Grass roots collaboration - invisible integral

I just found out about Transitions - a grass-roots model adopted to respond to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change. I am particularly impressed that their website is a wiki. What first caught my attention was the fact that they used Open Space Technology to host their annual conference. Not coincidentally, from the same source, I learned of a gathering of cultural creatives to be held in France, also to be hosted in Open Space format.

Across the Atlantic, the Food and Society movement, sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation, also held its 2008 conference using Open Space - among other techniques gathered under the banner of the art of hosting meaningful conversations. This was a very big gathering (600+ participants), bringing together people from the whole spectrum of food and society - as the name suggests. Since some of my friends were involved in the design and facilitation of the event, I followed with some interest and was impressed by the depth and breadth of the insights that emerged from the collective alchemy as these participative processes metabolised and presenced the system present in the room.

Collective intelligence at work

These are just three examples of mushrooming grass-roots practices that I read as symptomatic of the integral, peer-to-peer age that is emerging on our planet today. It is rare in ‘conventional’ integral circles (meaning communities gathering around the work of Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute) for this kind of thing to be recognised as ‘integral’, because there is no explicit reference to ‘AQAL’ (all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all stages), and I yet I believe that it is an integral phenomenon, whether it is ‘officially’ recognised as such or not.

In my experience, these events tend to cover all the bases simply by dint of being participative and inclusive, so that what comes out of them is multi-quadrant, multi-level, multi-perspectival and yet integrated. But it’s hard to appreciate just how much this is the case if you’re looking in from the outside. It isn’t until you experience them from the inside that you really grok how integral they are - without any particular individual or group deliberately holding any integral consciousness or design. That’s how integral can truly be said to be an emergent phenomenon in the world (in my book): because nobody’s orchestrating it.

Something that doesn’t get enough attention (if any) in integral circles is the whole field of collective intelligence and collective consciousness (it tends to get dismissed as ‘GREEN’). A few individuals with strongly developed consciousness coming together to ‘hold a field’ (it’s the same phenomenon as darshan, I guess) can catalyze a ‘normal’ group to work at a heightened level of awareness quite systematically, in my experience. That’s part of the prototyping we’re playing with (unofficially, I need not add ;-)) inside the EU Commission - where there is a growing demand for these participative approaches, because they are so much more effective than the usual bureaucratic shenanigans.

 

The cards never lie…

On the evening of the third day of our women moving the edge retreat, Maria and Sarah did a tarot reading on the collective question that had emerged from the centre of our circle during the previous days.

The pattern they chose for the spread was the Celtic Cross, where the central card, represenging what is at the heart of the matter, is crossed by what stands in our way. The horizontal line represents time; the vertical line represents consciousness.

The question: What is the next level of women’s leadership connected to source?

Celtic cross

Central card: What is at the heart of the matter

The tower

The next level of women’s leadership connected to source is breaking out of every structure, every paradigm, every thought form that we’ve known. This is going to be like a divine intervention - the lightning rod that comes through.

This is fundamental change, and it’s shocking. It’s painful, it’s frightening. You don’t have a choice of staying in the tower. You’re evicted.

The old concepts of masculine and feminine as we have known them are shrugged off. From the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, from the in to the out, change. It’s absolutely radical.

Transversal card: what is the barrier to that happening?

Seven of swords reversed

Seven of Swords

The right way up, we call this card the nightmare of perfection. You take care of every little detail, and you have to make sure that everything is perfectly right.

The fact that it’s reversed in this spread means that what’s blocking us is that we’re always looking at the bigger picture! We want to get it all perfectly in the big picture, it’s all very conceptual, it’s all up here in the head: we’ve got to figure it all out, and then it’s going to be OK.

That’s blocking us. Because we’re too ‘up there’ in the conceptual realm. We’ve got to ground it. We don’t know how it’s going to be, but let’s just do it.

Actually, we don’t have the choice, given that the central card is the tower. So the more we are sitting with our heads up somebody’s plough… It’s falling to bits, you guys! Let’s be real, we’re in disintegration.

Upper card: What is visible

Eight of pentacles

Eight of Pentacles

This is the apprentice card.

One way of seeing this is that we are making a new contract. We are starting to learn practices and we are apprenticing to learning a new way.

What the apprentice does is the same thing, over and over and over. It looks really mundane, but that’s how you slip through into the mystery.

It’s the archer who becomes the arrow. It’s not about getting the bulls eye, it’s the act that lets the mystery come through. It’s practice, practice, practice… prototyping - and NOT waiting!

Lower card: What is coming to our consciousness

The Emperor

The Emperor

This is the masculine. This is the king.

So what’s coming into our consciousness is, perhaps, how the masculine worldview is so deeply ingrained in us – that’s one way of reading the card.

But the other interpretation is about creating order. So it’s not about throwing out the masculine, but  about creating a new order. Because that’s what the Emperor does.

We do need form. But we have to create from source. It’s not going to look like the tower. It’s going to be completely different. We’re not going to sit down and design it: it’s just going to come through.

