Intentional Society: Celebrating Our Achievement (2 of 3)
2 of 3: Following the current invitation, I'm looking at what we've achieved in getting to this milestone. As a reminder, newly-interested folks can join Saturday's orientation to get involved.
I (and I'm sure many of us) tend to focus on the challenges, the problems, the difficulties and uncertainties that lay ahead of us — and neglect to sufficiently celebrate the progress, the achievements, the victories already accomplished. But I was reminded, at the Microsolidarity monthly today, to take a better look at what's worth celebrating.
Intentional Society has been, for the past almost-three years, a developmentally-informed community for personal growth through relational practices. A "community for people who want to grow," in the original language. Now, we'll also be exploring high-awareness organizing/working atop that cultural foundation. That didn't make sense for us before. Why is that possible now? How did we get here? What has changed?
Well, I think (and I still feel bashfulness even writing it) that we've actually achieved something very rare and very valuable. In my humble opinion, we have managed to actually develop a practical playbook for "how to grow" relationally into bigger, happier, more capable and capacious consciousness! Capacious means spacious and roomy, and the capabilities that get unlocked are the ability to hold-and-handle complexity in the form of situations and challenges that stress our present-or-former ways of being in and relating to our environment.
We've learned how to facilitate growth, wow! Interpreted at one level, it's a trivial claim: "People are always growing, can't help growing, for thousands of years we've cultivated wisdom and passed it from person to person." On another level, it's an impossible claim: "There's no magic trick for wisdom transmission, it's a long and personal process that can't be short-circuited despite thousands of years of seeking." Both of those book-end caricatures are true, AND, the claim in the middle which I'm making and celebrating is that we've created an incredible platform for unlocking developmental growth.
Caveats: lots. And it's not a script, not even a system — it's a toolkit requiring meta-systematic operation and further elements embedded in the cultural layer.
But this was arguably the most important hypothesis that I was seeking to test with the creation of Intentional Society. And at this point, proof-by-existence has resolved the question for me: creating a highly growth-facilitating space is possible. It can even be done on the internet.
Damn straight I'll celebrate that. I celebrate the impact I've seen and felt, the testimonials I've been given, the descriptions of how people have been changed and expanded, loosened and freed, in their perspective and stance and relationship to themselves/others/everything.
Why is growth important? Well, at the scale of humanity, development (i.e. increased capacity to hold complexity) is what can give us more of a chance to have a future we'll celebrate — or perhaps even a human future at all, given the complexity we're facing in the spiral of technological power growth and societal evolution. It's what gave me release from much of my suffering, and continues to increase my clarity and effectiveness and capacity and joy. It's what can give my kids the opportunity to grow "up" better and sooner and higher than I have. It's the seeing that frees. It's the dance of life that can meet the universe in stride if we can just hear the music.
In general across time and billions of lives, most of our transformative growth has come, I think, unconsciously and accidentally — incidental inducement from struggling to cope with challenges that overwhelm our prior way of being. The pull of the universe, the calling of our challenges, will continue to draw us to level up our dancing abilities. And. We can tap the beat for each other, mirror our steps, help each other catch on to more dance moves with more flow and fewer big knocks.
It can be done. We're doing it. There can be more of it. It's time to apply it in addition to growing it. But in this moment, I celebrate that we have it, and honor the many hours (now well above 3,000 person-hours, by the numbers) that have gone into our learning and achievements thus far.