Here are a few suggestions to assist you in this endeavor.

1.  FOCUS YOUR ATTENTION
Achieving your life’s purpose requires focus. Focus produces a directional field of intention that magnetically attracts all that is in resonance with your purpose.

2.  PROVIDENCE
Recognize that all experiences serve a greater purpose than can be understood at the moment.  It is important to realize that over a period of time you will have both challenges and support. The learning that comes from the most negative experiences may turn out to offer you the greatest spiritual growth or be the gift you give to others in service. Life is the Great Teacher.

3.  DESIRE
Achievement of your life’s purpose is accelerated when you have dedicated and focused the desire to transmute those conditions within your personality which stand in your way.

4.  ACTING AGENT
By using the power of your personal will, aligned with the will of the soul, you can accomplish the necessary attitudes, skills, changes, and choices which are necessary to your success.  Choices arise in your everyday life which require you to keep your personal will aligned with your life’s purpose or you may scatter your energies in other directions.  You utilize your will to become the acting agent of your life’s purpose.

5.  ACTION
When desire and your focus as acting agent are properly aligned, a result is always produced.  It is now up to you to act upon the ideas and impressions that come to you.

6.  DYNAMIC POINT OF POTENTIAL
It is important to establish a conscious alignment with your Inner, or Higher Self.  This alignment with your Higher Self creates a Dynamic Point of Potential.  A focused point of receptivity attracts an influx of knowledge, creativity, and wisdom. This influx of wisdom and inspiration can then be infused into all of your actions, emotions, and thinking.

7.  DEVELOP AWARENESS OF YOURSELF AS SOUL
As you consciously develop your awareness as Soul, you begin to gain greater knowledge and thereby grow in wisdom. You begin to acknowledge your connectedness to everyone and everything. New paradigms, new and creative ways of thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing arise. At its most profound expression, your conscious acknowledgment of yourself as the Soul, assists you in your ability to aid in the evolution of Human Consciousness.

Need more direction? To sign up for a class or to make an appointment to talk with one of our instructors, Click Here.

To join with others of like-mind, who are finding or living their soul’s purpose Click Here.

by Maryann Miller

 ”Serenity and peace are not identical. Peace must ever be temporary and refers to the world of feeling and to conditions susceptible of disturbance. It is essential to progress, and an inevitable happening, that every step forward is marked by disturbances, by points of crisis and chaos, replaced later (when successfully handled) by periods of peace…. Serenity signifies that deep calm, devoid of emotional disturbance, which distinguishes the disciple who is focused in a “mind held steady in the light.” The surface of his life may be (from the worldly angle) in a state of violent flux. All that he cherishes and holds dear in the three worlds may be crashing around him. But in spite of all, he stands firm, poised in soul consciousness and the depths of his life remain undisturbed.” ~ Master Djwahl Khul

Fear, on the other hand, is the absence of serenity and peace. It is the expectation of something negative, either immediate or in the future.

Although fear can be a valuable and appropriate response to imminent danger, kicking in your fight or flight response, it can also be an illogical response to certain stimuli. Fear of insufficient of money to make ends meet, fear because you can’t figure out how to work your computer or electronic equipment, fear of losing your job, fear of public speaking, these and many other fears can cause extreme stress in your life and can kick in a fear response that can escalate to a full blown panic attack.

Your subconscious mind is silent, unseen, and unheard yet it is the master of your life and destiny. It can keep you in bondage or open wide the doors to freedom.

The last two decades have produced an enormous amount of research on the brain and brain technologies. Much of this new information dramatically changes how we view the brain, revealing mental and emotional capacities that, once we discover how to use them, can be lifelong assets with which to create positive qualities and dimensions in our lives.

Your brain interprets your thoughts and feelings based upon, not only current thoughts and feelings, but long held emotions and beliefs. Your brain is also influenced by external and internal stimuli such as the thoughts and beliefs you hold in your conscious mind, and how your current thoughts align with your subconscious beliefs. Your thoughts and emotions become wired in the brain and this circuitry elicits intellectual and emotional responses, from your subconscious, according to the beliefs you’ve programed into your subconscious.

Your beliefs empower and rule the way you view and live life. Each of your emotions and reactions are the result of your beliefs. How you perceive and experience reality, and your reactions to experiences, are the result of your beliefs. Your beliefs elicit a counter response to your words and actions thus grounding your currently held beliefs, or your response can help to establish new beliefs and reactions.

How Do You Perceive the Person or Current Situation?

Are you in tune with what a person or situation wants you to know? Does your lower, ego-mind say things like, “I already know this person is greedy, unfair, or is going to verbally attack me,” or “This situation is not going to turn out good and I feel like just opting out.” These, and other repetitive reactions, can keep you trapped in the same or similar disabling thought patterns. As is often said, in neuroscience since the late 1990’s, “… neurons that fire together, wire together”. When a pair of neurons fire at the same time, they build an association or connection between them. When you choose to wire together certain feelings or responses to particular stimuli, patterns are formed in your subconscious mind that are triggered whenever the same or similar events take place.

Self-Examine Your Thoughts and Emotions

When life presents you with the same challenging situations or choices, do you wonder why you seem to repeat them over and over again, without different outcomes? Your conscious mind wants something different, yet you continue to repeat the same cycles again and again. Sometimes, in an attempt to avoid these painful or challenging situations, you go into your default modes of behavior:

At times like these, it’s important to discern what’s really causing you to feel the way you do. What thoughts run through your mind when you feel put on the spot, angry, ignored, rejected, put down, etc.? Dr. Athena Staik says, it’s important to remember that “habitual thinking patterns that cause intense feelings of fear, anger, shame, or guilt are not only toxic, but also addictive in nature.” In other words, you are hooked on your reactions because they cause the release of hormonal secretions that make you feel better so you continue to use these reactions to cope with threatening situations.

Any thought that shuts down your reasoning mind is coming from your limited ego-mind, not from your Inner Voice of Wisdom, Love, and Power 

When conflict arises, life is expressing itself. Listen to your Inner-Voice and truly examine the situation. What’s happening in the present moment? Is there a deeper truth that is signaling for your full awareness? At times like this, it’s important to be conscious of the moment and understand that the situation or experience is there to support your internal growth; it’s there to help you remove old beliefs and patterns that hinder and no longer serve you.

It’s important to examine the experience a little deeper to perhaps find a solution that is in the best interest for you and the other person/people, or a way for you to develop a more appropriate response? Observe how you have contributed to the situation and determine if you can either rectify it or learn from it. Do you fully understand the other person/people? Are you acting from your ego-mind or your Inner Voice of Wisdom, Love and Power?

Everyone has some type of fear. Rejection of some type is the most common. When you reject others’ ideas, beliefs, feelings, or worth, they will naturally feel wounded and become defensive. Once they are in a wounded frame of mind, they move into their defense mode and their listening shuts off. Think about it, they have the same need to feel worthy, in control, smart, successful, and good enough as we.

Self Discovery

Roberto Assagioli says, “Thought is an energy, and unseen but real power…thought lies at the back of everything we do: building our attitudes, our relationships, and our whole way of life. In the world of the mind are born the practical beginnings of everything that eventuates on earth.”

It’s important to discover what thoughts and beliefs you hold in your subconscious. What emotions and beliefs do you associate with particular people, events, memories, and situations and experiences? How do you react to these feelings, thoughts and beliefs?

Fear

Athena Staik, Ph.D. says, “If you resist your own efforts to change a habit, it speaks to the quality of rapport between your mind and body. Simply put, they’re not in sync. What can disturb this special relationship, essentially, between the conscious logic part of your mind and the subconscious felt-emotion part? In a word, fear.”

Fear equals stress, conflict, anger, resentment, guilt, jealously, shame, violence, etc. If you have any of the following feelings, you are living in fear.

•  self-doubts
•  feeling rejected
•  feelings of inadequacy
•  a need to be right
•  a need to be in control
•  wanting to get back at someone
•  wanting to avoid someone
•  a need to get your point across
• a need to avoid having a conversation with someone because of anger or resentful feelings
• a need to release pent up frustration or anger about something that has happened in your life
• feelings of judgment over how some people live their lives, their relationships or their financial status
  

Don’t let Fear be the Master of Your Life!

Fear is toxic. Whenever energy gets stuck, it restricts the natural flow and becomes toxic. This stuck energy reduces the flow of oxygen in the body and triggers physiological changes that engage your survival mechanisms. This in turn creates hormonal and blood sugar deviations that directly affect your adrenal glands and immune system.

Fear destroys. It zaps your energy, paralyzes, steals confidence, overwhelms reason, and is addictive. When you react in a fearful way, your fight or flight mechanism kicks into gear, your energy is short circuited, and stress is the result.

Fear overwhelms reason and steals confidence. Fear overwhelms reason because it trains the subconscious mind to respond through habit rather than your brain’s intellect, thus the fight or flight response is stimulated at inappropriate times and in unsuitable ways.

Fear is addictive. Dr. Anthena Staik says, “At the root of all addiction is a fear of intimacy, in particular, an intimate knowing of self.” Fear is addictive because it causes a hormonal secretion that continually stimulates the pleasure area of the brain. Dr. Staik goes on to say, “Though toxic thoughts paint images of self and others with colors of lack, gloom or failure, subconsciously they are protective strategies that get activated automatically in our defense when something triggers us. Thus, our body associates them with pseudo “feel good” feelings that lower our anxiety, albeit in ineffective, quick-fix ways.”

Fear as the Great Teacher

Fear can immobilize you but it is also a great teacher. When you encounter stressful situations, you can learn a lot from them, if you pay attention. What was said or done to elicit fear or danger? How did you perceive the situation; was there a different way to see it or respond? Did you truly listen to what the other person was saying or doing or was it old belief patterns that caused fear to rear its head?

Hearing is Different Than Listening

Hearing is different than listening. Listening is being present long enough to observe the situation differently, actually listen to what the other person is saying or sense what s/he might be feeling, hearing a shift in attitude, or sensing a solution arising. Listening allows you to move into modifying or correcting the situation, for you and the other person. Your ego-mind might say, “Gosh, s/he really needs to get a grip.” But, if you come from a little deeper place of compassion, you will genuinely desire to rectify the situation for yourself, the other person, and the issue that separates you.

Wherever you place your attention, the energy will be amplified. If you concentrate on listening to anger, resentment and rage, you will not be able to listen to your Inner Voice. In a stressful situation, the ultimate is to first find your own inner balance. By centering or balancing your own emotional energy, you will be in a place of serenity and can more easily restore peace.

Remember, no one causes your anger, frustration, or stress. When you dwell in serenity, you will not become combative no matter what the other person says. Shifting your thoughts, feelings and beliefs allows alternative solutions to surface and you will be rewiring your brain to shift into higher frequencies of consciousness immediately, which in turn establishes new patterns and reactions for future encounters and events. It’s imperative that you keep your calm knowing the other person might also be experiencing her/his own fears. Listen to your Inner-Voice, even if it is faint.

Ego-Mind Consciousness

When operating from your ego-mind, your reality is formed through the operation of the five physical senses, beliefs held in the subconscious mind, societal conditionings, and humanity’s mass consciousness. The ego-mind restricts your conscious connection with your Inner-Voice, thus you live life in the illusion of separation. Your actions and reactions are based upon personal survival of varying degrees, seeking happiness externally without recognition of the wisdom of your Inner Voice.

There are times we each act from our untrained Ego-mind but each time you recognize the cause and effect of any situation, and grasp the opportunity to operate or deal with it from a higher level of consciousness, you move into higher frequencies of consciousness that allow you to transmute old ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that have previously kept you in painful recurring situations and cycles. As you transmute these old energy patterns, you heal your psyche, your emotions, and your physical body. Old challenges seem to no longer stifle your progress, new and exciting opportunities arise, and you begin to live in serenity, thus proving the old saying that Peace begins within.

Thoughts are Powerful

Your thoughts are potent, dynamic energies that form your attitudes, feelings, relationships, and experiences. Thoughts actually create changes in your subconscious and how you act and react to life’s challenges and situations. In The Intention Experiment, Lynne McTaggart reveals the following research. EMG imagining, is “a real-time snapshot of the brain’s instructions to the body….””As skiers mentally rehearsed downhill runs, the electrical impulses heading to their muscles were just the same as those they used to make runs and jumps while actually skiing the run. The brain sent the same instructions to the body, whether the skiers were simply thinking of a particular movement or actually carrying it out. Thought produced the same mental instructions as action.”

Energy follows attention so wherever you place your attention, energy follows.

Thoughts are strengthened through repetition. If you want to change your reality, you must reprogram your beliefs and create new patterns whenever you feel stress rising up within you. You must replace your old thought patterns by creating new ones, and then be consistent with them long enough to implant them into your subconscious as new beliefs. So how do you stop old patterns and cycles or change their outcomes?

Observe the Situation

Observe yourself when you are feeling stressed, upset, angry, insecure, want to express yourself with a combative tone, or are in the middle of an argument; that’s the time to focus inwardly and center yourself. This will give you time to regroup your emotions and halt the conflict before it begins. Recognize that all external conflicts reflect internal struggles that need balancing or healing.

Look at the situation. What does the situation want you to know? Look for deeper truths that are signaling for your full awareness. Be conscious of the moment and understand that the experience is there to support your internal growth.

