Footnotes to Crossroads Dispatches

They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. - Malidoma Some

One day after the dot-com bubble burst and I was no longer a CTO at an Internet start-up, I was at a wonderful bookstore and cafe in Salt Lake City, The Golden Braid. Instinctually, a particular book had a magnetic pull and I lifted out of the shelf. At that time, I very much defined myself as a left-brained, analytic, rational pseduo-intellectual that thought I knew how the whole world worked... until the rug had been pulled out from underneath me that previous year. Every part of my life went from idyllic (if you didn't look too far below the surface) to catastrophic, and I finally found myself in an unknown place where I had no pat answers.

This is a long-winded way of saying that this book I'm about to excerpt below made a huge impression on me. It changed my life. It was a voyage home, a true homecoming even if I didn't quite understand everything in it, it still rang true. It's the true tale of an African boy whisked from his village to a missionary school and his odyssey back to his own culture and shamanism. I don't really want to give too much away, but I recently checked the book out of the library to re-read my favorite passages.

In the world I reside today everything is based on left-brained intelligence (or, seeing as I'm in Vegas now, primal emotions run-amok) which culturally and systemically dismisses and buries any conversation by methods of mockery and/or fear all things not measurable and taught in schools or books. Thus, I tend to not speak of these agreed upon taboo subjects.

The passage below also explains why I'm moving more toward fiction writing to convey another view of reality.

This passage is in the Introduction by the author, he also mentions that Asian countries tend to also hold a non-Western view of reality that is foreign to Western education. Another reason that two of the main characters in a story I'm working are Asian-American.

"In the culture of my people, the Dagara, we have no word for the supernatural. The closest we come to this concept is Yielbongura, "the thing that knowledge can't eat." This word suggests that the life and power of certain things depend upon their resistance to the kind of categorizing knowledge that human being apply to everything. In Western reality, there is a clear split between the spiritual and the material, between religious life and secular life. This concept is alien to the Dagara. For us, as for many indigenous cultures, the supernatural is part of our everyday lives. To a Dagara man or woman, the material is just as the spiritual taking on form.

. . . .

The world of the Dagara also does not distinguish between reality and imagination. To us, there is a close connection between thought and reality. To imagine something, to closely focus one's thoughts upon it, has the potential to bring something into being. Thus, people who take a tragic view of life and are always expecting the worst usually manifest that reality. Those who expect that things will work together for the good usually experience just that. In the realm of the sacred, this concept is taken even further, for what is magic but the ability to focus thought and energy to get results on the human plane? The Dagara view of reality is large. If one can imagine something, then it has at least the potential to exist.

I decided to do a little experiment of my own with "reality" versus "imagination" when I was home visiting my village in 1986. I brought with me a little electronic generator, a television monitor, a VCR, and a "Star Trek" tape titled The Voyage Home. I wanted to know if the Dagara elders could tell the difference between fiction and reality. The events unfolding in a science fiction film, considered futuristic or fantastic in the West, were perceived by my elders as the current affairs in the day-to-day lives of some other group of people living in the world. The elders did not understand what a starship is. They did not understand what the fussy uniforms of its crew members had to do with making magic. They recognized in Spock a Kontomble of the seventh planet, the very one that I describe later in this story, and their only objection to him was that he was too tall. They had never seen a Kontomble that big. They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. I could not make them understand that all this was not real. Even though stories abound in my culture, we have no word for fiction. The only way I could get across to them the Western concept of fiction was to associate fiction with telling lies.

My elders were comfortable with "Star Trek," the West's vision of its own future. Because they believe in things like magical beings (Spock), traveling at the speed of light, and teleportation, the wonders that Westerners imagine being part of their future are very much a part of my elders' present. The irony is that the West sees the indigenous world as primitive or archaic. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the West could learn to be as "archaic" as my elders are?

As in the case of "Star Trek," Westerners look to the future as a place of hope, a better world where every person has dignity and value, where wealth is not unequally distributed, where the wonders of technology make miracles possible. If people in the West could embrace some of the more positive values of the indigenous world, perhaps that might even provide them with a "shortcut" to their own future." -- Malidoma Patrice Some, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman

Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities. - Joseph Campbell

"Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities.

. . . I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks before the Wall Street crash. . . I'd earned several thousand dollars--which was a lot in those days--and that was what I had until it disappeared. I didn't make another cent for five years. I found that, if you had no responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money. Now, that does not mean that when I do something for somebody I don't ask for money. I want as much as I can get, but that's the secondary part of the game. My life course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because you are giving life and life responds in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.

Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing with it I've had to be in touch with people whose business is money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I've had an interesting and surprising experience: I've met some magnificent people.

Money experienced as life experience is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others. There's a beautiful thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money tha surprised me.

In the living of life today, money is a facilitating energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you can get places you other wise couldn't go.

. . . From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollinger Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That's whay they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollinger Series on on the literature and science of America has been enormous.

. . . When you put the money in the wrong place, it can be devastating. Where is the money [and its associated intent to prioritize, value, attend to] going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling. What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down there in your stomach?"

- from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Olson

This is a companion blog for longer excerpts to cite transcriptions from books. The main blog on inspiration, imagination, innovation, improvisation, creativity, and the Call is over at Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez. Since, I mentioned Campbell in this one, you may also be interested in the art, myth and alchemy blog called Fertile Verge.

This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty

Some notes taken from a book about that experiment in a self-organizing culture and ephemeral city-springing, This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty. And the subtitle is:

page 272
What I'm picking up from Larry's new dispensation [more anti-consumerist and political activism... BM used to be apolitical event] struck me as antithetical to what I originally found interesting about Burning Man--that it offered a seeking and celebration of creative expression and liberated experience as a key to brain change and a means to search for what one might call the sacred. There are times, though, when Larry and I are feeling the same things. "We are beings, created things," Larry tells me. "We're the products of genetic mutation, and we're infinitely variable. The world presents itself to us as an artifact with slots to fill. But everyone's gifts are unique and not necessarily apparent to the [people themselves] unless some circumstance calls them forth. The whole story of my progress," he surmises, "might seem blind and hapless. But there was from the beginning a sense of something real in me and the idea that it had to have a home out there somewhere. Intuitively, blindly, as chance allowed, I moved in that direction even if it didn't make any sense by the world's standards. The human world is like a flowery meadow, and the individual is like a weed--each one different. A wed is simply an unwanted plant. It's a human category. There's no such plant as a weed. But the human world is more and more a monoculture. Farmer Jones wants corn and everything else is a weed, and if you can't get with the corn program, Buster, then get your thistle ass out of here! That's the problem everyone faces."

As he looks around at Burning Man, Larry sees lots of weeds essaying things with no apparent practical purpose. "It's weeds, but it's their weeds. Who knows what that leads to? Maybe nothing. But unless people are given that opportunity they will never find out. If their judgments are always governed by the world's standards, they might never find that one thing they are brilliant at, that they were born to do, and that's the greatest tragedy of all--the quiet desperation Thoreau wrote of. That just means that they never discovered what they were meant to do with the transcendent faith that they were meant to do that something. And that's been the moral of my life."

There's a lot I could argue with Larry about, but not that.

page 273
[What is it?] This book, I hope, provides some answers to that question. It's a place for human beings to live vividly free lives and have--as Larry used to recognize--experiences that are fundamental, unconditional, marvelous, and worth a thousand lectures on why one ought not to shop at Wal-Mart. [Kind of giving Larry a jab on that last bit.]

page 274
Interactive is the buzzword for Burning Man-style art, defined by BRAF's Jessica Bobier as "art that blurs the line between artists and audience, with collaboration in the creation or the experience of the piece. Art that requires the action of a participant to complete the piece. It represents the opportunity for people to come together and incites them to interact with one another, whether directly because they are needed to make something happen, or just something so exciting it makes people gather, brings them together." It fits in smoothly with the old Burning Man dispensation: art that creates community, art that gives you an opportunity to have an experience other than spectating.

page 282
It didn't start out as an art festival. It didn't really start as anything but an act and an excuse to gather. "What is art, you know?" muses Michael Michael on the meaning of this train he's riding. "Why art at Burning Man? What is this art thing? There's something much larger here. Art is a vehicle, a symptom of something bigger occurring. It's spreading beyond the desert, beyond the playa. It's a way of being, of thinking, to change a person: That's the real story, the real thing that's happening."