We’re realising – It’s not just about us feeling and loving and being nice to one another. It’s like: “What the fuck are we going to do now?” It’s creating more form. The form and structure are there, but it’s what it serves that makes the difference… It’s going to be new, it’s not like the hierarchy.

This new level  of women’s leadership connected to source is going to have form. It actually does something. There’s a masculine energy. It’s very clear and manifest. It’s out of the fundamental shift represented by the Tower that the form will come through.

Card to the left: what we need to leave behind

Judgement

Judgement

We are stepping into a new life. We’re already in a new life!

We’ve been waiting for the judgement call. We’ve been waiting to be awoken to our new lives. There are still a lot of people in this world that feel that they are waiting to step into a new life that somebody else will have made for them. There are a lot of people talking about how bad things are. “It’s really bad, and we need the new life… Someone has to do something about it… “

And that new life is already here! We’re in this time! This time has arrived and we need to let go of waiting for someone to call us into it.

We have to call ourselves into the new life. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

Card to the right: what is the near future we are stepping into

Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune

The wheel is turning. Get out of the way, it’s happening anyway.

We are the right people in the right place at the right time. Things are lining up. This is like the slot machine, about to hit the jackpot.

The next level, in terms of our breaking out of that tower into collective feminine leadership, is that all of us have got to be awake to the alignment. So if you’re not aligned, get the hell out of it! And go find the alignment.

Because that’s what we do: when we find that collective space together, we align with source. That’s what’s going to happen. And we will also know our alignment. It will be more visible. We won’t have to think “Am I? Aren’t I?” It’ll just be there.

This is the culmination of the practice we see in the eight of pentacles. This, we know we must do.

Adding the numerical values of all the cards in the spread, we get the hidden message, the river below the river: Forty-one

We start with the One: is the Magician. The new beginning. Pooling all the tools that we have to create magic. It’s a masculine energy, it initiates, it moves forward to the Four: the Emperor, which is giving form; creating the container in which things can happen. And then you add 4+1 to get 5, which is the Heirophant – or perhaps, in this case, the High Priestesses – it’s the new level of wisdom. In Greek, it means ‘to make the sacred visible’. He is the wisdom holder. He brings through and sheds light on the sacred.

It’s interesting to see all these masculine archetypes here. Part of what we have talked about in this women’s circle is the fact that we have mastered the models (thinking here, in particular, of cutting edge models like Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, U Theory, systemic constellations, the adult development models of Kegan, Cook-Greuter, etc). We understand how to do that, just the way the men do. And now we are remembering what so many of us have forgotten, during these long years in a world steeped in the masculine perspectives, that other bit, about connecting through our bodies to source. We do come through a masculine lens, no matter how much we’d like to think that we don’t. But the feminine is not some sit-around, wishy-washy do-nothing. She is a sassy chick - there is oomph to this! You get out there, talk through the bullshit and get it done! That’s part of what’s being shown to us.

In Greek mythology, you’ve got Heracles. Everybody thinks of Hercules as the big strong guy. In the feminine goddess history, ‘Heracles’ means ‘the one that does what Hera tells him’. Hera, in the masculine mythology, is the nagging wife of Zeus. But Hera is the feminine. So the masculine that does the bidding of the feminine is very powerful. We are talking about source. It’s for us to come through in a very clear way. It’s not about becoming something that we are not. It is time for us to come forward with this presence that we are holding.

We can see how we have been initiating (Magician) and bringing together the skills that we have in order to hold space – create the container (Emperor) in which all of these things can happen in order to shed light on the sacred.

Piece of advice - To help us step into this new level of leadership.

Three of Wands, reversed

Wands are creative energy. Three is a number that brings things together to really move forward and manifest in one direction. This is reversed, so we read this card as: “Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket”. There’s going to be many creative forms of the feminine coming from source that can be manifested in the coming time. The tailor-made, off-the-shelf version is not going to work here. It’s going to be different, and that’s fine. There are going to be many different levels and layers to how it needs to be offered. So let’s not try to centralise it, trademark it! Open Source! Because this is a reversed card, it means that sometimes the creativity can get diminished, because it’s not pulled together.

When we get a piece of advice that is reversed, we pick another one until we get one that’s not reversed. Sometimes this tells us the journey we may have to go on.  So we picked another card, to see how we can heal the reversal.

Ten of Pentacles, reversed

In order to reverse that Three of Wands and get that creativity lined up, we are going to have to be extremely untraditional. We’re going to have to not do what the family has always done before, we’re going to have to be extremely different. However, it’s still reversed. Because it’s reversed, it means we’re not going to manifest the level of karma/potential that we can.

King of Pentacles

This guy is the personal level of the Emperor. He’s the manager. The one that creates order again, but on the personal level. There is a very strong message that’s coming through here, that the masculine really has to do its work. But doing its work gives form to the feminine. This is what we’ve been sensing during these days. We need to have form for the feminine to emerge in our world. For the source to be spoken – to be made explicit. Giving it language, having a model, inviting a gathering…

 

Women Moving the Edge - Day 4

Stone as talking piece

On our last morning, Judy, Nina and I meditated as we had done every morning and it seemed that all of history’s witches and priestesses were with us, holding our circle. As I review our time together, seeing the weaving patterns and recurring cycles, I see how we have been adding all our stories to the cauldron. All the stories from the past, that were invoked in us by the centre, and by each other’s stories. And all our longings, called forth by our own and each other’s stories. All ingredients into the potent potion brewing in the middle. At moments of collective resonance, when the circle being came into focus for a spell, one of us would dive into the cauldron and bring back an insight, a call from the future. What we have been weaving here during these days is of inestimable, unfathomable importance for mankind and our beloved Gaia.

