34. NATURE AND SACRED
SPACES

IN THE WILDERNESS, SELF-REALIZATION IS BORN, AND, OVER TIME, IT CAN MATURE INTO A DISTINCTIVE KIND OF AWARENESS, WHICH HAS BEEN DESCRIBED IN THE ANCIENT TEXTS FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

From my earliest memory, I always experienced the power of nature – but I’ve always struggled to explain this experience to others. In developing the curriculum for the Leadership Forum, we all simply took it as gospel that the wilderness experience would be at the heart of the year-long program, enabling the injunction Bohm gave me to break the “self-imposed boundaries” between the Fellows so they could operate as a “single intelligence for the good of their communities.”

It was a year or so after my meeting with Bohm that the Harvard biologist, E. O. Wilson, popularized the biophilia hypothesis that our evolutionary history has blessed us with an innate affinity for nature. The appeal of the natural is reflected in where we most want to live. Many studies have shown that even a limited exposure to nature, like a chance to look at the natural world through a window, is good for your health. Hospitalized patients heal more quickly when there is a window to the outside world, and prisoners get sick less often. Virtually all indigenous cultures have regarded nature as the ultimate teacher, as have all great poets, painters, and scientists, such as Newton and Einstein.

These powerful effects of nature were well known to me, but I didn’t understand the cause until years later when I met Ian Player, a leader of nature retreats in the African wilderness. Founder of the Wilderness Leadership School in South Africa, Dr. Player is often referred to as “the man who saved the white rhino.”

Ian and I spent a weekend together in 2002 at the conference in Putten where I had met the Unilever chairman, Antony Burgmans. The following week, Ian and I met in London where I absorbed all I could of his penetrating wisdom. Ian explained that thousands of years of human evolution are imprinted in our psyche. Spending time alone in nature is at the core of our genetic coding. We are virtually identical to the people who lived at the end of the Ice Age and who possessed capacities that lie dormant in us today, including a heightened sense of awareness and knowing beyond the limited self. I believe it was the mythologist Joseph Campbell who talked about feeling the rhythms of life in the wilds of nature – “the rhythm of our own heartbeat is the rhythm of the universe and when we are in accord with this universal rhythm, we feel most alive.” Ian said that when we are in solitude in nature, we enter a world of long-past experiences and become free again – our “secret birthright.”

Ian’s view of the generative power of nature has been confirmed by my direct experience of over thirty years, especially my three extraordinary experiences of communication with animals – the ermine in the Tetons described in Synchronicity, the whales in Baja, and the mountain lion in Montana. Ian’s view has also been confirmed by virtually every remarkable person I’ve interviewed about the source of the entrepreneurial impulse, including John Milton, Brian Arthur, David Bohm, and the scientists at Pari, Princeton, and HeartMath. The consistent experiences of the participants in Innovation Labs over the years underscore his views as well.

The wilderness passage provides a liminal experience, the root from which our highest characteristics and experiences can grow. In the wilderness, self-realization is born, and over time, it can mature into a distinctive kind of awareness, which has been described in the ancient texts for thousands of years. Descriptions of this kind of awareness are found among the traditional beliefs of people in every region of the world, and in its fully developed form, it has its place among every one of the world’s major religions. Such a passage for a management team in an Innovation Lab acts to dissolve the team’s self-imposed boundaries, enabling it to operate as a single intelligence to resolve the issue at hand.

Over the years, we’ve learned that taking groups or teams to sacred sites enhances their capacity to gain access to new knowledge. All cultures have celebrated particular places as powerful. The Japanese word ba, “place,” is used to refer not only to a physical place, but also to an existential place that arises from the interaction and patterns of relationships that evolve among participants in any undertaking of mutual importance. Used in this sense, ba transcends time and space.

The subject of such “conditioned space” was at the heart of the Field Paper as well as the salon we held in Boston with Nonaka. Ba is the field Bohm described in which true dialogue occurs. Bohm told me that such positive fields can be set by our “intention and way of being.” Bob and Brenda told me that it was accepted in their scientific circles that space can be conditioned this way.

I told them of Professor Tiller’s conversations with me about sacred sites and “conditioned space.” Tiller’s studies show that by entering a deep meditative state and then sending or “imprinting” intentions onto RNGs shielded from electromagnetic and human influences, these effects are maintained and even transferred to the space around them. Tiller says that sacred sites, like churches and special holy places, are “conditioned” spaces and retain a certain quality about them that can be measured with simple pH or temperature meters. “Intentions, previously … erratic and feeble, now become more constant, more direct, and more ordered.” Jahn and Dunne’s work confirmed that such conditioned spaces have “more structure, a higher level of order.”