Think of society as a human construction, a very sophisticated defence mechanism. Society’s restrictions get bred into the cells themselves by a process of selection. And these restrictions become part of the self-regulating feedback in society’s governing system. There’s a serious question whether humans actually can break out of their self-regulated pattern. It takes audacious methods indeed to explore beyond that pattern.
from Destination: Void by Frank Herbert

Observation 1: the matrix has memory: it remembers and grows with each instance. Since last I joined a matrix, it has moved on, and flows with more ease. Incidentally, as a performer of ‘Choreography for Blackboards’ at Sidestep Festival, I noticed that that choreography too, despite not having been performed in two and a half years, has remembered… It was as if we started from where we had left off before, even though new people were involved… This leads me to assert that these kinds of social choreographies – which are esentially processes that are driven by the personal experiential material of participant-performer-citizens – have certain qualities of memory and, perhaps even, intelligence. I refer to Rupert Sheldrake’s thinking about ‘morphogenetic fields’ as a useful analogy:

..organizing fields within the developing organism, called morphogenetic fields. These fields contain, as it where, invisible plans or blueprints for the various organs and for the organism as a whole. In mathematical models of morphogenetic fields, the goals of morphogenetic process are represented as attractors. These attractors lie within ‘basins of attraction’ in a multidimensional phase space, and draw the developing organism towards developmental aims.
…
First, morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns or structures on otherwise random or indeterminate processes in the systems under their control. Second, they contain attractors, which draw systems under their influence towards future goals. Third, they evolve, along with living organisms themselves. The morphic fields of all species have history, and contain inherent memory given by the process I call morphic resonance. … Morphic resonance works across space and time, from the past to the present.
Through morphic resonance, each member of a species both draws upon and contributes to a collective memory of the species.
…
Morphogenetic fields are part of a larger class of fields, called morphic fields, all of which contain inherent memory given by morphic resonance.
Morphic fields also underlie our perceptions, thoughts and other mental processes. The morphic fields of mental activities are called mental fields. Through mental fields, the extended mind reaches out into the environment through attention and intention, and connects with other members of social groups.’
Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense Of Being Stared At
(See also: A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981), The Presence of the Past. Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) and The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1991), all by Rupert Sheldrake)

Observation 2: what an effort it takes to maintain the clarity of a space like UNI! I keep seeing the great attention and concentration it required to ‘hold’ the space. It is always a difficult process, creating an open space and at the same time trying to protect it, trying to create a zone of sensitive speaking and listening, without the need to police it. These are the very human challenges of the 21st century.. how to cultivate both the cultural space that is flexible and durable… and the modes of behaviour that can be deemed appropriate and constructive for that space… Perhaps it is more a question of how to exclude (or dissuade) inappropriate behaviour…

I wonder, were there such issues where visitors need to be in some way managed? It is difficult too for the newcomer who has never encountered a ‘way of being’ similar to that which the UNI space was growing.

But the positive note, I think, is a progression from observation 1. there is reason to believe that the next ‘new meaningful public space’, wherever and by whomever and however it is called, will remember the effort that has been invested to date, and will pick up from that point. It will hold over memories of how the space functions, what kind of activities it invites, and how visitors might appropriately behave inside. So the great effort of UNI 2009 does not vanish into a void but actually has constructed a choreographic process that will live on.

Observation 3: the raw thinking circle has really developed as a choreography. Use of the term ‘oracles’ is very apt and shifts the expectations of participants and listeners in a subtle but important way. It is good to feel secure enough with such an event to not have to open the conversation to the whole room. I think there is a special quality of listening demanded by raw thinking circle which is the task of the ‘audience’. As in a theater performance, one can be very involved from one’s seat, because there is at work a specific concentration of attention which, when handled well by ‘performers’ or ‘oracles’, makes it possible for all present to experience some new revelation, or to view an aspect of reality, or bear witness to ‘being’ in a unique transaction absolutely specific to that moment.

Observation 4: Following, there is something here to do with what Gordon Lawrence calls ‘symbiont thinking’. It is an ability to receive thoughts that can not be received by only one person ie the ability to receive this thought is only available to us when we are in a relation of two or more. We do not produce the thought, but become capable of thinking it. My analogy is with a heavy or large object that one person cannot lift but two or more can: they do not produce the object together, they merely become able to lift it.

There is clearly a dynamic like this at work in the Social Dreaming Matrix. There is a degree of insight, and an applicability of this insight to the larger context, that is only possible because a matrix is made by a number of people. It is by putting dreams together and observing them talk to each other that we can come by these insights into our own situation.

Observation 4.1: Indeed, I came to the conclusion during UNI that the true purpose of dreams is to be put into the ‘matrix’ of dream and allowed to swim there. Perhaps in hundreds of years time, humans will look back on the 20th century as the era of a great wild goose chase down the deadend of dream analysis and individual meaning making. UNI shows the way to a collective subjectivity, where the individual is not submerged or devoured or oppressed or controlled, but can exercise full creative autonomy in a fluid dynamic of multi-authorship of meaning and significance.

If, as my intuition suggests, consciousness is a socially evolved tool, then dreams, as the expression of the unconscious, may indeed have an essentially social function.

Observation 2.1: The question of managing behaviour in a new meaningful public space, it is surely a question of ethics, not just morals, but in terms of ‘work ethic’ or indeed ‘play ethic’. I feel somehow that the UNI experience affirms my previous intuition

I propose a choreography of ethics elaborated as a series of spaces or rooms.
…
A choreography of ethics would seek to create conditions for healthy interplay of different private ethics. It would seek also to induce a state of ‘dance’, which is described by Michael Klein as ‘that state of excitement in a system wherein change becomes possible’, a state of lightness which allows new patterns to activate. This lightness and ease of movement enables a context free of crippling hierarchies of function or status… This state of dance would also be most conducive to exchange between agents: allowing them to move freely between perspectives, their private ethical codes becoming stepping stones to full communicative participation, rather than impediments…

Dance does not create or use space but discloses it as a meaningful situation. …does not diligently conduct a building project of the world, but rather stops mechanical building and begins a poetic living – a hearing and sharing the common being-in-the-world with the creatures of the world. Kirsi Monni, About the Sense and Meaning in Dance

A most straightforward and flexible manner in which to begin would be, I feel, to imaagineeer spaces in which these activities, these uses of self, may accommodate their own iteration by separate agents.

Dance ..can be comprehended as laying out a world
in its involvement with being.
About the Sense and Meaning in Dance

I believe it is important to conceive of such a way of life: ethics in a recursive trinity with aesthetics and ecology…