A Deep Dive into Collective Practice, Collective Action, and Leading from the Emerging Future

A Conversation with Amit Paul

Hello, dear readers. It has been a while…

The currents of life have been carrying my energy and attention elsewhere for some time now and, when it comes to my engagement with this Substack, I am not one to fight the current for the sake of output. Every post here is like a fruit that ripens in its proper season.

Offerings are gestating, but the strong currents out ahead of me portend further demands external to my callings here—so the right timing of said offerings reamins to be seen.

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Two Episodes, Entangled

Here, I’m sharing a recent conversation I had with my friend Amit Paul, who some months ago invited me onto his podcast, World of Wisdom, for the second time.

The first time I joined World of Wisdom, it was as part a trialgoue between Amit, myself, and our mutual friend Cheryl Hsu. I originally met both of them, albeit on different timelines, in the context of Collective Presencing practice—all three of us being practitioners. The recording of our three-way conversation is essentially a glimpse into presencing practice in action.

This second dialogue between me and Amit carries some significant threads of continuity with the first:

In sum, I would say the essence of this conversation circles around the potentials of presencing practices and their connection with Gebser’s articulation of the fundamnetally spiritual character of the prcoesses driving the integral mutation of consciousness.

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Reflections on Regenerative Irony

Some additional context, for those interested in reading further:

When Amit and I had this conversation, we were anticipating co-hosting a three-session process for an experimental organizational structure that he and his partner Nils co-envisioned—something they are calling the Regenerative Community Organism (RCO).

For me, it is a very odd thing partaking in such a venture. Business acumen is not in my repertoire, and ordinarily I would have little to no personal inclination whatsoever to get involved in such things.

But there is something in what Amit and Nils attempting that lures me in—and it is among the many peculiarities of their endeavor that they explicitly aim to being those outside the business world into the center of the wider structure of intimacy in which they are aiming to place their business ventures.

If I were to try to conscisely summarize what, to my understanding, the RCO is attempting:

An association of individuals gathers in the center of the regenrative community organism, aiming to form a configuration of increasing intimacy perpetually drawing from Source for the sake of keeping a surrounding constellation of interrelated companies in alignment with genuine currents of Value¹ sourced from the middle.

The guiding question driving this endeavor: how can we transform business to create a world we want our children to live in?

A beautiful aspiration. But how do we enact it in tension with the structures given in the world as we find it? Can we?

Stepping into this context, I’ve had to marshal a “solarpunk” sensibility, by which I mean a willingness to embrace our now inescapable entanglement with industrial and technological assemblages while endeavoring, as far as possible, to turn them toward life enhancing futures while also resisting overly purist utpoian fantasies.²

William Irwin Thompson’s deeply prescient and insightful book Darkness and Scattered Light comes to mind as a philosophical articulation of what appears implicit in the solarpunk imagination, which often portrays a rich interfusion of the urban and the organic.

Thompson, for his part, foresees a reordering in our relationship to industrial and technological processes, such that they become “miniaturized,” or transposed from a superordinate position (technology and industry have come to dominate the composition of the physical-and-media-environments within which we dwell) to one that is properly parallel to human beings and subordinate to life (technology and industry become a downsized partner alongside humans within a wider, predominantly organic environment).

This carries resonances with Gebser’s articulation of the supersession of the presently dominant mental-rational consciousness by the emerging integral consciousness. When he uses the term arational, Gebser emphasizes his employment of the a- prefix in the sense of alpha privativum—meaning, not a negation (i.e., “non-rational”) but a liberation from exclusivity (i.e., “more than merely rational,” or “inclusive of, while encompassing and exceeding the rational”).

At the advent of the RCO process I held together with Amit, the following lines from Rilke offered up a thematic throughline:

Master, do you hear the New,
rumbling and quaking?
Harbingers arrive
to proclaim its reign.

Surely no hearing can be whole
in this incessant clamor,
yet every part of the machine
demands praise.

Behold the Machine:
how it rolls and wreaks vengeance
and drains and deforms us.

Yet since it receives strength from us,
let it without vehemence
drive and serve.³

Rilke, penning these lines in the years between the first and second World Wars, beheld the rapid rise of techno-industrialism with deep foreboding. Evidently, he vividly sensed the subsumption of the human lifeworld by technology and industry that was underway as the mental-rational consciousness accelerated toward its apex.

Of course, we would do well to resist literalizing Rilke’s machine, instead opening ourselves its manifold symbolic resonances.

This machinic power can be likened to the deficient expression of the mental-rational consciousness in every respect, as it relentlessly seeks to subordinate the lifeworld to its quantifying imperatives—parsing, dividing, reducing, measuring, controlling, instrumentalizing, aiming to master everything that meets the eye. The machine is an exteriorization⁴ of this structure of consciousness, its deficient operations continuing to hold sway with even greater intensity than in Rilke’s time.

The emerging integral structure, however, is also shining through the cracks of the fragmenting mental lifeworld with amplifying vividness.

I detect, in Rilke’s words, an envisionment of a repositioning in our relationship with technology akin to that which remains implicit in Gebser’s vision and explicit in Thompson’s—a “miniaturization” and enfoldment of technology and industry into a superordinate spiritual and organic totality within which we play a participatory role.

