In Devon in the Totnes area, right now, a network of Men's and Women's Initiation Groups, and 'conscious marriage' Partnership Groups, is busy with subtle and skilful revolutionary work. Gently and wilfully, they are pioneering a cultural alternative. The area has got more therapists than therapees, more workshop leaders than workshoppers (which helps - the experience is there), and together, hundreds of people are pushing beyond the introversion and individualism of their various quests into the unknown territory of community reform, of cultural modelling - into realising the vision of a dynamic, co-creative Questing Social Body. I have been at the core of this 'alternative social engineering work' since its formal inception in 1994, within the structure of the non-profit making organisation 'Balance'.
Elisabeth and I had had the chance of a month without the children. We'd lived it naked in a cave in a cove in the south of Spain. We'd fought and danced and swam our way into a deeply present ritual space. Then on our return to Devon I wrote this:
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To stand naked before the mystery of life- naked in the unknown...... yes. To stand untamed men, women, flesh, blood, under the sun, under the moon..... yes. To love and hate in awareness, To grow whole, gradually, bitterly, gloriously...... yes. To know the psychology of our being - to know oneness and difference - to know dignity and humility, significance and insignificance - to not know..... yes. To affirm all of this and intuit the pivot point, the edge, of wise action - and build houses and homes and live together...... this is balanced community. |
That was the gong. That was the frequency, the resonance. But behind it there was an intellectual framework and a sophisticated plot for social reform...
My path, like that of many of us, has been long and tortuous. After my hippie years of hitching and smoking and magic and freedom and chaos, for a decade I played the part of a shaven, robed Hindu monk - in a fundamentalist sect. By the time I finally risked damnation (or at least, rebirth) and fled into therapy, I was something of a ghost. I could not integrate into the trivial and vicious cartoon universe of modern culture, but nor could I bear the self deceit, self denial and babyish arrogance of a rigid, archaic spiritual culture. But throughout the healing - the confessing, the sobbing, the raging, the growing up - I thought and listened and wrote. In refinding my heart I did not become anti-intellectual and it was in researching spirituality and politics at Lancaster University that I came to feel peaceful and balanced and clear enough to act.
My thinking crystallised thus. Firstly, that the social structures in pre-modern cultures were intended to facilitate transformation. By transformation I mean growth in openness to and awareness of The Great Mystery Of Life. And I am not romanticising ethnic cultures, nor minimising their dogmatism, oppression, ethnocentricity or fanaticism - I am referring to their intent, as they saw it. In Mircea Eliade's terms, all pre-modern cultures were sacred cultures.
Secondly, it was clear to me that the social structures of modern culture do not attempt to facilitate transformation. As I have written elsewhere (Social Structures and Transformation) "the truth of modern culture is so appalling, so shameful, so horrific... And we are so blandly accustomed to it... This is such an ugly culture... And we are so disempowered... Our social vision, our social expectations, are so low... We have lived under the tyranny of an anti-transformative culture for so many generations, that we have forgotten... It's the stuff of fairy tales, of wickedness hanging over the land, and of spells, and of loss of memory...."
And thirdly, I came to believe that today's challenge is to create modern social structures to facilitate transformation. By modern I mean structures which acknowledge the individual, which do not impose, have no absolute hierarchies, are open, flexible and dynamic.
So when we returned from the sparkling skies and seas of our cave life in Spain, our call was about courage, and rawness close to life and death, and about holding each other.
| We'd fought and danced and swam our way into a deeply present ritual space |
But there had been plenty of forethought. We knew the areas we wanted to work in - the social structures we considered, anthropologically, to be the basic building blocks of a culture. the Men's Community, the Women's Community, Partnership, Community Organisation (decentralist politics), and Community Celebration (focused around the seasons). And we knew these social structures had to be nurtured in a modern mood, in the mood of co-creativity.
But as we all know, it is not what you know, it is how you know it. When, by word of mouth, the call began to circulate, and men and women began to congregate for our first Men's Initiation Group and our first Women's Initiation Group, we came up against our own inexperience and immaturity. Our own, and that of others. Not so much in the 'what' of community reconstruction as in the 'how' of co-creativity.
