Beyond Imaginal Privatism (pt. III)
We are called to become more individual in service of becoming more-than-individual...
Is there another world in wait, accessible only through individuation and its supersession, just as individuation was brought about by surpassing the clan? What if behind man humanity, behind god divinity, behind spirit spirituality, were to become “attainable” to man, or more exactly, become transparent to him to the degree that he could divest himself of individuality and cancel his exclusive and patriarchal ego-confinement by freedom from the ego, just as mythical man abandoned the secure enclosure of the maternal, magic man the unity of the mere clan world?
—Jean Gebser, The-Ever-Present Origin
This limitation of the universal ‘I’ in the divided ego-sense constitutes our imperfect individualised personality. But when the ego transcends the personal consicousness, it begins to include and be overpowered by that which is to us superconscious…
—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
This is the third and penultimate installment in the Beyond Imaginal Privatism series (see parts one and two).
This Substack project has grown, quite organically, into a hypertext. What is written in this installment draws its deeper context from material explored in other posts I’ve made thus far that are not explicitly situated in the series (namely this article, and this one).
If you are new entrant upon these writings: yes, you can go back and follow the trail of postings in linear order. That route has its own style of intelligibility. Linearity, however, is no longer the exclusive rule of the day. Perhaps, you might dare to discover what unfolds as you follow the momentum of your appetite and interest in response to whatever is immediately at hand, knowing that interlinking corridors abound amid this entangled hypertextual labyrinth.
The whole, already whole, may be seen and approached from many sides.
Becoming More-Than-Individual
There is no avoiding it: the human species, in all likelihood, is in for a challenging century ahead. Many of the fragile systems we’ve spun around ourselves are in a critical period, with signs of imminently intensifying disruption widely in evidence.1
Widespread dissolution may be a prelude to a turning, a dramatic reconfiguration signaling the growing pains of a nascently planetizing civilization that, if it is to take root and flourish, must arrest and radically transmute the governing logic (and fantasy) of infinite industrial growth.
In kinship with Jean Gebser and others, I affirm the intuition that there are deeper forces at work in the evolutionary threshold upon which we find ourselves, and that the choice to voluntarily develop our latent capacities for participation with these unseen currents is a crucial necessity of our time.
As I’ve expressed elsewhere, this intensification of disequilibrium in our planetary systems may be part of a larger metamorphosis that also includes an intensification in consciousness. What follows will be a more detailed description of dimensions of this process that I’ve so far only alluded to.
While I would argue that the atomized modern self is not cut out to navigate this turning, I also maintain that the unique creative capacities of the individuated psyche—corresponding to the intensified emergence of the “I” catalyzed amid the Axial Age (to which I gave attention in a previous post)—is indispensable for the unprecedented creative challenges we presently face as a species.
The two epigraphs above, quoting Gebser and Aurobindo respectively, intimate the leap we must make—the leap into an emerging mode of being that entails a radical transformation in our very experience of selfhood.
A new phenomenal locus of selfhood is presently struggling to come into existence: one extending beyond the egocentric phenomenology2 of the (post)modern self while preserving and appropriating it.
Gebser described this process as the supersession of the ego,3 and it directly correlates with the leap beyond imaginal privatism.
Before elucidating this further, however, we first need to take a closer look at contexts in which this mutation seems to be occurring and what they have to teach us about this evolutionary leap.
Tastes of Transegoic Phenomenology
Others have shared Gebser’s intution. Indeed, some have allegedly gained experiential glimpses of what he was gesturing towards, offering their own convergent articulations of this supersession of ego.
These fleeting tastes of a new phenomenology of self often occur in varieties of group-oriented practices typically designated we-space.
It is to the testimony of experienced we-space practitioners that we now turn.
