David Sauvage - The Future of Collective Decision-Making
David Sauvage - The Future of Collective Decision-Making
Podcast: Emerge: Making Sense of What's Next by Daniel Thorson 06.08.2022
Daniel: Welcome back to the Emerge podcast. Today on the show, I'm joined by David Savage. I'm connected with David at the recent Emerge gathering in Austin, Texas, and I thoroughly enjoyed his presence, even though our connection was pretty brief. And then afterwards, he reached out to me on Facebook Messenger and told me that he had a vision that he'd like to share my podcast about collective intelligence and the need for sacred containers for emergence. And we scheduled a very short conversation just to kind of feel ourselves together and, you know, it was a provocative invitation. And for whatever reason, I was just game.
People reach out to me on this, you know, on all kinds of mediums asking to be on this podcast and generally I decline people who invite themselves. But in this case, I don't fully understand why I was very into it. And so I'm really excited to talk to you, David, and have enjoyed just the way you show up in the spaces I've seen you in and excited to explore your vision. And maybe before we dive into that. Would you be open to sharing a little bit about who you are, what kind of work you do in the world, what you tend to think about?
David: Delighted and grateful to you for allowing me on. I felt that actually when I was reaching out I felt something like “this happens a lot and probably ‘no’ is usually the answer, but I also felt like we would do it.” I would say there's something in the air about this conversation, or there's something that wants to come through this conversation that you and I are subtly attuned to.
I am currently in my house in upstate New York, I live about 20 minutes from the town of Hudson. I think the essential thing to understand about me is that I put a lot of time and energy and care into attuning to my own feelings and attuning to other people's feelings and putting words to it.
About six or seven years ago, I started calling myself an empath, not merely in the sense of I'm really sensitive, but also just owning it as something of a career path. I would do these performances where I would get in front of audiences, close my eyes, invite members from the audience to sit with me, take in their feelings, and then describe what I feel they're feeling as a kind of performance art. So, I'm really interested in the edge realms of empathy, let's say.
I'm also really interested in the intersection of the subtle realms and the political realms, and I think we'll probably go there, here. There is a moribund activist in me. I used to be very activisty, lefty activisty, then I dropped that thread more or less to focus on my healing. Maybe a better way of saying it is the thread dropped me so that I could focus on my healing. And now I wouldn't say I'm on the other side of my healing generally, but I'm on the other side of what there was for me to work through. And now I'm starting to see and feel the hybrid of my anarchist leftist leanings or the synthesis of my anarchist leftist leanings and my understanding and appreciation of the subtle dynamics between people.
A couple more random things about me that are coming up. I used to make a living as a director. I directed documentaries and commercials for many years. I really loved the word and identify with the word propagandist. It has a lot of negative connotations, but I kind of don't care. I'm super passionate about finding ways to communicate meaningful and powerful ideas on a large scale.
I grew up in Los Angeles. My dad's a story and my mom's a lawyer. I have a younger sister and a week ago I hurt my knee really bad and I have been limping around on crutches. So I'm a little bit out of sorts too.
And I think that's mostly me, some of me anyway. I write, I teach, and I appear on podcasts periodically and I'm happy to be here.
Daniel: Great. Thanks David. Also, let's dive into it then. As I said, he reached out to me with a vision that you had that you wanted to share with the world. I kind of leave it to you. What's the best way to open that up?
David: What's coming up first is Occupy Wall Street. So maybe what I'll do is I'll share the vision or the visions in a nutshell so that I don't leave everyone too confused. But as I share them, I recognize that they won't make a whole lot of sense up front and then I'll take the long route to explaining them. How's that? How's that strike you as a narrative strategy?
Daniel: Yeah, let's go for it. Sounds good.
David: Awesome. Before I get to occupy, I'll say what the vision is: It's a vision that emerged at the Emerge gathering. A part of it felt like it came through me, and I'll share that first and another part of it, maybe the bigger part of it, seemed to emerge through a few of us at the gathering. It just landed and I got really excited to put language to it.
The part that came through me is the following sentence:
“The future of collective decision making is the creation of sacred containers for emergence with clear and clean intentions.”
I'll unpack that for a little while and then I'll share the even bigger and bolder vision that was coming through a few of us at Emerge, but this one will start here.
Collective decision making is simply how any group of people makes decisions and I think we all would agree, even people who don't think about it much, that the way we make decisions right now on a collective basis is not just broken, but extraordinarily broken and destructive. The best we seem to have on offer in the mainstream is something like representative democracy and I think most of us in representative democracies are no longer in the belief that they can really do the job. I don't know anyone who really believes that the American political system, for example, without almost unimaginable reforms could possibly make decisions that serve the highest good of even Americans, let alone the world at large, let alone the biosphere. I think there's this creeping consciousness, and this unspoken collective awareness that our collective decision making apparatities are irredeemably broken.