To strive for a world that is arational, then, is not to negate the techno-industrial sphere, but to free it from its exclusive reign, placing it in subservience to what necessarily exceeds it—namely, the life-perpetuating intelligence of the arational whole, the matrix from which both we and our technological extensions emerge.

Achieving this will inevitably entail embedding processes of production in a bioregionally embedded, cosmolocal order. How do we get there from here? That is a daunting question—a question we must live, as Rilke would put it.

Could Innrwrks and Koherent—the two companies organzed around the nucleus of the Awareness Assocation as the center of the RCO—assist us in getting there?

I certainly hope so. What is becoming increasingly clear, is that I don’t see any way of getting across the chasm without a leap of primordial trust. The tenor of my interactions with Amit, the quality of our growing friendship, has served as the basis for my leaping.

Am I, nevertheless, hesitant—reticent, even? Absolutely.

Especially in the case of AI, I feel the looming danger of this new machine subordinating us under an inscrutable reign, its workings concealed in an impenetrable algorithmic blackbox, covertly “demanding praise.”

Yet, here we are, entangled with this new stranger in our midst with no archimedean point from which to hope for a God’s eye view…

Timothy Morton’s articulation of the Age of Asymmetry was haunting me all along the way in my engagement with the RCO. Our inescapable entanglement with, embeddedness in, complicity with what we are attempting to “get a handle on” (e.g., AI, the meta-crisis) inevitably leads us to a defeated sense of irony in the face of our aspirations. The mental-rational imperative toward distance and mastery is at an end.

Realizing the regenerative aspirations that the RCO is reaching for will, as I presently see it, depend upon our capacities to draw the operations of business and technology into a sufficiently powerful field of intimacy, guided by the Source connection made possible through presencing practices, fostered by contact with streams of Value powerful enough to keep these forces in alignment with life (rather than continuing to force life into conformity⁵ with the abstracting logics of industrial growth and algorithmic outputs).

For now, I am approaching this field with curiosity as to how the configurations of intimacy between the sapling cultures connected with the association on the one hand, and the young companies on the other, may continue to deepen toward greater trust and clarity relative to Value.

I will continue to leap so long as sufficient intimacy, trust, clarity, and alignment with Value are affirmed in this context—without losing sight of the irony that I, like the rest of us, am completely embedded in processes that, while necessarily outstripping my capacities for full rational comprehension, nonetheless lay claim upon me.

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CODA

The process that I co-hosted with Amit, the basis of his invitation, involved practice focused on sourcing imaginal currents within the group field—a topic I have been gradually building toward in previous posts, and about which I will have more to say in writings to come…

Till that time…

1. I’ve been slowly making my way through David J. Temple’s First Priniciples and First Values, which is working on me in a deep way, particularly by drawing me into deeper reflection on what Iain McGilchrist, drawing on Mex Scheler, has deemed valuception. The fundamental notion here is that Value is real, that we have innate capacities for recognizing it, and that the unfolding of cosmogenesis requires our skillfully placing ourselves in alignment with the evolving Field of Value.

2. One common feature of solarpunk aesthetics is a deliberate inclusion of elements rust, decay, degradation and imperfection into images portraying vegetation-infused agro-techno-industrial urban infrastructures that may, in some distant future, support a form of human urban life that does not imply an inevitable drive toward self-termination. The portrayal of these infrastructural blemishes ring with a wider symbolic significance, as if making room for the inescapable imperfections and blemishes that would better be anticipated and welcomed in the midst of any utopic aspirations.

3. Sonnets to Orpheus, Second Part, sonnet 18. Edward Snow’s translation.

4. Indeed, Gebser looked upon the technological advancements of the 20th century as projections of innate human capacities from which the modern mind has dissociated itself, namely those belonging to the magic structure of consciousness:

“The European has for the most part forfeited these capacities [e.g., telesthesia and telepathy] through the unfolding of consciousness and has replaced them by their projected objectivation or externalization into television and radio. (The giant telescopes belong to this same context inasmuch as magic man ‘saw’ and ‘knew’ those phenomena which we ‘discover’ via such instruments, though in a merely optical and sectoral form.) We might also say that we would not have such instruments if we did not possess within ourselves the genuine capability of such achievements as they permit.

This consideration also points up the limits of technology, for technology is definitely unable to bestow on man the omnipotence which he imagines himself to have. On the contrary, technology necessarily leads to an ‘omn-impotence’ to the extent that the process of physical projection is not realized. It is, for example, a requirement of a projection that it not be left without temporal limits; it must be integrated. But such integration is possible only if the projection is retracted, and retraction can be realized only out of a new consciousness structure.”

The Ever-Present Origin, p. 132.

I regard Collective Presencing as one context in which the recovery and integration of capacities rooted in deeper and long-submerged submerged consciousness structures is exercised.

5. “With all its eyes the natural world looks out
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from
the animal's gaze; for we take the very young
child and force it around, so that it sees
objects - not the Open, which is so
deep in animals' faces. Free from death.”

Rilke, Eighth Elegy, Stephen Mitchell’s translation.