• What percentage of the community needs to turn up to inquire about community Purpose?

  • Are cities discovering there is a peak size or a form of relationship that enables optimal wellbeing? (and/or climate change responsiveness?)

  • When we notice the tensions between individual agency and collective consciousness is there an uber-voice that presences the whole ecosystem?

Local Purposing

These last few months I have been dedicating much of my energies to catalysing a Vision and Purpose Quest in the Ecovillage Findhorn in northern Scotland, where I live.

In the process of designing a Vision Quest and then following the paths that people are attracted to travel, we have re-affirmed many of the processes Integral City has identified in earlier times in other locations, working in towns and cities. It appears that key fundamental questions still reveal realities that are the energizers for incubating change in our human ecosystems (no matter what size):

  • What works around here?
  • What doesn’t work around here?
  • If you were mayor for a day, what is the first thing you would change?

These are questions I started using in much larger urban settlements than ecovillages and that I thought would still make sense to use here (see Book 2). And so the engagement with these questions does indeed raise individual interest, energizes groups and even releases resources – especially when they are interwoven with the spiritual practice of Attuning to the Silence – the greater Field of life that flows through all of us.

It is intriguing  and inspiring for me that these core questions still have power. Their simplicity means that most everyone can answer them. They are a potent place to start an inquiry and generate a Field of engagement where the 4 Voices  (citizens, civic manager, business/innovators, civil society) of the ecovillage can notice the patterns that connect them.

But now that I am moving forward with focalising this inquiry in the ecovillage where I live, I notice a peculiar experience – that it seems more difficult to live (comfortably) in the ecovillage than it does in a larger town or city?

Why should this be? Perhaps it relates to the proximity and intensity with which human interaction takes place in the ecovillage? Even though our ecovillage has outgrown Dunbar’s number (of 150 key relationships) it still hovers in that zone of natural connections – we have about 200 houses. And when people turn up for the community engagement  processes, we are numbering between 55 and 150 in attendance.

But whether you attended group interactions, or stayed on the sidelines, in the ecovillage most everyone has an opinion that they feel entitled to express.

So the discovery experience invites not only curiosity but it can get diverted into blaming and criticizing even before the whole process has been completed. What is the difference between having an opinion and taking responsibility? The exploration of this question is vital to the ecovillage’s capacity for change.

We are discovering that the identification of Purpose opens the doors to not only an exploration of Vision, but also invites Mission and Aims and Goals into the process. We move from the demonstration of Mutual Trust and Respect (MTR) for each other to the invitation to join forces and create the conditions for outcomes and outputs. This can even mean commitments to timing, budgets and expert resourcing. It requires us to move from the general to the particular.

And when you live in an ecovillage this can become uncomfortably close to home – because those resources of time, funding and resourcing are found in the very people we live next to, interact with in life, work and play and depend on for safety and security. So we risk asking for and/or taking on the intentions to Dream, Design, Deliver, Debrief not just as an impersonal Appreciative Inquiry that we might do in a large workplace or a city with many neighbourhoods – but as a commitment to every day living and the quality of life.

Whereas if you lived in a city, you could engage in all these ways – but you have the opportunity and option to walk away from them until you agree to meet again.

In the ecovillage you may agree to a formal time to convene for exploration, but you have an infinite loop of relationships with those same people you will meet daily in the shop, at Taizé, at the café, walking on the street, strolling on the beach, minding children, attending an art exhibit. In an ecovillage there is no escape from each other because of the proximity of life interactions.

So perhaps this explains the hesitancy for some/many to get involved? In an ecovillage accountability is an uncomfortable reality that not everyone wants to make explicit.

City Distancing

Whereas in the town or city, escape or distancing is possible. Intense engagement is not measured as 24/7 but perhaps 1/14 or even 1/30. There is both greater distance, more people to involve in the process, more facilities to use as resources, and budgets from the public and not-for-profit and profit sectors. So the responsibility (aka burden) of any projects is more widely shared. In the city we even take this for granted and don’t bother to get personally involved. If we want, we can receive all the benefits without doing much (or any) work. In fact we can often simply pay a fee or tax and it is done for us.

However, recently people living in cities have experienced a challenge to our assumptions about town and city capacities. During Covid lockdowns, our access to town/city resources was severed and many neighbourhoods discovered the power of creating “urban ecovillages”. People realized that they had to depend on their neighbours and/or offer help to those less able to look after themselves. And from these local outreaches we saw the emergence of Community Action Networks (CAN) (Alternative) . In generally self-organizing ways, people came to know each other to help themselves survive the constraints of lockdown. Now that the need for the CANs has mostly disappeared many people who discovered the value of CANs, have not returned to the impersonal relationships they had with city departments. They are working to keep their CAN alive. And discovering both the potency and invasion of a kind of village life into individual citizen expectations.

Many are finding these closer relationships are rewarding and don’t want to give them up. Some (like Cool Blocks) have developed whole systems to connect, consolidate and integrate their local intentions and attentions. And in the process neighbours are developing systems of resilience and regenerativity.

4th Voice

Another outcome of this rediscovery of villaging lifestyle is a recognition that collective consciousness arises beyond the voice pronouns of 1st (I/We), 2nd (You), 3rd (S/he, They)  – it is an uber-consciousness that Scharmer/Pomeroy call the 4th Person.

In some ways their 4th Person is a phenomenon that arises from calling the Integral City 4 Voices together as representing the whole system. Their 4th Person is identified as a Field arising from and beyond all the sensibilities and consciousness of the perspectives we take for granted in daily conversation/life. But Scharmer/Pomeroy point to the power of integration that the 4th Person brings. This aligns deeply with Scharmer’s call to Presence ourselves – not just as individuals but as collectives. To become aware of the Field of Intelligence that arises because we invite in Silence as well as the spoken word (taking the Power of the Evolutionary Intelligence at the centre of the Integral City GPS).

And ironically this takes me back to the power of the Ecovillage – because certainly at Ecovillage Findhorn attuning to the Evolutionary Silence sounds very similar to what Scharmer/Pomeroy propose is the eloquence of the 4th Person or 4th Voice – to bring us into the Unitive Field (Currivan) .

Patterns of Human Interaction

So from Purpose to Placing to Presencing we discover a fractal, holographic pattern of human interaction – that connecting the system to more of itself, enables our ecovillages to become coherent, our neighbourhoods to become rewarding containers of connection and our 4th Persons/Voices to be heard in the power of their (shared) silence.