We don't do much better in smaller organizations where collective decision making happens in the corporate world, for instance, collective decision making is generally a function of straight up power, who has the power to make the decision makes the decision and how that power is accumulated, generally goes to the person who is believed to be able to maximize the profits of the organization, irrespective of the damage done to the employees, let alone the wider community, let alone the world at large. We all sense that this is broken.
And what you get on the left, where I tend to hangout, is a lot of theorizing and occasional practicing of something called participatory democracy. And so participatory democracy is when everyone who is relevant to a decision has a direct voice in the decision itself. That's a simple way of understanding participatory democracy. There are periodic movements of participatory democracy that come and go. One movement centered around participatory democracy, that I was a big fan of and a big part of, was Occupy Wall Street 10 years ago. Occupy Wall Street was a radical attempt to organize society, first the little society of Occupy, but with the dream of organizing the larger society of America and indeed the world around the idea of participatory democracy.
I'll pause there because that's a lot and see how all this is landing before I go further. I'm somewhat self conscious at the density of these ideas so please help me lighten them up if need be or whatever you think.
Daniel: I think you're doing a great job of explaining all this and I'm imagining right now that most folks listening are familiar with a lot of the topics that you're exploring. They’re topics that you know I've explored in numerous conversations on this podcast.
And just to add: I actually didn't know that you were part of Occupy. I was also part of Occupy. Were you in New York City?
David: I was
Daniel: What working group were you in?
David: The media working group.
Daniel: How cool! I was in facilitation and info. I was there for like eight months. I bet we met there.
David: Oh wow! I was there for six or eight months too. I mean I was all in.
Daniel: Yeah me too. I moved to New York City to be a part of it. I was sleeping in the square and everything, yeah.
David: Oh well, since I was living in New York City and a little too privileged, I didn't sleep in the square except for one night, but I went for five days a week and spent many an hour there.
Daniel: It's an incredible, incredible place, incredible time. I learned so much there. I feel like a lot of my work was seeded there and so I'm appreciating your presencing of that movement and its relevance to the conversation that we're having now. But I think you're doing a great job. There's nothing that I would add or change to what you're saying. I think you're right on the money and I just wholeheartedly agree with your framing.
David: Yay. And we're about to get into facilitation and occupy Wall Street so which was not which was not my working group. For those who don't know, I'm delighted to share with you that Occupy Wall Street was organized along working groups. And there were, I don't know, this is a rough guess, don't hold me to it anyone, I'm going to go with 20 or so working groups and a working group would just be whatever people were most drawn to doing. So, Daniel spent his energy in facilitation. I spent my energy in media. Other working groups would be like kitchen or medical or direct action. Direct action were the group of people who planned the marches or the protests or any action. Sanitation… you get the idea. So basically it was a self organizing society where people naturally and I would say beautifully, for the most part, gravitated to what they were most passionate about. And it was for both of us, I'm gathering, one of the formative experiences of our lives.
Daniel: Yeah, indeed.
David: Yeah, and it was my political awakening. What I didn't even know was possible, until I saw it at Occupy Wall Street, was that a group of people could come together with different needs and perspectives and spend the time to share what's inside them and to listen to what's inside others until an agreement is reached by all of them, that feels genuinely good and serves the greatest good both of the community there and the larger whole, that the community represents. I didn't even know that was possible and I would wager that, unless you see it with your own eyes and feel it with your own body, you can't really know that it's possible. And it is so different from democracy in the sense that we're used to thinking about it, where you gather people together and usually there are two sides, they fight about it. One side wins the argument rarely on the basis of the quality of their arguments, usually on the basis of their charisma or their leverage. And then there's a vote. The majority takes the power and the minority sucks it up embittered, plotting to win later. This system that I just described, democracy, blows.
Daniel: Yea, Forrest Landry described it as “this kind of the system we have is the perfect technology to divide a population and to polarize them.”
David: Yes
Daniel: And to your point about Occupy and the choice making processes that were present there: that was one of the things that drew me in, that made me fall in love with that whole movement. I remember attending a kind of workshop intro to consensus decision making, which was one of the main decision making processes that we did there. And just falling so deeply in love with this mode of being together, whereby you hear from the concerns of the group and do this creative work to integrate the concerns in order to make a choice, that meets the needs of everybody present, which we kind of intuitively do with small groups like your friends, but doing it on the level of a hundred or in some cases, a thousand people when we're making decisions at the general assembly, the whole group-choice-making-space was incredible, was incredible work. I remember it just being so much work to do that and it is beautiful, meaningful work. And so yeah, I'm right there with you in terms of the beauty and the profundity and the deep significance of that aspect of what we're doing together.
David: Yeah, sounds like we have both come out of that experience holding something in our hearts, and I don't know about you, but it's been pretty uncomfortable to engage with politics in any on the ground way, that isn't connected to the truth of what we saw there.
Daniel: Yeah, for sure.
David: I used to be more conventional, like if you think about even on the left, even on the far left, even on, not the far far left, but the acceptable far left, let's call it the Bernie Sanders left or something like it, we're still in the broken paradigm of convincing people you’re right, amassing power for leverage and getting what you want done, in spite of the people who disagree with you. We're still in that model and there has not yet entered into the political mainstream, even the idea that there's another way of doing it.
