Being Relateful, Three Frames

Self-Awareness & Alignment 🎚  

This week I noticed how often I describe Relatefulness from the perspective of an individual’s experience in a relationship. This frame makes a lot of sense; it’s quickly accessible experientially.

From this view, relational mindfulness helps us explore a nearly infinite array of questions like: What are my blindspots? What am I responsible for here? Can I change so the we/world changes? Can I love what is? How can I find peace, no matter what, without bypassing? Where do I abandon myself, when I could bring more of me into the relating? Where do I withdraw or dissociate, when I could stay present to more discomfort—and gain more insight, freedom, and acceptance? What unconscious rules and norms am I following in groups—and thereby upholding? How can I skillfully choose differently or surrender more fully? How am I reifying my whole sense of “I” in the first place? How can that be transcended? How can “I” be of deeper service for the divine?

More individual presence around relating is awesome, but it’s not the whole picture. It relegates us to the realm of the personal. It doesn’t address many of the confusing aspects of being a human, or the ways that being relateful can innovate and help us in our infinite interdependence.

Group-Self Awareness & Collective-Alignment? 🧲

Another frame on what we're doing: How do groups become more group-self aware? What are we blind to, what interactions do we enforce/exclude, how do we update, what do we defend, what can we let go of? What external incentives corrupt our purpose? What larger motives are our collectives already serving (and do we want to be?)? What happens when we look at the self as the product of relating, rather than the cause?

I believe these inquiries require different methods than becoming more conscious individually. Flow sessions in particular offer us a chance to actively inquire into our collective unconscious. The quirky and minimalist structure of Flow is uniquely suited for learning how to get autonomous beings to act together while maintaining unique points of view, leadership-through-being without demanding a shared ideology or prescribed set of rules.

This opens the door for looking differently at collective alignment, which I think we need to get better at to address the biggest problems facing humans today.

The Ethics And Relationships Between Individuals and Groups 🍱

Third Frame: We can see Relateful flow practice as an exploration of the relationships between individuals and collectives. I think this is especially interesting in ethics: How do collectives take responsibility for our collective impacts, when it's not the responsibility of any particular individual? Or is that ever the case? There are a lot of wise philosophical and political perspectives on this.

Ken Wilber's twenty(ish) tenets of evolutionary systems—which address holons and their properties—are especially pertinent, but how do we use this knowledge? How do we embody it? When we're in a dilemma, with people, what do we do? We’re struggling these days with our extra potency (eg: Nukes), so I think there are extra questions to ask. For example, I started looking at the AI alignment question less technically (How do we get this technology to do what we want?) and more interpersonally: How do we align our civilization, when we're already largely optimizing for what's most expedient, rather than most helpful?

With love, Jordan