The movement: beyond events! by Ria Baeck

I wrote this originally as a framework for Moving the Edge, to provide an answer to what Tina (one of the convening team) wrote in a recent email, that people who consider to participate the gathering experience “a lack of context to relate to”.

I write it also as a ‘reflecting back’ to the collective as I see it so far: the first Evolutionary Salon (the Hacienda), The Kaleidoscope Café Retreat in Devon (Hazelwood), Evolutionary Salon 2 (Whidbey) and Moving the Edge within some weeks in Denmark and the next Salon in May.

Tina wrote also: “It also stresses for me the importance of taking time to share experiences, and set the context by which they can be understood and interpreted in order to support the integration of the insights on all levels.”
There appeared already a lot of content on the pages of EvolutionaryNexus.org but I’m sure there is still a lot, lot more hiding in people’s minds! I try to share here what I see or what I know, from the biggest context that I can get my arms around. And I invite a lot of others – who try to embrace the same context – to do the same.

A bigger perspective
Tina wrote in her long email: “ It is my impression that a lot of people … are longing to connect and understand their works and walks of life in a bigger picture and perspective, but I also think that the structures of minds dominating our culture makes it quite a difficult task, since breaking new land usually is being seen from the perspective of change as a horizontal movement and as something that needs to be integrated into something that is already there.”
What we are experiencing now, indeed needs a bigger perspective! It is a real upshift, a transformation and not “change as a horizontal movement”!
Stephen Silha wrote while being in the Salon: “I love the meta-aspects of this gathering. We’re Homo Sapiens Sapiens examining many aspects of our process. We're meta-conscious of meta-stuff.”

I will give some explanation – or better: use quotes from others - on the pieces that I see from this bigger perspective.

Beyond individuals
We go from individual consciousness to collective consciousness.

I wrote on the second day of Salon 2: “The calling we are all responding to in one or another way has to do with a deep integration of authenticity and interconnectedness. At the deepest level of this authenticity or inner coherence and at the highest level of interconnectedness – which can also be named as coherence! – I see a collective being formed by all the people here in the event. This collective being is waiting to become conscious of itself; it is a potentiality until we realize it and are aware of it.”

Finn wrote more a few days after the Salon:
“What is the edge of our community now?
We have co-created, supported and witnessed emergence of capacity for engaging collective intelligence, social creativity and community.
We can trust that collectively, and on the level of organizing ourselves, we do know what conversations we shall have to sustain our community in action.
We call into being that which can now be named.
I see a bodhi sangha.”

Michael C. wrote it in a different language: "All that Is" is birthing a new child of Collective Consciousness manifesting in communities with enough openness and awareness to accept this arrival.  Clarity will crystallize as each individual takes responsibility for his or her own participation in the collective and notices when they do not.”

And Dana added: “I think of Finn's powerful observation "we ARE an awakening community" and I feel "we ARE the turning tide"....

Beyond space
The collective consciousness seems to work beyond space, although we have little ‘evidence’ of that.
Tina wrote: “While the salon took place I felt interconnected to the field in a way that I’ve never experienced so concrete. …. I experienced having deep insights that usually only come to me by actually being present and participant in a field. The fact that I could have co-experiences across the continents – that on some level seem parallel to those you (the participants in the Salon) where having – to me add a deeper understanding of how the field is working.”

Beyond time or beyond events
For me it is quite easy to see that the collective consciousness was building, or is unfolding over time and space, partly because I was part of most of them.
From the big context of ‘the Field, or the Community as an Open Space happening through time’ I see the transfer of collective transformation from the first Salon to Hazelwood to the next Salon. And even further down the road the yearlong conference calls with the Collective Intelligence Conveners, and on the other side the line of Spirited Work who were pushing the edges of Open Space. I’m pretty sure this transfer will happen also for Moving the Edge, although I expect only a few people who were participant in the last Salon.
Finn wrote: “If the evolutionary edge of human consciousness is pushed by our common engaging a collective field - as I think we experienced in the salon - and if that field is still awake/alive/engaged/present - as I think I experience it to be - then how do we take part in sustaining that field? I come to think of the Tibetan prayer rolls that everyone in the community takes part in keeping turning.”
As I see it, it are not only individuals that ‘take part in keeping turning’ but even the events are taking their part in keeping the rolls turning. We are building a collective capacity that is not depending on certain leaders or certain methodologies, it doesn’t even need the same participants every time.
I see one big U-curve happening through the different events. The opening of the Mind in the CI Conveners (and probably in Spirited Work?), the opening of the Heart in Hazelwood and the first experiments with collectively listening to the middle and the opening of the Will in Whidbey were ‘the collective’ was truly born.
The process that happened, the collective consciousness that was build over the events, even if we are not able yet to fully grasp it, is set in the morphogenetic field and will become more accessible for other groups/communities. For this purpose it is important that not only we share the new content that has emerged in and after the events, but even more so the inner process that happened within the collective.
And even more: it would be good if we would be able to consciously design for it for Moving the Edge, Salon 3 and all the next events.

Transfer of new thinking and new practices can partly be done by writing and reading. How can transfer of inner, collective transformation be done? Part of the answer is ‘by entrainment’; but my guess is that there is more to it…

I would like to end with a quote from Mark Jones: "What happens in the in-between times that keeps calling to us?"