Daniel: Yeah, Somebody framed it subsequently, I forgot, might have been Nathan Schneider, who framed it as a prototyping of a new political operating system… that's in a way, what you can understand, what occupy was attempting to do or trying to build, the thing that we would then use as a new way of organizing our society, which is, what it felt like: getting food every day, people taking care of sanitation, people taking care of each other, making choices together.
And I will add though, and maybe you'll get to this, as somebody in the facilitation working group, making consensus decisions with multiple hundreds of people didn't work very well in the end, it actually didn't go so well. In a sense, I got quite traumatized by that experience, trying to do consensus decision making with that many people. And, being a part of a movement that really, really valued inclusivity, that was, I think, one of the tensions that ended up vibrating Occupy out of existence.
David: I agree. And I wonder if we share the same analysis of why it, quote unquote, ultimately didn't work. My analysis right now is that there's something rigid around consensus decision making and there is something rigid around the inclusivity. So if your intention is to get to a decision that everyone consenses upon, you are oriented around what people say, you're oriented around external forms of communication and you are stuck with the will of whoever happens to show up. And you're also stuck abiding by rules that inevitably will be undermined by people who intend to undermine things.
Daniel: Yes.
David: So one conventional problem that that Occupy ran into was, for instance, the biggest veto power you could exercise as a member of Occupy Wall Street was a hard block, where you would cross your arms and basically you're saying through this hard block, that if this goes through, you would leave the movement. And what there wasn't was clarity around who's hard block mattered and who's hard block didn't and how much time to spend with people who hard blocked. And there was a massive difference between a white man hard blocking and a black woman hard blocking. And there was very little deep thought about the intentions of that white man or that black woman and it just collapsed into a stew of unprocessed racial fears, dogmatism and I would just say general immaturity.
Daniel: Yeah, I want to share just a quick story and then I want to spend more time just getting your whole vision, so you can talk once that's all constructed.
As a member of the Facilitation Working Group, we were very aware of this vulnerability in the consensus making process, essentially that there could be agents who weren't on the side of the occupation of Occupy, who had bad intentions, bad faith actors who could use blocks to disable the movement. And so I took it upon myself foolishly, naively, to attempt to create a process by which you could exclude people from the movement. [laughter]
David: Not a job for a white man, my friend.
Daniel: Yeah, no, many, many ways in which it was foolish and naive, but I remember this is the kind of beginning of the end of Occupy for me … was holding the initial meeting to try to solicit perspectives on how to craft this Proposal. And the “who showed up” was everybody that we suspected was an agent, who just completely tore it apart, disabled it, made it completely impossible for me to move forward. And I remember something in my heart actually broke that day with regards to Occupy. I started falling out of love with it. I started getting burned out.
And so, as you're speaking, there's a lot of emotional activation, a lot of memories happening in me, that what you're speaking of was very real for me, was very present in my life, almost every day.
David: Well, I think it was a fatal flaw. And there was no winning. There was no way to come up with a solution to people exploiting the rules that had already been agreed upon, to undermine the movement. There was no winning. So no matter how you tried to hold that meeting, it was hopeless. And if you didn't hold that meeting, it was hopeless. And that is because ultimately no fixed rule will survive somebody who is smart and determined to bring you down.
Dogma will always destroy things. And that is the problem, I think, with Occupy Wall Street.
And obviously, we're both coming from a lot of love and a lot of just admiration for the facilitators, especially who were breaking new ground as far as you could tell. There's a history of participatory democracy and all of that, but for most of the facilitators, it was new ground you were breaking.
And, but my God, we need experiments and they're going to fail and we need to learn from them. So this isn't so much of a critique as an appreciation of what we were able to learn from that. And what I'm learning from that right now, it took me 10 years to get clear on the message. But what I'm learning from that right now is that consensus is not the right goal.
Consensus is not the right goal!
And I want to posit what is the right goal:
The right goal is not consensus. The right goal is resonance.
The right goal is a collective experience of the truth.
What the problem with that is, that it appears, at least to people untrained, as subjective and elitist and it raises the question of who gets to decide what is true then and are we not just replicating blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I am of the belief now that there are enough of us who are committing to embodying, well, at least first allowing, listening to, and then embodying the truth of what wants to emerge through a group, that we can hold the proper resonance that allows for the right decision. And the right decision is not one that everyone consenses upon, even though I think when it's felt, it will be largely consensed upon, but the right decision is the one that resonates through a group of people and feels like the truth. And when consensus driven decision making works, it works because it's doing this. And Occupy had a big spiritual blind spot; spirituality at Occupy Wall Street was a drum circle … and facilitation was the center.
