The Evolutionary Cafe

What is the Evolutionary Café?

David: The Evolutionary Cafe is the Auroville version of the World Café.

Ulli: The World Café started in the 1990s and it came out of the ‘dialogue’ movement inspired by physicist David Bohm. Juanita Brown and others tried to develop a model where society could be transformed through conversations that follow a basic model. It is important that participants understand the difference between a discussion and dialogue. Dialogue tries to create a free flow of meaning; it an attempt to break out of our normal way of responding and reacting so that we can tap into something deeper. As somebody put it, the objective that the World Cafe and Bohmian Dialogue have in common is to “think together, to go places no member has ever been before by themselves or in the past.”

What is its relevance to Auroville?

Ulli: The World Cafe is explicitly designed to harvest collective intelligence. As Juanita Brown expressed it, “World Café conversations hold the promise to access the unique relationship between the individual and the collective that enables a special type of mutual intelligence to emerge”. In this sense it’s like a tool designed for Auroville.

David: I think one of the things that Auroville is missing is tools with which to work collectively. We need new systems, new ways of interacting and dialoguing, and new paradigms of thought in order to move us forward. I see the Evolutionary Cafe as an amazing possibility to go deep and really question what it means to be here for evolution.

Actually, the concept is not new for Auroville. Dreamcatchers [a forum which aims to call down and synthesise different aspects of Mother’s Dream for Auroville. See Aurovile Today April, 2006 eds.] have already used this model with architects. We called it a Design Café and had very interesting results in getting architects to sit around a table and come out with a collective design.

Now you are starting the second season of the Evolutionary Cafe. Looking back on the first season, what did you do and what were the highlights?

David: We always begin with a video to stimulate discussion. We began with Barbara Marx Hubbard talking about the ascent of humanity, then there were two sessions when Robert Gilman presented the big picture of humanity’s past cultural evolution and how we can engage with the next step. Finally, there was an introduction to ‘Spiral Dynamics’, which is a dynamic model of human development

Ulli: I think Robert Gilman was outstanding. In the first video he talked about the shift in our past history from kinship to empire, and in the second he speculated about what is happening now, which he identifies as another huge cultural shift into the ‘Planetary Era’.

David: There is a very interesting overlap between Gilman and Spiral Dynamics. Gilman covers this very large timescale of cultural evolution. Spiral Dynamics explains in more detail how it happens.

Ulli: We always try to relate the content of the movie to Auroville through a question to the participants. For example, after Robert Gilman’s first talk about the transition from kinship systems to empire we asked participants, “Where do I see these empire structures in Auroville?” The next time, when he focused on the planetary era, we asked people what evidence of a planetary culture they could see in Auroville today.

Is there any indication that these kind of conversations have a practical effect in Auroville? Do they lead to practical change?

David: This is very much one of our intentions. However, my experience with Dreamcatchers was that there was very little direct immediate result. People were very positive but you could not put your finger on something and say this changed because of Dreamcatchers. However, now I see little results, like small shoots emerging. For example, last week Aurelio asked me if I would to do something like the Design Cafe with architects for the extension of SVARAM workshop. What makes him open to this approach is that he had been part of the Dreamcatchers experiment. It is ‘shoots’ like this that give me the energy to do the evolutionary cafe with Ulli.

In the end, all we are doing is throwing out seeds and waiting to see what germinates.

Ulli: We have no idea what the outcome will be. We trust in emergence.

I saw nobody from the local culture at the recent Evolutionary Café. Is the Evolutionary Café approach culture-specific?

David: Perhaps the Evolutionary Cafe approach may not immediately appeal to some local Aurovilians. But I suspect it is just a matter of time before they participate.

Ulli: I think our Tamil brothers and sisters are perfectly capable of participating; we just haven’t reached out to them sufficiently. They are, of course, very much welcome.

David: After all, it’s meant to be a World Café not a western café!

The evolutionary cafe is very much designed for people who are comfortable with verbal/mental forms of communication in English. If you are talking about collective emergence, why not include other forms of expression and communication, like dance and painting?

David: There are many ways of exploring connectivity and collectivity, and there are other people doing that already in Auroville. I suspect that free dance is doing the same thing through dance that we are trying to do through dialogue, and the same is probably true of free art sessions. We are just bringing one piece of the puzzle. These are all tools, and the day may come when we find a way to weave those things together. At the moment, however, the evolutionary café has a fairly short timeframe of a few hours and we can only do so much in that time. But perhaps we could do a weekend where we could bring in some of these other things, a body awareness, dance, art, dialogue jam session!

Any other ideas for the future?

Ulli: One possible issue for a future evolutionary cafe is evolutionary leadership. Then there is Barbara Marx Hubbard’s ‘Wheel Of Co-Creation’, which is a theory about the developmental process of the universe, and Otto Scharmer and his ‘U-Theory’ that shows how groups and organizations can develop leadership qualities in order to create a very different future.

What about the point of view that all we need to progress as Aurovilians is already provided by Mother and Sri Aurobindo?

David: If people are getting all their answers from reading Sri Aurobindo I am very happy for them. I am not there yet. I need these little stepping-stones to get to what Mother and Sri Aurobindo are talking about. So I feel there is space for both the Evolutionary Café and for people simply opening to Mother and Sri Aurobindo.