IS: Dia-Logos, and the traversable onion
Upcoming open events:
- Saturday, Apr 27: Exploratory Series session #2 — Dia-Logos with Romeck van Zeijl (2 hours)
- Friday, May 3: Open-to-all Office Hours
all start @ 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). Core Calls on Sundays for members run every week through June 23.
Dia-Logos this Saturday — two hours, to give us enough space to go deep with this practice. Says Romeck, "It is a way of walking into the unknown together with all our senses wide open" and "it can turn a conversation into a kind of improvised jazz. You "listen into the dark" together, open yourself to the possibility of letting some greater Intelligence speak through you"
Moving through movements, the traversable onion
Many phenomenon have layers: conversations, belonging, commitments, ogres. If I say "the surface layer of conversation" you'll say "how's the weather?" If I say "a deeper layer of belonging" you'll say "like when I really own the space, not just a guest being welcomed." This (obvious) point is really about relationships and relating, and a "shallowness vs depth" dimension.
Dia-Logos is beneficial because it helps us to "go deep" in dialogical exploration. We seek depth, we feel called to it. We treasure our deep relationships much more than our acquaintances and situation-ships. We consider the "deep down" core of ourselves to be most truly who we really are.
That depth in our selves and relationships is like an onion in another aspect because there seems to be something convergent "at the center" of these depths. Profound, meaningful, sacred, transcendent, good, true, beautiful, there's a universality or oneness quality to our experiences. How much would we all love to live inside/within a life full of profound meaning and awe? There are also good things in the shallows (like optionality and stability) too, but how can we pursue a desire to spend more time accessing the deep? Let's look at a concrete case of desired change:
Lots of people describe their ideal life as something that in many ways maps to communal living with intergenerational community and more connection to land/nature. But buying property and moving in together is something that very few communities or friend groups end up doing (proportionally, ic.org folks notwithstanding). That's a big, DEEP commitment! And you don't get there by making a social media post asking strangers who's interested. You need many trust-building steps, and many ever-deepening experiments, to get you to the point where you together know, individually and collectively, the rightness of that commitment with those people in these ways with this culture and these agreements.
Being different, living differently, requires depth. There's a whole world of depth and solidity to the existing ways of living and being in the current world — so it takes a lot of depth of courage, conviction, and culture to counterbalance that weight. This space/scene here is full of people who see and want to live in a third horizon depth of difference relative to the Game-A late-stage capitalist-modernist first-horizon world. The second horizon is a battleground, so much so that the two loop model of hospice and new birth may be more applicable in the grand scheme.
People, though, we have a growth path, a journey of steps, a zone of proximal development, a certain tolerance for change. This brings us back to the onion, to layers of depth. The three spaces of Intentional Society are layers through which people can travel! People's journeys into the Liminal Web move them through layers of engagement and deepening connections. Any movement needs front doors, welcoming spaces for newcomers, spaces of deepening practice, and a center of committed core creators.
There is absolutely a coherence and realness to the depth to the next renaissance of cultural evolution. We (in IS, and the wider scene) are being, doing, and living more and more in the beautiful world our hearts know is possible. It's quite a distance from the surface to the core of that onion though! The topology of the meta-network is a mesh, but every node in that mesh also has a depth (or a range of depths) and making all those links traversable is a key challenge of allowing more people to flow toward this attractor — not pushed through a funnel but through an ecosystem of harmonious interconnected spaces.
If we have faith in each other, then the way exists, whatever its details may be. Be like water, getcha boots on, and let's use all our awareness and intentionality in service of moving towards, creating, embodying the society of humanity that we want be.
In kinship,
James