integral yeshe

I’ve just spent a few hours indulging in reading the current edition of What Is Enlightenment Magazine. Of course I found some gems that feed into my current inquiry into collective intelligence and the evolution of the next stage of human consciousness.

In Everyday Advaita, Tom Huston, talks about two contrasting views of spirituality:

-    the ascending path towards transcendence: the idea that we are emptiness, pure consciousness, that sees the body as shackles and the manifest world as a distraction to be overcome.
-    the descending path towards embodiment, “learning to integrate our deepest realisations of transcendent Being with our ordinary everyday, fully human lives… by accepting ourselves, warts and all, exactly as we are… “humanity is not the flaw: the flaw is a teaching that forces us to live in shadows and carry secrets”.

Not satisfied by either of these approaches, Huston asks: What is authentic spirituality – or enlightenment – if not a personal commitment to a transcendent ideal? In his personal experience, which closely resonates with my own, it is “the innate, mysterious compulsion to rise up, to change, to grow, to mature, to develop, to evolve and to otherwise transform my oh-so-less-than-ideal human self”.

… “because whether we prefer traditional self-transcendence or postmodern self-acceptance, the resulting spiritual lifestyle is essentially the same: the human self remains fundamentally unaffected by spiritual awakening, either ignored as it is or embraced as it is, but never evolved from what it is into something radically new.”

Now I can hear many voices raised in protest at this – the ancient wisdom traditions contain all the truths, there is nothing new under the sun and we’re just kidding ourselves if we think we’re different from those who came before. I have that conversation again and again, and I must admit it bores me… AND it segways nicely into the conversation between Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen in the Guru and Pandit series, where Andrew evokes the utopian impulse, which he believes to be “part of the human experience at all levels, the minute we evolve beyond mere survival needs… and part of what’s driving humanity forward.

Ken’s take is that human beings have at least two components: one being absolute and the other relative… the utopian impulse comes from “sentient beings intuiting their absolute nature” (See the Atman Project for full details). Andrew responds with “there’s always going to be that kind of ecstatic reaching forward, reaching forth to manifest that utopian urge toward fullness, toward perfect relatedness, toward profound integral interrelatedness at all levels, which, when you’re awake, is simultaneously always already fulfilled and always just about to be”. He calls it enlightened duality.

Ah! That got my attention… those words get my innards whirring. We’re getting warmer here.

Ken: “Enlightened duality: even though you’re aware of the great perfection, you are still driven, not out of a lack but out of an overflowing”. And then he brings in Abraham Maslow: “When he was looking at the hierarchy of human needs, found that there were two different kinds of needs, found that there were two different kinds of needs and there was a huge jump between them. The needs that go up from physiological needs to safety needs to belonging to self-esteem to the beginning of self)actualisation are all what he called D-needs, or Deficiency needs, because they are driven by people feeling that they lack something. But then the highest needs are those of self-actualisation and self-transcendence, and those needs are not driven by deficiency but by what he called B or Being values. They are driven out of a sense of fullness, not out of a sense of lack.”

Bingo!! Well isn’t this interesting? Instead of the unsatisfactory “ascending” versus “descending” conflict we started with, we can now see a different dynamic at work, in what Andrew calls “top-down” as opposed to “bottom-up” development. Bottom-up development is driven by deficiency needs, and top-down development comes when an individual has reached that point of overflowing.

So let’s take a closer look at the individual who has reached that point of overflowing. Andrew defines it in these terms: “at least fifty-one percent of whatever the self is must be abiding in that fullness, beyond ego”. The unenlightened seeker has died, and there is a different relationship to development. If you have crossed the 51% threshold, you have to act like it. “One can no longer behave like a hungry ghost – always seeking for fullness. The inherent fullness of one’s being has to be acted out in one’s personal conduct, and also in one’s relationships with other people.”

“One’s relationship to development would begin to express a certain kind of maturity, consistency and self-confidence… Because what I’m interested in is a unique kind of development that can happen between people, which can only occur when each and every one of the individuals involved has reached nothing less than that 51%”.

This is where Andrew’s approach – what Ken calls “intersubjective yoga” – starts to make so much sense to me as a description of the emergent phenomenon of individuated humans choosing to pool their consciousness in a collective. Because I don’t think it’s just happening in the EnlightenNext community. Although that’s perhaps where it’s being most closely documented…

And so, the holons in the Buddha collective will be not desperate seekers, but finders who are interested in higher development. Even more interestingly (and challenging to the all-levelling post-modern mind), “because they have transcended ego, at least to a significant degree, they are able to come together in a context of natural hierarchy, where the inherent hierarchical context of life at all levels is realised, and you admit and acknowledge the hierarchical differences that exist between individuals at different levels.”… (Pause while buttons are triggered across the planet and blood-pressure levels rise…).

“If we can come together in a context with other people where we can admit all this, see all this without being threatened, and have transcended our own egos to a significant degree, then a miraculous capacity for intersubjective creativity emerges… Then individuals come together not merely in a state of harmony or lack of conflict, which is the GREEN or pluralistic ideal of peace, but in a process of creative friction.”

Ahhhh. In my blog on Women Moving the Edge, I mentioned my frustration with the “shadow of feminine green”:

“I can’t believe how stifled I feel by the group’s norms. The monster political correctness in feminine guise. It’s all too nice, it’s all too respectful - paying lip-service to depth. And all the while, consensus prevents anyone from being authentic.”

