Strange things: the field of potential and emergence
The field of potential
One of the big differences between facilitation and hosting is that when in a hosting team we also tend to the field. We mentioned before the intersubjective field, that what is between all of us sitting in this group. It is difficult to explain what it exactly is, as it is something we perceive on an energetic level. Next to what is between us – as human beings in this circle – there is also the field of potential that becomes accessible with this group around this specific question. Again, we don’t see this potential with our eyes, or hear it with our ears, but there is indeed something subtle we can (learn to) perceive.
The best metaphor to point to this field of potential is thinking how parents hold the potential of a young child. They don’t know what kind of gifts their children hold: will they be good at sports? Or rather good in math? Or have a gift for drawing? Or singing? Or taking care of children? The parents hold open a wide space in which the child can explore many different pathways, and over the years the potential of this specific child becomes more visible and tangible. This is what good hosts also do: holding the energetic space wide open so that the potential of the group – with ultimately its brilliant, new insights and capacities – can come forward. We all have the immense capacity to be open, to be a channel through which the new can come, to even become a new process together. It’s a skill to hold this kind of space when the group is in a phase of not-knowing-yet, or when a conflict arises, still this is a new social capacity that will eventually give rise to collective creativity.
We mentioned before that how you frame a dialogue session, from what level of awareness you are inviting the other participants in, is of crucial importance. So, when you prepare to host a Collective Presencing dialogue one of things to keep in your mind’s eye is the diversity of the group of participants. Typically you don’t know what they are going to share and you might be surprised; but somehow you relate with the whole of the group and with its potential; a potential that hasn’t seen the light of day yet; but still that is what we are steering towards. As we try to set the conditions for emergence – some creative, new approach appearing – you can look at this type of dialogue as some serious play, or even see it as a new form of ritual.
Please read this blog entry by Cheryl who pictures this in a much more poetic language.
The Collective Field, by Cheryl Hsu
What is this field that we discover and create as we hold space of Collective Presencing through the vibrational frequencies of a video call? Let’s zoom in to this strange digital room that we all pop into… and zoom out to this global technology platform that skyrocketed in value when the pandemic locked the soft animal of our bodies behind the physical walls of our homes.
In the apocalypse (but let us remember that apokálypsis means “disclosure or revelation”), our apartments and homes became prisons and cocoons. We were afraid that the coronavirus might contaminate our bodies. Little did we know that we were already being contaminated by something else… an unfathomably deep longing for connection, for contact, for intimacy, for a world that might be different. And a longing and a calling that begins a subtle mutation that is electrifying.
So people living all over the planet, across generations, space, time and geography, stumble across the dark forest of the internet and meet to connect. We show up with our faces in a grid of small boxes, filling the larger box of our computer screen. We check in with our unique voices and particularities, and place the piece in the centre. And just like that, our bodies sink into something deeper, a wider resonance field of energetic frequencies. We spill out of our boxes into a teeming ocean of love.
Love seems to be that which is both empty and full. The container and everything contained.
Collective Presencing has invited me into feeling the collective field – suddenly, it is no longer a theoretical concept. I’ve heard about quantum fields, social fields, resonance fields, morphogenic fields. But somehow, the lived experience feels completely different from the abstracted descriptions. When the searching mind becomes still, and the ego quiets in the weave of collective attention, my awareness waterfalls into a deeper, more expansive ocean of frequencies. I inexplicably experience the field as a delicate fabric that I can touch and sense, shimmering in my awareness. Like running my hands through rippling waves of luminous light, or the gossamer threads of spider’s webs…
As I listen to the words of others, my awareness is not simply focused on the weave of semantic meanings and linguistic stories, but on the waves of felt frequencies that flow beneath. These frequencies resonate with the unseen strings in my own body, they pluck and vibrate at the instrument of my heart, and my soul responds to the call. My heart beats faster, the whole body becomes warm, pliable, and radically sensitive.
Often, this is when I am moved to pick up the piece. And I let the centre radically speak through.
Emergence: the aha!
To explain what the result is from a dialogue held in this way, I used the image of a puzzle many times. Each one of the participants in the conversation holds a unique piece that will contribute to the image that will arise in the middle. The difference with a real jigsaw puzzle is that there is no full picture available upfront to see or know where a specific piece would fit in. Another possible metaphor is the image of a sand mandala, maybe even more appropriate here. Painting with sand, with full attention to be artful and aware, and when the mandala is finished we are not attached to keep it, but can sweep it away and what stays is the deep experience of creating beauty.
