MTE Chronicle of March 5, 2006

Some of us were at a workshop at the MTE venue and it is great!  We think our event will be very lively.  

Nine people have registered, and six are in the process.  Three paid sign-ups responded to our email saying they are coming no matter how many others attend; one is coming just to see who initiated this!  There were four new registrants this week (2 couples, including Brad Blanton, founder of Radical Honesty movement, from the US) and 2 more are interested (including Anthony Judge, Brussels director of the Union of International Associations, who happens to be being interviewed by a journalist who was just interviewing Ria!).  By Tuesday we will have a list of the names of registrants posted on our MTE website, and their status.  We don't expect an explosion of numbers, but will probably have a few more.  We'll keep communicating to others about this event.

Anthony Judge saw parallels in some things he's been involved with:

• a letter he wrote to a group of friends introducing them to the 1st World New Age Congress, organized with some of the challenges and dynamics that we are experiencing (see http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs/newage.php)
• an effort to articulate the dynamics of the International School of Ignorance (http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs/ignorant.php)
• many struggles to articulate where the next steps in magical fruitful dialogue are to be found (http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/themes/azdialo.php)
• With respect to wisdom, he has just struggled with endeavouring to understand what might be the dynamics of a Council of the Whys (http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/rock.php)

We found this quote from his 1978 paper particularly evocative and instructive:

If we do not meet that challenge on this occasion (whether individually or collectively), other events will emerge. However for these events to be as significant as a challenge, they will still have to have the same uncomfortable difficulties in the same unpredictable mix on every level. So we can avoid the immediate challenge, but we cannot escape in the long term. Share in the joys and agonies of this immediate opportunity. We can but intuit to what it may give birth. Your experience of it at this time would enable a greater challenge to be confronted collectively when the next opportunity emerges.

We also received a report of a dream about Moving The Edge.  In a subsequent meditation on that dream, the following came: "Holding space for presence to show up. . .fully.  Holding space for people to show up authentically. Inviting authentic presence into Being."

In our Sunday phone call, we decided to invite all conference attendees to post burning questions and pre-conference intentions on the site -- and to move the forum for that from the MTE site to an EvolutionaryNexus forum topic.  We'll change the link on the EvolutionaryNexus Blog posting on this, to reflect this shift in location.  It is great to not isolate the two communities (MTE and EvolNexus) but we need to ensure that MTE participants do not get confused by activities elsewhere on EvolutionaryNexus.

During the conference we can use EvolutionaryNexus blog, forums, and wiki to post comments and reports from both participants and people elsewhere around the world, thereby connecting everyone together during the event.  We considered promoting some formal commitment or special scheduling to encourage in-conference participants to do this online work, but finally decided to just remind people about this in appropriate ways during the conference.  This kind of online engagement helps weave us into the larger community of practice and inquiry about collective inteligence and evolution.  We will make sure that wireless service is available at the conference.  And we'll check with a techie friend to see if it makes sense to try something more ambitious, like audio or video conferencing at scheduled times.  We'll try to make a little movie of the conference, too.  (AFTERTHOUGHT:  WE COULD ENCOURAGE SKYPE CONNECTIONS AMONG PARTICIPANTS AND OTHERS.)

Our first mailing to participants will provide MTE site account information and how to sign up, and encourage them to post an introductory piece on the MTE forum.  After that we can encourage them to do a blog posting before the event, to practice for blog postings during the event.

We need to start sensing how to best manage the facilitation of the beginning of the event.  There is an MTE forum topic on that.  Those of us holding the space at the gathering -- and any other convenors or participants -- are encouraged to post at the beginning of Wednesday and Friday, and read what's posted by the end of Wednesday and Friday, so that adequate discussion about this can happen before the event.