Feather as talking piece

Source is here.
Magic is here.
The oracle is here.

This is what we have hidden,
kept safe through the era of man and machine,
through the years of scientific discovery.
After the divergence is come the time of convergence.
Now it is time to rediscover
What of all that we buried is still real,
in the light of all that has been learned.
There is no longer any danger here:
Nothing that is real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.

The oracle is here.
Magic is here.
Source is here.

BIG talking piece

I wrote in my journal: “It is time I lived life by my own rhythms - moment by moment. There is nothing that stops this any more. The old is dying and there is room already for us to bring in elements of the new. But this time, there need be no repression or denial, no punishment of the old order. Every piece must be turned over and examined, sensed fro mall angles and allowed to find its pace in the new order. Let us dismiss nothing from our awareness that arises there until we have reflected upon it with collective wisdom.”

There is so much still to be said about all that emerged during this gathering. One thing that became clear for us - that Ria has been exploring already for some time - Source and Spirit are not one. And Source is where the feminine connection lies. The question kept coming back again and again - How do we allow source to manifest through us?

Black egg as talking piece

Something came through Lisette on the last day which blew me away. I captured her words exactly:

I’m not
somewhere
else. I’m in your
body. Live me, Be me
as I am. I am this glow. Feel me
I am always there.
Allow
me
to
be
there.
Allow me to show you the way. Allow me to teach you
there’s always a next step and live me by taking that next
step. I am right here. I guard you, I support you, I live in you.
It’s not big deal. I’m just life. Don’t make it too holy! It happens
anyway. I’ll find my way. I’ll have my way with you! I always do.

Holding each other in silence

Ria’s blogging is here. My and Nina’s photos are here.

 

Women Moving the Edge - Day 3

Sunrise over Flemish Brabant

The sun rose redly this morning on ice in the moat and frost on the grass. Yesterday we sank through layers of archetypal woman – the fear, the pain, the anger, the joy and the power. We moved our bodies, we lay around in soft heaps of intimate communing comfort, daring to go that much further together moment by moment, driven on by our curiosity, by our determination not to be held back. Towards dinner we ended up in an excavation of our sexual power and mystery that had us screaming with laughter and weeping with fury and punching pillows in turns.

I have been impressed by all the shared patterns and archetypes that have come through, but I feel a tension between the immediacy of our bodies, with all the SUBJECTIVITY that brings, and the broader arena that women need to move out into if we are to contain and support our menfolk and work in partnership to set our world onto a sustainable path for all its children and species.

Essence of sister-heap

There have been glimpses, but we keep sinking back into the womblike depths of the domestic perspectives. Individually, these are powerful and active women. Collectively, we are still retreating into our harem and wallowing in introspection rather than using our bodies as the collective sensing organ they have the potential to be. Ria is steering us purposefully in that direction, but the field keeps collapsing.

I’m starting to discern one of the edges we are working on here. It’s coming from the stories that the women are telling. Nancy spoke of her dream of buying a bicycle that didn’t fit her and not being able to take it back. Ursula spoke of the split between her power of choice in her home life and her sense of powerlessness in her work life – and the dawning understanding of where her choice there lay. Anne-Marie talked of the choice she made to entrust her newborn baby into the frightened hands of her husband. This was the metaphor that we took to most strongly: we are the priestesses of humanity’s meanings and deep purposes, what keeps us connected to the earth and our physical reality. We cannot just wash our hands of what the men do, fold our arms, shake our heads, turn our backs and stay at home. Our habit of doing this is what has allowed the disconnect to become so strong that it will take a lot of undoing. And that, now, is our task.

Ria the uncompromising!

Sarah and Maria arrived half way through our morning and were absorbed effortlessly into our circle. There is a breathing in and out, an oscillation between seeing and sensing, between looking far outside and sinking deep inside to the enormity of knowing that is accessible to us through our bodies. Oh, how we have forgotten how to do this! Oh, how glad I am that Ria is here to remind us that we KNOW, if only we tune in to that place in us that knows. Ria is awesome. I hadn’t realised quite how thoroughly she has divested her body of the scarring and armouring that so many of us carry deep within us. She had us all sensing with our vaginas, in ways that had me cross-eyed with concentration – while for her it was now second nature. A walking advertisement for emotional body work!

Nina and Ursula evoked Kali in her many-armed form, and we also called in the thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara with the eyes in his hands to see the need in the world. There is a huge disconnect in our world, with so much action going on fed by disembodied concepts without ever any real, visceral checking into what meshes with reality, what is sustainable and what has true heart and meaning. We women have not been doing our job, insofar as we have withdrawn from the world of men into the domestic sphere.

