10 Insights from Constructing Consciousness
Below is a video transcript of a talk I gave at the Integral ICON Conference in May of 2024 exploring the journey of Constructing Consciousness and 10 insights learned along the way.
To learn more about Constructing Consciousness, see these links:
Thank you all for being here!
I invite you to buckle your seat belts. We’re going to go on a fast 20 minute ride through a year and a half of Constructing Consciousness gatherings.
The purpose of Constructing Consciousness changes all the time, and the purpose that emerged a couple of days ago for our upcoming gathering is to practice loving each other with ever more intimacy, depth, presence, care, joy and heartfelt creative expression.
The birth of C.C., in a sense, goes back to Integral Theory. Pacific Integral arose out of Integral Theory, and then Terri O’Fallon started STAGES International, from which a group called MetAware Millennials came into being. The MetAware Millennials were invited to collaborate on a gathering with STAGES, and that turned out to be the first Constructing Consciousness gathering.
I also included the Boulder Lighthouse Collective, just to show that there’s another collective that’s been meeting for over a year now that’s come from the Constructing Consciousness soil. So the plants are continuing to grow upon each other!
So what is C.C.? It started a year and a half ago, in November of 2022. There’s been some amazing co-organizers that have been a part of this project. There’s been over 100 participants that have gathered from over 15 countries. We’ve had about seven gatherings total in five countries, plus three that have happened here in Boulder.
On average, there’s about 30 to 40 participants per gathering. But we’ve also had a few smaller ones. We’ve even had a family gathering with children present, as well as elders in their 80s and beyond.
These gatherings are also curated across a number of different lines of development, which I’ll talk about in a bit.
The gathering structure changes for each one. On average, they’re about 3–4 days long. There’s both structured portions and highly emergent open portions where we get to collectively play and co-create.
The big thing about C.C. gatherings is that they’re not a facilitated workshop. There’s no teacher or guru or anything like that. It’s really about coming together, being in presence, and seeing what wants to unfold. I’ll touch into this more later.
We use Open Space technology as one of our tools to help catalyze all the different energies into a structure that will hopefully be enlivening for everyone. There’s no one specific goal or outcome, so a lot of different expressions of energy emerge at these gatherings.
They’re kind of like a little Burning Man. Sometimes someone will be crying in a healing process while another person will be playing guitar in bliss, while another group will be having this crazy intellectual conversation, and their minds will be blown, and someone else is having a nap at the same time. Everything is happening all at once!
An example of some of the collectively-sourced Open Space offerings at C.C. New Zealand included:
- Exploring and relating with/as transcendent beauty
- Grief & gratitude when a parent passes on
- Ritual with the sacred mother tree and our human roles in stewarding the lands we inhabit
- An embodied healing container exploring the paradox of life’s inherent goodness with the human challenges of physical and psychological pain
- The bossy and very playful humor of our inner 12 year olds
- Poetry as an emanation of deep presence
- Sharing our soul-sourced vision for our lives and receiving constructive feedback from the collective
- Rewriting (and performing) ancient Persian fables with a developmental twist
- Full group guided morning meditations in nature
- Each day we also frolicked through the forest, dipped in the ocean, chanted in the sauna, wove stories around the fire, and drank a copious amount of fancy homemade coffees!
In this presentation, I’m going to share 10 insights. And these are really a work in progress as we’re constantly learning!
1. Gathering Matters
The first insight is that gathering matters. A number of ICON speakers have spoken to this really beautifully. Gathering matters for the past, the present and the future humans, all of whom, from one perspective, are always gathering in this ever present Now. From that view, we’re in a C.C. gathering right here, right now!
These gatherings have had a really profound impact on many people’s lives. It’s not an uncommon experience that someone will come up and be in tears at the end, having felt as if they never fully found their people until now. Often, there’s this feeling of not knowing that a “Second Tier” (to use Integral language) collective is possible, and that they can be globally plugged into a group of people that they feel really met, seen and stretched by.
