Presencing the Spiral: Interlacing Theory U & Stage Development

When I read Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future in 2009 during my bachelor`s studies in business administration, a book co-authored by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, it blew my mind — the book opened up the perspective that my spiritual practice, at this time dominated by Qui Gong which I used to experience moments of creative insight, must not necessarily be something individual but could benefit from the collective field as well. In the following years I developed several versions of the so-called U Movement, that in its center, according to the aforementioned authors, leads to “a state of ‘letting come,’ of consciously participating in a larger field of change” where we “can shift from re-creating the past to manifesting or realizing an emerging future,” approaching it from an individual point of view and wondering how the three layers of body, life, and mind that I was aware of back then could be well integrated at each station of the process.

Ten years later, in the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bettina Wichers and I wanted to support an emerging future that suits humanity better than the old clothing that we could strip of through the ongoing phase of dissolution, that shattered our human certainties around the globe. Out of this attempt, both practical and theoretical in its nature, a new conception evolved. This conception elucidated how human stage-like development can be supported and gracefully hold with trust in a larger reality and wisdom — we called it Presencing the Spiral and have already applied and tested it with dozens of people throughout the last two-and-a-half years. The following article describes its main components.

Theory U According to Otto Scharmer

The following passages and the depiction are strongly influenced by Otto Scharmer`s writings in Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges and The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Applications both published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Whoever is already familiar with the U Movement can light-heartedly skip this passage.

One of the interesting features of Theory U are its numerous drawings and tables that make the process more palpable and support the envisioning of the steps on the pathway to cessation, grace, revelation. Over the years numerous different representations of the U process have become popular— this one describes the kinetic energy we follow in Presencing the Spiral quite accurately and resembles the main depiction in Otto Scharmer`s early works:

The seven steps of the U Movement according to Otto Scharmer`s “Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges”

The following list explicates the seven steps depicted in the image above:

1. Downloading: Becoming aware of our old patterns of thought, consciousness, and content, which we unconsciously and repeatedly download from the causal space in everyday life and thereby incessantly bring into manifestation. As long as we reel off the old, the world is frozen due to our past thinking habits and previous experiences; nothing new penetrates our thinking. It’s the same old story over and over again.
2. Seeing: As soon as we withhold our habitual judgment, our seeing awakens with new eyes. We notice novelty and see the world as a constellation of things external to us, the observing persons. Letting go of a judgment brought with us and looking at reality with a fresh eye — however, the observed system is perceived as separate from the observer at this step.
3. Sensing: As soon as we turn our attention from objects to their source process, our perception widens and deepens. This turning bends the ray of observation back to the observer and the boundaries between subject and object begin to diffuse. You connect with the field and observe the system from the whole and therefore as the “both/and” of inside and outside.
4. Presencing: By entering into a shared connection with the inner place of silence the future in the making can be perceived. When we enter a space of inner and outer silence, we let go of the old and connect with the sphere of future potential. The boundary between the observer and the observed dissolves completely, opening a space where the future can land.
5. Crystallizing: When we condense the visions and intentions into a pictorial imaginative sight and let them come, the relationship between observer and observed begins to reverse. The once envisioned emerges from the field of becoming and not from the observing person.
6. Prototyping: When we stage prototypes, we explore the future in our doing. The relationship between the observer and the observed is further overturned. A successful production takes shape through an ongoing “dialogue with the universe” and is therefore not the result of a solitary genius.
7. Performing: When we embody the new, give it a new form by developing appropriate practices and infrastructures, the inversion of the relationship between observer and observed is complete. Institutional embodiment takes shape from the realities and functional requirements of the larger ecosystem (and no longer from the particular requirements of individual institutional egos).

Presencing as Part of the Absolute`s Fractal

The main pattern in Presencing is one of “fours”: the field of the future emerges as the fourth in the series of ascending downwards to cessation in the presencing phase of the U. In the process of descending upwards and back into manifest reality the emergence within presencing is the first in a series of four.

The number four has been recognized as central to human consciousness by a wide variety of traditions and thinkers therein. At least since the Upanishads, the philosophical textual foundations of Hinduism, a series of four spiritual states has been known to humanity which describe a stagewise pathway to enlightenment from waking (gross state), dreaming (subtle state), deep sleep (causal state), and Turya (witnessing state), the one-without-a-second and thus two-ness-less witness untouched by all phenomena. Sri Aurobindo in the early 20th century applied this patterning to the whole of consciousness by ascribing these four states to the absolute self-contained reality of which the manifest trajectory of body, life, mind, and spirit is a reiteration.

The “Supreme Self-Contained Absolute” and the “Manifestation in Eternal Time” adopted and modified from Sri Aurobindo`s “The Hour of God”

The four spheres of the absolute coincide with the four main patterns within Presencing.

1. Parameswara: The awake identity of the absolute as the consciousness of creation coincides with Downloading as a simple apprehension of whatever is manifest or descending from Aditi.
2. Aditi: The indivisible power of consciousness that dreams new directions for the absolute coincides with Seeing as an open mind.
3. Sat: The blissful principle of the absolute that holds all opposites together; especially the waking state and the dream state of the absolute — that is, inside and outside — coincides with the “both/and” in Sensing.
4. Tat: The oneness of the absolute that encompasses and knows everything and is not limited by anything includes the principle of Vijnana, the gnosis or intuitive revelation of truth, which coincides with Presencing.

