There’s an interesting thing authentic relating people do at workshops that they call “setting intentions,” and I think it works in a different way than either of these. The difference seems to me to be that the intention is being “held by the group.” I’m not sure how to explain what I mean by this. There are at least two visible signs of it:
1) people remind each other about the intention, and
2) people reward each other for following through on the intention.
If everyone knows the intention is being held by the group in this way, it both comes to mind more easily and feels more socially acceptable to follow through on (the latter might be causing the former). In my experience group intentions also require almost no willpower, but they also don’t feel quite like policies to me (that would be “agreements”) - they’re more like especially salient affordances.
The key ritual is that at some point someone asks “so, do we all agree to hold this intention?” and we raise our hands if so—and we look around the room so we can see each other’s hands. That way the collective holding of the intention can enter common knowledge.
Said another way, it’s something like trying to define the values of the group-mind we’re attempting to come together to form.
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I relate to your resistance to willpower-based intentions. It’s something like, a lot of people have an “inner authoritarian” or “inner tyrant” that is the internalized avatar of other people making them do stuff when they were younger (parents, teachers, etc.), whose job it is to suppress the parts of them that are unacceptable according to outer tyrants. You can live under your inner tyrant’s reign of terror, which works as long as submitting to the inner tyrant keeps your life running smoothly, e.g. it placates your outer tyrants and they feed you and stuff.
At some point this strategy can stop working, and then other parts of you might engage in an internal rebellion against your inner tyrant; I think I was in a state like this for most of 2017 and 2018, and probably still am now to some extent. At this stage using willpower can feel like giving in to the inner tyrant.
Then I think there’s some further stage of development that involves developing “internal leadership,” whatever that is.
There’s a bit in the Guru Papers about this. One quote, I think in the context of submitting to renunciate morality (e.g. Christian morality):
Maintaining denial actually requires constant surveillance of the thing you are pretending isn’t there. This deepens the internal splits that renunciation promises to heal. It requires the construction of a covert inner authoritarian to keep control over the “bad” stuff you reject. This inner tyrant is probably not strong enough to do the job on its own, so you submit to an external authority whose job is to strengthen the internal tyrant.
I have not much considered group intention-setting. This seems super interesting to explore too.
Phenomenologically, I feel it kind of as… the agreements or intentions of the group (in a circle) recede into the background, to form the water we’re all in together. Like it gets to relax in the VERY BACK of my mind and also I’m aware of it being in the back of other people’s minds.
And from that shared container / background, I “get to move around” but it’s like I am STARTING with a particular set of assumptions.
Other potential related examples:
I’m at a Magic tournament. I know basically what to expect—what people’s goals are, what people’s behaviors will be, what the rules of the game are and how to enforce them. It’s very easy for me to move here because a lot of the assumptions are set in place for me.
I’m in church as a kid. Similar to the above. But maybe less agreeable to me or more opaque to me. I get this weird SENSE that there are ways I’m supposed to behave, but I’m not totally sure what they are. I’m just trying to do what everyone else seems to be doing… This is not super comfortable. If I act out of line, a grownup scolds me, is one way I know where the lines are.
Potential examples of group policy-based intentions:
I have a friend I regularly get meals with. We agree to take turns paying for each other, explicitly.
I have a friend, and our implicit policy is to tell each other as soon as something big happens in our lives.
As soon as a third person is added to the dynamic, I think it gets trickier to ensure it’s a policy-based intention. (Technology might provide many exceptions?) As soon as one person feels a need to remind themselves of the thing, it stops being a policy-based intention.
Willpower-based intentions in groups feel they contain a bunch of things like rules, social norms, etc.
There is definitely this sense that exerting force or willpower feels like an EXTERNAL pressure even if that pressure does not have an external source that I could point to or even gesture at. But it /feels/ external or ‘not me’.
I have some trauma related to this. I could’ve gone into the trauma stuff more, but I think it would have made the post less accessible and also more confusing, rather than less. So I didn’t. :P
There’s an interesting thing authentic relating people do at workshops that they call “setting intentions,” and I think it works in a different way than either of these. The difference seems to me to be that the intention is being “held by the group.” I’m not sure how to explain what I mean by this. There are at least two visible signs of it:
1) people remind each other about the intention, and
2) people reward each other for following through on the intention.
If everyone knows the intention is being held by the group in this way, it both comes to mind more easily and feels more socially acceptable to follow through on (the latter might be causing the former). In my experience group intentions also require almost no willpower, but they also don’t feel quite like policies to me (that would be “agreements”) - they’re more like especially salient affordances.
The key ritual is that at some point someone asks “so, do we all agree to hold this intention?” and we raise our hands if so—and we look around the room so we can see each other’s hands. That way the collective holding of the intention can enter common knowledge.
Said another way, it’s something like trying to define the values of the group-mind we’re attempting to come together to form.
---
I relate to your resistance to willpower-based intentions. It’s something like, a lot of people have an “inner authoritarian” or “inner tyrant” that is the internalized avatar of other people making them do stuff when they were younger (parents, teachers, etc.), whose job it is to suppress the parts of them that are unacceptable according to outer tyrants. You can live under your inner tyrant’s reign of terror, which works as long as submitting to the inner tyrant keeps your life running smoothly, e.g. it placates your outer tyrants and they feed you and stuff.
At some point this strategy can stop working, and then other parts of you might engage in an internal rebellion against your inner tyrant; I think I was in a state like this for most of 2017 and 2018, and probably still am now to some extent. At this stage using willpower can feel like giving in to the inner tyrant.
Then I think there’s some further stage of development that involves developing “internal leadership,” whatever that is.
There’s a bit in the Guru Papers about this. One quote, I think in the context of submitting to renunciate morality (e.g. Christian morality):
I have not much considered group intention-setting. This seems super interesting to explore too.
Phenomenologically, I feel it kind of as… the agreements or intentions of the group (in a circle) recede into the background, to form the water we’re all in together. Like it gets to relax in the VERY BACK of my mind and also I’m aware of it being in the back of other people’s minds.
And from that shared container / background, I “get to move around” but it’s like I am STARTING with a particular set of assumptions.
Other potential related examples:
I’m at a Magic tournament. I know basically what to expect—what people’s goals are, what people’s behaviors will be, what the rules of the game are and how to enforce them. It’s very easy for me to move here because a lot of the assumptions are set in place for me.
I’m in church as a kid. Similar to the above. But maybe less agreeable to me or more opaque to me. I get this weird SENSE that there are ways I’m supposed to behave, but I’m not totally sure what they are. I’m just trying to do what everyone else seems to be doing… This is not super comfortable. If I act out of line, a grownup scolds me, is one way I know where the lines are.
Potential examples of group policy-based intentions:
I have a friend I regularly get meals with. We agree to take turns paying for each other, explicitly.
I have a friend, and our implicit policy is to tell each other as soon as something big happens in our lives.
As soon as a third person is added to the dynamic, I think it gets trickier to ensure it’s a policy-based intention. (Technology might provide many exceptions?) As soon as one person feels a need to remind themselves of the thing, it stops being a policy-based intention.
Willpower-based intentions in groups feel they contain a bunch of things like rules, social norms, etc.
There is definitely this sense that exerting force or willpower feels like an EXTERNAL pressure even if that pressure does not have an external source that I could point to or even gesture at. But it /feels/ external or ‘not me’.
I have some trauma related to this. I could’ve gone into the trauma stuff more, but I think it would have made the post less accessible and also more confusing, rather than less. So I didn’t. :P