Ask yourself, “Is this a repeating pattern in my life?” “Is this what I truly want?” Observe what’s going on inside of you to see if you are reacting from subconscious beliefs and patterns. Look deeper into the experience to find a solution that is in the best interest for both parties, and a way for you to grow from the experience. Examine how you have contributed to the situation and see how you can rectify it. Discern if you fully understand the situation or the other person and observe what, if any, fault might lay with you.

Master Your Life – Release Fear and Reprogram Your Subconscious

You can rewire your subconscious mind and become master of your life thereby attaining serenity, happiness, joy, health, and success but you must first determine that you will listen to a different voice.

The subconscious mind is the storeroom of everything you’ve put into it; i.e., your beliefs, feelings, emotions, memories, experiences, situations, and so on. Fears held in your subconscious are programed by repetition, not by logic. Your subconscious is not capable of original thinking and it doesn’t discern between what’s good for you and what isn’t, it’s simply like a computer that initiates the program you request. If you’ve stored programs for certain fears regarding people, situations, or experiences, your subconscious activates your stored program every time you encounter the same or similar people, situations, or experiences.

There are several techniques you can use to help reprogram your subconscious. Rick Hanson, Ph.D. offers two techniques in his The Enlightened Brain audio learning course, which you can check out at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhhGhF1RFKo

or

http://www.soundstrue.com/shop/The-Enlightened-Brain/3659.productdetails

Dr. Hanson says, “First, research has shown that when you put words to your feeling, when you just label them, that does two things. On, it stimulates activity in what’s called the prefrontal cortex – the very front part of your brain – and second, it lowers activity in the amygdala alarm circuit. The simple act of naming to yourself what you’re feeling as you’re feeling it helps to dampen this overreaction.”

“The other method is based on science’s new understanding of how memory is actually formed. The brain is so fast and it has so many neurons that it can afford to rebuild a memory from scratch each time it brings it up. When something painful is in awareness, If you also bring to mind positive information – especially positive feelings that are really felt and intense – you gradually infuse that negative experience with positive associations when it goes back into storage. And so the next time it comes up, it’ll bring a little bit of that positive tinge with it. It won’t change overnight; you need to stick with it. But over time, you can gradually help yourself from the inside out to shift your interior landscape. “

Another technique I’ve used, when faced with non-threatening, yet challenging situations, with others, is to:

Observe Both Voices

Go within and clearly listen to what your ego-voice and Inner Voice are saying and discern the difference.

Ego Voice:

Listen to what the ego voice is saying. What thoughts are your ego-mind generating?

• Do you feel fearful or angry because of past experiences with this person or situation?
•  Do you feel rejected?
•  Do you feel out of control?
•  Does the person or situation make you feel inadequate?
•  Do you feel like a failure?
•  Do you feel you’re not good enough?

Inner Voice:

• If you hear anger, fear, self-doubt, or rage, choose to listen to your Inner Voice of Wisdom, Love, and Power, even if the voice is faint.
• Be fully present. Be willing to really understand the other person’s point of view.
•  Inwardly observe your feelings. How does the person or situation make you feel; are you beginning to feel defensive, out of control of the situation, frustrated, angry, or powerless?
• Still your emotions long enough to relax and go into the silence for a moment so you can compose your emotions.
• Listen to your responses; are you thinking about what you want to say next or are you really listening to what is being said?
• Listen for the issue(s) that might trigger conflict.
• Listen for the other person’s feelings – are they feeling fear, lack of self-worth, not being heard, etc.?
• Even though my past experiences with this person or situation made me angry or afraid, I know I’m in control of my experience and I can change my reaction and the outcome.
• I can only feel rejected if I believe I’m not worthy.
• Even though I don’t know everything about this subject, situation, etiquette, or problem, I’m capable and can learn from this experience.
• It’s never failure when I try.
• Never compare yourself with others for there will always be those who are not as knowledgeable as you and those who are more knowledgeable.
• Discover, Mentally Create, Rehearse, and Verbalize
• Discover the emotions certain people or situations generate.
• Discover what beliefs you hold about yourself that make you feel defensive or want to lash out? Do you choose your actions or do you react from outdated beliefs stored in your subconscious? Can you calm your emotions, when they do arise, and listen to your Inner Voice?
• Mentally create and rehearse your emotional reactions and what you want the outcome to be with certain people or situations.
• Rehearse your mental creations, reactions, and your intention to alter the way you react to certain people and situations. The greatest athletes do this all of the time. Rehearsing is different than visualization. In The Intention Experiment, Lynne McTaggart quotes R.J. Rotella, et al as saying, “Visualization implies that you observe yourself in the situation, as if watching a mental video featuring yourself or seeing yourself through another pair of eyes. Although this may be useful in other areas of life, visualizing oneself from an external perspective in a sports event can hamper athletic performance. Mental rehearsal also differs from positive thinking; happy thoughts on their own do not work in competitive sports.”
• Verbalize your mental creations and intentions to help embed them into your subconscious. Resistance to change is a magnet that keeps you trapped. When resistance and pain rear their heads, know that life is communicating with you and it’s important to pay attention.

Act As IF

A very wise person once told me that, if you want to be in control, happy, prosperous, successful, or healthy, you must begin by acting as If. If you haven’t used this technique before, don’t expect to perfect it overnight. I’ve been practicing this skill for most of my life and still find myself slipping back into old habit patterns, when caught off guard.

It’s important to acknowledge your fears and recognize you want to achieve serenity and peace, even though you may not know how to go about it at first. Fully accept yourself just the way you are without undue judgment. Acknowledge you’re striving to change old, outdated beliefs and it may take continued effort to completely transform them into new, more constructive patterns of behavior. When you find yourself repeating an old pattern or belief, don’t blame yourself; instead, recognize you’re reacting and consciously set and implement the intent to modify or change that particular pattern. With repetition and time, you will definitely begin to notice new beliefs and patterns materializing in your life.

Achieving Serenity and Peace

Serenity is a state of harmony you create within yourself. Whenever you genuinely recognize and accept that all things are One and that you are the creator of your reality, you instantly and effortlessly generate serenity. When serenity exists within, you are able to face life’s challenges with calmness and objectivity; your emotions and brain (heart and head) are in a state of balance; one does not dominate the other. You meet your challenges, tests and trials with calm resolve, wisdom, and love.

You clearly hear and listen to your Inner-Voice of Wisdom, Love, and Power and you are at peace within yourself. No matter what the circumstances, you do not become triggered by others. You do not feel the need to argue or lash out. You are able to see the other side as non-threatening and are able to listen to the other person with understanding and compassion. You are able to recognize how you may have contributed to a situation and you are able to speak your truth from respect and consideration for both sides.

Peace is a state of harmony that can be created in the world of affairs; it is attained when we are able to achieve balance and harmony with others. Peace can be reached by all, without exception, when we see, feel, and practice our Oneness. As you live your Oneness, new beliefs will be created within your subconscious and your thoughts, feelings, and actions will move to mirror your new beliefs.

Each time you encounter a challenging situation, you either consciously or subconsciously choose peace or conflict. If you choose peace, you face the challenge with a philosophic, unemotional, unbiased, impersonal attitude. This in turn, allows you to move into higher frequencies of consciousness and act through the wisdom, love, and power of your Inner Voice, thus helping to create a world of lasting peace.

http://drdansiegel.com/

Editor’s Note: In the following dialogue, excerpted and adapted from the Institute of Noetic Sciences’ teleseminar series, The Essentials of Noetic Science, IONS Director of Research Cassandra Vieten talks with psychiatrist-educator-writer Dan Siegel, author of the internationally acclaimed The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience , Parenting from the Inside Out, and, most recently, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation.

Mindsight is literally the ability of the human mind to see itself. It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner lives with more clarity, transform the brain, and enhance our relationships with others.

Vieten: Let’s jump right in. Would you explain what mindsight is?

Siegel: Mindsight saved my life when I was in medical school. It’s a word I first used to describe the professors I had who could see the mind of their patients and treat them with dignity. When it was absent, I would say to myself, “Oh, that person doesn’t have mindsight, so be careful, because he’s not a good role model.” I actually dropped out of medical school but ultimately came back, trying to understand how so much of what was happening for me and my colleagues in school was a kind of socialization not to see the mind as something real in our patients or even in ourselves. When I became a psychiatric trainee a few years later, I used the word again to mean how we see the mind of others as well as our own mind.

So, mindsight is literally the ability of the human mind to see itself. It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner lives with more clarity, transform the brain, and enhance our relationships with others. The word emerged as I realized that people have this perceptual ability, although some don’t have it very well developed.

Vieten: It seems some people have it naturally, others an inkling, and still others remain sort of “mindblind” their whole lives. Can you talk a bit about the possibility of training this capacity for mindsight?

Siegel: There was a study done with deaf children that illuminates what, in the research terminology, is called “theory of mind.” The deaf children whose parents were sophisticated at using sign language could imagine that other people have a mind, but the deaf children whose parents were just beginning to learn to sign showed impairment in theory of mind – similar to children with autism, in fact, who also are impaired in this way. This research taught us that the use of language to imbed terms for feelings, thoughts, perceptions, hopes, memories, all those kinds of words that we share with each other, especially with children while they’re growing up, are the kinds of communication symbols that help people develop mindsight — the capacity to know that I have a mind and you have a mind. Relating with children stimulates this set of brain circuits to grow. Even adults who weren’t fortunate as children to have this ability taught to them can, in many cases, later be taught. In cases where the deficit is not caused by experiential lack, such as autism, mindsight may not be as easy to teach. In fact, sometimes it’s not possible because the circuitry isn’t there. But for many people who haven’t had the opportunity to learn mindsight, it’s a teachable skill. The great news is that once it’s learned, people begin both to develop well-being inside themselves and to improve their relationships with others.

Vieten: You’ve had an interest in meditation and contemplative practices as pathways toward training mindsight. Would you say more about this?

Siegel: During my journey in medical school back in the late 1970s, I was discouraged by professors of medicine because they didn’t teach or address this factor of mindsight. When I went on to study psychiatry, my desire to use this knowledge of “seeing the mind” as an important element in clinical care led me to explore it in the field of attachment research. I studied how parents and children interact and how the mind develops its ability to reflect – what Peter Fonagy and other researchers call the mind’s “reflective function,” which allows us to “mentalize.” My training in attachment research and my work as a therapist underscored the importance of relating for the development of a healthy mind. I then wrote The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are [the paperback version of the 1999 hardcover with a different subtitle] to look at the science underneath mindsight, this ability to reflect on the internal nature of the mind.

When I translated The Developing Mind into a book for parents, Parenting from the Inside Out, which Mary Hartzell wrote with me, we used the term “mindfulness” to mean being mindful in your parenting, but then I learned that there was this whole field of mindfulness meditation which I was unfamiliar with. That’s when I got to know Jon Kabat-Zinn and Jack Kornfield and others in this mindfulness world. I was literally unaware not only of this deep contemplative practice over thousands of years but also of the science that was emerging from studying mindfulness.

In the last five years, much of what I’ve been doing in my writings is looking at the overlap of a number of different ways of knowing, whether it’s in contemplative practice or attachment or psychotherapy or the arts or whatever. What I see with mindfulness meditation is that it encourages people to look inward at their inner experience. You go beyond words and thoughts to get to the sensations and experiential aspects of life, and in doing so, you become clearer about what’s actually going on with yourself in the moment. You let go of expectations and judgments, and in that way, the practice of mindfulness is a direct way of developing one aspect of mindsight, which is to see the subjective inner world.

It turns out that mindfulness meditation is also useful for developing empathic relationships, which is another aspect of mindsight – the empathy that is fundamental to healthy relationships. A third aspect of mindsight is focusing attention to integrate the brain, to link differentiated parts, and mindfulness meditation is an extremely integrative process. The regions of the brain that link widely separated areas to one another are the regions that are stimulated during meditation. There’s also preliminary evidence that suggests these regions seem to grow with continued meditation practice.

The bottom line is that in the field of mindsight, we’re excited to learn about this ancient meditation practice because we see it as profoundly integrative, where you develop fine attunement internally and interpersonally.

Vieten: It is interesting that a personal, introspective practice helps us to connect with other people. Being able to observe your own inner experience somehow allows you to be more aware of other people’s experience or to take their perspective.

Siegel: One time I was with forty neurologists on a meditation retreat. We practiced a form of meditation known as shamatha. On the fifth day of the seven-day retreat, two of the neuroscientists shared similar observations that their partners – in one case a fiancée and in the other a spouse – had made about them. Both said something along the lines of “What’s going on with you? You’ve become so empathetic. You’re so open to me now. You’ve never been like this.” All we had been doing for five days was a breath awareness practice, yet when you look at the circuitry of the brain that is activated during such a practice – which is simple in theory but not easy to sustain – the neural firing of areas of the brain that allow you to tune into your own internal state are the same circuits that studies on empathy show we use to tune into another person’s inner world. A system of neurons called mirror neurons is engaged. When you look at the neural circuitry these mental activities use, you discover how an internal practice of attunement would naturally lend itself to more interpersonal attunement.

