We call them _guiding intentions_. I first started experimenting with them when I helped start TaborSpace 
, a community space created in Portland.
Ten years ago we opened the doors. It was an experiment aligned to an Audacious Aspiration: what might happen if you opened to the commuity a beautiful, but underused church building, inviting people in for creative activities. A place of co-creation.
And connection – to build the fabric of relationship.
We knew we had to ground the effort with an important intention, something that held a deeper truth, a higher truth. We called it a _guiding intention_.
So we defined it: to create a place of _unconditional belonging._
With that we launched, creating a wonderful coffee shop and began to build an organization that allowed the space to be used by others.
In just a few years, there were more community events held in TaborSpace than any other space in Portland – over 3,000 a year.
It was that same intention that we used two years later when I helped to launch the Rosewood Initiative . But, this time, planting the seed in the part of Portland that was considered a wasteland, a forgotten edge of Portland that met Gresham. The place with the highest crime rate in the city.
So again, we created a space of unconditional belonging. Within a few years, a neighborhood emerged with increasing new opportunities for those in it.
And so it was when Jami and I embarked on the Dayton Experiment . This time, we claimed a new guiding intention, that of _unleashing the creative genius_ of every student, each and every teacher. And it became real.
The same power of a guiding intention that Ward used when he original developed the wiki. That platform that went on to enable the largest repository of human knowledge ever created. more
We are left to wonder, then, about the power of these intentions to manifest new realities.
Might these guiding intentions act as strange attractors from which new Fractal Patterns emerge from chaos? That chaos which is the void known by some as dark energy, dark matter. That emergence that creates, what Whitehead might call, the "occasions" of matter?
All emerging from the void where mystery flows. Mystery, much like a higgs boson, around which matter begins to form and become shaped, with other emergent matter, into patterns. Patterns of order, fractal patterns.
Here we sit Dancing at the Edge on the emergent cusp of a reimagined science. But also within the deep waters of old sacred wisdom. For this mystery has been probed for thousands of years by those reflecting deeply on our human experience, by Brahmans, by Buddhists, by Jewish scholars, by Christians, by ancient Zoroastrians. All of whom recognized emergence that flows from an unknowable source.
Are we, perhaps, closing a circle?
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