I. Transindividuation and the Co-Conscious We
Elizabeth Debold and Thomas Steininger, co-developers of Emergent Dialogue practice, have introduced the idea of transindividuation, signaling “a new capacity for collective consciousness [that] would have implications as profound as the emergence of individuated consciousness.”4
Unsurprisingly, they explicitly connect the idea of transindividuation with the notion of a Second Axial Age. The springboard for the leap into transindividuation rests upon a recognition that the imperative toward individuation that intensified during the Axial Age has, since the outset of modernity, been increasingly driven toward overemphasis, culminating in the mounting cultural deficiencies that we are, today, encountering collectively.
This calcified egotism—a condition that Gebser meticulously demonstrated, describing it as “the hypertrophied I”—has also been well-described by Steininger and Debold:
“In the two thousand years since the Axial Period, human consciousness has developed so that now, as postmodern individuals, our attention is habitually focused on the self-absorbing and mesmerizing stream of thoughts, feelings, and sense impressions occurring within us.”5
Here, the hypertrophied ego is construed, at least to a significant degree, as a habit of attention. It follows, then, that our participation in the supersession of the ego entails a process of transposing, reentraining, and broadening our attentional habits within properly conducive contexts—something that will be explored more closely in the next session.
First, there is a crucial caveat that must be noted here: this supersession of the ego by no means entails a negation or erasure of ego. To supersede, in this case, is not to simply undo.
Loss of ego leads to regression to a condition of pre-egoic collectivity resembling conditions prior to the advent of individuation. Because the ritual and symbolic containers that once served to contain and entrain collective energies are generally lacking or atrophied in the modern world, this diminution of individual agency gives generated dangers and disadvantages, including possession by groupthink or psychic epidemics. Of particular relevance in the context of this extended discussion, however, is the disadvantage of losing the intensified creative potency that is only possible within the sorts of emergent fields generated among sovereign and differentiated individuals.
Debold and Steininger initially employed the term Higher We to describe one of the potential fruits of ego supersession:
“The Higher We needs highly individuated autonomous individuals who freely choose to surrender to a process larger than themselves. It is a trans-individual We-space that transcends and includes individuality, rather than a pre-individual tribal We based on custom and conformity.”6
“…this structure of individuated experience, and the sensitivity and awareness that it has given rise to, are necessary to cognize and hold depth and an understanding of the cosmic process that is critical to the Higher We emergence.”7
How does this Higher We—or Co-Conscious We, as they have more recently described it—arise phenomenologically?
To give a sense of the further reaches of what is possible in we-spaces, we can look to the experiences that Debold and Steininger each had, during different time periods, while they were members of Andrew Cohen’s controversial8 EnlightenNext community.
The first breakthrough allegedly transpired in 1999 amid a group of all-women practitioners, among whom Debold was included:
The experience was one of being fully at ease with oneself and simultaneously united in consciousness with all the others in the group.9
Another major breakthrough took place in 2001, this time among a group of male practitioners10:
Not only did the men intend to catalyze a leap beyond the separate self sense, according to Steininger who present, within the fire of experience they were able to speak about the emergence from the perspective of one consciousness.11
These reports undoubtedly comprise the far reaches of collective coherence in consciousness allegedly made possible through we-space practice.12
What sort of conditions, including the aforementioned attentional shifts, are capable of making possible such dramatic phenomenological shifts?
II. Causal Leadership and Spontaneous Wisdom
Some hints are found in the description of causal leadership advanced by theorists and practitioners affiliated with Pacific Integral.
In this case, the word causal is applied in the context of an integral approach to spirituality. The contemporary use of the term is derived from early English translators of Sanskrit texts who decided upon the word “causal” as a rendition of kāraṇa (कारण), understood as an ontologically fundamental and highly spiritualized (as distinguished from materialized) “body” or “sheath” (kośa, शरीर) comprising our total constitution.13
Integral thinkers have drawn parallels with notions hailing from other traditions, such as the Vajrayana notion of dharmakaya or the Advaita Vedanta conception of turiya, suggesting that these concepts likewise correspond to the same causal level of reality.
These notions gesture to an originary fount beyond and prior to all form, corresponding to what Meister Eckhart described as the Godhead, “an immovable cause that moves all things.”14
As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, Gebser spoke, to this effect, of Origin.
