ES3 - Tuesday Evening Circle

ES3 - Tuesday Evening Circle
May 24, 2006

•    Collective intelligence is my life's work.
•    It doesn't have to be so hard.
•    Hold the tension between the positive vision and complexity of the evolutionary story.
•    Conscious evolution is self-awareness of one's increasing capacitance for complexity and the conversation that arises out of that.
•    I am the center of the universe but you are too.
•    Waking up is hard to do except when it's not.
•    Open heartedness is never naïve.
•    Lion was right.
•    This group is frustrated by a lack of shared specific compelling intent but it is united by a desire to belong and make a difference.
•    We are growing into the people we are waiting for.
•    As each of becomes what we want to see in the world, we'll have the world we want and know exactly what to do.
•    Organizing around virtues is essential so that every individual group who shows our principles will grow in congruence.  
•    Make perfect your will and to think you not of the harvesting but only of the proper soil.
•    Sometimes I love you.  Sometimes I love you.
•    There is nothing to change or do.  
•    Emergent wisdom needs many vessels of expression.
•    Convergent understandings embody emergent capabilities.
•    We still don't know who we are, but we are in love with who we are becoming.
•    Team building.
•    We got as far as the groan zone but didn't make it through the eye of the needle.
•    The world is unfolding perfectly for awakening the consciousness necessary for the next stage of evolution.
•    The invitation is to enter fully into an evolutionary story and to help others enter theirs.
•    I want to hear the song in the middle that brings forth all our voices, every one.
•    We can handle language better.
•    I want to see a matrix of info up over there.
•    Know your dream and live it.
•    Embracing dynamic tensions unfolds the way.
•    Once we as a collective have fully digested and expressed the evolutionary metanarrative in our own words we will then have a true great story.

Joy's offering  & contribution of non-ordinary reality - Tarot reading on behalf of the collective from the Osho Zen deck

Teacher - master
Challenge - go with the flow
Now - comparison
Outcome - friendship

We want to call into being that which can now be named:

Barry McWaters wrote the first book on conscious evolution.  I studied Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo back 30 years ago.  Have had the strong realization that the thinking, capacity for thinking, systems for facilitation, how groups can come together and produce the next level, have actually evolved in that time.  What we have learned in personal dynamics, enneagram, different parts of ourselves.  I want to acknowledge that evolution in our systems, in our ways of being with each other, in our capacity to discern, gives me hope that we can continue to evolve.

I want to speak to the issue of patience; having a perspective of what we are doing here.  We are at the pinnacle of a complex world and we are trying to figure out what to do.  It takes time, it's messy; it's difficult.  We can't just rush into action without thinking of the questions.  I want to expand our perspective on the degree of difficulty of what we are addressing.  If you are in charge of the world, how carefully do you want to think about what you are doing.  I'm reminded of a song by Charlie Murphy - "There are those who want to set fire to our world.  We are in danger.  There is only time to work slowly…

[As informal notetaker, I got too caught up in the circle and stopped typing…I have regrets seeing this end here so abruptly and wanting to continue reading and remembering; maybe someone else has the rest of this evening; J'espere.]

Communications Technology- Augmented Reality

Session hosted by Lion 

Augmented reality, on the way to virtual tech.  ideas like a computer can be something someone else uses, or you could have a view of your own into another place, but in a mixed reality there can be both computers and projectors and interactive tech, a mixed social experience, then you can have augmented reality, where maybe you wear glasses, where if you look here, you see someone who couldn’t be here today.  Already business people have a display that is not 3D.  I want to communicate that this is happening it’s very real.  It can be very good for you.  Intel is an arms dealer for democracies.  Weapons are called computer chips used to communicate messages of mass change.  At Christmas we’ll see wee controllers.  This is a part of this trajectory.  Playstastion 3 doing more advanced, the wee is cheaper and the interface device is it realizes itself in space.

In terms of communication, it’s a trend towards mixed reality, more natural interfaces.  Now body language can be communicated across afar.  

People are making silent messaging controllers in this book, “Rainbows End”, Vernor Vinge, it’s about life in twenty something.  He’s a programmer well respected, the IETF, or IEEE are the ones who determine the standards of http etc, bodies of people who determine the protocols and standards. 

People wearing vests, can use controllers with miniscule motions, silent.  Gregscript, a shorthand.   People will be functionally telepathic. 

Speech recognition, NASA and two colleges have this tech, sub vocal speech recognition, you think thoughts out loud in your head (think of dog’s twitching), the brain sends an imperfect suppressor signal.  When you read in a loud voice in your head, your mouth is making subtle motions.  The louder you shout in your head, at NASA the tech outs sensors on the throat and you can think with your thoughts.  Then translated, and put onto other people’s visors.  This was done last year,

The website:  unilog.com.  Sensors will still be required.  Can’t do it remotely?  You can shine a laser beam at a window and get the conversation in the room, this tech has long been had. 

When the tech develops to this point you can have protection devices.  Moving bodies willget expensive, so this will be useful.  Cybernetic interfaces, direct cord into the head story type things, that already exists, there are people who can see who could not see, they can see with limited vision.  Here’s the wire, here’s the head, here’s what the video says you can see, over the time of a month they say do you see anything, yes I see a dot, etc, and then they manually calibrate this thing.  It’s manually calibrated, very primitive.  More experiment than innovation.  It’s not two hundred years, it’s ten or fifteen years.

 There are projects to give all people in Africa a laptop. The hundred dollar laptop project.  Open source software. Those countries are heavily invested in tech.  Will poorer nations and people get to use these. 

Interfaces.  The blunt end of this.  More important things:  about how communications is changing.  Invisible people, so if you don’t wear the glasses they’re not there.  There’s more applications for this than there is time to explore.  And all you need is to integrate these things.

Search and analysis may be taught in schools taught rather than information. 

