He shared with me his fear and lack of clarity about exchanging the security of a paycheck for the freedom of becoming all what he can. He also expressed his desire “to get full financial benefits for the value I will be adding to the world (ugh, still takes something to say this ).” I post my reply with his permission.

I understand the “ugh” because: how could you know the value? You can know the purity and generosity of your heart, the sharpness and agility of your mind, the sense of giving and receiving in your hands, but not their value. Their value can be co-created and known by only who are on the receiving end on your gifts.

If you let your fear make you too concerned about your value for the world, that would keep you in the narrow perspective of the “I.” Who is that, anyway? From its perspective it’s almost impossible to gain actionable clarity aligned with the wisdom that is present in your moments of Open Will. Its antecedent, your Open Heart is the key to the wisdom that you’re seeking. And as you know, “there’s no way to love because love is the way.” I ask myself, do you love enough Evolution/Life/the Spiral, to seek out the opportunities to generate a huge momentum for it and dedicate your talent and full engagement to it? My answer: it seems that is what you are doing...

If so, then use your FlexFlow capacity to integrate “structures, and forms into evolutionary flows” (Don Beck) that will inform your StriveDrive about healthy directions to take for its growth in you. However, when somebody is playing at your stage on the Spiral, FlexFlow cannot manifest its fullness without some guidance from the a WholeView, a communal meme carried by what the “we” is becoming. Keep your eyes on the center of the we, and you will realize the potential of the value that you are bringing to the world.

Who is that we and the We? The We (with capital W) is the millions on the evolutionary movement without realizing it as such. Besides the tip of the wave, they include also the people of HumanBond and StriveDrive. To be a bit more precise: those in HumanBond who, when confronted by chaos and disorder, feel the frustration of not having effective tools/approaches to deal with it, and; those in StriveDrive who, when facing crises, want to exercise their response-ability, with bigger impact.

 

The we (with lower case w) is those in your environment who are joining forces, combining intentions, synergizing strategies, and creating sustainable containers for cohering action. When you find your tribe don’t just soak in its warmth; clarify roles and offer accountabilities.

 

Thank you dear friend, for the sincerity and passion of your quest that inspired me to sense into and think through what I’ve just written.

In India, one of my teachers said once something like this: a man is not a whole human being until he marries his inner woman and a woman is not a whole human being until she marries her inner man. That saying has been serving me for the last 30 years, as a conduit of my observations and deep learning… 

 

I’ve been yearning for that marriage for many years, imagining it as an “inner wedding”, until I discovered that it’s not one event but a moment-to-moment flow as natural as breathing in and out. (It’s that experience that I tried to capture with “In our every breath… .”) Natural may be, but not without conscious intention.

 

Remembering to act only from inner silence and deep, generative attention is not yet an automatic groove that appears at the outset of every emerging situation. Yet, I know, that androgynous stage ispossible, and the journey towards it is already richly rewarding.

 

“The androgynous individual is simply a female or male who has a high degree of both feminine and masculine traits.” Source: Wikipedia

 

Androgyny is not the blurring of our gender differences but a stage in our development, at which women and men are able to paint with the full palette of feminine/masculine faculties, outside the biological ones.

 

I knew little about all that during my first ½-year stay in Berkeley, California, in 1978, when I discovered a print shop providing T-shirt printing services. The sign in the window said, “You create it, We print it.” Next day, I returned with my original “artwork,” and the day after I could proudly put on my T-shirt emblazoned with this motto:

Our steady attention to what is moving us
in the luminous moments of co-inspiration
transforms the fleeting experience into continuous celebration
of the awakening of the collective learner
to its potential for higher intelligence and wisdom,
capable to hold more compassion and complexity.

More conversation with Darina. She wrote:

 > The need for massive engagement & urgent collective involvement on as many levels as possible is higher than ever, as are the stakes of not responding to it.

Indeed! As Tracy Huston put it, in Inside Out – Stories and Methods for Generating Collective Will to Create the Future We Want :

“A mighty movement of a kind never before enacted would be required to make real change... The magnitude of the response must be equal to the magnitude of the challenge... How can we intentionally create such a movement that allows us to shed the old stuck self and ways of being and thus emerge into a new state of co-existence?”

Effortless intentional creation is dancing with the discovery of  how we are such a movement.

> there is still substantial gap and lag between the technological advancements and our capabilities to apply them consciously with more joy, creativity and meaning for the good of the whole and for the evolution of our collective consciousness.

Learning to significantly and rapidly reduce that lag requires community action research. (Co-)designing such a research is both dear to my heart and central to the market offers of CommunityIntelligence.
 

> I do resonate with your clear vision and very eloquent expression of it totally: "I imagine it as a learning and action community (both in the sense of a "community of learners" and a "community that learns") dedicated to liberate the human spirit from every internal and external condition enslaving it. Sharing our learning edges, our passionate inquiries, and deeply listening to each other's driving questions, may lead to the discovery of unimagined  synchronicities and synergies..." Absolutely!
 