We-space practitioners often allude to Source. Miriam and Stephan Martineau, who have experienced levels of coherence comparable to those reported by Debold and Steininger, have described the essence of development in we-space practices as a process of “becoming available as one who listens and expresses from Source.”15
In practice, resting in and as the causal entails disidentifying with all form and content arising in experience. It implies rooting one’s sense of beingness in the vast, open, nonreactive and lucidly awake spaciousness that is the context in which all experience occurs—the void of luminous clarity within which all things arise and to which they return. This causal level of existence is always present and available, recognizable as the self-effulgent and self-aware companion to any and all particular experiences—spaceless, boundless, timeless, birthless, deathless.
The reason we often don’t notice this is because the mind—and especially the modern mind—tends to fixate upon the flux of experience, identifying with certain phenomena as being “me.” The idea of the causal (not to be confused with what the idea points to, which is not an idea) comes with the implication that there is a more absolute identity, unbound by what is dying and changing.
We might interpret Gebser’s allusion, in the foregoing epigraph, to a condition of “freedom from the ego” as implying a condition of abiding in this causal ground (that is groundless).
Causal leadership opens to a view of wisdom as ontologically rooted. To the extent that practitioners can rest and abide closer to the roots of existence, a self-arising flow of clarity, coherence, and alignment becomes possible.
Ultimately, the specious distinction between the formless casual and manifest form resolves in a recognition of nonduality—what has been variously distinguished as corresponding to “causal,” “subtle,” and “material” levels of reality are all recognized as distinct but inseparable expressions of Origin’s innate wholeness.
(For those interested in practicing nondual meditation, which over time establishes and strengthens the capacities described above, Michael Taft’s vast archive of guided meditations offers an excellent entry point).
Causal leadership, then, as we will see, emphatically does not entail dissociation from the manifest form of embodied existence. Rather, it vitally depends upon a lucidly sensuous embrace of the body as a transducer of transpersonal knowing.
Causal leadership further entails trusting the influences of the “immovable cause” as a source from which wisdom may spring without our contriving (though, as we will see, by no means does this negate or obviate the appearance of confusion, tension, and turbulence along the way).
Gebser coined the term Urvertrauen (“primordial trust”) to describe this unshakeable faith in the efficacy of Origin:
“The strengths of origin, and our own strength in bringing this origin to effectivity are the factors that will decide our fate.”16
Gebser explicitly noted a deep alignment between his vision and that of Sri Aurobindo. Both affirmed that the whole of the evolutionary process, right up to the critical threshold we find ourselves in, must be grasped as a fundamentally spiritual process.
Hence, Gebser’s allusion, in the first epigraph, to a transformation whereby “the spiritual” becomes “attainable” or “transparent” (diaphanous).
For his part, Aurobindo, in the second epigraph, suggests an evolutionary fulcrum whereupon the individuated ego “begins to include and be overpowered by that which is to us superconscious.”
In the context of causal leadership and we-space, we may experience what is being pointed to here with the discovery that what needs to happen in a given situation begins, under the right conditions, to happen through us.
We begin to feel a deeper current, a sense of contiguity with a deeper source of creative agency—yet which does not exclude our own individual volition. Rather, our volition is seamlessly enfolded into it. Following periods of unknowingness, tension, and turbulence—clarity and effortless alignment can spring forth organically in such a way that individual authenticity and collective coherence are effortlessly reconciled.
As Debold and Steininger have described this:
“While surrender and will are usually opposite to each other, here the two literally merge. It is not will as one typically understands it; it is will in the form of surrender.”17
Ramirez, Fitch, and O’Fallen offer a compatible account:
“Releasing further into the spacious emptiness from and through which all creativity arises, causal collectives and the individuals who comprise them, realize pure potential sourced through the Unknown of emptiness. Causal leaders recognize subtle glimmers of emergence, sparks that ignite a natural movement into new possibilities, and ultimately, unite with that spark that drives passion and creates life and existence without effort. The group as a whole experiences a relaxation in the entire subtle relational energy field of the group through awareness of awareness. Together they sense into a coherent, potent, creative field—a common field of pregnant possibility.”18
This invocation of a “subtle relational energy field of the group” will lead us into the next turn our investigation will take. It entails the presence of the subtle level of reality (often conceived as a metaxy bridging between the causal and material levels). In this case, the subtle expresses itself in a modality that complicates any stark divergence between individual and collective.