Imagine having a conversation with someone using this technology.  Imagine when you said a word, a model appeared in your hand.  Or imagine as you speak the words they log down beside you, so if you have a prior conversation that’s similar you could see the nodes.  In the Wikki culture, the text of conversation is folded into a page.  In order to teach new models, we have to collect the info, which is very laborious, because conversations have to be reconstructed.  Imagine that you are union, they have a view on the world, local politics, to communicate that you could write a big fat book, waying here’s our view on x,y,z.  If you could write it fast enough you could collect all the intelligence.  But it will be long, boring, dry.  Instead what if they gave you something to put on your web browser, so that any time your mayor’s name appears on the web, now a bubble pops up, saying your local union has a perspective on that, collected fro their Wikki or whatever…not just the mayor…anyone.  Augmenting the newspaper. Groups, informal groups, incorporation are going to be very important.  The internet blurs all those lines, you can automatically become a group.

This is the kinds of things, it’s not blunt like the interface, here we’re talking about transfer of ideas, different ways to think about ideas.  All the time someone said spiral dynamics.  I understand the map, so if some one said spiral dynamics and you saw and image. 

Holding the history of an object in your hand.  (remember gurdjieff)

Demographics information.   (I’ll talk about privacy at the end, it’s more than public or private)  There was the Howard Dean campaign.  The campaign was a massive force, he had these huge orgs that were enormously visible on the blog world, they could account for all their membership, a really eat campaign.  It was a whole movement.  Just occurred almost overnight.  There was an error in judgment almost universally the HD campaign was very good at counting its people, these other campaigns, don’t have that accuracy.  So they undercount.  Things are going to get more precise.  We’ll have demographic info like you’ve never seen.  When you see a perspective, you’ll see who believes this, what was the realm of influence there.  Maybe not names of people, but better stats.  There was a funny onion piece (satirical newspaper), talking about the response to the poll results of the response to the event…

Conversation can be fluidly moving from explanation, to document, to hypertext.  One day the books will talk to each other.  Marvin Minsk, research into AI.  Soft singularity and the hard.   The concept is that people develop tech that allows them to make better and better tech in shorter and shorter cycles.  I think we’ll merge with the machines cause if we don’t we’re toast”  A prevario scenario is that we merge with this.  Communication and dialogue are an intelligence.  Dialogue is sharing models, that’s how you teach a computer to think, so it can augment and learn about its models.  When you’re communcaitn gyou’re building intelligence.  We will communicate faster.  We need to balance this with the slow and the still and te present.  There will be Buddhist computer programs.  They will have beliefs, called heuristics.  Shortcuts.  This is my general model, metaphysical models where the map is clearly not the territory, we form beliefs that are part of our identity.  They will have moods and beliefs reflecting their owners.  Heuristics are rules like rules of thumb.  A collection of them could be called a worldview.  Ie, its generally better to tell the truth.  Another computer might believe in deviousness.

Link language is activated words, I ay something and it evokes a link to further information.  Linguistic User Interface, where computers listen to computers and look for relevant information. 

Lion is a Wikki expert.  In five year is don’t know if there’ll be anything called a wikki.  A wikki is a place on the internet where there are webpages, and at the bottom it says, edit this page. Then you can reshape it, and other people can reshape it.  You tend to put documents here, rather than messages.  There’s a few important aspects, something that’s easy to edit, “recent changes” is the name of the page, everyone’s watching, there’s no login, it’s secure because someone will just hit the revert button if someone fills it with spam.  There’s stuff to protect it automatically too.  Another important aspect is that the titles of the pages can become part of the language.  A frequent mistake is to have a long title.  You want titles like “Spiral Dynamics”  a word people can say in conversation a lot.  So in a good wikki, as soon as you say it, it links, so a person not in that conversation can see deeply into it.  Every community construct language reflecting their models of the world.  Right now its so hard to put a picture on line, it takes like half and hour.  Soon that will be easier.

“Illuminate”  you can talk to each other on line, and when she’s drawing you can see everyone.  Integrated platforms are very important.

Wikkis could die out in five years, because the fundamental ideas will be integrated into everything you use.

Who do you trust?  The BBC wrote an article, saying we know that you don’t trust us, we are in a transition time, we don’t know where this is going, we know it has something to do with trust in the media.

Most of my meaningful relationships are online.  It’s a global sympathy. 

Time zones are very important to this.  Business culture, have hired artificial intelligence, they pay people to be intelligent, we as ordinary citizens are acquiring business like capabilities.  

Book: “eastern standard tribe” Cory Doctorow notable for social emphasis, activist household, free schooled.  “Theme punks”

There’s always a day after even after we have deaths.

Movements never apologize.  The republican party is having struggles, they’re changing.

3D games are putting a lot of pressure on the developers.  So you shouldn’t have to ask, are you looking at this.  There’s so much conversation, that is painful.  Things that are transparent in real life, like interruptions, or other manners are not developed online.

PRIVACY:  privacy, people think engineers should be thinking about this number one right now.  The most info about you is already for sale.  Ie, your house payments, ask a librarian what he can find on people.  These things have always been public, business and politician have always a had a lock on the world. 

Privacy is in multiple grades.  Large orgs have always had systems for maintaining privacy.  Backups are dangerous, that’s an unencrypted copy of everything.  You need automatic deletion cycles...All the orgs, ideals ideas that we subscribe to have various needs, we subscribe to them for various reasons.  Some things must be done in private.  There must always be private.  Some tings can only be developed in public, in full light.  Software supports: this is just for me (and the system operator), then there’s everyone in the group can see this, then there’s everyone in the world can see this.  Presently the effort in people’s mind is that we wan to get private.  I want to argue that it’s good to be public.

The Intelligence communities, NSA, CIA etc, have a security classification scheme, and then there are categories within that.  This will happen online.  We’ll all have intelligence classification systems.  So much met-communication that wouldn’t happen in person.  It’s very costly.  It will go away with classification systems. 