THIS is what I have been looking for, intuiting and thirsting for. Having once tasted it, I find it addictive and am driven to investigate the conditions for replicating it. “The absence of conflict, in and of itself, is not higher wholeness: it’s death”.

Andrew, again: “Authentic friendship – where human beings are creative partners, lovers of life, God and spirit – requires individuals to be able to come together and conflict with each other in the most creative way possible. It’s not necessarily going to be peaceful, but it will be ecstatic.”

So what are the conditions? According to Andrew, it demands a “very highly developed capacity for autonomy and independence where you’re willing to embrace and dance and argue and fight in the most creative way with other people”. The very memory of my own experiences of this fills me with a fierce joy… For individuals who haven’t taken the leap beyond 51%, this creative friction wouldn’t be very appealing. But I agree with Andrew that it is the “definition of deep, spiritual, psychological and emotional health and vibrancy in a community or intersubjective context.”

It’s so exciting to me to be embarked upon this journey, to be riding this emergent wave, to be awake and alive and seeing these nascent collective buddhas leaping into being like a fleet of spaceships jumping in from hyperspace into some magical formation encircling our beloved planet. What’s still missing, in part, is our ability to see each other and intuit the meta-buddha that we all form together. I see a role there for the Edge of Emergence community – or whatever it metamorphoses into as it gains momentum. Provided that it makes the leap, as a community, to awareness of the vertical dimension of consciousness development and learns to work with that explicitly and competently.

We also need to learn to harvest and interweave our many-layered conversations as skilfully and evocatively as possible, making use of the best of what Web 2.0 and 3.0 have to offer. And once we have learned to do this, we have to teach and serve our fellows. The Art of Hosting and the Art of Harvesting are fields which deserve our sustained collective attention and reverent practice if the movement is to scale up and really evolve into something that is equal to the challenges we face.

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….?

---

* "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.

 

You might recall that I told some stories about the Women Moving the Edge retreat I attended in March. After two and a half days of intense chaos and emptiness, we made it through "the eye of the needle" into an extraordinary space of collective consciousness, where we spent our last 24 hours together. During that time we did a systemic constellation about leadership, which is shared with you below.

Reconstruction of the constellation

Characters in order of appearance:

The facilitator

The Future

Consciousness

Community

Action

Leadership

Inner Knowing

Pain of the World

Holding Back

The set up

In the beginning was the future. Then came consciousness, then Community. The Future developed fear and a headache because Community was too close. Then Action arrived on the scene and balanced Community, giving Future more space. Leadership came next, followed by Inner Knowing. As soon as Inner Knowing came, the headache passed from the Future to Leadership. The Pain of the World came slap bang in the middle, and Holding Back held back until the end!

When Inner Knowing came in, it felt a partnership with Consciousness. Action always wanted to do something – the first thing it wanted to do was to bring Inner Knowing and Consciousness together. And yet it never acted: it didn’t feel that it had permission.

Consciousness: When Pain arrived I felt drawn to both Pain and Leadership. I couldn’t decide and moved a little backwards, further away from both. (Ended up supporting Community)

Inner Knowing: When Pain arrived I felt this deep knowing of pain, at the deepest level and a holding for all of humanity.

Leadership: It was constantly important to see and have a connection with the Future; most of the time other elements were in the way, particularly Community.

Community felt confused and didn’t know where to go. I wanted to be in the midst of everything. To begin with I felt uplifted by Consciousness. Then when Community moved to be more into the centre Leadership felt sick. When the facilitator instructed Community to tell Leadership: “I give my power to you”, Community felt disempowered and leadership felt overburdened.

Holding Back and Inner Knowing join Leadership
Holding Back was touched by Inner Knowing offering support to Leadership. This was what lead it to moved next to Leadership. Holding Back felt grateful to be seen and acknowledged by all the others. It was the feminine power. (It was later rephrased by Future as caution, and that it was important.)

Leadership felt whole when flanked by both Inner Knowing and Holding Back.

Holding Back demanded that Community honour and thank Leadership for having assumed responsibility. (These days leadership gets blamed for everything).

Relationship between Leadership and Community.
Leadership was more comfortable when Community stood next to it, although having Community behind it felt like a confirmation or a justification/authentication.

Insight: If the Community is behind the leader and the leader is leading Community, then the leader is representing Community and the community has nothing to do. When the Community is part of the circle, then the different roles become clear, because the Community needs to be empowered and play its role. It has a role to play.

Holding Back identified that Community had a hidden agenda - but didn’t identify what that agenda was. In many ways, Community elects the leaders to act as a scapegoat for the world’s pain.

From the vantage point of the Future (standing by the open door!) (i) it was striking how disempowered both leadership and the community were. (ii) I am your witness; as if the 7 generations to come are speaking.

The role of action
Although action called on everybody else to act, it did not act itself. There was a threat of violent, uncontrolled action: If leadership didn’t get its act together and listen to consciousness and inner knowing, some kind of rash action would ensure.

So instead of acting, Action tried to take leadership. But interestingly, action was trying to act within the constraints of the constellation rules, with only one element moving at a time. Action as a real rule keeper! Perhaps embodying the executive branch of leadership?!

Action felt that community really got in the way of things! When Community came and stood in front of Action, between it and Leadership and Holding Back and Inner Knowing, Action’s energy was blocked.

