Living Room Context

What Time Is It In The World?

The Living Room learning community is based on a perception that a key human need of our time is to learn together a fundamentally new way of thinking, and that to do that we also need a shared context for learning aligned with that way of thinking, a context that can support us to nurture our own and one another’s learning processes.

We see this as a time in human history of deep challenge to all people and institutions, a time when the future and sustainability of the human venture is in question. It also is a time of an emerging new shared human consciousness about what kind of world it is, what time it is, what a human being is, and what it makes sense to do with our lives – a paradigm shift in human thinking.

Einstein famously said that with the atomic bomb, everything has changed except our mode of thinking, and that furthermore we cannot solve the problems we have created with the same mode of thinking that created them.

Utopia, Buckminster Fuller once said, is becoming the only viable option open to us. Ervin Laszlo wrote in the Manifesto of the Club of Budapest, “Whatever we do either creates the framework for reaching a peaceful and cooperative global society and thus continuing the grand adventure of life, spirit, and consciousness on Earth, or sets the stage for the termination of humanity’s tenure on this planet.”

The human venture, which we have become differently aware of in the last two hundred years, and of which our lives are part, is a million years (or more) old. It is already a learning community. The perspective which the Living Room uses is that in the last relatively brief part of that time, humanity has found its way into a cultural system of blame, guilt, fear, isolation and violence, which does not meet our deepest needs and which is no one’s ‘fault’, and yet which may be the end of us.

We are working with the hypothesis, shared with many other thinkers and writers and explorers, that our lifetimes are part of a time of a deeply significant transformation from an Age of Coercion into a potential emerging Age of Collaboration in which common patterns of cultural and personal perception and understanding going back hundreds and perhaps thousands of years are evolving in new directions.

The Research

Those of us who include ourselves in the Living Room Context participate as a means to empower us to
- pull ourselves out of a cultural mindset of blame, guilt, fear, isolation and violence
- into a mindset of deep learning, trust of ourselves in the world, and awareness of the interdependent systems of which we are part
- and to find our own voices, develop our personal and our collective or co- intelligence, reclaim our creativity, nurture the quality of relationships we want, and act together effectively towards a workable world.

We will likely find ourselves searching out directions for, “What part of the ‘human venture’ is significant and attractive enough to me to devote my life energies towards? How might I go about doing that? And with whom?”

The Living Room Context is one suggestion of a form/structure for experientially exploring answers to these questions.

The Practice

Those of us who choose to be consciously involved in change will in our lifetimes will find ourselves
Reparenting ourselves – and parenting differently
Re-educating ourselves – and supporting new patterns of learning
Reculturing ourselves – and creating new cultural forms and organizations.

The core practices of this Living Room exploration are coming together for:

• Open, curious, trust-based listening and revealing to each other and to ourselves
• Deepening our intellectual, emotional and physical understanding of ourselves as both unique individual persons and at the same time interdependently embedded in larger systems and wholes.
• Exploring navigating principles, and learning skills for journeying in a ‘new way of thinking’ perspective.
• Creating all sorts of opportunities for questioning and experimenting based on asking ‘What would it take to…?’ (Fill in the particular change you value and want to see happen.)

The Challenges

And Margaret Wheatley says, “I believe the fundamental work of this time – work that requires the participation of all of us – is to discover new ways of being together. Our old ways of relating to each other don’t support us any longer, whether it’s at home, in community, at work, or a nation state.
…the work is not to introduce a few new ideas, but to change a world view. Now that I understand that this is our work, there are different things required of us, not just some new implementation techniques. If, in fact, we are all voyaging to discover a new world, then we need to be together in this work differently, with greater patience, compassion and courage.”

We are all pioneers and researchers on the leading edge of human evolution, learning to embody the personal and collective human possibilities to survive and thrive in the face of enormous environmental and social challenges. Learning our way together into that required new way of thinking, that mindset of collaboration and co-creativity, is the exploratory research of the Living Room Context and its community of learners and leaders.