Vieten: How do you define mind? When you say mind, I know you mean more than thoughts. What is mind?

Siegel: I’ve now interviewed 94,500 mental health practitioners from around the world – including Australia, Europe, and Asia – and whatever their profession, whether it’s in psychiatry, psychology, social work, nursing, or occupational therapy, the number has been the same: only 2 to 5 percent report ever having a lecture that defined mind. We have defined all these mental health disorders, but we don’t have a framework for health, for the healthy mind.

My operational definition is for a part of the mind, not the whole of the mind. Of course, the mind is a mystery. It’s full of consciousness and incredible majesty – the sensation of red, the feeling of love, the impact of music – all that makes up our subjective inner life. While those are all parts of the mind, a definition I developed for one core aspect of the mind (which helped scientists communicate with one another in a think tank I ran some years ago) explains the mind as an emergent property, something that arises in the interaction of our neural system and our relational system. These two systems allow energy and information to flow in reciprocity – like right now, between you and me. We have energy and information passing between us but also passing through the nervous system. So, the mind can be seen as an emergent property. Where is it arising? It’s arising in an embodied way, not just in the brain in the skull but throughout the whole nervous system, the whole body. It’s also relational. This emergent property that regulates the flow of energy and information is an embodied relational process.

This definition also facilitates our understanding of how relationships deeply affect the way neurons get connected to one another, as well as our understanding that the way your neurons are connected by way of experience and genetics affects how your relationships emerge. Both our relationships and our neural structure influence our mental experience.

The other thing that’s great about this definition – and so useful for application in clinical work or educational work or parenting – is that you can show people how to regulate with more clarity and specificity by teaching them to do the two things involved in regulation. One is monitoring, like when you drive a car, you have to watch where you’re going. The other is modulating or modifying, like turning the steering wheel, putting on the brakes, or accelerating. You can teach people to monitor with more clarity and depth so that they can see more detail. When that’s stabilized, you can teach them to modulate. Once they see the details, they can then modify in a way that moves the system toward integration.

In the work we do with this mindsight approach, we embrace a definition of mind that defines part of what the mind is, and then we are able to define what a healthy mind is. A healthy mind moves us toward integration, a harmonious flow, bounded on either side by chaos or rigidity.

The details in all this are wonderful because we find we can begin to predict what future research might show, and it’s exciting to find predictions coming true as technology advances.

Vieten: So what is new and hot and interesting for you? What are your next steps?

Siegel: One thing that we’ve been doing at the Mindsight Institute is providing an online presence so that people in science, education and parenting, psychotherapy, the arts, and the contemplative arts can apply these principles in various settings. My hope is for people to find practical uses for our definition of the mind and our definition of health as integration.

On the scientific side, we now have two dozen books, most of which are already out in a series about this interdisciplinary field of interpersonal neurobiology – which is different from social neuroscience and not just a branch of neurobiology. We’re trying to weave together a consilient approach in a field that looks at all the different ways of knowing and puts them into one scientifically grounded perspective.

I also worked with fifteen interns to help me revise The Developing Mind, which was published in 1999. I gave them the task of proving the book’s hypothesis wrong and three months to go over all the scientific literature they could find. I’m happy to report that we found seventeen hundred new scientific papers over the last eleven years which support the book’s basic hypothesis that you can work with the concept of health as integration and thereby predict impaired integration in various unhealthy conditions, such as schizophrenia and autism. Psychotherapy is ultimately a process of harnessing the brain’s neuroplasticity, using the focus of attention as an experience that doesn’t just change the structural connections in the brain but that actually integrates them. That’s been exciting.

And finally, in light of the scientific exploration of integration and how it leads to health, we are now trying to make projections of what future technology will show us about various forms of psychiatric disorders. Whether they are experientially induced or genetically induced vulnerabilities, they are examples of impaired integration. Scientific studies of new forms of psychotherapy will examine how such therapies try to integrate the brain through the power of empathic relationships. I talk about specific techniques that can do this in Mindsight and also in my book The Mindful Therapist. Where you snag the brain, you stimulate neuronal activation and growth. The way a surgeon uses a scalpel, a therapist uses attention.

In short, we hope to lay a broad framework of health, to offer a working definition of the mind, and to look for new ways to use the mind to make the brain stronger and relationships more empathic. Basically, we want to bring more health and kindness into the world.

Vieten: It seems that in many fields we’re learning that it’s not so much about what symptom you have or which part of the brain is lighting up but what’s happening with an individual, a family, a community, or a culture – a systems approach. We’re looking at greater integration, greater cohesiveness, and, really, greater relationality in the ways we approach these issues, which are important to everyone.

You mentioned practical steps people could take. We talked about mindfulness. Are there a few others you could identify for us?

Siegel: Well, if you apply the definition of mind we’ve discussed to your personal life and say, “Okay, I’m defining the mind as an embodied and relational process,” then you see that, “I need to honor my body and be tuned into my body.” So, any kind of mindfulness practice that allows you to do that is very important, any kind of body scan, yoga, whatever keeps you in touch with your body.

Then there is the relational part. It is a scientifically established reality that our mental lives are profoundly interconnected with one another. When you see that, you see that you have to pull yourself out of thinking in small ways. “If I’m relational, then what do I do with that?” you ask yourself. Well, you can begin to monitor the energy and information flow inside your body in a new way.

[EXERCISE:] Start tonight by focusing on your breath. That’s the mindfulness piece. But even more than that, see if you can start to open to thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories – all of the elements of your mental life – as energy patterns. Just try that as a monitoring thing.

Then, move beyond doing it within yourself alone and begin to extend this practice to others – someone you’re close to, a neighbor, someone you work with. Notice how you’re taking in their internal world. Are you really allowing yourself to resonate with another person? This is a first step in opening up your monitoring ability. In the mindsight way of thinking, your body and your relationships are part of the same system of energy and information flow.

There are many trainings a person can do. On my website, you can stream a formalized practice called the Wheel of Awareness. It facilitates your ability to integrate consciousness by guiding you to feel the centrality of a hub of awareness and anything else you can be aware of on the rim. The Wheel of Awareness allows you to deepen your monitoring capacity. When I was in Australia recently, I taught this practice and a couple of people with severe chronic pain came up to me at the break and said, “I don’t know what happened, but I’ve never been pain free and now I don’t have the pain. What did you do?” Well, it’s not what I did. They integrated their awareness through the practice and put the pain in its proper place, on the rim. They strengthened the hub and found a way to actually differentiate these elements of the rim – in this case, body pain – from the fullness of awareness. They liberated themselves from the prison of pain by doing that.

As for the modulating or modifying part, when people begin to differentiate this rim element from the hub of awareness, they enter a process whereby they can start to modify exactly what’s going on with themselves. I’ve had people with severe anxiety, for example, bring their anxiety to this Wheel of Awareness practice, and the anxiety melts away. You can go through other domains as well, for example, learning what the left and right hemispheres are like and finding a way to link the two areas. Just today I saw a new person who was struggling with being aware of his body and of autobiographical memories, and he had trouble reducing his anxiety. Autobiographical memory, the ability to map the whole body, and stress modulation are all right hemisphere specialties. Both hemispheres share them, but they’re dominant in the right. For various reasons, he had a hard time developing those skills in his childhood. But with these mindsight skills, like integrating left and right, he’s going to develop more of his right hemisphere capacity and then link the two hemispheres. Once you get the general notion of how to master this idea of integration as health, the mind can move the system of energy and information toward integration. The wonderful thing is how it empowers the individual, even independent of therapy.

So, there are lots of things to do. The Wheel of Awareness practice is one of them. A good way to heighten mindsight is to start with something that facilitates the integration of consciousness.

To purchase Dr. Siegel’s new book, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, go to:

http://www.amazon.com/Mindsight-New-Science-Personal-Transformation/dp/0553804707

The Science of Transformation, was excerpted and adapted from a teleseminar series, “The Essentials of Noetic Sciences” with Daniel Siegel, MD and Cassandra Vieten, PhD. It was first published in the March 2011 issue of Noetic Now, the online journal of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, located at www.noetic.org/noetic/. With permission from the publisher. ©2011

by Maryann Miller, Msc.D

The Institute For Global Transformation’s vision is a global network of individuals whose purpose is to experience personal transformation, master their own lives, and in some manner share their experience with humanity in order to uplift and transform consciousness and make our world a better place for all. By exploring consciousness, we find new solutions to global concerns. We then apply our discoveries to assist humanity in building a better world.  By learning how

the natural laws of the universe operate and how to apply them in practical ways, we not only attain higher states of consciousness, we experience happiness, health, success and most importantly, we find our life’s purpose. Additionally, the more conscious we become, the more potent are the energies of Universal Power, Love, and Intelligence magnetically drawn to us.

The Dynamic Point of Potential^®

At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is. And without the point, that still point, there would be no dance. And there is only the dance. ~ T. S. Elliot

This still point, which we’ll call the Dynamic Point of Potential^®, is an interval in space and time in which an harmonic is created that magnetically attracts higher frequencies of consciousness. It is a point of self-initiated dynamic stillness and a critical midway point or juncture where lower and higher resonating frequencies of consciousness meet and merge. It is here that poles are held in relationship and where balance is restored between divergent polarities of consciousness through the transfer of energy from one pole to the other. The construction of this Dynamic Point of Potential^® is one of the most important phases of the transformation process.

It is also within the Dynamic Point of Potential^® that the Light of Mind is merged with the life of the personality, thus giving it direction and purpose. The Dynamic Point of Potential^® operates like a fulcrum or balance point between the lower, more receptive frequencies of consciousness and higher, more dynamic frequencies of consciousness. The degree of transformation that can occur at any given time is dependent upon the strength of your focus, the frequency of consciousness with which you are able to hold a resonance, and the operation of the Dynamic Point of Potential^®.

If we have been consistent with our meditations or directed prayers, then we’ve established the necessary brain-mind-soul alignment that equips us to act as instruments for the reception and transmission of higher, spiritual frequencies of consciousness. It’s very important that we consciously construct this inner temple, so that we can carry out the Great Work that awaits each of us, if we choose to serve.

We’ve probably all seen pictures of the Charioteer riding in a Chariot pulled by three horses. Symbolically, for the Mystical Marriage to take place, the Charioteer, (the Soul Personality) riding in the chariot, (which is the cave or 3rd ventricle of the brain), must be able to steer all three horses, the physical, emotional, and mental bodies, in unison, or the same direction. When the Soul-Personality is able to align and steer these three etheric bodies, self-mastery is achieved and we are fully equipped to carry out our Soul’s purpose.

If however, any one of the three horses is allowed to dominate and pull in its own direction, disharmony or conflict occurs and our life and affairs reflect that disharmony. We can’t fool our Higher Self. A very wise person once told me “If you want to become a Master, you must begin by acting like one.” But it’s not just the benevolent deed we did two weeks ago or the donation we made to our favorite charity; it’s the person we are every minute of every day, month, and year that demonstrates the degree of consciousness we’ve attained.

I’m sure we’ve all known people whose emotions ruled their personality. They never allow the intellect to step in, sort things out, and intelligently direct a course of action. We’ve also known people who allowed their intellect to become so dominant that they appeared to be like the character Data in Star Trek, The Next Generation. There’s also the person who builds a super physical body to the exclusion of his/her mental and emotional nature.

As we continue to harmonize and refine our brain-mind-soul alignment, with higher and higher frequencies of consciousness, we approach a certain level of initiation and more exalted frequencies of consciousness are transmitted to us so that the work of the Soul can be accomplished here on Earth.

We’re all familiar with the axioms: When the student is ready, the Master will appear and When you knock, the Door shall be opened. Through meditation or directed prayer we build the necessary internal alignment, within the cave or third ventricle of the brain, and established a vibration in harmony with the Door to the Cave. At this point, the Door is no longer a barrier; we pass through freely and easily, and the Guardian of the Threshold bids us welcome.

It is also within the third ventricle of the brain that the Mystical Marriage takes place, in the physical body. When we have attained the required level of consciousness, the Pineal gland dips its transformed fluid into the Pituitary gland. This interaction actually changes the chemical makeup of the glandular secretions in the brain, which in turn affects the endocrine and other systems of the body and the Mystical Marriage takes place on the physical plane.

After self-mastery has been achieved and the Mystical Marriage has taken place, we stand as an Initiate who is a conscious co-creator and true servant of the Soul. We then work in conscious cooperation with our Soul and the unfolding of the Universal Plan for humanity here on Earth.

In order to accomplish the Great Work, we must learn how to work together, not only on the physical plane, but the emotional, mental, and spiritual planes as well. During periods of meditation or directed prayer we can set up a direct alignment among one another thus creating a group alignment with the higher frequencies of consciousness. This group alignment serves to:

• make us receptive to a wider range of incoming spiritual frequencies of consciousness;
• more easily allow us to gain access to our particular aspect of the great work;
• add potency to our individual alignment, which allows for a more powerful and effective projection of higher, spiritual frequencies of consciousness that benefit humanity and the entire planet.

So by uniting our efforts, we become a more powerful and effective force for bringing harmony to the world, thereby bringing the planet one step closer to a paradigm shift that will change the consciousness of every human being on the planet.

