Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino.
~ Antonio Machado
“Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. Walking makes the road.” This is maybe the best poetic definition of Process. There is no “road” but through movement and change. Our lives are wanderings; journeys in constant evolution. And, our environments and relationships are made real through our passages. Our footsteps create the world we live in. And again, reality is entangled with us experiencing it as we move through it.
Process describes movement and change and requires someone to notice and experience it. Experience in some ways is the basic stuff of reality; process and experience are the foundation of reality and without anybody experiencing them, objects and processes don’t exist. In that sense, experience and process are fundamentally relational; they don’t exist in isolation. They are also to some degree relative as every experience comes with a different set of previous experiences.
The philosopher-theologian Raimon Panikkar describes our experience of the world with a window metaphor. He says we see the world through a window, each one of us through his or her own window. We can’t see through our neighbor’s window. What we can is to listen to and hear the other’s experience of her view through her window. Hence, as we are co-creating the world with our footsteps and individual perceptions, we need good listening and relational skills.
As David Whyte describes it, the experience of reality is an ongoing conversation. That conversation happens at the frontier between what you think is you, what you see through your window, and what you experience as not you, the world outside or the world that someone else sees through her own window.
So, if we think of ourselves as listeners, conversationalists, and wanderers, knowledge of Process and its multi-level manifestations, helps us ease our and other people’s journeys. To foster the conversation and bolster your listening skills, Process Work helps you relate to your own inner conversation with all your diverse fractions, and to experiences that others have as they look through their own windows. It is true that we cannot fully experience the world through someone else’s “window.” But we can, by better communicating and conversing with our own inner diversity, putting ourselves into someone else’s shoes and imagine seeing the world through their eyes.
We can live our conversations, keep them internal and have them with the environment, our friends, families, teams and communities. You can join us on the Communal Intelligence Projects Facebook page.