Torus
Technology
"A way for many
to also be one!"
Torus
Technology
"A way for many
to also be one!"
ABOUT TORUS MEETING TECHNOLOGY
For many years in the Possibility Management gameworld we've searched for a meeting format that meets four important criteria.
It has been a struggle.
At long last, here is something that truly inspires us: Torus Technology. The funny thing is that we had to invent it ourselves!
This website is intended to be your free online mini-handbook for how you too can shift to using Torus Technology in your company, project, community, government, organization, club, etc.
The distinctions, thoughtmaps, models, and processes in this website are all copyleft. This means they cannot be copyrighted. This is all open-code thoughtware from Possibility Management donated to the creative commons.
(Creative Commons Attribute and Share Alike International 4.0 License - CC BY SA Int'l 4.0 by www.possibilitymanagement.org)
An Introduction To Torus Technology
From Christine Duerschner interviewed by Julia Neumann
PROBLEMS / SOLUTIONS
PROBLEMS WITH HIERARCHICAL MEETING TECHNOLOGIES
A multitude of handicaps are hidden in any hierarchical power structure:
PROBLEMS WITH CONSENSUS DECISION MAKING
One problem with majority votes is that 49% of the people may resist or disagree with a decision. To avoid this, some form of consensus decision making may be adopted. Even in flat circular organizations consensus can entangle you in huge problems.
SOLUTIONS WITH TORUS MEETING TECHNOLOGY
Torus Technology meetings liberate both individual and team potential almost 100%. This enhancement can be an ongoingly exhilarating experience.
TORUS DYNAMICS
From the outside a TORUS looks like a beautiful geometrical energy field, a vibrantly flowing organism
From the inside, however, the TORUS may feel like a chaordic beehive buzzing with self-directed activity. The dynamics seem disorderly.
Since in the Torus, individuals are under their own recognizance, the movement resembles automobile traffic circling l'Arc du Triumph in Paris, free-wheeling in every direction while each driver gets safely to where they want to go.
The Torus weaves itself with THREADS and NODES.
A THREAD is an individual person's resources, their attention, intention, ideas, efforts, wishes, connections, knowledge, skills, impulses, experiences, and commitments. Within the TORUS each individual is free to weave their THREAD of resources wherever they like.
A NODE is a project, an initiative, a task, a goal, defined and committed to by the exact people who are interested in the best outcome of that effort. The stakeholders of any particular NODE are self-appointed. A NODE may either be a one time meeting or an ongoing collaboration.
The TORUS alternates between two states, DIVERGENCE and CONVERGENCE. This is the TORUS breathing.
During DIVERGENCE, the THREADS spread out and meet in private with whichever NODE they choose. THREADS do whatever creation, research, practice, production, or decision-making is needed so that they are energetically fed and the purpose of their NODE is accomplished.
During CONVERGENCE the NODES of the TORUS come back together into one space. New NODES are announced, and completed NODES are officially disbanded. Each NODE has a chance to report what the TORUS needs to know about the NODE'S activities. If a decision has been made at a NODE, the decision applies to the whole TORUS. Therefore each decision is checked for ratification by measuring the RESISTANCE to the decision from everyone in the CONVERGENCE.
The basic TORUS agreement about decisions is to agree to disagree during the decision making process, and after the wisdom of dissent is extracted during the process, to agree to agree.
Final decisions are recorded by the SCRIBE in the TORUS CODEX.
The TORUS CODEX is not located at the center of the TORUS. The CODEX is not the basis of the TORUS. The CODEX is kept outside the TORUS, over on a shelf somewhere, in case anyone in the TORUS needs to refer to it. The CODEX is not a set of rules that dominates the TORUS gameworld, but rather more like a set of guidelines...
Each NODE selects a SPACEHOLDER for the NODE to hold and navigate the space while the NODE is meeting and also between meetings until the NODE is dissolved. A NODE functions like a mini-TORUS, a TORUS withing a TORUS, which will sometimes spin off its own NODES to go handle specific issues or tasks assigned by the NODE and will then report back to the NODE.
QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
A Torus Is A Gameworld
Our lives are made up of the GAMEWORLDS that we play in.