But the point of facilitation is not to get everyone to agree. The point of facilitation ultimately is to allow for the collective intelligence to emerge. The facilitators are not supposed to be mere mediators trying to balance everyone's needs. The facilitators are more like, hold this word lightly, but I think it best more like priests. Not in the sense that they have the authority of God, but in the sense that their job, like the best priest, is to connect you with your own openness to God, your own spark of divinity, your own receptiveness or to prepare the space for the emergence of the divine intelligence.
I cannot imagine a better way of making decisions. I think this is the gold standard of collective decision making. It doesn't mean that we will often be able to reach it, but I find that it's meaningful and powerful to put language to it. And it sits very comfortably at the intersection of what, I don't like this word in this context, but I got no better one what modern spirituality is starting to tell us around embodiments and what anarchist political thought is trying to tell us around participatory, participatory democracy.
It also aligns with what I imagine have been the containers for collective decision making throughout history: you gather people who are capable of listening together around the fire and you sit for days or weeks or however long it takes until the divine speaks through the group. I don't think that that is a new idea. That is an idea that is likely found among cultures all over the world. It is one that we have been, I guess, incapable, or at least reluctant to adopt in our modern world. But I think now with our understanding of participatory democracy and the edge of spirituality among those who would be otherwise simple leftist, but are now recognizing that the revolution that we need is something like embodied love. I think now we can put it all together and say, I think we can say it with authority. I'm going to say it with authority that:
The future of collective decision making or even the future of politics is the creation of sacred containers for emergence with clear and clean intentions.
And emergence in the broadest sense, I'm using the word emergence to mean what happens without force, what arises without force, what arises naturally. So what is arising through the group naturally without force, and then what I mean by sacred is, I mean a conscious attitude of attuning to a higher intelligence. We're not just pretending that's what you think and what you think and what you think are all equal. That is an old, dead, and boring paradigm that causes a lot of frustration and confusion in left leaning circles, but we're also not going to privilege people based on money, power, status, and race. That's even older and dumber paradigm, but we're going to have to start acknowledging that some of us are more equipped to listen and tune in to what wants to emerge through the collective and others of us, and those people who are most attuned to what wants to emerge, and most adept at organizing a group such that it emerges are going to be known as facilitators.
And what I mean by clear intention is that when you gather a group together, if you don't have a clear intention of what you need to understand or decide, then whatever ambiguity is in there will corrupt the container. It could be something trivial. Us five here are now here to decide on where we are going to dinner. That is our intention here and if that intention is held with clarity, then more likely than not, even with a mediocre facilitator, you'll find the right answer. But if the unnamed intention is to placate the person who we all imagine is going to be paying, then you've got a corruption in the intention, which will corrupt the process, which will corrupt the decision.
And the last word I had there is clean, clean means that you are genuinely trying to bring down or allow to bubble up the collective intelligence. The facilitator does not have some hidden, other agenda. And once we get clear on this, and I'm not a big fan of my language here, this is how it's coming out of me, but once we get clear, that the future of collective decision making or the future of politics is the creation of sacred containers for emergence with clear and clean intentions, once we get clear on that, and put that in language that people can get. - This is really crappy propaganda I'm sharing right now. These are just good descriptions of what's happening under the hood. I'm not saying we should put this in a meme yet. - but once we get good at explaining this and good at showing it, I think it will be clear enough to more and more people that this is how decisions must be made. This is decision making itself.
So if we get clear that this kind of container is how we make the right decisions, then in any container or in any organization or in any political system, that comes into contact with this healthy way of making decisions, then the political process will be faced with the decision of whether they want to move toward healthy and wholesome and authentic and like spiritually alive decision making processes, or if they want to stay in the delusion of representative democracy, or in the toxicity of pure power based politics.
We haven't yet had a new mem to pull people into new forms of decision making. You can't go around the world and tell people “trust me democracy works” and then point to America or France, that's a farce. If I were a tyrant, if I were a tyrant anywhere in the world, I would say “are you sure” to my people and my people would say “you know what, you're right.”
So we need a new coherent decision making process that we can point to as something to aspire to. And this is my offering for what that is. It might take 10 years or 20 years or 50 years before it clicks, but I'm pretty sure this is what it is.
Daniel: The first thing I want to share is that, when you said that the right goal is resonance my whole body tingled, right, and I felt like this sense of clear alignment, which we might call resonance. And so that seems like the most significant thing that happened on my side.
I mean, it feels like you're speaking with more clarity, a lot of sensing that I've been doing and maybe we can save this for later, but a lot of my work is preparing people to be appropriate instruments for that kind of truth seeking or truth resonating, that kind of collective harmonizing, that I sense is possible and that I've had experiences of, in these sorts of spaces at the edge of our culture.
And so, I think that the main thing I want to respond with is just, yeah, I'm with you in a deep way.
David: Well, that feels really good. And in a way we're doing, we're doing our jobs here at the level of the soul that we tried out it Occupy Wall Street, which is if your work is to help people become clear vessels for emergence and resonance, that is job of the facilitator in the world, I'm describing, and that does not feel like my job. My job is to propagandize or share what people need to get, so that I can draw them into this world and then you can help center them. [laughter]
Daniel: You're still in the media working group and I'm still in the facilitation working group.
David: Exactly. That's what I'm saying. We're doing our jobs. [laughter]
Daniel: Fantastic, Yeah.
David: Yeah, I'm glad it's resonating. Maybe I'll say more about resonance. The question that resonance is the answer to is, how do we know what the right thing is. How do we know what the best decision is?
And unless you have resonance as the guide, You're left with a bunch of really crappy answers like voting, or even like consensus. Resonance transcends consensus.
The problem with resonance is that a lot of people are liable to confuse resonance with something like satisfaction, or pleasure, or it feels right to me. But there is, for those of us who have done sufficient work on ourselves, a relatively easy distinction to make between this is what I want and this is what feels genuinely true. And if you are not ready to make a distinction between “this is what I want” and “this is what feels genuinely true”, you are not yet in a position to contribute in a meaningful way to collective decision making.
Daniel: How do you support somebody in making that distinction in their own experience?
David: I think most of us have some examples where we were able to feel both, even in retrospect. So you might say “I really wanted it and then I got it. And then I realized that maybe I shouldn't have eaten the pint of ice cream. Because now I feel sick and I kind of knew that before I got the ice cream. I could feel that it wasn't the right thing.”
So in almost every decision that you really regret, there was a split in you between what you wanted and what you needed, what seemed true and what was true. And so, in a way, life is always trying to teach us the difference between resonance and mere desire or resonance and your avoidance.
Daniel: Well, it's really tricky. I mean, so even when you say there's a difference or distinction between something feeling right and something that resonates, I hear those being used interchangeably. I think I've actually used them interchangeably in my own life. So as you're speaking, I'm realizing how there is this challenge around language and definitions and almost phenomenology of these experiences so that we can start to track them better and honor them with their truth carrying nature, right?
So resonance is something to be deeply honored or inspected, what you desire, if it's a kind of clinging ego desire in the Buddha sense, that's actually to be discarded as an obstacle to truth. And yet the untrained mind can see them as being, as you say, kind of indistinct. So it's really, really interesting.
David: Yeah, I guess I'm not so Buddhist here. I would say it's relevance, it's just not supreme. So somebody's desire might be healthy and we want to meet it. I wouldn't say just because you have a desire you're attached, we ignore it. We want to integrate it but we want to integrate it consciously. So like you want this. Thank you for that information, that goes into the pot. But the sheer fact that you want it is not in itself a sign that it is right. It's not a sign that it's wrong either. So it's just more information.
But what's right is when those who are sufficiently attuned to the higher intelligence collectively feel it as resonance. That's what's right.
Daniel: Yes, I think perhaps a better distinction that you're helping me bring forward is that many people who haven't done some kind of training or introspection don't treat their desires as information but as truth claims.
David: Yes. Right.
Daniel: And that if you are able to treat your desire as nearly information, relevant information, then that's also a signal that you would be prepared to enter into this kind of collective choice making space.
David: Yes. And I want to add to that, that we all go in and out of that ability even those of us who are pretty far along. So it's not a clear line like you're ready or not. Some of us are going to be more or less capable at different times. For the last week, I have not really been in a place to make many very good clear decisions, because I've been in pain and fear around my, what I now know to be a small fracture in my knee. And so, one of the hallmarks of maturity too here, in this new world is knowing when you are equipped to be part of the resonance field and when you need to step back because you are distracted.
And also another hallmark here is the willingness to, not just the willingness, the ability to have others tell you, reflect back to you where you are in your capacity and to take that in. So if somebody's … I'm very willing to have somebody say to me, you're not in a place to make a decision right now, and that will not hurt my ego. If I … it won't hurt my ego period and if I trust them, I will defer.
So these containers for emergence are going to require facilitators who are able to reflect back to people where they are in their journey and facilitators who are able to listen to others who reflect back to them, their capacity to hold the field.
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah, and this is resonating with, and maybe this is a different use of that term, but with the sort of term that's often used in this liminal emergent space of sovereignty, right, that you have the capacity to hold your experience in relationship to others and you also have the capacity to know when you are no longer in sovereignty, when you are out of a kind of agentic mode of being and are into a kind of trauma patterning or some other kind of delusion. And that you can then step out, you have at least enough sovereignty to recognize that.
So yeah, and at least in the Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall, their construction of sovereignty was for the sake of the value of coherence in collectives, which is something I think like collective resonance. Right. There's a kind of harmonic that can happen there when sovereign individuals get together in care about something that's important.
David: Yeah.
Daniel: And so I'm just picking up on that.
David: Yeah, I would say maybe coherence is a, if not a requirement, something like it for the kind of resonance that I'm talking about.
Daniel: Excellent.
David: So I want to share the bigger idea. Are we ready?
Daniel: Yeah.
David: All that was scaffolding.
Daniel: Great.
David: The bigger idea is about the movement. So what I shared was about politics and politics is an aspect of the movement, but it is not the movement. Collective decision making is a part of what needs to change in the world, but it is not the only thing that needs to change in the world, it's a part of it.
And I'll use some of the framing that we got from the emerge gathering, even though it's problematic, but at the very least it's simple. So I'm going to steal it.
There was this premise that there are three possible futures. One is a totalitarian one, maybe a techno totalitarian one, where control is used to keep the world running and we see the world trending in that direction in some ways.
And then another possible future is chaos. Not in the sense that the anarchist in me would appreciate, but in the ugly Mad Max sense of the term. Think roving bands of dangerous folks raping and pillaging. And we can imagine the world heading in that direction in the near future too.
And then there's this third possibility, which was called at the Emerge gathering and maybe it's called more broadly, but I didn't know the phrase, the third attractor. The third attractor, it's another kind of world. The best language I know for that world is from our friend Charles Eisenstein, who calls it the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, which might very well be my favorite phrase in the English language. That is where I want to live. I want to live in the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
And so the question is always present: how do we create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?
And obviously, well, not obviously, but it's obvious to me, but maybe it's not obvious to some. It's obvious that we cannot force it. We cannot force the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. If we force it, then it is a function of force and the force will be there and that is not the world my heart longs for, my heart longs for deep freedom and genuine community and natural harmony with earth and with the cosmos.
And even as I use those words, you can feel the absence of force. You can feel the absence of, let's call it the Bernie Sanders approach. We need to redistribute resources in this way. It's coming from a different energy. It's not coming from a desire to set things right through justice, though I too want to set things right through justice. It's coming from love. It's coming from what is flowing through my soul into my voice and the word that I like the most and I've liked for years is: it's emerging. It's emerging.
What do we do to help it emerge is the question that I think so many of us are oriented around, especially if you're listening to this podcast and unanswered that bubbled up loud and clear for a few of us at the gathering is that we can, one thing we can do very powerfully for it to emerge, is to gather people who are genuinely committed to emergence itself, emergence as a process, not just an idea, not a concept, emergence as a process, who are capable of holding space for emergence, to gather such people together with the intention of holding a shared field for the emergence of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible.
So there is a sacred fire that I sense is burning at the center of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible, that is as of now not yet being consciously tended to by the appropriate folks who need to collaborate together to hold it sacred and who will use resonance and coherence as their guide, hold that frequency, rotating in and out per their capacity and then inviting more and more people who can also hold that frequency with them or with us until that frequency becomes the norm.
So back to occupy Wall Street for a second, one of the problems that we both agree on was fundamental to occupy was that anyone could join, including those people who were out to destroy it and there wasn't a way to avoid the problems that that created. Here conscious exclusion is the center of the thing. It's like, are you capable of tuning into and facilitating what wants to emerge in service of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible. Can you hold this with us and if you can welcome and if you can't, whether you think you can or not, you are not yet welcome, please wait. And then in come more of us, and more of us. And I hope that my language approximates it enough that you can feel it, this shared frequency.
I'm a little bit more concretely, it might look like gatherings of facilitators whose intention it is to hold the space for the emergence of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible, working together to find coherence with the ultimate intention of allowing that world to come through. That's the center of the movement that hasn't yet formed, that I was feeling was needed and not yet available at the Emerge gathering. And that I feel is needed and soon to be emerging in the movement.
That's the big idea. And I want to acknowledge that it's not just mine, there were like four or five of us who just kept circling this until we started to put this not quite yet clear language to it, but I'll stop there to see what you got out of it.
Daniel: I wanna pause and just let it sink in. …
Yeah, so what I notice is that there's again a kind of quality of rightness to it. And there's also in me a kind of sobriety that it brings. You know, questions that come up are like, is it time yet? Am I ready? Are we ready? Is our culture ready?
And I even can sense that the training that I've been doing here, I live in this kind of monastic community and I have for a long time, that the training I've been doing is, and I've always felt like it's to prepare me for something like this … and I can feel the longing in my heart too. In a sense, that is both the means and the end collapsed into one. Right. That is the thing. And I could feel that being gestured towards at Occupy in moments, that there was, that means and ends collapsed, but we couldn't hold it. And maybe it wasn't time.
That's the question I'm left with and I hope listeners will forgive me. Maybe you have more concerns and questions, but to me from where I'm sitting, you're giving more precise descriptions to a possibility than I've felt for a long time. And so, I was already “in” in a sense before we met. And then there is this question of timing and rightness of like kairos, the right moment … that comes for me.
David: Well, to the extent that part of my role is to play the shofar, to blow the shofar or sound the bugle for when the moment is. I don't yet feel it.
Daniel: Yeah.
David: So it doesn't feel like it's yet. But it doesn't feel that far away. And my language here is approximate. And I think we want to do better to find better language, so that when it's time to issue the call, it's crystal clear.
Daniel: Yes.
David: And it's not yet. But yeah, it feels really good that it feels true to you and it does feel to me too like what it's pointing to.
And I have one more big idea to share when you're ready. A climax.
Daniel: Yeah. Let me see. Let's pause for a moment.
