Dispatches from Collective Presencing

Fleeting Glimpses of Germinating Integrality

“The practice that we came to call Collective Presencing seems to tell us something about evolution itself, about a human capacity beginning to emerge, and about the new paradigm that we see and feel unfolding through us. The framework I found that best fit our experiences was Jean Gebser’s description of the mutation of consciousness, written half way through the previous century.”

“Our world is getting bigger, complexity is increasing, chaos is spreading . . . It seems that we humans are being gently – or not so gently – nudged, asked to grow: to embrace more, increase our collective capacity to navigate complexity, access deeper places of inner ground, grow our roots down deeper than we have done so far, embrace more of our environment, open up to emerging novelty, learn from nature and listen to the future… the possibilities are endless.”

“Above all, noticing what is, in relation to potential, calls for truly deep listening. Deeper than being sensitive to what is happening in the group, we are listening for hints or intimations of what is not present yet. By definition, such signs are subtle, not existent in the manifest realm.”

“Just as someone with perfect pitch can distinguish whether two notes are exactly the same, so there is a need for us to develop our capacity to sense the ‘pitch’ of coherence, when the physical is aligned with the subtle.”

—Ria Baeck, Collective Presencing

Entering the Circle of Presence

My own experience with we-space is predominantly rooted in Collective Presencing practice. I strongly recommend reading Ria Baeck’s book on the subject.

For any who are interested in trying out the practice for themselves, there are biweekly drop-in sessions held via Zoom at various times of the week. These open sessions are a practicing ground to begin exercising the capacities involved in presencing.¹ While depth of practice and quality of the field can vary widely session by session, these offerings present an opportunity to participate in glimpses of collective coherence through what Ria describes as the Circle of Presence.

The Circle of Presence proceeds with certain essential protocols that support the practice of subtle sensing. A hosting team sources guiding questions to provide focus and direction to a particular inquiry.² The hosts frame the practice and inquiry before opening for a round of check-ins amid the participants in the circle. Then, the guiding question is shared, as participants respond to the inquiry, using a talking piece to support attentive listening, entrainment of collective attention, and a slowed-down pace supportive of the deep, unhurried listening necessary for cultivating subtle sensing while tracking the evolving flow of meaning.

These protocols are intended to foster coherence.

Coherence, as it relates to collective wisdom practices, is defined in numerous ways. Baeck, quoted above, describes coherence in terms of an alignment between the physical and the subtle.

I will offer my own account of the phenomenology of the further reaches of collective coherence that I have experienced (which fall short in comparison to the other reports included in the previous post). While I readily affirm that I have made progress in developing these emerging capacities over the last few years, I have by no means mastered them and very much remain an apprentice in these practices.

Central among these capacities is what Ria Baeck describes as subtle sensing, which is essential toward opening to direct experience of the group field:

“Here, we use the notion ‘group field’ to denote the inner dimension that seems to be present in any kind of group, to which our Western world pays scant attention. We distinguish between ‘group field’ and the much more widely recognised ‘group dynamics’, which point mainly to common emotional patterns that occur in group settings. My point here is that, alongside these emotions, there are always subtle energies present that we can learn to detect, to trust, amplify and nurture.”³

I’ve found that this aspect of presencing can, indeed, be practiced, developed, and enacted, but not easily described.

Imagine that someone asked you how you open and close your fist. It would be a trivially easy matter to simply lift a hand and demonstrate.

Now imagine that you were subsequently asked to explain how you do it using only words. It would be nearly impossible to give a clear, descriptive account capable of imparting the knowledge through language alone.

The knowledge is embodied, not abstract; enactive, not propositional.

There is a significant extent to which this is the case with the practice of presencing: one must gradually develop a feeling for how subtle sensing is enacted.

To the extent it can be described, this would be my best attempt⁴:

Feel, fully, into the entire field of your bodily sensations
and begin to tune into the space inside you
as though you were listening, very closely,
from the tip of every nerve

Extend that listening to the space surrounding your body
and then listen to the shared space, the space around and between the group,
listening very closely to that space
until you are listening from that space,
listening as that space

Feel the thickness, the depth, of the field of listening that you are, that we are,
let your awareness sink down, and let it rise up,
let the spacious listening expand in all directions
until it is boundless

Enacting the posture of subtle sensing is only half of it, at most.

After much practice, I’ve reached agreement with a number of other we-space practitioners that the subtle phenomena involved demonstrate agency. We can practice making ourselves available, but the gesture of availability must be responded to by autonomous processes operating beyond the ken of our conscious control.