If you are not consciously building and playing in your own GAMEWORLDS then you are a pawn or a slave in other people's GAMEWORLDS.
In a GAMEWORLD such as a company, a public school, or a government, you serve the 'we' by forcing yourself to conform to a job description.
In a GAMEWORLD such as a community you serve the 'we' by being the same as everyone else.
In a TORUS GAMEWORLD you serve the 'we' by being 'you.' In other words, it is necessary that you be 'you.' This may bring you unexpected elation.
What Is Responsibility?
In the modern capitalist patriarchal empire the term 'responsibility' is defined as: a heavy burden, making you guilty, being blamed, having to pay, and being punished. Since the way to make 'profit' in modern culture is to externalize your costs (to society at large, to third world countries, to the environment, or to future generations). In modern culture, taking responsibility is seen as being stupid, to be avoided.
In next culture, archiarchy (the culture of archetypally initiated women creatively collaborating with archetypally initiated men) the term 'responsibility' is defined as: being the source, being at cause, taking a stand, showing up, navigating the space, choosing the way, inventing new options, being fully involved, engaging presence, serving transformation.
Which do you choose?
The CONTEXT of Your TORUS
Responsibility can spread out in a spectrum from no responsibility, to child level responsibility, to adult level responsibility, to high level and radical level responsibility.
If a child makes a mess, who cleans it up? The adults.
Modern culture is making unconscionable messes with no intention at all of ever cleaning them up.
This means that the GAMEWORLD of modern culture is centered on child level responsibility.
By setting the CONTEXT of your TORUS GAMEWORLD at adult or radical responsibility you change the morphogenetic field of the human race. As matriarchal and patriarchal cultures fade into history, your archearchal TORUS will serve many people as a bridge into next culture.
Divergence
In this photo you can see over 100 small NODES in DIVERGENCE simultaneously creating results. You might call this parallel play, a maximum harvest of group intelligence.
DIVERGENCE is like a solutions engine cut-loose, flying at full throttle. Nothing interferes with the creativity. Results are specific and personal, custom-designed to meet individual needs, while also serving the TORUS as a whole.
Convergence
During CONVERGENCE each NODE has an opportunity if needed to report in about their activities and any decisions they have made.
Resistance to decisions can be checked and the decisions can be ratified or returned to the NODE for further work.
New NODES can start. People can join an existing NODE or can leave a NODE.
NODES can melt together or separate, or you can officially dissolve a NODE that has completed its mission.
Logistics can be handled. Personal support or processes can be asked for, then time is set for the next CONVERGENCE, and DIVERGENCE begins again!
Natural Movement
This short video shows actual jellyfish propelling themselves forward using DIVERGENT and CONVERGENT body movements. The way a jellyfish swims is the way a TORUS breathes.
Node Decisions
NODE decisions are valid for the entire TORUS after they are ratified at a CONVERGENCE.
Here is a photo of a NODE in the actual moment of making a decision at the end of a long process.
The individuals of the NODE who are making the decision care about the outcome.
Making a NODE decision is a satisfying and empowering moment.
Node Strategizing
Each person weaves their resources into the NODES of their choice. NODES can have any purpose.
This is a photo of a large NODE collecting diverse project resources and inventing more efficient organizational strategies.
From time to time it may be necessary that all the participants at a CONVERGENCE of the TORUS need to work together as one NODE.
Dissolving a Node
This amazing photo is the actual moment when a longstanding NODE completed its mission and dissolved itself.
The members of the NODE spontaneously laid themselves down on the floor together and let the NODE die.
When each person stood up they were free individuals again, finished with the responsibilities and requirements of having been in the NODE. This is celebration time!
Two Kinds Of Teams
The 'Uniform Team' and the 'Transformational Team' have different purposes and traditions.
If you do not clarify which kind of Team you have, processes can be frustrating and outcomes can be ineffective.
THE 'UNIFORM TEAM'
Teams originate to fulfill various needs.
One kind of Team could be called a 'Uniform Team'.
What is a 'Uniform Team'?
Members of a 'Uniform Team' all wear the same uniform.
That, of course is a simplified and generalized definition, yet it gives you a simple place to start understanding what a Uniform Team might be about.