Although action wanted to empower leadership, making if act at that point would have been premature. Some other steps were still needed to set the stage before leadership could act, given the pain, the holding pattern, and the distance of consciousness and pain from leadership.

Insight: The reason why this is so interesting is because then action starts to act on everybody else’s behalf, gets energized in all kinds of other directions. And that’s a symbol of what the world is doing. Because leadership isn’t conscious yet, action seems to go all over the place, everywhere but around leadership. Somehow leadership doesn’t get proper action. And in some ways that makes sense, from an archetypal level, because leadership is not ready for that concerted power of action. Action felt more able to approach leadership when more other partners were involved.

So why did Action see Community as being an interferer as opposed to also being a way to reach leadership? Community was confused about what/who it was and what its role was.

At the end of the constellation, the Future spoke: “Welcome, and thank you. Now you have overcome your created challenge (the mess we have all made in our unconsciousness), you are ready to face your real challenge. The true task facing leadership is to lead humanity to the essence of consciousness. You can only do it together. You can not do it as long as you are fighting among your selves. You can only speak the truth when the truth is there.

Perspectival insights

Sharing the deepest insights from the position we occupied:

(Facilitator): One big insight for me was that consciousness wanted to go to Community, and what happened when Community and Consciousness came together. It is important for Consciousness to go not just to the leaders but to the many; to the whole population. Everybody needs to get to the next level of consciousness.

Marianne: I was struck with how Community disempowers its leaders - that it has in the Western world largely elected - by not trusting them. I was also surprised by how Leadership become empowered by the support of Inner Knowing and Holding Back. As long as it was just holding back, that made a lot of sense. But it wasn’t exactly empowering (except in the sense that it was at least possible to refuse to do things, which is a kind of power). But with the Inner Knowing, it really started to change. I was also struck by the fact that once Community came together with Consciousness, it became possible to move towards Leadership. There was this knowledge piece in both camps that needs to come to the forefront before that deep distrust could be overcome. I perceived a real chasm between community and leadership, a deep split that I’d never seen before. It’s never occurred to me before.

Nina: As consciousness I was surprised how helpless I felt, and the only insight I can draw is that consciousness had to be claimed. It couldn’t go to somebody. I wanted people to come to me. I wanted them to want me.

Nancy: That’s why I felt I was the driver for Consciousness and Inner Knowing, because both of you are passive essences, that don’t have a body and a driver by themselves. The need to be put somewhere to act. The horsepower in me had me wanting to move these two around to take care of the Pain, to take care of the Holding Pattern, to be able to empower Leadership, to be able to serve the Future. And I’m still wondering why, in the Action that I was, Community such an impediment for me?

Helen: Before dinner, Ria and I were having this conversation, after we talked about Community earlier on. Ria and I looked at each other with a dawning understanding of the fact that the Community we were talking about is a layer of consciousness - a segment of the world population - that claims the MEME “community”. It’s a high level of development, that is currently causing problems of stagnation – a kind of mushiness - about moving on to the next phase, which will bring with it an ability to act systemically. It’s what we call the “Green Meme” in Spiral Dynamics. The insight is that it’s the system of thinking that claims community – and World Community in particular - that has a weakness. Every system has its strengths and its weaknesses, and it’s the weakness of that system that’s getting in the way… Getting between Leadership and the Future, for example. So that was an understanding that we had around the Community piece.

Ria: Spiral Dynamics is a model that shows how communities develop over time, dependent on the life conditions that people are in. What we see a lot is this individualistic level of “I care for my development as a means of excelling and winning – I’m not in it for you”, that’s Orange, and the next level up from there is called to care for community, and lots of us know this kind of community from feminism and so on. It can be hard for business people to take the step to that level, but of course every level has a good seed in it, so the progress that is made in this Orange is good. And this community level, called Green, has a tendency to say “everybody can be as they are” – that’s what’s good about it: but there is a tendency to stick there. And an inability to see that there is a higher truth, and that not everybody is the same.

Lisa: So that belief system is keeping things stagnant. It’s getting in the way.

Helen: They’re the ones who think they know better, and that they know what the leaders have to do to fix the world. But unfortunately, the leaders can’t necessarily hear that language.

Marianne: The basic fallacy, as I understand the Green meme, is that everybody’s belief, faith, opinion is equally valid on every subject. It’s also true pluralistic relativism that there is no true truth, there’s just everybody’s view. There’s your view, my view, the other view. So you get lost on two counts. One is that everybody can have an opinion on what’s the best way to build a safe bridge. All opinions about how to build safe bridges are equal. And the other problem is that all views are relative. There is no absolute. Ever.

Helen: Except for the fact that all views are relative…

Marianne: All views are equal. Everything else can be questioned, but that cannot. And those two points together are totally destructive of any progress, because you’re always stuck in these eternal go-arounds where everybody in the community is equal and you can never go anywhere… And the last one is that preferably all decisions should be made by consensus. With those all in place, you’re not going to get anywhere ever. Guaranteed.

Helen: But everyone gets to feel heard and belong.

Marianne: And the beauty of it - which tends to get lost - is that it moves from the individualistic “Me first”, self-made get more, buy more, do more… towards the sensitive desire to protect the earth and the technologies can be used to protect trees, to protect water… the first environmental dynamics came out of Green consciousness. The whole Flower Power movement. Human rights, equality,

Helen: The whole awareness of inter-subjectivity. The “We”-space. That whole thing is born of the Post-Modern movement, and that is all a child of Green.