These four states are repeated in the sphere of manifestation as four spheres or orders of consciousness:

1. Truth Form (Body): The sphere of our body that brings forth a sensual, self-conscious identity.
2. Truth Life (Life): The sphere of our being that, with the help of dreams, can dynamize and align our identity to make the world like us.
3. Truth Mind (Mind): The sphere of our archetypal ideas that hold dreams and identity, outside and inside together and mediate their interaction.
4. Vijnana Loca (Soul): The sphere of truth-consciousness or the gnostic being, whose self-experience is knowledge as the unity of the previous spheres, dynamized by a spiritual revelation.

In the West these four dimensions were likewise described by Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder in their book on the Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence as four transformations:

1. The Identical Transformation: The infant’s early identity at two years of age, leading to certain non-questionable expressions of will — imagined desires and forms of personhood, like girl or boy, experienced as adaptations to the sensory world, that is, as non-negotiable and real, identity experience.
2. The Inverse Transformation: At the age of about four with the intuitive phase of the pre-operational stage, the child acquires the ability to experience imaginations about imaginations in the external world. Thus, it becomes capable to consciously differentiate imagined desires and roles, i.e., to switch between them and to use them consciously and in a goal-oriented way — if I act out X, then that will lead to Y.
3. The Reciprocal Transformation: With the concrete operations at the age of about seven, an early social consciousness emerges in the sense that different identities and their inversion are distanced from the immediate world-relationship by a new reciprocal consciousness. Internalized thoughts and dreams occur, which work as an integrative sort of source, that makes negotiable what was up to the powerful self or other previously. This source aligns rule and role expectations with behavioral adaptations.
4. The Correlative Transformation: At the age of eleven to twelve, the so-called formal operational stage emerges. This allows all three previous transformations to be cancelled out and instrumentalized in a structural whole that equilibrates observer and world, self and other, as well as dreams and sensory experiences within a “golden rule” that self-thematizes this equilibrium — e.g., “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

Following Piaget and Inhelder, Kurt Fischer`s Skill Theory and Terri O`Fallon`s STAGES, for example, have, too, located this pattern of fours in the developmental process.

According to our conception these patterns reiterate not only across the spectrum of consciousness in the form of spheres, layers, or tiers of consciousness and stages of consciousness within each sphere, but within stages of consciousness as well, namely, as four subphases of each.

The reiterating patterns of the absolute as they show up in Presencing, our model`s dimensions of consciousness, and the mystical practice of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila

As you can see in the table above, we don`t consider Presencing, or the Turya and Witnessing state that is infused with divine gnosis, as the Final step in the trajectory. Because, if one adds the Absolute, as it is represented by Sri Aurobindo above and beyond its four iterations in the manifest world of body, life, mind, and spirit, five orders of consciousness arise. The fifth is the origin of involution and the end point of evolution, in which everything is transformed into a self-contained unity and the identity of the absolute.

Likewise spiritual traditions, building up on the Upanishads, added a fifth state, Turyatita — that which is beyond the fourth — , similar to the Absolute in the late works of Sri Aurobindo; comparable to how the first stage of each order unifies the previous stages in a new Identical Transformation, and each new stage unifies the four stages of the previous in a new mode of existence, this fifth is the endpoint of the subtle divisions between the four previous states and the mergence of the separate identities of waking, dreaming, sleeping, and witnessing into an ultimate experience of oneness.

Presencing the Spiral & the Mergence with the Absolute

Our Presencing experiences follow the U Movement — ascending along the descending path towards rupture and stripping away layer by layer through the Night of the Senses, the Night of the Intellect, and the Night of the Memory; and then descending along the ascending path adding layer by layer through the Dawn of the Memory, the Dawn of the Intellect, and the Dawn of the Senses.

That is, the movement represents an evolution from the first to the fourth phase of the U where each phase of a stage is matched with its respective step within the U; and then the envisioned future of that stage, revealed in the 4th quarter of that stage as a personal or collective utopia, is brought into involution through both the individual and the collective; a new expression of the particular dimension of consciousness is brought into manifestation by a backward movement from presence to performance — from the 4th quarter of that stage to the 1st quarter.

The interplay of the U Movement with phases of a stage and the Dark Nights of Christian mysticism and the converse Bright Dawns of a new day in the descend into temporal manifestation

Throughout the whole process the spiritual guidance focuses on transmitting the proper frequencies of each phase within the overall targeted stage and to support that frequency through appropriate practices and content from that stage and phase so that a resonance field opens up within which enlivened awareness shines through the collective; and thus, the individual consciousness is drenched with the semen of the new, either through the content that arises within the field as a new discursive expression of that stage or a new structure-stage that gets revealed to the very awareness of that moment so that the emergence of the future within and as the individual is slightly foreshadowed; without any pressure whatsoever to move past the point of no return into the Dark Night of the Will that would generate a new stage for oneself, however, carried safely in the simultaneous contemporariness of that fifth state and phase that the spiritual guidance embodies while the process moves along the targeted frequencies that can be harnessed from transmission and appropriated practices.

Differently said, the fourth transition, the Dark Night of the Will, which in an experience of grace would dissolve the attachment to one`s current stage in order to direct the entire consciousness to the mode of existence of the first phase of the next stage, is in this process not intended by us. At the same time, however, a foretaste of stages through which you may not have grown yet arises from each Presencing that targets a stage beyond your current one. Your consciousness touches into a new connection to dimension that are always accessible to us as spiritual states. This emergence or flash of the new can then be consciously translated into stage growth or remembered and reactivated as state potential. A decision, which, however, is yours alone.