Beyond polarities
The first (big) book, Collective Presencing: an emerging human capacity, is built up in two major parts, with a transitioning chapter in the middle. The first part describes what relates to becoming a Circle of Presence (up to Part 4 in this book) and tries to get a handle of what could be – for lack of a better word – a Circle of Creation. This chapter in the middle is mainly about: A human capacity as beyond polarities.
Our conceptual minds are trained to see the world in dualities, polarities or opposites. This dialogue practice brings a deep embodied experience of the interbeingness of it all. It’s hard to convey through the written language, as the basis of an English sentence is always about one element causing something to another element; it doesn’t offer much to express the liminal, the in-between space, the interweaving and the interbeing, which is in fact the fabric of life.
From our experience there seem to be a couple of polarities that are hard to crack. Probably because they slipped into our unconscious awareness when we were still pretty small.
The most important ones are: individual and collective, and feminine and masculine. They are all loaded with different kinds of pain and hard separations. But for the creative working space that we try to manifest, we need to integrate these pain points and learn to see the creative dance that goes on between the so-called poles.
Of course, the individual is distinct from the group or the team; the feminine is distinct from the masculine. And… they are related; even more so they link into one another. We all know the yin-yang symbol where it shows that in the center of yang there is yin, and in the center of yin there is yang. It is that kind of interpenetration or interweaving that we try to picture here.
It is also important to realize that all of these poles are invited to develop into something new. It is not enough anymore for the individual to obey the rules of the collective, or to take the opposite stance of putting the individual first and live without any sense of a communal self. Both poles as it were have to evolve and come to a new balance between individuality as authentic agency and a collective co-creation.
Similarly we can look at feminine and masculine. There is yin and yang in the feminine and there is yin and yang in the masculine (independent of gender). Of course, different physical bodies and hormones make for distinct experiences; but even so there is more and more gender fluidity. It seems quite difficult to go through the pain of “I’m not seen as the man/woman that I am.” As if modernity tried to make us more or less the same, and we are still burdened by that attempt. How to relate, how to dance with each other fully acknowledging the huge diversity of inner experiences that we have, also around feminine and masculine?