service’).
People who have been following this blog know that I quit my ‘spiritual career’ a year or two ago, and have – to my own satisfaction at least – deconstructed the myth of the spiritual authority significantly, and I’ve also shown the patriarchal, authoritarian, gender-biased and abuse-prone tendencies in what I call ‘vertical spirituality’. So I won’t go into that here now. I just mention it to explain why I – in retrospect – know that I was under tension before, and now I’m not. The whole drama of that type of spirituality seems to have dropped off from me, and I’m very happy that I took that long a break from conducting or facilitating free and open-2-all seminars.
Since some of the participants in this seminar used to participate in my seminars in former time, in the beginning of this one I firmly deconstructed my leader’s role and our tendency to look for expertise and leadership in areas which belong to our heart of hearts, our innermost being. And as that was well taken, the beauty and joy of mutual empowerment and support, the mutual apprenticeship that flowered where incomparable and a source of a ‘group love-affair’ without the collusion that very easily crops up under such circumstance.
Creating Dynamic Presencing constellations, doing a constellation (Hellinger style) on helplessness, anger and sadness, and using all kinds of other methods to both, look at issues that challenge us, and freely explore the deeper spiritual and mystical dimensions – the seminar revolved around self-empowerment, finding and expressing what we really and truly want, and gaining trust in our indwelling authority on all things that concern our deeper life and higher meaning.
Being truly and effortlessly at peace with myself as a malleable, fallible, imperfect human crossroad of being and becoming; championing mutual empowerment and mutual apprenticeship; understanding that it is a most joyful activity to be true to myself and others; doing and not-doing what I truly want and thus being an encouragement to others to do likewise, it has become visible, clear and obvious (in a real-time situation, in the experiment of this 5 day seminar) that the vertical energies and powers (the light that streams down on us from ‘on high’; the angelic forces that can ‘overshadow’ people; the healing that emerges from deep sources of being; etc.) are truly natural to us and therefor naturally unfold in a field of people that move to a more authentic space, that are courageously being whoever they find themselves to be, in a field without a leader claiming or (subtly) expressing higher authority, revelation or enlightenment in word or behavior…
I’m well aware of the ambivalence and paradoxical nature of an endeavor where I was clearly facilitating the process and leading in some manner, yet, as a servant of people re-claiming their own spiritual authority and power. And when someone said, “What you have been expressing these days – I already knew it inside of me; maybe it wasn’t as clear, but it was there…” I was very, very happy.
So what have I learnt?

  • Dynamic Presencing works just as wonderful when I hardly ‘do’ anything; it is self-generating significant experiences for its participants which shows as:
    – streams of light pouring down from ‘on high’
    – waves of spiritual & also simple joy
    – feeling to be one with all creation
    – feeling human closeness / intimacy
    – liberation of ancient sadness
    – being “overshadowed by” and eventually becoming an angel
    – seeing the factuality of the beauty of all things
    – participating in divine ecstasy
    – seeing deep into the soul of an other
  • I’m relaxed utterly, being whatever it is I am; feeling whatever I feel
  • I don’t have to do anything
  • Not having a spiritual goal in mind I freely surf the waves as they appear on the shore of my awareness
  • Deconstructing external authority, and reconstructing one’s inner guidedness relaxes everyone
  • It’s very, very easy to truly listen; not as a method to get anywhere but as a� natural happening
  • Affirming my fallibility and imperfection is joyous and relaxing
  • I have a new gusto for spiritual experiment and research.

So I’m happy to embark on the path of doing more of these seminars – and the organizer of this one already booked me for next year (to do a whole series; among others a training in “Dynamic Presencing Constellations”). And I feel I’ve reached a milestone on my mission to:

Co-create a society and culture that supports and empowers individuals and groups to live according to their innermost values and insights, and that can make their living with what they really, really want to do.

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Open Source Spirituality & The Emerging Spiritual Commons

Over at the P2P Foundations blog we are having a conversation about the principles of open source spirituality instigated by Michel Bauwens. In the course of this conversation some things have become clear to me and I hope to show here a draft of what an Open Source Spirituality could be, and how that could lead to something that might be called Spiritual Commons.