The public space: there are things you can do in public, that you need to do in public, like explain a vision.  You’ll meet people in network.  Some people stay secret, some people stay public.  The spooks, there are people who are paranoid, who study cryptography.

People who want to oppose public activism will be proponents of the private. We will live more public lives.

Librarians are here to help you find info, not to service the books.

The midterm future, near term future.

10-20 year future lots of power as activist. 

Discussion and feedback on Peter's version of the Universe Story

In these pages, I invite a discussion around the contents and languaging of my book, Magic and Mystery in the Universe Story. You can download it here.

Evolutionary Media - Session Notes

“Evolutionary  Media” Session – 1:30 pm May 23, 2006
Integral Communication Strategies and Musings for the Planet

See:  http://www.evolutionarynexus.org/node/508

Core Inquiry:
 
What is the highest potential of a media system in service of the whole
that supports the acceleration and creation of the culture
and institutions we are envisioning?
 
Co-Creating Integral Second Tier Media
 
Deepening questions:
 
•    How does media and communications fit into conscious evolution and what is the relationship with the Images of the Future (see session notes)?

•    What would we like to see as a media system for a new wisdom culture?  What might it look like?  Do parts of it currently exist?  How can we support those places and build links?

•    What are the tools we’d need to create the next conscious step in the birthing of a new media infrastructure?  Who is already doing it?  How might we actively engage with making this more visible?  Mapping the current field and imagining the next steps?

•    What message is authentically compelling that can scale and what are the means to engage people with it?
 
Context:  Thomas Jefferson said 250 years ago that “Information is the currency of democracy.”  What would we say now?  Another point of reference is Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere; we see its presence now with us in the form of the Internet (see note below).
 
Current media situation:  Media and communications systems are largely controlled by multinationals with an interest in making huge profits from news and public affairs programming, as well as controlling many of the inputs to our cultural story. We swim in it and lose awareness to one degree or another.  This is a one-to-many media model.  We are seeking a vision of a media system that brings into congruence and coherence the values a new rising integral and wisdom culture are cocreating.  How does an evolutionary movement connect with the storytelling capacity of all of these integral transformation agents?
 
Developing intentionally positive images of the future:  The one causal factor which allows a civilization to reorganize in a successful form is having a coherent positive image of the future.  This image is held by a marginalized (on the edges) group growing under the radar.  Can we source a creative image which will do this?  Susan’s research clearly indicated that from the Cultural Creatives there was a restorative image which people don’t realize was there.  Is this true for us now?  Can we use media to evolve and share this media?  Of course, there are multiple competing images.  Which will prevail?
 
Next steps in developing “evolutionary media”:  The current alternative, independent, positive media (Yes! Magazine, Ode Magazine, Utne Reader, Orion, New Dimensions, Shift, Resurgence, etc.) are good, AND we need to envision and imagine together the next step toward “evolutionary media in the service of the whole”.  New technologies are supporting us in taking this work to another level.
 
The Renaissance turn-around took three generations and 1000 people.  (Joanna Macy says that future generations will look back and call our time the “Great Turning”.  It’s rare that such a thing can be named and consciously acted upon while it is actually happening (the last time was the Renaissance!).  What an opportunity we have!)
 
Now people have the technology to make this happen.  Personal video blogs are “competing” in healthy ways with commercial TV Channels (see Rocketboom for a great example http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/about.html - imagine something similar for the emergent integral culture we are cocreating).
 
Why are you here and what is an outcome you’d like to get from this session?
 
Traditional media is primarily orange and blue; Indymedia as very green (1M hits a day to www.indymedia.org); we need the media structure that honors and includes those lower levels; integral media; 2nd tier media; 22media; interested in technically what that looks like.

Working with an approach that is a positive image of the future; a way of thinking as human beings; natural form of collective intelligence; we are natural fractal generating quality; question - how to put that into the media?  If they saw that it would give them hope.  

Works as a teacher, real interested in teacher learning at all diff levels, strong relationship between how to transmit information; work in local public policy around water quality and works with media.  Curious to know what is the next evolutionary media would look like?  

Media as an important trimtab for the transformation; gets big ideas before they come into being.  We need a new national newspaper that fits the vision of what we're talking about.  

Involved with evolver magazine; we document inspirational people and inspirational things; potential to reach large audiences; there are so many different modalities; once we're all on it, there's this buzz and there's this new wave -- is TV going to be out, what are the ways that we gather info now and what will they be in the future, what are people drawn to and why?  Would love to dive into those questions.  How to create a buzz?  There's such a broad network and so many social networks that people are creating or trying to create, how do we link them all together and get the word out.  There's friendster and social networking software.  How do we reach everyone?  Get the ideas of collective intelligence into a bigger arena.

I get hung up on what people want and why?  What's news to people?  I keep going back to what's going wrong with the current situation.  I get stuck on - the media is just giving people what they are asking for.  Why can't we be talking about the good things going on.  There's this state of consciousness of where we are as a species that we can imagine a better way of doing things but how to get that established.  Why aren't more people subscribed to Yes Magazine.  Why isn't the alternative media gaining ground faster?  I get stuck on how is it ever going to get implemented and how to do that.  How do we change the mass media?  (see Duane Elgin's work on this).

As our culture evolves, people are getting dissatisfied with the news.  That system is crumbling and there's a new one emerging.  Paying for the new media like integral naked.  There are enough prototypes out there.  As people get more conscious and politically astute about bringing that forward.

How do we fund the possibilities we’re talking about here?
 
Contemplate these 2 Qs as we listen in to the center:
 
Personal:
What would a media system look like that supported your work and your network?
 
Interpersonal:
What would a media system look like that would support the whole and conscious evolution?

Discussion:
 
This is a practice of images of the future. We have to dream what we need into existence (additional note regarding role of imagination in creating change: “To see is to experience the world as it is; to remember is to experience it as it was, to imagine is to experience how it has never been, but what it could be.”  This allows us to think about the future.)
 
