Intentional Society: Un-knowing experiment review
Our orientation calls for newcomers continue this Saturday April 2nd, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)
"What can I un-know?"
That was the prompt and subject this week in our group practice. I'd been approaching this subject for a couple weeks before we tried the experiment last Sunday, to mixed reviews.
On the structure/container dimension, I tried to leave it minimal and loose, using "abiding in silence and holding divergence" (h/t Lisa Norton) as the main guidance. Full group, not even a talking piece, see what emerges. However, I notice that "using a prompt" itself had a stronger impact than I anticipated, and am taking a note to the effect of "the smaller the amount of structure is, the more concentrated its usage will be."
Why "un" knowing? The thing that felt workable there was to perform a "swivel" move away from things that we do know that we know. That seemed more tractable than trying to stare directly at unknown unknowns. I think the technique could be said to have worked, as we generated lots of observations, conjectures, statements for almost an hour with very few dry spells. However, something did feel a bit lost in the intellectualism of the experience. Maybe it privileged propositional knowledge (in terms of Vervaeke's four kinds of knowing). Maybe it was the "what" in the prompt, vs a "how would it feel to."
A little deeper, perhaps there's something buried underneath that disembodied feeling which has something to do with employing the intellectual mind as a tool to try to subvert the mind. Like the left-brain emissary usurping its master, perhaps the true openness and un-fixedness lies outside that frame, requiring a more holistic and embodied kind of expanded awareness.
I'm glad for the divergence, to have this complex bag of learnings — if one's experiments are all coming up as expected (or worse, as "wished"), then one isn't really doing experiments.
Cheers,
James
P.S. Two weeks left in the season, then we're off April 17th in alignment with Easter.