According to the Wikipedia, “Open source is a development methodology, which offers practical accessibility to a product’s source (goods and knowledge)… The open source model of operation and decision making allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, and differs from the more closed, centralized models of development.” And for spirituality Wikipedia offers us this meaning, “Spirituality, in a narrow sense, concerns itself with matters of the spirit, a concept closely tied to religious belief and faith, a transcendent reality, and one or more deities. Spiritual matters are thus those matters regarding humankind’s ultimate nature and purpose, not only as material biological organisms, but as beings with a unique relationship to that which is perceived to be beyond both time and the material world.”

The aim of an Open Source Spirituality (OSS) is the aim of any spirituality, to develop a relationship to what can be called our ultimate nature and purpose, our deepest root, or the ever-present origin (TEPO) as John Heron calls it in his longer critique of what gave rise to the above mentioned conversation. So if we follow the Wikipedia’s open source definition and take the product to mean spirituality then in order to move towards an OSS a “practical accessibility to its source” is required. Which means that we need to first get clear on what exactly is our personal spirituality’s source code. If I were a practicing Buddhist, for instance, my source code would encompass the 4 Noble Truths, awakening from the “sleep of ignorance”, the Noble Eightfold Path, and what is most important, what I personally believe and act according to.

So taking a First Step in OSS entails to figure out and openly state what is the Spiritual Source Code (SSC) that the person participating in this endeavor is using.That in itself might already be a challenge, as different people have different talents, and for some it might be hard to verbalize and/or state their spiritual source code in written form to be shared in the Emerging Spiritual Commons (ESC), but there are other ways: a movie of a dance that expresses it, for instance, or a mind map, or a sculpture, or a hyper-textual mesh-work or whatever might be possible in this regard.

Taking John Heron’s ideas into account I would think the purpose of Open Source Spirituality to be “to support an Emerging Spiritual Commons.” I moreover envision this ESC to be composed of people practicing their basic beliefs – what John Heron calls Code 1: one’s basic beliefs and practices. The principles that guide the emergence of the spiritual commons, it’s Prime Directive can therefor not be about the “content” of some Code 1; it’s Prime Directive must be about the socio-cultural ecology needed to create enough trust amongst participants so that they can be open about both the content of their Code 1 and share how they practice it.

The Prime Directive of the ESC is in all likelihood also an expression of the insight that any real-life practice of spiritual principles (sense-co-creating, meaning-guiding principles) is worth sharing and learning from. Since the Prime Directive helps to co-create the ecology that fosters flourishing relationships between people implementing their Code 1, and since creating an ecology is a process of/in mutuality, most likely the Prime Directive incorporates encouraging people to find out and live according to what is true and authentic for them, and to share this in an atmosphere of deep respect.
I refrain from formulating the Prime Directive so that it is wide enough to take in anybody of ‘good will’, and at the same time I write what it is about to indicate where its boundaries might be.

To ‘open source’ something means to put it into a language that is shared with a larger group of peers who can than contribute to this ‘project’ as they please. So certainly any Open Source Spirituality worth this name needs to co-create a “Meta-Code A” which ensures maximum flexibility and ‘space’ for different Code 1’s. Meta-Code A would be an incarnation of the Prime Directive as guiding principle of research and expression.
And even though there is the Prime Directive it is also clear that, paraphrasing John Heron, “it is neither a prescription, nor even a recommendation, for any other node or person, but a contribution to the commons pool of experiential data, which others may find of interest. Then it is simply up to them whether or not they integrate in any way any part of it or the whole of it, within their own Code 1.”

Within the Emerging Spiritual Commons there would be a “library”, as a participant in the conversation, Simon, suggested; a library that functions as the main “memory” or maybe even as the DNA of Open Source Spirituality over time.

To conclude, I couldn’t agree more with John Heron, when he says, “This allows for varying degrees and kinds of hybridization, cross-fertilization, between different nodes.” He seems to be using the terminology of nodes within a network where I would prefer terms coming from the idea of constellations and ecology – all phenomena come in constellations or patterns within an ecology of influences.

And finally it seems important to realize that even using the terms “Open Source” in connection with “Spirituality” is already a language of concepts influenced by recent developments in ‘net-culture’.

