The BIG Questions

The Four-Plus:

  1. WHY DON’T WE CHANGE?  WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO SHIFT THE WHOLE? [Presence] 

    JJ: ... I’ve been wondering if shifting the whole requires deep change on a scale most of us have never experienced, are we ready for this kind of change? 

    OS:…..It’s almost as if we’re living in a split world. Plus the clashing forces Nonaka talks about show up personally as well as publicly. On the one hand, many people are experiencing a profound opening. But they are also experiencing a buildup of pressure, tension, anxiety. Time is speeding up. .. we’re struggling simultaneously to speed up and slow down. As the need for reflection and deeper learning grows, the pressures against that need being fulfilled grow, too.
    But the Opening is occurring, and [particularly] those people on the periphery of the first-world mainstream society are most open [e.g., Guatemala, S. Africa]…
    BSF: Something seems to be shifting, but the changes are subtle .. fragile..
    JJ: Many of our interviewees over last 5 years talked about profound personal experiences that altered their worldview and then said that they’d never told anyone else what they told us. the opening that is occurring is disorienting, and people can easily feel alone.

    [[[But when it happens from within, one by one, it certainly can be overwhelming – personally transforming – without being this kind of overwhelming, as JJ implies. And in fact it can be so comforting and mutually empowering to realize other people are and have been experiencing the same kind of thing as oneself, once people open up and begin to share their stories enough to realize this. Rhea White calls this “the new dispensation” ; I think of it as the New Story.]]]

     

  2. RE:  Large Group Transformation [What would it take ...?]
    Berlin Wall 
    S. Africa
    VISA
    Gen. Motors
    MLKing
    What The Four are talking about is happening, as deQuincey says, ALL THE WAY DOOWN. 
    How about the challenge of the whole human race as a large-force / group "    project of transcendence"!?
    Imagine:
    This Consciousness Shift as a recognized global Movement with its fully realized VOICE and self-realized Intent, collective, individual, and as ONE; the mutually recognized capacity to move forward as one divine being of divine purpose, in divine accord, because together we choose it. And in the choosing, we are the attractor force that brings Nature and Spirit into play with us! 
    It’s everywhere – the sprouts of this consciousness. Let’s bring it into the fullness of our collective consciousness as who and what we are and what we are capable of doing together.

  3. And What does it take to connect to that other stream of time, the one that gently pulls me toward our future potential? [Presence] [[[Also, see EHE Aftereffects.]]]
    [[[In EHEs, I believe this is fundamentally what happens as well – that presencing is another way to ‘language’ what naturally happens, especially the more profound the Experience -- at the bottom of the 'U'. I also believe as a consequence of such experiences, recognized widely within the context of aftereffects, such as the consequent alteration of lifeview and values in certain ways, also reflect this type of behavior. But it would be very interesting to study this specifically.]]]

  4. Can living institutions learn to tap into a larger field to guide them toward what is healthy for the whole? What understanding and capacities will this require of people individually and collectively? THE ANSWER: we’ve come to believe that the core capacity needed to access the field of the future is PRESENCE.                                    

[[[==AtL / wHe ; all things EHE. We could together make a world of difference with this as common and openly discussed knowledge and in-common, shared experience.]]] 

  1. VISA – a self-governing democracy. Key question that led to what it is today: Can an organization be patterned on biological concepts and methods so that it can evolve to continually organize and invent itself?
    The genetic code became Visa’s purpose and principles, its governing idea .. spelled out in its constitution.
    ‘chaordic = how order emerges from chaos – powerful metaphor for the entire U process.
    [[[This is exactly what’s naturally unfolding with people all over the world having these Awakening experiences / EHEs. Once enough of us really ‘get it’ that this is a global / species phenomenon, we will recognize – not: we will become or begin – we are literally a chaordic entity and have been all along. Through this Awakening Shift, we naturally operate out of this relational field of knowing / ‘field knowing itself’ = aftereffects of EHEs, on collective scale.]]]