And, as we will see, this corresponds with a posture of availability to the tangible effect and influence of the future at work in the present, the palpable pull of latent potential that can shine through, here and now.
IV. Transsubjectivity and Fourth-Person Knowing
Otto Scharmer’s use of the term transsubjectivity19 denotes the emerging perspectival modality corresponding with transindividuation: fourth-person.
The birth of individuation and the modern mind was accompanied by an intensified perceptual differentiation of first-, second-, and third-person perspectival modalities—reflecting, respectively, what we’ve come to distinguish as “subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” and “objectivity.”
Transsubjectivity suggests a deepening into a different kind of shared presence, paired with a form of knowing rooted in resonant mutuality, an intensified perception of interbeing that cannot satisfactorily be described as merely intersubjective.
Intersubjectivity denotes, on the one hand, all that arises through the interactions between differentiated subjects, everything that follows upon the interplay between distinct first-person perspectives. On the other hand, it relates to any shared contextual atmosphere (language, culture, etc) shaping the mind’s interpretative process and making shared understanding possible (or opposing mutual understanding, where shared context is lacking).
Fourth-person knowing enfolds the first-, second-, and third-person perspectival modalities while simultaneously reaching beyond them and disclosing the fundamental source from which these differential orientations co-arise.
As Otto Scharmer and Eva Pomeroy describe it:
While the differentiation of types of intersubjectivity is useful, we believe that the need for this differentiation arises from a conflation of two separate epistemologies under the second-person banner: intersubjectivity and trans-subjectivity. Just as it has been argued that the second-person perspective cannot be reduced to either the first- or third-person perspective, we argue that the fourth-person perspective (trans-subjectivity or self-transcendence) cannot be reduced to a subsection of the second person (intersubjectivity).
Fourth-person knowing has a particular quality of being neither my knowing nor yours, neither solely outside nor inside me but rather something beginning to articulate from a different source that operates beyond these distinctions.20
Following Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we may say that fourth-person knowing operates from a vantage wherein individual and collective come to be “distinguished without division.”21
This alternate vantage is intimately bound to the subtle phenomenon attested to by many we-space practitioners as the field. Thus, Scharmer and Pomeroy describe fourth-person knowing as a knowing from the field.
Steininger has attempted to describe the direct experience of this form of knowing:
There is a field, a wholeness between us. There is something alive between us, more than the sum of the parts. You can look through the eyes of the space itself, and have a love relationship with doing so.22
This points to the radicality of the supersession of the ego, for it suggests a perspectival orientation capable of permitting the individuated ego to fully express its singular creative charisma, but to do so from the standpoint of an awareness that is liberated from restrictive identification with that ego, whose self-expression is experienced as a feature of the larger whole to which it is responsible. The phenomenal locus of self-identification is transposed, reaching beyond habitual centration upon the bounded egoic self-sense.
Debold and Steininger, originally retaining the language of “intersubjectivity” that Scharmer and Pomeroy have explicitly attempted to supersede, have described this transposition in terms of the “Higher We”:
For the individual participant, the Higher We entails a shift of identification from the personal ego to the emerging, intersubjective process itself as self…23
The locus of selfhood is transposed from exclusive identification with ego to a broadened and deepened sense individuality. This emerging mode of individuality is grounded in and expressive of a subtle, transindivdual field serving as a conduit and amplifier of transpersonal and transrational ways of knowing.
I trust it is needless to say that no field amongst a group becomes a permanent center of identification, as though some higher organism were trying to enduringly stabilize itself among a particular group of individuals. This, rather, becomes an ongoing potential capacity wherever particular groups gather in mutual presence. Dynamic networks of individuals in co-creative relationships gather, cohere, and disperse through varying combinations and permutations across time.
