Cultivating the Songlines of the Noosphere: Report

Report of meeting of Club of Budapest.

Report on the first Members Meeting of the Club of Budapest Budapest, May 1996 (as recalled in 2006)
[see References

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A. Preamble

The gathering of people in Budapest was effectively the first attempt to give form and relevance to the archetypal 'policy-making' encounter explored in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi and other less known works (cf Alan Dean Foster: Game Players of Zan). The concern was to build an alliance of art, literature and spirituality in response to the challenge of both human survival and evolution, whether individual or collective.

The distinguishing feature of the gathering was the manner in which insights from the process of artistic creativity were embodied in the organization and processes of the event -- considered as the 'material' constraining and inspiring the artistic possibilities of the moment. The intent was to use the gathering itself to engender an 'elixir of transformation' from which wider society could benefit. This could only be done by acting with presence in the moment to give appropriate form to what could be more widely shared.

The gathering acknowledged the trap of conventional meetings in which representatives of various perspectives make presentations in an effort to design and colonize the future of others who cannot be present. The failure to creatively manifest new behaviour and organization in such meetings has been reflected in the subsequent failure of their work in responding to the challenges of wider society. Recognizing that a 'A trap is a function of the nature of the trapped' (Geoffrey Vickers), the transformative challenge was seen to lie in co-creating in the present. Instead of seeking to avoid this trap, the meeting sought to integrate the behaviours associated with the trap into new understanding.

Explanations of such a catalytic event are themselves misleading traps. Any such attempt -- as an ex-planation --effectively displaces the focus of attention out of the grounded plane of the present moment from which it derived both its essential meaning and its wider significance. How indeed does art both carry the insights of the spirit and entrain more fruitfully transformative behaviour -- and the social and conceptual organization to sustain it?

The diversity of perspectives present in the configuration of insights assembled at Budapest was therefore a challenge to any understanding of what was occurring. Any understanding depended upon the capacity of the attentive individual to integrate this diversity into a meaningful pattern whose nature necessarily transcended those perspectives. The transformative effect of the gathering lay in the manner in which a participant's awareness was entrained by the interference effects, harmonies and oppositions that gave structure to that configuration of perspectives.

The 'effect' of the gathering on wider society lay in the transformation it engendered in those who subsequently endeavoured to understand what had occurred in the light of the various 'products' that appeared to emanate from the gathering. In several senses, it was the meeting itself that was both 'the message' and a transformative catalyst.

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