Acknowledging the limitations in my capacity to verbally explicate the embodied and participatory aspects of how presencing is practiced, I will outline three characteristics that, in my experience, have tended to signal the early stages of emergent coherence: intensification, transsubjective felt sense, and transegoic expressiveness.

I. Intensification.

I assume this to be a quality of the group field that generally strengthens in positive correlation with the degree of presence and subtle sensitivity enacted by the participants in the we-space.

Sometimes the intensification is comparatively subtle, gently registering as a felt sense of energy in the body. At other times, the intensification can grow quite powerful to the point of testing my capacity for maintaining presence and stability of attention.

The greater the intensity, it seems, the more capacity one must have for embodying stillness and spaciousness, resting in a vast and uncontracted awareness that is capacious, unhurried, nonreactive (some would describe this as the “casual” level of consciousness). This is not an easy posture to maintain when the energies rise to levels of intensity where, devoid of such presence, they will naturally seek some route of discharge or release or otherwise lead to dissociation.

Intensification can sometimes feel, quite palpably, like a deepening in the field, as though an invisible gravity well or black hole were growing in the center.

II. Transsubjective Felt Sense.

A felt sense of energy begins permeating the body in correspondence with intensification.

Eugene Gendlin coined the term “felt sense,” describing it as a “a special kind of internal bodily awareness” expressing “the body's sense of a particular problem or situation”:

“A felt sense is something you do not at first recognize—it is vague and murky. It feels meaningful, but not known. It is a body-sense of meaning.”⁵

Gendlin further describes the process of finding a “handle” for the felt sense—searching for words that resonate with the vague feeling, thereby rendering some portion of its implicit meaning explicit. Finding an adequate handle is accompanied by a feeling of rightness, of accuracy.

Verbalizing such a handle also frequently effects a transformation in the felt sense, propelling a dynamically unfolding somatic-emotional-cognitive process.

Similarly, practicing the Circle of Presence entails something akin to finding a handle for the felt sense of the group field—a process that is often called “speaking to and from the middle.”

Along the course of regular practice, I have had many experiences of personally contacting a felt sense that is revealed as carrying implicit meanings that are impersonal. Something someone else says often resonates with what I am sensing; their “handle” fits, sometimes in extremely precise ways. The felt sense seems to correspond to the shared space, even while being refracted in unique ways through the prism of every individuated perspective comprising the whole.

Elizabeth Debold and Thomas Steininger have recognized and articulated the same phenomenon in the context of Emergent Dialogue practice, which matches the experiences I have had practicing Collective Presencing:

“…when the individuals in the group have the repeated, almost uncanny experience of having their own thoughts and insights expressed by others in the group, the recognition of a shared interior experience develops. Each participant experiences being a focal point of the whole field in which Life is unfolding at the level of consciousness between human beings.”⁶

It can sometimes feel as if our individuality springs from an entangled system of roots mingling in a common soil beneath the visible surface of things, and that we are collectively speaking from the mutually-experienced felt sense issuing from those mutual depths.

III. Transegoic Expressiveness.

I assume this form of expression to correspond with transsubjectivity and transindividuation. All suggest a process whereby the individuated ego enters into participation with sources of agency extending beyond, but in some way continuous with, ordinary consciousness.

While practicing presencing, I have at times felt moved into spontaneous expression. The impulse on one level feels as though it is coming from elsewhere—and yet it is also chosen. There is no sense of compulsivity or possession by unconscious impulses driving my actions. I am neither compelled nor obligated to follow the creative channel, which feels “given over” to me as a “self action” from an unknown source which I can readily choose to withhold or deviate from if I wish.

In special instances, there is a deep and authentic trust in the rightness of what comes through. The choice to cooperate with the spontaneous wave of expressivity is felt as being right. In these cases, when assenting to the decision to actualize the impulse through the conscious choice to enact it, there is surprise at the sense of wisdom and clarity coming through—which does not seem to be coming from “me.”

While I am fully responsible for what is being enacted, there is a strong reticence to claim personal responsibility for it. If the action is coming from my “self,” then I assume it must be a more essential Self, supraordinate relative to ego. And yet my wakeful, and willing, participation is fully part of the process, the felt experience of sovereign choice remaining intact.

I readily imagine that such moments, still quite rare in my experience, approach what has been described as wu-wei.

IV. One Final Quality, Unnameable.

There is one more experience I feel moved to attempt to describe—though, in truth, the experience entirely escapes words.

I assume my attempt to give language to it is going to wind up sounding very strange.