The change--that knowledge within that you no longer have to be and think and act as you previously been and thought and acted if you don't wish to--is a mystery, and Burning Man has no monopoly on the technology of generating it. It can come in an instant like a thief in the night, like Christ, or after years of difficult discipline, like those spent with a yogi master, but what's important is that it can happen and that the technologies of change exist and Burning Man is very, very good at reminding people of that.

page 280
Chris Radcliffe: "You don't need to go to Puerto Vallarta and lay on the beach and eat fish and drink frozen daiquiris and read Jacqueline Susann novels. You can have a primary experience of existence instead of something processed and fed back to you. Someone once said to me, if you're being entertained, you're not having any fun. And that's perfectly right. What we were doing was a very primary thing."

The main blog is at Crossroads Dispatches; this is accompaniment blog for longer excerpts cited there.

I've come to the realization that we have to discover the shaman within. - Alberto Villoldo

Another excerpt from Alberto Villoldo's book imparting the knowledge he gained through Inka shamans and his own direct experiences in Shaman, Healer, Sage. This one about the transpersonal awakening (typically comes from a collapse of the conceptual separate identity, and can be facilitated through mental queries like, Who am I?, What am I?, Am I?, et all) and its potential "personal' consequences.

He explains a pretty common ego trick which has us worshippinng the exoticism of the Other as the self-realized--the whole "not me, I'm not worthy" routine--and plan elaborate excursions to South America or to drool over an African shaman dressed in his native garb in your local cellphone shop--and I cite two examples from folks I know, and totally be oblivious to the ordinariness of It, and its innate in-dwelling in yourself. Seeing it only out there (and in specific steoreotypical disguises) keeps you from knowing and being It yourself and seeing It everywhere anytime. Anyhow, without further ado, Alberto's words:

"I've come to the realization that we have to discover the shaman within. I teach my students that no amount of traveling with the Indians will bring you to your own wisdom and power. I've found that it frequently achieves exactly the opposite, distracting us from a true encounter with Spirit. The shaman is a self-realized person. She discovers the ways of Spirit through her inner awakening. Antonio would remind me that the Buddha was not a Buddhist, and that Christ was not a Christian. One sat under the banyan tree until he gained illumination. The other went to the desert for forty days. In the sixth chakra [pineal gland, third eye] we experience our own awakening. We shed the ponchos, the robes, the rattles and feathers, and all other exterior markings.

An awakened third eye allows the shaman to know who he is. It gives him knowledge of the past and the future and allows him to envision alternative destinies. Some legends report that those who awaken this chakra can even attain physical immortality. They no longer age or succumb to disease, but rather are able to maintain their youthful vitality and strength. All the desires of one with an awakened third eye come true, and if a number of healers hold the same vision, it comes true for the planet. Native religions have long practiced this tradition. Elders of the Hopi and a similar council of Inka medicine men and women sit in meditation envisioning the kind of world that hey want their great-grandchildren to inherit." - pages 98-99, Shaman, Healer, Sage by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.

Alchemy of Relationships: From Dependence to Co-Dependence to Independence to Interdependence

In Almine's book, Journey to the Heart of God, there is a chapter on The Alchemy of Relationship where she shares the four stages of relationship development.

The entire chapter is about how crucial relationships are to our awareness and consciousness. The last stage, Interdependence, is about allowing and celebrating the diversity in unity, or the unity in diversity, much like in Scott Pecks' development from pseudocommunity into full-fledged community where everyone is allowed to be who they are.

The four stages:

"Dependence: In this stage similarities are stressed. Couples experience this as their initial stage of being 'in love'. They feel euphoric because they see themselves in the mirror of the other person. Culturally this manifests as tribal life where the individual is expected to behave in a certain way in exchange for the tribe's support.

Co-dependence: Some individuality is expressed, but there is still a strong desire to identify with each other and no one steps too far out of 'the box.' Many tribal members in North America are in this stage, where they live in the city, but retain strong ties of dependence with the tribe.

Independence: In personal interaction each individual becomes almost desperate to find his or her own identity. Differences now are emphasized. In the modern, mechanized societies all types of insurance are needed since there is no tribal support. In apartments people live without knowing their neighbor's name.

Interdependence: If stage 3 can be survived, this stage brings stability. The individuals are secure in their relationships and supportive of each others' differences. This is the template for communal living for the future: a group lives together because of a common goal, voluntarily commits certain contributions and is free to express and grow in diversity."

Other quotes I resonated with:

"These stages lead from uniformity to unity within diversity."

"Tribal societies that remain in sameness are painfully pushed into change. Diversity produces more chances of exploring the unknown."

