Cultivating a Collective Mind

Its been about 9 months since we embarked on a journey to re-dream a function at Youth Alliance that we called Leadership Development Programs. The vision as it got named 8 months ago was - “To cultivate a multi-sectoral sense-making and influencing living network of young org leaders.” As I reflect back, the journey has been an adventure of mainly cultivating a team to nourish this intention, hold complex questions and experiment our way towards collective transformation.

The central question we have been holding in my view is - 'How does collective transformation happen?' In this piece, I intend to intertwine my own reflections and the vision of this work as it is becoming visible to me.

To begin with, let me start with the context of the group mind and how I see it affects the deeply personal and expansively systemic behaviours.

1. Group Mind

I have come to understand that each individual is not a mere individual - having thoughts of her/his own, making her/his decision and taking action for her/his own sake. Each of us are continuously thinking and acting in consonance with the collectives we are part of. It may be our families, our workplaces, our friend circles, our religious community or something else. This is deeply intertwined with mass behaviours as well. Let me take an example - ordering food online..

So, what's a group mind? In my understanding, when a group of people come together - there begins to build a mind which is greater than the sum of individual minds. Similar to the idiom ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ In our own tradition in India, I keep hearing 'Aise hi hota hai' as a justification of many actions. I would often ask my parents - how do you know. Now I begin to understand that the group mind that they are part of makes them believe a certain norm and the cause of their choices gets projected to the hypothetical group. The interesting part is that this group mind is often unconscious. So the question is what does it mean to be intentional in cultivating the group mind?

In our work here at Youth Alliance, the central pivot has been personal transformation. How do we create spaces and experiences that support individuals to take charge of their own inner work. In my journey with this question - I seem to have begun to get stuck at the validatory functions of the collectives that individuals are part of. Simply, does my family / workplace support my journey of inner work or becomes a barrier to it? And from another perspective - how is my collective receiving the insights and shifts from my inner work? This relationship between the collective and the individual determines the conditions for personal and social change.

If the collective do not support the individual - the individual may choose to be in communities that do support that process. Or learn to engage with existing collective differently. I invite you to hold on to this question - ‘What does it mean to be intentional in cultivating the group mind?’

Let me now lay out the context of the human condition as I am understanding:

Complex Interconnected Problems of our times

As you might agree, we are in the middle of interconnected crises - ecological devastation, socio-economic inequity, political polarisation and spiritual disconnection. There are three phenomena that I intend to lay out here:

• Story of Separation - Like Charles Eisestien would tell us - underneath all of these crises is a shared human condition - a civilisational story. He calls it the story of separation - ‘I am a discreet separate individual, among other discrete separate individuals in a hostile universe’. This story of separation is underneath all our institutions and systems. For instance, education makes us believe that the world is a harsh competitive reality and we must compete our way to the top for success. This story locks us in an isolated self or rather in an illusion of isolation. And we experience it intimately in the collectives most close to us - where relationships may be becoming transactional in communities or competitive in workplaces or superficial in family networks. So essentially it's a crisis of belongingness prompted by our relationship with the collectives we are part of.

• Collective Patterns - As per fractal theory - systems exist in fractals - self-similar patterns. That is, any magnified part looks just like the larger section from which it was taken. I began to apply this in large systemic problems - ….

The key in my understanding is how a collective makes sense of the world and thereby forms a group norm of behaviour for individuals and itself - collective patterns. Often this process in most of the collectives is unconscious and therefore unexamined. So there needs to be a way for collectives to make this process of sense-making conscious and examine the pattern they create. And we come back to the collective mind here.

• Thinking systems - At this point in my understanding, all of these crises and patterns of behaviours are a product of thinking systems that developed post the age of enlightenment in the west and brought to the east through colonialism. One of the examples of this has been technology- We tend to believe that there would be just another technology out there that will solve our problems. And that was true for a large part of the last 300 years - tech to connect us across the world, make us travel faster, make us grow muscles, fight diseases, increase soil fertility and so on. How would you find a tech that solves the rise of hate in our political systems? What tech exists now that can reverse mass extinction? What tech can shift the paradigm of man's fight against nature?

All of these demand us to think outside of the thinking systems that have been given to us through existing dominant institutions. How does one do that? There can be multiple pathways - one of them may be cultivating a collective mind.

Cultivating a Collective Mind

So what becomes available to us when we become intentional about the collective mind?

• Making sense of reality: In our own experience of being in this collective for merely the last 8 months - I have felt our yearnings to venture into the mysteries of human life coming together. And in our pursuit to investigate into reality - I have felt the tools of investigation becoming more precise. I am reminded of Ernst Mach, a physicist who said “Science is based on measurement, but the concept of measurement is a concept of relation.” What we call length or weight, for instance, is really the relation between an object and a ruler.

So for me, this collective has been a relational field that makes it sharper for me to measure my way into understanding the world.

• Sense of the Whole: As the idiom goes - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This collective has enabled me to get a sense of the whole that shows up when we jam together. For me it means - our connection becomes dimensionally deeper because of our similarities and our differences. When we are able to invite our individual context further and further, it connects us to larger and larger whole.

• Collective Patterns - There are typical patterns any group takes up - authority, norms, gender dynamics etc. While there may be some uniqueness based on the group's context, however there’s similarity given our shared humanity. When there’s intentionality in the collective mind - awareness of such patterns comes to fore quickly. And the possibility of disrupting or strengthening those patterns too. Applying the fractal theory - a pattern disrupted in one fractal may cause a ripple in larger and larger fractals.

From where I am seeing - there’s a long way to go - however there has been a few pivots of efforts that all of us six members have made in the last 8 months to cultivate the collective mind:

• Inquiry - It’s become visible to us that inquiry does create community. Coming together in holding a question creates connection with the question and with each other. This is quite unlike coming together based on fixed conclusions - there what connects may be is a central figure - guru/leader or an ideal or a shared document like the constitution. Over the past many weeks - we followed the natural path of our alive inquiries - here are some of the questions that struck me deeply:

• Rhythm - Mondays and Fridays - Mondays for tactical conversation, Fridays for Inquiries was our weekly rhythm. Each of us had another preoccupation other than this collective- in the time we carved out for this work, there emerged a rhythm. And it has had its own frequency.

• Practices - Some practices like check-in about our personal selves - that enabled inviting wholeness in each person and therefore in the group. It also helped us connect to each other’s context deeper and further. Another practice has been collective decision making - not letting anyone behind. Till each owns it, we don’t own it. It made us slower - however the tree that takes longer to grow has deeper roots, perhaps?

There are many questions that still requires adventures of inquiry and experience -

• How does this collective become available in the service of the collectives in the world?
• As the collective creates new understandings through its own lived experience and therefore shifts in action, what would it look like for it to enable other collectives go through the same journey?