Intentional Society: Why are we here?
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Seen this morning:
your child asks you, why are we here? why are we alive?
what do you say? -Tasshin
I flipped the script just now and asked my kids what they thought:
kid1: No idea. I don't know.
kid2: Uh, because God created us?
kid3: <shrug> ... I have no idea. ... So, this is my lego car... 😂
What about you — what's you're "why"? It can be tough to even grasp the question, as Calvin and Hobbes illustrate:
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for April 01, 1988 - GoComics
Calvin: Why do you suppose we're here? Hobbes: Because we walked here. Calvin: No, no... I mean here on earth. Hobbes: Because Earth can support life. Calvin: No, I mean why are we anywhere? Why do we exist? Hobbes: Because we were born. Calvin: Forget it. Hobbes: I will, thank you.
In the largest context, to which Calvin is trying to point, I hope anyone's answer starts with (or contains a healthy dose of) "I don't know." I grew up in a culture where it seemed important to believe that this is knowable, but it's now very important to me to hold a bigger space for possibility and complexity, leaving room for unknowing and for parallel/paradoxical threads of meaning-making co-existing.
However we would express the deep whys, or where our meaning-making grounds out, the "why ask why?" meta on that is basically, "because what are you going to do?" (with your one wild and precious life) The inward flow of self-development and inner work eventually cycles back around to exterior interaction with the world around us (and keeps on looping).
Many of us in Intentional Society would, I believe, give quite related answers for what motivates and animates us in relationship to our "life purpose" — answers that are perhaps self-referentially loop-y, touching ourselves and the universe and the convergence of what is of benefit for both scales.
The fractal nature of the I-we-world connections between scales, this is why I.S. carries meaning to me beyond what it provides in my own personal life. Our "we" leads first to the "I", yet the "I" loops back to the "we" and outward further to how both "I" and "we" connects/relates to the "world" or societal level.
Beyond the "we" scope connoted by "group," we'd tend to label/model global/world-scale actors as "institutions." The vast majority of institutions today, it seems easy to see, don't seem to have the self-awareness capability from which aliveness (i.e. in the live player sense) can emerge at that scale. Can Intentional Society become a shining example of a self-aware institution? Or can it perhaps midwife other examples into being from its self-aware culture?
For me. For us. For the world. To increase integrity and harmony of interacting systems. To continue discovering which purposes most benefit and increase life and aliveness. Good luck to us all.
Cheers,
James