The paper which I presented at the 3rd annual Integral Theory Conference is something I labored for a long time to create—something that speaks directly to the question of our times. (You can download the full paper here)
You and I have been given an engraved invitation to an adventure. Its surfaces are completely obvious, and yet its deeper character is hiding in plain sight.
What’s the context? We are among the luckiest, most comfortable and most privileged people who have ever lived—really! We have unprecedented access to food, art, mystical wisdom, technologies, information, and mobility. Not only that, we have every reason to be confident in the power of progress and the resilience of evolution and human creativity.
At the same time, we are alive in a profoundly disorienting time. We are facing an unprecedented world crisis—with environmental crises coinciding with crises in all our institutions and infrastructure—financial, agricultural, educational, healthcare, political and more. There is nowhere to hide.
We face ample reasons to relax and rejoice in gratitude, and, simultaneously to get very sober and serious.
This is a deep existential invitation to evolve. We’re asked to participate in the rapid evolution of our consciousness and culture. That’s asking a lot. (We can’t see, in any detail, exactly how we can do this, but it’s clear that it’s needed. So life asks us to presume that there are very real ways that we can actually respond.) Accordingly we sincerely and passionately ask: How can we become the change that unlocks the stuck game that is co-creating this global crisis?
That’s the question that was calling my heart when it came time for me to write the paper I had agreed to present at the July 3rd annual Integral Theory Conference. So I dug in and explored it vigorously—from many perspectives—recognizing that it had to catalyze a transformative existential confrontation, not just an intellectual discussion.
The result was a passionate and intellectually adventurous exploration of transformational communication, including a short history of practices for bringing forth a “higher we-space” (the first ever written, as far as I know). It’s titled, Enacting an Integral Revolution: How Can We Have Truly Radical Conversations in a Time of Global Crisis? And below, you’ll find a link where you can download the full 37-page paper.
This R[e]volution refers to rapid interior evolution, something akin to the rapid transformations visible in the fossil record of “punctuated equilibrium”. After all, that’s what our world crisis is calling for!
During my presentation at ITC, I confessed to the audience that we don’t have models yet for what we need to become. The really vital conversation is not one that we already understand, it’s the one that we don’t yet understand. It’s a co-inquiry in which we create the conditions for new emergence in the noosphere.
From the conclusion:
“ In my deepest private trans-rhetorical conversations, my conversation partners have entered deeply into the discourse, sharing their darkness and light, depth and freedom. A dialogic “dance” has emerged. Personal sharing has sparked empathic resonance which has provoked insights about the nature of the obstacles to a coherent human response to the crisis. This has in turn sparked connections to ideas about engineering social change and sticky memes which have then provoked personal examination, and back and forth, co-creatively uplifting the level of awareness, presence, clarity, care and engagement. The “dance” between perspectives has then begun to feed on its own momentum and is beginning to become more and more coherent.”
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