How to learn during planetary cultural change?
A description, by Jordan Hall, of a healthy stance towards personal transformation and societal cultural evolution
You can follow his writings in his Emergent Culture publication. Here, first few intro words from me.
The way I see it, polarisation we are witnessing worldwide might lead to a synthesys that will move us beyond dominant culture, and I do hope this could be another step towards regenerative cultures.
People all over the world have been looking into this for decades — you and me included — but that was happening on the margins of societies and in separate and fragmenteted ways. Personal growth and psychology (including all kinds of psychotherapy, because we are all “damaged”!) on one side — and anthropology, sociology, activism, economics and politics, well… on the other side(s). It might be that these explorations and practices are now moving from widely separated edges towards mainstream and are blending into one phenomenon of cultural transformation, we’ll see…
What follows is slightly edited transcript of Jordan Hall’s response to a question “What advice would you give to people to navigate this new world?”.
I think and feel his response could be a welcome guideline for anybody’s (me included!) personal transformation by focusing on emergence, including surfing unavoidable planetary transformation while currently dominant human culture is “meeting” planetary boundaries— regardless of the edge we personally are coming from. Also, I find this advice to be very much in line with a number of permaculture priniciples, observe and interact and use edges and value the marginal included, so there is some overlap with the edge I’m coming from.
But don’t take my word for it! Do your own reading, watching, listening and reflecting — and let it sink in :) You can watch and listen in video by David Fuller embedded below (starts from the question above), or read the transcript below the video… or both [good-to-know background to the making of this documentary is available here].
“The first is — free your mind, be aware of the fact that the habits of the Blue Church, and how it works, don’t work anymore. Recognize that your ways of making the sense of the world that used to work — don’t work, and that you really, really need to set yourself free to begin learning anew. Child’s mind. Beginner’s mind.
Second — this by nature must, in fact, be exploratory. So… swim. Do not make sense prematurely! In spite of the fact that the world feels dangerous, in spite of the fact that you may want to protect yourself in this dangerous world, doing so too quickly does not allow the natural exploratory approach to do what it needs to do. Really just listen… and learn to always get back to your human base. Turn invard. Learn how fear shows up in you. Learn how not to allow fear to drive the choices that you make. Learn how to listen to the whole way that “all of you” percieves what is going on. Become more integrate with your own body. Go out to nature. Spend a lot of time not connected to the chaos that is going on and a lot of time reconnecting yourself with your fundamental capacity to percieve reality in all the different modalities that human beings have the capacity to do.
Then — re-learn how to use other human being as allies in figuring out how to make sense of the world. I mean that — really re-learn! We have been abused and constrained by institutional frameworks that remove us from our own native capabilities. So, re-learn that. Understand how to be a friend and an ally. How to have a conversation with somebody where you’re really listening closely to get a sense of what their perspective brings — to you. Where you are not obligated to agree with them, where you are not obligated to move out of what you feel as right to form some new “consensus reality”, but where you are actully authentically recognising that their perspective has some capacity to bring richness to your perspective.
This, by the way, is almost exclusively possible in person. What we are doing right now is a OK version of it. We better be very mindful of the fact that linear broadcast is bad, and even interactive bandwidth like this [video call] is not good enough. You’ve got to learn from raw, physical [i.e. not mediated].
And get yourself into places where your “consensus reality” and your habits are willfuly destroyed. Get into human-to-human conversations, and get as far away from ideologies as you can. Your job is not to know what the fuck is going on. Your job is to be absolutely certain you have no idea what the fuck is going on and learn how to feel from raw chaos, from raw uncertainty — up.
Then, and only then… [ask yourself] are you finally able to begin the journey of begining to form a collective intelligence in this new environment?
That’s my advice.”
How to make “not good enough” virtual communication and remote collaboration actually work? See Virtual Team Quick Guide and virtual team tips above, check what’s being shared under agile & lean sociocracy above.
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