Join us in working towards a wiser democracy!

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Subject: Join us in working towards a wiser democracy!

December 2023 Newsletter

As we move into the New Year, we at the Co-Intelligence Institute are seeking to expand our impact.

If you already know you want to donate to our work, just click here! If you want to hear more, read on about our upcoming projects. Then we share a retrospective of where we’ve been - celebrating all that we’ve learned, and an invitation to our last gathering of the year.

Will You Help Us Grow a Wise Democracy?

We’re looking for partners in our journey to expand the reach of our key projects. We are motivated by the deep need for a new paradigm of democracy grounded in wholeness, interconnectedness and co-creativity...

Tom Atlee and CII have been working on co-intelligence since the late 1990’s, building theory and pointing to the many emerging examples in practice. Recently, since 2020, we’ve been working to increase our offerings by creating a slightly larger organization that includes, honors, and develops beyond the work of our founder. As we see humanity facing interwoven global crises, the seek to strengthen our collective ability to co-create our future.

We welcome your support for our end-of-year fundraiser, including your good thoughts and wishes. We also welcome financial donation, in-kind contributions, a few evocative words about the value that CII's work has for you, and/or any leads to potential funders whom you sense could be a “good fit” for our organization.

You can donate directly here or by clicking the button below. Whatever you can contribute is greatly appreciated.

Donate To Grow Wise Democracy

Thank you in advance for your contributions! You can find out more about our projects here.

A Celebratory Gathering
of Hearts and Minds

We have just completed three meaning-making sessions to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Tao of Democracy, spanning Oct 25th, Nov 8th, and Nov 29. A big thank you to everyone who attended and joined us in collective inquiry!

A key part of our work is acknowledging the larger context of the times we are living in. Along with many, we share serious concerns over the decline in electoral democracy and rise in authoritarian governments throughout the world. At the same time, are also called to notice the ongoing efforts toward self-governance that have continued to grow and spread over the last twenty years. And that inspired us to extend an invitation to come together in a supportive context.

In all the three calls, it was wonderful to see and reconnect with many of CII’s friends, old and new. Lively conversations and valuable insights were shared in whole-group explorations and in breakout rooms. Whether or not you were able to attend, here are the harvests:

On our first gathering, we explored “The Meta-crisis as a Doorway to Connection”

On our second gathering, we explored “The power of stories about our shared future”.

On our third and final session, we exploring “Appreciating the Evolutionary Edge”.

While we did not record the first session, here is a YouTube playlist from the sessions 2 & 3. And, if you were not able to make any of calls, here’s another opportunity to connect:

December’s Real World Co-Intelligence community learning call - Dreaming Together to Co-Design the Future

On Friday December 22nd, our Real World Co-Intelligence community learning call will feature CII’s Sita Magnuson and Pasqualina Azzarello sharing the story of the Easthampton Futures Project, an experiment in citizen-driven planning that took place in 2019 in Massachusetts.

Through a series of facilitated workshops, community members were invited to envision and articulate a future for Arts & Culture in their city. Facilitators—volunteer community members and individuals from Dpict’s global network—designed a multisensory environment and a collaborative process for residents to develop ideas, establish principles and priorities, and work with City officials to help bring these ideas into being.

To see the wonderfully rich participatory environment they created, visit this panoramic tour of the space.

Watch the video recording of the call here.

In our interactive call, Sita and Pasqualina will share the long-term effects of this work and propose possibilities moving forward. You can join us here!

What We're Appreciating This Month...

We’ve been appreciating ‘Appreciative Thinking’ itself! On the Friday following Thanksgiving in the US, we had a community call exploring ‘Appreciative Capacitance’ which turned out to be richer in insights than we ever imagined. You can watch the call hosted by Andy and Tom here.

Our explorations from this call also relate to a psychiatrist, author and scholar we’ve been appreciating - Iain McGilchrist. His work delves into the way in which the left and right hemispheres of the brain attend to the world - how our culture over relies on the left hemisphere to the detriment of the holistic, intuitive and big picture thinking of the right hemisphere. This has profound implications for society. McGilchrists’ huge body of research detailed in his latest opus ‘The Matter with Things’ provides compelling evidence as to why our culture desperately needs to reappropriate its ability to see the whole, and to embrace mystery, paradox, conflict and complexity.

Image from Iain’s website: channelmcgilchrist.com

This is the heart of our work at CII: how to bring wholeness into the work of governance at every level of scale.

December's Wise Democracy Pattern

Bringing Understanding To Life

Dry, lifeless knowledge fails to draw people into dynamic understanding for individual and collective wellbeing. So nurture deep realization of important truths, and vitalize people and activities with arts, questions, reflections that draw people into energies and understandings that make sense of their lives and move them to wise action.

Featured Question

How can we help people actually experience what’s important about certain understandings so that it shapes the way they think, feel and behave?

Featured Resource

Sacred Instructions: Creation Songs

https://www.dailygood.org/story/2232/sacred-instructions-creation-songs-sherri-mitchell/

December's Co-Intelligence Poem

We Never Ever Fully Own

Written By Tom Atlee

We never ever fully own

what we believe is fully ours.

We never ever fully lose

What once we thought we really had.

We never fully are alone

And nothing's fully good or bad.

Experience is what we choose.

And all of us are made of Stars.

Nothing is what it seems to be.

All is part of endless Birth.

Changes make us who we are.

And form is change that we can hold.

Rivers dance into the sea

as water snows into the cold.

Who I am sees who you are.

And all of us are made of Earth.

Make me part of endless sky.

Make me fish and reel and rod.

Make me life in the underbrush.

Make me breath upon your lips.

Each word you speak I'll occupy,

each blessed thing each baby grips,

the holy sweat as lovers rush,

for all of us embody God.

Know the dance of dark and light.

Flow where life is gifts enjoyed.

Grow towards centerpoint and sun.

Show what makes the many one.

See what makes each story right.

Let meaning rise and meaning run.

Upon life's canvas paint some fun

for all of us are home to Void.

With nothing lost and nothing gained

amid the dance of joy and strife,

flowers open where I look

and you embrace me everywhere.

Show me I'm already trained.

Teach me I'm already there.

Read me in the open book

where all of us alive are Life.