The subtle, the causal, and the evolutionary movement

Fernanda Ibarra is a visionary of virtual communities of practice, who wrote in the Club of Amsterdam Journal "The main source of value creation is shared knowledge and collective intelligence, not land, labour or capital. It is that shift in the basis of value creation, what propelled virtual communities in the limelight as collective players with largely untapped potential for radical innovation."

She has just commented (see below) on my entry about Collective consciousness: a “peer to peer” phenomenon?, which inspired me to learn more about her thinking.

Fernanda: Very inspiring George, tell me if I grabbed it, could it be possible that we are collectively connecting in this causal state of consciousness that happens during deep sleep? Connecting and sharing the files of sensing the whole, the witness?

Then, could it be possible that during sleep, like the spread of a meme, a a deeper purpose of caring for the health of the whole may rise? As Wilber points to, during a causal state of consciousness (sleeping, drugs, meditative and altered states) we connect to a higher stage, which could be the witness, the whole, depending on where you are individually. Now, Causal energies spreading a vision, or stage, regardless where you are individually, like a center of gravity, in a way that may be 'collectively shared' is, as I said, very inspiring."

I believe Wilber's "causal state of consciousness" refers to the state in which all forms and experiences--including time and space--are transcended, as in the Buddhist nirvana. Because of that, it's not a likely actor for spreading any kind of social vision.

My original question in the entry, to which Fernanda relates was this: Can it be that we are sharing “files” created by It, and doing so, we’re giving a distributed yet increasingly coherent voice to It, each of us with the unique timbre that we are? It is delightful to notice (online ad off-line) that there are more and more of us picking up the tune :-)

But the "It" that I referred to above was not the Wilberian causal state. I was writing about the collective consciousness (of the evolutionary tip), or Zeitgeist, which is situated in time, not formlessness. Why is that difference important? Because a post-metaphysical spiritually--that is the hallmark of Wilber 5--will be a natural ally of the evolutionary movement, while any idea of a positive future that pre-exists somewhere and can be accessed in formlessness may weaken us.

A more useful approach to access the information content of the Zeitgeist is through the subtle levels of consciousness ("level II" in Wilber's classification), where archetypal imagery can help us bridging the known present and unknown future.

Both Fernanda and I are aligned with a vision that she articulated as the "vision of enhancing more participative ways of organising as a mechanism to allow each individual to connect with their sources of creativity and to being able to participate in the key decisions that affects one's future."

"Participative ways of organising," as opposed to the still dominant command-and-control model, are at the heart of community-based, peer-to-peer learning and co-creation, as we can see them in the growing the signs of the emerging open source civilization. No doubt, we are living in a "Jump Time", as Jean Houston put it. It is a time when the old institutions and ways of thinking and organizing became unfit to our changing life conditions and the new ones have not yet fully formed; a time when even "a small group of concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

Well, it would be an obvious understatement to say that there are more than one small and not so small groups engaged in the business of evolutionary transformation. They are still in a deeply fragmented, disjoint state. What are the non-denominational and post-metaphysical spiritual practices that will help us tapping into and mobilizing the collective intelligence of the whole movement?

Thank you Fernanda for triggering that question.