Image by Audrey Helen Weber
Collective metîs
More notes from our adventures in collective intelligence
Once a year we hold a work period to explore Collective Intelligence. This gathering directly engages the idea that a group can coordinate energetically to become a receiver for higher intelligence. There is this idea that “the community is the new guru” and we’re pushing it as far as we can. By decentralizing the power structure of information flow from “talking head at the front” we move toward a spontaneously emergent wisdom shared by the whole Body.
In terms of metis (a term I will be posting more about soon), I have no doubt that as our collective skillful means increase and cohere, the possibility of decisive, instantaneous group understanding (and action!) increases as well. One signal of this is when a group receives a unified message through individually varied media. Just such a thing happened at our 2025 gathering when the wisdom of Thresholds continued to emerge from seemingly unrelated activities and teachings. Another signal of this increased possibility is the observable phenomenon of individual participants risking more than they normally would – stepping out with increasing boldness into uncharted seas. That happened this year.
Our in-person, Collective Intelligence work period relies heavily on a few basic inversions.
One is the front post—the person opening, talking, delegating roles, holding and shaping. We could call it the post of “the Responsible.” Typically this post is occupied by a single person, or sometimes two, across a given retreat…people get quiet when that person walks into the room. So instead we ask participants to take turns fully occupying that post. We let the post become very fluid, a flow of people constantly taking it up and laying it down. It is emphasized that the whole body share in a sincere willingness to fully join, and commit to what any one “Responsible” may bring.
Another inversion is from my body to larger Body, returning continually throughout the gathering to the fact that “I am a Part of a greater Whole.” This is something like group-remembering rather than simply self-remembering. The Larger Body is formed by individual parts and everyone brings something unique. Each has a different view and every one of those is relevant to forming the Body. No part “thinks of himself more highly than he ought.” No part decides in advance that they have less to offer. Every part constitutively belongs to the Body.
A third inversion is the schedule. People quite like having a printed schedule in advance of in-person retreats, stating exact times by which they can then plan their personal phone and Zoom calls. This is an attitude fostered by guru culture, evidenced by the fact that people will skip any and all scheduled activities, but never the guru. So to mess with the schedule, we put up a white board with a lot of empty slots and unspecified times. The empty slots are there for people to write their own names in – this is where they will take up the teaching post for a time.
The breaking-up of rigidity is marvelous to watch unfold. The so-called “responsibles” swap slots because their outdoor activity wants better weather; half-hours are horse-traded, careful planning is jettisoned last-minute in favor of a sudden, more cohering possibility… A typical afternoon schedule as written on the white board:
- 11:30 : Lunch prep team to kitchen
- Lunch — when it’s ready
- Clean-up: All
- After that: Rest / Silence
- 2:30 Elective: ______________
- Break: 30 minutes
- After that: Elective: _______________
- After that: Dinner prep team to kitchen
- Dinner — when it’s ready.
How to know which elective I can skip?
The laughter when someone asks why dinner is late.
No one part more important than the rest. So hard to resist the urge to assign other people elevated value based on externals or to more tightly grip the hours that I am in the Responsible post. So rewarding to smile in equality, Working Together as a single body.
There’s every reason to practice such a thing, because we are on a search together. Olga de Hartmann said,“There is only one important thing — to actually develop our possibilities. We should not be content with anything else or anything less.” So we take her dare, and the dauntless spirit I encounter in groups tackling this grand possibility head-on, is exhilarating. We are learning from our pilot endeavors, and we’re nearing the time to explore these uncharted waters with bigger vessels, larger groups. For those who go down to the sea in ships to do business upon great waters will see the works of the Lord, and Her wonders in the deep.
Author: Andrew Breitenberg, you can read more from Andrew’s Substack here.