Facilitating Transformational Journeys II

Hallo! I’m Anthony Hodgson and in this short talk I am going to introduce you to the core course on the approach and method that H3Uni has developed as a contribution to a vision of a practical third horizon education. Let me explain the meaning of third horizon.

The starting point is the accelerating demise of our dominant world views and way of life on our limited planet. The extractive and exploitative model is no longer congruent with a viable life style for humanity. This is represented by the descending red line – the first horizon. Pockets of a viable and benign way of life that is renewable, resilient and ecological are emerging. The vision of one planet living is horizon three. Over time it could gather strength and become congruent with the reality of the Anthropocene. However, the transformation from H1 to H3 is a massive global shift of the pattern of our lives and the legacy of methods of gover-nance, cooperation and awareness of horizon 1 cannot do this. Yet those are what dominate our so-called education system.

This gives rise to three great tragedies which are unfolding. Firstly, the tragedy of the commons; secondly, the tragedy of horizons; thirdly, the tragedy of consciousness. 

The tragedy of the commons points out the social structure in which individual users of a common good acting without regulation for that common good end up destroying the very resource they are exploiting. This principle applies right up to the planetary level and leads to the breaking of the planetary limits for survival. 

The tragedy of horizons points to the domination of short term and expedient interests which are unable to take into account the deeper systemic structures that are distorted and damaged by ignoring them. This results in decisions which take no regard of the long term and of the present trends that are eroding the viability of society. For example, the taking of the premium required to ensure resilience as immediate profit.

There are three aspects of the tragedy of consciousness. Firstly, the way our brilliance at managing the complicated blinds us from seeing how to manage the complex. Secondly, the way our quest for rationality has blinded us to our real presence in the world and our effect on it. Thirdly the way cultural condit-ioning is preven-ting us from releasing the creativity needed to mitigate and transcend our predicament of which the climate emergency and the pandemic are but symptoms. This ensures that humanity continues sleep walking into the first two tragedies.

The development of shared wisdom capable of exploring new paradigms and world views is crucially needed to be able to address the mess and find a way to surviving let alone thriving. 

The quality of wisdom, or better wise agency, is an elusive quality if we remain stuck in our usual ways of managing things. We need to create new ways of evoking this mutual quality of life to create a transformative field. This field has three components. It has the personal engagement of being at your best; it has the power of a coherent group (singing in the choir, playing a game of football), whatever it is with that sense of   being together; and a congruence of shared method and praxis that matches the complexity of the task.

This is a universal structure behind all the various individual methods that will be introduced. Each one of them is in some way, allowing us to develop a mutual quality. The idea of a mutual quality of wisdom sits in the middle and is evoked.  So all of them have inherent in them that core quality of evoking wisdom if we see them through the perspective of this synergy.

It is important to clarify the difference between wisdom and cleverness. We can be clever and be right about some-thing but without doing anything about it. However, if we’re in a particular place at a particular time and are faced with a situation where we have to act the outcome is mutually emergent. So wisdom, in that sense, is always existential, because it’s dealing with something in the flow of being, in the flow of existing individually and together.  

This means that we need to learn to make transformational journeys together. Such journeys have a deep underlying structure reflected in mythology and in subconscious archetypes – but also in lived experience.

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