Helen: Pain stood around being ignored for quite a while, but aware of being a Pain; snagging on everybody’s awareness. Ruining their digestion. And at a given moment there was so much navel-gazing going on - as perceived by the Pain of the World – the poor, the disinherited, the sick, the victims, the forgotten, the marginalized, the desertified - by everybody else’s self-obsessing, all the rest of society that had a stake - that Pain felt sick and angry.

And had been feeling that for quite some time, and had known for some time that it wanted… first it wanted to move and be embraced by Leadership. But understood that Leadership was basically walking the plank. It was being frogmarched up the plank by Community. And so I understood that the last thing Leadership needed was to embrace the poor of the world and fall off the end of the plank.

And that was where the wisdom of the Buddha comes in: in order for the Pain of the world to be addressed by Community or Leadership or anything, it has to be held in Consciousness. There has to be an experience that Consciousness is so vast that it can even hold the Pain of the World and be bigger. Because otherwise it’s like going on holiday as a tourist to India. You just scarper for the closest comfortable hotel because you can’t get your head around the poverty!! It’s too much. And that’s the way it is for leaders. They are on permanent holiday in India, wherever they go. They can’t get their head round it. No matter how far back they stand.

But in the mean time, in order to go to that expensive hotel, you have to harden your heart. You say “No, there’s nothing I can do about this.” But once Consciousness has embraced the Pain of the world, then the Leader can look Pain in the eyes. And that connection transmutes the world’s Pain into compassionate Action. Which comes from a space that has nothing to do with fear. Where the whole community, plus its leaders, can suddenly wake up and go “Jesus Christ, Where have we BEEN? Come ON! NOW! ACT!”

And Holding Back is holding back because it understands that without Consciousness, Leadership cannot embrace the world’s suffering. And without Consciousness, Community cannot be led by compassionate leaders. If Pakistan and India – the British Raj – had been more conscious at the time of Ghandi, he would have been able to move them forward united. But the consciousness wasn’t there.

After that, I reached out to take the hand of Action. Who had been declaring she was 25 horsepower… And the surge of energy I got from holding Action’s hand became Explosive Creativity. Which is what humanity needs at this moment in its history.

It takes Leadership guided by Inner Knowing and Patience, and supported by responsible Community to hold the World’s Suffering in Consciousness in order to transmute the pain into Compassionate Action, so that the Future will have something to look forward to!

Nancy: When Pain came into the picture, my 10 horsepower (as Action) went up to 15, because I wanted to tend to Pain with Consciousness. I really felt the need to bring those two together, but because I am an obedient rule keeper, I didn’t go get one to bring to the other. Especially because I knew that our coach meant business and I felt that I could be excluded from the game, pulled out altogether from the constellation and there was no way… I was not going to get pulled out because I was so driven to get something done. And I wanted to tend to the Pain, and I knew there was no point in bringing Pain to Leadership, or taking Pain to Holding Back, without first getting it to Consciousness. And that did end up happening. And that’s when then the 15 horsepower went up to 25. When our facilitator finally agreed to let the Pain go to Consciousness to accommodate her, I felt that this was what needed to happen. I felt impatient throughout it all. The impatience was energizing. I was walking on a treadmill to take care of the pressure, because I didn’t want the pressure to explode, I wanted it to be creative and constructive, rather than destructive. Which in the end it ended up being.

Lisa: As Community, I was most struck with the confusion, not knowing where to go or how to help; or even what my role was. Not liking to be an impediment. Wanting to be empowered, when Consciousness came, it felt very right and uplifting, even empowered, I suppose. It was very helpful to thank Leadership and to realise that there was this chasm between Community and Leadership, and that gratitude was what connected.

Inner Knowing: The Future spoke to me strongly. Right from the beginning, the Future opened the door and so the open door was waiting. It’s interesting that a year ago, or maybe less, I was part of an improvisation where I had to represent the gates of the future. It is important to recognise how important it is what we are doing. And the future was witnessing and inviting. And somewhere in there was the idea of these seven future generations. So it was all very powerful. And what the Future said about the essence of Consciousness was just powerful.

Helen: The power of constellations is known to shift that which is being represented in the world. Without intervention necessary.

Is there a World Leaders’ Day? A day when everybody gets together and says: Thank you for leading us? I think the world’s leaders deserve a day to themselves. A day when everybody brings them breakfast in bed, offers them flowers, holds a minute’s silence for all the horrible things we say about them during the rest of the year… They’re human too! It’s not We’re human too, it’s They’re human too. Because that’s the missing piece. In order for us to give this message to world leaders, we need to come from a place of profound respect

Judith: As leaders, I need to feel that it is something I can trust. That it’s not just something we do once a year. I was really struck how passive you can be as a leader. In the beginning, with no support from Holding Back and Inner Knowing, I preferred to keep out rather than doing anything. There was really a fight with Community. Because we really tried to get it, and to speak it out was helpful. To really say: I want this, I want that. There were no more hidden agendas. When Inner Knowing spoke out “I support you”, that opened me up.

Marianne: The day for leaders has also two or three parts:

One part is a healing or support of the “caution” and the “inner knowing” of leaders. These need our caring, our support, our encouragement. Invocation.