  2. What has been lacking in the 20th century is a central cultural thought that would unify all these things: economy, technology, ecology, society, matter, mind, and spirituality. There have been no great philosophers or great thinkers who’ve been able to develop the thinking that unifies all these questions. The decline in integrative awareness and thinking has been replaced by a focus on business and making money as a default common aim.
    [[[I believe both the ‘all things EHE’ and / or Theory U offer magnificent means to transform this.]]]

  3. How do you go about eliminating the blocks between people so that they can operate together as a single intelligence? That was the beginning of my lifelong quest, actually, to learn about this phenomenon. 
    COS : What I’ve heard you say so far is that your underlying question related to a different mode of learning to actualize emerging futures relates to the experience of collapsing boundaries in your life. Joseph Jaworski: Right. 
    Two Questions 
    The first one was how to understand these collapse of boundaries, right? 
    Joseph Jaworski: Right. 
    COS : The second question arose after the meeting with David Bohm, and involved how to bring these kinds of collapsing boundary experiences about, how to produce that experience. And not just individually, but on a group or collective level, right? 
    Joseph Jaworski: Right. 
    [[[The EHE model, etc. would give us a whole new way to approach seeing something powerful and from the heart, this capacity for transformation and more that unites us and even illuminates this unitive factor in a way that really does dissolve boundaries – through love and mutual regard that are gained through these types of experiences.]]]

  4. Re: sign behind Ishmael the gorilla: ‘with man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
    PS: … Ishmael is asking a truly radical question: Might the gorilla really need man [and wo-man], not just for protection but for something more? There is a questions we’ve stopped asking. It’s a question about our purpose as a species, about our purpose within the larger web of life, within the universe. I think we’ve stopped asking this question because we no longer see ourselves as part of that universe. We see our purpose only in human terms: what we want, how to make things better for us. we don’t wonder how we might contribute to life as a whole [making this a felt-to-be basically meaningless question today].
    JJ: Which means we really have no larger purpose at all. We simply live to meet our needs and to pursue our selfish aims, building a world fashioned in human terms. How can you have a larger purpose if you’re separate from the larger world?
    PS: we consider the living universe around us as nothing more than ‘natural resources’ that exist solely for us to take and use. We even treat DNA, the very program of life, as something for us to exploit as fits our needs with no thought of how it might affect other species.
    The environmental movement is mostly focused on how we can be ‘less bad,’ … But what if humans, as a species, actually have a purpose? What if we have something distinctive to contribute – something to give rather than just take?
    OS: … What you’re saying is that no alternative path forward may exist without rediscovering why we’re here – because only then can we start to see what we actually have to give.
    [[[reminds of the tremendous sense of purpose and meaning that drives and also sustains people who have had EHEs. And that sense of Purpose is also recognized among EHEers as recognizably unitive as well as individualistic, as if there is an overlighting Purposefulness out of which individual purpose EHEers discover or feel is all connected back in the Oneness, such as NDErs and others keenly recognize.]]]
    OS: … and that will require us to think differently, to think as if we are part of the universe. The ancient Anasazi, like many native peoples, believe that they needed to conduct their dances and ceremonies in order to maintain balance in the universe. If they neglected this duty, not only they but countless other forms of life would suffer. Maybe all of this is about rediscovering what our dance is – today in the modern world – and who we, the dancers, are.
    BSF: So seeing our collective journey down the U is rediscovering our purpose actually reveals this deeper question. Who are we? … we need to re-experience our place in the universe before we can see how it needs us as well as how we need it. and this is no mere intellectual discovery. Remember the grief you felt in Baja, JJ?
    JJ: .. It was more like discovering that I had a family I’d never even known about – and that my family was suffering.
    BSF: And out of the grief you found your connection to the purpose that Ishmael’s questions suggests.
    JJ: Yes, for me, it has to do with our stewardship responsibility today and in relation to new possibilities for life, even if we have no idea what these new possibilities might be.
    OS: Perhaps they’ll come from the collective intelligence emerging in global networks, what Nicanor Perlas calls the ‘real message of globalization,’ becoming ‘more aware of how deeply we’re interconnected as human beings across all of society.’
    [[[RE: “collective intelligence” another rendition to my mind of the possible evolutionary objective of becoming the global brain in a way that we can truly see, out of a shared sense of purpose ; supported by our collective, growing ‘super’-sensory capacities ; and with a translucent and unified conscience to boot! Another way to describe the meaning of living out of PRESENCE together. When we do, as we do, and as we nurture this together and in each other, we become WHOLE and the MOST fully Human of which we are capable. This is the only thing, the one thing that can make the difference in our world now.]]]
    [[[(On another tract:) I am reminded again of the Spiritualist movement. Without judgment as to what that may or may not be about, look at it as ‘a phenomenon’ in its own right. It began in 1848 with the Fox sisters hearing and communicating with an unknown source producing raps in the wall. By around 1860, just 12 years later, --- before there were phones, before there was an internet, before the first airplane flew New York to Miami nonstop --- it is reported that over 60 percent of the people in the United States were converts to this ‘new religion’!! And that was from roughly 0% to start with. It doesn’t appear to be a matter of some people actively converting or recruiting others. It was just that people were having these experiences, and others were repeating them, they were openly talking about them, exploring them, believing them, gaining a kind of hope from them – across all religious and other social barriers. Imagine that! So we are talking about accessible human experience, potentially available to everyone, itself being the shift factor. People just naturally [at least 60%] were attracted to this through their own personal experience and that of others. This was not a top-down event, it was a wildfire that just spread. Emphasis on ‘horizontal’ and by word of mouth and on direct personal experience and the potential of direct experience, as well as the empathic belief factor. A whole hefty century before the internet and at least many decades before all the other communications options we have today.
    Now we have enormous advantages that were not possible then. I believe we can facilitate something like this, and: THAT THIS IS A FUTURE THAT URGENTLY SEEKS TO EMERGE. It’s already in the making, obviously something that is happening all over the world, but, as many EHEers themselves have observed, almost invisibly, soundlessly—without voice. Like a baby being born, it can be eased and nurtured into being all it can be, if, as Rhea A. White says, enough of us do it’ – if enough of us work toward this singular purpose to give it what it needs to grow in our hearts and out of our collective experiences.]]]