"In the stage of unity within diversity [interdependence] the chances are maximized for individual growth to contribute to the growth of the group within a stable environment."

You can download a copy of this chapter Alchemy of Relationship, by Almine, here.

 

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark

A Ritual To Read To Each Other (from "A Scripture of Leaves", 1989)

by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider-
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Keith Ferrazzi's keystones of mutally supportive lifeline relationships--generosity, vulnerability, candor, accountability

Excerpted from Who's Got Your Back, by Keith Ferrazzi:

"Far too often, I've found, we are cut off from each other, both at home and in the workplace. (I sure was once!) Too many people try to go it alone. I can understand why. In today's culture, we've overemphasized the individual at the expense of teamwork and collaboration. The media give us story after story of business and sports and political superstars--hyperachievers who seemingly reached their goals single-handedly by following a brilliant but solitary vision. Too often, we're left the nagging sensation that those who need or seek out help are somehow weak, lacking in confidence, or otherwise insufficient. The result is that too many of us lose our way or falter and stumble on the path to the top.

We're wary of opening ourselves up even to our closest friends, never mind our colleagues in the office. We view vulnerability, and occasionally even outright kindness, as a badge of weakness. We keep our opinions, our secrets, and our fears to ourselves. Honesty is viewed as risky, mine-filled, something others can't handle (whereas a lot of the time we're the ones who are afraid). So instead of telling people what we think to their faces, we talk in circles.

The result? Instead of giving heartfelt advice, we gossip, speak indirectly, play politics, or use other colleagues and friends as our in-through-the-back-door messengers. It's as if we're still in high school! We view generosity of spirit as if it were some old-fashioned throwback to an era that no longer exists. Some of us go so far as to assume that if someone holds out an offer of help, she must have an ulterior motive: What does that person want from me? And so we continue to go it alone.

At the same time, as a culture, we complain of a lack of balance in our lives--that we spend all our time working, thinking about work, winding down from work, or getting ready for work. Yet according to economists Ellen McGrattan and Richard Rogerson, our work hours have actually remained more or less constant since World War II. In fact, some studies suggest that our leisure time has actually increased. (Whose fault is it if you keep your Blackberry glued to your knuckles while you're on vacation or at the gym?)

So if we're all working the same number of hours as before, or even less, why does it feel as though we're toiling away at our career responsibilities more while getting a whole lot less out of our efforts?

The real villain, as I found for myself, is the lack of richer, deeper relationships in both the workplace and our personal lives. We have too many nodding acquaintances and not enough close encounters of the lifeline variety.

Sad to say, a lot of our relationships have become more focused on accomplishing specific tasks or projects, rather than on developing and nurturing intimate connections. Unfortunately, that's a choice we've made. Our day-to-day dealings with colleagues and clients remain, for the most part, on a surface level. Most of us are happy just skimming across the water. The result, in the workplace, has been a major loyalty drain among customers, employers, and employees; we're not achieving our full potential in our careers because we're so afraid of soliciting the advice, feedback, and support of others. The result in our personal lives has been a nagging feeling that there's got to be more to life than this.

Vulnerability, authenticity are key to connections -- "They were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were."

 

The above TEDx video has been making the circuit on the Internet. Videos going viral and spreading like wildfire is nothing noteworthy in the geek community. However, I was pretty stunned that this TOPIC did. It's wonderful. Recommended!

It is very relevant to the topic of community and relationships I've shared in this Footnotes blog (especially if you delve into the excerpts and books by M. Scott Peck and Keith Ferrazzi I've quoted, see Community category).

Watch the video, and below are some of my recaps so I don't have to re-watch the video to recall the highlights. Anything in "quotes" is a quote by Dr. Brown. The rest are my own notes. She also has a recent book titled, The Gifts of Imperfection.

Presented by academic researcher in social psychology/social work, Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW: "You're going to call me a "storyteller"? Why not a magic pixie!"

"Lean into the discomfort." - a mantra in social work... interesting!

Shame unravels connection. "Shame is easily understood as the fear of disconnection: there is something about me that if other people know it or see it that I won't be worthy of connection. The things I can tell you about it: It's universal, we all have it. The only people that don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy and connection. No one wants to talk about it; and the less you want to talk about it the more you have it. What underpinned this shame--this "I'm not good enough"--which we all know that feeling. I'm not blank enough--I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough.

The thing that underpinned this was this excruciating vulnerability--this idea that in order for connection to happen we have to be willing to be seen, really seen."

