On June 18, 2024, Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson, Ruth Shilling, and I heard from the guys upstairs in the course of a small ILC group meeting. Their theme: How a few people working together, forming a temporary group mind, in effect create a new level of organization with its own peculiar possibilities, rather like what we are as individuals in bodies. Something to think about.
TGU (through Frank):
You as one individual in one body are a community that functions as a unit. But you [referring to the four of us functioning together at the moment] can form another layer of organization.
As above, so below – the same sense. What you’re accustomed calling a “group mind” is the equivalent of an individual made of communities. It’s temporary, but nonetheless, it’s an individual.
After all, you’re temporary, too, and if you don’t believe us, wait until you die, and then we’ll tell you.
Everything that could describe that larger sense, that larger group mind, could contradict itself if you looked at it from a different point of view – which is what’s happening. So you can look at it and say, “Well, it used to be four different units, now it’s one unit: That’s change.” Or you could say, “They’re the same strands, containing all of them, but now they’re working together: That’s continuity.” Both of those are true.
You could say, “There is conflict among them. There is cooperation among them. There is indifference among them. There is unity.” You see. Reality doesn’t contradict itself, but it contains all contradictions. So, all of those things can be equally true, and it depends upon your ability to either keep your definitions loose or change them.
If you can change your point of view from here to here to here, then you can sort of see it in the round. But the difficulty with one point of view is it gives you perspective, and makes that perspective look real or more definite, more factual, than it is. It’s only a way of seeing things. Okay.
You’re all doing your best, and you’re all working hard to get the communication. That’s why you’ve come as far as you have so far, But to expect to come to a common understanding of it… You can come to a common understanding if you keep it imprecise enough, if you keep it more of a gestalt than a definition. You’ll get a general idea of it.
But to go beyond that… Look, there’s nothing wrong with what you’re trying to do. We’re just saying some ways work easier than other ones.
We will also say, though, that sometimes dead ends are very productive. So we would never say, “That’s a dead end. Don’t do it.” We’ll just say, “Well, that’s a dead end. Do it, if you want to do it.” Because, you know, who knows? It may turn out to be very productive.