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The Most Effective Way to Change the World

Wow… that’s really a headline, isn’t it?

And that is really what we’re going for here, isn’t it?

Well, one extremely effective way to not only change the world but your self as well is:
Changing the World one smile at a time.

If today we all make at least three strangers smile – maybe by a nice remark, maybe by smiling at them from our heart of hearts , maybe by offering them a helping hand – and commit ourselves to doing that every day… we will be spreading a lot of the “good stuff”.

Another way – and you can combine these methods – to effectively change yourself and the world is:
Doing what you want to do with all your heart.

What do you really want to do now? I ask myself this question in many situations…
Entering a restaurant I ask, “Were do I really feel like sitting?” and then I go there.
Talking with someone I take a moment asking myself, “What would I really like to talk about?” and then I do that or steer the conversation in that direction.
Standing in a grocery store I ask, “What would I really like to cook tonight?” and then I buy that. (Hey girls, you can do that with shoes too 🙂 )

You might say, “But often – in my work for instance – I have to do all kinds of things I don’t want to do.” Well, I’m not going to advise you to find the work you really want to do – you might not be ready to live this so radically, yet; we all go step by step, don’t we? So I’ll give you the advice I have been following for some time before I could muster the strength to actually live this way all day long; it come from Neil Young (I think):
If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.

Simple, effective, and causing lasting changes in your body-mind and the environment around you. Bringing your heartfelt presence to this moment and giving yourself truly, madly, deeply to what your doing (or not-doing for the Taoists among us) will not only be a blessing and change you on the cellular, psychological and spiritual level it is also already reflecting the world we want to live in, doesn’t it?

And one last ‘thing’ you can do for yourself and with friends as well – I have been doing this with the participant of my recent 7 day seminar “The Art of Being Happy”.
Take time to reflect on what you are really good at (and allow yourself to consider everything you’re good at).

What would happen if you told your friends today, “I really love it how you can …” or, “I think you’re a real master of …” or some such thing?
What if once in a while you got a little circle together with the expressed purpose of telling each other what you are good at, and help each other see even more things that you’re good at? You might even want to tell us here in the comments…. 🙂

So… what is your Most Effective Way to Change the World & Yourself?

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Integral We-Fullness – A Trialogue (The We of Us – Part 2)

TogetherThe last trialogue The We of Us [alas, link no longer functioning] was published here on May 21st. Since then there has been two posts by Michel Bauwens of the P2P-Foundation on his blog; one in which he talks about my post “We are the Next Buddha” and one where he looks at Helen’s post “The Next Buddha will be a Collective” (which sparked of my post after I realized that we already are the Next Buddha). Also there have been quite a few interest comments added to the posts in this interwoven thread on “We-Fullness” as we’ve started to call the emerging melody which I encourage you to look at.
Bruce — whom we hope can participate in our next we-alogue — has added significant and beautiful posts on Deep Dialogue (Part 1 & Part 2), and now 3 incredibly helpful posts on The Flowering of Intersubjectivity (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
Helen has also looked a bit closer at one of the topics we touched upon in our last trialogue, the question “Could there be a hierarchy of collective Buddhas“?

In this trialogue we talk about the young integralists, the fastness of the ego and development, we touch on trails of breadcrumbs and helpful stories, the art and discipline of we-full living,portable sacred spaces, connecting loops and what We-culture is,learning from ourselves and finally some interweaving. Helen is in Brussels, Doug in Berkley, California and Mushin in a little village near Prague in the Czech Republic.

After saying hello and some preliminary remarks about the quality of our connection …

Doug: I have been sharing the We a lot with young people from New Zealand. There are 20 people from New Zealand here for a youth retreat. It is called a collaboratory: Youth Insight Collaboratory.Starts this afternoon.The youth have been gathering the last three days in California coming from three continents.

Helen: How many will you be?

Doug: A community of 40+, with American youth and adult members, and then some volunteers who will take some of us on a beach outing.This all comes from the same moment I met Morel (one of the organizers of the Edge of Emergence meeting were we 3 connected for the fist time).From the same gathering.