She saw she herself hated vulnerability.

"I thought I was going to outsmart it."

"My one year turned into six years."

"People who have a sense of worthiness... and folks that struggle for it. There was only one variable that separated the people...   they believed they were worthy of love and belonging. They believe they're worthy."

[So it's somewhat self-fulfilling.]

"The one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection..."

Wholehearted people live from this sense of worthiness.

[She studied the patterns for six plus years...]

What they had in common was a sense of courage.... "These folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first, and then to others because as it turns out we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection--and this was the hard part--as a result of authenticity. They were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were. Which is, you have to absolutely do that for connection.

The other thing they had in common was this: they fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable nor did they really talk about it being excruciating as I heard of it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say I love you first. The willingness to do something where there are no guarantees."

The definition and purpose of research is to "control and predict."

"My mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability--and to stop controlling and predicting."

My first meeting with therapist I brought in my list of how the wholehearted live.

She's a therapist that works with therapists--"We have to go to those because their B.S. meters are good."
She said, What's going on?

"I have a vulnerability issue. And I know vulnerability is kind of the core of shame, and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears it is also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. I think I have a problem and I need some help."

It took about a year.

"For me it was a year-long street-fight... Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back."

"We numb vulnerability.... And I think there's evidence... We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history."

"You cannot selectively numb emotion." I don't want to feel these--so I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.

"You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects... We numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable and are looking for purpose and meaning--and we feel vulnerable, and then have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin." Cycle.

"The other thing we do is make everything that's uncertain to certain."

"Blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort."

"We perfect our children." ["You're worthy of love and belonging."]

"Let ourselves be seen."

"Love with our whole hearts even though there is no guarantee."

"To practice gratitude and joy in those moments of kind of terror when we're wondering can I love you this much, can I believe in this this passionately, can I be this fierce about this--just to be able to stop and instead of catastrophizing what might happen to say I'm just so grateful because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive."

"Believe I'm enough."

While I adore coworking, incubators... what I want: third mind--mastermind--two or more people, who work toward a definite purpose, in the spirit of harmony

Evan Rosen, in his Culture of Collaboration blog, asks the great question, "Is Coworking Collaborative?" I really like the coworking concept, and have been a fan of Citizen Space since I walked into its cozy environment when it first opened. I recall being thoroughly entranced by its community goals (plus I know and respect both Tara Hunt and Chris Messina). I adore Po Bronson's concoction of The Grotto for similar reasons. The startup incubator model appeals to me too. There is a vital energy in spaces like that.

However, the more I think about when I actually thrive and grow expansively within a work-play environment--it's not freelancing or free agency no matter how many people are buzzing around me, and it's not sitting in an attic scribing the Great American Novel in solitude.

Rather, I thrive in a "third mind" type of environment with others working toward shared goals, shared purpose. I desire immediate feedback and mutual experimentation that escalates toward building something new beyond anything we could have conceived separately. That maybe why I believe that the research laboratory or atelier (artisan workshop) analogy (and, for me, I mean situated in real space, not virtual space) is best suited for me.

I totally related to what Jane McGonigal shared about writing a book. It's too solitary, too much like writing to a piece of paper. For a long time, blogging, for me, was a peer-to-peer cooperative and real-time mutual feedback endeavor (more so during years 2004-2005 when folks had time and inclination to both blog and read each other's works). Blogging reminded me of letter-writing or an intense dialogue in a coffeeshop, but in a many-to-many format rather than just one-to-one. I never wanted to write a book.

"I need to game-ify writing my book...  Writing a book does not provide me with the same kind of real-time feedback, scaffolded challenges, and network of potential allies that a well-designed videogame does....Writing 18 months into the future is just too much like writing in the void!" - Jane McGonigal

I guess I'm seeking to create an environment akin to what Napoleon Hill described in Think and Grow Rich. There, Hill says a "mastermind" or "third mind" is:

"The coordination of knowledge and effort of two or more people, who work toward a definite purpose, in the spirit of harmony.

.... A third mind that asks and answers questions you didn’t know you needed to ask to solve problems and overcome challenges you didn’t know you were about to face!"

Or William S. Burroughs described: "No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind."

