Proceedings of the IFSR Conversation 2010, Pernegg, Austria
Discussion Paper (Team 3): A Sense of Syntony: The Evolutionary Aesthetics of Consciousness-driven Emergence
Alexander Laszlo
Learning systems for sustainability is a pandragogical orientation serving to open a path of being and becoming that liberates the full potential of conscious evolution. It is easy to make change happen in the world. What takes more presence of mind, heart and spirit is flowing change so that what you do is both a natural, seemingly inevitable outcome of evolutionary dynamics and, at the same time, an expression of your deepest dream and highest vision for what should happen next. My interest in Team 3 of the Pernegg Conversation 2010 is to explore the relevant axiological and dispositional orientations involving insights, practices, principles and lived experiences that can inform the challenge of embodying, incorporating and enacting flowing change in learning systems of all kinds (both formal and informal as well as both academic and entrepreneurial).
To begin with, my research explores the question of how we start down the systemic learning path of evolutionary leadership. The design questions for individual and collective learning systems for sustainability include:
- How do we align ourselves on that path, and where do we begin?
- In what way can we take the first steps so that we avoid trudging doggedly down well worn ruts of habit and reflex and instead are danced along flights of creative inspiration?
All of us have had the experience of being in moments of flow, of true alignment and dynamic harmony with an evolving pattern of being and becoming, and in these moments it seems almost as if we are borne along by unseen currents of creative emergence. That is the experience of syntony as an organizing force in evolutionary dynamics. My interest in this conversation team is to explore how to harness the power of that force through conscious intention and heightened attention.
For learning systems to embody the conscious creation of conditions for sustainability that give rise to syntonious patterns of being and becoming, it is important for them to be designed to cultivate an evolutionary sense-ability. The ability to sense patterns that foster creative emergence places greater importance on process over product. If we get the being and becoming of our life right, the living of it will be a natural by-product. Taking on the mantle of Evolutionary Leader therefore involves listening, learning, sensing, feeling and ultimately knowing the “rightness” or “trueness” of a developmental path that has heart. It is a whole-being engagement, not one involving the intellect alone. In fact, it requires us to think with more than just ourselves!
Conscious evolution through evolutionary leadership draws on our interconnection with the world around us, feeding and being fed by the flowing patterns of creative emergence. Fostering the ability first to perceive these patterns, and then to cultivate them, is the first challenge of the evolutionary leader. Becoming skilled at flowing the patterns into a vibrant and pulsing existence all around us is the challenge of syntony. The design objective of learning systems for sustainability is to explore the essential parameters of this challenge, to model the ideal systemic relationship that can foster it, and to plan how to move through the stages of conceptualization, crystallization, concretization, creation and creation that will take such a model into operational viability. This is the research interest and focus with which I come to the Pernegg 2010 Conversation Event.