Constructively-Critical Reflections on The Integral Living Room 2013,
Part 4:
Theme: Defining 2T/2TWe-space and
Naming Injunctions for 2T/2TWS
This is the fourth in a series of 6 blogposts, which are supplemental to the Notes from the Field report I wrote about the Integral Living Room event for the January 2014 issue of Integral Leadership Review online journal.
(http://integralleadershipreview.com/11117-integral-living-room-boulder-colorado-usa-october-31-november-3-2013/ )
These blogposts represent my more personal constructively-critical reflections and musings, and are not purposed for reporting, as the Notes report was. They'll make limited sense if you haven't read the Notes report, but, I hope, are of some general usefulness.
(http://integralleadershipreview.com/11117-integral-living-room-boulder-colorado-usa-october-31-november-3-2013/ )
These blogposts represent my more personal constructively-critical reflections and musings, and are not purposed for reporting, as the Notes report was. They'll make limited sense if you haven't read the Notes report, but, I hope, are of some general usefulness.
Note: This blog contains only a couple of my reflections as a member of the ILR Harvest Team; there is much more to be said, and that is a future blog, around our questions, our process, and our relationship to various elements of the Integral Living Room happening! These are dear to my heart and closer to my Divine Passions than some of the reflections and musings below, and more important to the world, IMO, than some of what is below, but these posts got written in the timeframe I had up until now. Stay tuned!
The blogposts are about various themes I’ve organized my reflections into:
Part 4. Theme: Defining 2T and Naming Injunctions for 2T
That's this post, read below. Find the others via the links to them.
Each theme section is independent, so you can skip around if you like!
Part 4. Theme: Defining 2T/2TWS and Naming Injunctions for 2T/2TWS
Why is this an issue?
Some people who did sense or know there was a “there” called Integral We-space to get to, ongoingly asked and tried to answer: How do we get there? What do I need to do, what do we need to do, to get there? And: How do we know we are, or aren’t there? It seemed to me that both record-keeping of emergent insights and answers, or any attempt toward closure on these matters, was not only not encouraged, but would have seemed disruptive and difficult. Even accumulating knowledge or consensus about them, was not given explicit importance, despite all that was said, as showed in the Notes report.
I wonder: Was this potential harvest ignored deliberately because the designers anticipated that the Green mentality among us would misinterpret and mis-use it, by prematurely locking in on “answers”? It is certainly true that the ultimate and most useful answers are not in the form of a once-and-for-all list or checklist; they are more in the form of Being and embodiment/capacities. But lists and checklists CAN be USED appropriately, usefully, if they are part of dynamic living documents and action-inquiries, things to bounce off of, not a set of rules enforced by a group or a leader on everyone. Perhaps there was not the bandwidth among the hosts to counteract a non-optimal closure on these matters by participants.
It’s possible also that the designers felt that participants themselves would not have the bandwidth to deal in the short timeframe with both conceptual understanding and experiential novelty and experimenting (assuming most people were not familiar with higher-consciousness we-space experiences, a pretty safe assumption, and one that seemed to have been made, given all the actual injunctions described below.)
I can see there is a natural tension or at least contrast between defining and injunction-scrutiny versus the living experience of an already-emergent we-space existing in the moment. Being within it, and talking about it, are different frames of mind, at least usually. If something is alive and happening right now, turning it into a label and mental object loses a great deal that is valuable to remain within. The concept of a certain kind of we-space and living in its living presence, usually would require different mental states.
Another consequence of keeping injunctions and definitions so experiential/implicit is that without a definition, injunctions cannot be selected appropriately. (Granted, there is an intimate connection and also a feedback loop, as some novel or creative injunctions can be explored to see what new or familiar kind or characteristic of we-space might result.) It might help to have some guidelines in the form of some conceptual definitions and distinctions, in those selections and explorations. What are the relationships among various we-spaces, various injunctions, and various capacities? Those seem to me worthy of very conscious exploration, perhaps not at ILR 2014, but in general.
Sub-theme A What is the value of defining “we-space” and of identifying injunctions or practices for creating the kind we seek?
What indeed is the value to be gained? What is at stake whether we do or don’t do all this conceptualizing? What does conceptualizing matter? It matters a great deal if we believe, as many of us do, that “collective intelligence” of a transpersonal “we-space” is humanity’s best hope for actually surviving as a species! Then indeed we need to know a great deal, specifically, conceptually and experientially, about what this is, what kinds of it exist, and how we can create, influence, and use it (or cooperate with it or let it use us!)
Unless we make some differential definitions or distinctions, we can’t deal with questions such as: What are the “we” and the “space” in “we-space”?? What are its
