Integral City 3.7

Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia's Human Hives

Marilyn Hamilton

• Publisher: Amaranth Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780998031712
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Integral City 3.7 considers a series of apparently intractable challenges that all cities face because the world has become so complex that cause and effect are rarely directly linked.This third book in our series explores three themes that are eternal practices for designing a collective life that works for all life; namely, Caring, Contexting and Capacity Building. The challenges cities face today result from the intertwining impacts of multiple life conditions, perspectives and capacities and can only be addressed by reframing them within an Integral City model that honors the plural realities, recognizes their developmental and evolutionary relationships and does not conflate differences.Book 3 applies and expands in multiple directions the 12 intelligences described in Book 1, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive and builds on the field work described in Book 2: Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive.

Part 1

Deepening Care

This first Part explores Care through three gateways: Spirituality, Creativity, and the Master Code.

Chapter 1 opens the gateway of spirituality. In terms of intelligences, spirituality is intimately enmeshed (if not causal to) the evolutionary impulse that lies at the center of our GPS (see Appendix C3). It was a spiritual impulse that lead me to write Books 1 and 2. As the prime author, Spirit was a guiding energy that revealed the 12 Integral City Intelligences, 4 Voices, Master Code and made the astonishing connections between the living systems of the species homo sapiens sapiens with the species apis mellifera that suggested the reality of the “human hive”. Spirit was behind every idea, each word and all the chapters of Books 1 and 2. Yet, as many readers pointed out, although Spirit was a major actor in Book 2’s first chapters describing the “Knowing Field”, Spirit was not explicitly honored with its own chapter So, in this third book I share my thoughts on how Spirit is waking up the human hive through the involutionary and evolutionary cycle that manifests care in our cities through beauty, goodness and truth.

Chapter 2 opens the gateway of creativity. Waking up to creativity in the human hive brings us into the realms of individual intention and expression and how that influences collective attention and realization of our shared intentions for care. While spirituality is our impulse, I suggest that creativity is the pulse that measures our aliveness and underlies our capacity for care in the city. Like spirituality, creativity is ever-present in individuals but not always attended with intention. When we are aware of this sacred connection, we declare that we are inspired! But creativity’s manifestation at the collective and city scale is greatly linked to human development. Creativity emerges through stages of development, often precipitated by the urges of diversity generation (see Chapter 8) at the early phase of new discovery and then birthed into acceptance as more people in the human hive wake up to the greater care for life that new creations can enable.

Chapter 3 re-opens the gateway of the Master Code. This is the gateway first opened in the exploration of Integral City Intelligences in Book 1, Chapter 12, and in the exploration of Inquiry Action and Impact in Book 2, Chapters 3 and 4. The Master Code codifies the relationship of the core holons in the human hive through their caring for self, others, place and planet. The Master Code both symbolizes and energizes the life-giving nature of spirituality and creativity that are embedded in the concept and reality of expanding our circles of care. By growing this sacred space progressively greater, we not only make the human hive resilient, we develop as individuals and collectives and evolve as a species.

Chapter 1

Spirituality in the Human Hive: Involutionary & Evolutionary Cycle of Love

An earlier version of this chapter was first published as: Hamilton, M. (2011). Integral Spirituality in the Human Hive: A Primer in Trialog.

This chapter on Spirituality may be considered the missing chapter from Book 1 (Hamilton, 2008). That book felt like it was written by Spirit, but this chapter is the exploration and explication of how that spiritual source, resource and field emerged what has become paradigm, operating system and inspiration for the Integral City.

Humans are Gaia’s reflective organ.

— James Lovelock

Chapter Summary

This chapter explores spirituality in the human hive using the Integral City framework and exploring the roots of the Master Code. It proposes that spirituality contributes to the quality of reflective capacity in the city with influences on design, planning and building. As an involutionary/evolutionary impulse, spirituality underlies the emergence of all life forms, including the most complex human system of all, the city. Multiple states and stages of spirituality influence place, space and grace in the city. Changing worldviews at the ego-ethno-world-Kosmic-centric stages of development recapitulate the meaning of spirituality to individuals and cultures and impact structures in church/synagogue/temple/sanctuary that contribute capacities to the city as well as create conflicts within and across the silos of education, health and governance domains. Spirituality in the human hive is source, field and resource to the city’s Goodness (Caring), Truth (Contexting) and Beauty (Capacity).

Keywords: spirituality, grace, space, place, caring, contexting, capacity building, involutionary, evolutionary

Introduction

Take Care of Yourself.

Take Care of Each Other.

Take Care of this Place

Take Care of this Planet.

Such is the Master Code for living well in the human hive (Hamilton 2008, 2017) as explored in Chapter 3. Essentially, this is an injunction for spiritual wellbeing in the human hive.

What is the Human Hive?

The human hive—the equivalent habitat for our species of the honeybee’s hive—represents man’s most complex system yet created. In all its qualities—both dignities and disasters—it is an expression of the deepest essence of man’s creative capacities. James Lovelock (2009) recently recognized homo sapiens as Gaia’s most reflective organ. If that is the case, then we might ask what are the qualities of a reflective organ and why would evolution call forth such a capacity? In 1901, Nobel laureate and author of the “Life of the Bee” (a classical reference still consulted for its incisive observations) Maurice Maeterlinck (1954) observed in comparing humans to the honeybee, that the purpose of all evolutionary beings is “read in the distinguishing orga...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Part 1
• Spirituality in the Human Hive: Involutionary & Evolutionary Cycle of Love
• Creativity and Care in Gaia’s Reflective Organ
• The Master Code of Care for Individual, Collective, and City Wellbeing
• Part 2
• Cities are Pivotal Trigger Points and Planetary Tipping Points
• Invisible Cities: Contexting Urban Challenges From the Inside-Out
• Security Systems: Evolutionary Framework for the Human Hive
• Part 3
• Section 1:
• Leadership to the Power of 8: Leading Self, Others, Organization, System and Supra System
• Diversity Generators: Resilience Innovators of the Human Hive
• Integral Intelligences: Practising Personal Sustainability Leadership
• Section 2
• Improving Organizational Wellbeing
• Organizations Will Reinvent the City
• Section 3
• Systems Thinking: A Primer for City Capacity Building
• Reframing Homefulness by Reframing Homelessness
• Section 4
• Integral City Systems of Survival: Why Not Just Privatize the Government?
• Capacity Building at the City Scale with Evolutionary Development Principles
• Conclusion
• Waking Up the Human Hive: Aligning Care, Context and Capacity for Gaia’s Reflective Organs