The Return of Collective Intelligence: Ancient Wisdom for a World out of Balance
288
The Return of Collective Intelligence: Ancient Wisdom for a World out of Balance
288eBook
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Overview
• Explains how collective intelligence manifests in flocks of birds, instantaneous knowing in indigenous peoples, and the power of sacred places
• Offers ways for us to reconnect to the infinite source of wisdom that fuels collective intelligence and underscores the importance of ceremony, pilgrimage, and initiation
• Draws on recent findings in New Paradigm science, traditional teachings from indigenous groups from North, South, and Central America and Siberia, as well as sacred geometry, deep ecology, and expanded states of consciousness
For our ancestors, collective intelligence was a normal part of life. We see it today as the mysterious force that enables flocks of birds, swarms of bees, and schools of fish to function together in perfect synchrony, communicating and cooperating at some undetectable level. At its most subtle, it’s an instantaneous knowing, shared by members of a group, of the wisest course of action that will benefit all.
As Dery Dyer reveals, collective intelligence still resides within each of us, and it is the key to restoring balance and harmony to our world. She shows how it occurs spontaneously when individuals who share a need and a purpose instinctively “self-organize” into a group and function with no leader or central authority. Such groups exhibit abilities much greater than what any of their members possess individually--or what can be replicated with artificial intelligence. Dyer explains, due to an unquestioning dependence on technology, modern humanity has forgotten how to connect with collective intelligence and fallen into collective stupidity, otherwise known as mob mind or groupthink, which is now endangering the interconnected web of life on Earth.
Drawing on recent findings in New Paradigm science, traditional teachings from indigenous groups, as well as sacred geometry, deep ecology, and expanded states of consciousness, the author shows how the ability to think and act collectively for the highest good is hardwired in all living beings. She explains how to release ourselves from enslavement by technology and use it more wisely toward the betterment of all life. Underscoring the vital importance of ceremony, pilgrimage, and initiation, she offers ways for us to reconnect to the infinite source of wisdom that fuels collective intelligence and which manifests everywhere in the natural world.
Revealing that once we relearn how to hear the Earth, we can heal the Earth, Dyer shows how each of us has a vital role to play in restoring our world to wholeness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781591433538 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Inner Traditions/Bear & Company |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2020 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Dery Dyer was former editor and publisher of Costa Rica’s award-winning English-language newspaper, The Tico Times, where she worked for over 40 years. She held degrees in literature and journalism from U.S. and Costa Rican universities and studied indigenous spirituality in many different parts of the world. She lived in Costa Rica.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 7. A New Kind of Intelligence
We educators have to remember that formal education is only a very recent addition to a process of learning that has taken place over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. We must look for ways to connect learning as we see it with those much older roots.
--Robert L. Fried
What David Bohm envisions as a “new kind of intelligence” is in fact ancient. It’s the way our ancestors learned to live in the world before the world became so complex that we needed schools and teachers to interpret it for us.
We once experienced the world directly. Now we learn about it from a remote vantage point many times removed from it. What we’re required to know comes packed in layers of information that only teachers trained in countless diverse areas can decipher.
Knowledge has become so specialized that it can be transmitted only by a hierarchy of initiated intermediaries; in fact, most of us will never be able to acquire even a fraction of the knowledge that makes up our world. We’ve been cut off from our sources of knowing as surely as we’ve been severed from our spiritual guidance.
Tragically, this reinforces the boxes in our brains through which we perceive the world, intensifying our feeling of separation from All That Is.
“Our education has taught us to separate, to compartmentalize, to isolate, and not to join notions together,” say Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern. “Therefore, it makes us conceive of our humanity as an island, outside the cosmos that surrounds us, outside the physical matter of which we are constituted.”
For Bohm, civilization and the formal education that sustains it robbed us of our ability to perceive the “wholeness of existence.”
“In early times man’s activities were an undivided whole, in which art and science were not separate,” he explains. “Similarly, young children do not tend, of their own accord, to separate such activities. What happens is that they are gradually trained to think, feel, perceive, and act in terms of this kind of separation (as happened to mankind in general with the growth of civilization).”
