Intentional Society: Practicing unknowing
We've entered US Daylight Saving time - our orientation call this Saturday March 19th is at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time, which is now 8pm UTC.
Last year I was in the habit of regularly giving, in our Sunday sessions, a weekly reminder that "I don't know what I'm doing and we're making this all up as we go along." I realized recently that I had fallen out of that habit of repeating that saying, and at the lower/practical level of "doing what we do together in a general session" I do think that is correct. We have more now in the way of the rhythms and routines of practicing what we practice together.
But at a higher level, this is and needs to remain true and salient in my awareness. I am reminded of Lisa Norton's uncertainment practice, framing this as a "negative capability" of abiding in uncertainty. Maybe I could say "inverted" to highlight the complementarity — like digging a hole versus building a tower, something like making space for better foundations.
What will Intentional Society become, where will it lead us, what will we grow into with it? I don't know. And it's hard to maintain that openness when my mind wants to make assumptions, wants to plan and control and know, all the good effectiveness practices of systematicity that themselves need to be object-ed and transcended to re-integrate with the complexity of reality that doesn't fit inside those systems that are small enough to fit inside our brains.
This seems hard to practice — like the "getting out of the car" skill (from this delightfully trippy SSC essay) when you don't know the car is a thing distinct from your own being. I know the motion of zooming out, in general — perspectival work, zooming out and in, trying different lenses, looking for conceptual fusions. Even then, it's hard to remember to practice, and actually practice.
Looking at this in community, the "extended brain" concept comes up again for me. Embedding hooks to awareness in and through our interactions and relationships with other people can literally make us smarter, wiser, more capable. We have social ritual grooves in our brains, and can fill them with things even as advanced as "making space for awareness of uncertainty and possibility." Embodied group cognition, exapting our social roots.
Cheers,
James