Below Evan Rose explains that while cooperation and camaraderie are wonderful things, they're not necessarily collaboration:

"So, is coworking collaborative? That depends. Undoubtedly, including people engaged in different enterprises under the same roof sparks synergies. And without offices or cubicles, interaction can happen on the fly. An entrepreneur working across from a web designer need only call across the table to get design input. A technical writer can engage a software developer with a tap on the shoulder. Relationships form, and trust may develop.

Collaboration, however, requires many cultural elements including shared goals. In collaborative organizations, people come together across disciplines, departments, roles and regions to create value. The shared goal may involve slashing product development time or closing sales more effectively or curing a disease. Coworking invites input from others, but usually without shared goals. One person has a stake in the input, while the other provides advice as a friendly gesture or deposit in the favor bank. Coworking may lead to collaboration, but collaboration is by no means automatic. Of course, coworkers may discover they share some goals and then join forces to start a business or curb climate change or elect a candidate.

The main connection between coworking and collaboration involves people from different disciplines interacting in an informal physical environment. This, in turn, encourages informal interaction which reinforces, but does not create, The Culture of Collaboration."

Stages of community building by M. Scott Peck

Excerpt from the book A World Waiting to be Born by M. Scott Peck (Bantam Books, New York, 1993) via The Foundation for Community Encouragement's website. I still have this book on hold at the library, and will read next after I finish The Different Drum. My notes from The Different Drum are here and here.

Pseudocommunity

For many groups or organizations the most common initial stage, pseudocommunity, is the only one. It is a stage of pretense. The group pretends it already is a community, that the participants have only superficial individual differences and no cause for conflict. The primary means it uses to maintain this pretense is through a set of unspoken common norms we call manners: you should try your best not to say anything that might antagonize or upset anyone else; if someone else says something that offends you or evokes a painful feeling or memory, you should pretend it hasn't bothered you in the least; and if disagreement or other unpleasantness emerges, you should immediately change the subject. These are rules that any good hostess knows. They may create a smoothly functioning dinner party but nothing more significant. The communication in a pseudocommunity is filled with generalizations. It is polite, inauthentic, boring, sterile, and unproductive.

Chaos

Over time profound individual differences may gradually emerge so that the group enters the stage of chaos and not infrequently self-destructs. The theme of pseudocommunity is the covering up of individual differences; the predominant theme of the stage of chaos is the attempt to obliterate such differences. This is done as the group members try to convert, heal, or fix each other or else argue for simplistic organizational norms. It is an irritable and irritating, thoughtless, rapid-fire, and often noisy win/lose type of process that gets nowhere.

Emptiness

If the group can hang in together through this unpleasantness without self-destructing or retreating into pseudocommunity, then it begins to enter "emptiness." This is a stage of hard, hard work, a time when the members work to empty themselves of everything that stands between them and community. And that is a lot. Many of the things that must be relinquished or sacrificed with integrity are virtual human universals: prejudices, snap judgments, fixed expectations, the desire to convert, heal, or fix, the urge to win, the fear of looking like a fool, the need to control. Other things may be exquisitely personal: hidden griefs, hatreds, or terrors that must be confessed, made public, before the individual can be fully "present" to the group. It is a time of risk and courage, and while it often feels relieving, it also often feels like dying.

The transition from chaos to emptiness is seldom dramatic and often agonizingly prolonged. One or two group members may risk baring their souls, only to have another, who cannot bear the pain, suddenly switch the subject to something inane. The group as a whole has still not become empty enough to truly listen. It bounces back into temporary chaos. Eventually, however, it becomes sufficiently empty for a kind of miracle to occur.

Community

At this point a member will speak of something particularly poignant and authentic. Instead of retreating from it, the group now sits in silence, absorbing it. Then a second member will quietly say something equally authentic. She may not even respond to the first member, but one does not get the feeling he has been ignored; rather, it feels as if the second member has gone up and laid herself on the altar alongside the first. The silence returns, and out of it, a third member will speak with eloquent appropriateness. Community has been born.

The shift into community is often quite sudden and dramatic. The change is palpable. A spirit of peace pervades the room. There is "more silence, yet more of worth gets said. It is like music. The people work together with an exquisite sense of timing, as if they were a finely tuned orchestra under the direction of an invisible celestial conductor. Many actually sense the presence of God in the room. If the group is a public workshop of previous strangers who soon must part, then there is little for it to do beyond enjoying the gift. If it is an organization, however, now that it is a community it is ready to go to work-making decisions, planning, negotiating, and so on-often with phenomenal efficiency and effectiveness.”