It happened during the final session in a “deep dive” series of Collective Presencing sessions that I attended during the fall of 2020. At that time, I was very inexperienced at the practice and generally had no clear sense for how to slow down, feel from the body, and rest in a more spacious awareness to better access my subtle sensing capacities. (For me, these ways of attending and expressing would gradually develop with ongoing practice).

I imagine that the experience I am about to describe managed to break through into my awareness, despite my comparative lack of subtle sensing capacity, as a result of a spontaneous and profound intensification in the group field.

Something began to “shine through” the space.

It was as if I could suddenly sense a constellation of time, a palpable intuition of moments scattered through the past and the future irrupting into the present.

It had a radiant quality.

Every individual in the space seemed to be implicated. Our personal histories, our individual potentials, the weave of all of our relationships—all wound together. It felt like a sudden intimation of the latent karmic entanglements leading us all to that moment, bound together with intuitions of how that moment would ripple onward through an interconnected meshwork of beckoning futures.

It would not be accurate to call this a sensory experience—not, at least, in the sense of data transmitted by the physical senses. My eyes were seeing the same exact scene as before, nothing visibly different.

Yet the scene before me stood radically transformed.

I can only describe what changed as an upwelling of some sort of subtly sensed noetic intuition. While profoundly subtle, it was also intensely lucid, as if an “inner” sensing were “seeing” things unseen.

The experience was accompanied by a state of intense reverence, a sense of profound sacredness. My sphere of care and concern extended to a vast scope of consideration, my longing flung itself out toward the horizon of the mysteries of life and evolution, infused with deep wishes for the benefit and welfare of the whole.

“May it be so.”

There was an intense potency, and considerable fragility, to the feeling of latent and very wide reaching potential saturating that moment.

I have never experienced anything quite like that since. How, or why, it emerged when in it did for me that day remains a complete mystery.

Gebser offers a striking, and challenging, account of the “diaphanous” (transparent) mode of perception corresponding to the integral structure. He introduced multiple words to describe this kind of percpetion, including waring (German, Wahren; Wahrung). In light of resonances between my own experience and Gebser’s following description, I do find it quite interesting that Ria has linked her experiences in Collective Presencing with the emerging integral consciousness:

“One cannot make this transparency visible, one cannot see it, indeed one is only able to become aware of it (in the precise sense of the word “aware”) through effortless super wakefulness. It is more than clarity or illumination, more than transfiguration or glorification, more than radiance. One could possibly speak of it as the flashing-forth or sudden shining-through of the whole. Who participates in this is more or less purified, as if melted and remoulded, liberated from the scoria of the soul, from the narrow limitations of mentation, without in the slightest manner being lost to the world through intoxication or ecstatic rapture; rather, who participates in this finds themself well in order, with the deepest trust, and with the sacred lucidity of origin’s ever-presence pulsating through them.”⁷

There are few other passages where the radical depth of Gebser’s description of the integral mutation so vividly shines through. I wouldn’t claim that my own experience had been a realization of this waring, though I can readily imagine that it was at least reaching in that direction.

Perhaps experiences of this sort will gradually become more commonplace as the integral consciousness struggles to take form amid the accelerating breakdown of the mental-rational consciousness and its corresponding world structure.

Closing Reflections: Protocol and Potential.

As is often the case, something (or that hidden, whispering someone) has urged me to write and publish these vignettes of experiences in strange borderlands.

As a chronic Icarus, prone to tragicomic cycles of flights and plunges, I sense some degree of bubble bursting is in order here.

Through practicing Collective Presencing, I have learned that entering into collective spaces while mutually enacting a certain kind of attention and availability can create the conditions for openings into transpersonal experience, ranging from the mild to the intense.

Here, I have focused in on some of the more salient ways these sorts of openings have come about for me. Yet, far more often than not, I experience Collective Presencing as a beautiful and intimate dialogue with the voltage turned up just slightly.

Like other practitioners and facilitators of we-space practice, I am committed to these experiments in collective communion and the radical potentials they hold because I sense they have something crucial to offer for our time of radical uncertainty and necessary metamorphosis.

Fundamentally, I believe the emergence of integrality means repairing our centuries-long rupture from the world soul and aligning with the already latent futures enlisting our participation

Yet, the practice can also, necessarily, be frustrating.

We-space practices must have their failure modes and limitations. At some point there will be challenging thresholds of maturation to cross in service of leaping further into the relevant potentials presently beckoning us forward.

Ria draws a distinction between what she calls the Circle of Presence and the Circle of Creation.