  5. Re: Bill McDonough, the American environmental architect – his fundamental question: “What will it take for us to become indigenous once again? – not as we were, but as we might be?”
    PS: I think if we find our place, we will find our purpose.
    [[[In EHEs, inherent in the aftereffects is that life becomes full of meaning and purpose.]]]

J. Jaworski  [Re:  1999 interview with Otto Scharmer]

  1. We need to learn how to have the larger system sense what it is that wants to happen. How can we uncover the common will?  

  2. The Question Underlying “Synchronicitiy” -- COS : If you had to describe the question that underlies your book, what would that question be? 
    How to access our highest source of creativity so that we can give birth to something entirely new. To know what it is that wants to happen in the world and bring it forth into reality. 
    I had had all these experiences I’ve been describing to you, but if you separate these into different things, into different realms, what would bring it all together? I wanted to bring these experiences and what I had learned from David Bohm, Francisco Varela, Rupert Sheldrake and others together in a coherent set of principles. I believe that the most important realm of leadership is … this capacity to collectively sense what it is that is wanting to be brought forth in the world, and to bring it forth as it desires.

I’ve found that real understanding comes for many people we work with if they can remember a time when they’ve truly surrendered to their commitment . Once they’ve experienced the periods of synchronicity that follow, they’re left with a burning question as to how to bring this about again more reliably.
Clearly, people relate to the U theory in different ways. …

  1. The underlying question has to do with learning based on a fundamentally different mode of cognition. The underlying question is:   How can we sense and actualize emerging futures? 
    I have a deep belief that the human capacity includes the ability to sense and actualize what wants to happen before it manifests. I’ve been grappling with that question for over two decades. ...

AtL / wHe [Ahhh-TheLight and wHeretwoworldsTouch]

  1. What could the unified consciousness, astounding creativity and brilliance, and purposeful commitment of hundreds of millions of compassionately motivated, Aware EHEers and EHE-Empaths from all over the world, who have oft-noted Aftereffect characteristics in common, do together, ‘chaordically’ with well-organized, Spirit-led intentionality?  