So as we each enter the sacred temple within, let us consecrate our hearts, minds, and beings to the Great Work before us. And as we work together, in conscious recognition of our true purpose, let us send Light, Love, Power, and harmony to transform consciousness on a global scale, thus building a better world for all.

Each month the IFGT posts a Monthly Focus on our website. We invite you to join us in this monthly meditation at:

http://ifgt.org/site/branches-home/healing-arts/monthly-transformational-meditative-focus/

“Framed upon memory’s wall is the self we sought to be. Deeds, not time will prove us worthy.” (Author Unknown)

May we ever dwell in Serenity, Love and Harmony and exemplify, by our thoughts and conduct, the followingCreed of Peace: TransformationOfTheWorld

www.heartmath.org

When we are born, the deoxyribonucleic acid/DNA in our bodies contains the blueprints for who we are and instructions for who we will become. For example, it can tell our eyes to eventually turn from blue at birth to hazel later on, our length to grow from 20 inches to 70 and direct a multitude of other changes over the course of our lives.
Many people have mistakenly believed that the DNA with which we are

born is the sole determinant for who we are and will become, but scientists have understood for decades that this genetic determinism is a flawed theory.

Epigenetics and Beyond

The field of epigenetics refers to the science that studies how the development, functioning and evolution of biological systems are influenced by forces operating outside the DNA sequence, including intracellular, environmental and energetic influences.

Since the 1950s scientists have accepted that epigenetic influence is critical in our development. Epi – Greek for “besides” – combines with the word, genetics, to essentially mean “something more than genetics.” That “something more” is widely held today to refer to our environment – thus meaning that our genetic code and the environment in which we develop determine who and what we are.

Researchers have shown through studies that epigenetics entails even more than DNA and the places where we live, the climate around us and all the twists, turns and hard knocks of our lives.

HeartMath deems integral elements of the model for who we are and what we can be are the thoughts, feelings and intentions we have every day. After two decades of studies, HeartMath researchers say other factors such as the appreciation and love we have for someone or the anger and anxiety we feel also influence and can alter the outcomes of each individual’s DNA blueprint.

Bruce Lipton, Ph.D.

Stem cell biologist and bestselling author Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., says the distinction between genetic determinism and epigenetics is important.

“The difference between these two is significant because this fundamental belief called genetic determinism literally means that our lives, which are defined as our physical, physiological and emotional behavioral traits, are controlled by the genetic code,” Lipton said in an interview with the online magazine, Superconsciousness. “This kind of belief system provides a visual picture of people being victims: If the genes control our life function, then our lives are being controlled by things outside of our ability to change them. This leads to victimization that the illnesses and diseases that run in families are propagated through the passing of genes associated with those attributes. Laboratory evidence shows this is not true.”

A Steady Diet of Quantum Nutrients

“When we have negative emotions such as anger, anxiety and dislike or hate, or think negative thoughts such as ‘I hate my job,’ ‘I don’t like so and so’ or ‘Who does he think he is?’, we experience stress and our energy reserves are redirected,” an article on IHM’s website explains. This causes a portion of our energy reserves, which otherwise would be put to work maintaining, repairing and regenerating our complex biological systems, to instead confront the stresses these negative thoughts and feelings create.

“In contrast,” the article continues, “when we activate the power of our hearts’ commitment and intentionally have sincere feelings such as appreciation, care and love, we allow our hearts’ electrical energy to work for us. Consciously choosing a core heart feeling over a negative one means instead of the drain and damage stress causes to our bodies’ systems, we are renewed mentally, physically and emotionally. The more we do this the better we’re able to ward off stress and energy drains in the future. Heartfelt positive feelings fortify our energy systems and nourish the body at the cellular level. At HeartMath we call these emotions quantum nutrients.”

In simple terms most people can relate to, what this means is that when we are having a bad day, going through a rough period such as dealing with the sickness of a loved one or coping with financial troubles, we can actually influence our bodies – all the way down to the cellular level – by intentionally thinking positive thoughts and focusing on positive emotions.

Changing DNA Through Intention

The power of intentional thoughts and emotions goes beyond theory at the Institute of HeartMath. In a study, researchers have tested this idea and proven its veracity.

HeartMath researchers have gone so far as to show that physical aspects of DNA strands could be influenced by human intention. The article, Modulation of DNA Conformation by Heart-Focused Intention – McCraty, Atkinson, Tomasino, 2003 – describes experiments that achieved such results.

For example, an individual holding three DNA samples was directed to generate heart coherence – a beneficial state of mental, emotional and physical balance and harmony – with the aid of a HeartMath technique that utilizes heart breathing and intentional positive emotions. The individual succeeded, as instructed, to intentionally and simultaneously unwind two of the DNA samples to different extents and leave the third unchanged.

“The results provide experimental evidence to support the hypothesis that aspects of the DNA molecule can be altered through intentionality,” the article states. “The data indicate that when individuals are in a heart-focused, loving state and in a more coherent mode of physiological functioning, they have a greater ability to alter the conformation of DNA.

“Individuals capable of generating high ratios of heart coherence were able to alter DNA conformation according to their intention. … Control group participants showed low ratios of heart coherence and were unable to intentionally alter the conformation of DNA.”

Heart Intelligence, the Unifying Factor

The influence or control individuals can have on their DNA – who and what they are and will become – is further illuminated in HeartMath founder Doc Childre’s theory of heart intelligence. Childre postulates that “an energetic connection or coupling of information” occurs between the DNA in cells and higher dimensional structures – the higher self or spirit.

Childre further postulates, according to the Modulation of DNA article, “The heart serves as a key access point through which information originating in the higher dimensional structures is coupled into the physical human system (including DNA), and that states of heart coherence generated through experiencing heartfelt positive emotions increase this coupling.”

The heart, which generates a much stronger electromagnetic field than the brain’s, provides the energetic field that binds together the higher dimensional structures and the body’s many systems as well as its DNA.

Childre’s theory of heart intelligence proposes that “individuals who are able to maintain states of heart coherence have increased coupling to the higher dimensional structures and would thus be more able to produce changes in the DNA.”

“This article was reprinted with permission from the Institute of HeartMath (IHM) and it was originally published in IHM’s Summer 2011 newsletter edition (www.heartmath.org).”

DNA – For additional information on changing your DNA, read Dr. Bruce Lipton’s book: The Biology of Belief

http://www.brucelipton.com/store/

http://www.brucelipton.com/

Comment from a Blogger on Dr. Lipton’s book:

“If the existence of what is referred to as the ‘mind/body connection’, which has spawned a massive industry of complementary medicine and given rise to a radical new mindset, still sounds like bunkum to you, hold onto your seat and read on. The new sciences quantum physics and epigenetics are revolutionizing our understanding of the link between mind and matter, challenging established scientific theories and prompting a complete re-evaluation of life as we have known it.

One of the shining lights to emerge from these new sciences is cellular biologist and best selling author, Bruce Lipton PhD, whose book, The Biology of Belief, was awarded 2006’s Best Science Book of the Year.

Lipton maintains that pivotal to this shift in thinking within the scientific community has been groundbreaking insight into the function of genes.

Bruce Lipton: “The old vision was that genes are self-actualizing (turn on and off). But current data reveals that there is no such thing as an on/off function for a gene because genes are blueprints (plans) to make proteins, which are the building blocks that give shape to the structure.”

The significance of this shift in belief is vast in that the original view led to the notion that we are victims of our biology. Whereas the ‘new’ sciences show that we are actually masters of our biology.

The old vision was formulated by Francis Crick, who together with James Watson deciphered the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. Based on experiments that were taken out of context but supported what he and Watson were thinking, Crick became completely enamored with the belief that DNA controls life. Crick came up with what is referred to in literature as the ‘central dogma’, the belief that DNA rules.

The crucial thing here is that this was only a hypothesis. There was never any scientific validation for it yet we all bought it because a belief already existed that this would be the answer to what controls life so when the data looked like it would fit it was simply assumed that this was right. (Lipton, who taught Cell Biology at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine, was one of thousands of lecturers who taught the theory.)

This dogma became so fundamental to modern biology it was practically written in stone. It was the equivalent of science’s Ten Commandments.

In the dogma’s scheme of how life unfolds, DNA perched loftily on top, followed by RNA – the short-lived ‘Xerox’ copy of the DNA. The new understanding of how genes work is that this hypothesis is incorrect because genes are actually blueprints that are read.

The following criteria was used in the evaluation and selection process:

• Individual’s actions and contributions promote the mission of the Institute For Global Transformation.
• Individuals must deliberately and consistently perform acts of unselfish service in the interest of raising consciousness and bettering humankind.  Such acts should be above and beyond the call of duty, necessity, friendship, or normal professional activities.

Individuals who were recommended but are not selected will receive honorable mention during the award ceremony and may be re-nominated in following years. Submissions were voted upon by the IFGT Board of Directors.

If you would like to nominate an individual for the 2012 Transform The World Humanitarian Award, please contact Renée Luczynski by Clicking Here. If you would like to make a donation, Click Here. We look forward to hearing from you.

In Shared Service, Renée Luczynski

• a sense of wholeness – a sense of connection, balance and integration – an experience of unity and deep trust,
• a recognition that each of us is an important part of a greater whole,
• a reorientation of self-interest and a realization of deep personal fulfillment that comes out of service to others,
• compassionate and loving wisdom,
• profound tolerance, and a desire for inclusiveness,
• integrity and authenticity, an understanding of the bigger picture and a deep sense of purpose and meaning to life.

Universal Consciousness is a powerful catalyst. When attuned with its frequencies, you develop a deepening awareness of a Divine Intelligence and Wisdom. This wisdom contributes to the upliftment, not just of the individual, but of humanity, and to the unfolding of a higher plan here on Earth.

Our charge, humanity’s charge, is to attune our conscious mind with the higher frequencies of Universal Consciousness. The more powerful our conscious connection with one another at these higher frequencies, the greater can be the spiritual transformative power of energies released, thus producing greater shifts in consciousness on a global scale.

Attunement with Universal Consciousness

Attunement with Universal Consciousness brings with it the means of accomplishing the seemingly impossible. Through heightened intuition we access a special kind of wisdom; through synergy we draw to us that which is needed, bringing with it confidence; and through synchronicity we are able to accomplish outcomes that are vastly more than the sum of each of the individual parts. Humanity has for centuries searched for the meaning and purpose to Life. Tenaciously and steadily, we have reached inward and upward to attune with our Higher Selves, while at the same time our Souls have been steadily moving toward expression within our lives and beings. At a certain point in this evolutionary process we each become conscious of this Divine Plan of the Soul and we begin to consciously evoke self-initiated growth.

By Philip Horvath

- Greetings to the IFGT community! It is exciting to me that I was invited to facilitate a conversation around Transformational Business for the Business Branch of IFGT.

We live in transformational times. Old ways of doing things are drowned under waves of innovations and new approaches. It is a time in which it is more important than ever to be flexible, adaptable, and creative in one’s modus operandi – for the individual as much as for organizations.

Further, the integration of perennial transformational practices that have weathered the storms of time becomes increasingly appropriate to consider – if not a necessity.

Business governs our lives. From banks that create an artificial scarcity of money to foster competition and entice profit making, to media conglomerates feeding us our reality, to the advertisement to which we are exposed, and the products and services we purchase as a result.

We start seeing cracks in these systems of production and consumption: the recent mortgage crisis, the urgent need for more sustainable ways to provide our energy and products, the globalization of commerce and information exchange creating new transparencies and exposing improper business practices around the world.

Change appears to accelerate, seemingly driven by Moore’s Law, resulting in ever new technology and the possibilities it provides, allowing us to connect to and collaborate on an ever expanding and more and more transparent body of knowledge, in all domains of our lives.

Completely new business models are possible and required. Models, which, unlike many of the current ones, can be sustainable, cyclical instead of linear, and integrated in ways in which nature and universe seem to operate.

To begin a meaningful conversation about Transformational Business begs for at least a first draft working definition:

A Transformational Business can be defined as a community of individuals which, through products or services aims to advance and raise the quality of the lives of a larger community.

This definition aims to honor the individual’s contribution (and required transformation) as well as the necessity for collaboration with others. In its intent, it is also meant to align with the Institute’s goal of ultimately affecting global transformation.

The primary distinguishing factors between a traditional business and a transformational business can be seen in their respective intent and their methods:

• While the primary intent of a traditional business is to create profits for its shareholders, the primary intent of a transformational business is to advance and raise the quality of how we collectively live on this planet and possibly beyond.
• A traditional business applies methods of production aiming to improve the mechanics of the organization. A transformational business applies methods of transformation aiming to forward meaning for its customers and the whole community it impacts.

Some of the primary goals for the business branch are to create community around the concept of transformational business so we can collectively create, gather, and share information and resources around the concept, exchange practices and support transformational business leaders.

All of you have conducted business all your lives. You have exchanged and traded goods and services, have dealt with land, labor, capital and information. You all have seen models that work and those that don’t. Hence, I invite all of you to participate in this conversation.

There will be regular blog posts on the IFGT website pointing to articles and resources that exemplify and illustrate possible concepts relating to transformational business.

