Emergence

This gathering has been called “Emerge”. It might be reasonable to consider what that word, emerge, means and perhaps to take that meaning seriously.

Emergence implies something that is greater than the sum of its parts. This means that we are not creating or producing what emerges, rather what emerges must be greater than us and we are part of and in support of it. What does it mean to take on this responsibility? To create a context that supports and nurtures the emergence of something that is greater than ourselves and in with which we collaborate?

First, perhaps, a stance of humility. Remembering that the costumes of our personae and identities in the old world are, ultimately, habits and not necessarily in service to the emergence of the future. By definition, we cannot know, and therefore must not pre-constrain, what can and should emerge.

Second, then, maybe a disposition towards listening and curiosity. Learning how to follow the signs and allowing for the serendipity that signifies that we are on the path towards what is emerging. This is the time to receive the wisdom of becoming like little children. It may seem odd to imagine that we are called to “play the future into reality” but perhaps deeply serious play is precisely the way.

Third, care. The sacred is that which calls for the greatest degree of care and carefulness. It seems proper to approach what we are called here to do as sacred. This implies holding exquisite care for that which is emerging. This is an awesome journey. It is reasonable to stand in awe and wonder as a basic disposition.

Finally, forgiveness. A profound forgiveness for ourselves and those around us as we stumble forth into this new possibility. The past ten thousand years have been a rough journey. We are all unlearning much that it is time to let pass and learning (or re-learning) much that is only beginning to emerge.

Jordan Hall

If our global civilization is to experience a deep and substantial break-through, it will not be through wishful thinking and a click of the fingers, but rather through a complex emergent process that is beyond our comprehension and control. We cannot know what the future will look like. We will not be able to rationally figure out how to manage this transition through some mega project plan. But we can foster conditions for, and facilitate the emergent process in different ways that increase the odds for a positive outcome.

Emergence is a process of attractive forces – phenomena drawn to different aspects of itself - giving rise to relationship – non-random patterns of connection - then to ‘synergy’ – a whole that appears to be greater than the sum of its parts - and then emergence, which is about how that ‘greater’ manifests.

There are a gazillion possible futures, but when you take emergence seriously as an underlying principle of life, it becomes clear that we are, figuratively speaking, at a fork in the road. One kind of future features emergence into one of many kinds of more elegant and complex civilizations, and the other kind sees one of many forms of decline into civilizational collapse.

Daniel Schmachtenberger puts it like this:

 “…Things are exponentially changing, which means changing at more and more rapid and more and more significant rates. You can cherry-pick metrics where things are getting exponentially better, and that’s true, and other things are getting exponentially worse, and that’s also true. The future that you predict if you just follow any of those curves is not happening. If things are getting exponentially better and worse at the same time, then that doesn’t mean that things are getting better or worse. It means the current system is destabilizing—and that means self-terminating. Then, we either have a discrete phrase-shift to a lower order, entropic system, or the emergence of a higher-order system that is foundationally different from the current system we have in every way.”

This is a crucial statement for the Emerge network to understand. While attractive forces and resulting relationships are inevitable, they can either contain the seeds of transformation or self-destruction. Teachers attract pupils and vice versa, and great educational relationships may arise, but it’s also true that resentful populations attract demagogues, and they share a symbiotic relationship reinforced by scapegoating media. What really matters then is whether the generative relationships of our time are characterized by synergy or entropy, because that will determine whether we have a viable emerging civilization or a collapsing one.

It follows that we should focus our attention on the quality of our relationships of all kinds; relationships within, between and beyond ourselves. The obvious emotional response is: “I knew it! Relationships! It’s all about relationships!” There is some straightforward truth in that realization, but the relationships in question are also within people’s hearts and minds as much as between individuals, they are between people and institutions and between people and their ideas, and between ideas and their foundations (ontological, axiological, epistemological) as well.

Drawing attention to the nature and meaning of emergence is about highlighting the possibility of a different intentional stance towards the world, grounded in receptivity, intuition and subtlety rather than ideology, reason and force. Some call it a spiritual perspective, in the sense that it’s less about imposing our wills than listening deeply to what we appear to be called upon to be and do; our own cosmic dance of being of becoming. The challenge is to accept the miracle of our contingency and interdependence while also taking responsibility for our uniqueness and autonomy. It is a different kind of game. All over the world, networks and organisations are rising up to explore unchartered ways of being, thinking and doing, and building new forms of institutional praxis and political capital around them; such initiatives are at the heart of the Emerge network.

Ways to facilitate this emergence includes meeting, and creating dialogue and understanding across networks of change agents that usually do not closely interact: philosophers, social scientists, psychologists and personal development facilitators, political activists, tech entrepreneurs, spiritual practitioners, artists and media. Facilitating emergence involves exploring new ways of knowing and new ways to relate to ourselves, each other, society and the planet. It involves exploring new, multi perspectival world-views. And it involves making this emergent process, through its agents, visible to itself.

Mainstream culture (if there is such a thing anymore) seems more receptive than ever to approaches that emphasize the complex interplay between systems, souls and society. The idea that inner and outer transformation have to go hand in hand, the intuition that we need multiple perspectives and collective intelligence to address our complex global action challenges, and the conviction that we must seek to rediscover modes of knowledge that go beyond the rational, are no longer esoteric.

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As a preparation for the gathering you might want to look at this video where Daniel Schmachtenberger develops his view on emergence.

And in the following video Daniel is sharing his higher order frame of the nature of the meta-crises and how to make it through. This framing is an important underpinning for the Emerge Gathering and project.