Conferencing as meditation

Just as individuals perceive meditation as a process to introduce increasing harmony into their jumble of thoughts, emotions and activities, conferencing can be considered as a process of collective meditation. During the initial stages of meditation, central themes emerge and are blended into an even larger theme. This is "attunement" or "alignment" . If an aim of conferencing can be described as introducing harmony into the jumble of issues, attitudes, and behaviour of the different groups and coalitions, the process can be recognized as being surprisingly similar to those of personal attunement. There are five main concerns:< (a) The physical well being, its health, balance and posture. (There are many parallels between the health of an individual and the health of a conference).

(b) Psychological well-being of the conference. Its "breathing", flexibility and suppleness; its internal relationships and awareness of itself and the polarities within it.

(c) Control and expression of emotions. The flowing and the channelling of emotional energy.

(d) Organization of concepts. The contradictions and inconsistencies and the process for integration and synthesis. The relationship of the conference to its larger environment.

(e) Once these concerns are being attended to, the next concern has to do with the focus on the conference and its nature as a whole.

The whole jumble of events of a conference can be viewed as the surface manifestation of a collective entity struggling to be. The efforts of the parts and the factions to control the whole, according to their limited perspectives, is the cause of confusion and turmoil, and yet is necessary as the parts develop their own self-awareness, prior to relating harmoniously to the other parts, in order to be able to express the whole. The real challenge is to maintain a sufficiently strong vision of the nature of the whole in order to ensure that this preliminary chaos of attunement does not completely absorb the attention of the participants, and prevent the whole from coming to maturity in the time available.

In its maturity, as a conscious meditation, the congress constitutes a chalice into which energies can be focused and through which they can flow. This is not just a beautiful image of the difficulty in reaching and attaining this level of consciously integrated focus. (Such synthesis is to analysis, just as fission is to fusion - and people do not yet have access to fusion energy, despite much research on the required configuration to bring it about).