IV. Sensing the Future’s Presence
What is perhaps still more astonishing relative to the worldspace generated by the hypertrophied modern ego, these fields of interbeing expresses their own agency—an agency that gathers the dispersal of time in service of a new temporal phenomenology. Time thickens into a dynamic, nonlinear, relationally entangled, inherently creative whole.
Within this phenomenology, the latent influence of the future issues through an active influx of palpably sensed potential. Scharmer, in accordance with this phenomenological shift, defined the practice of presencing (his name for causal leadership) as “leading from the future as it emerges.”
Advanced practitioners of we-space routinely attest to the operative agency of potential that ingresses into the group process at the far reaches of collective coherence.
Steininger and Debold describe it this way:
“…being aware of consciousness in motion in time and space, together within the circle of individuals engaged in dialogue, always has a slight upward pull, a lift, toward the horizon of potential. Inherent to it is an alertness, curiosity, and interest about the Not-yet. Placing attention on the shared field within the dialogue circle, the possibility and potential of the next moment, unknown, pulls.24
Possibility and potential pulls.
As Steininger and others emphasize, the ingression of efficacious potential corresponds directly to the intentionality we bring to the space. Potential becomes operative when we place ourselves “in service of the situation”25 at hand.
Ria Baeck, who stewards the practice known as Collective Presencing, speaks to the effective influence of intention in we-space:
“It seems that by setting an intention, and then speaking and articulating it, we make an energetic connection with the potential implicit therein. As if intention and potential are different facets of the same whole.”26
Thomas Steininger described this in the following timestamped video (18:32-22:36 : transcription below) as a process of autopoietic collective wisdom. (I strongly recommend watching the full 2-part interview from which the following is excerpted).
“At least how I experienced it and how I interpret it: the people present in a certain setting … are so attentive to this shared field that we are in and, at least to the degree they are free of their personal interference in that, the meaning field … not merely the cognitive sense … but in the existential sense… what’s happening between us means something to me…
And when there’s a shared meaning … this field doesn’t just hang around. Meaning has a certain quality … that it is looking for more of itself.
We allow this field to find its own dynamic of looking for itself … and in that, the meaning field becomes self-generative. It’s not that I or someone else is doing something … meaning is looking for itself through us.
So the subject/object relationship turns around … And the field between us becomes somehow the teacher.
What wants to emerge between us—as being meaningful and where this wants to go—tells us what to do in order to follow. But it needs a lot of maturity from the present people to allow this to happen…”
He concludes the interview with a description of a specific occurrence where the closing ritual of a multi-day we-space arose spontaneously, as if directed from the agency of the field itself.
Successful transposition of the self-sense from ego as center, to ego as partial expression of field, enables this capacity for what Thomas calls emergent synergy—an availability for creative emergence in participation with transpersonal influences.
It is common among we-space practitioners to speak, along these lines, of placing ourselves in service to “what wants to emerge” or “what wants to come through.”
This, to reiterate, requires the development of a new relationship to our own individuality. In no way does this demand we give up our individuality—in fact, it requires that we intensify our rootedness in our own individuality. What is crucial is that we relate to this individuality in a different way.
We are called to become more individual in service of becoming more-than-individual.
The further we are along our path of individuation, the more capable we become of expressing our singular creative signature, fully expressing our “I” while centering ourselves in the greater field of interbeing. The deepest creative potentials of this field—the “complex potential states” available in the present moment—requires the synergistic interplay between the potentials furnished by our individuated particularities, adding to this field potential.
It will not be easy to enact these capacities and carry them to their highest fulfillment.
Doing so will require our shared ability to increasingly hold the initial dissonance generated by multiple, seemingly incompatible, perspectives within a we-space process, all the while resisting the temptation to control the process or impose limited meaning structures to which we are egoically attached at the expense of the authentic potential seeking expression through the whole.