David: Yeah. I also want to be sure I was clear. So if you think there's something I wasn't clear about, that we can do better at clarifying… I'd be very down to…
Daniel: Well, this is the part that I'm kind of worried about: for me it is extremely clear, it is crystal. But when I take on the point of view of my listeners, I don't … it's harder for me to see.
But I don't … It's like coming up with clarifying questions because it’s consensus-decision-making terminology. It feels artificial to me right now. It doesn't feel real. So I'm not going to do it. And I would invite folks, if you don't feel with it right now, to just rewind the podcast and hear the explanation again or hear the description again. And if you have questions, let them burn you until you get clarity because it seems pretty clear to me. I think there's reasons for that and I think there's reasons why it's clear to you too.
David: I'll trust that. I also really appreciate that. I've never heard somebody who's responsible for an audience say “doesn't feel right to try to clarify for the audience.”
Daniel: I'm emboldened by your framing.
David: Yeah. Love it.
Daniel: So why don't you lay down the final piece? Is this the last piece?
David: This is it. It's probably just a, not just, it's a continuation of the last thing that we said this ultimate gathering, a perpetual gathering, both live and online, both between actual people in real time and also happening in parallel by people who sense it, of facilitators working to hold the space for the emergence of the more beautiful world and syncing up with each other, so that it holds with integrity. I think I know one thing that will come through that. So yes, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible is the intention, but I have a prophecy for what will emerge on route from here to there. And that I believe we are going to experience in our lifetimes, sometime soonish: collective undeniable experiences of the divine, shared collective undeniable experiences of the divine and not inside a religious context, that allows for rational skepticism. But inside a comprehensible framework that allows for anyone with an open enough mind to experience. And that spreads around the world. So, when enough of us are holding a sacred container for emergence, when enough facilitators are holding a sacred container for emergence and enough people who are able to allow things through them are gathered together. Then what will emerge, one thing that will emerge will be the collective experience of the divine.
The closest analogy I have is Mount Sinai. Moses went up Mount Sinai and got the 10 commandments, but it was clear to everyone, down at the bottom of the mountain, that God was present. And I think the age of Moses might be over. We are no longer going to rely on the single prophet with the direct connection to God. We have exhausted that approach to spirituality. Now, as has been said many times, the collective is going to serve as the prophets, the ultimate prophet. And soon the collective will be ready to do that or at least some collectives will be ready to do that. So this is the spiritual awakening that we have been sensing, calling for, intuiting and now it feels on the horizon and I'm able to articulate how we get there.
Daniel: Hmm … The next Messiah is the Sangha.
David: Yes. … That's what I got.
Daniel: Good. Good stuff.
Well, there's a voice in me and I have to imagine that this one is in folks who are listening too, because given my life, I'm actually surprised that it's coming up, which is a kind of cynical voice.
Right. It's saying: “We don't have time for that. That will never work. That is foolish as in the opposite of wise. The wise thing to do is to consolidate political power .. is to do really intense systems design … and networking with. Powerful agents to try to make some kind of significant change in the system. You know, there's all these levers we can pull and strategies we can deploy and …”
I wonder what … I have my own response to that voice in me, but I think it's important to name that kind of cynical voice and what would you say to that?
David: Try. I mean, I don't know. I can't exhaust you of that effort unless you either go through it and realize in a way you can feel that it doesn't work. In the fundamental way. It works sometimes to modulate some of the most horrible effects of our current system, but I don't think anyone believes that organizing in conventional ways to gather political power is going to affect the kind of drastic shift that we need to preserve the biosphere and better, to set up a harmonious relationship in perpetuity between humans and the planet.
Um, so you, you can try. And you'll fail and then you'll learn what those of us who have given up have already figured it out. Or you need to have an experience that shows you. If you have an experience of the divine, a concrete, inarguable experience of the divine, that you feel in your body, then you know already that the accumulation of political power and conventional forms is not going to bring about a meaningful enough shift in time. And then if you can start to imagine having collective experiences of the divine, what more could we want? The most powerful, the most powerful and transformational ideas that have swept the world, or at least a lot of them. The ones we are all in the shadows of are based on collective experiences of the divine. Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus on the cross, sitting with Buddha, these are collective experiences of the divine, unfortunately, as experienced through a man, a single man, but you can imagine it being experienced more directly. So I guess I would say that the cynicism is welcome and a function of where we are.
Daniel: Yeah. Hmm. I appreciate this most because mostly my mind is rendered silent. And I think that's … It feels appropriate. Yeah, and I can feel in the silence longing and the yearning that your vision touches in me.
David: My equivalent of your cynical voice is like, almost like a “whatever” quality in me, just sort of in my tone sometimes. The only way I can hold what I'm saying is to trivialize it somehow? So when I try to vision it, I'm in it. I'm honoring it. I'm doing my best.
But then when I take the pause, something comes over me: It's like “yeah, whatever.”
Daniel: Hmm.
David: I can't, I can't hold it totally either.