Maria brought in Greek Delphi and the Pythian oracle. She told the story of her visit with Sarah to that place, to all the male structures and systems that had been built around… the rock where the oracle spoke (in metaphors which were more often than not misunderstood – oh how we need to learn to be explicit!) and the cave where she went to hear the answer to men’s questions.

Maria the Wise and Funny

Maria reminded us that we have not lost that which we cherish - we have hidden it! It is still there. We are waiting to bring it out again when it’s safe. And soon, soon it will be. So now is the time to relearn that which we have forgotten in these long years of retreat and withdrawal. And to incorporate and embrace the education, the models, the intellectual power that we women have also stepped into, the masculine realm of concepts and constructs. We can build bridges in a way our men can’t, because we have something they don’t: that bodily knowing, that power to grow and manifest the seeds they plant in us. It is not clear to me whether this capacity is genetic or can be cultivated. All brothers reading this - please feel free to share your perspective on this!

The many armed Buddha

We keep moving from the deep past out into the far future. We revisit our grandmothers, our mothers, the passing of the generations. That is part of the woman. In telling our stories, we are weaving a story in this gathering of where we as women need to go from here, back into the world. We returned to Delphi to hear the story of how Apollo killed the python that protected the stone from which the Oracle spoke. And the python had been male - that part of masculinity that protects and holds space for the feminine. Gradually, a clarity is emerging around the need to send the call out into the world to that masculine, that so many of us – both men and women – are hungry to hear and answer. Before the gathering even convened, we had been talking about the split that had occurred in women – between the domestic and interior and the ‘emancipated’ agentic woman. And here there came, all unexpected, into our circle, the split in the masculine. Always we see the isomorphy of this living system that we are. If the feminine is split, then so will the masculine be. It didn’t occur to us to look, but it was given to us to see.

After dinner, Maria and Sara read the tarot for our question. (That will be a separate blog entry). It was uncanny, of course, as all true magic is. It reminded me strongly that in this world of men-in-suits and machinery, magic is still real.

 

Women Moving the Edge - Day 2

Here are some impressions from my journal, jotted during our gathering. It is an impressionistic and rather disjointed glimpse, snatched in breaks - in between managing multimedia down- and uploading. Our time together deserves rich and textured, multifaceted harvesting. There will be more structured offerings to follow.

Arrival

Once everybody arrived on the first afternoon, we sat, ten women together, sharing our personal edges and exploring our collective one. A bundle of polarities and paradoxes came out. As if we were stuck in the middle. It was a good start. Aquarian energy coming in. A good, warm space, with a satisfying depth of circle conversation and plenty of insights. And with it, for me, a headache that stayed all night, insinuating into my dreams. I was fully prepared to lose the next day to one of my habitual migraines. Thank the goddess, by morning it had dissipated.

The second morning, already over breakfast the ancestors came to call. The women in the forefront, of course. What our mothers did to us, all inadvertently. All these privileged women sitting around the table, the voice came in: it’s not just about being a woman. There are so many other factors. Is the feminine perspective really where we need to be putting our attention right now? And yet, what about the huge majority of that 50% of humanity – our sisters – who are in thrall to their womanhood. Breathing through the noise of the tragic, violent and unequal world created by our subjection, our missing perspective?

The omnipresent middle

Back in our circle, Ria, on behalf of the ‘facilitators’, surrendered leadership to the collective. There would be no more facilitation. Only holding. The structure would come from the talking pieces, the centre and the bell. Looking back, I’m not sure anybody really took that on board. It certainly didn’t result in instant chaos, like it did the first time we pulled that trick. Instead, no sooner than we began, up came all the pain, individual and collective. Heavy and juicy. Why do we carry it? What happens if we drop it? Through what, if not through that, can we connect to ourselves, our bodies, our fluids and our feelings, our ebbings and our flowings?

Anne-Marie reminded us, like a bombshell in our beautiful introspection: Don Beck is opening the circle with five hundred Palestinians today. THAT brought me alive. A flood of ecstasy and urgency and power through my capillaries. My hair on end. The indomitability of life that can bring these forces together…

Unstructured time

It’s interesting what a break can do. We always seem to know when the natural hiatus arrives. We drifted back after a spell around the coffee and biscuits of trying to lead or design what would come next. Nah! Couldn’t be done. We all felt it. When the last of us finally gave up, we were all back in our room together. We didn’t even get back into circle. Some music, some dancing. Some cuddling. Luxuriating in this spontaneous, honeyed silence, interspersed with the occasional chuckle or sigh. Drawing, writing.

It is becoming very apparent, as we gently sink our sensing toes into this third gathering of women on the edge, that we are building on the two that went before. The ‘We’ has been much quicker in the birthing, and the questions born out of the previous gatherings have flowed straight in to the centre, into the present from the past. A major inquiry in the first gathering had been “what is it that we are holding back, and why?” What is this holding back? Since the second gathering, another question has been mingling in with this: What if it’s not always holding back that we’re doing? What if it’s about timing? What if we must sense what the world is ready for, moment by moment by moment?