A deeper coherence of meaning may emerge from the “meaning field” in ways that cannot be known or predicted in advance.
Descriptions of causal leadership may be interpreted as implying an opening to the influx of “superconscious” factors as described by Aurobindo, signalling the possibility for transpersonal influences to effect guidance toward solutions and breakthroughs with an elegance that can only be described as grace.27
It is vitally important, however, to acknowledge the inevitable wholeness of the evolutionary process leading to the influx of these sorts of transegoic influences. Historical routes filled with doubts, lapses, failures, tensions, struggles, traumas, and intensities of all varieties will be inexorably enfolded into any causally-determined climaxes marked by a spontaneous and graceful emergence of alignment and coherence, ultimately adding to the totality of their meaning.
Brief Reflections Concerning Paradigms
The sorts of conceptions concerning the causal outlined above rely on the occult methods28 employed by their expositors (Aurobindo, Steiner, or otherwise), entailing the cultivation of perceptual capacities allegedly exceeding the physical sense gates. Such affirmation of spiritually-determined modes of causality also affirms subtle planes of existence of which we, at present, understand little (including to what extent the “subtle” may or may not ultimately be amenable to empirical scientific methods that are, in principle, possible despite remaining thus far beyond experimental reach).29
Many will be philosophically or temperamentally opposed to metaphysical formulations of this variety, instead favoring alternate conceptions such as those couched in terms more compatible with cognitive science paradigms (e.g., “causal leadership” as a mode of distributed cognition expressed through collective flow states, which are generally accompanied by first-person reports of an experience felt as sacred or numinous).30
Preparing for the Final Leap…
I am in agreement with Steininger and Debold’s conclusion that the further reaches of collective coherence will likely take at least many decades—more likely centuries—to truly take root as stabilized human capacities.
There may well be a dark night we must collectively navigate before our species reaches that point.
What latent futures we attune to, what living potentials we place ourselves in devoted service to, matters greatly.
In our present milieu, we-space practices can be seen as attempts to set down grooves for future practitioners and generations to build upon in service of viable futures.
My central interest concerns the confluence of these emerging human capacities with imaginal practices.
Are fourth-person, transsubjective modalities of imaginal practice possible?
What I’ve called “imaginal privatism,” linking it with Corbin’s understanding of theophany, can be seen as an interpenetration of first and second person phenomena—for it is an enactive exchange between mystic and Angel, who are ultimately recognized as two dimensions of a single personhood.
The position I am advancing is that there must, indeed, be an imaginal expression of the emerging fourth-person perspectival modality. This modality expresses the imaginal background of the present cosmological imperative to build upon individuation, leaping beyond the ego while preserving it and braiding its creative potentials into something more.
This will be the topic of the next, and final, installment of the Beyond Imaginal Privatism series.
But, before we take this final leap, I intend to share a brief dispatch reporting on some of my own experiences in Collective Presencing—the we-space practice with which I have the most personal experience…
More to come…
Examples abound. Two prominent sources are Steffen et al.’s The Trajectory of the Anthropocence: The Great Acceleration and Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation.
Note: egocentrtic phenomenology is not to be conflated with an egocentricism in values or worldview. There is no shortage of people harboring value systems extending care beyond the narrow concerns of the individual, just as many would assent to conceptual frameworks that expand the sense of self to be far more inclusive, incorporating beings beyond the ego (and even beyond the human). However, most (post)modern individuals (myself included) nonetheless tend to habitually interpret the structure of their experience as suggestive of a psyche and mind that is essentially separate, private, and bounded—and it is precisely this firm “privatism” of consciousness that, I am proposing, is on the verge of mutating.
This description comes from a list of numerous, pithy descriptions of characteristics Gebser ascribed to the integral structure of consciousness in The Ever-Present Origin (p. 362).
Thomas Steininger and Elizabeth Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process: The Intersection of the Higher We and Dialogue Practice” in Cohering the Integral We Space: Engaging Collective Emergence, Wisdom and Healing in Groups, p. 270.
