My search for life-serving transformational directions in these times

Dear friends,

We are certainly in a time of profound transformation.  The competition between worldviews is heating up and the field of ideological rivalry itself is evolving as new worldviews and technologies enter the fray.  This ideological storm generates – and is buffeted by – environmental and social disruptions which impact our real-world lives. 

Many of us feel disoriented. What our lives FEEL like is getting disrupted.  Where previously we had at least some sense of how things fit and how to function – a sense of normalcy and predictability – we may now feel more uncertainty and growing anxiety. 

The old boundaries between “sides”, old expectations about various people and groups, old assumptions about what is real and true, right and wrong, possible and impossible – all these are either being shaken up and complexified or solidified in an effort to hold off the disruption. 

At the same time, many of us feel a sense of crescendo, of too much, of “something’s gonna break”.  The screaming intensification definitely can’t continue forever.

I’m hearing more about breakdown and collapse, on the one hand, and breakthrough and transformation, on the other.  Those conversations are still happening around the edges, while in the mainstream I see people holding tighter to familiar touchstones – for example, those on the activist Left holding on to liberating and empowering demographic diversity and mass protest while those on the traditionalist Right holding tighter to patriarchal authority and binary gender categories. 

Given both the rise and vulnerability of political, economic and technological power, I find my orientation dancing between the likelihood of collapse and the many possibilities for transformation.  

I’ve come to sense my main calling lies in the latter.

So what might life-serving transformation look like in a time of “this changes everything”…?

Responding to the New Context

About 40 years ago, after my life-changing experience on the cross-country Great Peace March in 1986, I began a transition from peace activism to co-intelligence research.  15 years later, at the dawn of the 21st century I began to realize the overall shape of that transition.  I wrote an article called The Common Ground of Peace and Democracy.  Here are key excerpts.

Peacemaking, mediation, community organizing, democracy-building and the promotion of sustainability all center on a common skill:

The capacity to help people come together to pursue their interests, satisfy their needs, and realize their dreams — both individual and collective — within the context of the common good.

The phrase “the common good” embraces a spectrum of progressively larger goods ranging from immediate mutual benefit to vibrant long-term healthy human and natural communities — with activities being wiser the broader the scope of their benefits across the range of possible beneficiaries….

[Furthermore], real peace and real democracy support each other, since they are ultimately manifestations of the same thing:

Peace and democracy both involve, above all,
the co-creation of our individual and collective well-being.

If a certain “peace” does not reflect this fact — if it is merely the absence of war — it is only half a peace, and will not last.

If a certain democracy does not reflect this — if it is merely people voting in a manipulated society — it is only half a democracy, and will not last.

Full peace and full democracy — peace and democracy that are healthy enough to last — both involve the simultaneous co-creation of our individual and collective well-being.

I wrote that before so many of us realized how quickly our tech-accelerating polycrisis and unprecedented wealth extremes were hurling us past limits of what the Earth could support, and before social media so thoroughly tore us apart into alienated factions subject to powerful scientific surveillance and manipulation from all directions.  And yet its basic principles seem to be even more profoundly relevant today than ever before.

So I find my calling increasingly guiding me to promote contexts that support Life’s capacity for the co-creation of mutual and whole-system well-being well into the future.  And, given our circumstances, I’m searching for increasingly profound ways to do that.

This orientation includes increasing the capacity of participatory citizen and stakeholder deliberations to sustain life-enhancing collective wisdom in ways beyond our usual isolated mini-publics and elite negotiations.

It includes all efforts to enhance the practice and power of deep listening and reflection – including between adversaries, across demographic and power differences, and among all forms of life across space and time, towards fellowship, kinship, and belonging.

It includes transformed economic arrangements that deepen and expand the needs being met – and for whom – while massively reducing the lopsided and often “invisibilized” trade-offs, harms and denials that sustain our world-destroying current economic arrangements.

It includes greater understanding of the many varieties of power and participation, so that greater levels of holoficiency (efficiency of, by and for the Whole) can be achieved more through increased awareness, presence, collaboration and design than through force, atrophied attention, and alienated caring.

So I wonder how to bring orientations like these to the nonviolent actions, protests, community organizing, pro-democracy work, environmental initiatives, and other activities that concerned people around me are undertaking in response to – and in the midst of – the new political context we find ourselves in.  I don’t know.  But I feel drawn to explore it.  Because business-as-usual is coming apart – even our own modes of business-as-usual, our forms of engagement and our coping strategies.  How consciously and creatively can we, together, apply our aliveness in new ways when profound change is what is happening already?