Mushin: And I just want to mention that there are interesting people engaging with our conversation some of which we will surely invite to participate in some of our future we-alogues.

Now we take a moment of silence — the way we like to start these we-alogues.

Doug: I want to tell about this room full of these young people being absorbed into this awareness.In the meditation we had, and they showed up.

Helen: How did you experience that, Doug?

Doug: A lot of light. And also I have been evidencing with them a lot of connectedness to their body.They are very attentive and they have been flying across the world, so they take care of their body to be awake.
I was up early this morning and I ran into some of them, and they were responding to how present they were since time they have had arrived.They are in their young 20s.

Mushin: One of the persons who wrote comments on our last trialogue, Lynn, she is also 23, I saw in her profile.Young people seem to be catching up on that We-fullness rather early.

Helen: Yes, it’s the integral babies;Even if they haven’t found it yet they are very awake and bright souls.

Mushin: I feel called in this regard to create a trail of breadcrumbs, by that I mean us finding metaphors and story-lines so that it can somehow pave the way so We-fullness can easily flourish without people having to go through crystallizing ego structures.Do you think that’s possible?

Helen: I don’t know, because the ego is so fast that sometimes it gets there first; it works so fast that actually it gets a hold of things before they hit our awareness.Our direct experience gets labeled and fragmented almost before we perceive it, in between our perception of it and when it hits our brain it gets labeled and fragmented. But there is something else that is coming to me now.An inquiry whether or not that matters; because if we are present holding that we-full space then anybody coming into the field,whether they perceive it or not is being permeated and drenched in that space, a bit like sheepdip — there is a metaphor for you :-).

Mushin: As you were speaking about the fastness of the ego and fragmenting I was also thinking, “If we are holding the container it really doesn’t matter for the We.” But it does matter for the individual, the single person.I guess that’s where the bread crumb metaphor comes in.There needs to be a kind of collaboration of the ego function, or the individuality with the We, and for that to happen the ego needs good reason, that is, good stories.I think the ego lives by and through stories.Good stories will somehow help it feel the the goodness of that collaboration.I think the ego is always best motivated with goodies.

Helen: I have just been revisiting a paper by Susann Cook-Greuter about the nine stages of ego development, and in particular where she describes the higher, unitive stages, the Alchemist and the Ironist she calls them.The description of those stages is based on her research, people demonstrate those stages.It is fascinating how she describes the relationship between the consciousness and the ego.Susann Cook-Greuter is one of the leading development psychologists, she is one of students of Loevinger.

Doug: I have one other thing to bring from what we are saying a few minutes ago.When you talked about the bread crumbs and storylines… I’ve been a conscious of the role of one that has journeyed on the way to elderhood relative to the youth that I guide as my mission.I am very aware of being a storyteller when I’m in their presence.The stories just come out in the moment, and these young people are incredibly present to the stories and the teachings therein.And then they’re commenting, loving the stories.This is about Wu wei, action without action — in the way of being that I am with them in that role there is a telling of the stories as a way of transmission that is called forth in their learning journey.They love that, so that happened this morning…

Mushin: As you’re speaking about stories, breadcrumbs and storylines, I am considering that we-fullness and the We we are talking about is a new storyline.And just as the old stories have been told by good storytellers, and I think we as elders to young people…We tell stories.I often find myself doing that also, mostly stories of my life, experiences or stories that I’ve read.This is not so much a mutual storytelling, it is still one-way.The we-fullness is there, having a focus on that now I can experience it, but I doubt that it is experienced in the sense that we are having and focusing on; they experience it as a beautiful atmosphere which accompanies storytelling occasions.So what we are doing here now is — the We spinning new stories.And that seems to be an art that we are learning.

Helen: Can you tell more about this art?

Mushin: Take our conversations here: They differ from ordinary conversations because they are contemplative, that means as we are speaking we are aware of the speaking, and we are aware of each other and the nonlocal we-fullness, and we are consciously upholding it.So that would be part of this art.
Michel Bauwens in his post picked up on your term pattern cohorts… What emerges in we-fullness is patterns.And we are unpacking these patterns rendering them to each other in the story of we.