Some people have found their romantic partners through C.C. Others met new collaborators. Or made really deep, meaningful friendships. Or felt stretched and seen in ways that they’ve never experienced before in this developmental chapter of their lives.
A claim that I would like to make and fully own is that desiring a community of humans who we love and feel deeply connected to and inspired by…this isn’t a “Green” thing. It’s a human thing. For as long as humans have existed, we’ve gathered around campfires and told stories, exchanged our offerings, shared our love, traded our wisdom, and came together to create a more beautiful world. And we’re doing that right here at ICON.
How we relate to these gatherings and to collectives in general, of course, changes as our developmental expressions do. But the act of coming together and being in love is timeless, universal and deeply important to the health, wholeness and evolution of the human experience.
2. Life is Beautiful (even when it’s ugly)
If C.C. has a secret sauce, I’d say it’s this that we invite in the perspective that life is beautiful even when it’s ugly. Even during moments at C.C. where it felt like things were the least cohered, where there were tensions arising, and where things were uncomfortable, we would practice resting in and as Wholeness, which, dare I say, “transcends and includes” darkness, shadow, grief and pain.
Suffering, individually and collectively, would often arise when there’s a contraction against darkness, making it wrong or bad rather than (or maybe in addition to) seeing it as an energy that we can become more intimate with, to process, digest, integrate and grow from.
With this embodied view of seeing life as beautiful comes this deep sense of an individual, collective and even a cosmic sense of relaxation. It’s as if everything is okay, even when it’s not okay. This sense of fundamental wellbeing in our collective field brings us back to that ever-present beauty that holds all darkness, contractions and fears in a loving pool of wholeness and warmth. Being with and as this creates a deep rest in our collective nervous system.
I’m gonna take a breath, because I could use some of that rest right now…
3. Collectives are living beings of evolving wholeness
One frame I’d like us to try on for a moment is that the C.C. Collective is a unique being that lives in each of us while also infinitely interconnected as one unfolding whole that at times would often seem to have its own agenda, its own directionality, and its own vision.
Our contributions and our actions are co-creating with this agentic collective being. It’s almost like it’s an entity, a spirit, that we can commune and be in deep relationship with.
A funny example of how this once played out: our first two gatherings were generally filled with a lot of love and light — a lot of ease and flow and coherency. So much so that some of the complaints that the organizers got were that there was too much of this. “Why can’t we be more in the darkness together?” participants would sometimes ask.
And so at the next gathering, somebody who is here, who I will not mention…Layman Pascal [laughter]…he started this shamanic ceremony where he evoked the enemy, which kicked off the gathering with a sense of darkness, discordance and disillusionment. And then, of course, participants were saying, “Why can’t we be in the love and light more? What’s going on?” [laughter]
To me, there’s both a cosmic hilarity yet also a grief that I hold about this, seeing how the spoken and unspoken desires of our collective sprout over time. Often they can have impacts on people who didn’t know that these spells were being cast into the collective field and its unfolding.
It’s hard not to imagine how this plays out in our broader world, right? Our karma is colliding and our prayers clashing, co-creating the world that’s co-creating us.
4. Emergence is a paradox!
We usually go for a minimum viable structure. Our aim is to maximize emergence and create a flow by attuning to our individual and collective desires, sensing into our shared field from a state of awareness of Awareness. We then invite expression from the evolutionary Eros moving through us, speaking as both the whole and a part of the whole simultaneously, and as Source, and as Source expressing our unique individuality, simultaneously.
Even when we don’t have necessarily an explicit intention, set schedule or a desired outcome, the organizers, we’ve found, still need to be very clear and direct and transparent about our intentionless intention. What we’ve discovered over time is that having some practices at the start of the first day specifically to ground our physical bodies in a sense of safety and holding, and then to do some practices interpersonally where we feel connected relationally. And then if we bookend those with guided exercises that evoke causal and nondual states, that can be a really beautiful recipe for creating a whole body, whole system sense of safety and holding. From there, a lot of creativity and expression would arise!
