The Art of Intersubjective Cosmopoeisis
I share this piece from a posture of reverent humility. It was written over three years ago on March 2023, as an “excerpt” of an ongoing soul-research project around “Collective Soulmaking”. It comes back up again as I’m working on a project called the Sourcekeepers Guild, with my collaborator Tucker Walsh, as well as 35 friends, teachers and mentors who are devoted to the alignment of Soul, Friendship and the Sacred. Once again, I am confronted by the shadow patterns in my being, in my power and leadership. The learnings in this piece of writing came through the active transmutation of the pain, humiliation and struggle of karmic learning that was arising through the creative field of Participation Mystique (that took place from April 2022-October 2022 ) – a project of which I was the sourcekeeper. When I initiated that project, my sincere commitment to the holding of power was to “share power, take 100% responsibility.” Yet in that project, my relentless pursuit of creative vision hurt my friends. The wheel of karma continues to turn – three years later, as a co-source of the Guild, I continue to see how unprocessed shadow and wounding within my vessel continues to hurt those who I love most. It is humbling. The work is never complete. So I embrace the ugly reality of my flaws, my limitations, my shortcomings – tender and beautiful – offering it into the middle as prima materia for alchemy. So much of soul alchemy feels like agony and death, the holy release and purification of what must be willingly sacrificed. The heart breaks open again and again, raw and exposed. To cut through the fantasy of what one “wants” and clings to, so that the heart becomes ever more intimate with what is true. So that heart can see Reality more perfectly. May this conscious suffering be in service to the whole. Amen.
Collective Soulmaking: The Art of Intersubjective Cosmopoeisis
“I’m working on a speculative hypothesis right now that any field that is truly sourced by a source-keeper is a form of “cosmopoiesis” – it transmits a current of eros, a powerful creative life force from the Imaginal realm (a hierophanic field of potential). And this reality field will necessarily distort reality through the density and magnetism of its “middle” – not unlike the way a black hole will bend and distort space-time.
This is fine if it is masterfully sourced and held in a way that is consciously, intentionally, and responsibly coherent. For example, I’ve joked about Participation Mystique* being a kind of “temporary autonomous cult (TAC)”. There is something critical to bringing a metamodern awareness to the fact that any intersubjective field will always be a reality fabrication/distortion field. Fields are bounded, porous containers – lifeworlds – with generating functions that attract and afford specific ways of seeing and being. That is why Collective Presencing is powerful as an intersubjective psycho-technology – because it trains the capacity to bring conscious attunement (and the potential of critical discernment) to what we participate in unconsciously, all the time already. We live within and co-create nested reality fields of nation-states, organizations, cultures, tribes and family systems, of agreed-upon scientific paradigms, myths and metaphors. But what makes a reality field potentially dangerous or entrapping in what James Carse calls a “finite game” is when people lose their capacity to be self-aware that they are inside of a game at all, that they are inside of the “matrix”.
So what happens when more people are able to bring conscious awareness to their co-authorship of these reality-distortion fields, and their innate, latent capacity to source-keep new lifeworlds from the Imaginal, or “from the future”?
I speculate that the highest potential expression of an intersubjective field that is humming with alignment and integrity is one where each actor (or whole) is:
harmonized through intra-personal coherence, where each actor is presenced and holds the self-aware and sovereign view of recognizing that they are participating in “a finite game that is constitutive, entangled and interpenetrating with the “infinite game”; and
attuned to and acts from the field itself ; where each actor can also adaptively attune to and source from the transversal awareness of the group field and its own agentic and animistic desire;
… and when this happens, it will generate the energy to find the recursive equilibrium and toroidal function of exponential consciousness and creativity — cosmopoiesis and the transversal rupture of numinous wholes that desire to come into being.
You can hold this pattern of toroidal coherence as a fractal field pattern that can be harmonised across the intersubjective fields/systems/ecologies in the meshwork of relationships between self, other and world. A whole or actor might be a “part” in a family system, a “divine figure” within an archetypal pantheon of plural beings in the cosmos.
However, it is critical to be in a conscious relationship with not simply the creative potential of Collective Soul-Making, but with all of the risks and pitfalls.
This Collective Soul-making capacity for Imaginal sourcing – of what dharma teacher Rob Burbea names cosmopoiesis, as the discovery-creation of new realities – is powerful, but it also amplifies the unconscious, shadow patterns of the field. Not being able to clearly view and own this power can become harmful – and when it involves others, irresponsible and dangerous. This comes back to why I find Rob Burbea and Catherine McGee’s soulmaking dharma to be such a trustworthy transmission of wisdom – its ground and centre is always the return to the subtle attunement of the body and its fluctuating states of expansion and contraction. Imaginal practice is part of an ecology of practices that requires deep and equal capacities in cultivating emptiness and metta as well (to nourish view and compassion).
The intersubjective field becomes a vessel for alchemical transformation, and creative alchemy feeds on what is unprocessed in the psyches of each person – the karmic material that is asking for active transmutation – involving a far more entangled and mysterious metaphysics than we understand. And this process is intensely amplified by the eros and life-force generated in the field. I sense that this was the case for each person individually, but even more for the source-keeper of the field.
This is why the alignment and coherence of the containment and the vessel is so critical. This containment arises from the capacity to meet and hold intensity (in its immensity and subtlety), and to harmonise and balance the “tensegrity” of active polarities towards the centre of presence. And the source-keeper – the person who calls this field into being and is responsible for it – is one of the fractal wholes of that containment.”
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