The opportunities here are significant.  Things that were solid and resistant – worldviews, stories, institutions, habits, predictability, power relations, and more – are falling apart, being torn apart, or shifting on their own as part of the world’s shifting.  Where business-as-usual is coming apart, space opens up for further shifts – of all kinds, for better and/or for worse.  While many players use the disruption for financial or ideological gain, others with more concern “for the whole” are working more or less “under the radar” to lay the groundwork for life-serving shifts in narratives, relationships, consciousness, capacities, and institutions.  Some, with an Aikido sensibility, are even working within one or more of the partisan “sides” or dominant institutions, using the energies and tendencies of the battle or the marketplace to support some of that groundwork.

Here are a few examples of this that I find myself exploring as next steps in my own understanding and transformational response to the metacrisis that I feel is so present everywhere in our current predicament. 

A.  Holistic Problem-Solving

I have critiqued problem-solving as a linear mode of engagement unfit for nonlinear complexity and, especially, unfit for addressing the metacrisis. 

But I’ve recently run across Scott Spann’s holistic approach to “solving impossible problems” that takes people beyond solving for me/mine/our side to solving for the whole in ways that transform their consciousness and behaviors in the process.  

An inclusive “360 degree” set of stakeholders gets drawn into thinking systemically about challenges and aspirations they care deeply about, and then into working together on key leverage points with deep understanding of what they all want.  

It seems to me that the more our “solutionizing” is approached in this way, the more holistic consciousness will spread in society along with the holistic solutions the participants co-create. This powerfully counters the “story of separation” that is driving the polycrisis.  And since everyone has problems they want solved, and Scott’s approach does such a great holistic job of it, there’s a lot of transformational potential for this effect to spread in all realms, on all sides, at all scales.

So I and a number of co-intelligence colleagues are learning about and supporting the spread of Scott Spann’s work.  For more information, see Scott’s personal and organizational websites, his recent book IMPOSSIBLE  and/or this fairly detailed video describing his approach – an approach which is still evolving.

B. Community healing, organizing and capacity building

•  I’ve begun Libby Hoffman’s fascinating book The Answers Are There about her work in Sierra Leone’s post-civil-war villages.  Like Scott’s work, Libby’s approach seems to me to embody the wise democracy prime directive – to appreciate, evoke, and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole.

•  And I want to alert you to Shareable’s Mutual Aid 101 sessions in February and March.  Mutual aid is a fundamental facet of the dynamics of reciprocity that shape the vitality of Gaia’s living systems, as well as part of our human relational capacity for resilience in the face of communal challenges.  Shareable knows a lot about this – which sometimes arises spontaneously, as Rebecca Solnit documents in her book A Paradise Built in Hell. The more we face crises, the more invaluable this understanding becomes.

C. Regrounding ourselves with Indigenous kinship consciousness

•  I’m finding great inspiration and guidance from Mayan scholar of contemplative studies Yuria Celidwen’s book and meta-narrative of Flourishing Kin which leads us to prioritize the well-being of all our relations and relationships in the web of life.  I want to share the fascinating intro podcast through which I met her – and encourage you to listen to more of the videos on her website.

•  I’m also carrying close Vanessa Andeotti’s insight that we are (an aspect of) the biosphere’s metabolism, which I wrote about here.  Its constant presence led me to stumble on a “meditation into the world” based on life’s endless sharing of atoms that I experience imaginatively through a special kind of attention to my breathing.  This meditation is still evolving from the note about it that I added to CII’s January newsletter last week.  It now draws me into experiencing my fundamental connection with specific beings, including people like Trump and Gandhi, along with their suffering.  It is offering me so many ways to weave my consciousness back into the fabric of Life.

I want to reiterate that these are definitely not the only approaches available for life-serving transformational engagement in these times, but they are the ones currently calling to my attention.  I’d be interested to hear of any others that you see, experience, imagine or appreciate, if you’d like to add a comment to this on my blog or drop me an email.  The main characteristic I see in this category of response is a fresh out-of-the-box way of serving life in times of profound uncertainty and challenge – if only because the box, itself, is burning.  See what you think.

Coheartedly,
Tom

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

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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