To access these articles, click on the “Areas of Focus” tab, “Business Branch. http://ifgt.org/site/category/areas-of-focus/business-branch

Please share your thoughts in the comments section and let us know what you think. If you have suggestions for online resources, articles, white papers, videos or other media, please submit them through the business branch contact at: http://ifgt.org/site/contact/contact-us-business-branch/

I look forward to being in conversation with you and transforming business globally!

By Craig Hamilton

Can we discover a depth of wisdom far beyond what is available to individuals alone?

Chapter 1

A DIFFERENT KIND OF KNOWING

It’s July 2003, and fifteen top telecom executives have gathered at a small island retreat off the coast of Maine. Tensions are high as they head into a three-day summit to discuss the future of the industry. Since the advent of wireless service and the web, companies have been scrambling to stay ahead of the technological curve, and amid growing market competition, it has become clear that some new thinking is needed.

For the first two days, the talks are frustrating. Experts take turns trading theories and speculations, but everyone remains guarded. Finally, at the suggestion of one executive, on the third morning a “dialogue facilitator” is flown in to try to bring the group together. After giving a brief introduction about the importance of listening and suspending assumptions, and a plea to remember the common goal that brought them together, the meeting begins. Already, there is a different quality in the room. Around the circle, people seem more relaxed and more attentive to one another. A few minutes into the discussion, the CEO of one of the large wireless providers shares his vision: “I think we need to stop thinking of our work in purely business terms,” he states, pausing, groping for words. “What if we began to see one another not simply as competitors for market share, but as partners in uniting the world through technology? If you really think about it, in a sense, isn’t our larger mission to create the infrastructure that will make it possible for the Global Village to become a real community?” His openness seems to catch everyone off guard, and for the first time all weekend, there is a brief silence. In this silence, an almost imperceptible, vibrant energy begins to grow in the room. “I’m glad you had the guts to say it,” another executive offers. “I think we’ve all grown tired of just chasing the bottom line.” “I agree,” a third adds. “If there’s anything this industry needs right now, it’s vision.”

The shift in the group is now becoming palpable, and several people comment on it. There is an electricity in the air and a sense of space that seems to envelop everyone. More members join in, and as each individual speaks, it seems to pull the group deeper into a unity, not only of interest but of vision. Several people try to speak at once, only to burst into laughter upon discovering that they all spontaneously had the same idea. A creativity seems to swirl in the room, carrying everyone with it, and a mysterious recognition begins to dawn in the group that they are no longer operating as separate individuals but are actually thinking together. Hours pass, but nobody wants to stop. Eventually, the meeting comes to a natural close, and everyone sits together in silence for a few minutes. Nobody knows what has happened. But they all know it was important.

In a world where many of us are still apt to think that there is nothing genuinely new under the sun, something seems to be emerging on our collective frontier. Around the country and across the globe, from corporate boardrooms to social change think tanks, people are responding to an impulse to come together in shared exploration. And in their midst, something miraculous is being born. “When the group reaches a certain level of coherence, generally there’s some higher level of order that comes into the room and it’s very noticeable to people,” explains organizational consultant Robert Kenny. “It’s like something has shifted. People stop fighting for airspace and there’s a kind of group intuition that develops. It’s almost like the group as a whole becomes a tuning fork for the inflow of wisdom.”

Call it collective consciousness, team synergy, co-intelligence, or group mind—a growing number of people are discovering through their own experience that wholes are indeed far more than the sum of their parts; that when individuals come together with a shared intention, in a conducive environment, something mysterious can come into being, with capacities and intelligences that far transcend those of the individuals involved.

“In these group experiences, people have access to a kind of knowing that’s bigger than what we normally experience with each other,” describes author and researcher Carol Frenier. “You feel the presence of the sacred, and you sense that everybody else in the group is also feeling that. There’s a sense of openness and awareness of something larger than yourself. Your ability to communicate seems broader. What is astounding to people is how much creativity comes forth in a setting like that. You have a sense that the whole group is creating together, and you don’t quite exactly know how.”

As Frenier, Kenny, and a growing cadre of other researchers in this new field are finding, it seems that in the spaces between us, unexpected higher-order collective potentials can emerge that make even our greatest individual capacities look insignificant by comparison. And the implications for the way we understand ourselves and the way we work together are as startling as they are profound. Juanita Brown, author of the forthcoming The World Café: Bringing Conversation to Life, observes, “What’s happening in these settings is that you’re actually bringing up the new. That’s what makes it so exciting for people to be a part of. You’re bringing up the next level—whether it’s deeper or higher or broader—and people sense that there’s something there of immense value. Sometimes it shows up in the inner experience, either individually or collectively, as an ‘Aha!’ Other times, everybody will go silent, because they’re all reflecting on what has just been revealed. It’s almost like a revelation of some sort makes itself visible.”

If you’ve never read a book about this “collective intelligence,” you’re not alone. Despite its widespread emergence, it’s a phenomenon that until recently has almost escaped the lens of the social sciences. For the past decade or so, this nascent social dynamic has been quietly simmering on the cultural back burners, slowly building up steam for the moment when it would burst forth into full boil—a moment that may have just arrived. Thanks to the strong voices of a few key movers and shakers, this newly recognized potential is rapidly catching the attention of a growing number of innovators intrigued by the possibility of harnessing the creative power of collectives toward the resolution of our most complex problems.

Google “collective consciousness” and you’ll get over 64,000 results. “Collective intelligence” brings 30,000; “group mind,” 20,000. A visit to some of the sites listed reveals a host of new organizations with names like the Co-Intelligence Institute, the Collective Wisdom Initiative, and community-intelligence.com, all dedicated to chronicling and furthering our understanding of higher-order group functioning. Peppered throughout the latest literature on leading-edge organizational development are an ever-growing number of references to concepts like “developing group synergy,” “tapping the group mind,” “unleashing collective creativity,” and “developing team coordination.” In increasingly diverse fields of endeavor, it seems, the power of the collective is coming to the fore.

The fact that coordinated teams faced with a common task can access higher levels of functioning is, of course, not a new revelation. Ask a sampling of soldiers who faced combat in a platoon whether they ever experienced a heightened awareness of the whole, or even a “group mind,” and you might be surprised to find how many will have a sense of what you’re talking about. Indeed, rescue crews, sports teams, dance troupes, and music ensembles have for years been reporting remarkable experiences of team synergy or group flow that have lifted them to undreamt-of heights of coordination and effectiveness. Add to that several millennia of group worship and other shared religious practice, and you might be inclined to ask what the fuss is all about. From a certain point of view, it could be argued, experiences of communion are as old as the tribe. However, what seems to be new about what’s happening today is that this phenomenon is not only arising spontaneously in increasingly diverse groups throughout the world but, according to Otto Scharmer, cofounder of the MIT Leadership Lab, “more and more people are having this type of experience in the context of everyday work and professional settings. What’s interesting today is that this kind of experience is something that no longer occurs in retreat from doing your real work, but in the midst of doing your real work—particularly when the work is related to profound social change and innovation.”

How to account for this new emergence is not entirely clear. Perhaps in our increasingly secular global culture, the sacred dimension is simply being forced to find new, more secular channels by which to make itself known in the world. Or it could be that, in response to mounting threats to our very survival, a kind of adaptive impulse is arising in the species, calling us to come together. As Juanita Brown puts it, “Perhaps in the face of the collective danger we’re experiencing, our collective survival instincts are waking up and we’re searching for a way to pass forward that will not be suicidal.” But among those who experience it, there is an increasing sense that whatever is bringing this collective awakening about, its implications are nothing short of evolutionary. As Bill Veltrop, former Exxon executive and founder of the International Center for Organization Design, puts it, “We’re absolutely convinced that we’re experiencing the beginnings of an evolutionary shift that’s greater than anything we’ve ever experienced as [a] society.”

Chapter 2

GROUPTHINK, THE BORG, AND THE CULT OF THE INDIVIDUAL

In the group, I experienced a kind of consciousness that was almost a singularity, like a dropping of personalities and a joining together where there was no sense of conflict. Nobody was in opposition and everybody was just helping each other. It became obvious that we weren’t responding to individual personalities but were responding to something much deeper, much more real in each other that was collective, something that we shared—a commonality, really. There was a tremendous sense of listening and awareness that was much greater and much more vast than anything I’ve ever experienced. And with that experience came a sense that there was just one body in the room.¹ Jane Metcalfe, London

Of course, for most of us in the contemporary west, the idea of becoming part of a “group mind” hardly sounds inviting. In a postmodern culture that has elevated individuality, independence, and autonomy to near-sacred status, the thought of a “collective consciousness” is likely to send many of us running for the nearest mountaintop. What Star Trek fan would disagree that of all the formidable foes faced by Captain Picard and the Next Generation crew, none was as intimidating as the “collective entity” known as “The Borg”? Traveling from planet to planet, “assimilating” every intelligent species it encountered into its own ever-expanding communal mind, this archenemy of interplanetary biodiversity was not only a cleverly imagined cosmic villain but also a clear reflection of our cultural wariness around anything resembling group consciousness. A wariness that’s not unwarranted.

From the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the great social experiments of the past century, history has shown us more than enough evidence of the horrors that groups can perpetrate when mobilized behind a destructive ideology. And in case Nazism and Stalinism hadn’t struck quite close enough to home for those of us in the democratic West, in 1972, Yale psychologist Irving Janis sounded a wake-up call to us all with his landmark study on the dangers of “groupthink.” Analyzing some of the major U.S. foreign policy fiascoes of the mid-twentieth century, Janis demonstrated that the forces that drive collectives to bad and sometimes perilous decisions were alive and well, even in groups driven by more wholesome aspirations. In cohesive decision-making groups of all kinds, Janis found, our most basic social drives for belonging and acceptance become magnified, giving rise to an unhealthy climate of conformity in which important questions never get asked.

There may, however, be more to our cultural paranoia around groups than meets the eye. For, upon closer examination, our resistance to being part of a collective reveals itself to be rooted in something more fundamental than a fear of coming to a misguided decision, or even of being swept into dangerous collective madness. Is not our most basic fear of collectives a fear of losing our individuality, our autonomy—and thus, our freedom—in the group? As the Borg story makes clear, it is hard for most of us to imagine a collective consciousness that does not inherently suppress our independence, our liberty to think and act for ourselves. And while at first glance this fear seems well-founded, it does beg an important question: How independent are we really?

Insightful observers, from anthropologist Gregory Bateson to Gautama the Buddha, have been telling us for millennia that despite our perception of ourselves as “independent thinkers,” most of us rarely, if ever, have a truly independent thought pass through our heads. In describing culture as “an ecology of mind,” Bateson illuminated the fact that our thinking is, on the deepest level, conditioned by the narratives of the social environment in which we live. As consciousness researcher Chris Bache explains it, “While individuality is extremely precious and extraordinarily important from an evolutionary perspective, if you look carefully at what that individuality is, you find that it’s an open system which reflects the larger cultural and psychological history of the species.” Then there’s the evidence from developmental psychology that even our minds themselves only develop in relationship with other minds, that if left in isolation during our formative years, we would end up with but a fraction of our current cognitive and emotional capacity. Add to that the growing body of scientific research which suggests that our minds are not “locked” in our brains at all, but are actually fields that constantly interact with one another to create larger social fields with a tremendous influence on our behavior, and our fear of losing our independence begins to look like a bit of a red herring.

In light of these findings, the issue, then, does not seem to be so much whether it’s a good thing to be part of a group mind. If what this research is telling us is true, in some sense, for better or for worse, we already are. From this perspective, the real question facing us is: What sort of group mind are we a part of? Fortunately, in this new emerging collective consciousness, a radical alternative to the dangers of “groupthink” seems to be afoot. “This type of collective is very different than the old way of thinking about the collective, in which the individuals are subordinated or diminished,” Otto Scharmer observes. “In this new type of collective, the individual is actually enhanced. One has the experience that this way of operating actually connects one to one’s highest future potential.” According to Scharmer and others who have experienced the emergence of this collective mind, autonomy and individuality, rather than being suppressed, are actually strengthened by participation in the group. Tom Callanan, a program officer at the Fetzer Institute, explains: “My experience with these groups is that the stronger the collective wisdom present, the stronger my sense of unique individuality—only now it’s within the context of the whole rather than separate from the whole.”

A FLOCK OF ANGELS

The Blue Angels probably come as close as humans get to flocking. Flying in precision formation at supersonic speeds, these sky-dancing Navy stunt pilots have been inspiring American fairground goers since 1946 with their breathtaking display of grace and coordination. And in this case, it’s a grace hard won.

Every winter the Blue Angels leave their spouses and families behind and head out to the desert together for two and a half months. But theirs is no vision quest. It’s a training mission—with a uniquely collective twist. “It takes a long time to get everyone in sync, to get into a rhythm together,” Commander Russ Bartlett explains. “So, we’re out here to learn the way each other thinks, learn their idiosyncrasies, learn everything about the way we operate so that when we fly together, they can tell by my intonation and the way I’m flying the jet exactly what I’m going to do with it. We fly so close together that we have to execute everything simultaneously.” And in this case, “close together” means close together. In their tightest formation, the Blue Angels overlap their wings until, as Bartlett explained, “my wingtip is twelve inches from my buddy’s head.”