Helen: I keep having this image of Indra’s net where each of the stories reflects all the other stories and is reflected in them.That implies we are weaving some kind of Indra’s net with the conversations we are having, and with the way in which we are tracking other conversations and weaving them together, detecting the patterns in these different stories and holding them up so that people can see them. But not only the patterns in their own stories but also the shared patterns.And this is basically what Michel has done.He has picked up our conversation and is showing it to his interlocutors, saying, “Look, these people are talking about the same thing and they are taking it up in these languages and words, and here is the gateway into their conversation.” — it is nice to find soulmates.

Doug: From the time we first met until now I am quite conscious that in describing this part of my lifestyle recently or choosing to bring the story of the trialogues and the we-fullness to someone, that this invokes a sacred space.It’s quite subtle, but there’s a different quality in the choice to tell what we’re doing and to invite someone to open up to what is We.Sometimes I really miss we.The field is strong enough so I am conscious of the gap…

Helen: What is coming to me right now, and we’ve mentioned it a couple of times before, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am to.” We have convened this We and it is always there and not only for me — before I laughingly have referred to myself sometimes as a portable sacred space… but this has become three times stronger, and I’m noticing it in the way people respond; it’s as if this we-ness has become a dominant part of my personality.

Mushin: When I consider how this We influences me then it’s almost as if I’m becoming a spokesman towards other people who still see themselves as a lonely isolated I.Immediately or almost automatically, this is how I connect to Helen saying that it has become dominant, I take others in to the We that we are.And it is being sensed, and it is being felt I think. If you use Indra’s web instead of Indra’s net, it’s as if one immediately starts to weave a person in to the web, into the We.

Helen: What degree of volition or will is needed by the other in order to stay in the We?

Mushin: If I look at my history, where I am at now, it is the result of a development.Resulting from this development there is a voluntary focusing on the We, holding the We — like you say, Helen, I’m a portable sacred space. It’s intentional.It’s a doing that is becoming more and more automatic, but there are times when there is tensions with friends or my girlfriend so then there is a stronger willfulness needed to come back to the We.
But for others to stay in the We…You would need to have a kind of grounded basic feeling of being embraced by a bigger We, and then embracing this bigger We yourself, turning that into a discipline, a daily discipline of often looking at the we-fullness or we-emptiness of a situation.Some situations are not very full of We so you bring it in and other situations are we-full so you don’t have to bring it.

Helen: Through the habitual filters of the egoic mind, why would one want to be in a We — there is this whole groupthink…?

Mushin: Because you don’t want to be alone. Talking with my girlfriend Janshi recently about what in systemic thinking is a concept of loops… I’m using that concept in my training; we are working on loops of our basic assumptions, believing in something and also something else, and then there are tensions between these beliefs. And yet this tension is also creating a kind of balance; so I asked my girlfriend, “What do you think this balance is for?” And she said, “It’s aim is to be connected to others, connected well.” And as she was saying that I saw that this is a very natural tendency. If for instance you give children no chance to talk to you or relate to you, to be we-full with you, then if they’re small enough they will even die.So it’s obvious that the psyche is absolutely predestined for we-fullness.

Helen: As we hold that we-space and expand it around us even non-localy… as we hold the we-space that we have created with each other people feel it and they do come into it.And you’re right, there is something that is part of our birthright and part of what we are being called into as the next stage of our development. It is possible that if you’re walking into that field that your sensory mechanism, your energetic mechanism is going to pick it up and resonate with it whether or not you know how to interpret it with your egoic are rational mind. How you going to interpret it depends on your developmental filters.But fact is that you will feel it.It will be picked up in some way and that puts you in an altered state of consciousness ever so slightly.

Doug: Have you heard of David Suzuki, the Canadian environmental cosmologist? There is a metaphor for the field we are talking about and the effect of we-fullness on those in our surrounding; this is a scientific analogy that comes from him.Molecules of the breath that I breathed in in Japan within hours are breathed in and become part of beings in Vancouver. Our life energies is merged and integrated with the same stuff molecularly with those of beings all over the world within hours.

