Please Log in to Vote.

3 out of 3 members found this useful.

It’s Electric! Welcome to Integral "Scenius"

Posted October 25th, 2011 by Terry Patten in Integral Post
 
Share


“Scenius”: A word coined by musician Brian Eno to describe "the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of genius."

Research is teaching us that the most important creative new ideas come not from remarkable individuals but from the interactions of highly creative and collaborative communities.

The history of art and science is all about episodes of scenius: America’s founding fathers; Paris in the 20s; the Algonquin Round Table, the SF Beats, the ever-expanding Silicon Valley, Building 20 at MIT, etc. etc.

We keep rediscovering that, in the famous phrase, “we are smarter than me.” It’s such an obvious theme that we all laughed about our nostalgia for it earlier this year watching Woody Allen’s charming Midnight in Paris.

And if you’re reading this blog, you’re acutely aware that you’re (at least sometimes) participating in the remarkable “scenius” of the budding Integral and Evolutionary convergence, a genius scene with no single address.

Is it a movement? A zeitgeist? A meta-meme? An operating system? An academic theory? The call of the evolving Kosmos?

All of these, and yet none exclusively. Whatever it is, it is never far away—always at hand via the web, and in countless Integral and Evolutionary meetups, meetings, seminars, workshops, and informal gatherings all over the world.

“Scenius” perfectly describes what’s really going on among us all. Two brilliant co-creative friends in the field of this “scenius”, Elizabeth Debold and Carter Phipps of EnlightenNext, began pointing to this phenomenon last year. We don’t have to see eye-to-eye about everything, but as we awaken, connect, and press into what’s next, we feed each other. Higher-order consciousness co-creates passion and creativity and emergence.

You know what I’m talkin’ ‘bout if your life has been changed by the inspirational electricity of the field of scenius that crackles the air in the most alive Integral Evolutionary gatherings. When we come together with open trans-rational hearts, clear integral minds, and grounded evolutionary hands and feet, something amazing happens—it feels like arriving home for the first time in your life.

I remember showing up at the very first I-I seminars. Feeling higher vision-logic intelligence connecting up with openhearted vulnerability and transcendent spiritual ecstasy—I felt like a match had been dropped in a trail of gasoline, illuminating in a flash a vast interior-exterior landscape that created room for me to do the work I was born to do. And I’ve been engaged with it ever since. The rest (so far) is history (or, rather, Mystery!)

I’m excited and gratified that this year’s Integral Spiritual Experience at Asilomar is being designed to facilitate exactly that kind of intersubjective “quantum field effect.”


The Integral Spiritual Experience web page cites names like Ken Wilber, Alex Grey, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Andrew Cohen, Stuart Davis, Diane Hamilton, Sofia Diaz, Decker Cunov, Gay and Katie Hendricks, Junpo Roshi, Saniel and Linda Bonder, Jeff Salzman, and many more. And these amazing folks will rock the joint, you can count on that!


But it won’t be a “wisdo-tainment” event—the Main Event will be Us—the field of “scenius” we’ll all be co-creating together. And scenius can’t be directed. It can be invoked and welcomed—then all it takes is to get out of the way!

  • Art will be projected onto the main screen.
  • Music will be played before and after (and during!) key sessions.
  • Our process will progress in a fashion that will optimize all of our creative engagement—with our personal creative projects, and with one another.
  • We’ll be free to play, to dance, to laugh, to cry, to think rigorously, and (hey, we’re integralists) to question everything.


What the design team is dedicated to doing is to maximize opportunities synergy, co-creativity, convergence, cross-pollination, and the dynamism of our collective intelligence.


There’ll be room to focus on “my” creativity and creative breakthroughs or creative blocks, but the real point will be to just get together to wake up and love each other and share what’s alive, exciting, interesting, and real -- with the sincere intention to catalyze each other and be open to being catalyzed.


When we do that, the creativity of the Kosmos (thank God!) can be trusted to come flowing through. And it really does, especially “when 200 or more are gathered in my name” ;^)


Looking forward to seeing you there,

Terry Patten,
From the ISE3 Design Team, with Jeff Salzman and Diane Hamilton


PS: Use my discount code "Patten" and receive $100 off the registration fees.

