The discovery of one Circle Being

In the process of inquiry at Moving the Edge we came at one point to the tentative realisation that in the question is (part of) the answer. As in any scientific practice the hypothesis encompasses all we know about what we want to discover, including – maybe – what we know only through experience in the bodily or other levels of cognition and existence.

Therefore when the question or intention arose that we wanted to discover what it was that evolved in the middle of our group - what it is that can evolve in the middle of any group if the conditions are right, we turned the question around and looked at it as answer, and in this unfolding and deepening of the question we found a tentative definition of the “circle being”, the  “magic in the middle”, the “field of collective intelligence” or which ever words constitutes meaning to the participants.

Qualities of the field of collective intelligence:

1 – the first has to do with the experience of joy, hightened attention and sharpness that the explorer or participant has when being in the field. This is important since this is also why we tend to long for situations of collective intelligence.

2 – the second quality that characterises a field of collective intelligence, or maybe rather the activities taking place when this occurs, is creation. The creative aspect of a field of collective intelligence and collective action might be the very reason we engage in the field instead of solving problems on our own. From somewhere within the heart of the participants or the logic mind we see that we can create much more and from a much wider perspective when we lean forward and engage the collective openly, interested and intentionally.

3 – thirdly is the joy of the being itself. This is maybe a little harder to grasp than the individual joy of participating, but if a merely individualised worldview is disregarded for a moment it makes sense to speak of the joy and exhilaration of the field – that in the engaging of the shared there is something that is beyond the one and the other person, something between these persons to which it makes sense that we can ascribe experiences of joy and exhilaration.

4 – the last of the qualities emerging in this conversation has to do with being and becoming. This state of being something larger than yourself and becoming unknowingly more intelligent by simply engaging or leaning forward into the collective, is collective intelligence. Is it in us or is it in the field between us? Such questions only make sense if we try to stop the field and understand it with our individualised logics of mind. While we stand still like this, the collective will move forward because the last quality of the field of collective intelligence we can describe, is that it is not static. It is a dynamic and continuously unfolding occurrence.

These four discoveries of the field of collective intelligence are not the full spectrum. There are potentially hundreds of qualities that can be named and discovered. And several perspectives from which these can have meaning, making thousands of interpretations possible. However, this could be a step towards a better understanding, even though we know now also that “understanding sucks”.

Martin Ludvigsen