Coven

The word ‘witches’ has come up, and doesn’t seem to want to go away. And the continual nagging intuition of timing has suddenly quickened in me. We are the generation of witches who will not be burned for our witching. So perhaps, after all, the time is now.

To be continued…

 

Preparing for Women Moving the Edge

Friday 1 February 2008

We have been together for 24 hours, Judy, Ria and me. Soaking each other up. Allowing our energetic capillaries to flow into each other and mingle in the physical space as we have been doing in the ethers for the past however many months. These two women are beautiful souls and together I feel we can hold anything.

Judy

We always start in silence. Well… first off, when I arrived at Ria’s place on Thursday morning fresh from the school run, I babbled for about twenty minutes without even taking a breath, just to dump out all of the stuff I had carried with me into our circle. All the life, plans, projects, conundrums that had been occupying me, stressing me. THEN we could sit in silence. And empty ourselves some more. When I get into silence with these women, I could stay there forever.

Ria

We stayed most of the day in circle together, in comfort and transparency. Ria’s body acted as our dowsing rod. Are we getting there? Are we moving off into abstraction? We became aware of our dance between sensing through our felt experience and conceptualising what we were sensing. How sensing intertwines with abstraction, but how somehow, abstraction so often happens on its own, without the concomitant checking against our felt sense of life and our world. That’s how a section of the human race managed to invent and drop an atom bomb. If we had checked into our bodies more often, that would never have seen the light of day. How could it have?

Preparing our collective space today has been a joy. We decided to write up our core questions on flipcharts, and I couldn’t leave the words there alone without some kind of colour and adornment. So I got out Ria’s pastels and pens and started decorating. It was just so wonderful to have the time and space to do this stuff.

 

Women will move the edge again in Belgium, February 2008

Purpose

A purposeful collective space for conscious women who will:
• explore and move the edge of what it means to know, sense, be and do our emergent collective future potential
• ask together the question(s) it has never yet occurred to us to ask
• hold a resonant field from which miracles can spring
• co-create new grooves in consciousness beyond our individual and collective edge
• contribute to expanding the global field of collective consciousness

In this gathering we will not only explore the edge, we will be it; we will do it.

Our world requires of us the courage to open, to engage, to inquire, to suspend, to empty, to hold and to explore beyond what we think we know.

Together we will co-create and be the vessel to awaken the inter-subjective “She”, the Being who comes alive through all of us together, who awaits our invitation to birth Collective Presence into the world.

What we learned in the previous gatherings:

• As women we hold unique qualities of leadership to bring positive change on this planet
• Silence, listening, sensing, holding and receiving are active movements in birthing collective knowing
• We need to hold the paradoxes of chaos and order; stillness and movement; emptiness and fullness, joy and pain in order to give birth to the miraculous
• There is a Wholeness of Knowing, Being and Doing
• To find the new order we must allow the messiness of the process
• Coming into the collective invokes a deeper nature, inherent in who we really are.

Next Guiding Questions

• What does conscious collective women’s leadership look like?

• Are we ready to die for love of the whole, moment by moment?

• How do I come from Source? How do I access authentic embodiment?

• Is the ‘We’ the pathway into
Source? Is there a Collective
Source? What has it not occurred to us to ask her?

• How to live “the self-generating fire storm”, the “gentle fierceness”, living Life with no holding back?

• What if it is easy?

How will you show up?

• Willing to be fully present
• Open – to risk, to move beyond safety, to be surprised
• Leave behind what you already know so as to cocreate in-the-moment
• Hold the courage and intention to find and move your edge
• Be in a constant state of evolving inquiry, of curiosity, and open to grace
• Be steady and patient in deep respect for one another and the process
• Hold the ambiguity of doing really important work and BEING WILD and HAVING FUN!

Beauty in the centre

What we will do

Our work is informed by the art and practice of Presencing, the Art of Hosting, and a commitment to creating the space for the magic of emergence. As our time together unfolds, we will open the way for collaborative engagement with various modes for creatively and
organically exploring into Wholeness of Knowing, Being and Doing. We will create a self-organising field of women’s wisdom, which will include all (y)our gifts, like:

• Collective practices like World Café, Open Space and Circle
• Ritual and celebration
• Movement, dance, tone/vibration
• Art, music, poetry, journaling
• Walking and listening to nature in her beauty and presence
• Silence and meditation
• Emergent practices like Generative Dialogue, Constellation, and the U Process of Presencing

Invitation
If what you have read speaks to you; if you are ready to fully engage in this way, you are
invited! We are looking forward to meeting you.

Ria Baeck, Judy Wallace, & Helen Titchen Beeth

You can read about the first gathering (or see the pictures); and about the second one.

Dates
Friday February 1, 3:00 pm to
Monday February 4, after lunch.

Venue
Heerlijckyt van Elsmeren, Belgium (40min drive from Brussels by car)

Registration
Contact us for more specific information about payment and travel, as well as further instructions about how to join in the pre-gathering on-line conversation.