It bears noting that Steininger and Debold weren’t the first to introduce this term. Gilbert Simondon spoke of transindividuation in his 1964 book Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. I won’t unpack Simondon’s meaning in this article, but it is deeply valuable toward understanding the wider, structural implications of moving beyond the ego (or, rather, toward a vividly recollection that the ego is always interdependently and co-creatively entangled with what is more than itself). Debashish Banerji has done interesting work relating Simondon’s work to that of Sri Aurobindo.
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” p. 278.
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” p. 278.
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” pgs. 278-279.
Steininger offers reflections from his own perspective in this interview with the late Terry Patten.
Cohen later published reflections on his community, many years after its chaotic dissolution, in his book When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva: The Challenging Transformation of a Modern Guru. The book includes reflections on the breakthroughs into intensified coherence of collective consciousness seemingly enabled, or at least assisted, through the intensive practice of EnlightenNext community members, as well as Cohen’s own convictions regarding the obsolescence of the mythic ideal of the spiritual Guru.
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” p. 277.
I recently participated in a Collective Presencing group, initiated by Nick Shore, designated Alpha/Omega:
“A/O is a ‘titrated’ container, designed for investigating the potent creative evolutionary possibilities that we believe can unfold when yin & yang (masculine & feminine; shiva and shakti) energies ‘dance well’ together in this particular dialogue practice. Our intention is to co-sense and creatively co-presence what is emerging from the dynamism generated between the alpha and omega polarities.”
From my perspective, as one who initially felt confused by the emphasis on these dimensions of practice, we discovered that consciously and creatively attending to the presence of these polarities in the we-space radically intensified the felt experience of creative potential and Eros.
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” p. 277.
A comparable report can be found in Miriam and Stephan Matrineau, “Evolving the We: A Journey and Inquiry” in Cohering the Integral We Space: Engaging Collective Emergence, Wisdom and Healing in Groups, pgs. 155-174.
Two excellent podcast interviews with Miriam Martineau conducted by Future Thinkers and Joe Lightfoot offer accounts of her experience in the Morning Star Community she co-initiated with her husband Stephan, where profound breakthroughs in collective coherence emerged.
Simon Cox, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy.
Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, p. 311.
Martineau and Matrineau, “Evolving the We: A Journey and Inquiry,” p. 144
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, p. 278.
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” p. 278.
Veinta Ramirez, Geoff Fitch, Terry O’Fallon, Causal Leadership: A Natural Emergence from Later Stages of Emergence, p. 16-17.
Otto Scharmer, Theory-U: Leading From the Future as it Emerges.
Otto Scharmer and Eva Pomeroy, “Fourth Person: The Knowing of the Field” in The Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change Volume 4, Issue 1, p. 27.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
These statements are a condensed summary of comments Steininger made during an interview about Emergent Dialgoue with Rufus Pollock of Life Itself.
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” p. 279
Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” p. 272.
Ria Baeck, Collective Presencing: An Emerging Human Capacity
As Miriam and Stephan Martineau have described it, “There is a critical point where the efforts of individual will are met by the wonders of universal Grace. We give it everything we can and there is support for this endeavor from the spiritual realm. A big resounding ‘Yes’ from the universe. When we are aligned and intrinsically motivated, we contact and are lifted by the force of life itself” (from “Evolving the We: A Journey and Inquiry,” p. 162)
“A later psychology [than the ancient Vedantic approach] found that these five sheaths [material, vital, mental, ideal, spiritual] of our substance were the material of three bodies, gross physical, subtle, and causal, in all of which the soul actually and simultaneously dwells, although here and now we are superficially aware only on the material vehicle. But it is possible to become conscious in our other bodies as well and it is in fact the opening up of the veil between them and consequently between our physical, psychical, and ideal personalities which is the cause of those ‘psychic’ and ‘occult’ phenomena that are now beginning to be increasingly though yet too little and too clumsily examined, even while they are far too much exploited.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pgs. 273-274).
Ken Wilber addresses such questions in his essay, Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies.