Participatory Practice
Consciousness, the self and the spiritual A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He [sic] experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. (Einstein, 1950, cited in Calaprice, 2005: 206)
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While thinking in ecosystems terms helps us begin to understand how participatory our world is, it is not sufficient. The relational also includes our inner world and its relationship with the outer world, as well as our relationship with the intangible, that which we cannot see and measure. There is a dynamic relationship between the inner and outer. As Macy and Johnstone (2012) argue: The distinction often made between selfishness and altruism is misleading. It is based on a split between self and other, presenting us with a choice between helping ourselves (selfishness) and helping others (altruism). When we consider the connected self, we recognize this choice as nonsense. It is from our connected selves that much of what people most value in life emerges, including love, friendship, loyalty, trust, relationship, belonging, purpose, gratitude, spirituality, mutual aid, and meaning. Our ideas, thoughts and visions of the future affect what kind of future emerges.
Our intentions become the way we contribute to the design of the world through our collective unconscious. This requires paying more attention to our intuition, our feelings, our perceptions and experiences: listening to our inner world to make more sense of our outer world. Heron (1996) calls this ‘in the presence of something’, a process of engaging all the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, experiencing it with attention and intention, like when you engage in mindfulness practice. As Scharmer and Kaufer (2013: 31) point out, the role of this inner knowing is rarely talked about by activists but is reflected in the way they speak truth to power: ‘They are connected to deep sources of knowing, sensing the future that wants to emerge.’ Senge et al (2005), in their book Presence, see such a participative experience as that point before which transformation takes place, and draw on the analogy of the experience as one of being ‘at one with nature’. Such presencing does not just happen automatically but requires us to commit to paying attention to the underlying source of our actions in the world, our intentions and our habituated thought patterns. Merleau-Ponty (1962) argued that the experience of perception is our presence in a single moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us. For him, perception is a nascent logo, it teaches us outside all dogmatism, and in his sense 84