Mushin: That makes me think of Masaru Emoto, the Japanese man working with water crystals and resonances.If we claim for air the same properties that he claims for water then we breathe spirit into each other; inspire, inspirare, “breathing together.” That’s going on all of the time and has been going since the beginning.So there must be a difference to that situation now as we are coming to We-culture.So is what we’re doing now creating a We-culture, turning this into a We-culture?

Doug: It is very simple, “What do we as a society put our attention on?”We do this by choice, so we-fullness can become a choice.Therefore being an accelerator of the formation of we-culture is an elemental choice of beings.

Helen: This is waking something up in me in the moment, saying, “What do we choose to pay attention to?”

Doug: It’s a very powerful phrase.What do I have my attention on? Then you can direct it.Shaping and influencing in leadership is about calling into question what does the group have their attention on? And then it instantly shifts…

Mushin: Self-consciousness means being conscious of yourself, then we-consciousness is being conscious of us, us-consciousness is being conscious of the We that we are.We are moving from self-consciousness to we-consciousness in some way, and as we are putting more and more attention on that then the we-consciousness inevitably will grow.

Helen: It’s a learning curve.Basically we are becoming consciously competent at holding the We, and there are times when you need to hold it consciously and other times when it’s more automatic.So that is the learning curve.And it is incredible how much faster one learns when one is awake.

Mushin: We can actually learn from ourselves… how easy that is!Much easier than learning from some other. If I had to learn from somebody else there is always the possibility of resistance, my ego and their ego, who is right and who is wrong, and all that stuff.But when we are learning from ourselves,there is none of that resistance.

Helen: This is something I’m learning with a colleague. Since we did the Women moving the Edge there is a very strong sense of a We… once you’ve had this extraordinary experience like we had, once you’ve been through the eye of the needle, you don’t get back again.

Mushin: The first time I really experienced this was 15 years ago.And I forgot all about it, I didn’t remember any of this anymore, it just disappeared.I remembered that there was something special there, the sense of being together but really I forgot all about it.This brings me back to the breadcrumbs and we-culture… at the time of the first experience of this I was busy with quite another story.It was the story of my personal enlightenment. I was concerned with moving up the ladder of a spiritual conquest, of spiritual development, of being able to doing this and that, to meditate deeply, etc.So my attention was very much on myself.And even having had that we-experience didn’t change that.Somehow it needed the development of the last 15 years for me to be ready and willing to create a we-culture and not be so concerned about myself.

Doug: There is a power and a limitation in the illusion and fantasy of progress that you were caught up in in the past, and in its essence it’s very self-oriented

Helen: And yet you have to go through it.

Mushin: That brings me back to the young integralists. It seems that our job as elders is to create we-full containers and we-cultural memes and powerful stories.I think this ego development of trying to conquer Mount Kailash, climb the Himalayas and do this whole heroic story is necessary, at least for men.What is valid for both genders, to reach my happiness, to first be happy myself and to then spread it.Thinking about Robert Kegan’s curriculum for fourth level consciousness, on that level it is all about self, self-empowerment, self-trust, self-reliance… so the question is, and this is maybe something for the next trialogue, how to embed this quest for self empowerment, self-reliance and so on which is absolutely needed in my view, how to embed it in such a way in we-fullness and we-space that as you’re climbing your personal Mount Everest that you can easily jump off any place on the mountain into the we-space, and to be embedded, to be embraced and even empowered on this journey, being encouraged on this self-journey that eventually will come to an end.

Doug: I would like to introduce you to one of the youngsters from down under. (Doug introduces us to Karl and him to us.)

Karl: It’s really a privilege to join you. Doug showed me the transcript or montage of the trialogue you were having, and I am enthralled. I’m with these 20 young people, and we are looking at how we shape the future and the spaces between us… (long silence)

Helen: This silence is also a part of our trialogues (I usually don’t transcribe these silences 🙂 ; Mu.).

Mushin: We-fullness is also emerging from the interweaving of silence and words coming through one person or the other — opening up, different colors coming through different voices — whereas the silence, of course, comes through all of us. (Silence)

Helen: I am getting such a surge of spirit right now. Just hearing Karl speaking about what these young people are gathered together to do.

(After Sam, another young man from down-under says hello to us it is time for Doug to start the retreat and we finish this trialogue.)