Daniel: Yeah. Well, I think, I think none of us can. And that's why it needs to be this collective. Because of my experiences with even really deep cats … that they fall down often, because the world right now is just so burdensome. It's just so harsh. And so it's the idea of doing it with the kind of, maybe it's not the right analogy, but a metaphor of an army of folks who are dedicated to this and who are willing. I mean, this is one piece that came out for me … who are willing to sacrifice, right? Who are really willing to sacrifice.
This was one of the things that was so compelling about Occupy is that there were people who just gave up their lives to be there. You know, they just gave up everything to take part in this because they felt called to, they felt like it was worth the sacrifice and that sacrifice really matters. The folks that you and I know, the folks at the Emerge gathering, that they would be willing to put down their lives to put down their projects, to engage in this kind of way and not that they'd have to … there's lots of different ways to participate, but part of what seems called for and part of what I hope to be able to do when the time is right, is that kind of sacrifice, just to give it up for the sake of something like this.
David: I am so right there with you. To me, it feels not that much of a sacrifice, because I'm so excited, like my soul, so running in that direction, but it does require the giving up of your identity and it definitely requires a jettisoning of the resume.
Daniel: Yeah. Well, and it will appear as a sacrifice to many, right? It would appear like an insane sacrifice to folks who are still embedded within certain narrative structures and what life is for.
And the other thing that occurs to me and that we saw at occupy, the other thing that will come rushing in, is all of the unfelt pain of our world. Right. This happened at Occupy, all the folks who felt like they've been cast aside by our culture showed up for the occupation to have their voices heard. You'd have their pain recognized. So, which of course, with skillful facilitation becomes a portal into that kind of collective experience of divinity, but it was just like feeling into the immensity of the thing that you're pointing to as this adventure, for sure, to say the least.
David: We will need huge containers for the processing of pain and those containers need to be held distinct from the making of decisions.
Daniel: Hmm. I remember when I had that inside at Occupy. [laughter]
Great. Well, hmm. There's a part of me that wants to be like, how do we know when the bat signal goes out, David, where is it going to come from? How are we going to … who pushes the button? What's the next step?
David: Oh, I've always felt like one of my, for a decade, I have felt that one of my jobs, and I didn't even know what it was for was to, like, fire the gun at the beginning of a race. I didn't know what the race was.
I don't know that I'm the one to listen to, but I think I will at the very least have a sense of when the moment is. Or maybe it's more like when the moment is right, it will announce itself through those of us who are sufficiently attuned to it and it could come in any random way, in a way like with Occupy Wall Street.
I have the poster on my wall right now, It says, hashtag Occupy Wall Street September 17th, bring tents. Iit's an image of a ballerina on the bull, the statue at Wall Street. That was the meme that launched occupy. So there will be an invitation for the creation of this container of facilitators for the movements.
I don't know who, I don't know when that meme is launched, but I know that enough of us will know and I feel like it's … the field will shift.We will just, it's like we'll all turn left at the same time and go, Oh, wait, did you hear that? Did you hear that? Not all of us, but those of us whose job it is to be in that facilitation. I think I want to be there for it. But again, I don't know if that's my role. So my precise role is to help with the communications. I know that for sure. So I'll be there, I'll be there with the bullhorn. I'll be there with a laptop. I'll be there trying to figure out the right language.
Daniel: Oh, man. You're speaking me into an embodied experience that … the felt sense of being in Occupy Wall Street right now and it's electrifying. Like what I've dreamed Occupy could have been. I appreciate you evoking that in me. It's a real gift and I feel totally turned on and alive from what you shared.
David: It feels like the call … like everyone's waiting, not everyone, those of us who are consciously and with their hearts oriented around the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, are tuning to a call that hasn't yet been issued and I think it will be issued when enough of us who are far enough along on our emotional spiritual development can hear it such that we can hold it together. So there's some sort of critical mass. It's not as simple as numbers. There's like a critical mass of energy that can hold the frequency of this. And the call cannot come until that critical mass is reached, or maybe another way of saying it is that the call is issued by the critical mass itself. It's like, it has now been reached, we can hold this.
Daniel: Hmm. In that sense it is kind of like the dress rehearsal.
David: Mm hmm. Yep. I mean, it had so many things right. It just was missing, for lack of a better word, it was just missing God, God needed to be at the center and instead. Participatory democracy or the best form of political dogma, my favorite political dogma was at the center, but God transcends dogma. So what needs to be at the center is … maybe a better phrase than God is the way … The way is at the center.
Daniel: Well, thank you, David. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with folks before we end the call?
David: I'm grateful to you for allowing me on your show and I guess I want to say to the folks listening: I really care about being comprehensible. I really care whether what I said made sense. I wanted to be clear, but I trust Daniel's intuition that maybe perfect clarity is not the thing yet and maybe what's here is to be with whatever feeling emerged in you through listening. Did you feel some faint stirring? And if you did, then I am grateful or satisfied. I am satisfied and I am grateful for you listening. So, thank you so much.