The way a Uniform Team makes decisions is by some kind of unanimous vote, whether that is 51% majority, Consensus Minus One, the Resistance Method, or the choice of the Benevolent Dictator, all is chosen together.
The result is the assumption that the members of a Uniform Team should all agree.
They should use the same thoughtware.
They should seek equality.
They should not make creative moves until after they have presented their idea and the whole Team agrees that they should go ahead and create the thing.
The motivation for being on a Uniform Team can come from a longing for being accepted, fitting in, finding a family of like-minded friends, and knowing about and approving what the Team is up to.
On a Uniform Team the Team's evolutionary steps are somehow more predictable, organized, comprehensible, and... uniform.
THE 'TRANSFORMATIONAL TEAM'
Another kind of Team could be called a 'Transformation Team'.
What is a 'Transformational Team'?
Members of a 'Transformational Team' have in common that they are ongoingly in some kind of Transformational process. Their 'uniformity' is their chaos.
The foundation for how a Transformational Team makes decisions is radical trust and radical reliance.
Radical Trust is, "I trust myself to take care of myself around your creations."
Radical Reliance is, "I rely on your reliance on me," which includes that there are Pirate Agreements between Transformational Team members to stay in Transformation creation and to stay communicating what they are discovering.
One Transformational Team member may have no idea what another Transformational Team member is creating, and yet they still can love them and trust them and rely on them to keep creating and learning (going around the Learning Spiral) and sharing what they are creating and learning.
The main creation criteria on the Transformational Team is:
On a Transformational Team the Team's evolutionary steps unpredictably morph out of control and yet provide entertaining inspiration for further evolution navigated by ECCO(Earth Coincidence Control Office).
TORUS CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS
CONTEXT
Who sets the CONTEXT for your TORUS?
The CONTEXT is your TORUS' relationship to consciousness and responsibility. The CONTEXT spits out a set of distinctions depending on whether your TORUS is established at child level, adult level, high level, or radical level responsibility. Ordinary modern
-culture organizations originate in child level responsibility.
Until the CONTEXT of your TORUS is clarified and agreed upon in a CODEX you do not have a TORUS. Instead you have an ordinary meeting.
Your CODEX is the Rules of Engagement of your GAMEWORLD, your distinctions. Perhaps the most crucial ingredient to a successful TORUS is being clear about the CONTEXT out of which the CODEX of your TORUS GAMEWORLD emerges.
The distinctions of your TORUS can be clarified and agreed on. Clarity leads to power. By establishing which distinctions apply in your TORUS as the original focus of your TORUS you give it the power to create its full potential.
We are finding that best practices for TORUS TECHNOLOGY include these distinctions:
TIMING
With regards to time agreements, if everyone in a group is doing the same thing at the same time, for example, in a workshop, then the timing of when people come together or take a break can be determined spontaneously depending on what is occurring during the workshop. However, when everyone is in different places at the same time, such as in a DIVERGENCE, the timing for the next CONVERGENCE needs to be agreed upon beforehand.
A TORUS takes in new members and lets go of unnecessary members like an amoeba, with complete organic equanimity. It is no big deal.
A TORUS is not a burden that takes energy away from participants. A TORUS is an amplifier that allows more energy to flow through each person's life.
CONVERGENCE MANAGER, SCRIBE, AND GUARDIAN
Each CONVERGENCE is held and navigated by a CONVERGENCE MANAGER. The job of the CONVERGENCE MANAGER is to impeccably navigate each CONVERGENCE space for logistical matters, efficiently facilitate NODE reports, measure resistance for ratifying decisions, announcing the beginning time for the next CONVERGENCE, selecting the CONVERGENCE MANAGER for the next CONVERGENCE, and announcing the DIVERGENCE.
In addition to the CONVERGENCE MANAGER you will need a SCRIBE taking notes of any decisions which need to be entered into the CODEX. If needed, the SCRIBE can also make a public listing of existing NODES.
We also suggest that your TORUS select a temporary KAITIAKITANGA or RANGER, someone to be GUARDIAN of the CONTEXT during a Torus Meeting who immediately signals with the Purple Card from a neutral but clear perspective if ever the CONTEXT is not being respected.