> What I see as one of the challenges is actually what WE need to do both individually  AND collectively, inner and outer work and play, to match the complexity of these needs, calls and coming shifts. That growing and living ecosystem of shared ideas, connections and actions needs both visions and actions, theory and practice, ancient and post-modern, personal and transpersonal, local and global, micro and macro, male and female, minds and hearts, bodies and spirits, human and divine in order to evolve fast enough with the timeless shift of the ages we live in.

I could not have said any better! The ecosystem of shared ideas, connections and actions can thrive and support us, only if we give it all what you speak of.

D a r i n a wrote in an email about her current experience:

> meeting new ideas, places and people very intensely and synchronistically

I replied:

It is happening with more and more of us.  It feels like W-E-mergence is moving into higher gear.
We are just scratching the surface and doing so, laying down new Kosmic grooves in consciousness.

Waves of pronoia are coming in, yet incredible amount of man-made, unnecessary suffering
is still occurring everyday, threatening with worse-case scenarios.
What is our answer?

What is our answer that can seduce into the ecstasy of co-creation
a large enough number of lovers of beauty, truth, and goodness,
to awaken the massive collective intelligence and wisdom that humankind needs in this hour?

Source and Spirit are the primary manifestations of the One.
Honoring both is learning from both.
Doing and being it is our path to wholeness.

Together, they keep weaving our lives into a magic carpet.
The inner woman and inner man dance on it,
as they fly over uncharted territories...

Reboot is "Calling all practical visionaries of the world!" It's an event to reboot our minds, play on the edge of technology, and re-dream our culture. Its is a brainchild of Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, in its 9th successful year, happening in Copenhagen May 31 - June 1, 2007. The event is designed for 400 people ans is sold out but you can still participate in the Reboot online community, by registering (for free) here.

I will co-facilitate there an experiment in Boosting Our Collective Intelligence. The subtitle is: Presencing the future we care for, by liberating the potential of communities of practice and life-work communities.

Let me know whether you'd want to learn more about it, as it unfolds.

I am curious of what those Zaadz Wizards and users, who are familiar with Spiral Dynamics, think about the color of the Zaadz enteprise. Is it Green or Yellow or Turquoise, or neither, or all of the above? (If this is already discussed somewhere else, please point to it.)

Brian wrote:

> In 2007 we'll be focusing on empowering people in the business of empowering people as we offer micro-communities for life coaches, veggie restaurant owners, meditation and yoga teachers and other “conscious entrepreneurs” passionate about making a difference in the world and getting paid to do so.

It's a good focus, no doubt, but I'm wondering whether it is not too narrow compared with a fuller potential for growth with integrity. The examples you gave are practitioners in the business of empowering people, one person at a time. What about those who focus on empowering workplace communities, making social institutions wiser, practitioners of system change? Why  don't we see here more of the artists of the Art of Hosting, Action Learning, World Cafe, Collective Intelligence, Appreciative Inquiry, and some of the other 60 organizational change methods and disciplines described in the Change Handbook. Even if they are not in the current focus of Zaadz, they could have shown up here in a larger number. If they didn't, there must be a reason for that. Let me guess why it is so.

My guess is that their primary interest is not social networking per se, not even "social networking with a cause" but social networking with results that support their work on not only empowering people but empowering communities and changing whole systems. They would need collaborative workspaces, knowledge ecologies, and change processes embedded in software, so that they can invite their client systems to play with and explore them in a safe environment.

That's the need around which I built a business concept. It has  generated some interest in the "conscious business" funding circles but when I saw Zaadz having already implemented slightly over  half of the platform functions I wanted to build, I suspended pursuing it and started to reflect whether it wouldn't make more sense to join forces with you, given our high degree of philosophical and spiritual alignment and complementarity of professional competences and networks. From my perspective, it would. Would you guys want to explore that possibility?

Brian, thank you for joining this conversation. It seems, we need the presence of the evolutionary entrepreneur-philosopher to take it further.  You are a still rare embodiment of an archetype sooooo essential to creating a world where business (and all social institutions) are designed to help us realize our highest potential!

One of things I am passionate about in this conversation is the question of what Zaadz can do to make that archetype less rare? I know, it is already doing a lot, AND i see many  specific, untapped  contexts, tools,  practices that could up the game. In fact, so many that it wouldn't be possible to jam them into blog entries unless I became a full-time "Zaadz development" blogger, :-) something that I couldn't efford beside my "day job."

What draws me here, what motivates me to include in my morning  practice a contemplation about the fututre of Zaadz, then write about what comes up, is the spirit expressed in your words:

> you're correct. Our intention has been to create an oasis that honors the highest within us and gives us that much needed sanctuary that inspires and empowers us to live at our highest potential.

It is the same evolutionary impulse, the manifestation of the same Authentic Self that is working through you, the Zaadz team, and a good number of Zaadzsters, including myself. From our shared  commitment to realize the highest potential flows something that I feel as a moral obligation. It is  to put my professional talents--as evolutionary leadership coach, online community architect, and knowledge ecologist--in service of Zaadz. Same is true about the excitement of co-discovering a way that could bring together Evolutionary Nexus and Zaadz into a new, mutually empowering configuration.