What is the practice of co-intelligence? Part 2 – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

This is the second of six posts seeking to describe what it means to practice co-intelligence. (You can find the first post here.) I’m doing this to support the creation of what’s called “a community of practice” – a network of people who are seeking – together – to better understand and apply co-intelligence in their lives and their work. In the process, I’ve come up with six new ways to describe co-intelligence. So you can use them as windows into the world of co-intelligence, whether you are interested in a community of practice or not. The window of THIS post will present to you co-intelligence as a special form of aliveness. See what you think. – Tom (PS: As you read, you may reflect on how this is what the Co-Intelligence Institute is all about – and that that’s what any support you send us will be furthering in the world.)

2. Practicing co-intelligence as a special form of aliveness

In this approach we consider co-intelligence as something that is always already happening, woven into the ever-shifting, boundlessly responsive interactivity of the world’s complex aliveness. Every aspect of The Whole is responding to every other aspect of The Whole.

However, we modern humans have had a tendency to show up as quasi-separate outsiders who know best and want more, intervening in the world smartly to get what we want without giving back, while protecting ourselves from what the rest of The Whole needs to maintain its aliveness. We don’t want to suffer or get sick or die or be wrong or fail. That would be stupid.

This is our fragmented intelligence at work, bereft of the “co” that can enable intelligence to play well and sustainably within the complex vital interactivity of the world. This fragmented, narrow, short-term, self-centered intelligence seems to require Nature’s responses to reach catastrophic proportions before that alienated intelligence will finally SEE the blind spot of its tragically limited understanding and caring.

The Co-Intelligence Institute seeks to identify and spread awareness of the many ways that narrow human intelligence can expand into – and enter into partnership with – the greater intelligences that reside beyond our isolated individual brains and beyond the tools (like AI) that we have created to magnify our alienated intelligence without transforming it into co-.

Co-intelligence is the intelligence of wholeness. It is the intelligence of the whole of life engaging with the whole of its situations in ways that maintain or enhance the aliveness of the whole. In practice, that seems abstract. But co-intelligence comes down to earth in the lives involved in each particular situation as they explore together the nature of their situation and their relationships to it – and as they co-evolve those relationships in ways that enhance the ongoing aliveness of their shared situation, learning as they go.

A key word in the framing above – a window into the wholeness of co-intelligence – is the word “involved.” It seems innocent enough, but wholeness is characterized by interconnectedness and co-creativity. So we may start with one sense of who and what are involved in a situation, only to discover – as we exercise our co-intelligence – that there’s more to it than that…. connections we didn’t recognize earlier begin to present themselves…. we need to engage previously unforeseen actors, impacts, information, resources, perspectives, capacities, victims, dynamics, definitions of the situation itself, and more….

Interestingly, as our sense of who and what are “involved” expands, the sources and forms of intelligence and aliveness that are required and available expand as well. As we practice co-intelligence, more co-intelligence becomes available. As we go on – if we go well – that intelligence tends to evolve into wisdom which then evolves into more profound aliveness in the dance we’ve chosen to do together more consciously.

There are so many ways to carve up and categorize this capacity, this exercise, this practice to try to make its many dimensions explicit. As I’ve tried different ways of describing the “practice of co-intelligence,” I’ve become increasingly aware of what gets lost as we sort aliveness into boxes – especially if we seek to be comprehensive in what those boxes collectively embrace. Aliveness gets whittled away and messed with, with each effort to finally get it all boxed up. We can ameliorate this problem somewhat, both by having multiple approaches and by not getting too fixated on any one approach as the Right One.

So the intention of this approach is to help us get an initial big-picture feel for what “practicing the conscious aliveness of co-intelligence” involves. Whatever method(s) we are using, whatever situation(s) we are trying to address, whatever transformation(s) we are seeking to facilitate, co-intelligence involves a deepening, broadening, expanding impulse – albeit often dancing with the need to focus – on behalf of the long-term well-becoming of aliveness – an ongoing journey into the well-being of the whole and wholeness of life.

Whatever form that takes at each stage of the challenge we are meeting, depends on us and our sensitivity to the ensemble of factors, lives, and energies involved. I’m afraid there’s no “how-to” here. It is a journey – with an intention and a direction, surely, but not a destination. Because a journey of co-intelligence will never end. There’s always more to it.

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

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2. Practicing co-intelligence as a special form of aliveness

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