Dear People -

Thank you for your presence on this network, and your continuing connection to this ongoing creative process.

Here at the end of the year, at the Solstice, I wanted to briefly review and introduce some of what has been going on, and describe some of the new projects and technical things that have been emerging for us.

There are some exciting new possibilities beginning to take shape.  In particular, there is this concept that we have been calling "Portal to Unity", and which may end up with any number of names, somewhat following the Taoist idea that "the Tao that can be spoken is the not the Tao."  I will write more about this project in another email.

For now, I simply want to review some of the new technical methods that are emerging.  These new tools promise some powerful new creativity, and I can feel it in the air.  This is a time of birthing, and something is being birthed.  So, with gratitude and appreciation, I am just doing what I can to quickly illustrate some aspects of our emerging network power.

• One basic new factor -- is a new method for handling email errors and undeliverable messages.  Now that our system runs on this "dedicated server", we have a higher level of control.  The flood of email error messages that used to be handled by hand is now redirected to mailboxes which can be downloaded and processed automatically.  This is an enormous time-saver.
• We are exploring and developing the use of this "Rich Text" editor, which is a writing tool that offers many of the features of a Word Processor.  For me, it's becoming a delight to write with, and I am just beginning to learn how to use it.  We are still discovering how to make this tool work correctly with various browsers and operating systems, but once it is dialed in, it is an absolute pleasure to work with.  You can grab a big chunk of highly formatted information, and just directly paste it in to your document, and it displays perfectly.  That's pretty hot.
• We have created a new "blog" system, that is increasingly fluent, and offers a variety of options for composing and organizing a composite unit of postings and messages.  It is designed to "cross borders" and offers writers the opportunity to share messages and insights between separate groups and networks.  A writer can create as many "blog themes" as they wish, and post as many messages to any theme they wish.  Themes can be displayed on any group where the user is a member.  The blog system is directly integrated into the email/bulletin board system, so any email or bulletin board message can be "imported" into a blog, or a set of blog themes, whatever is appropriate.
• We are developing a system to do "online surveys" -- in the form of questionnaires.  This process is interesting for several reasons, beginning with the fluency of this approach, which allows an online questionnaire to have any number of questions, of a variety of types (short text, long text, multiple choice - two kinds - and yes/no), and any number of multiple choice options.   We are just now beginning to develop ways to send these surveys by email, and are beginning to unfold the powerful "conversational meaning" of this format.  A survey can remain open indefinitely, like a forum topic, and new questions can be asked (inserted into the survey), and sent independently by email.  New questions and options can be based on responses received, so the entire process can become a "cocreative conversation" on a critical issue, that can be guided and tightly on topic.  Unlike the rather overwhelming stream of prosy emails that tend to blow away the internet world, this approach stores all the responses and comments in a web database, and keeps the responses in high order. We are anticipating some exciting new ways to conduct "conversations" when the thematic integrity of the process can be so tightly maintained.
• And there is this emerging new "Portal to Unity" concept, which feels to me like a major application, which I hope to unfold through the principles of "co-creativity" -- probably following "the laws of the circle" as we generally know them.  Put very simply, this Portal project is intended as a way to gather up in simple terms just about every factor and principle and belief and technique that is involved in this emerging and transforming "shift" process that seems to be going on across the planet.  Some of these principles include topics like "everything we know about dialogue" or "everything we know about sacred circles or co-creativity".

A couple of months ago, anticipating the US national elections, we were working on our concepts of "Integral Politics" -- generally, the idea that all communal/political decisions should ideally be anchored in a profound sense of "oneness" -- of absolute unity.  We have developed a powerful metaphysics of "The One", and have literally thousands of quotations and literary citations on this theme, taken from 600+ high-caliber reference texts.  This is something like an avalanche of authenticity.  It is on target.

But how do we move this profoundly metaphysical vision into the real world of politics? 

The answer has to be -- in bite-sized pieces, that people can handle.  We need an entré -- a way to enter into this process, that builds this unity, in an additive and stable way. We need an approach that "compiles" unity from the elements that are out there today.   It's not enough to wave the flag of some ideological doctrine.  We have to build the unity from what there is.  And yes, this is something akin to a "Humpty-Dumpty" engine, that aims at building primal unity from the fragments from everywhere that are our world today.  It's almost a doctrine of "the restoration of Eden".  So, seeing all of these things, there was a powerful calling to devise a way forward that was not so overwhelming and abstract.

This issue, as it began to take shape -- took a little time to deal with, and was at first quite overwhelming.  There are thousands of related simultaneous factors moving in the world right now, that have some significant meaning for this "shift" process.  If we presented a long list of these factors to a person informed on the subject of the emerging new spirituality, they would very likely recognize most or all of them.  But this long list simply overwhelms normal human cognition.  It "exceeds human bandwidth".  Nobody can deal with or conceive or hold all those ideas in their mind at the same time.

So, what ends up happening is -- we can't conceptualize the integrity of this process, except through "feeling" and trust.  We "know" it is going on, but we can't really prove it, or explain it very well.  We look around us, there are a hundred alternative explanations, and they are all correct and interesting -- and, apparently, all partial.  It's hard to put together.

Somehow, we have to call them all into the same environment, and unfold every aspect of this process in a co-creative way, that is highly strengthened and supported by computer network and database tools.  With the right kind of system, we can put 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 simultaneous factors together, and deal with them as independent units, in small bites, one at a time.  The system can hold the integrity that the individual human mind cannot.

So, we are beginning to see this process as the essence of coalition and alliance development.  This is how any large movement of people or ideas brings itself into focus, as it forms around some body of common ideas or dimensions.  In this case, we are organizing a very high number of these simultaneous aspects, and we are compiling them in co-creative and cooperative ("many hands") ways.

All of this feels very in-resonance with the emerging agenda of Barack Obama -- and, might be able to support some of his high idealism, when it turns out that real-politck tends to destroy the idealism.  We are aiming for a very high-bandwidth holism, that can convene something like "the collective genius of the human race", which certainly seems to be the appropriate and called-for response to some of these conditions in the world today.

All of this is in formation, and still taking shape.  But the sustaining force appears to be there -- particularly because this work seems driven forward by this co-creative spirit, where each one brings their small gift to the table, and the entire process is held in integrity through a kind of sacred trust.  It feels to me like this is going to work, and I'll try to tell you more about it soon.

With love, respect and appreciation, and many blessings, from Santa Barbara