September 19, 2024

IS: Aliens & building what can't be imagined

(This Sunday, Sept 22 wraps up our 15th Season for members. Community calls will resume October 6th.)

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Welcome! I’m glad you have all awakened. I shall recite once again the frame that brings us together in this special mission: We have discovered that we are not alone. There is another sentient species in this very galaxy, and so close to us that we can reach them! We did not notice them at first, but now we have collected a substantial sample of their radio frequency communications. These aliens call themselves… humans.

As part of our "collective imaginal" arc of the last several weeks, this last Sunday we roleplayed some wise and benevolent beings examining what messages and gifts we'd want to bring to these strange and confusing human aliens. I authored this game myself, which was aptly described by one member as "a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and guided meditation." 🐉🧘‍♀️🤣

The component parts correspond to (and this was invisible/unmentioned at the time, but I'm flying my geek flag here) elements of the Structural Tension (Fritz, Senge) model:

1. ideal state (describing what we liked about our custom-designed alien bodies and utopian society)
2. current state (describing the confusing and disturbing differences we observed about human society)
3. bridging the gap (constructing our "first contact" messages

This could potentially become a publicly-published guide. Does anyone want to run a session elsewhere? (I'm more likely to do it if I have a known user.)

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As I zoom out to ponder the season-to-season level of Intentional Society, I'm excited to continue evolving each of the three IS spaces:

• Practice Dojo (start a coalition and redefine the container with "community center" elements)
• Core Community (solidify "crew AND concregation" scopes + provide affordances for enlivening service of the community)
• Intentional Ventures (launch squads, solidify layers, head towards reopening invites)
• and at this point I almost consider Second Renaissance a fourth wing of our campus, for "wise action responding to the meta-crisis" (that isn't livelihood/venture-constrained)

With a hat tip to Gall's law, my system-level excitement centers on the amount of already-working-ness that I see in the various parts of this already-complex (and getting more so) ecosystem, primarily within IS itself but extending out into 2R and VillageCo and the whole Liminal Web. We don't have it all figured out but I have much more of a "downhill" sense of rolling the boulder at-least-slightly-down the slope of the incentive-landscape terrain, vs pushing up toward a challenging crest. Not "this will be easy" but, I feel a lightness in my outlook that is less murky and less tentative.

It's already here. It's already real - in both the "practically different from conventional ways of being" and the "it was already there inside us all along" senses. I felt a lot of resonance with this tweet today:

I can't say those words yet and fully own them, but I look forward to making this "it" more fully built and realized over the next several years (and to infinity and beyond)...

Cheers,
James