The 'what' was reasonably refined. Our approach to weaving together a local transformation facilitating Men's Community and Women's Community was this. We saw initiation as process and product of collective healing journeys - so we planned to convene co-creative initiation groups, link them up with support and inspiration through community conferences, festivals, and so on (establishing cores of initiated adults), and then watch this lead, eventually, to the reconnecting of the generations... There were many open questions but we had a workable game-plan for recreating these two basic social structures.
Similarly, for the partnership work, the 'what' was fairly focused. If partnership was to be a shared transformative journey, neither the traditional model nor the romantic model was enough. We needed to empower each other in creating and developing our own models. So again, we would convene groups, link them through community magazines, conferences, and so on - and another transformation facilitating social structure could emerge, gain status and become public property.
At Lancaster I had experimented with co-creative ceremony, I had written an article on co-creativity entitled Flexible Form, and co-creativity was one of the buzz words of our marriage. But what we still did not appreciate, then, was that co-creativity is not the automatic result of the interaction of assorted individualistic inputs. It is a conscious collective orientation. It is a principle and it has to be agreed in advance. And in general, people are not experienced in it.
In my article Flexible Form I contrast the Fixed Form of tradition with the Formlessness of modernity, and I propose Flexible Form as a way forwards - a way of working co-creatively which preserves the focus and continuity (of form), and allows the unpredictability and sense of responsibility (of formlessness). What I did not appreciate was just how 'collectivised' the consciousness of a group needs to be in order to co-create. That to co-create we need not only to stay close to our individuality, but also hold an awareness of ourselves as part of the larger organism of the group. I have often talked glibly of Co-creative Social Structures, but as my experience matures, I am more and more concerned that groups understand co-creativity intellectually, and, dare I say, believe in it. Not as Absolute Right, but as right, right now, and that with that foundation, groups then come to really understand and believe in it, by practising it.
| I could not integrate into the trivial and vicious cartoon universe of modern culture |
Our other large learning around Co-creativity has been with issues of equality, authority and power. At first, we did not realise the extent to which we were inviting people to participate in a directed co-creativity. We explained, for example, that these Initiation Groups were not Support Groups. That they would, of course, be supportive, but that they were not only for sharing, they were intended to be sacred journeys through the wounds, one by one, of male/female disempowerment. The groups were being invited to co-create their own maps, to decide which lands to visit, in what order, how they would travel... Yes, but, nevertheless, although Elisabeth and I were inviting them to co-create, we were not giving them full creative freedom. They could co-create, but it had to be a journey, a sacred journey, a thematic sacred journey with a purpose, initiation. There were parameters, there were conditions upon their co-creativity. And we were not aware of how directive we were being. This was partly inexperience, but also partly immaturity. And we are still working with issues around self-worth, fathers, kings, competition, self-assertion, authority and power.
The same happened in our first Partnership Group. You could co-create your own model, we explained, but it had to be a model (and this we did not explain). We did not realise the co-creativity we were suggesting to these Men's, Women's and Partnership Groups was so directive because to us it all seemed so obvious. How could initiatory work be anything but collective journeying. How could Partnership work begin anywhere other than with the moulding of new vessels? And our opinions have not changed. What has changed is that we realise we have them. Progressively, in all the groups we have established since, and in all of the groups other Balance facilitators have convened, we have acknowledged our standpoint. We have acknowledged that we hold a vision, that we are sharing a vision, and that we are inviting people to participate in it. But we also claim that that vision is not disempowering. On the contrary, our experience is of empowerment, unity and high spirits.
We still believe that the challenge is to establish transformation facilitating social structures. We still believe that Men's Communities, Women's Communities, and Partnership are fundamental among them. And we still believe these social structures need to embody the principle of co-creativity. Co-creativity still seems to us to be the essential mood of progressive modernity. It implies equality, listening, give and take, trial and error, exploration, self-determination, responsibility. It still seems to us to be the ideal mode for the modern mind. But we are now less naive in the degree of competence in the art of co-creativity we expect. And we now take responsibility for the degree of control we are exercising in pioneering a co-creative transformative culture.
In this article I have tried to weave together something of my personal story, the philosophical and social theory behind Balance and the Totnes Experiment, and the telling of our trials and errors and learning. We are deliberately limiting our activities to the local area, with a view to modelling something which could be duplicated elsewhere, although I am sure the same seed would grow very differently in different areas, in different atmospheres.
Information about Balance can be obtained from:
Balance, Palston Park, S. Brent, Devon TQ1O 9JR
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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