Intentional Society: Life, self-aware
If you'd like to connect to the community life of Intentional Society, register for the orientation call this Saturday at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)
There is a tension inside the essence of life. The nature of creation evolving and growing. Life holds the balance of entropy and order, chaos and crystal. Structure itself is dead -- buildings are dead, stone is dead, laws are dead. Randomness, on the other hand, is meaningless -- light and energy, recombination and transformation, infinite complexity asymptotes into pure noise and entropy. Life itself is the integration of this polarity of emergence and structure, form and formlessness. Either one alone is dead, but together they dance life into awareness of itself. Order channels energy, where a void would dissipate it. Rigidity also constrains energy, where a free flow would resonate. The most meaningful, valuable, configuration of any part of the universe joins these intertwined forces in harmonization. The pulsing, breathing, aliveness of life is an infinitesimal (or unavoidable, or both) sweet spot of both form and emptiness and neither.
This same balance applies fractally to the aliveness of an organization of people. For an org to be alive, in some vital sense, it can be neither structureless nor fully structured. There are many walking-dead institutions, zombies ossified in structure and animated by humans still turning and cranking the gears of the machinery. There are perhaps even more non-existent orgs which have fallen apart or never even formed in the first place.
Now, an important is-ness: Sameness and difference is that very same life-polarity, applied to group intelligence. Pure sameness gets trapped rigidly into place, freezing life. Pure difference doesn't cohere, scattering apart into nothingness. Inside the balance of dynamic tension, vibrancy. Diversity and similarity integrated, yet without giving up the gifts of either pole.
To become aware of sameness and difference is to see the threads in the weaving of a group mind. Unconscious egregores have birthed themselves from the complexity of our society; how can they be grappled by anything other than conscious living egregores of even more vital human coherence?
What we're doing in Intentional Society this week, may it be so, is to look in the direction of our sameness, our differences, and our awareness of both. How can we navigate the oscillations of managing this polarity? Where might the integration be? Such potentially crucial questions, hidden behind a simpler question: "So, how was the party?"
Cheers,
James