Indymedia network has seen exponential growth on every level.  30 million hits a month on the virtual global site (the hub in a network of over 200 websites).  This is a very green meme media prototype and is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of its potential.  When Indymedia breaks into second tier it will be huge.
 
How do the stories reach the mainstream?
 
I believe the average American would like to see a different kind of news, information and programming.  It’s a matter of putting it forth and reaching them.  Tom Paine: “Such is the nature of truth, is that all it wants is the liberty of appearing.”
 
I’d like to see a well-researched conspiracy channel.
 
One purpose of media is to critique and show what is wrong.  Another purpose is to show clearly where the new models are emerging.  These are two hands of social change.  “It is not enough to slow the rate of destruction; we must increase the rate of creation.”
 
Internet broadcasting will become cheaper and easier.  How do we put self-organizing coherence into place so what we want comes up.
 
We could develop a map of our combined social networks and filtering topics to those interested. We could create our own media.
 
What images are we already holding in our current networks which we haven’t made visible to ourselves? I’d like to broadcast our story more effectively to ourselves and create internal coherence and continue a sustained dialog. Maybe that’s a media channel. Evolutionary Nexus hasn’t done it.
 
The growth of core question-based systems correlates with the amount and quality of shared information. I’d like to see a system that facilitated this communication around a question focused on the well-being of humans and nature at the same time.

I want to hear what's really going on.  Hurricane Katrina.  

Such is the nature of truth, that all it wants is the liberty of appearing.

Fractal generating process; one of the things that accelerates it is communication.  If you track the rise of science, it has to do with communication.  Science is not a solitary event it's a social event.  The more people you get involved, the more CI you get.  They put in bits of information.  Most scientists put in data and tests.  They collect all this.  And make a theory.  Build and build and it's based on communication.  If you had this fractal generating system that I'm talking about:  2 factor:  well being of humanity and well being of nature.  If our cultural brain were different it would be the same thing.  If you are asking for that, people can apply that at their local level.  People ask how does nature work….in my village, how could I change my garden to be restorative.  Sharing best practices, sharing results of experiments, people finding each other.  But focused around this question.  It would facilitate this process of building infrastructure.  The core question does not go away.  The question provides a coherent core.  Core question approach.  I'm working on a book.  Fractal generating.  

I remember the day when the big problem was finding something.  You have to go to the library, which book contains it.  Today the big problem for me today, it's to find the information in the vast pile of information….the ultimate barrier to learning is not access, it's my effort it's my attention.  (attention economy).  Culturally that a creates a bias toward information who are disseminating, trying to get information to you.  Further acceleration of the trend toward receiving information from the same mainstream sources.  One coping approach is to just take in all that information and another is to create some filters with your current belief systems (a bit fragmented) - responses to information overload.

Waiting for the next level of google….have some faith that that will happen.
 
Coping with Information Overload - Developing evolutionary capacities:
 
How can we cope with info overload? Either be noncritical or set up super strict criteria. Neither is sufficient for our times.
 
•    I've had to become extremely intuitive.  Dial into that and allow that flow to come.  That's an evolutionary capacity             

•    I’ve become extremely intuitive.  I’ve had to resort to that “inner technology”.

•    I’d agree (speaking as a major geek). I got swamped with info overload a few years ago, pulled back and tuned and had to go into training my intuitive resources, being more accepting of what comes.

•    I also don’t know what I’d do without that capacity, and observing more the emergent synchronicities.  We could train ourselves in this as a social technology.  So while this is the inner technology resource, the outer technology is the ongoing development of RSS feeds – evolving personal filters.

As we create our own blogs with rich media of all kinds, we’ll be able to tap into what our leading edge is doing: a way toward sustained dialogue.
 
I want smart people who look over the universe of political things and pick out the megatrends and signs of the times. I haven’t found the right blog.  Indymedia comes close but is basically a news medium but I’m interested in ideas as well.
 
Some of our favorite sources of news, information, inspiration and ideas:
 
With our remaining 5 minutes we sensed into what would be a good outcome/artifact for the whole, and decided to quickly popcorn some of our favorite websites.  This is very incomplete, but is a starting point for mapping our collective intelligence as seen through the internet.
 
Arts and Letters Daily - journal of higher education http://aldaily.com/
 
Climate Action Network http://www.climatenetwork.org/
 
Common dreams http://www.commondreams.org/
 
Cooperation Commons http://www.cooperationcommons.org/
 
Daily Grist – environmental news and commentary http://www.grist.org/
 
EarthTrends Environmental Information http://earthtrends.wri.org/index.php
 
Evolver Project (beta site) http://www.evolver.net/
 
Futures survey - Review of the month’s publications http://www.wfs.org/fsrvapr06.htm
 
Imaginify Community Network – imagine if I read the good news http://www.imaginify.org/index.php
 
Integral Naked http://in.integralinstitute.org/
 
Integral Reflections http://www.integralreflections.com/
 
John Hawks – anthropologist http://johnhawks.net/weblog/
 
Media Giraffe project http://www.mediagiraffe.org/
 
New Heaven New Earth http://www.nhne.com/
 
Ode Magazine http://www.odemagazine.com/
 
Omidyar.net - What are the good things happening – sharing, discussing, new projects http://www.omidyar.net/home/
 
Salon http://www.salon.com/
 
The Transitioner http://www.thetransitioner.org/wen/tiki-index.php
 
Utne Reader http://www.utne.com/
 
Worldchanging – Another World is Here http://www.worldchanging.com/
 
World Pulse http://www.worldpulsemagazine.com/
 
Yes Magazine http://www.yesmagazine.org/
 
Zaadzs.com – beta social networking site for 2nd tier http://www.zaadz.com/
 
 
Additional Resources/Links
 
The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness
The Noosphere & the Internet
http://www.matrixmasters.com/spirit/html/2a/2a.html
 
In Chardin's view, the noosphere is nothing less than a collective human organism.  It may take a giant leap of faith for some readers to "consider inter-thinking humanity as a new type of organism whose destiny it is to realize new possibilities for evolving life on this planet," as Huxley suggests in his introduction to The Phenomenon of Man.