Contemporary education serves the status quo. But is it equipping us to live in harmony with the Earth and our fellow beings? Is it helping us solve our most urgent problems, or is it simply perpetuating the Old Paradigm . . . and the old problems?
Confined by specialized straitjackets, our fragmented modern minds are simply too limited, their focus too narrow, to come up with anything but fragmentary solutions--which is undoubtedly why our problems are not only persisting, but growing. And it’s why many new thinkers are taking a closer look at old ways of learning.
We Can’t Not Learn
Modern educators struggle to teach. But traditional people and the new science insist that we can’t not learn.
Watch a kitten, puppy, baby bird, or human child: they are driven by curiosity to know their world. Sometimes, their curiosity gets them in trouble--but if they manage to survive their more hazardous encounters with life, they always, inevitably, learn.
“The ability to learn [something new] is a principle common to the whole of humanity,” David Bohm says. “Thus, it is well known that a child learns to walk, to talk, and to know his way around the world just by trying something and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him.
“As the child grows older, however, learning takes on a narrower meaning. In school, he learns by repetition to accumulate knowledge, so as to please the teacher and pass examinations.”
Education professor Robert L. Fried insists that the desire to learn “must surely be as strong as any impulse within the human soul. Children cannot not learn.”
Adults cannot not learn, either. Curiosity continues to drive human behavior throughout life, and when unfettered, can lead the learner in unimagined directions.
Curiosity leads naturally to the kind of group interaction that produces collective intelligence. When people come together in curiosity rather than certainty, magic happens. Sources of deep wisdom are tapped; totally new ideas and solutions emerge.
“This permanent movement of searching creates a capacity for learning not only in order to adapt to the world but especially to intervene, to re-create, and to transform it,” writes Paulo Freire. “Curiosity as restless questioning, as movement toward the revelation of something hidden, as a question verbalized or not, as search for clarity, as a moment of attention, suggestion, and vigilance, constitutes an integral part of being alive. There could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making.”
Good News, Bad News
Discoveries in neurobiology confirm that we can’t not learn. Biologist Humberto Maturana showed that all living organisms become “structurally coupled” to their environment at a cellular level; we are “hard-wired” to learn, easily, naturally, and continuously.
“We have ignored for half a century or more the studies that show some 95 percent of all a child’s learning or ‘structures of knowledge’ form automatically in direct response to interactions with the environment,” writes Joseph Chilton Pearce, “while only about 5 percent form as a result of our verbal teaching or intellectual instruction.”
The good news is that we can learn everything we need to know in spite of what Freire calls “the banking system of education” in the industrialized world. The bad news is that some of what we’re “structurally coupling” to may end up threatening our eventual survival. We’ll be looking more closely at this in Part Two.
Table of Contents
In GratitudeINTRODUCTION
What Is This Force Called Collective Intelligence?
PART ONE
All That Is
1 An Ancient Gift: The Interdependence of All Life
2 We Can’t See: The Crisis of Perception
3 Subtle Energy: The Flow of Life
4 The Magic of the Circle: A Symbol of Unity
5 Collective Intelligence: “Amazing and Insane”
6 The Collective Intelligence of Health: Healing Ourselves and the World
7 A New Kind of Intelligence: Living, Listening, and Learning
8 Ceremony, Pilgrimage, and Initiation: No Free Lunch
9 Black Madonnas and White Lions: Manifestations of Mystery
PART TWO
The Cultural Trance
10 The Descent into Collective Stupidity: Traveling on the Road to Nowhere
11 A World out of Balance: To Take More than You Give
12 Two Paths: Artificial Intelligence or Collective Wisdom?
PART THREE
The Return to Forgotten Wisdom
13 Reconnecting: A Vital Tool for Restoring Oneness
14 Rebuilding: Wholeness Can Heal Us
15 Rediscovery: Seeing with Our Hearts
16 Rebirth: Love Will Replace Fear
Notes
Bibliography
Index