Whereas the former is focused on practicing the emerging capacity of subtle sensing, the latter is really about sensing the latent potential in the field, feeling and honoring what wants to emerge such that it can ultimately be enacted.

Needless to say, the Circle of Creation is an achievement, one that is considerably more difficult to realize than the Circle of Presence:

“The difference is not superficial – indeed, there is a chasm to cross: to transition from a Circle of Presence to a Circle of Creation is to make the very paradigm shift that is currently embroiling humanity at this time.”⁸

Ria tends to emphasize the importance of slow, spacious listening to support the sensing of subtle phenomena typically crowded out of awareness when we operate from culturally habituated patterns, hence the protocols.

Bonnitta Roy has highlighted the tendency of predetermined protocols to effect limitating constraints. I think she offers an important challenge precisely where these practices may get stuck as they approach the crucial fulcrum where presence pivots toward creation:

“I learned that we do not yet know how to be with our own uniqueness, which is the same as being with the infinite diversity of the human experience, expressed by the others, because, when you remove the rituals, the reified concepts, the social objects and peer cult values, and remove the ‘person at the top responsible for making it all work,’ then the process quickly falls into its authentic state of chaos. Meaning-making techniques stop making sense, and sense-making techniques no longer have any meaning. It was clear to me that this edge, mostly experienced at the time as existential despair, is also the horizon of what is possible.”⁹

The protocols themselves, while playing a deeply important role toward effectively weening us away from habitual ways of relating that obscure the subtle phenomena present amid the group, can themselves threaten to become habitual and stultifying.

Protocols that once served as enabling constraints, if they harden into factors that interfere with the active expression relevant potential, may eventually need to be molted if the latent possibilities of the space are to have a chance of being realized.

And this may mean allowing all the constructs, habits, and social games to fall away and enduring the disorientation that follows—but aided by the capacities for coherence that have been honed and developed through practice.

The crucial question is when?

These emerging capacities are delicate, and generally require roughly identifiable conditions to be nurtured.¹⁰ If we discard the protocols too quickly, we readily risk relapse into egoic habits, insufficiently sensitized ways of relating to the situation at hand, and the tendency of individuals to strive—consciously or unconsciously—to impose limited views or agendas as to what “should” unfold at the expense of the whole.

On the other hand, if we inordinately cling to the protocols, they can rigidify and inhibit generative engagement with the latent potentials urging to spring forward.

As I’ve understood Bonnitta’s view, nature’s attempts at expressing the complex potential states pervading the field of relationships in a given situation includes the building intensity of our arousal energies. This often requires that we undergo a process that might be uncomfortable, confusing, conflict-ridden, frenetic, and messy. Charting a course between the extremes of artificially dampening, versus recklessly discharging, these intensities will require a great deal of skill.

The common practice protocols utilized in we-spaces may be crucial “training wheels” helping to usher in deeper possibilities of authentic collective coherence, where individuation and communion are genuinely reconciled and integrated. And, perhaps, a crucial part of our task is carefully discerning when the moment comes that the protocols must be released.

How does a newly born butterfly, awakening from the slumbering chaos of its former dissolution, sense when it is time to break free from its chrysalis?

I assume we will be living this question for some time to come…

1. The term presencing is derived from Otto Scharmer: “Presencing is a blending of the words ‘presence’ and ‘sensing.’ It means to sense, tune in, and act from one’s highest future potential—the future that depends on us to bring it into being.” (from Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, p. 8).

2. As Ria Baeck puts it: “it is important – always and everywhere – to clarify the intention of any gathering, call or event. Why is intention so important? 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.”

3. Ria Baeck, Collective Presencing: An Emerging Human Capacity.

4. I do not assume that other presencing practitioners would find this description satisfying, or even necessarily in agreement with their own approach to practice.

5. Eugene Gendlin, Focusing, p. 7.

6. Steininger and Debold, “Emerge Dialogue Process,” in Cohering the Integral We Space, p. 272

7. Aaron Cheak, From Poetry to Kulturphilsophie.

http://www.aaroncheak.com/from-poetry-to-kulturphilosophie

8. Ria Baeck, Collective Presencing: An Emerging Human Capacity.

9. Bonnitta Roy, Open Group Practice: Eight Social Selves, Kosmos Journal.

10. Debold and Steininger designed the guidelines for Emergent Dialogue as a protocol-based approach to emulating the natural ways of being expressed through what they originally called the Higher We. They also acknowledge that the protocols themselves, while helping to guide newer participants into the modes of experience on which they are modeled, are not a substitute for the shift in awareness that must ultimately become primary.