Intentional Society: Integrated-learning loops
This is our quarterly rest week — an in-between time of change and strategy and potential, when I put on my system design hat towards our next season. I was glad to share that hat with other community members in yesterday's Meta Meeting, and am brimming now with connections between ideas, proposals, and collected wisdom.
The way/dao of Intentional Society is a way of being, the essence of being how-we want-to-be, inhabiting our highest values in self-awareness, spacious presence, and coherent intention...
...as. we. live. Life, everywhere and all the time, not just when we're together. The pull/call/desire I'm describing is toward integration across outside (of General Sessions) and inside parts. Opening up to more doing-energy, while retaining our priority on being-ness. Opening up to more exterior action, to complement our interior action.
Bringing in more space for increased scope, that allows room for more complete, integrated learning loops to occur in our personal journeys: The inner game (inside ourselves, and inside our community) connects and flows outward to the outer game, which brings new feedback to fuel the inner game, and so forth.
I wrote similarly about this internal-external learning loop strategy a couple years ago, calling it building doghouses. Being "on the pillow," having a great team, is incomplete in itself — but the solution isn't to charge out directly to build a skyscraper or save the world. Contact with reality is critical, yet neither side of the polarity is "the point" of it all. Being and doing, inner and outer, accepting and changing, exploring and exploiting, all these polarities require accepting both sides, without exclusion/shadow, to integrate our values and manage these dynamic tensions.
I'm also sensing the complementary nature of both broadening and focusing: Broadening the scope-and-space of what IS is/does will, I think, counterintuitively give us more ability to narrow and focus and strengthen our core skills in relational practice and presence. By bringing that strength into contact with exterior reality, turning some of our exploring into exploiting, we can likely reap further benefits for ourselves even while having external impact/influence in ways that we value.
Am I communicating this well enough that it comes through to you and makes sense? I hope so — I hope you can catch a bit of my excitement at the prospect of extending our frame a bit, building on a solid foundation of connection and trust and support, in a way that can increase the depth and breadth of what's possible inside this micro-society while increasing the coherence and integrity of the whole system. Possibly like a chrysalis transition of caterpillar to butterfly: a dramatic transformation of perception and capability, using existing raw materials, reconfigured without losing identity or purpose.
Cheers,
James