I rarely came across a stranger, who could as accurately describe my feelings and aspirations, by expressing his own, as Michael Dubois did in his blog entry on "Co-Intelligence. The part and the whole".
"What if some of us did know or at least had the requisite pieces of the whole of understanding for what to do and how to do it? How would we recognize a workable way among all the competing philosophies and strategies and schemes? And if we did recognize a workable way out of our mess, how would we communicate it?"
"This is what is haunting me every day now. I seem to be understanding more and more of what is happening, and what we will need to do now and in the very near future. And the interesting thing for me is that the main feature of this understanding is that it is a partially complete piece of a much larger whole, and that whole is all of us. In other words, I don’t have the answer, and I never will, but I am an intrinsic part of the answer. I am a node of the collective intelligence that literally MUST awaken from its dormancy. I feel now like a piece of the Big Hologram. I have the whole vision inside me, but it must be united with the whole visions that are inside everyone else or it’s worthless and doomed. And I’m beginning to wake up to how this will work or die trying."
Fortunately, not only we are still alive but there are more and more of us "beginning to wake up to how this will work."
Yet, the movement of "collective intelligence" is still largely invisible to itself, in spite the half million webpages using that term. "The 'movement' isn't lots of people carrying signs in the street. It is the motion of the living social body, in this case, as it is waking up." -- Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute.
It is awakening as we connect our conversations, seeking the answers, the new capabilities that only together we can be. I don’t know why but that reminds me of a cartoon showing a little girl hugging every little comrades of her in the kindergarten, and in the last picture, she says, “because God has only my arms to hug them all.”
The creative impulse of the universe that is trying to come through in our 1-on-1 conversations really needs us, each of us, to connect the fragments of meaning perceived individually and in pairs, into a bigger picture of coherent landscape and action. It is both humbling and inspiring to realize that there are important messages coming from the noetic field, which have more enfolded complexity than any individual mind/consciousness could fully contain and absorb.
It is humbling because our personally-focused self-sense can’t grasp the higher, impersonal sense of self, in which it is extended to the collective that became, from an evolutionary perspective, the basic unit of cognition and intelligence.
It is also inspiring, if we hear it as a knock on our door by evolution (towards higher complexity and integration), which says, hey come out, join the bigger you and play.
Knock... knock... do you hear it?
"One of the things I love that is so special about the Redwood trees is that they are MASSIVE and yet they only send their roots about ten feet deep... they send them wide and hold onto their community for strength. Good reminder for us all," says Gentle Thunder, a sister of the "standing people," her bellowed tree beings. She plays flutes, drum and hammer dulcimer in a way that stirs the souls and seduces us into the deepest reverence for life. The beauty of her music and the systemic wisdom of her words reminded me a new way to look at my quest, a new way to hold my question:
1. Rigorous,