Coherence: Our Next Big Move?
When our efforts are driven by our collective vision
Coherence: “The situation when the parts of something fit together in a natural or reasonable way.”—Cambridge Dictionary
Most readers here are well-informed and likely active in the effort to stem societal and environmental breakdown and to foster a robust and regenerative life on this planet instead. So many remarkable things are happening!
Typical activities include
Organizing people, communities towards specific action
Gathering others and collectivizing around an idea, place, or issue
Sharing methods and practices
Communicating messages and frameworks or promoting ideas through writing, speaking, or discourse
Telling others what we have learned and what we think is important for them to know
Creating groups, communities, movements, and platforms for interaction on a topic
The Second Renaissance beautifully maps “the changemaking ecosystem” of those advocating for a better world, each entity through its own lens and means and the larger shared territories each resides in. It also points to many other such maps.
I remember when I first learned of the Liminal Web, not realizing I was already deeply entrenched in it. I was taken by the interconnecting images of so many familiar approaches and groups involved in creating a new planetary narrative. I felt comforted seeing things diagrammed out as though now they were more real. I also suddenly found myself squarely amidst the generalists and the meta-tribalists and this finally made sense of my perpetual “not fitting in” to any particular genre or community. That was an important ah ha. But the biggest ah ha was, ‘Wow! Look at all these subcultures working so hard towards the promise of a new story!’
You may have your own organization or message and are growing a movement to make critical changes. This is fundamental to our evolution and—even if whopping success is looking a little precarious at the moment—no doubt exactly where we have needed to be. Thank you for doing what you have been doing.
And what if now is time for us all to take a bold new step?
This moment requires boldness. It requires galvanizing in a unifying energy. It requires cohering at the next higher plane. Now is the time to zoom out one notch and put most of our energy towards converging around our already common motivation: the vision of another way of being.
This means turning some of our attention from our own organizing, creativity, and interests and towards the raison d'être behind our actions: essentially, the potential for the more beautiful world we are all imagining. This is the foundational vision that unites these multitudes of groups and efforts, congeals our collective efforts, and becomes the primary driver of all of our work.
This shift from acting mostly from separation (as important and valuable as each of our work is) to acting mostly from the inspiration that powers our separate actions is far-reaching. It unifies and directs the combined energies towards a more streamlined, focused attention. This affects our collective trajectory significantly.
So, instead of creating more opportunities to wake people up to what is happening on this planet, offering models to understand our predicament, or introducing useful healing modalities, what if now is the time to take some of our individual energy and pool it into the next level of organizing: collectivizing the inherent unity.
After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda ended abruptly with the ethnic Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front crushing the ethnic Hutu-led massacre, international Non-Governmental Organizations fled into the country to provide humanitarian aid. Just before that, a million Hutus escaped to neighboring then-Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) while hundreds of thousands more found refuge inside southwest Rwanda, protected from potential revenge by a French military contingent. After a month, the French decided to pull out, leaving the Hutus vulnerable.
Many of the Hutus who had fled to Zaire, soon died by the thousands from cholera on a lava bed-cum-refugee camp on the north side of Lake Kivu. Politics and karmic justice aside, we humanitarians were afraid the remaining Hutus in Rwanda would run across the border to the southern side of the lake. Working for a donor agency, a colleague and I drove over there and found a logistically untenable scenario that could not sustain the influx of massive refugees. Were they to flee, they would more than likely suffer and die for lack of clean water, food, and shelter and our inability to reach them.
With that information, in a remarkable effort, a handful of relief agencies abandoned our fierce organizational independence and united under the attempt to prevent more massive casualties by keeping the Hutus in country so they wouldn’t meet that fate. It was rare that the usually mandate-focused and media- and funding-driven NGOs volunteered together with UN agencies and donors to provide a sense of security from international eyes and humanitarian measures to reduce their inclination to leave. It worked. While some Hutus did cross the border, the massive departure that would have been untenable did not happen. We humanitarians had put aside our attention to our competitive personal and organizational identities and rallied for a greater cause. I still recall it as an extraordinary, unique act of higher will.
I wonder what could happen with a much weightier motivation—that of a global transformation—as we give more unified attention to it.
What might this look like? We’re not talking about the elimination of separate efforts altogether or the relinquishing of our unique offerings; we each continue contributing within our domain and expertise. Now, however, we put perhaps 40% of our attention on our individual activities and give 60% to synchronizing within the larger, underlying intention of a more beautiful world, no matter where we fit in the changemaking ecosystem. This could look like
Speaking first to the new world we are imagining and second to our role in that creation
Placing our efforts within this larger vision and letting the larger energy guide us
Seeing our groups foremost as part of an interconnected web of relationships with a common deep drive towards something emergent
Building relationships across genres, movements, and subcultures with the aim of cohering under this larger vision
Celebrating the sacred and deep co-joined values
Tuning into a new paradigm and letting that lead
This is already happening in so many ways! And now we make it more intentional and place a greater share of our attention on it. This is truly big picture and transformational stuff.
So we need to be clear. What we have done thus far has focused a great deal on supporting individuals finding resonance with each other and within a group. We justifiably want to share and attract people to good ideas, help them see the importance and value of joining in, and create powerful experiences that we can build on. This is all absolutely worthwhile and there is always more to be done on this plane!
However, this is often within the foundation of separation that connects people to our work. The point now is to focus on our united sense that something else is possible—and necessary—which is our underlying motivation of why we do what we do. It is about seeing this transition from the whole, not from a parts perspective. We are in the same spaceship heading for the same distant star.
This big move is about energetic integration. The key here is to tune into the gravitational pull towards a synchronized vibration that resonates towards a planetary transition. Yes, very lofty.
On one hand, we might resist this switch in focus because we are so intent on the value of our individual work. Understandable. On the other hand, the ongoing, uphill individual exertion is exhausting! Just beyond that, we can feel the lure of deep mutuality and a final relief from the struggle and pain of solo efforting. We might also recognize that subconsciously (and consciously) we were always heading in this direction; that is, it feels ultimately natural to synchronize in service of something larger. It is the lengthy process of winding up our Pisces era of the individual and moving into the Aquarius age of interconnectivity and bigger picture.
Ultimately, I think we can simply fold the paper at any time and live the new paradigm now. But, to put it into our familiar linear model, cohering has been happening within our groups and communities for quite a while. Now is time for our groups to cohere. Perhaps after that, we will see whole populations and then planets and galaxies cohere and then we will cohere with coherence itself! Intentionally taking this next step could be a monumental move down that road.
Want to dialogue? Write me at kimmaynard@substack.com