 

 
     
 

Terry Patten

Terry Patten co-developed Integral Life Practice with Ken Wilber and the core team at Integral Institute, and was the senior writer of the book, Integral Life Practice. With Integral Spiritual Practice, he leads people step-by-step into a life of heart-centered evolutionary unfoldment. He hosts the acclaimed online teleseminar series Beyond Awakening: The Future of Spiritual Practice. Terry speaks and consults internationally, inspiring, challenging, and connecting leaders and institutions worldwide. His personal web sites are gobeyondawakening.com, theispcommunity.com, and integralspiritualpractice.com. 

  
     
  MORE WITH TERRY PATTEN  
     
  Integral Life Practice: Enough Talk, It's Time to Live!
Terry Patten and Ken Wilber 		 
     
 

 

 
     
 

Whether you know it or not, you are an evolutionary artist. All of us are already participating in a great dance of creativity, each in our own unique way. Our journey as evolutionary artists touches every aspect of our lives—from the words we choose, to the beauty we create, to the love we make.


That's why we are truly delighted to invite you to Integral Spiritual Experience Year 3: Kosmic Creativity on December 28th, 2011 - January 1st, 2012, at Asilomar Retreat Center in Pacific Grove, California. Featuring some of the world's most leading-edge spiritual teachers, artists, activists, and visionaries, we will be joined by the integral evolutionary community from over 30 countries world-wide. And we want you to be a part of this extraordinary experience!

  
     
 

 

Share

 

Please Log in to Vote.

0 out of 0 members found this useful.

Supplementing our We-spirit (with better We-protocols for collating higher...

Posted December 3rd, 2011 by Layman Pascal

Hi.  I'm not coming but I love the concept. 

What really stands out to me, reading over this description, is how easy it can be to focus on the collaborative-consensus "vibe" as the central component of collective engagement.  Clearly it is the main affair in establishing scenius.  And clearly the creative enactment of a integral/evolutionary We-space absolutely needs people to gather, communicate, lay down the discursive & co-emotive grooves by which we promote the cultural morphic field of higher values that is so urgently required at this moment in the history of planetary human civilization.  A big Yes to all of that!

However, what I hear very little about are new protocols for collating the intelligence of individuals into a collective position -- which can be enacted on a given topic.  Standard pseudo-democracy is an "orange" improvement upon the social decision-making style of theocratic "amber" kingdoms.  So what are the actionable decision-making protocols for "teal" and "turquoise" community?  

In books like The Wisdom of Crowds we see not only a promotion of the general principle of collective intelligence but we find clarity on the fact that the particular approach to sharing and deciding make enormous difference.  That book features a famous anecdote about Francis Galton & the market crowd guessing the weight of an ox.  The average guess is closer than any guess, closer than the majority guess, and would almost certanily be closer than the deeply felt and openly shared consensus of the crowd.  This example shows that "we" is smarter than any of its "me"s -- but only because they shared their intelligence in a very specific fashion. 

A majority or consensus from that crowd would not have exceeded the wisdom of its smartest member.  Rather it was the statistical average of their estimates on a graduated scale (weight).  The protocol makes enormous difference.  Likewise "secret ballots" provide a qualitative leap upward in the democratic process simply by structurally obstructing the tendency of the ME to skew his or her own intelligence prematurely toward a consensus feeling that is more acceptable to the observing WE in which they are embedded. 

So I hope this is being factored into the generative mix.  The production of a higher we-space cannot rely just on the sincere intercourse, common moods & shared intellect of people who themselves can access higher experiential "operating systems" in their own psychology.  All this must somehow be supplemented by higher innovative mechanisms for locating, evoking, recording and compiling individual intelligence into a collective conclusion.  The glorious necessity represented by the co-production of higher community spirit, with all its capacity for inspirational (Paris-in-the-20s style) contagion needs to consider which technical protocols of intelligence sharing can best scaffold its emergence and shepherd its expansiveness into social systems activities.

Intentional evolutionaries need something like SMART DEMOCRACY to "have their backs".

And I hope everyone has a great time!  Bless.