The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly

Wonderful book. It's also oddly similar to my own book, Getting Messy. We must have been breathing the same molecules from the collective unconscious or something...

It's really great to read someone else write about this stuff though, and it makes me happy and excited that I'm in this field. I think the most interesting part of the book for me was learning about Jacob Needleman's belief that the group is the new "art form" of the future. I've always been most interested in the cr

Wonderful book. It's also oddly similar to my own book, Getting Messy. We must have been breathing the same molecules from the collective unconscious or something...

It's really great to read someone else write about this stuff though, and it makes me happy and excited that I'm in this field. I think the most interesting part of the book for me was learning about Jacob Needleman's belief that the group is the new "art form" of the future. I've always been most interested in the creative process on the group level, rather than on the level of the individual. Groups have so much power, and the thing I most love about teaching is when the magic happens in a group--some larger wisdom comes through that is larger than any of us individually. Jacob Needleman wrote this in a letter to the president of the Fetzer Institute:

“I [believe:] that the group is the art form of the future…In our present culture the main need is for a form that can enable human beings to share their perceptions and attention and, through that sharing, to become a conduit for the appearance of spiritual intelligence.”

"It is instead an expression of the belief that there exists a field of collective consciousness—often seen and expressed through metaphor—that is real and influential, yet invisible."