The Co-operative Inquiry Group

In earlier posts we have offered accounts of co-researchers’ experiences with the River community as sentient being; and described some of the practices and ceremonies we developed as ways of engaging with River. In addition to these specific practices, the inquiry group itself proved to be important for participants in providing a discipline of engagement and an ongoing, supportive forum to which people could bring their experiences and share others. The cycles of action and reflection provide a structure that supports both the encounter and inquiry; and the close relationships with co-researchers provides both support and challenge.

Participants reported ‘the intimate dialogue with the smaller groups was very helpful’; ‘being able to talk with people are on a similar path and share our experiences in a safe place’; ‘committing as a whole group to showing up time and time again, showing up when nothing happens, making a pledge and sticking to it’. Torsten and Luisa captured the experience nicely:

I'm really very grateful, because I was for a long time alone with my River. I've written a whole book about her all my own. But I could rarely share anything of these poetic, holistic experiences. And this is now brings it all together, because it's so wonderful to be able to be able to talk and share those experiences with you as a group; you have been like witnesses. This is so fruitful and rich and great. Because it makes me not feel alone with my River anymore after all those years. And it also makes me see my River differently, with new eyes.

The group became a shared practice of opening spaces and moments of connection with the other-than-human world. Throughout the months we were visiting River weekly, it became a ritual, a commitment or discipline with a friend, that grew into a cycle of giving and receiving. And with our encounters, we created a sort of melting pot of experiences where synchronicities lined up and meanings were created. It slowly evolved as a textile, a recollection of different fabrics that all together created a shared space of making sense. Each of us bringing into the fabric different questions, fears, visions, experiences and connections, that then became amplified with the response of the inquiry group.

That we met on Zoom seems significant but difficult to assess. While we may have missed the intimacy of face-to-face interaction, we quickly adapted to online conversations: a quick check-in, equal time for each person, taking turns to introduce and lead the conversation on their narrative. Zoom enabled us to meet across continents and oceans, to maintain regular conversations without the time and energy demands of travel. It provided a facility for automatically recording all conversations, and using Otter.ai voice-to-text transcription software to quickly share rough and ready transcripts.

In the Sentient River group, over more than three years of our work together, we expressed our appreciation of the group in different ways: Andrea expressed her ‘joy’, even in the face of grief and destruction; Dave that he was ‘happy, excited’; David ‘openness, appreciation, fondness’; for Luisa it was a ‘huge gift… an ‘honour’. These positive feelings were associated strongly with the purpose of the group. As Ezekiel put it, he had ‘longed’ to be part of a ‘regenerative, healthy, earth-based culture’. Working with people with different views was important (although we should note that most members were Westerners, most educated to postgraduate level). Kathleen reflected on the relative narrowness of her perspective as a conservation scientist:

As a reclusive, introvert, scientist, agnostic, American, etc., the unconscious boundaries of my positionality and cultural programming often truncate my capacity to perceive. Working within a diverse group of humans and more-than-humans allows for expansion, offering permission to knock on the door of alternative views, and to deconstruct and examine the veracity of previously strongly held personal opinions.

Our different perspectives and ideas were mirrored back to us by the conversations, so that, as David put it:

The intimacy and opportunity to meet with the panpsychist world and with other human beings in a deep, rewarding and opening way where I was able to discover so much more about the world around me as well as the world within me; where I could touch things about myself and my relationship to the non-human world and aspects of the human world I hadn’t been with before.

The structure of weekly cycles of inquiry, reading and then listening to each other’s narratives to draw out common and different themes provided an intimate ‘container’, a ‘discipline’ for our explorations. We had a sense of ‘being on the road together’. Kathleen wrote,

A co-operative group exploring panpsychist experiences offers a safe space to re-examine and remember our innate connection with the more-than-human world with both the wonderment of children but also with the ‘radical empiricism’ that comes from a lifetime of learning and experience. This is amplified across the experiences and learning of the group, so that each of us becomes richer than we ever could individually.

We realized the significance of the group when we paused our weekly meetings, finding other projects drew our attention, the impetus for the inquiry significantly weakened: as Ezekiel said, ‘Now, without that regularity, or that container, I feel sort of, like, “What am I doing?”’

However, the group served more than a practical vehicle, it became for Luisa ‘a shared practice of opening spaces and moments of connection with the other that human world’; Ezekiel found ‘an opportunity to cultivate the imagination as an organ of perception’. Kathleen thought ‘There's clearly some something happening just because we're doing this together… there's all these synchronicities’. This drew Dave to wonder if we were developing ‘a sort of a group mind, group soul, group intention’; and how we might facilitate its emergence. Ezekiel emphasized that we needed to make sense of our experience in mythic rather than rational terms.  Maybe, Dave suggested, the group could be understood as a Sangha—drawing on the Buddhist term for a fellowship of practice – that supported the Dharma, the teaching of the panpsychic worldview.

I'm looking to develop the Dharma practice, what is this practice? Some of it’s alone, some of it’s in reflecting together, some of it’s in the discipline imposed by the fact that we are somehow travelling together, that keeps me on track. And I learn from other people's experiences and interpretations.

We're trying to invent a liturgy together… a co-creative, spiritual practice…

We found ourselves turning to traditionally religious language. Would what we were doing best be described as ‘worship’? Dave again:

I wondered for a long time, what prayer is, and come to the conclusion that it is making a connection with the ineffable. And the ineffable is what we're talking about... The world that's always, always there, which is miraculous, and terrifying, and gorgeous and overwhelming… A group of people praying together is worshipping. And I suppose we're kind of trying to invent a liturgy together… a co-creative, spiritual practice for entering this liminality. And coming back was having had one's prayers answered… or even not having a prayer answered is having your prayer answered. You can't really lose. You just got to turn up! The only way I can think about is just steeped in mythic language: Divinity, Prayer, Liminality, Threshold, Worship, Sacred.

While we appreciated the experience of being in a small, intimate group, we also wondered if there was some means of working at a greater scale. As Kathleen asked,

I want to know, what is the impact of doing this collectively? If we think about sort of the energy created in this little group over this short period of time, what would that be like, amplified, you know, ten times?

As one Living Waters participant asked, reflecting a final discussion of what we had learned, ‘

I guess much like everybody else, ‘I think still very much a question for everybody: how do we now own this? How do we now take this forward… communicate visually, verbally, poetically?’ How we live a life, which incorporates this? That's what we felt was the biggest question. How we now tie this into our lives?