Evolutionary Salon 3 - Closing Circle

Evolutionary Salon 3 - Closing Circle
May 25, 2006

What's moving through you now?

•    Birthing…..and it's painful.
•    We're in hour one; Stephan sharing his own experience with Adonia being born
•    Sense of urgency
•    Looking at our sculpture together - 2 observations - coming from the south into the center or center into the center.  If it's the south, there's a lot that's really delicate and about to get knocked down.  Besides all the great relationships formed or strengthened, deep respect for folks who are gripped with the story and are having it move through them.
•    Words that move atoms; words that move atoms.
•    I can't identify what's moving through me, it's gratitude.  
•    Hope and possibility; thank you for that.
•    Seeing all the creative power I saw coming through and people stepping out to share their requests.  I didn't really step into my power as bringing out workshops.
•    Feeling a couple of paradoxes the last few minutes, this future that we're calling is always emerging and it's already here.  Tangible sense of that from this field.  It's incredibly urgent and yet we have all the time we need.  It's equally present.  Thankful for this field.  It's profound for me.
•    Something about the space that we've all created and allowed me to step into my larger universal self; and feeling the birth pains; stepping more fully into myself; terry tempest Williams - open space for democracy.  We're moving into ways of being that we don't know.  Also feel some of the pains.  
•    I haven't been to your country; I was fairly scared to come down here and I'm leaving with a great sense of hope and seeing a lot of possibilities unfolding.  Feeling much more hopeful about the future of America and therefore of the world, thanks to you.
•    Feeling very grateful for arriving here.  At a place that I feel called to.  Will go to a sense of the continued sense of being present and consciously evolving in my life.  Thank you.
•    I have mixed feelings, mostly an overjoy with everyone I've met here.  Wow.  The beauty each person encompasses; a wonderful birthing.  Mixed feelings about how things went and got from the general feedback. 

•    Acknowledge and appreciate all the conscious evolutionary work and energy that was happening before this work and out of everyone participating in this group, here as a group.  I can hardly wait to see what good comes from this.  
•    I'm a person who has been given many blessings and privileges…I'm very aware today that I've been given a lot of unusual privileges.  Ivy league generation, 4th generation lawyer, living in the richest country ever been and yet I feel like I'm only operating on half my cylinders.  I offset of those privileges with a lot of weaknesses and wounds and foibles and I would like before all of you to commit to doing a better job of doing that.  Better job of taking care of myself so I can be of more service to myself and to each and every one of you.  And to the goddess.
•    Hafiz poem - look what happens to a love like that, it lights the whole sky.
•    A throbbing, and when I first felt it it felt like an urgency, my mind labeled it, as I'm sitting with it, it feels like a heart pulling a pulling into my power and all that I can be.  As I sink deeper into it, it's just us being pulled forward, expanding outward.  And what's falling into place and my mind says not totally, just an acceptance of the me getting out of the way to fall into the we moving forward.
•    I'm sitting here with aches and pains in my body all over that I didn't feel an hour ago.  My primary gift is the gift of dissonance.  The only way out is through and the only way through is to embrace the dissonance.  We have to say this is what is here.  
•    The journey, rains come from the headwaters.  These are the headwaters here and they are multiplicity.  Bu the headwaters start a movement.  If they follow their natural course, the droplets flow toward each other.  It's a long time before the journey gets smooth;  you have to go along way down from the headwaters…if we let go and we keep on keeping on.  Accept all the diversity of the diversity.  Then we're going to the ocean of change.
•    Gratitude for call toward authenticity.  Authentic silence, words that are there when they serve.  Grateful for new meetings.  For reminders of compansionship on a journey.  
•    Since es2 I've been on a journey of looking at where I'm not trusting.  My gift is to invite you to trust.  
•    I feel the beginnings of intensity.  
•    Spiral patterns of the universe are flowing through me.
•    It doesn't step being a mystery.
•    [There were more that I missed, please add what you said if you do not see it on this list]

Evolving toward Mutualism

Session Notes Sunday 10:30 (partial -- more to come)

Evolving toward Mutualism, hosted by J. Andrew Hoerner

When two organisms live in asociation over evolutionary time spans, they will typically coevolve. This coevolution can favor mutualism, or it can go in the dirction of parasitism or predation. In our session, we explored the biological concept of evolution toward mutualism as it might apply to social systems. 

A few terms: 

• mutualism: a kind of symbiosis in which both parties affect each other in a positivie way.
• parasitism or predation: forms of symbiosis in which one organism is favored and the other harmed

Initially, andrew presented three example of forces or situations that favor evolution toward mutualism:
Tying - the survival and reproductive success of two organisms are closely tied together. Evolutionary parasitology has found that when a parasite can suvive and propigate after the host's death, it is more likely to be highly virulent. At the other extreme, mitochodria were once free ranging organisms, but have coevolved past mutualism all the way to fusion-- our cells can not live without them, and they can not live outside of our cells. At the social level, there are many examples showing that long-term relationships are more conducive to mutually supportive dealing than short-duration or one-tie relationships.
conditional exchange - an interesting biological example is mycorizae, fungal fibers that feed water and minerals to tree roots in exchange for sugars and other nutrients. If the tree stops providing sugars, the fungi stop providing water -- and sometimes eat the root. A social example is our current our current capitalistic, economic paradigm.
detect (monitor) and punish - a biological example would be the way that our immune systems attack cancer cells, which have stopped paying attention to the well-being of the larger organizim in favor of their own reproductive success. The obvious social example is the criminal jusice system, but more subtle punishments, such a withdrawl of attention or facial expressions of displeasure,  are much more common.