And gratitude and respect for the job that they do for us.

Helen: As consciousness and pain between or among the community and the leaders.

Marianne: The fact of the hardship of leadership itself, and the job it is, needs our gratitude.

Lisa: A resting and a being held, a kind of comfort for the leaders.

Marianne: This is getting kind of huge! I was just thinking what would happen if we establish a world leadership day. With a meditation, as we start all the world peace meditations – instigate something like that, where we set this in motion. That everybody in this counter-culture can pick it up. As they started to do, for instance, a ten-minute meditation at a certain set time around the world for these purposes. And one of the reasons I say that is that in the book Entangled Minds, there’s this thing called the global consciousness project. It has studied when you get coherency patterns in the world. I’ve always felt that these global meditations are kind of airy fairy, and what I noticed in that book was that several of the recent heightened consciousness all over the world periods have coincided with those global meditations processes. And that really got my attention. That it does seem to tilt, effect the coherency of world consciousness when that happens. And I’m wondering about the measurable effect. Because people are arguably a whole lot more influenceable than random number machines. So I get really curious about what would happen to world leaders if we get that running.

Kris: As Holding Back it was clear that I was not entering the constellation on my own impulse. Once Holding Back did come in, I was very interested. I was important. It was good to be together with Leadership, I was following her. We were equal; it was a good relationship. I never would have thought it, but it was good to be there, next to Leadership. I was the woman next to the Leader, not behind ‘him’. When the woman is not honoured or seen, or she has to do it in the shade, behind the leader. Now I had an open place. I was seen. What I see now is that it’s important to learn what is the place of the masculine and the feminine archetypes in relation to leadership?

Nancy: I just had a huge realization: The hidden agenda around Community… How appropriate. The mistrust that Holding Back would have of Community because Community is out there positioning leaders by ascription rather than by merit or representation, and everything today shows us that the Holding Back mistrusts and scorns the collective – and when we say collective we mean the greater collective, not just our collective, collective in general – it makes sense. Earlier I was thinking “Poor Community” She is really being treated hard by the Holding Back here, but it makes sense.

Kris: But why do I know she has a hidden agenda? Because as Holding Back I specialise in hidden agendas! Otherwise I couldn’t recognise that in you.

Nancy: To me it’s just another demonstration of the power of this whole exercise. After the fact, looking and that and thinking “Yes, of course”. It’s totally normal that Holding Back would have this mistrust of ambiguity.

Lisa: What I was struck with in Holding Back, you were woman that was not seen. So that in bringing you forward in equal partnership with Leadership… Part of the World Leader Day is bringing the feminine energy to Leadership. It’s bringing compassion, intuition, inner knowing. All those things. It’s lifting you to the same level. It’s an appreciation of the feminine.

Kris: For me, this constellation work is giving it a place in the light. That’s what’s basic.

Lisa: An “Aha” I’m having thinking about an action plan for this group or whatever. I’m not really speaking about the constellation, but that you were just feeling, and rightly so, that all of a sudden, once again, Holding Back was skipped over. And I think that is valid. And then I thought, in the action plan that’s not what would be happening. It would be how we would be honouring that aspect in this kind of work that we’re talking about. This isn’t in relation to the constellation. But that is the work,

Helen: Something important, I think, about the relationship between passion and caution. If you’ve got passion, sometimes you lose caution. But caution has some extremely valuable things to say. And there’s a tension there: caution tends to get ridden over rough-shod by passion. We apologise for that, we got carried away.

Another interesting piece that I heard in what Kris was saying when she was talking about – it wasn’t just Kris – but that whole idea of male and female. the role of the masculine and the feminine in leadership. As an archetypal thing. And I’m thinking here of a very interesting part of Integral Leadership, what we tend to look at the different leadership styles of male leaders and female leaders. But we don’t look at whether the role of leadership covers both bases – the masculine and the feminine – and whether that is not also interesting concept in future leadership studies: how the different types – the masculine and the feminine - can be represented in the leadership function?

And the third piece, and this will probably come up again if we start talking action tomorrow morning. I just wanted to slip this in under the radar. If we’re talking about meditation and global consciousness, then that experiment on world leaders’ day would have a natural ally in the Institute for Noetic Sciences. Get them on board and we’ve really got a much bigger platform. This is right up their street.

Nina: I love how unexpected it is. And I love how, when we walked in here a couple of days ago, we might have had more of a tendency to say “Oh, world leaders, they should just get on with it!” And here we are suggesting a day of compassion! It has flipped over to exactly what I feel is edgy!

This Edge work is addictive. I have just returned from the UK, where I spent four days in the company of 26 extraordinary individuals of all ages and backgrounds, from all over Europe and even further afield (US, Israel) - we were all called, but none of us really knew why we were there. At least, not to begin with. All we knew was that we were gathered to inquire into the edge of emergence.

We were hosted by the Brahma Kumaris at their Global Retreat Centre (which one of the residents informed me was the house where Lewis Caroll wrote Alice in Wonderland). What a blessing and a privilege to be in that beautiful place. Exquisitely schooled nature and silence - except (during our silent time on Saturday afternoon) for the encroaching civilisation, which was having a motocross race just over the river. There's something about the leisure pursuits of the rich that is quite objectionable...