From participating in these dialogues what stays – as a deeply felt embodied experience – is the artful way of communicating, most likely not with any distinguishable linear thread, but more the weaving of the stories, the resonance of ideas, the energy of the listening, the shifts in perspectives, the deeper intimacy shared, the wholeness of it. Reading a transcript of what was said, without the silences, without the tone of voices can never convey the richness of the experience and gives the impression of a conversation that jumped all over the place.
Steve March says that collective wisdom is not like a puzzle, but it is more a search until we see it, or until we have the aha. This is it! Sometimes I have named this the flip, where we are able to step outside – or underneath – of the problem framing into a space where we have access to more creativity and see more opportunities. Steve March names it as something that is ontologically prior, it is a deeper intimacy; the relatedness that gave birth to you and to me. For our Western trained minds this kind of emergence feels a lot like jumping into the unknown together. Because the nature of this participatory knowing is that it is radically discontinuous (from John Vervaeke) with everything we have known before.
Bonnitta Roy names it as changing the vantage point, which is different from taking different perspectives from the same level. This deeper vantage point is what we aim to access when articulating a guiding question. We try to hit a deeper base, closer to origin, where multiple perspectives fall away and polarities give way to some new creation. Collective Presencing, in its simple form, is designed for emergence, as through the guiding question and through the deep sharing and listening, we attend to a process of cultivating potential states (Bonnitta Roy). The new insight or creation emerges out of the many shares into the middle. It is something that nobody had in their minds before they entered the circle, and if not careful we might brush over it and miss it, as it might look too simple for the habit of creating more complicatedness when confronted with more problems. As someone named it: it is looking for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. From the depths of the exchanges images can arise in the middle that hold the potential, that are possible and creative manifestations of a source we seldom touch upon.
Collective wisdom and ripples
A good dialogue process, where the participants feel they are gathered, is a condition to come to collective wisdom. Through the process of sharing and deep witnessing – which is in essence about building more trust and more care between us – we build up our communal self; which hardly gets any attention in our modern world.
Through practicing this type of dialogue together we are also discovering that the creative force of more people connected in this way is exponentially bigger. It might seem unreasonable to believe in this, as we look around in the world, but world history has never been linear and things could actually change for the better; just think of the Berlin wall falling. So, we are not only adapting to the circumstances – which seems impossible to do with the many problems in the world – but there is an untapped potential that we could try to reach or tap into.
Any dialogue space has also – what I call these days — ripple effects. In the Art of Hosting we named it the invisible harvest: the ways in which people are changed through the process of deep participation in an inquiry. There are relationships built, the trust between people has grown, perspectives have been changed, new personal steps become more accessible. For any complex system or question we can never name what success actually is or what the outcome would be because it is all constantly alive and changing. But we do know and we can see and sense that there is some impact, somewhere – that’s what I call the ripples. We don’t know beforehand where or when they are hitting the shore, who will be touched by them, what it can set in motion in others…
Although I can’t be sure, I tend to think that every session of artful dialogue might in itself be enough to be an indirect cause of some change. The experience of being gathered, of all being attentive to the whole, inside and outside, gives us another meaning (as a possible response to the so-called meaning crisis). Our acting as if everyone and everything is connected and interwoven settles as a different meaning in ourselves, because we felt it as different in our bodies. The collective dialogue is a shared wholeness, an experience of coherence; in that way it is an opening or a catalyst to the emergent.
Amanda speaks here about this rippling, which she names as the butterfly effects:
Butterfly effects on Peace, by Amanda Zamparo
I know each session of Collective Presencing has butterfly effects on how each person relates to each family, community or group of friends they are in, and this effect is a peaceful one.
It is peaceful in the sense that it gives us more spaciousness to experience the whole of contradictions we live with in our messy internet-wired minds. It gives us the flexibility to feel and sense before acting, and acting from the middle.
World peace could be only a joke, but it is not, it is something actually possible. That is my belief and all I have been doing, if I am honest, is searching for a way to be closer to this sense of peace; closer to the relief that I am doing the right thing, that I am at peace with nature and all its beings. Collective Presencing meets all the criteria for bringing me more peace – not in the easy way, as sometimes I do get overwhelmed by the intensity – but in the right way.
After reading this chapter on how to host dialogues you could take up your courage, find some co-hosts who also want to dive into this experiment, and start. You don’t really need to read the next chapters, but it will give you more of the story of our community – its ups and downs – that can be a rich learning ground too.