In preparation for this high-stakes journey, before each flight the pilots spend forty-five minutes sitting together, eyes closed, listening to Bartlett recite the commands he will use during the flight—an exercise that at least one researcher has compared to the entrainment rituals practiced by hunting tribes. Although Bartlett declares that there is nothing “cosmic” about the synergy that allows these Angels to fly as one, his own descriptions seem to suggest that there might be more to the story than “rote repetition” and “muscle memory” could account for. “Sometimes you have these shows where everybody is on top of their game. Everybody’s flowing together. The maneuvers are coming off well, one after another, and nobody has to get out of the formation for any reason. Things go like clockwork. And when you come back, you just go ‘Wow! That was awesome.’”

Chapter 3

A CALL TO DIALOGUE

When someone else spoke, it felt as if I was speaking. And when I did speak, it was almost egoless, like it wasn’t really me. It was as if something larger than me was speaking through me. The atmosphere in the room felt like we were in a river, like the air got thicker. And in that space we started to create. We started to say things that we had never thought before and started to let ourselves be influenced in ways and think in ways that we had never thought before. It was almost as if when someone would speak, something would become illuminated, something would be revealed, and that would open up something else to be revealed.² Beth Jandernoa, Essex, MA

Start asking people to explain collective consciousness in scientific terms, and it won’t be long before you hear something to do with the “quantum vacuum” and the “zero-point field.” It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the latest scientific theories to have infiltrated the New Age seminar circuit would have found their way into a field as open to theorizing as collective mind. But there is a connection between physics and the group mind that is perhaps a bit less esoteric. His name was David Bohm.

A renowned physicist with a passion for inquiry, Bohm is probably best known for his contributions to plasma theory and his widely celebrated dialogues with the great Indian mystic J. Krishnamurti. But toward the end of his life, Bohm’s attention became increasingly drawn to a potential he saw for a new kind of conversation that he felt held “the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.” He called it, simply, “dialogue.”

For Bohm, all the problems of human affairs could be traced to the “incoherence of our thought,” and particularly, of our collective thought. Looking at the way our unexamined cultural presuppositions, beliefs, and ideas prevent us from coming together in meaningful exchange on matters of importance, he proposed a new mode of inquiry that would both reveal this incoherence and point the way beyond it. Drawing from the Greek dialogos, which he defined as “meaning moving through,” Bohm explained that in this new form of dialogue, “a new kind of mind . . . begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning, which is capable of constant development and change.”

The basic idea behind Bohm’s dialogues was simple. Gather a group of between twenty and forty people into a circle and have them talk to each other—about almost anything. Through following a few basic, if challenging, instructions—like suspending one’s strongly held ideas, listening closely to others, and speaking authentically—Bohm felt that the group would enter into a deeper current of engagement, one that would begin to reveal the unexamined assumptions behind our thinking and propel the group into a higher level of congruence and a new collective understanding. But for Bohm, the significance of this dialogue pointed far beyond the experience of those in the group. By bringing “a new kind of coherent, collective intelligence” to bear on the very thought structures underlying culture itself, he felt that this inquiry “might well prove vital to the future health of our civilization.”

Bohm’s ideas on dialogue began to take shape in the early eighties, and for the eight years leading up to his death in 1992, he made a considerable effort to demonstrate and interest others in the potential he was seeing. During that time, many reported having profound experiences of the kind of collective opening he was pointing to, and a small movement began to form around his work. Bohm was certainly not the first modern thinker to have seen the potential for a collective mind. In the twentieth century, such visionaries as Sri Aurobindo, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alice Bailey, Rudolf Steiner, and M. Scott Peck had all spoken of this extraordinary potential for the emergence of conscious collectives. But it was in Bohm’s work that this emerging vision would first begin to capture the attention of a broader, more secular audience, thanks in large part to the interest of a few key figures, foremost among them the renowned management consultant Peter Senge.

It was 1990 when Senge’s The Fifth Discipline rocked the business world with its groundbreaking translation of systems theory into hands-on strategies for a corporate learning revolution. In addition to introducing a radical new way of thinking about management, Senge also devoted considerable attention in the book to the merits of Bohmian dialogue as a method of “team learning.” As the book’s sales skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands, this late-formed idea from a thoughtful physicist began to find an unexpected audience in the boardrooms and conference halls of American big business. And within a few years, the demand for skilled practitioners and serious study of this largely unexplored discipline had reached a threshold. Armed with a sizable grant from the Kellogg Foundation, William Isaacs, one of Senge’s colleagues at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, launched the MIT Dialogue Project in 1993.

The goal of the project was straightforward: to explore the potential applications of this new “social technology” across a broad range of practical settings. Over the next several years, Isaacs and his colleagues did just that. One group brought together leaders in Colorado healthcare management. Another worked with citizen groups in urban settings. Isaacs himself took dialogue into the heart of a union/management battle in Kansas City. And at the core of the project was a practitioner group that was brought together to experiment—on themselves. As Mitch Saunders, who was part of that group, describes it, “We saw ourselves as a group of guinea pigs, and we tried everything we could imagine to explore the dimensions of the field, both at the individual and collective levels. And this was before the field had been defined at all.”

Testing the limits of Bohm’s ideas, and experimenting with their own, during the three-year life of the project these pioneers of conscious conversation began to chart the terrain of collective thinking in a way that no one previously had. In the course of their research, they learned a lot about the need for a variety of approaches to meet the diverse demands of real-world situations. Some settings, particularly those involving strongly opposing sides, demanded more structure and facilitation. Others, where the inquiry was more open-ended and exploratory in nature, called for a less directed approach. But across all the modes of their research, there was at least one finding that remained universal: when people came together with a willingness to look beyond their preconceptions, something remarkable came into being between them. As Saunders describes it, “In almost any session, you could count on it happening. That magic in the middle of the circle was becoming a reliable feature of life. So much so that our fascination began to shift from the emergence of that magic toward the question of what to do with it. How could we use that phenomenon, where everybody drops into a collective mind, to take the next step and move into collective leadership? Is there some way this kind of consciousness could serve the evolution of something more coherent, to give shape to what’s emerging?”

Saunders is not alone in his question. Indeed, as the field has expanded far beyond those initial experiments in dialogue into ever new domains over the past decade, the question of how our higher collective capacities can be used to our collective advantage has been coming increasingly to the fore. In the case of one organization, it has become the focal point for an initiative that is attempting to mobilize this still-fragmented field into nothing less than a movement.

Chapter 4

A COLLECTIVE WISDOM INITIATIVE

Then another person stepped forward, and another, and another, telling their stories and offering their experiences and questions. I got this sense that there was a stew that we were making together. There was this cauldron in the center of the circle. . . . From the outside it might have looked like just a group of people talking. But it was totally magical. Toward the end, I would say something, and somebody across the room would say, “You know, I was thinking the same thing.”³ Tom Callanan, Kalamazoo, MI

Anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the past fifteen years has probably noticed the surge of interest in mind/body healing that has recently swept the West, and particularly the U.S. From PBS’s immensely popular “Healing and the Mind” series with Bill Moyers to the superstar status attained by Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil, we’ve seen the field of mind/body medicine gain a firm foothold in the modern psyche seemingly overnight. But what hasn’t yet made it onto Oprah is the unique, catalytic, behind-the-scenes role that the Kalamazoo-based Fetzer Institute has played in this explosion. And, more importantly, what collective intelligence has to do with it.

A small, endowed foundation with a spiritual mission, Fetzer has, since its inception in 1962, earned a reputation as one of the primary sponsors of research into the upper reaches of human potential. But unlike most foundations, which issue grants to fund individual projects, Fetzer is what’s known as an “operating foundation,” which means it takes a more hands-on—and more collective—approach. As program officer Tom Callanan explains it, “We proactively go out into a field and ask, ‘How can we help advance this field?’ We pull the leaders in the field together, and then instead of competitively giving grants to the best projects, we say, ‘We’re going to support a project to advance the field. How are we going to work together to do that?’”

As part of its mission to bring thought leaders together, in the mid-nineties Fetzer built a small conference center in southwestern Michigan, where it began to host a series of think tanks with the leading luminaries in mind/body health. The goal, Callanan explains, was “to create a container where breakthrough thinking could happen.” But as the discussions got under way, what soon became clear was that it takes more than great thinkers to make a think tank. As Callanan put it, “Good conversation doesn’t just involve getting the best people in a room and saying ‘Let’s talk.’” Occasionally, an unexpected intimacy and vulnerability would emerge between the participants. But often the groups struggled to find cohesion. At times, something magical would occur, and a remarkable collective creativity would be unleashed. But at other times, the dialogues ended up being little more than a sharing of diverse ideas and opinions. They had all the ingredients of a good think tank. But for a foundation whose goal was to “support the cutting edge of individual and social transformation,” the results were too unpredictable.

It was out of this recognition that in early 2000, Fetzer launched a research project to begin to look for ways to increase the effectiveness of its dialogues and to deepen its understanding of the dynamics of group wisdom. What was this experience of “magic” that emerged when groups were at their best? What was the mysterious intelligence that often seemed to accompany it? And more importantly, what were the conditions that would make it more likely to occur? With these questions as a leaping off point, a handful of researchers began to pull together the fragments of a field still in its infancy, to see what had been learned by those who had already been working with group intelligence and how they could be encouraged to join forces to move the field forward.

It wasn’t long before they realized they had gotten more than they had bargained for. Alan Briskin, an organizational consultant with a long history of working in groups, was one of the initial researchers on the project. As he explains it, “We began by simply seeking out people who we thought might be able to inform us about these questions, and the response was so enthusiastic that people not only welcomed the chance to talk about this, but they directed us to increasing numbers of people in the field. So the project that we had initially imagined would involve talking to maybe eight or nine people grew to over sixty interviews.”

The findings of that project were eventually published in a small, spiral-bound 2001 book entitled: Centered on the Edge: Mapping a Field of Collective Intelligence and Spiritual Wisdom. And according to Callanan, along the way, Fetzer learned enough about collective wisdom for its mind/body healing think tank “to become one of the collective wisdom engines of the mind/body health field.” For Fetzer, however, this initial foray would become but a catalyst for further exploration. Having come across a field that was ripe for pulling together, the research team, headed by consultant Sheryl Erickson, proposed a new, more comprehensive project that would not only document the body of knowledge that was surfacing but also would serve as a self-organizing structure around which the field itself could begin to take shape and move forward. Excited by what their initial inquiry had opened up, the foundation’s board agreed, and the Collective Wisdom Initiative was born.

Visit collectivewisdominitiative.org and you’ll find a wildly configured conglomeration of information on topics from collective intelligence to collective resonance to group synergy to group creativity. Go through one “doorway” and you’ll land on a long string of “personal profiles” of people who work in the field. People like Jim Rough, whose pioneering “Dynamic Facilitation” process of dialogue has generated phenomenal breakthroughs in the most entrenched disputes. Or Tom Atlee, whose initiation into collective intelligence during the Great Peace March of 1986 inspired him to found the Co-Intelligence Institute, a networking and research organization committed to tapping group wisdom for social and political change. Click on another “doorway” and you’ll find a series of interviews with people about their spontaneous experiences of collective wisdom and “flow”—from a Marine sergeant’s description of the deep brotherhood he experienced with his platoon to a police officer’s account of the “collective resonance” that enveloped her and all the other participants at a heated crime scene. On the “Concepts” page, you’ll come across research papers and essays with titles like “Group Magic: An Inquiry into Experiences of Collective Resonance” and “Exploring Essence: Collective Wisdom and Group Experience.” Under “Social Applications,” you’ll learn of an experiment in dialogue that brought together leaders on both sides of the abortion debate—with some surprising results.

Taking in the site as a whole, what becomes undeniably clear is that this phenomenon is real. It is happening. And it is more widespread than one could have imagined. What started as one foundation’s attempt to increase its understanding of “group magic” has become a nexus for a thriving, connecting, and rapidly expanding community of individuals for whom furthering the advance of this new collective potentiality has become nothing less than a life’s mission. Through their efforts, a growing body of knowledge is emerging about the mysterious ways in which collective wisdom works and how it can be cultivated, enhanced, and directed toward the greater good.

Chapter 5

THE MAGIC IN THE MIDDLE

A remarkable thing happened that evening in the second round of conversation. It was an almost indescribable feeling—like another being was in the room. I guess we could call it the collective, but that doesn’t do it justice. It was palpable in an almost physical way. I could feel its energy and I could feel a commitment to it—a kind of love for it. People sensed it and spoke up about it. One person described the ‘being’ as glue. He said, ‘It’s what joins us together—a larger whole that we always knew was there, but never really appreciated.’ And this ‘being’ had a momentum of its own, so I didn’t need to take responsibility for making something happen. It was happening by itself. I could just run along behind it.⁴ Emmett Miller, M.D., Nevada City, CA

I THINK IT REALLY COMES DOWN TO GRACE, Juanita Brown explains. “You can set the conditions that make it more likely for that ‘magic in the middle’ to happen, but you can’t predict that it will happen. I do think, though, that you can increase your chances quite substantially by being highly intentional in setting up the preconditions.” For Brown and many others who’ve dedicated their lives to working with groups, identifying what exactly makes collectives tick has become a primary point of focus. Some, like Brown, have developed elaborate sets of guidelines for creating just the right preconditions for group magic to emerge. Others seem to prefer a more open-ended approach in which a facilitator follows his or her instincts in guiding the group into greater depth. But while no two approaches seem to concur on every element of what makes group magic happen, among collective consciousness researchers one hears a lot of talk of shared intention, trust, vulnerability, not knowing, authentic participation, interest, and perhaps most fundamental of all, listening.

