Feedback from Manuel Manga

Dear Friends,

First, I would like to thank the organizing team for having the guts, courage, energy and love to build such an event. It is easier to criticize (even in the most constructive and positive way) than to build, so thanks for taking these risks and placing yourselves in a position of vulnerability and openness. Tim Murphy's feedback is pretty much mine too. Here's what I would like to add as my own piece.

The things I valued the most:

Definitely the people. Gathering such incredible beautiful persons was a challenge in itself. What a present, how beautiful an experience to see all these links, roots, symbiosis operate to form the rhizome of these emerging social forests in these new noosystems. It is about those connections that operate at the deepest level of the Self, for a life time, no matter how much time we spend in live interaction.

Possible improvement:

I did not experience collective intelligence in the deepest sense I usually give it. We certainly talked about it, shared views, questions, emotions...

The reason why I insisted on the idea of vulnerability was not to make group therapy, but to initiate the process of trust and oneness. By being bold and vulnerable, by sharing my incompleteness with others, I offer them the gift of social existence because they can help me. I invite them to join this transpersonal and integral space of humanness. Then I can be offered in return the gift of my own humanness when others offer me the opportunity to support them, to complete them. And so on. That's for the expression of needs.

Note: the ontological work in groups offers powerful contexts for this mutual empowerment and radical trust building.

There is also the expression of offers. By inviting people to put on the table what they have to offer (knowledge, practice, time, money, art, energy, relationships, ideas, etc), just like in a pot luck, then we let everyone visualize what is the wealth at the community level. And what is missing too. This very process of the 'banquet' is a key step in creating group consciousness. Group consciousness comes with a sense of shared wealth.

Offers and needs come together and create the shared 'market place', in the deepest sense of it. IMHO this is an important starting point for catalyzing collective intelligence. Then other dynamics can be worked and reviewed one by one in order to build the social architecture: emergence, holopticism, object links, polymorphism, learning dynamics, social contract, gift economy, etc... See the 12 tenets of a global collective intelligence.

I would stress with Tim Murphy that there are many tools, exercises, practices, technologies, that participants may want to work on in order to develop such or such group capacity. It takes time, efforts and practice to become a good sports team or jazz band. It is very fun too. Why wouldn't it take time, efforts and practice to be a collectively intelligence social stem cell, building the most efficient social DNA? This is precisely what we are going to work on by organizing training retreats this year. We will be glad to share our own learning process with the Evolutionary Salons, and why not, coordinate more deeply as our contribution.

I also experienced an ontological trap in the early phase of the salon, when we self-proclaimed to be at the cutting edge evolutionary consciousness (please pardon me if the words are not exactly those that were used). I am not against this idea as long as we are aware of the existential position it puts us. This placed us into the paradigm of being the subjects (we) operating on an object (the world, the evolution...). This 'objectivization' (or socialization) creates a world that is outside of me, it can easily prevent me from operating this transformation at the deepest levels of myself. In other words, we talked about it, we looked at it, we asked 'burning questions' about it, but did the context brought me into my own inner cutting edge? Did the burning questions really burn me? Not for me, probably not for many people if you consider the low emotional and high mental levels in the room. Burning questions often generate sadness and tears because... they burn what we have to let go, they bring us to a new world view, to the next level. We mourn our old world by giving up the latest ties to it, and then we can jump into a more integral level, with more capacity to collective intelligence, wisdom and consciousness.

The other challenge for me was to realize that those who come with a high expertise on CIW, such as Tom, George, Peggy, and others, didn't have the opportunity to teach some of what they know. Sometimes I experienced the dictatorship of the 'I don't know' and 'I don't know what I don't know' as the politically correct to say. Claiming 'hey guys, I know, I can teach you' might have looked very selfish and an absolute lack of humbleness. Open space, dialogs, conversations can fall into another extreme if they are not balanced with spaces where we can teach or be taught. Sometimes I would love to teach what I know that the others don't know, and I would love to seat and listen to what others can teach me. Conversations and live interactions don't offer that much of this possibility. Should teaching/learning spaces be part of the offerings in the open space sessions? Probably. But the 'pressure' of the open space architecture doesn't facilitate such a context. Maybe a special care and attention should be given to improving our practices in teaching/learning spaces.

There are 2 links that you may want to check out:

* CI for large events: a collection of ideas for improving CI during large events like the Evolutionary Salon

* Building a wisdom network

How do you imagine your gifts contributing to the future of this movement (of which Evolutionary Salons are but a part)?

* By continuing my research work and offer it as a contribution

* By creating CIW retreats and R&D centers to train people and expand the practice.

* By creating the next monetary systems.

I will not be able to come to every event because such trips are very expensive from Europe. But I will do my best.

Thanks again for offering this possibility of a feedback and for setting up this space for it.

Jean-François