Question:  Are there other example of situatis or factors that tend to suport coevolution toward mutualism in biological systems? Stuff from complexity theory, maybe, or from Prigogine's work on disipative systems? (unanswered)

Question:  How can these approaches be used to improve the tendency of social systems to evolve toward mutualism? Example: Tying: If each large corporation and all its subsidiaries globally were permanently tied to a single union representing all of its workers, this would better support coevolution towards mutualism between the well-being of the workers and the success of the corporation.

Question: Are there other factors favoring evolution toward mutualism that are unique to humanans and their social arrangements and are not available to biological systems? 

Our group identified several facto that influence coevolution in uman relationships:  intuitive judgements of harmony or discord; purpose and context; cutlivated intention (e.g. this Salon); various large group processes (e.g. Wisdom Councils, Open Space, World Cafe, Nonviolent Communication) that facilitate mutualism; feedback between players and within the system;etc.

Human systems (we think) may be unique also in the fact that we can feel a 'pull' towards future possibilities.   We also have other drives beyond self-interest.  Or, we can pursure our self interests without undermining the welfare of the whole.

Evolution is driven by relative, not absolute success. Can we effectively withdraw social approval from people who acquire wealth through exploitation?

One test of a workable system is to ask if a selfish 'mutant' invading a system can succeed?   But adjustment to an invasive force is evoultionary.  To varying degrees systems tolerate/embrace dissonance and diversity. 

Are some of the uniquely human tools mentioned above inherently usable only for good? Any tool can be misused. Bot if people are motivated primarily by power and control over others, some of these tools and processes are likely to uncongenial.

Books people made reference to:

Evolution's Arrow - John Stewart

Nonzero - Robert Wright

Symbiotic Man

Collapse - Jared Diamond 

See also related session: Michael Dowd on harmonizing individual interest with collective or planetary interest.

Exploring Sharing and Creating Forms

Session notes for Sunday session with Margo

EXPLORING  SHARING AND CREATING FORMS THAT INVITE COLLECTIVE RESONANCE

REFLECTION AND CREATIVITY.

We explored working with pulse of the group in a visceral way, singing and doing a meditation "Energy Circle" as a form to pull groups into coherance.

Images of the Future

IMAGES OF THE FUTURE

Hosts:  Susan Cannon & Nancy Margulis

Brief introductions – bring your voice in; what drew you to come to this particular session and one outcome that would really delight you:

Tree – I came because I need to be nurtured and out of my head.

Bill – my image of the future is pretty dreary; I’ve been studying pretty intensely peak oil and feel a certain urgency and building community is the modality I’m choosing to put my modalities into and I’m really curious about what you see as an image of the future that might be different from the one I hold.

Andrew – I have been interested in trying to work on processes for representing the future in today’s decision-making and I thought this would inform that in an interesting way.  Looking for a broader view of the future within which to situate my own work on climate and sustainability.

Sheri – I actually have this strange capacity for seeing and holding really positive visions in the future even amidst seeing and being deeply aware of the multitude of inconvenient truths.  Holding this tension.  I’m very interested in the consciousness, the conscious engagement with this capacity of mind, the role of imagination activation, and collective visioning, and how to bring it into a larger field.

Rick – I needed more feminine in this conference and I figured this is where I’d be able to get it.

Anodea – I’m with Einstein.  Imagination is more important than knowledge.  The 6^th chakra the place where we hold vision is the first step consciousness takes on its way down to manifestation, so the images we hold are one of the most important things we can put out into the collective.

Laura – I was drawn firstly because I also am very interested in the question and had a very similar question that I was interested in exploring.  So why would I not be here.  I’m really, I came here to this conference looking for the spark of creativity that happens when people engage in a real creative conversation and I think this kind of topic can provide that. 

Jean – What drew me to this session was actually the sense of Susan’s energy and wanting to find out what you were doing and what you were involved with and seeing a sense of the ripples of energy around you and who was responding to that.  In terms of images of the future, I think the most powerful image that stayed with me is reading a piece by Margaret Meade where she was talking about how until very recently all of human knowledge and culture was passed within three living generations and it had to be passed because there was no other transmission means and we’ve been in this period when we’ve developed all these means of transmitting it and her projection into the future was that we don’t know the answers now; we’ve passed on answers and technology but we have any idea of what the questions are evolving into the future, so the present need is to support and nurture the upcoming generations to ask the questions that will evolve at that time.  So that’s my image of the future.

Mark – What drew me to this session was Susan’s presence, a kind of gravity there, I haven’t heard much from Susan and was encouraged to lean in that direction.  I work with my friend Kenoli Oleari in communities around the world and we like to convene a real full panoply of voices in that community to imagine together a future they would like that everyone can support. 

Lynnea – I would say ditto to a lot of the reasons, plus I really needed to get out of that room (laughter).  I actually think there’s something that we can call a future attractor.  I don’t think that it’s just that we’re kind of being propelled forward from something that happened in the past, I think that we may be being drawn forward.  I was thinking about it, I started studying conscious evolution with BMH and David Spangler in 1980, that’s a long time ago, and I feel that if we could become more conscious of what might be drawing us into the future, we might be able to participate with it more consciously.

Zoe – I appreciate what has been spoken here.  What comes to my mind is those times when I’ve looked into the future and have been given the options of unlimited resources with limited amount of time.  Visualizations of you have 2 years to live.  And when I’ve reread what I’ve read, I’m astounded at what I envisioned is either pulling it into being, but it’s just so literal, so if we are that powerful with our dreaming and we are dreaming the world into existence, then it’s importance for us to be sitting in groups and looking at how we see the future and how we’d like to see the future.

Carl – Came because of some things I had read in your bio about cultural images of the future, historical images that groups of people held.  Also I’m intrigued in the responsibility of the leaders to be able to articulate a clear and compelling vision of where we are heading, where are we going.