The house is extraordinary. In every room there are loud speakers, and every hour on the hour they transmit gentle music and everybody stops what they are doing and sinks into quiet contemplation for however long the music lasts. That took us some getting used to. "Traffic control" they call it. And rightly so. It brings life into a different rhythm, slows things down and reconnects you to the deepest source active in you. I couldn't help thinking how different things would be in the corridors where I work if this traffic control were in operation there!

At dinner time on Friday, the administrative head of the Brahma Kumaris, Dadi Janki, arrived from India. The energy shifted palpably. Many of us made the effort to get up at four the next morning for the "time of nectar" - meditation with Dadi. I sat in the front row and gazed at this ancient, minute lady as she stood there, as if rooted to the ground, absolute presence, and gazed quietly and deliberately at every person in the room. It was electrifying. My first impression was of Yoda. She sat with us for 45 minutes and gave "drishti" to everyone in the room. I sat and watched her, in the dim light, with my eyes tearing from the strain of sleeplessness, and my whole system ponderous with the weight of what her presence brought out in me. I felt like a sentient tree. Very often, as her gaze alighted on one of our group - mostly new faces to her - she smiled. Not to be friendly, I think; simply because of what she saw. Sometimes her eyes seemed barely open. Being with this woman, I saw a model of extreme old age (she's 91 and still stupendously active) that I can happily aspire to.

At seven o'clock that morning, sister Manda spoke to us. I actually disagree with much of the content of what she told us (the BLUE "this is how it is", coming from a woman with a luminous presence - underscoring the validity of Wilber's claim that you can be "horizontally" enlightened at any stage of development, and will interpret it through your memetic filters) but that didn't matter. She spoke of a path to peace that calls for transcendence of the body as a distraction, not who we really are. Which is all very well, but all the while I am learning to recognise my body as my most exquisite sensing instrument, so attuned to the subtle consciousness, if I can only "listen" with enough acuity. Without the body, I cannot presence the future or tune into another human being...

What I am acutely conscious of is a danger that as a group we might take a wrong turn. A less-than-integral perspective is leading to people picking up and echoing the famous "pre/trans fallacy" that we must "return to our original selves". But we can't go back. We can only move forward. Like time itself. The understanding/awareness of the developmental trajectory (of adults) was missing from most of our conversations. When I brought it up, the subject usually dropped like a lead balloon, as if it were distasteful. It seems natural to honour the teachings of these kind and saintly people who are hosting us, and yet the conclusions that we reach risk being misguided if we fail to take this perspective on board. By the end of the retreat, however, I felt much more hopeful that our future work will embrace a more AQAL approach.

We talked a lot about sacred space: what it is and how to create it. Sitting across the circle from Mike the complexity man, with his love of nature and deep understanding of the paradoxes surrounding us, I had the insight that our mother earh, the blue-green Gaia jewel, our planetary home, is the mother of all sacred spaces. We just need to awaken to the fact.

So clearly, the sacred space is in our own selves. In our inner silence and our deep seeing and listening.

On Saturday, we had five hours of silence. As I quietened down, and my mind dropped some of its busy-ness and my prehension sank back down into my body, I could sense myself being drawn into patterning. Describing it later,  I had the image of photographic paper floating quietly in the developing solution, as patterns gradually emerged into awareness. It was important not to grasp at them until they became fully clear... It's not about the intellect. It's not about me at all. Thankfully, my job is to diminish. To retreat. Which puts me back on the path of surrender, still unable to articulate what it is I'm surrendering to. Just releasing the little tensions as they arise, and keeping on listening. Loosening my throat in readiness to speak the truths I perceive, when they are ready to be spoken.

After our silence, Dadi spoke to us. It seems there was a prophecy made by the founder of the BKs, Brahma Baba, that things would speed up and groups of individuals would emerge

with the consciousness to bring the world to its tipping point into the necessarity awareness of sacred space...

It seemed that Dadi and her sisters were happy with the calling of this group of people. The BKs will continue to support the edge of emergence by hosting these retreats.

But what is it that's emerging? From this group, in all our sameness and diversity, Doug Cohen spoke of the new type of leadership needed in these times, in the context of the emergence of a global citizen's movement.

"A specific type of leadership is required that would have the authority and resources to convene and maintain the dialogues for developing shared visions and perspectives. A global citizens' movement might develop a new form of leadership—movement diplomats—that would complement civil society’s paid staff, charismatic visionaries, influential philanthropists, community organizers, and organizational heads. Trained and supported directly by organizations or communities, these diplomats would be charged with the task of building systemic coalitions. They would seek to translate the rhetoric of different factions, foster communication, and find common ground. They would provoke learning in their own organizations in addition to reaching out to form alliances. Ideally, this new evolution in leadership would include core competencies of facilitation, strategic dialogue, systems thinking, and familiarity with future scenarios and the requirements for a sustainable world. This new role of leadership would not replace other necessary types of leadership, but would complement them in helping to maintain the balance between coherence and diversity within a global citizens' movement.

"This difficult work of diplomacy, often unglamorous and contentious, could become a highly respected and influential form of leadership. If such roles are given recognition and support, a network of movement diplomats and diplomatic training programs could help a systemic movement overcome barriers of language, class, region, and outdated “issue-silos”. It would be through the work of these diplomats that spaces for engaged dialogue would be developed, multiplied, and enhanced. Movement diplomats could be a key to developing coherence while avoiding the evolution of stultifying movement hierarchies."

