IS: The felt sense of wisdom
Upcoming open events:
- Saturday, Apr 6: Open-to-all Office Hours
- Saturday, Apr 13: Exploratory Series session #1 — Practice TBD
all start @ 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)
Operational notes first:
Come to Saturday's Office Hours if you'd like to get hooked up to our IS core (membership) space. Those weekly Sunday calls resume this Sunday the 7th and members should now have received the invite on their calendars.
The Exploratory Series lineup is taking shape and the full lineup will likely be in shape by next week! (Ironically the first session date is the last to firm up.)
The overall three-space model of IS that I described last week has been tidied up a bit more (this week I'm trying on "core" as a label - any better?) and placed on the home page of intentionalsociety.org.
And now, an inquiry for you:
Do you know, really know, the wisdom you hold in your system? Have you felt it? (I'll use "system" here to reference the whole of your body, your nervous system, your many brain parts, and your self-aware mind.) One useful reference is to explore the holistic right-brain frame of McGilchrist's brain model. But I want to focus on how "rightness" feels.
It's a whole-system feeling, this felt sense of wisdom-rightness-clarity. Your cognition (liberally speaking) flows through your neck, chest, muscles, face, skin, posture — everything kinda lines up, relaxes, drops into place. There's an aliveness, a steady ready alertness that's humming with some kind of latent crackling fire.
When we don't have that full embodied "hell yeah"... something else is present. We sometimes may not know that we know, but it's there, expressed as a tightening of muscle or fascia, or a posture shift, or a subtle facial expression. In sensed-energy space, there's turbulence or resistance or unease.
But when our system finds confidence and clarity in the wisdom of every way-of-looking we have, well, then seeing is deciding — or rather, the sense of competing options falls away and there is no more choosing. The Way is there.
I don't claim that you or I have access to this wise knowing on demand. It does seem to me that wisdom can be cultivated and practiced, more readily sensed and found... but I have no assurance that we can know the "right answer" in any situation. Often the wisdom of our system is telling us that we can sense there's something we don't know!
There's also no rational-logical proof that our felt wisdom is infallible. However. I think we can trust our felt sense, our holistic intuition, much more than we generally dare to with our modern minds. I have not yet felt a deep and integrous seeing/knowing that turned out to be deceptive or overconfident.
Relational-perspectival hygiene also seems to be able to help me find and apply clarity in more situations, I am noticing recently. I can know that I don't know the truth of my story, while still feeling the clear truth that my story is what it is!
The big instances in my life of feeling the full experience of this full system knowing... I could probably count them all on my fingers. The realization (again, it didn't really feel like making a decision after seeing it) of Intentional Ventures felt like one of them.
Holding on to that sense-memory, what it feels like — I'll practice recalling that sensory state as a guide to more of my action-considerations. Let me know if you find any success in doing similarly?
Cheers,
James