Our contact information:
•   Ria Baeck, Belgium
ria.baeck@vitis-tct.be

•    Judy Wallace, USA
judykwallace@comcast.net

 

Human Emergence Confab - the Netherlands, 28-30 September 2007

 

2007 European Human Emergence Confab

This entry is based on a short piece I wrote for the Integral Leadership Review…
Hosted by the Dutch chapter of the Center for Human Emergence, organised by Peter Merry,
Anita Floris and Anne-Marie Voorhoeve, with participants from the Netherlands, Belgium, Iceland, Israel, the UK, USA, and Switzerland. We were sorry that our spiritual father, Don Beck, was prevented from attending by a vicious bout of flu. But we did him proud by going ahead without him, creating a buzzing and blooming
learning environment that never wavered in intensity.

The Dutch Human Emergence family knows more than most about collective, integral leadership. They are quite a small core team of individuals working together in different
combinations inside different teams and communities, bringing spiritual depth and integral awareness into different spheres of public and civic life.

This three-day event was a balance between plenary sessions and self-organising open-space breakout groups, with plenty of space in between for networking and intense one-on-one bonding and collaboration.

 

    Elza skyping in for Palestine

The plenary sessions really showed how Spiral Dynamics and integral practice are gaining ground in mainstream Dutch and European society, with speakers and facilitators from IBM, the Dutch Police Academy, the European Commission, and the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment. On the first evening we had an interactive world café to explore the meaning of European citizenship. Elza Maalouf showed up by Skype to share what’s cooking in Palestine – with Neri Bar-On, present with us in Holland, to fill us in on the Israeli perspective. All topped off by a Saturday-night bop-till-you-drop with a difference: an eight-zone experiential journey around the quadrants guided by integral dance master Dylan Newcomb.

The parallel sessions were so mouth-watering that I yearned to split myself three or four ways so I could attend them all. Participants stepped up to ask for thinking partners to help them crack the challenges at their learning edge:

• memetic profiling of the past and present of Holland - by the authors of the new book ”Nederland op doorbreken” (alas not yet available in English)

• memetic data collection using PeopleSCAN;

• the School of Synnervation (integral and 2nd-tier leadership technology);

• using SDi and integral in a Dutch municipality;

• guiding collaboration through “meshworking” among 20 public/private stakeholders in a project to crack Millenium Development Goal No 5 (Mothers’ health);

• integral business performance and transformation software (Gaiasoft
  provides software and consulting to build integral management systems
  for businesses and governments. Customers include multinational
  Philips, the City of Johannesburg and the $32 billion Crossrail project
  building a tunnel under London) and a values-based social networking
  platform (Gaiaspace);

• energetic psychology up the spiral (using kinesiology muscle-testing to explore
  one’s relationship - healthy or otherwise - with the different memes up the spiral);

• connecting to life and the earth from 2nd tier in all four quadrants - a riveting session with Peter Merry

 

Connecting to life and the earth from 2nd tier in all four quadrants

In case it’s not clear what these have to do with leadership, let’s take a closer look at the meshworking project with millenium development goal 5. The project is part of the Dutch government’s drive to mobilise its country’s contribution to the Millenium Development Goals. In this instance, it is supporting a groundbreaking approach to public/private partnership which we can hope will be a prototype for other such
complex projects throughout the world in future. The CHE itself has the leadership role here, initiating and supporting the project organisation in the form of a “meshwork” of the 20 participating organisations (spanning the spectrum of the maternal health sector). Where a network exists to enhance its individual members, in a meshwork
what is primary is the collective purpose. Creating an effective meshwork, then, involves aligning the parts to their collective purpose. The meshwork can be said to be the “organising form of life force in its turquoise manifestation” (to quote Peter Merry).

The CHE team is facilitating the contribution of each participating organisation from an evolutionary perspective. So far, the work has been to lead the participants step by step through Otto Scharmer’s U process to surface the collective purpose. This kind of deep collective inquiry is already working its developmental magic on the consciousness of the participants, helping them to break free from their individual perspective and move towards an overarching set of principles from which can be born initiatives that are resilient, interconnected and vitalising.

 

Social presencing theatre in action

during the world cafe on Europe Emerging

The pattern that emerged for me throughout the Confab was that each of these real and inspiring case studies was born from an act of individual vision and leadership. Men and women coming up against the edge of meaning in their lives and stepping out into the emergent void to become someone unknown in their known—and often threatening and
hostile—environment. Not all of them are ‘leaders’ in the traditional sense of ‘CEOs’ and top managers. But each one has dared to embody and enact the new world they envision, with the courage to face the incomprehension and fear of their communities and provide a vision and a compelling experience for those they seek to persuade to step with them into the unknown.

It’s always a thrill to congregate with a group of peer spirits. Coming together with some of the shakers and movers at the leading edge of human emergence in one of the world’s most advanced democracies—as well as a number of players on the global
stage—was nothing short of breathtaking. I came away intensely stimulated and exhausted, but above all open-hearted and full of hope.

 

Why the next Buddha will be a collective

I never know what I will be called to blog about next. When I woke up this morning, I could not have guessed that I would (again) be dedicating the evening to something that wasn’t on my to-do list.

