Intentional Society: Outside the museum
on collaboration and exterior-directed energy
Click here to register for an orientation video call on Saturday, February 4th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).
Collaboration is in the air. I just wrote that sentence to a friend, as I send out a few custom invitations to a design/brainstorming session. I'm finding this very energizing, to consider connecting-and-unleashing a bunch of potential energy and value around doing things together. I'm also still figuring out how to describe and position this direction within the context of Intentional Society and the extended network to which we're connected group-to-group, so that's what you're invited to for a few more paragraphs here.
Contemplating the "being and/vs doing" duality/polarity is often how this domain is considered, how I've written about it in the past. Exploring those labels breaks down, though, at different scales in the fractal of all "being" moves/practice/attention also being acts of doing, and no "doing" being done free from a state of being. Currently I appreciate interior/exterior focus in the language. I'd say, Intentional Society has been heavily investing in interior work, doing together around interior states of being. Now, what is it like to add more of a different pole of energy?
I used the phrase "like opening up a new wing of the museum" recently to try to point at the continuation-and-expansion nature of reaching out toward exterior doing and integrity-with-outer-systems. A science museum or a children's museum, where there are activities in each room of each wing in the space. Different people will spend more time in one or the other wing, and you can move back and forth as you please, and you learn different things that might relate to each other.
The museum metaphor falls apart, though, when I consider the external nature of an external focus. Seems obvious when I look at it now, but exterior focus leads us outside the "walls" of IS much more. Interior focus supports more inside-the-community membranes, protecting vulnerable digging down into inner exploration. Exterior focus begs to connect with the outside world! Other people, other groups, projects already going and in potentia, interfacing with allies and systems and integrating across it all.
Coalescing emergent energy into coherent directions, this is one of the big challenges of collective-intelligence spaces. Can we hold enough, expand our awareness enough, transcend-and-include enough, remember/inhabit/maintain that awareness support, such that the collective organism can be conscious? Mmmmm.
Cheers,
James