A Natural Emergence from Later Stages of Awareness
Presented at the Integral Theory Conference, San Francisco, CA, 2013
Drawing on ten years of longitudinal research with nearly 200 participants in Pacific Integral's Generating Transformative Change program, Ramirez, Fitch and O'Fallon name and describe a form of leadership arising at the later, causal stages of adult development. Building on O'Fallon's mapping of concrete, subtle and causal tiers of consciousness, they argue that when a leader's sense of "I" shifts from the constructed self to ever-present awareness, leadership stops being something a person does to a group and becomes something that moves through individuals and collectives together. The paper describes the four causal stages — Construct Aware, Transpersonal, Universal, Illumined — examines the disorientation of the transition into them, and considers what this form of leadership might make possible at a civilisational scale.
Causal Leadership is a way of being. It arises naturally, as a creative spark, from and through spacious awareness, aligning multiple visions, delivering creative resolution to “unsolvable” problems, and providing spontaneous intuitive direction beyond imagination. Opening and surrendering to this source of being, individually and collectively, at the most profound level of human consciousness, is one of the most pleasurable experiences a human can have. It is beyond the self and yet it includes all selves. And this is precisely why opening to this primal awareness as a leader and as a human being is so effective on every level, and why it rings true. It is the one element that unites us, the one that we collectively share.
Causal leadership is an experience. Words are only pointers, and yet the words we use, craft and define our experience. Through words, language, and beliefs, we shape and create our lives and our collective future. Similarly, through causal leadership, together we consciously and collectively have the capacity to create new ways of being, relating and functioning as a species. We can create new possibilities that meet the unprecedented requirements of our time, while envisioning a more elegant and generative future for humanity and for all of life. Through causal leadership, doing is done through us and by us, spontaneously, as wakeful collective intelligence. In this way, leadership is effortless, an emergence of the One seeing itself through the many, an act of grace that follows the natural order of things.
This concept of causal leadership has emerged through the collective awareness and direct experience with nearly 200 of our participants in our evolving, intensive leadership programs over the past ten years. This phenomenon seems to be, in part, the result of humans’ recent access to our collective resources and capacities as global citizens, as well as the confluence of eastern and western theory and practice, and an increasingly trans-disciplinary approach to learning.
— From the paper’s introduction.
Causal leadership; Concrete, subtle and causal tiers; Construct Aware; Transpersonal; Universal; Illumined; Witness; Emptiness and fullness; Embodiment; Intimacy
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