  2. What great good could come about as a result of their extensive knowledge and networking capabilities, etc., if The Four-Plus applied their knowledge to this global movement as a whole?  

  3. What would it take to bring this Consciousness Shift as a Global Movement,  emerging as this “Field Knowing Itself,” into the awareness and active participation of the world’s humanity?  

  4. What would it take to actively engage a more open and awarely collaborative relationship among our global humanity in our collective efforts to bring people all over the world together into active, mutual regard with the understanding that we as a global phenomenon are Awakening into a whole new consensus reality? 

  5. How to access highest, best creativity in our unitive work as a global movement?  ESC and DTCII .. 


 Further questions explored -- mostly in Presence:

The Key to All of This Is Love ..
 COS : If you were to summarize the essence of what you found out during the last year of research, and of all your previous work, what would be the key points that come into your mind? What is it that you brought to surface in that last year’s work? Joseph Jaworski: Well, there’s one penetrating insight that I’ve come out with, Otto, and that is that the key to all of this is love. COS : Does that happen because you are a particular person? Or that you are consciously bringing it forth? Do you know what I mean? Your question was how to produce it, so is it something you consciously bring forth, or is it something that just seems to happen? 
Joseph Jaworski: I think this can be developed in people. I think that’s the whole purpose of the program we’re putting together. I think that it is an innate capacity in every human being to be that way, and it is the natural human condition. COS : It’s the natural human condition, and yet in everyday experience it often doesn’t happen, right? So why would that be? So what’s getting in our way? Blocks 
Joseph Jaworski: I would like to be able to articulate this better, but it’s the blocks that Bohm talked about, and the necessity to find ways to remove the blocks. COS : What are the blocks that you have to move out of the way? 
Joseph Jaworski: I think it’s been socialized out of us. I am speaking from a Western paradigm. In the West this is much more difficult for us than in the Eastern tradition. You know, it’s the Western scientific paradigm, you know, of separateness. Our institutions—schools—and even our language is that way, subject, object. I was brought up in church and they were not teaching this kind of love in church. It was all rational and a lot of it was about fear. COS : Removing the block is also very consciously paying attention to, for example, your call, and to what is the purpose of it. So in other words, there’s also always the story underneath the story. 


RE: The key to everything is love.
What does that really mean? Are you suggesting that business people and other leaders, that everyone who does things, who makes things work in the social world, that they operate on love? And what would that really mean? What do you really mean by that beyond a radical statement? The second question is, as a senior consultant, do you really think that this is the way to do it and that there is no other way? 
Joseph Jaworski: That’s what I’m saying, period, paragraph. I know that’s radical but I believe that’s it. I believe that the world is moving to the place where people will understand that more and more. It’s not true now. But I feel it’s moving that way. COS : Can you say more about that? In another presentation that we recently did you said we are at the incipient stage of a new awareness. Can you say a little bit more about it? 

[[Re: I see this as this global consciousness movement – YES!!! ]]

Joseph Jaworski: I said that we’re at the incipient stage of a wave of spirituality that is going to wash over the world. That’s a radical statement but I see these things, sometimes years and years before they happen. I’ve made the mistake of being too far ahead of my time in relation to business things before. I can’t explain it. I just feel this is happening. Now actually, my thing is I actually see it all over, but it’s anecdotal evidence. 

[[And such transformed people either consciously operate this way already or are becoming conscious of doing this or how to do this. ]]
 
[[ I almost wanna scream for JOY that someone else like JJ is actually seeing and saying this too!!! ]] 

COS : Can that quality of love be attained by a group of people or a larger system or a larger whole? 

[[EXACTLY !!!]] 

 The Blind Spot: Not Seeing the Blocks 
 COS : I have two closing questions. If we go back to the beginning, you talked about the core question as being related to how can we sense and actualize emerging futures. We talked about the collapse of boundaries and how over time that gave rise to various manifestations of your core question. My first question is this. If you consider the research that has been done on your core question - how to sense and actualize emerging futures – what do you consider the blind spot of all that work? 

