MTE Chronicle of Feb 26, 2006

A man from Holland found us through the Collective Wisdom Initiative website and called, noting and appreciating the self-reflective, transparent quality of our process together.  And a number of people from the Jan Evolutionary Salon have written very energized, encouraging letters, even though the writers are not attending MTE.

We posted travel info and revised some pages on our site.  One of us wrote an article entitled "Beyond Words:  Body, Movement, Art, Nature" and posted it with two other MTE perspectives dealing with consciousness and interconnectedness.  She used the EvolutionaryNexus blog to point to these articles.  We are beginning to use the evolutionary blogs as pointers to wiki and forum posts.

Some of us who are Danes met locally. We started with no agenda, but an agenda emerged.  We noticed -- and were confused by -- the paradox that in order to be aware of our practices, we have to use a practice to reflect on them.  So the effort folds back on itself.  In the end, we decided to gather monthly to live the "moving the edge" inquiry in a more focused way together on an ongoing basis.

One of us compiled a list of individuals at various stages of registration and sent that list to the convening team and to prospects, as well as posting it on EvolutionaryNexus.  Included in those communications was an invitation to registrants to withdraw if "numbers" mattered to them, or to specify how many other attendees they needed before they would want to attend MTE.  This same convenor sent out a nudge to his personal network list and attendees at the second Evolutionary Salon, encouraging MTE registration, and we decided to see if Jean-François Noubel would be willing to promote MTE to his network.  We sense we have reached the networks we can readily reach.

We noted it was a challenge to target a specific number of attendees, and to stress on it while we tried to achieve that, and then to let it go, and shift our attention to the needs and questions of the individual people who are coming.  We need now to shift our focus to stewarding a growing conversation with prospective attendees up to and into the MTE event in three weeks.

Charlotte is travelling and Carl dropped out of the convenor group to deal with personal issues.  Both will be kept in the info loop, and Carl still plans to attend the MTE event.

In our Sunday Feb 26 phone call we were concerned about our focus:  Does MTE needed more explicit direction or the naming of some specific inquiry we were gathering around?  Is it enough to hold the space, or should we be clear about what we are holding the space FOR?  If the intention is too open, attention disperses.  If the intention is too focused, it cuts off emergence of new possibilities.

We noted the role of energetics in this work.  Our invitation has a certain energy that resonates in certain people (like us!) who then feel drawn to attend.  That resonance is very implicit, but vibrates with potential.  There is something there that can be sensed into and drawn upon, before or during the MTE gathering.  We wondered if we convenors should formally sense into that implicit resonance and see what explicit question or questions surface that we could then take to the MTE event.

We looked at the very explicit structure and inquiries that shaped the first Evolutionary Salon (May 2005) around evolutionary science and social activism. We noted that the second salon (Jan 2006) also had specially crafted questions, but that it convened largely around energetics, with many people not even reading the invitation or the questions, but picking up the energy from the people who invited them.  Considerable attention was recently given to creating convening questions for Salon 3 (May 2006).  Interestingly, some of us noticed that we couldn't remember the questions for ANY of these salons.  One of us raised the possibility that the very act of creating the questions may have been part of convening the field and holding the space for these events, even if people didn't read or remember them.  At least offering questions gives attendees a sense of intention, that someone wants to know something, learn something, from their participation.

We considered having the first part of the MTE event be a World Cafe or other exercise in which the whole group (not just the convenors) explored what question or questions wanted to emerge and be addressed at the event.

Then we noticed the fact that questions in such contexts tend to evolve.  Each individual's burning questions change over time, especially when they are addressed in the context of other people's burning questions.  This led us to decide to establish an online forum where convenors and participants could post burning questions when and as they came up, and read each other's questions, so the questions could evolve among us and become an unfolding ecosystem of inquiry.

This opened up the idea that we were living on and leaning into the moving edge of our collective intention for the gathering.  The fact is that the edge of our evolving intention(s) will unfold/move whether we attend to it or not, but that evolution will be speeded and deepened by our living on that edge consciously and participating in actively moving it.  One way to do this is the online forum we had decided to establish.  

One of us suggested that "moving the edge" might be a special mode of being conscious of our participation in the world -- and inviting groups to be conscious of their collective participation -- as it is happening.  In this sense we BECOME the moving edge of evolution (or at least a facet of it) as it unfolds.  

So our exercise regarding intention for MTE involves being aware of the unfolding direction and exercising conscious, active participation in that unfolding.  We are holding the space for collective intelligence to unfold and deepen into itself.  And as we do that, our "direction" is to develop our awareness of the unfoldment of direction!  We are called to lean into the implicit nature of the MTE invitation, and trust that it can and will unfold from there.

One of us suggested that we now know what it is like to be an enlightened community (at least in a gathering or planning sessions).  So now the question is:  What are the consequences and implications of our sense that we can access wisdom or Buddha-mind or collective intelligence in the middle?  What does it mean that we know this?

We then explored using the Open-BC network that George and Fernanda work with, to promote and continue our organizing sessions, both asynchronous and synchronous.

We closed with an appreciation of the beauty of holding space for unfolding direction, noting that it unites feminine and masculine energies.