And so what has emerged is that our task is perhaps to presence these new leaders. To help bring them to the world stage. What training and what processes are needed? What is in their toolkit? What are their practices? Where is their community? They are the Shambala warriors, perhaps. Whatever else, it is a task worth our attention.

The fellow zaadzsters present were Jeroen, Nader, Mushin, Morel, Jo, Doug. I'll be inviting the others over the coming days... :-)

And all the photos I took are here

I wish to pay tribute to the vision of George Por, my friend and mentor on the "off-piste" adventure of evolutionary agency that we are in together.

"A world in which people's capacity to reach their full potential is strengthened by all human organizations. A world that makes obsolete the alienating division of work and life. A world in which work as creative self-expression ceases to be the privilege of the few.

A world in which organizations are responsible to the whole - their members, communities, and the biosphere. They foster the emergence of unusually productive synergies that arise from webs of healthy, mutually supportive relationship.

A world in which organizations are guided by the collective wisdom of their members. Their measure of wisdom is in their responsible choices that reduce waste and fear, and increase joy, awareness, creativity in the organization, its members and all social organisms touched by it."

George has been steadfastly holding this unspeakably beautiful vision through thick and thin for the past 20 years. It speaks to me very strongly and resonates with my own, which is much less sharply articulated (ahem... that's a euphemism).

You can find more of George's work at EvolutionaryNexus and CommunityIntelligence.

Ten days ago I spent almost four days with eight other women engaging in a bizarre evolutionary passtime called moving the edge. To the extent that we knew what we were letting ourselves in for, we were prepared for anything. That’s what being on the edge is about. We soon learned that our edges were very different.

So what is "The" edge? Judy and Ria blogged about our process at the time, as they perceived it. I was too busy being in the process, witnessing, engaging in my own form of visual harvesting, and being flat out exhausted at the end of the day to write anything much at the time. But a number of things happened, as far as I could see.

Firstly, I realised almost as it was happening that we were going through the different stages of community building described by Scott Peck in his book "A different drum". This process, it seems to me, cannot be faked or staged. It can only be gone through. I wonder whether it is true to say that if it hasn’t been gone through, there can be no "true community". All I can say is that once we got through it, the quailty of our being together was totally different. The photo you see above was taken at the end of our time together. I think that shows.

Secondly, I was suprised at how much time I spent in my "wrathful" manifestation. Particularly in calling out the "shadow of feminine green". This is what I journalled at the time:

"There’s fire and rebellion in me. Wrathful Dakini. I can’t believe how stifled I feel by the group’s norms. The monster political correctness in feminine guise. It’s all too nice, it’s all too respectful - paying lipservice to depth. And all the while, consensus prevents anyone from being authentic.

"What would a group be like in which each person could be fully who we are and free to express ourselves in our own way? I’m very aware of the shortcomings of language to express what has been happening here. Fire hits the green swamp. What is the world asking us to do? The question might be too big for Action Learning (that attempt fizzled out mid-process, usurped by the abdicated leadership and not defended by the others). But it’s not to big to respond to: it’s asking us to evolve. Because from our current level we can’t help. We can only continue to contribute to the problem."

Thirdly, what happened - in terms of Theory U - was that half way through the third day we finally slipped "through the eye of the needle" at the bottom of the U curve, and entered a collective space which I can only describe as mysterious, enlightened grace. We all felt it. The best explanation I have found so far of this phenomenon comes from Otto Scharmer himself: " Going through the eye of the needle is a threshold experience that happens at the bottom of the U at "point zero" between the downward and the upward path. The eye-of-the-needle experience has been described as "birth" or "breaking through a membrane." Going through the eye of the needle is better understood in terms of what it does to the nature of the individual-collective relationship. The essence and, to some extent the mystery, of the eye-of-the-needle experience is a very subtle switch in how individuals relate to the collective whole of the community (or team or organization) they are part of."

As this happened, we more or less spontaneously organised ourselves into a systemic constellation around a question which had been snagging our attention the whole time: What is it that the world’s leaders need in order to take the next step in opening doors for planetary healing? You can read some of the story of the constellation here. I’ll be posting up more insights elsewhere when I’ve finished harvesting them. The long and short of it, after the constellation we spent the last 24 hours of our time together as a "circle being". 

Lastly, something about leadership. I just by chance came across a small piece on leadership by Martin Ludvigsen which sums up perfectly what we experienced. In answer to the question "What is a leader?":

"A leader engages leadership.

"Leadership should be seen as an occurrence that is not necessarily tied to a person. The best groups work where leadership is shared. The person taking leadership at any given time is the one with a strong intention towards moving forward or any other image of the future.

"All this demands some kind of collective intelligence or respect for the dynamic of a group. When this is misunderstood leadership becomes someone’s and then the doors are open for power struggles and ego-battles.

"The leader is the person IN leadership. This requires that he or she is speaking for the community that is led.

"If you want to be a leader for the sake of being on top of someone else, then this will probably lead to sickness in your organization since you act from personal ego, insecurity and the lust for power for power sake.

"If you want to be a leader because you want to move the world - the only thing you must do, as i see it, is to be constantly awake and stay on the edge of your own existence and the world.

"If you are not at the edge why should you be a leader?"