Judy – I think originally the word that I was drawn to in the little write up was attractor.  I want to understand more about what those attractors are and how my experience and gifts of skills at this place and time can be woven into the time that is coming.  What is my role.  Learn more about what those attractors are.

Margo – I’ve been working a lot with vision and story.  How to maintain and keep alive and growing vision if possible, without it people keep recreating the same stuff.

Nancy – my draw is that I wanted us to leave with an artifact of our time together, in terms of a vision which is articulated in words and visions or however it shows up and offer some ways into that that might bypass the rational mind we’ve been using well to think about this and help us discover something new. 

Charles – Susan is a colleague from 10 years back.  I don’t think there is any really more important question than images for the future.  For the most part we don’t have them because as a species we aren’t used to think of the future or if we have them they are incredibly naïve.  Or if we look at them more closely we easily end up in cynicism or hopelessness and none of those three options serve us.

• Role of imagination more important than knowledge 
• Margaret Meade - until recently knowledge was passed within 3 generations, no other transmission needs (now we have new means of transmitting); her projection: we don't have answers now but we don't have the questions either, the present need is to support and nurture the upcoming generations to ask the questions that will evolve at that time.
• There's something we can call a future attractor.  We're not being propelled forward by something from the past, we may be drawn forward.
• Studying conscious evolution in 1980…if we could become more conscious of what is drawing us into the future, we might be able to participate more fully.
• What I envisioned is pulling it into existence.  If we are that powerful to envision the future, we should be doing it more consciously.
• Responsibility of the leaders to clearly articulate where we are going.
• Drawn to the word attractor. 
• I want to understand what those attractors are…
• What is my conscious engagement?
• Working a lot with visions and putting story together…how to keep alive and growing vision is key.  Without it we keep creating the same stuff. 
• I wanted to leave with an artifact of our time together - words or visions and ways to engage into that that would bypass the rational to discover something new.
• There's no more important question - we are not used to thinking about them….

SETTING CONTEXT

What is the image of the future?
How has that played out historically?

Image of the future is a compelling, sometimes not even possible, but extremely compelling, attractive, story – call it an image because it lodges in the senses and acts as an attractor to pull us forward

-         example “the rapture” – not compelling to all but to very coherent minority

The “image of the future” is a term used by futurists in actual research because it has an actual force in creating the future.  It is a particularly compelling, sometimes not even necessarily completely possible, but extremely compelling, almost mythic, attractive story, or idea, it’s a compilation perhaps, we call it an image because it kind of lodges in the senses and acts as we now know as an attractor to draw culture forward.  The idea of the rapture, we hear that one word and that conjures up a whole set of images and you can see where that’s pulling a large group of people in our culture, and that’s not a particularly desirable image of the future, but you can see what that has done, how that is drawing people towards a certain way of being, and it’s not like everybody is sharing a particular script around this, it’s not a stated vision, but it is an idea that is shared and it’s shared by a very coherent minority that ends up affecting the larger whole. 

Where this got started and how I got interested in it, was back in the 50’s there were some of the early path breakers around the ideas of systems and complexity who were just starting to form, and one of them was a sociologist named Fred Polack (see below for link to online text of Image of the Future), and in the 50’s, it was after WWII and people were getting very interested in, okay so we’ve just been through this huge cataclysm of world war two, what is going to come out of this, where can we go, can we do anything about understanding where civilizations go when they start to change, when we see that they are naturally decaying or exhausting their sort of “cultural capital”, if there’s a change coming.  People were already starting to sense it.  People were there on the edge.  So what Polack did was embark on a huge study of mostly western civilizations, he looked at art and science and governments and history.  He just amassed all this data because he was sure if he studied enough stuff cross-disciplinarily which wasn’t done much then, people mainly studied in their own subjects and disciplines, that he could find a pattern that could tell us what would be the factors that would result in a successful reorganization. a successful shift of culture, because sometimes they just use up their energy and they collapse, you know, Rome just kind of fell apart.  And sometimes they go on, some part of them reemerges in a more complex culture and a new way of being and he wanted to see what those factors could be.  So he spent a lot of time studying this, and this was before computers and before people understood systems theory.  So he went and did this huge study and looked at every possible causal factor and tried tried tried and finally what he came up with and it shocked him as well as everyone else, the only correlate, the only causal factor and the dominant causal factor in the successful reorganization of these societies, was was there a desirable image of the future, held by a small enough but significantly aligned, what he called a creative minority.  Did that exist?  If it was positive, the culture went on and, it didn’t matter what was going on at the current time.  There could be war happening, decay, horrible things, but if people had this particular image of the future to motivate them, to draw them forward, the cultures went forward and did not collapse. 

o       A desirable image of the future held by a small but significant “creative minority” that could grow and provide something to organize around

o       Clear and imaginal (not necessarily rational) image

o       Most often, it’s a small group existing on the margins at first

o       There can be a lot of competing creative minorities, question which one will wind up being the one to move the system forward

o       In the beginning, it’s not visible by dominant majority – beginning to live…like a seed crystal.

o       examples:  Christianity; American dream; Jewish covenant; the Renaissance

o       Chiliastic (apocalyptic + utopian)

o       Some systems have collapsed that were seed images, originally (communism in Soviet Union; Nazi Germany) – sometimes the system is in so much chaos during collapse that even a not-so-good alternative that is coherent can take hold

o       This strong image of the future was emerging on the margins of culture.  There were often competing groups and one would be dominant enough to bring some coherence to the idea/image.

o       Susan wanted to find such a group and research it to make that image more visible so that it can become more coherent.  This was in the late 90s. 

§         Paul Ray’s work on “cultural creatives” – new subculture of values emerging for the first time in 100 years.  Very positive.  Decided to use this as her population to study.  From all different walks of life.

§         Went through future-building process with individuals; turned out that there was a lot similar – definite emerging vision of the future.

§         How does this “research” continue?