Finding the balance between form and formlessness is an ongoing exploration, and the goal for us is not to land on some perfect recipe, but to be in emergence with emergence itself. In that way, we’re embodying the very invitation that we’re drawing people into.
5. The dance of developmental diversity
Like at ICON, relative to the entire human population, C.C. gatherings are a very niche group of humans, yet even within that niche, there is still a ton of diversity of expressions, vantage points, perspectives, personalities and capacities. So diversity, at times, led to this creative aliveness that saturated the field and expanded wholeness in a really catalytic evolutionary way.
Other times, there were clashes and contrasts between the varying desires of the people present. Some wanting more action in the world…how can we address the Metacrisis…while others were wanting to lean back into deep stillness, into contemplation, to simply being. The Open Space structure we used would help channel different energies into different spaces of the venue, allowing people to choose their own adventure.
Another way that we worked with this is to evoke a meta-synthesis through a psycho-somatic-technology like meditation or body movement or ritual. That helped to drop the collective into a more shared state weaved the diversity into a more coherent whole. Finally, evoking the wholeness that is always already present (or the coherence that is always already present) as well as naming our projections, constructs, inherently partial meaning making helped us to return to the source of our shared being, loosened up our attachments to certain outcomes, and re-established attunement with our collective heart.
6. Curating with care
One of the most challenging aspects of C.C. for the organizers was how to maintain a really tight curation leading to a strong container and collective field, while also holding care for the human hearts that are impacted in this process.
The first C.C. gathering started primarily curating for those in the STAGES MetAware community. Over time, we opened it up to more and more people within the broader Liminal Web.
What we found is that when fewer people had a shared language or map of meaning making, or shared developmental expressions, we needed to have a lot more structure and holding from the organizers. And that wasn’t really ever the intention of C.C. — to offer a highly structured holding.
So in a way, we’re now returning back to the lineages that we are birthed from and opting to have smaller gatherings with fewer people where there’s more of a shared coherence, primarily due to an awareness around the STAGES model.
7. The value of eldership
One of the most beloved aspects of our gatherings was the value of eldership. This is Saniel Bonder with one of our youngest participants, Michael Wilson. We had a huge age range. We even celebrated Terri O’Fallon’s 80th birthday in Ontario!
We also held our most humbling gathering near Vancouver Island with families and young kids, which added a fun dose of complexity that truthfully we were probably underprepared for.
What’s become clear is that our elderhood and our youthfulness are interpenetrated. What I mean by that is that elders can only really be elders in the context of having younger folks to serve and be served by. And the younger generation at our gatherings can only really grow into mature, developed human hearts when they have access to the wisdom transmission of those whom have so much life experience to offer.
While elders played an immensely important role, at the end of the day, all C.C. participants, regardless of their age, were equally important in their contribution. Often we fall back into a deeper holding that transcends yet also includes time and form.
8. Is an online global village possible?
We have not figured out how to transition the heart, the intensity, the love and the excitement of the in-person gatherings into an online format. It’s a challenge we’ve found, especially with it being such a broad global collective. How do we maintain connection and aliveness in an online space? If anyone has ideas about this, we’re all ears!
We use Signal as our main communication platform, creating a new group for each gathering. After, we’d add all the new folks into our Constructing Consciousness Global Collective Signal group which will soon have over 100 people on it.
There’s been some incredibly intimate and powerful shares over the past 1.5 years, and some beautifully enriching developmental theory conversations in a subgroup that formed.
That said, it feels tough if not impossible to maintain the level of intimacy, depth and energy that we have together in-person in the online space, including on Zoom.
My focus has been more on prioritizing the in-person gatherings than cultivating an online global community. But in theory this is a place where C.C. can really grow.
