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The Co-Intelligence Field Concerned with The Universal Dance

Return to Five Fields of Co-Intelligence

Healthy participation in the co-creative unfolding of a cosmic story and in universal forces infinitely larger than we can comprehend.

Central inquiry: How can we connect more consciously with the universe's natural Dance of co-creativity and help it work through us towards more positive outcomes than we can envision by ourselves?

Forms of co-intelligence particularly useful in this field (see Five Dimensions of Co-Intelligence): Participation in the universal dance involves, naturally, communion with universal intelligence. Such communion requires a good measure of wisdom -- and can generate wisdom as well.

Sample projects in this field: Individually and collectively we can: Move beyond dichotomies (certainty-uncertainty, control-victimhood, good-bad, right-wrong) to realms of greater wholeness and responsiveness (learning, participation, compassion, appropriateness). Let go of outcomes and attachments. Appreciate and celebrate what is. Love unconditionally. Learn everything we can about wholeness, interconnectedness, self-organization, flow, co-creativity. Explore and celebrate The Great Story of the living unverse and our role in it. Expand our sense of identity to discover the other in self and the self in other until we realize we are "one with everything." Practice co-incarnational manifestation. Connect to the still, responsive center out of which co-creative energy flows. Expand our sense of working with Nature to work with the nature of everything in our lives (such as educating children by following their natural interests, inclinations and aptitudes). Dance, practice improvisational theater or jazz, or do some other creative activity that involves moving with the world in and around us. Learn to value the quality of the journey as much -- or more than -- the destination.

Comments: To the extent we are willfully attached to certain outcomes or qualities at the expense of other outcomes or qualities, the flow of the universe becomes distorted or impeded as it moves through us. This doesn't mean we shouldn't work for what we believe in. Nor does it mean we can't be our full unique selves. After all, our actual passions and selves are all part of the universal Dance. However, we can honor and love the life force that's operating in any situation we're trying to change -- and then we can ally ourselves with it, become one with it, and move more fluidly with it wherever it is going. Life tends to counter entropy and increase possibilities, and we can support that kind of energy in any situation.

The "universal dance of life" can be hard to talk about. In one sense, it is happening all around us all the time, and is therefore totally obvious. In another sense it is so totally inclusive, constantly changing and richly nuanced that it evades any attempt to characterize it one way or another. If we aren't careful, we lose more than we gain when we subject The Dance to analysis or proof, because when it is carved up and separated out it appears to be something other than the dynamic whole it actually is. So this field is often best apprehended through faith, love, appreciation or insight. Some people use the nice parts of it as a fuzzy-warm refuge from the hard realities of life. Others find in its wholeness an inclusive place to stand that embraces all dimensions of life -- a place where they can experience life in all its intensity -- passionate, tragic, comic -- while calmly witnessing it all unfolding like an awesome miracle in and around them. All viewpoints -- even those that find any notion of The Dance nonsensical -- are part of The Dance; each has its co-creative place.

Some individuals, groups and tribal cultures have highly evolved cooperative patterns that are very congruent with The Dance of life. It makes me wonder: Is it possible to have similarly cooperative cultural patterns in large, complex civilizations? What would a cooperative Dance look like in the U.S. or China? Do certain sizes of population and levels of complexity impede the fluid responsiveness needed to consciously Dance together in the fields of co-intelligence?

Each insight brings more questions, as the cycle of evolving coherence unfolds...


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