Intentional Society: Unknowing and sensing
There's one more orientation call this Saturday July 24th, 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC), which will be the last in one for July.
Some days, I just. don't. know. Clarity fades out and nebulosity swirls in. Nowadays when I arrive at this place of unknowing, I can welcome it --- though I still rarely travel there proactively. Unknowing is a place that expands my awareness to see the divergence between my mental models and reality. Maybe it's even a practice, of taking perspective on my knowing and seeing that the concepts and labels are always riding on top of an incredible ocean of complex reality.
How much of a difference is this whole thing making? How much did I expect yet? Which signs should I be paying attention to? Learning from reality is a great teacher, while calling reality out of touch is a trap that trades learning for temporary ego preservation. But the bigger a feedback loop is, the harder and slower it gets to learn from it! "Two steps forward, one step back" makes consistent progress, but when some days feel like "10 forward, 9 back" it's hard to gain evidence for what the "true" rate of progress is.
Aha, but then again that model of a "true" rate is just another fiction, a simplification riding atop tha ocean of complexity. So, I try to let my right brain steer the little boat of my mind on this journey. I can't logic away the ocean --- all I can do is keep sensing and adapting.
I brought questions, not answers, with me to our general session last Sunday:
- What does personal development/growth mean to you right now?
- How (in what way) do you want to grow?
- What feelings, tensions, or challenges are pulling you to grow?
- What questions do you have for yourself right now?
Reflecting together on our responses, and then also taking those into our meta time for steering the new few weeks of Intentional Society... was reassuring for me. I could feel the progress of letting the questions lead us to and through embodied truths. Participatory knowing is transformative in a way that propositional knowing is not.
Our current direction is to follow the "pull" of the things in our lives that are calling us to grow bigger. I think that looks, this next Sunday, like taking a Case Clinic approach and aiming it at developmental tensions, with some relational feedback aspects from some other circling practices. Potential simple roles: A giver, a reflector, a resonator, a balcony oberver... I'm quite excited about assembling this! My intuitions are loudy saying that this can be a high-potential perspective-taking growth practice, to synthesize these powerful bits of multiple already-innovative frames.
But do I know? Haha, no I do not. Let's run the experiment and see what happens. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
James