Yesterday I was privileged to be invited into an e-mail exchange between members of a group of friends that was so overwhelmingly rich and juicy that it has sparked off fantastic and complex inquiries in me. I realise that I am party to many such conversations, all about seemingly different subjects, but with underlying similarities that are starting to snag at my attention. So what is it that these collective inquiries have in common? Having spent yesterday evening in deep conversation with Duri about knowledge ecology and the sacred work of knowledge gardening, I am called to apply the patterns I learned from him to the exploration of the theme at hand.

First of all: Who are the people engaging in these conversations? Not all of them know each other or are known to each other, but they seem to be part of a growing number of PATTERN COHORTs. I googled the term “pattern cohort” to no avail. Hmmm. Google didn’t find it for me, but I sense that it’s something that exists. So how to define it? A group of individuals coalescing around a powerful calling question. Many of these conversations are taking place in cyberspace, among groups that are networked across the globe. Many individuals are active in several networks, thus functioning as nodal connectors, cross-fertilising the multiple conversations in which they are engaged. Occasionally, individual members of these dispersed networks manage to make it into the same physical space, for retreats, conferences… any excuse. They have great parties and the time they spend together tends to be transformative, turboing the individuals to ever greater depths of wisdom and heights of consciousness. Bonds are strengthened and the quality of the inquiries and conversations is powerfully augmented.

Inquiring into the “What?” of these conversations, it would seem at first sight to be “human evolution”. There is overwhelming evidence that the evolution of consciousness is marching on, moving from collective living, where the individual was totally embedded in the life patterns of the collective; through a gradual, often painful, process of individuation, with the emphasis on the will and sovereignty of the individual; to what is emerging in our time: a conscious return to collectivism where individuated, or self-actualised, individuals voluntarily – and temporarily - pool their consciousness in a search for the elusive collective intelligence which can help us to overcome the stupendous challenges now facing us as a species as a consequence of how our developmental trajectory has manifested on the physical plane thus far. (Thich Nhat Hanh: “The  Next Buddha will be a collective.”)”

A deeper inspection brought me to the insight that this conversation is also about the relation of the individuals/parts to the whole. First came the whole in which the parts are unaware, then came the parts awakening to their individuality in the whole, and now we have some of the individual parts awakening as the whole… So human evolution has something to do with human consciousness awakening first to itself, then to its own evolution and to a recognition and finally an embodied experience of the ways in which we are organically part of a larger whole. As we enter this new stage of individual/collective awakening, individuals are being increasingly called to practice the new life-form composed of groups of individuated individuals merging their collective intelligence as the circle being. Since these groups tend to coalesce around a fascination to explore a specific pattern among the many patterns arising in the universe, this could be another definition of the “pattern cohort”.

Meanwhile, as human consciousness gets down and intimate, the story of the Kosmos is also unfolding elsewhere. The Great Story is being told by many voices: it starts off with the big bang and progresses in mind-blowing beauty and complexity to land us where we find ourselves today. Some examples of these stories are:

Humanity Ascending
The Great Story
Global Mindshift
I am

From the cosmic altitude of 13 billion years and counting, watching these glorious patterns unfold, we can see the emergence of this phenomenon of collective intelligence as a fractal of the unified field.

And so we have, in this global conversation, an array of different views, ranging from the fractal perspective to the cosmic perspective, and even the Kosmic perspective (in the Wilberian sense*). Sometimes there are tensions between these perspectives, with one camp fighting for the supremacy of their perspective over the other. But for me – as for a growing number of others - wholeness is approached only when we can simultaneously hold the paradoxical perspectives at both ends of the spectrum.

So what are the individual practices that people engage in to facilitate their entry through the eye of the needle into this collective I-thou space between us? That is an inquiry worth engaging in, and I would invite you to bring your experience to this space by posting comments.

Some approaches that I am aware of are:

Enlightened communication
Moving the Edge
Theory U
The Art of Hosting
The Edge of Emergence
Dynamic presencing

How (and why) do these cohorts form?

Morel Fourman writes: “We can learn from nature about building the New Civilisation. Here is a quotation from my friend the evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris: “I like to use the metaphor of the butterfly. In metamorphosis, within the body of the caterpillar little things that biologists call imaginal discs or imaginal cells begin to crop up in the body of the caterpillar. They aren’t recognized by the immune system so the caterpillar’s immune system wipes them out as they pop up. It isn’t until they begin to link forces and join up with each other that they get stronger and are able to resist the onslaught of the immune system, until the immune system itself breaks down and the imaginal cells form the body of the butterfly. I think that is a beautiful metaphor for what is happening in our times. The old body is going into meltdown while the new one develops. It isn’t that you end one thing and then start another. So everybody engaged in recycling, in alternative projects, in communal living, in developing healthier systems for themselves and each other is engaged in building the new world while the old one collapses. Its collapse is inevitable. There is no way around that.”

Morel talks of soul families: “The soul family – a global community of people sharing a deep sense of purpose in service – is beginning to connect. This soul family carries the blueprint and is here to steward creation of a new form of civilisation. This new form of civilisation mirrors the most divine aspects of human consciousness in the larger systems and structures of human community and society, at every level from global to individual. The great experiment and adventure which the soul family serve is to create a civilisation which reflects timeless values of love, cooperation, stewardship, a society which fulfils the promise in the words “as above, so below”.” Again the fractal.

