Collective Emergence: morning, afternoon and evening

This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend in Copenhagen, a member of the Danish CIPI (Collective Intelligence Practitioners Initiative). Among other fascinating subjects, we touched on the dynamics of collective evolution in spiritual movements that allow and encourage a whole range of participation intensity. We noticed a variety of needs that attracts members and a corresponding variety in their capacity to sustain the quality of presence reached together, when they are not in the same space. We also revisited the Wilberian distinctions of “states” and “stages,” where higher states are gifts but higher stages must be earned by practice.

This afternoon, a friend from Amsterdam forwarded me Andrew Cohen’s article on A Collective Emergence. It came very timely, opening a whole new perspective not only on the conversation of the morning but alos, how I want to live my life. After seeing the powerful patterns of meaning that emerged from my silent conversation with Andrew’s article, I cannot back go back to live the same way as if I wouldn’t have experienced what I did. Here are some excerpts from A Collective Emergence, with notes from my contemplating them. (Emphasis is added by me.)

“As we progress in our engagement with spiritual evolution, we will notice that our attention gradually moves from being focused only on the individual to becoming attuned to the collective, until finally it is drawn directly to the field of consciousness itself.”

“While this process infinitely transcends the individual, paradoxically it is completely dependent upon the individual. Personal enlightenment is an individual attainment; radical impersonal evolutionary enlightenment is a collective emergence. But if it is to be more than a short-lived foray into the glory of our higher potentials, the stability of that collective emergence is entirely dependent upon the individuals upholding a very high standard.”

Radical impersonal evolutionary enlightenment – just like that, without commas, because the first three words are not a list of adjectives but inseparable parts of a new, emergent whole, a new groove in the evolution of consciousness. For many, it is inconceivable to imagine, let alone experience a state of enlightenment beyond the individual. I wise man said once, never argue with anybody’s experience, so I don’t. But neither do I deny my own, the experiences of “short-lived foray into the glory of our higher potentials” that were necessary steps, giving me and us glimpses but, by themselves, they couldn’t equip us with what was needed to realize that potential in the world outside the enlightened communication or the magic in the middle conversations.

What has been their function, they did it well: to awaken us to the possibility and experience of inter-subjective consciousness raising. However, Andrew’s A Collective Emergence article points to an even more enticing possibility that became a reality for me as I was reading, then contemplating it with the following question in the back of my mind. What is the next edge that my experience is asking me to live on?

“If a group of people has met in this extraordinary shared revelation, what happens when they leave that intersubjective context and go their separate ways? Will they each honor and uphold the higher level that they reached together? This is the moral imperative inherent in the evolutionary process at the leading edge. If the individual feels obligated to sustain his or her own highest attainment, which has occurred in an intersubjective context, then individual transformation becomes the only moral response to the collective emergence.”

The last sentence encapsulates the essential story of my recent past, since I first participated in enlightened communication circles, in a retreat with Andrew, in 2002. Experiencing that the quality of attention/presence/consciousness that I am able to sustain over time is, actually, my contribution to the whole, struck me as full of implications for who I am and how I want to live. (By “whole,” here I mean all who rally with the banner of conscious evolution, comprised by the first millions of people, including those who may have not yet realized the constant transformation that it is asking from each of us.)

“What is actually coming into being, at the level of consciousness, is that which compels each individual to rise up and meet the very potential that he or she is participating in creating. That’s emergence; that’s conscious evolution. The individual, in relationship with others, is literally creating that which will demand his or her transformation. That’s nondual evolutionary enlightenment at the most subtle and profound level... That is the beauty in the process of conscious evolution: together we generate this miraculous higher potential and then we each find ourselves obligated by our own development.”

It is so true! Yet one has to experience “collective emergence” to get the fuller sense of what Andrew wrote about. Intellectual grasping is not enough because it’s not implicating, it doesn’t call for stepping up to the challenge of reaching and sustaining higher stages, for the sake of the whole. Sustaining is the responsibility of all who experienced them at least once and awakened to that moral obligation. I am talking about a felt sense of “I need to drop the bundle of bad habits called ego to realize the highest potential of not only me but also me as the world.”

An inner-driven moral obligation is minimum but not sufficient ingredient to the victory of the long march of consciousness through the wastelands of our individual and collective egos. Another one is following through with transformative practices, also individual and collective. Only sustained practices can break the power of habits that we built in a time of our story when they served us, and that now block our moving on.

By “practices” I don’t mean only spiritual practices; or yes I do if we take the latter in a sense as broad as to include the use of inter-subjective consciousness (Lower Left) for generating inter-objective (Lower Right) results, e,g.: addressing tough, whole system problems at increasing scale. To create evidence showing the power of the interplay of that kind of inter-subjective and inter-objective, we need to form sustainable communities of practice.

Such communities are widely known in large organizations, where they mean, most frequently, “groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better." (Etienne Wenger). Practitioners of collective emergence will, most likely, form communities that include being as well as doing practices. Collective intelligence, the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, requires both.

This evening, when I will put the day in bed, with a final contemplation of the lessons learned today, these will be my two inter-related focusing questions: How to integrate better in my life the work of a student of Evolutionary Enlightenment, social innovator, social scientist, and facilitator of organizational change and transformnation? Where will I find my community (-ies) of practice?

There’s more to say about what "A Collective Emergence" means to me but that should be the subject of another blog entry.