“It’s a different kind of listening than we’re used to,” describes Anne Dosher, a community development specialist and an elder in the growing “women’s circle” movement. “It’s listening for a deeper meaning, knowing that out there in the field there is something wise to be learned, and listening for when that begins to be spoken, listening for the shift in meaning.” Otto Scharmer observes: “This type of listening focuses on the essential self of another. It’s that part in the other person that is connected with his or her highest future potential that you can help to come into the present moment when you focus your attention and intention on it.” By whatever words it’s described, what’s clear is that by some means or other, an unusual quality of shared attention must be evoked in a group for our higher collective potentials to come into being.

In attempting to cultivate or evoke this quality of deep attention, many group facilitators have emphasized the importance of creating a trusting and supportive environment, in which diversity is honored above all else and every voice is given an equal hearing. In the midst of this “safe space”—so rare in our competitive world—individuals find themselves free to express an unusual authenticity and vulnerability, which seems to break down social walls and allow for a remarkable coming together. But among those who work extensively with groups, there are also those who feel that what is more important than creating any particular atmosphere is bringing the group together in a common interest or aspiration that focuses their attention on something higher or larger than themselves. In this common higher focus, they report, individuals naturally seem to forget about their personal agendas and concerns, the group’s attention unites, and unexpected potentials emerge.

Both of these approaches no doubt hold their value, but it does seem that the latter might ultimately prove to have more real-world applicability. For while, in grappling with life’s stickier dilemmas, we may not always be able to create a “safe space” where everyone feels personally acknowledged, heard, or valued, it is at least plausible that we might be able to identify common purposes capable of capturing our collective attention and interest long enough to open the doors to group wisdom.

Chapter 6

CHAOS, COMPLEXITY, AND THE EMERGENCE OF HIVE MIND

There was a high-frequency energy being passed between people, and I could sort of see into people’s minds. And there was a period of time where the whole group had a very discontinuous awakened experience, where we could basically perceive the same reality together but express it in each of our own unique ways. It was almost as if we were suddenly surrounded by this ambient energy that allowed each person to leap, inside of themselves, into a much vaster way of being in expressing themselves and interacting with one another. ⁵ Jaime Campbell, Santa Fe, NM

Attempting to understand a phenomenon as mysterious as collective wisdom, it turns out, is a bit like trying to understand God. Although everyone kind of knows that their concepts will only take them so far, it doesn’t stop anyone from putting forth their best guess—with confidence. If you ask a handful of collective wisdom researchers what exactly is happening in these experiences, you’ll end up with a list of explanations that run the gamut from the scientific to the sublime.

At one end of the spectrum, there is what we might call the “additive model,” which suggests that collective intelligence is simply the compounding of our individual intelligences. Get a few individual minds together, the reasoning goes, and you’ve got a group mind. Two heads are better than one. And three are better than two. Robert Kenny explains: “Sometimes people who have these experiences simply say that a collection of individual minds kind of aggregate in some form or combine and become a group mind, a kind of new entity with its own particular characteristics.”

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who suggest that by coming together in a receptive state, we are simply making ourselves available to a deeper collective consciousness that is already there. Tom Callanan states, “I believe that collective consciousness already exists, and our individual consciousnesses are nodules that are poking up out of that like little islands. We imagine that we’re separate, so we go about trying to build bridges across the gaps between our islands. But through conversation you actually sink to the level of collective consciousness where you’re already connected. There’s no need for the bridges.”

Between these two poles are countless other theories and subtheories attempting to make sense out of this mysterious phenomenon, including at least a handful of models rooted in the “new science.” But none seem to have conferred legitimacy to this otherwise esoteric field like the new sciences of chaos and complexity have. “I would say that collective intelligence is a systemic phenomenon. It’s a nonlinear dynamic,” Juanita Brown explains. “If you think of it in terms of living systems or chaos theory, it’s like the collective intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in a variety of diverse and creative ways. If you are collectively focusing attention around a real-life question, and you intentionally increase the cross-pollination between individuals—the synapses, let’s call them, in the social brain—the likelihood of collective insight emerging increases. So it’s a product of the systemic interactions, not simply the product of one plus one.”

In the emerging science of complexity theory, the notion that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts is no longer a matter of poetic fancy. Studying the complex behavior of beehives and ant colonies, cities and economies, researchers are discovering that when individuals combine forces, higher-order collective properties emerge that cannot be explained by studying the individuals in isolation. A close look at an ant colony or beehive reveals a remarkably orderly and surprisingly complex society—surprising, that is, given the fact that ants and bees have brains that are less than one-millionth the size of a human brain. Does that mean that they are all just working automatons taking orders from the more intelligent “queen”? Not likely. It turns out that the queen herself is equally unintelligent and has no executive power whatsoever. “Mother” would perhaps be a better name for her, as her anointed role owes entirely to her maternal capacities.

How, then, does a hive decide to swarm and go in search of a new home? And moreover, how does it choose its new home once it gets there? How does an ant colony know how to organize itself into an elaborate city with the garbage dump in one place, the cemetery in another, and the dwelling units wisely as far away from both as possible? The answer is what has become known in complexity theory as “hive mind.” But the implications may not be as esoteric as they sound. Wired editor Kevin Kelly, writing in his 1997 book Out of Control, states that the general scientific view is that this emergent “mind” has a “technical, rational explanation” and is not a product of “mysticism or alchemy.” To most scientists in this field, the simple explanation for emergent complexity is that when you get a large enough group of individuals following the same few simple instructions, complex patterns can emerge that begin to look like higher intelligence—or at least intelligent behavior. But is there actually anything like a thinking mind driving the hive’s behavior? And moreover, does the hive mind have anything resembling self-awareness? Does it know that it’s knowing? In the eyes of most scientists, the answer to all of the above is “no.” For them, the hive mind is simply a metaphor. There is no ghost in the collective machine.

So, despite the obvious analogies that beg to be drawn between hive mind and human collective intelligence, it does seem worth questioning whether in fact the group mind that emerges between conscious, self-reflective humans can ultimately be accounted for by the prevailing theories of emergent complexity alone. It is of course plausible that the awakening of collective intelligence experienced between human beings is in fact something like the hive mind made conscious. But there are at least a few scientists who see something else at work in these experiences.

Chapter 7

THE FIELD AND THE FLOCK

In last night’s discussion, we all went into new territory. It was as if a profound unified structure in consciousness descended down into us and between us, and at the same time mysteriously seemed to be functioning within its own dimension. No one could be said to be creating this, but everyone who gave themselves to its expression became animated through its explosive power. As we established ourselves firmly in this liberated field, extraordinary things began to happen. One woman who was in a struggling emotional state transformed into a joyful radiance. Another woman who was sincerely concerned by world issues shed tears as she collided with the profound meaning in what was happening.⁶ Patrick Bryson, London

SCIENTIFIC MODELS OF EMERGENT COMPLEXITY ultimately feel a bit too reductionistic to explain collective intelligence among humans, according to biologist Rupert Sheldrake, they don’t really account for the group behavior of most other animals either. “When you look at a flock of birds flying, you can get an entire flock of hundreds of birds suddenly changing direction, suddenly banking, turning almost at the same time. They all know where to go without bumping into each other. This is more complicated than you might think, because it happens too quickly to explain it just in terms of the birds looking at their nearest neighbors.” Sheldrake explains that early attempts to create complexity-based computer models that simulated flock behavior, though initially impressive, ultimately failed because they tried to reduce the flock phenomenon to a few simple instructions followed by each individual. “By basing their models on nearest-neighbor interactions, they produced animations that looked a bit like flocks, but were biologically naive. The best state-of-the-art models of flock behavior are ‘field models’ where you treat the whole flock as if it’s in a field, the field of the whole group. This is what I think of as a morphic field, a field that organizes systems where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”

For most who have witnessed the emergence of collective intelligence, Sheldrake’s notion of group fields seems to have some resonance. Indeed, one of the most common ways people describe the experience of collective consciousness is as an increasing awareness of being in a field together, a field of knowing and seeing that unifies the group. But what makes this notion of collective fields particularly intriguing, in light of collective wisdom experiences, is the way it seems to account for one of the most remarkable phenomena of group experience: the sense that, once it emerges, the collective mind seems to take on a life of its own.

Central to Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance is the notion that collective fields, once created, should begin to impact other groups engaged in similar activity around the world. His well-publicized research seems to demonstrate convincingly that once one individual or group breaks through to new knowledge or capacities, it becomes easier for others to access that same knowledge or capacity. And, in speaking with practitioners of collective wisdom, again and again one hears stories that seem to confirm Sheldrake’s theory.

Jerry Sinnamon, a Connecticut hospital administrator faced with the challenge of transforming his failing institution, described how, through a series of dialogue-type workshops with hospital staff, a new collective vision for the hospital progressively developed—despite the fact that each workshop comprised an entirely different group of people. “It was almost as if the same group was meeting month after month, when in fact there was no overlap of attendees between workshops whatsoever,” Sinnamon describes. Regardless of the individuals involved (and there were a thousand in total who participated over the course of two years), each successive group seemed to pick up where the previous one had left off, moving the inquiry forward. Sinnamon recalls, “It was as if the collective consciousness of the organization was building this new vision for what the hospital could become. And as a result of this process, we not only rebuilt our reputation in the local community, but we ended up actually gaining an international reputation as a healing place.”

Among the researchers and practitioners of collective intelligence I spoke with for this article, such phenomena seemed to be almost a given. Dialogue pioneer Sue Miller Hurst described a series of workshops she led in which each new three-day gathering seemed to begin where the previous one had ended, in spite of the fact that each workshop was attended by a completely new group of participants. “It’s as if there was a hideout who’d been at the last one, who came there and said, ‘Okay, you guys. This is what we’re going to do.’” Chris Bache described a similar phenomenon in his university courses, the development of what he called “course mind.” According to Bache, a kind of learning field develops around each course that, over the years, makes it easier and easier for students to grasp the material. “I find that every few years I have to redesign my entire course, because the students are starting out at a higher level of understanding and receptivity. They get it faster. Now, this could be caused by improved pedagogical delivery or by cultural shifts that are taking place in the background. But I’m convinced that one of the things that’s happening is that the learning which previous students have undertaken actually makes it easier for subsequent students to pick up these same concepts. So you can move through things more quickly.”

As mind-bending as these stories are from a conventional scientific standpoint, for Sheldrake they are not in the least bit surprising. In fact, when I described this phenomenon to him, rather than offer an in-depth explanation, he simply responded, “Yes, that’s the sort of phenomenon you’d expect with morphic resonance. Theoretically, this kind of thing is what my hypothesis actually predicts.” And while the existence of such phenomena is not ultimately a proof of Sheldrake’s field theory itself, it does seem to suggest that whatever this collective mind is, it appears to exist independent of the ongoing participation of the individuals who gave birth to it. And that in itself is a mystery worth pondering, a mystery with far-reaching implications.

Chapter 8

A NEW CONTEXT FOR TRANSFORMATION

“Atom-splitting” is too mild a description for the sheer force of this collective consciousness. Not a gross physical sense of force, but a force of intelligence that no words can encompass. It permeated every possible space within the small room we were meeting in. It said “no” to separation; it engulfed any insistence that we need to produce anything to make this happen. It is us. It is our life on the edge of creation. Our minds, hearts, voices—all were one in this, united in a vortex of boundless positivity, on a mission to evolve by any means necessary.⁷ Jody Paterson, London

While the jury’s still out on what exactly collective wisdom is, one thing no one seems to be debating is the fact that it is a powerful force for change. Throughout the literature of this emerging field are countless testimonials to the awesome power of collective mind and its mysterious capacity to transform the individuals and groups it touches. And among those who have experienced it, the conviction it evokes is nothing short of religious.

First, there is the impact on the individuals involved. “A year of therapy could not do what being held in a group can do,” Anne Dosher observes. “I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen people being born again. Once they were given an opportunity to be in a circle where they were held to be responsible, they became healed and connected and able to find a purpose for their lives.” For Dosher and many others, the discovery of collective consciousness is not simply a new and helpful complement to the spiritual path. It is the very foundation for individual transformation. As Otto Scharmer sees it, “What’s new today in the world is that now the first and most accessible gateway into deeper spiritual experience is not individual meditation but group work. What happens is that, in quite a spontaneous way, you tap into this deeper process of awareness and consciousness as a group. And then, once you have done that, you can say, ‘Well, I want to sustain this quality in my own life, so therefore I will pick a practice or two to do on a day-to-day level.’ I think that for many people today, the collective is the most important teacher on this whole journey, because it allows us to explore a territory that is much less accessible, if at all, for individuals.”