Questions

seed crystal visions are not always ones that history judges with favor…

when the Russian system and the Weimar republic went into chaotic phase, there were all these other competing visions. And the Nazis dominated because they had a clear coherent vision. 

How much French revolution has taken over our thinking…unique about American revolution is that it was successful.  It was a subgroup or minority that started it.  Adams and Jefferson - the American revolution started way before the war started.  Benjamin rush, one of the founding fathers from Pennsylvania said 10 years after the war ended, the war was just the first piece in a great drama that was unfolding.

Who is to say we wouldn't have a collapse?  There are some indicators in financial market that there is a collapse (imminent).

Brain research - being able to sense the future, the human brain is the most capable organism to sense the unfolding gestalt.  We have this capacity.  The cerebral cortex were a recent development - enables us to envision the future.  On a planetary scale, the internet is the ability to envision the future.

The renaissance - named rebirthing time during the time….within 30 years.  It was a tiny group, 1000 people. 

GUIDED VISUALIZATION
Sharing of our Images of the Future

What would be a process that we could engage in that would allow us to go into an exploration of the images that we’re holding and could be part of this seed image. 

• Human soma is wired for sensing into the future (when we are not so involved in the busy-ness of the logical mind that we can’t be aware of it)
• Otto Scharmer’s work on presence states that imagination is an organ of perception

Images that came through:

Peaceful, full, healing gardens, temple space where young women come to me for initiation and healing; people singing; magical cat was with me – feeling of fullness and peace and that people were in order in harmony with earth and community of people.  In temple space young women doing art; creating objects that represented harmony – my face much older but much more peaceful and serene – happy

2012 – similar images of temple, young women – living exactly where I live now – when I looked in mirror, lighter, healthier and younger than I look now – in my box was a pitch pipe and I was getting everyone together to sing; I was speaking to large groups of people – we had already gone through whatever the crisis was

10 years from now – very much today, writ large – lots and lots of information – constant sense of mild overload – TV and computer screens had disappeared because whole walls were that – I had my community, felt financially secure, almost everything about my life was better – pieces of the world were better (developing countries had more – more relief aid and the US had finally joined the world community), but a lot of suffering – headlines of day were Asian nations in nuclear stand-off over drought

2020 – crisis had happened, and still lot of repercussions, but we were a whole as a world – political will had emerged out of the crisis – a lot of creative energy was gong into recreation – community I was in (I and others) knew our purpose; had been called together for some engagement in soul work – transportation had no noise – had information (like library) in us – sitting in circle communicating – filtering information, just getting exactly what we needed when we needed it.  Spiritual computing.  Using full human capacities and intelligences.

Lot of self-contained communities that were connected – existing under the radar of a very threatening force – sort of fascist gray energy between the communities – all the communities were co-creating and producing more than they needed and sharing what they didn’t need – gardens flourishing – communities multi-generational and not single families

10 years out – peace and calm that seemed to be everywhere – people were doing whatever they needed to be doing – working with other women from multiple cultures and there was ease there – as vision progressed, I was in Central America – could look back at America and see that the eastern portion of the US was gone – there was rebuilding, didn’t sense chaos, but rebuilding; where I was was a safe and quiet place

Mine was about 12 years out – I was in school yard and I was in supportive capacity to teachers – child gave me a blue metal box and in it were a piece of wood, a stone and a feather

20 – 30 years out… a very peaceful place, didn’t notice cars – sound of bee, children’s laughter, many domains of activity – could go to farming area; places to talk about ideas; places to play – had a sense that I knew what I needed to do – right away, I knew whether there was a need to do something for the community – we were aware of many other communities around the world; when they came either coming with news of some terrible news of natural disaster or coming with good news; mentor was old, big person – genderless and as I received my box I thought I didn’t need anything and saw that it was a little piece of flesh – shaped like a penis or was it a small piece of labia? –

Saw little islands of cultural creatives holding space until system has collapsed enough to hold something new and fresh

Place where we honored and hugged each other and really knew each other and what the day was about – quiet mode of transportation out to join a choir – both artistic and communicative – gift came in a lovely little box and a balloon came out with a string and I held on to the string and headed up.

I had islands in a large sea of chaos and misery, death, etc.  day started alone and moved into more and more contact with others – had more of a sense of self as a pattern of energy than as an object – school where each level mentored the level below, yet with overarching presence of the adults – gift was very moving – mentor was very shadowy sort of figure – gift was a ring with a stone into which I could look and have brief eye contact with people from my past with whom there was some misunderstanding and have a moment’s glance of understanding with that person.

Remember opening a box and what leapt out was a little round mirror that reflected the light that was present and gleamed – something about reflecting the light that is there – when you see something positive reflecting and amplifying it (today we’re reflecting the negative more)

Surprise Process
 

A question was already written inside on a sheet of paper that is neatly folded up.  Sit with the question for a while just holding the piece of paper (you don’t actually get to read it – just sense into it), and then something will come to mind (image/word/phrase) and then record it on the outside and then open it up and see the connection between the two.

NEXT STEPS - Participation in a larger project related to this and what will be happening in the future of this?

Next step, take it away from me as an individual researcher and create a systemic way of pulling forth this vision.  The work is to make it more conscious and more coherent.

Interest and next step?  How do we collect this image in a systematic way to bring forth this image that clearly rests within a group like this already.  And/or to support those seed crystals into greater coherence.

Download a pdf of Image of the Future by Polack

http://futurefeeder.com/index.php/archives/2005/02/03/the-image-of-the-future/

Polak’s “the image of the future” is still relevant even 50 years after its first print.  Polak argues that the human condition is bound to its self-conscious image of the future.

“The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures.  As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom.  Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.”

 

May 2006 Evolutionary Salon - Planning

These wiki-pages are for:

- posting reports of the Planning group of Evolutionary Salon 3, scheduled for May 2006

- working together on the same text - like the invitation