Cognitive engagement with globality

Engaging with Globality through Cognitive Circlets (Part #10)

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• with respect to the individual this is the emergent sense of personal integration seen as a culminating characteristic of many understandings of human development (as profiled by the Human Development Project). It is associated with a sense of groundedness and centeredness -- possibly even to be sensed by others as charisma. Globality is then the direct experience of the unity of the world -- of the "pattern which connects" in the terms of Gregory Bateson (Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, 1979). This experience, whatever its scope and depth, is open to every individual, whether the uniquely powerful or the uniquely disempowered.
  
  
• with respect to the knowable universe, beyond individual human ken, globality is readily associated with understandings of globalization, especially in communication terms around the planetary globe. Understandings of "universe" are then associated with the planet occupied by humans and other species, as with "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", "Miss Universe" or the "Masters of the Universe" mentioned in Dimension 1. Such usage obscures an important dimension discussed elsewhere (Future Generation through Global Conversation in quest of collective well-being through conversation in the present moment, 1997):

  The fashionable use of "global" focuses on the geographical dimension: the planet as a whole. This emphasis is the culmination of a century of successful effort towards international understanding -- of "thinking globally and acting locally", of "global villages", of "global action plans", of "global ethics", of "global consciousness" and of "globalization".

  What has been largely lost in this process is the other sense of global, namely some kind of comprehensible, integrative whole -- of which a geographically bounded planet is but one particular instance. "Global" is too readily taken to mean planet-wide and no more -- a recognition by certain regions that there are others on the planet. "Interdisciplinarity", "transdisciplinarity" and "integrative" have themselves evolved into holistic buzz words because of the essential failure of the initiatives they represented in responding to the fragmentation of knowledge. "Holistic" could even be considered as content-free. "Global understanding" in this integrative sense has become almost a myth in pursuit of which some heroes occasionally continue to quest.

The challenge in both cases is that of how to engage meaningfully with globality and a sense of wholeness. The challenge for the private individual mirrors that of anyone who is "crowned" with responsibilities for global leadership. It might even be assumed that, unless such integrative engagement is rendered meaningful to the disempowered, any strategy by the empowered will necessarily be experienced as "warping" and doing violence to their space.

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