Beyond the individual benefits, of course, there is the benefit to the group itself. “When groups get really good at this and practiced at it, it can lead to very fast decision making,” Robert Kenny points out, “because you’re drawing on intuition, which is a way of direct knowing as opposed to a linear process of rationality and discursive logic.” Part and parcel of this collective intuition seems to be the capacity for truly original thinking that can often lead to breakthrough solutions. Glenna Gerard, coauthor of Dialogue: Rediscover the Transforming Power of Conversation, explains, “When the group has really come together and there is collective wisdom present, there seems to be the ability to generate thinking that transcends what any one individual has thought before. It really is new thinking.” But to Gerard, what is perhaps most distinctive about the kind of intuition that emerges in groups is its ability to reflect a sense of the whole. “I think one of the functions of collectives is that we become able to add what we see through our different individual lenses into the center, and the collective then becomes an instrument for perceiving the whole.” This kind of vision can have dramatic effects. “When this happens, individuals act differently, both in the circle and then as they move out of the circle,” Gerard continues. “There seems to be some heightened, embodied knowing about interdependence. Such individuals become agents of the community. They don’t give up their individuality, but for example, when they speak about the purpose of the team, they speak from a shared understanding. Their actions and choices are informed not only by how they see something but by how that’s going to sit within the whole. There is this kind of collective responsibility.”

The potential for groups to access a larger, holistic perspective is something that has excited collective consciousness researchers and practitioners from the beginning. Indeed, it was this capacity for discovering wholeness that served as much of the catalyst for David Bohm’s own enthusiasm for the power of dialogue. For Bohm, as for many of those who are working in the field today, it was this higher order of thinking that held out the greatest promise not only for the transformation of individuals and groups but for the healing of our fragmented world.

Chapter 9

A TIPPING POINT

I’m noticing a new way of working together, where our interest in what is possible—from the most creative to the most practical—comes deeply alive and our flow of ideas is like a dance, where we are each paying attention to one another, taking in the thinking and research that each individual has done prior to the meeting, and responding in such a way that we really come together. It is so far from any meeting I’ve ever had in any other work setting—and I don’t know how it is happening—but we’re able somehow to bring forward the ideas we have without being attached to them, and without our identity being wrapped up in them. It is as if this creative mind just sweeps down on us, and the more we pay attention to each other and keep open the space between us, something else happens.⁷ Laura Hartzell, Lenox, MA

IT’S RARE TO FIND CONGRUENCY IN ANY FIELD, let alone one that is still in its first stages of emergence. But among the twenty-plus researchers and practitioners I spoke with for this article, and the many more I read, nearly all had arrived at the same burning question: How can we use collective wisdom to change the world? Perhaps it has to do with the awesome power revealed in these experiences. Discovering a force with such potent capacities, it seems natural to ask how one might harness such a power to create positive change. Or perhaps it owes to the collective nature of the phenomenon itself. It makes sense, after all, that if such a thing as a group mind came into existence, its concerns would necessarily be collective ones—that its emotions, its will, its conscience would inherently be tied to matters of greatest significance to the whole. But whatever the source of its unified aspiration, what’s clear about this collective consciousness is, when it puts its mind to something, it’s a force to be reckoned with. As this fledgling field enters its second decade, several major movements and initiatives are already under way, with a vision for bringing the power of the group mind to the complex dilemmas facing our beleaguered planet.

“Any innovative path forward through these very complex issues—whether it’s the environment or water or AIDS or the kind of divisiveness that’s being exacerbated around the world right now—is going to come through real conversations about questions that matter.” As co-originator of the burgeoning international “conversation movement” known as the World Café, Juanita Brown is a woman who knows whereof she speaks. Along with her partner, David Isaacs, and other World Café hosts around the globe, she is applying what she’s learned in her twenty-five years as a senior-level corporate strategist and researcher toward the creation of a dialogue modality capable of nurturing large-scale social change.

And it seems to be working. Since its inception in the mid-nineties, the World Café’s innovative approach to large-group inquiry has spread to five continents and been engaged across a broad range of organizational and social settings. In the Middle East, it was recently used to assist in bringing new perspectives to tough Israeli/Palestinian conversations. Mexican government and corporate leaders have applied its methodology to scenario planning and national social development. And in Singapore, it is now being used in several government ministries to support the nation’s goal of becoming a “learning society.”

And the World Café is but one of a handful of collective intelligence movements with aspirations to transform our global culture. Mitch Saunders’ Laboratory for Social Invention project is attempting to harness collective thinking to prevent civil war in Venezuela, Liberia, and Indonesia. Harrison Owen’s “Open Space Technology” has been used to successfully bring about a ceasefire in a bloody, seven-year-long conflict between two ethnic nationalities in the oil-rich Niger Delta region. And here on the home front, organizations like Sandy Heierbacher’s National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation are working to reinvigorate the democratic process by mobilizing groups of citizens to think together about the country’s future. From Dynamic Facilitation to Deep Dialogue to Appreciative Inquiry, new collective technologies are spreading across the country and to the corners of the earth, mobilizing and empowering countless organizations and communities to reach for innovative solutions to their most troubling social dilemmas.

In keeping with the inherently cooperative emphasis of the collective wisdom movement, most of these approaches tend to be self-organizing or “bottom up,” lacking any central governing structure to steer them. And this absence of a strategic body guiding and controlling the effort is certainly an important part of the magic that is allowing it to spread so far and so rapidly. But while this grassroots collective activism no doubt has the potential to play a major role in catalyzing large-scale change, there are at least a few individuals who feel that a more centrally organized approach is also needed to grapple effectively with the magnitude and complexity of the challenges we face. Inspired by the possibility of creating a unified planetwide transformative team, a small group of dynamos out of Boston are about to launch what may be the single most ambitious collective wisdom effort yet. Determined to grapple head-on with the most troubling problems facing the world today, Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, Otto Scharmer, and their team of colleagues are rolling out the Global Leadership Initiative—an effort that aims for nothing less than to “generate a ‘tipping point’ in humanity’s ability to address its most critical global challenges.” By developing a network of leaders “from all sectors of the human community—who understand how to harness the collective power of small groups to co-create better futures,” over the next five years, they plan to “launch ten international projects that will address inherently global challenges, such as AIDS, malnutrition, water, and climate change.” And what’s more, they intend to do it with “a standard of excellence and professionalism unsurpassed by any other organization or institution.”

In our cynical age, it’s not often that you find a group of people so confidently optimistic about their capacity to bring about significant global change. But before you write off this activism-on-steroids as the product of naiveté, hubris, or hyperbolic idealism, consider that the individuals at the helm are some of the most influential organizational minds in the world. In their work at MIT, Generon Consulting, and the Society for Organizational Learning, these management moguls have been pushing the envelope of collective learning and innovation for two decades. At the vanguard of large-scale systems change and leadership development, they’ve worked closely with multinational corporations, government agencies, and NGOs throughout the world.

At the heart of this initiative is a deep conviction in the potential for small groups to generate breakthrough thinking. Over years of “action research,” they’ve developed what they feel is a “rigorous” state-of-the-art methodology for “creating unified learning fields in which teams made up of highly diverse individuals become capable of operating as a single intelligence.” Using collective wisdom to actually solve our most pressing global problems, it turns out, is a dream that may not be as outlandish as it seems. Even a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine such an idea being taken seriously by business and government leaders. But these are indeed rapidly changing times. And given the receptivity these pioneers are finding to their vision, there is at least the possibility that a lot more positive change may be in store for us all.

Chapter 10

REACHING TOWARD OMEGA

As we spoke, and the circle widened, it seemed like one structure of relationship was giving way to another, and one could observe the shifting of boundaries from the old to the new. The fact that we were conscious of it, consciously groping our way into a new dimension, was perhaps the most extraordinary quality of what was occurring: imperfect beings, aware of our conditioning, consciously choosing to evolve. . . . Our attention expanded, and we could see the structure of universal spirit, incarnate as many, using us as its mouthpiece, revealing the perfection of Being—a vast impersonality that rendered our notions of personal significance completely obsolete. One knew that this bigness is our destiny.⁹ Melissa Hoffman, Lenox, MA

In the mid-twentieth century, French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put forth a radical new vision for our human future. “We are . . . moving forward towards some new critical point that lies ahead,” he wrote in The Human Phenomenon, “a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the Earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection. . . . Beyond all conflict of empires, peace in conquest and work in joy await us in an interior totalization of the world on itself—in the unanimous building up of a spirit of the Earth.” It was a vision with far-reaching collective implications, culminating in a final “unanimization” that he called the “Omega Point.”

And while Teilhard’s vision would not come to be realized in his lifetime, nor has it as yet in ours, his words, written over a half-century ago, continue to shine as a beacon for anyone who has ever experienced collective wisdom and pondered its larger implications. For although our understanding of this mysterious collective consciousness is still only beginning to take shape, what is clear to most of those who discover it is that the experience itself seems to be pointing us somewhere. Carol Frenier, in synthesizing the personal accounts of over 150 individuals for the Collective Wisdom Initiative, found that the vast majority of those who have experienced the emergence of collective wisdom feel that the purpose of this wisdom is “to midwife a new social/spiritual order of an evolutionary magnitude . . . that is already emerging of its own power.” What exactly is the nature of this new order, this evolutionary leap? And what role might we play in “midwifing” it into existence?

The answer, it turns out, may lie in the very nature of collective experience itself. For if, as all the reports suggest, the collective mind really does think better, create better, and function better than any of our individual minds, and if our own individual capacities are actually enhanced by our conscious participation in this collective intelligence, then wouldn’t the first evolutionary question be: What would it take for us to remove any barriers to the emergence of collective consciousness, not just as an occasional peak experience, but as a permanent ongoing capacity? What would become possible if even a small group were able to live and work together on an ongoing basis with unbroken access to this higher communal mind? And moreover, what if such a phenomenon were to begin to occur on a wide scale? If the growing body of evidence for Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance is real, what could prevent such an occurrence from spreading through an ever-increasing number of groups throughout the globe?

In his landmark book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues convincingly that the march of human history has not been random in direction but has in fact been progressing along a very specific trajectory—toward increasing cooperation and unity. As the parameters of our capacity to feel and express “brotherly love” have expanded from kin to tribe, from tribe to nation, and beyond, he writes, we have gradually “become embedded in larger and richer webs of interdependence”—on a course that leads, at least plausibly, toward the sort of ultimate Omega Teilhard envisioned. As Wright speculated in a recent interview, “Five hundred years from now, maybe the whole kind of techno-social organism on this planet will be sufficiently cohesive to have a unified field of subjective awareness. Maybe it will be like something to be planet Earth. If Teilhard is right that, more and more, there is such a thing as the collective mind of the planet, and that human beings are kind of neurons in some giant global brain, then maybe someday the planet will, in some sense, have a unified consciousness.” Could it be that we really are on a journey to Omega? Is it possible that the murmurings of shared wisdom arising in small groups throughout the world are but the initial stirrings of a much greater wave of collective consciousness trying to be born? Whatever the ultimate verity of Teilhard’s vision, in our increasingly connected world, it is at the very least, to use Wright’s lingo, a noncrazy idea.

However, if imagining a grand Omega centuries down the line feels a bit decadent given our current global predicament, at the heart of the experience of collective wisdom is another understanding—one with subtler and perhaps greater implications for the lives we’re leading right now. What does it mean, after all, that we can come together in a collective higher mind? If the nature of our individual consciousness is such that it can merge with or be transcended by the collective, what does that say about the nature of who we are? As Chris Bache pointed out, “experiences like these teach us that whatever individuality is, we have to think of it in a way that is more like an open system than a closed system.” What if, in the face of this knowledge of our permeability and interdependence, the ground of our identity were to shift away from our cherished sense of separate individuality to the whole in which we are embedded? What if our overriding preoccupation with our personal welfare—the ego’s endless chain of wants, desires, and fears—were to pale to insignificance in the face of a concern for our larger, collective identity and destiny? What kind of human world would come into existence then? Freed from the moorings of self-concern, what could our individuality express? And more importantly, where could we go collectively that we could never reach in our present, fragmented condition? Admittedly, given the current state of human affairs, this vision too seems a far cry from fruition. But in light of the remarkable potentialities emerging in our midst, it is hard to imagine a possibility more worthy of our collective aspiration.

1,6,7,9: Descriptions by participants in “Experiments in Enlightened Communication,” hosted by What Is Enlightenment? magazine and its parent organization, EnlightenNext. www.andrewcohen.org

2: Beth Jandernoa describing her experience during the first International Women’s Dialogue, involving twenty-one women who worked in large-systems change from around the world. Appears courtesy of the Fetzer Institute.

3: Tom Callanan describing his experience during an Introduction to Dialogue training with Glenna Gerard and Linda Ellinor. Reprinted from Centered on the Edge: Mapping a Field of Collective Intelligence and Spiritual Wisdom,
Fetzer Institute, 2001 www.collectivewisdominitiative.org

4: Emmett Miller, MD, describing his experience of a World Café that he and his wife organized to build community in the rural town of Nevada City, CA. www.theworldcafe.com

5: Spiritual teacher Jaime Campbell describing a spontaneous collective awakening she experienced during an intensive group workshop she was leading.

8: WIE Digital staff member Laura Hartzell describing her experience of working on project teams.

Reprinted with Permission:

Magazine Reprint Series, Issue 25, May-July 2004 © 2005 What Is Enlightenment? Press http://www.wie.org/collective/?ifr=af&ifr=srcho