Fourth Person Knowing

The knowing of group fields

I haven’t written for some time. I’ve devoted most of my efforts this year to developing my astrology practice and have not had time to sit down to write. (I turned off my paid subscriptions some time ago due to my intermittent postings here.)

Astrology is a true love. I had an opportunity when I was younger to enroll in a counseling psychology program but the framework always felt too limiting and bureaucratic to me. I tend to operate better on the edges of conventional society. Unlike psychology, the worldview underlying astrology is inherently enchanted. Perhaps primarily because of that, I find that I am happily congruent with the identity of ‘astrological counselor.’ It really is a joy to help people realize their unique place in the Cosmos.

My driving interest in life has been to explore the link between individual and collective transformation. I had an early intuition that there must be a way to harness the transformative power of personal and spiritual growth technologies, like meditation, prayer, or depth psychology, for the benefit of social and cultural change. I eventually called this approach ‘subtle activism.’ For years my subtle activism work focused mainly on the collective end of the spectrum, in the form of large-scale global meditation events and ‘WiseUSA’ campaigns that used collective spiritual practice to help raise the vibration in the USA around national elections. Now with my astrology practice I’m bringing more attention to the process of individual transformation. I find adding this personal dimension makes the collective work seem more real and grounded.

Central to my subtle activism approach has been an exploration of the emergent capacities of coherent group fields. When a group of disparate individuals join their essence together on a deep level, they create a shared presence that has qualities that transcend the sum of its parts. Most participants in such fields experience a very profound kind of intimacy, not only with each other but also with the inner dimension of natural and cosmic forces in the wider world. For example, we might experience ourselves coming into resonance together with the natural rhythms of the Earth or the majestic stillness of a mountain or the radiant joy of the Sun. It is a common intuition among participants that such experiences have significance beyond their own personal benefit — that the encounter transforms both them and the world they experience in some mysterious way.

I’ve been experimenting lately with incorporating this group approach into my astrological work with individuals. In the lead up to a major planetary alignment in April (the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction), I convened a three-week clinic for those wanting to explore the unique opportunities that transit presented to them. The clinic began with a group call during which we created together a coherent group field to hold each of the participants throughout the clinic. Over the next three weeks, each participant had a private session with me to discover how specifically the transit was activating their natal chart. In each private session, we invoked the support of the group field for the individual work. We then reconvened as a group at the end of the clinic to share our discoveries with each other and created together another group field to bless our learning and send it out to the wider world.

What I realized through this experiment is that when we make the connection between individual and group work more explicit, it becomes easier to recognize the link between personal and collective transformation. In the clinic, it was obvious that the individual work took place in the context of the group field, while the group field was itself nested in larger social fields. Making this link more conscious enabled us to recognize that a continuous, interconnected process of transformation is always taking place between these hierarchically-nested fields, from the individual to the planetary (and beyond), and that a change at any level inevitably effects every level.

This insight offers a different take on the age-old question of how best to effect change in the world. Spiritual types tend to believe that outer action without self-awareness usually creates more problems that it solves; therefore the only real way to change the world is to change ourselves first.  Political or worldly types tend to critique such conclusions as narcissistic in the face of collective suffering, and focus their attention on effecting change in the systems and structures of the world. But if we become more aware of the dynamic link between fields of consciousness at different levels — individual, family, group, nation, world —  it becomes more possible to imagine how we can participate in seeding change at every level.

I recently became aware of two new intellectual developments that powerfully contextualize the significance of this direction in consciousness work. I’ll focus on one in this essay and the other in another one next week.

The first is a new article by MIT senior lecturer Otto Scharmer, “Fourth Person: The Knowing of the Field.” Scharmer, the author of Theory U, is an action researcher based at MIT who specializes in awareness-based systems change. In “Fourth Person,” he argues that the number one problem we face today is not climate change, nuclear war, or economic inequality, but our inability to change any of it. In the context of our polycrisis and systemic collapse, Scharmer maintains that our existing categories of knowing — first person (subjective), second person (intersubjective), and third person (objective) — which form the basis for much of our existing learning, knowledge, and leadership systems — are insufficient to catalyze the profound shift now called for. Instead, we need to draw from a new form of knowing “that allows us to connect with … the dignity and interiority of the worlds that surround us and that we co-shape and co-enact moment to moment.”

Scharmer introduces the concept of fourth person knowing as a distinct epistemology emerging at the intersection of the other three. In the context of collective inner experience, the source of knowing or cognition shifts to a realm of interaction that blends subjective, objective, and intersubjective knowing, a mode that Scharmer and his colleagues call trans-subjective knowing. Trans-subjective (or fourth person) knowing is the knowing of the collective interior. Although it appears in subjective experience, it is neither purely subjective, nor purely objective or intersubjective. Rather, it is a distinct form of knowing that is “neither mine nor yours, neither solely outside of me nor inside of me… nor something that exists only between us.” Instead “it is something within, between, and beyond us simultaneously.”

This is the clearest description I’ve yet heard to describe my experience of a group field. I’ve often wondered in the context of these group experiences, “where is the field, exactly?” It’s obviously not only inside of me, nor is it only outside of me, nor does it belong only to the group participants — there is very evidently also the presence of something more than us.

From Scharmer’s action research in awareness-based systems change, he identifies several traits that characterize fourth person knowing, including “a heightened sense of possibilities that previously were experienced as unattainable now seeming within reach” and “sensing one’s own agency in helping the universe/larger field to evolve.”

Again, this corresponds well with my own experience working with group fields. Participants seem to innately recognize that the field has emergent properties almost bursting with new levels of evolutionary potential. They consistently report that such experiences inspire in them a sense of hope for the future and a joy in knowing that there is some way they can meaningfully contribute to shaping the collective unfolding.

Scharmer believes that, far from being of merely esoteric interest, the deep collective awareness of the kind that emerges in coherent group fields is both a critical gateway for future possibilities and the basis for significant long-term impact in terms of practical results. As such, for Scharmer, this new fourth-person way of knowing is — or ought to be — “at the core of our planetary moment and movement making.”

Here, here.

Next week, I’ll share about another recent intellectual development that offers profound context for why we need these emergent forms of knowing to start to move into the center of culture as a matter of survival in this time between worlds.