I had the opportunity this week to spend time with 17 community leaders facilitating their thoughts and ideas about how they could make a mark on their community that would be memorable, artistic, meaningful and important.
I started the session with this quote from the great quantum physicist David Bohm…I have used it here before.
“the tree doesn’t come from the seed. The seed is an aperture that organizes the processes of growth through which the tree finally emerges.”
When people come together whether that is in real time and space or cyberspace, there is an invisible architecture and shape in those relationships. That invisible architecture is called the social field, and it is comprised of visible and external– “what we say and do with each”– as well as the invisible and internal origins of those actions.
I shared with them the invisible and internal is where our intention arises but where our attention rarely focuses. As a result much of what we do is download from our past programing what we think is possible. In other words we move on autopilot — hardly creative sourcing for a conversation on creating the future through collaborative knowing. A couple different times in our several hours together I would stop and say…”what do you feel right now is your chest or your stomach?” “Do you feel the shift in the field that just happened?” We are deeply connected. We create an aperture together.
While we were on one hand trying to ideate and get a creative project off the ground we, on the other hand, all came to recognize there was a quantum field, a palpable soup we were all in together. It was far deeper than ideas, it was spiritual it was originating from a deep place within us. They were learning how we act and interact, learn and unlearn, see and reveal, grow and transform is determined by how the social field is sourced by our interior life and the content of the conversation. This project for them quickly became about how their interior lives collectively were forming an aperture out of which “this thing” was going to emerge.
It was one more example in real time where I got to see, feel and in a small way facilitate (facil-to make easier) a tangible shift in space that will in the next several months impact an entire community.