[[[I think that is what this Movement is all about and …removing the blocks together, And as M. T. Benedict says, lovingly, we are going to hold hands and walk out of hell together.]]] 

Joseph Jaworski: The blind spot is that we don’t understand that the blocks that keep us from seeing how connected we truly are. If we only could remove these blocks that keep us separated, this could literally change the entire world. 

COS : The first stage of your work focused on understanding this collapsing the boundaries phenomenon. In the second stage you focused on how to produce it in the ALF kinds of settings. How might you characterize the third stage, your work during the 1990s? 

[[AtL / wHe]]

Joseph Jaworski: I think that the answer is I would like the work to take place in groups, and to learn how to elicit this phenomenon in groups, in larger systems, and communities. 

[[YES !!!]] 

COS : These projects would be embedded in organizational structures and institutions, which add a whole other layer of complexity. 
Joseph Jaworski: Right, right. We need to learn how to have the larger system sense what it is that wants to happen. How can we uncover the common will? 

[[How would they see this unfolding in the context of the global movement being chronicled by AtL / wHe .. as a not for profit organization? ]]

COS : One issue that one encounters in such endeavors is the shadow work. What should we pay attention to in the future? 
Joseph Jaworski: I’m glad you mentioned it. I have met it many times. I have dealt with it by recognizing that it’s there, not being afraid of it, meeting it head-on, and just saying it is there. 

[[[One of the pervasive shadows that underlies why AtL / wHe is what Annie Besant wrote a whole book about: glamour. Every person needs to be able to see clearly into themselves, into their hearts and see that they have the same potentials as anyone else. I feel very strongly that on the one hand we need our great exemplars, because they often are the very ones who give us a heads-up about what we ARE capable of, such as the great talents / we could say truly gifted EHEers [e.g. Carolyn Myss, Edgar Cayce, Rudolf Steiner, David Spangler, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, etc.]
But one of the shadows to this, even with those like the ones i just named who do not manifest the virulence of glamour themselves, is that other people who do not have memories of such experiences or who do not feel they can do anything like that reinforce their own feelings by projecting onto EHEers in a way that gives away their own innate power as human beings. I did that. I spent years with a number of very gifted people like this. I was a bit too awed by them to imagine that i too might experience such things. Until: I went back to NC the last years of my parents' lives
and particularly my mother began to tell me a number of such stories about quite a few people in our family to whom various exceptional experiences had happened, including her. For the first time in my life I could SEE the very real truth of just how ubiquitous these experiences are. I couldn't help but see how we can so easily, unthinkingly get in our own way by not being able to accept that just because someone "famous" can do so-and-so, they / we can't, or otherwise we would be more __________ [whatever] ourselves. We are on the other hand, opposite to glamour, too easily
bought of by our own too-well-known shortcomings and ideas that go with that like, 'I'm not good enough,' 'I don't deserve,' 'I wish I had the faith to be able to connect with G*d/dess like that,' 'i can't possibly imagine that happening to puny little me,' etc.]]]


[[[Maybe there's a positive side to the glamour too! if someone very charismatic like Anthony Robbins or a Mother Meera tells someone personally that they can do 'X' or have or will have an experience, and heshe naturally accepts this, and as a consequence goes on to have such an experience, well, that's definitely a winning event!]]]

What other questions would you consider relevant or important, that deserve future research? 
 Joseph Jaworski: Right now my mind is set on doing pilot programs in collective settings, where you can actually do this sensing in a collective way. As part of that I’d like to do some work on actual practices. How can we help people form intent? And the other one is about meditation. COS : Why do you think meditation would be important? 
Joseph Jaworski: I am convinced that meditation is a key element of the capacity building of the future. One effect of meditation is to calm and still the mind, and to help a person be more stable. But the second effect is developing the capacity to drop underneath the chaos of surface reality and to see a more enduring, generative reality. I want to do a lot more work on that. 

 

[[[Please consider doing exactly this with this web project!]]]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to www.hubblesite.org for the original of the star image above.

 
  
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