9. Make gatherings affordable again!
If anyone has ideas about how we can make these gatherings financially sustainable, we also would love your advice on that! This has been a passion project for myself and the C.C. organizers. In order to continue gathering and expanding our offerings — to bring more people into the collective — we need to find a way to make them both affordable for people to attend while also resourcing for the people who have invested so much into making them happen.
10. Emergence often happens in invisible ripples
The crazy part about all the “ripples of love,” as Kim Barta says, that birth from C.C. is that they’ll forever be unknown to the vast majority of people who helped emerge them.
I have this really unique and privileged position as being a community weaver. I get to have a bird’s eye view and hear about all these stories, of these synchronicities and miracles that have unfolded that can be sourced back to the C.C. gatherings.
For example, just a couple of weeks ago, I flew to Europe to meet a potential romantic partner whose mom actually introduced us. And I met her mom at a C.C. gathering in New Zealand!
Audience Member: “How did it go?!”
It went beautifully…and she’s not my romantic partner [laughter].
There is a women’s group that formed after C.C. Ontario which has been meeting regularly and having an impactful journey.
The Boulder Lighthouse Collective has been meeting bi-weekly for about a year now with 11 people coming together in-person.
People have discovered new creative partners and best friends and new teachers and coaches and mentors, and made really deep connections with people that maybe they only previously knew online.
The co-founder of Constructing Consciousness, Fionn Wright, said after the first gathering that he was able to go home and hug his two little boys with an amount of love that he never knew was possible.
So the message I leave you with is this: community matters. Being in love together matters. Finding those who we feel developmentally met and stretched by matters. Being in-person, in the flesh, bodies weaving and connecting with the Earth and with each other, and even being connected with Source, and as Source, and as these vastly unique, beautiful expressions of the radiant wholeness of Source, really matters.
Constructing Consciousness has been one giant experiment. The truth is that the boundaries between where a C.C. gathering and the rest of life begins and ends is just a construction. When you bring together a beautiful group of humans who share immense capacities and enjoy the simple grace of being alive, amazing things can happen. Many of the ripples will only be known by the people whom they touch. And those ripples will create other ripples, and before long, it’s impossible to conceptualize where anything ever started and began.
The miracle of C.C. gatherings transcend into the miracle of the unbounded, timeless gathering of Life itself. We remember that all this is, is one ever-present gathering. The boundaries and the borders dissolve only to reappear as a rainbow of sacred formless form. Insubstantial, yet vividly appearing. God’s art on the canvas of Awareness.
It’s then that we remember that we’re Home. Always evolving. Already here.
Thank you.
[Applause]
We’ve chosen not to have a public-facing website. We’re a bit incognito, so you can email me directly if you want to learn about future gatherings.
I want to thank and honor, Terri O’Fallon, who’s here in the audience, who really made this whole project possible.
Audience Q&A
Thank you all so much. Do we have time for questions?
Audience Member: Yes, so I’ve been in some Integral circles. How do you prevent what used to happen in some of the circles I was in where it becomes a bit of — pardon my language — but a shit show of trauma dumping with the processing circles and everything. How do you avoid that?
Yeah, you know, there’s one moment that just immediately arose in response to your question. A moment where it was beginning to get into that space, someone just stood up and goes, “If people want to talk about this more, go into the other room!” [Laughter]
So again, because there’s not just one facilitator that everyone’s looking to, any person can feel that activation of leadership, emergent leadership, and we can practice that together. And sometimes people practice it, and it’s like, man, that probably wasn’t the best move, but we’re practicing. We’re practicing being in love together. And so imperfection is welcomed.
But also the gatherings are curated. And so the main curation that we’re looking for, ultimately, is, does this person have strong interpersonal capacities, ability to self-regulate when emotionally triggered, ability to ask for help. These are in a way very basic but can also be incredibly difficult human relational capacities. Often we found the “deep Green” that Bence Gánti was talking about, like, that’s actually the thing that will make these gatherings feel really strong and well held.
