The Fourth Person Perspective
we were on the precipice of what wanted to happen next
My feet are tired but my heart is strong. My time at Olympia continues to be marked by struggles with housing, and stress in my schooling. But it is the beauty I want to tell you about.
I could tell you about my new job as a Restorative Justice Fellow at Evergreen’s Prison Education Program. And how, when I signed up, an administrator asked me when my first day of work was. And for administrative purposes I said, Today, but the truth is I’ve been walking toward this for years.
I could tell you about a bracing conversation I had with a Reentry Navigator at the Washington Department of Corrections, who told me that sometimes, when she drives a legally liberated human being out of prison, they cry when they see the night sky, or a tree, because they haven’t seen either in 20 years. And they get carsick in the car, because their body has forgotten what it feels like to move freely and at speed.
And I could tell you about Grady, who was in prison for almost the entirety of my lifetime (37 years), and who is now illuminated with the zeal to help system-impacted men to heal. And when he started talking about unwinding patriarchy, and teaching men to cry, I sighed at the sheer gorgeousness of it.
I could tell you about the huge healing experiences of this season, so right for fall. How I was held in my grief and held to my vision with the help of an elder and an empathogen. How I wept saying aloud the words of Mister Rogers, now my morning prayer:
“No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be Tikkun Olam—repairers of creation.”
How in late September we gathered in song, we raised our voices, united in our commitment to grief, to the joy of the trees and the confusion of park goers in West Seattle (do check out the newly born Wails album from my friend Ahlay Blakely).
I could tell you about a spiritual encounter I had with a bunch of men in a forest church on the Olympic Peninsula.
How a grizzled silverback of a man fell to his knees and pleaded: Please, please don’t stop singing. It’s so beautiful. And we circled him and it was my hands that caressed his bald head and my voice that sang to him but the love came from somewhere bigger.
And there, on the damp forest floor, in the arms of men, I met the divine masculine in his glory.
And the divine feminine and the divine queerness were there, too.
And I’m developing a theory about who it is I’m talking to in those moments.
When I looked up through the trees at the sky and asked, Where are you?
And a voice said, I’m the everything.
And I walked by some old folks handing out Gideon’s bibles, at Evergreen of all places, and I thought, Your god isn’t big enough.
And I could tell you how my vision has expanded, from grief work to something bigger: A place where we come together to heal, to see, to dream, and to act.
I could tell you how I speak differently, how I walk as if propelled by a stiff wind when I’m carrying that vision.
How I’m straightening my spine and sharpening my words until I kick down the right door and deliver the pitch that will ignite this thing.
And when my anxiety, that scared little orphan, says, How will I do all of this? Another part of me, this now familiar voice, the selfsame voice that spoke to me in the trees, says, Leave it to Us.
The Fourth Person Perspective
I’m not accustomed to weeping to an academic paper, but my world has gotten strange indeed. And sometimes I worry now that I sound a bit messianic, or manic. Or god forbid, religious. And I can tell you my ego is still very much present, fretting and individual, inflating and deflating.
But there’s something else afoot. Strange to find it in the oddest work of academic writing I’ve ever come across. Here’s a taste:
Fourth-person knowing shows up in our individual experience, but it is not of our making. Nor is it of a specific interaction or intersubjective experience—it is not something that exists only between us. Rather, it is something within, between, and beyond us simultaneously.
(Scharmer, Pomeroy, Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2024)
This piece comes from a brain trust on the East Coast, an esoteric spin-off of the MIT Sloan School of Management known as the Presencing Institute.
Even this word ‘presencing’ is weird, a neologism born of presence and sensing.
Sensing we all know, but what is presence?
Like anything sufficiently big, language falls flat. Metaphor is a glancing blow. Poetry a bit closer to the mark. Art a gesture towards.
In the 30 pages of the “The Fourth Person Perspective,” some attempts, which I’ve arranged into a poem:
On Presence (Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp. 19-48)
1. You Are Not Alone
“What stood out for me was this warmth.”
“…it gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song” – B. Dylan
This self-transcending human perspective
“It's so hard to talk about, because it does really feel as though we’ve entered another realm, and yet the realm is somehow familiar.”
recognizing our role on the planet and in the cosmos.
“There was no time…It was out of body.”
“But also, it feels partly generated by us.”
“a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him”
“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas.”
3. Who I Am and What I Do Matters
“Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.”
“…it says, ‘It's open: pass.’ The voice is not that gentle. It's a very determined voice.”
a future potential that was previously experienced as out of reach moves inside the horizon of what feels doable and possible.
“You have officially entered into a contract with inspiration”
“My sense is it's partly the presence of something that's already there anyway, so it feels like a recognition.”
The simplest answer, of course, is just to say no. Then you’re off the hook. The idea will eventually go away…You don’t have to do anything.
4. Whole-in-the-Parts and Parts-in-the-Whole
“my body-heart-mind is part of a large evolutionary movement of body-heart-minds.”
The evolutionary step that distinguishes humans from other species…is our capacity to enter into shared agency.
“we experienced flow and awe and ‘just- rightness,’ and the felt sense that it just might be transformational.” United Nations Liberia SDG Leadership Lab Initiative, 2023
tends to activate longer-term generative social fields
“we were on the precipice of what wanted to happen next”
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If this still feels like shadow puppetry, I’ll switch to prose (likely a mistake). What is presence, you ask?
There are many different names for what this is: Spirit, collective knowing, the earth, trans-subjectivity… But perhaps the simplest frame is the idea of collective consciousness. That when we get quiet and we listen with our whole beings, we can tap into our collective sensing, our shared longings, and our common vision for the future.
A very clear thing about presence is that it is always, always generative.
It can be identified in much the same way the higher Self can be identified in Internal Family Systems therapy, the so-called 8 C’s and 5 P’s:
Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, and Connectedness
Perspective, Patience, Persistence, Playfulness….and Presence.
This is where we delve into the philosophical ouroboros which is the connection between Self and Presence, and whether they are fractals of one another or The Same Thing, which in either case Indicates Fairly Significant Things About the Nature of Reality.
Please consult your nearest spiritual mystic. Or an upcoming edition of the Standard Rainbow Hour, which you should subscribe to.
Yes, But Why
Why does all this matter? Maybe I should have started here.
It matters because of what the Presencing Institute calls Awareness-Based Systems Change. In essence, this is a theory, a practice, a system grounded in the idea that human beings can tap into our collective knowing to take in the complexities of our world to a super-human degree.
And from that position of knowing, we can access our collective creative imagination toward a better world, one that is simply waiting to be born through us.
With co-sensing, and co-intention, we can then accomplish the ultimate goal of ABSC, which is co-agency, or Awareness-Based Collective Action.
And what is our collective longing asking of us? In this shattered human world, this broken earth, what is asking to be born?
I can tell you that when my little water droplet of consciousness has merged with the collective, in each and every healing and spiritual encounter I’ve had the great good fortune to experience, when I merge with the stream and it becomes a river and then a torrent and then an ocean and then the everything…It is the words of a 20th century spiritual mystic and puppeteer that I hear:
“No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be Tikkun Olam—repairers of creation.”
And now, sweet darlings let us get to work.