To me, developing a new civilization has a whole lot to do with
participating in a process.
The reason I'm bringing it up is that I notice occasionally how different
people have different assumptions about how things are supposed to be done,
and we're not all equally willing to participate in processes we don't know
where will lead.
I notice this in meetings, in discussion groups, in business negotiations,
and many other places.
With "process" I mean the change, the growth, the adjustments, the
transformations that are involved in making something new happen. A process
has sort of a life of its own, you can't always know what will happen, or
where exactly it will lead.
I'm particularly interested in the process that people go through in
working out how to do something together. That is, things will come up when
you sit some people down to try to accomplish something with each other.
There might be conflicts, personal issues might come up, people might have
different perspectives, different assumptions, different visions, they
might have fears, doubts, emotions, confusions, etc. Bringing all of that
out in the open is, I think, essential in working out how a group of people
can REALLY work together.
The old civilization has little interest in people's process. You can go
and see a therapist, or join a meditation group, or go outside and fight,
but otherwise process if often not something that is considered to fit in
very well. At your job there will usually be somebody else who's the boss,
who'll tell you what to do, and if you display too much of an issue about
it you might no longer have a job. Lots of things get swept under the
carpet.
I think part of the new way of doing things is to stick with the process,
to allow things to develop in an evolutionary way, to allow new things to
emerge, without constantly going back to old solutions and old hierarchical
ways of deciding things.
If a group of people come together to do something, and they feel they are
allowed to speak their truth, at least to a certain level, things will come
up. That is, very often something uncomfortable will happen. Somebody will
tell somebody else something they don't want to hear, somebody will get mad
at somebody else, there will be disagreements.
Some people will respond to issues coming up in a group by trying to stuff
them back where they came from, by stating that that kind of stuff "doesn't
belong in a business meeting", or whatever the setting is, or by pretending
that everything is fine and there's really nothing to talk about.
Others will consider whatever comes up to be part of the process that
happens in a group, and will do whatever it takes to work through it.
If not enough people are willing to go through the process, quite possibly
it won't go anywhere. The group might fall apart, because it never figures
out what it is really about, or somebody might take charge and enforce
their personal choices on everybody else, or it might continue on a
superficial level, pretending that there's nothing going on under the
surface.
A new civilization is something we haven't quite done before. I don't know
exactly how it is done, and, with all due respect, I don't expect any of
you to have all the answers either. I do expect that it is a process, it is
something we'll develop and figure out together. That requires quite a bit
of an open mind, and a willingness to participate in the journey, even if
it has ups and downs and surprising twists and turns.
Expect to occasionally run into some regions of chaos where new
civilizations are being grown. Expect things to sometimes be confusing.
Expect to run into a diversity of people with different ideas. Expect that
the going might be rough some times.
If you turn around the first time you run into trouble, the first time
somebody disagrees with you, or the first time you get confused about the
rules of the game, you might not get very far.
I firmly believe that there is a built-in intelligence in evolution. If you
set the flow of nature free, if you allow learning to grow out of mistakes
and misunderstandings, if you allow diversitities to find their synergies,
the natural direction of things is towards a higher level of evolvement, of
better ways of doing things.
Of course, not every mess is productive, confusion is not always helpful,
some conflicts can be very destructive. The trick is to find some kind of
balance, where there's enough creative chaos for new things to emerge, and
enough sanity for things not to fall apart.
Part of this probably involves an awareness of what processes are going on,
what is generally "trying to happen", and some discernment about how to
help processes develop in useful ways.
That you are here probably indicates that you are willing to participate in
the process of growing a new civilization. I salute you for that.
- Flemming
(send discussion to ncndiscuss-L@newciv.org)
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/ \------------------ Flemming A. Funch ------------------/ \
/ * \ World Transformation/New Civilization/Whole Systems / * \
/ * * \ ffunch@newciv.org / * * \
o-------o----------- http://www.worldtrans.org/ ----------o-------o
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