Creative endeavors change a lot, especially in their early formative days. So I wasn’t surprised to find that as the InterbeingDAO meme’d itself into existence, others who shared in a similar vision of wise open-source psychotechnologies began to reach out and connect with me.
Over the last few weeks, and after several conversations, I’ve come to understand that the ecosystem around wise open-source psychotechnologies is already co-arising! This is good news, because it means that I don’t need to do all the heavy lifting myself, and that’s not how genuine movements arise anyway, so doubly good news, this appears to be a real movement!
As a result of recognizing I’m already part of this larger co-arising movement, I’ve decided to let go of the original purpose of InterbeingDAO and instead pivot the purpose of InterbeingDAO toward increasing the reach of our own unique open-source psychotechnology, Social Meditation.
Making Meditation Social
Meditation–in the modern era–has been conceived of and practiced, largely, as an individual affair. Yet in the early days of the Internet era many are beginning to realize that the Network, not the Individual, is a better orienting model for who we are. Modern meditation needs an upgrade. Social Meditation is an open-source psychotechnology for the networked age.
More specifically, social meditation is a form of interpersonal contemplative practice in which each participant is invited to verbalize their practice aloud with others. Social Meditation is a peer-2-peer format of practice, one that was developed by pioneering meditation teacher Kenneth Folk. It can be done just as effectively in-person as online, and it can either be facilitated by a human, or if the instructions are sufficiently simple, automated by a program.
🆕 Increasing the Reach of Social Meditation
From this point forward the InterbeingDAO exists to increase the reach of social meditation. Here reach is best described as the span, or number of people that are reached, multiplied by the depth at which they’re reached, such that:
Reach = Span * Depth
Fortunately, thousands of practitioners have been cultivating the depth dimension of Social Meditation, since it was developed over a dozen years ago. As a broader community of practice we’ve learned how to go deep into these practices, both in-person & online. We’ve learned how to safely plumb the depths of social meditation on retreat, as well as in our daily lives. Hundreds have learned how to facilitate these open source practices in a variety of different contexts, roles, relationships, languages, & cultures.
As a result of the last dozen years of collective practice, some of the hard problems around how to facilitate & practice social meditation have been resolved. The big challenge before this DAO–as I see it–is in how to help set-up an ecosystem model that encourages open collaboration, shared governance, and well-aligned economic incentives for all participants of the ecosystem. If we can seed such an ecosystem properly, and the starting conditions are fertile, there’s no telling how many beings could be touched by the practices of interbeing. May it be so!