They’re curated right now, and that may change in the future, but for now, we’re keeping them this way — just like a football coach would. I think of these as art projects, and so we’re kind of playing on the stage together. Right now the curation process is working for us, and that may change in the future.
Audience Member: When you’re deciding what to put on the agenda, what makes it Second Tier versus First Tier? What happens that you’re calling it Second Tier?
Well, I would say there’s a flavor or vibe that you can feel that maybe is distinct from what we might call First Tier. I don’t tend to use….I’m using that language because we’re at an Integral conference. But that’s not generally how I orient to this stuff. I would say we’re expressing all tiers. It’s all developmental levels. It’s Wholeness. And so if we want to wrestle on the ground, which I’ve done with my friend Nicky, I guess that’s what…I don’t know…Red or maybe 2.0 in STAGES language? But who cares? It’s fun. And it’s human. And we’re alive. And we get to express ourselves in our fullness. And in a way, yeah, I don’t know whether it’s Second Tier or not. Maybe that’s for somebody else to judge.
Audience Member: Do romantic partners ever come to the gatherings? If so, does that create a dynamic when you’ve got people who know each other really well and others who don’t know each other at all?
We definitely have couples who come!
I think there was maybe a naiveté in the organizers at first, this sensing that, yeah, we could just sort of drop people that maybe don’t know each other so well into a space and social anxiety and all those kind of typical things wouldn’t arise. We’ve learned over time to settle the nervous system and to settle the social anxiety and to create some safety and holding upfront really helps to ground — like it creates a ground from which the more causal and nondual experiences can unfold.
If we’re all kind of activated, and we don’t know if we belong, and who’s this person, and do they like me? Well…[laughter]. What I’ve learned is that this stuff basically doesn’t really go away regardless of one’s developmental expression, in most cases. And so just being aware of the reality of what our human experience, I think, is important.
Audience Member: Yes, can you share a little bit about your experience of the MetAware or causal space that you guys enter?
There was a moment in Sedona when Alexander Love was leading an emergent dialogue, and there was just a way in which it felt like all of life itself incarnated as this moment, to experience specifically this moment, and that it would die a trillion deaths all over again just to get back to this one moment. And so there’s a sense of a profound grace, and that grace isn’t coming through one person, necessarily. It’s like a dance. It’s like a grace that is everywhere, but also expressing simultaneously through unique beings. In that way, it’s maybe not so different than going out and watching a sunset or watching a ballet performance, where we’re just kind of in awe, and there’s a sparkling aliveness, but then also a sense of this is so real, but it also feels like a dream, but also my heart is opening, and it’s all happening simultaneously. And it seems to like the borders between me and say, somebody else, kind of dissolves, and it becomes more like an energy body, which is One, that we are experiencing together.
Audience Member: How do you integrate the experiences you have and synergize them into the rest of your life?
I have the best job because I get to do this with collaborators. We have so many calls before and after the gatherings. And in a way the gatherings for me are these calls with my collaborators. Then the actual being together in-person is like the cherry on top, you know. But we also have post-gathering Zoom calls that we invite people to, and people can offer a practice or conversation that they want to invite people into online.
And then I tend to have one-to-one calls with almost everybody who went to the gathering and really get their feedback and check in with them, making sure they’re doing okay emotionally. There’s not necessarily a robust system for that. It’s more of like a tuning in and a sensing to who should be connected with next, and then trusting that flow.
I think we’re out of time. Yeah, all right, thank you so much, everyone!
Available for community consulting!
If you’d like to learn more about Constructing Consciousness, Boulder Lighthouse Collective, Soulmakers Gathering, Gathering of the Sourcekeepers, or any of the various other community containers I’ve been stewarding and facilitating, please reach out.
I’m available for creating & facilitating collective experiences. I also do community advising, consulting, marketing and conflict resolution. tuckerlighthouse@gmail.com