Personally, I like the metaphor of making pancake batter. If you just throw all of the ingredients together, you get a dreadful lumpy mess, with little islands of unpalatable dry flour breaking on the tongue. Instead, make a well in the flour and drop the eggs in the middle. Then slowly stir the eggs, gradually drawing in the flour from around the edges. As the mixture thickens, add the liquid to thin it out. The result is a silky smooth, light and delicious batter. And so it is with souls. It takes a field to host a field, so first we coalesce with the like-minded spirits among those we know. Once the field of trust and purpose are strongly present in the initial circle, we can throw out the call and draw in others who resonate with it. There is an intent in making batter that isn’t present in slime mould. And now that the Kosmos is slowly awakening to itself, conscious intent has a crucial role to play. We become co-creators of our destiny, and so bringing our sustained collective attention to bear on what matters to us is the sine qua non of building the golden age we all yearn for.

This is what we see happening in the world today. Like rain drops on a flat lake, the calls of the different cohorts are rippling out and touching each other, setting up interference patterns which move on out to the edges of the universe and then head back on in again to the centre, which is everywhere. This describes how I keep landing up in these conversations…

In my conversations with Duri, I learn more about the technical aspects of all this, particularly of how conversations intermingle and the impact that can have, in terms of evolutionary intelligence. The generative memes of one dialogue may travel and interact with other generative memes. In Duri’s words, they are “pregnant packets of evolutionary intelligence flowing through the nodes of the field that we are when we attune ourselves to it in full engagement”.

Just as one imaginal cell awakens another one to experience their exquisite resonance, the words from one conversation can touch on something else. Duri has a favourite drawing which evokes this phenomenon, which he doodled, inspired by an generative dialogue with Toke Møller. When you look at the sketch, rest your eyes on the small spheres where the spirals connect.

What is the meaning of what we are doing?

Barbara Marx Hubbard puts it nicely: “The larger social structures are proving to be inadequate to solve the problems they’re creating. New social innovations are emerging everywhere, but they are not sufficiently connected or empowered. So right now, any effort that we can make to connect and create greater synergy and participation in this awakening process is probably the most important thing we can do.”

So what does this “synergistic co-arising of evolutionary learning communities” (another word for pattern cohorts?) mean? A wasted opportunity, unless we can find ways of connecting our circles to create creating and discover new patterns of consciousness.

The thing about memes…

Duri again, this time bringing in understandings from the field of neuroscience (where would I be without Duri?!): we can learn from the role of neurons’ firing in memory formation. Memories that enable new learning to stick are created in the collective mind “when clusters of hundreds or thousands neurons fire in a unique pattern.” (quoting from the Mature Mind, by Gene Cohen). Dr. Cohen also says, “The more often a particular pattern is stimulated, the more sensitive and permanent are the connections between the neurons in the pattern. This process of memory formation is summarised by the phrase ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’.”

And when these firing, wiring neurons are embedded in grey matter scattered all across the planet, you’d better thank the awesome potential of our technological platforms that can catalyse such widespread awakening (Ken Carey in The Third Millennium).

And so, we come full circle, to the collective practices that we awakening pattern cohorts are learning to engage in. If these new experiences, these temporary states of collective consciousness are to take root in the human psyche and lead to the next stage of our social evolution, this will call for “the sustained attention of groups on the tip of the wave to evolutionary dialogues, learning journeys into the future that wants to come into being through our loving attention to the “magic in the middle” as the late Finn Voldtofte used to talk about it.

“The co-arising spirals are a metaphor for more than our individual connecting (and letting ourselves be transformed by the connection); they also portray a dynamics of how our various communities of transformational practice may link into a blanket of bodhisanghas of increasing complexity, compassion, and competence” (Duri).

I think it important to state, in closing, that all this isn’t a fancy theory. It’s a synchronistic, collective attempt by awakening human beings to describe and explain our lived experience. What I have evoked here is actually happening, all over the world. What you are reading about here is an incipient attempt to hold space for the awakening collective Buddhas of the golden age to see themselves in the contexts in which they operate. To glean insight into how all of their collective purposes are subsumed into some emerging transcendent intention that will only become clear when each collective can join with the others to bring their sustained attention to bear in a sacred act of collective inquiry.

What was that about fractals….?

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* “Kosmos” is an old Pythagorean term, which means the entire universe in all its many dimensions-physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. “Cosmos” today usually means just the physical universe or physical dimension. So we might say the Kosmos includes the physiosphere, or cosmos; the biosphere, or life; the noosphere, or mind, all of which are radiant manifestations of pure Emptiness, and are not other to that Emptiness.

One of the catastrophes of modernity is that the Kosmos is no longer a fundamental reality to us; only the cosmos is. In other words, what is “real” is just the world of scientific materialism, the world of “flatland,” the flat and faded view of the modern and postmodern world, where the cosmos alone is real. – taken from the Kosmos according to Ken Wilber, published in the Shambala Sun, September 1996.