In our case, the first step was when the two original conveners of the group relinquished leadership to the group. The ensuing chaos was then held by these two women (an act of leadership nonetheless) until the voice of leadership recognisably spoke through one of the other women. From then on, the voice moved from throat to throat most organically. It made me think of a small furry creature that crept from lap to lap around the circle as the energy drew it.

The hardest thing, now that our Circle Being has moved into the past, is to know what to do with what happened. My sense is that every time a group comes together and moves beyond being a collection of disparate egos to speak from the middle, in that space beyond individuality (which won’t happen just because we want it to - there seems to be a mysterious movement of grace involved), we are making it easier for it to happen next time. Laying down the groove that will become the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness. Which - it is becoming clear to those that inquire into this question - will be a collective one. So in that sense, we don’t have to do anything. We did it while we were together. The Circle Being fulfilled its Circle Task.

The content of our inquiry and insights are also important, however. And they won’t survive unless we move with them out into the world. That is part of my commitment now. To chronicle what we spoke about. It’s feels hard, sometimes, being a working mum with school-aged kids and a full-time day job, when my larger life is calling me to evolutionary agency that I have no choice but to say "YES" to. I spent all of last week popping in and out of overwhelm - feeling the urgency of getting down my insights before they fade, while being continually yanked back into "now and next week" by said day job. And all the while, the newly acquired commitments of ongoing life keep on piling up. It would be good to be able to go off-line sometimes, to step off the timeline to recount what is happening at the speed of life all around.

We all came to the gathering with different expectations of what would happen. Mine had to do with moving beyond the tension between our individual selves, lives, pain, journeys, stories and agendas to become the collective organism that we could be, together, for a short while, to pool our separate sensory strengths in service to a collective inquiry that would be timely and to the benefit of the greater whole. At the time, I wrote "We women can get caught up in the particular, so letting go into the general might also be a challenge to us. In this global inquiry, we shall be using our bodies as sensory organs of a single organism. We can succeed in this only to the extent that our own bodies don’t also have to process our own personal, individual, ego stuff. Can we leave that outside the circle for an hour or two?" In the end we managed a whole 24 hours. There was clarity, energy, humour, spaciousness, fluency, humility, boldness, lightness, courage, inspiration and grace. If this is what happens when people make it through the eye of the needle, then there is hope for the human race.

I was again reminded of the power of hosting when I saw Ashley Cooper’s blog entry introducing her short Woven Essence film about a gathering of hosts at the end of last year.

It’s hard for me to overstate the power and the beauty and the utter relevance of this form of collective practice for the world today. If there is one pattern that could save humanity from our collective madness, then in my view it is this.

It isn't every day that I get a message in my mailbox from one of the EU Commission's political leaders.

Today there was a joint message one from Siim Kallas and Stavros Dimas, encouraging us to support local environmental action:

"Following a French initiative, a group of Belgian NGOs has launched a campaign for a symbolic 5-minute "blackout" today (Thursday 1 Feburary) between 19.55 and 20.00. The objective is to underline the threat faced from global warming and to draw attention to the individual actions that can be taken to reduce energy use and the emission of greenhouse gasses. This message fits well with the Commission's own campaign against climate change.

"This initiative is being widely followed throughout Belgium. Given the Commission's important role in the fight against climate change, we urge staff members to support this campaign by ensuring that you switch off all lights and electrical appliances before you leave your office on Thursday.  We also hope that you will follow this initiative at home in order to maximise its impact in order to further raise the importance of climate change."

Reassuringly, the campaign organisers have warned the Belgian energy authorities of the campaign, so the power grid won't be caught by surprise by a (hopefully) massive drop in electricity consumption...

I spent Christmas this year with my extended family in the forest close to Gothenburg in Sweden. Apart from the unseasonable mildness of the weather, which miffed the kids (no snow), it was cool to be together with these people. We were all staying in the house of my parents-in-law, ’we’ being myself and my two children, my parents, my (soon-to-be-ex) husband and his girlfriend, my brother-in-law and his friend... Everybody mucked in as we surfed on the chaordic edge of overcrowding at the most stressful time of the year for families. And we had a ball!




After the first week, the only ones left were me and the kids and my parents-in-law. I got to spend a heavenly week with no distractions or interruptions, able for the first time in months to read, write and contemplate; to harvest some of the fabulous conversations I have participated in in recent months, and follow my own rhythm of sleeping, waking, eating, contemplating and taking fresh air and exercise.

You can see the pictures here.

We saw in the new year in a tower room high on a hill in Gothenburg, from which we had a 180° view of the entire city erupting in a spontaneously self-organising conflagration of fireworks. I have never seen anything like it and it struck me as a very apt metaphor for the new dimension of consciousness I am emerging into these days, as I awaken to witness the flowing, self-organising movements of human society as it shifts gear - particularly here in affluent western Europe - into a dawning realisation: it is time to move out of the competitive adolescence of our species and into  collaborative adulthood. How else are we going to interrupt the destructive patterns that will lay us low if we don’t awaken to our leadership and dare to surf on the evolutionary edge?

Just got this from my dear friend George. I’d better pass it on. It looks like somebody’s beginning to understand.

"Friends, this is a sign of the changing of the times!

 A time of asking ourselves, are we on the edge?
 Are we getting all the leverage we need to and can get from the emergent forces of co-creation
 that are transforming the world?  

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2006

 
"But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."