BUMBLEBEES AND BUTTERFLIES
The originator of Open Space Technology, Harrison Owen, discovered that certain participants of nonlinear meeting technologies do not conform to the ordinary participation roles. He named them Bumblebees and Butterflies. We also find them in TORUS TECHNOLOGY.
Some people have a tendency to jump from NODE to NODE, picking up bits of information and dropping them here and there, slipping in and out of various NODE meetings asking dangerous questions but not even sticking around to hear the answers. The result is valuable cross-pollination throughout the TORUS These are the Bumblebees!
Some other people have a tendency to flutter about the TORUS at odd hours spontaneously enjoying their own beauty and delicate presence. They tend to care about and generally improve the overall mood of spaces. You might find them hanging out at the café, listening to the worries or ecstasies of people who feel a bit lost or frustrated in all the hubbub of the TORUS. These precious Beings are the Butterflies!
Both Bumblebees and Butterflies are welcomed contributors to any TORUS.
SPACE
New age style meeting circles are often filled with decorations such as silks, flowers, candles, shells, crystals and other memorabilia. People's attentions naturally focus on the decorations. Try the following experiment. Start with the flowers in the middle of the circle and ask people to notice their experience. Then take everything out from the middle and place it on an altar in the corner of the room. Then put it all back in the middle of your meeting circle again. Then take it all out again. Than ask people if they noticed any difference, and if they did notice something, to explain what the difference was. You may find that having anything in the middle of your circle fills up the space of emptiness that you need to connect with other people across the circle, and the void that you need to create new possibilities. Keeping the middle of the circle free and open then becomes a practice for creating more magic and not just a neurotic rule.
Torus Circular Meeting Processes And Spaces Of Clarity
Here are powerful healing and transformation processes that are regularly used during Torus Meeting Technology to bring a multitude of human capabilities into creative collaboration.
Feelings Cycle
First Position (the beginning of the Adult Egostate)
Frying Pan
Growness
Holistic Decision Making
Men's Circle
M.E.S.S. Process
Phoenix Process
Poop On The Table
Purple Card
Requiem Process
Resistance Decision Making
Tar Baby Process
The Hierarchy
The Problem Is The Solution
WEConFest
Whizz Bang
Wisdom Counsel
Wok
Women's Circle
and PM Processes
4 BRAINS
INDICATORS:
ARCHIARCHAL ECONOMICS
Everyone in your toroidal meeting space was most probably born and raised in win-lose Gremlin-feeding competitive economics, a system which is working as fast as it can to 'monetize nature' regardless of the number of species that go extinct. Oddly enough, or perhaps, self-evidently, even human beings are now at risk.
An entirely new Context for economics is being applied in Archiarchy.
Relocating your Point Of Origin into the Context of Archiarchal Economics will confront every single assumption you packed into your Memetic Construct regarding money, investing, profit, finances, and economics. An entirely new gameworld spreads out before you on the same playing field: Earth. A new future is possible in the challenging new game.
Torus Technology meetings use Archiarchal Economics. It is perhaps time for you and your Teams to upgrade your Standard Human Intelligence Thoughtware (S.H.I.T.).
INDICATORS:
CONFUSION SHIFTER
INDICATORS:
CRACK IN CERTAINTY
INDICATORS:
DECONTAMINATIONS OF THE ADULT EGO STATE
INDICATORS:
EHP (EMOTIONAL HEALING PROCESS) DOJO
INDICATORS:
FEELINGS ORCHESTRA
INDICATORS:
GREMLIN TRANSFORMATION
INDICATORS:
FEAR OF CONNECTION
INDICATORS:
FRYING PAN
INDICATORS:
HIDDEN COMPETING COMMITMENTS
INDICATORS:
HOLISTIC DECISION MAKING
INDICATORS:
MEMETICS / MEMETIC ENGINEERING
INDICATORS:
M.E.S.S. (Midwifing the Emergence of Sophisticated Synergies)
INDICATORS:
PARTS (We have Parts...)
INDICATORS:
POOP ON THE TABLE
INDICATORS:
P.O.P (Place Of Possibility)
INDICATORS:
THE PROBLEM IS THE SOLUTION
INDICATORS:
PULL THE RUG OUT
INDICATORS:
PURPLE CARD
INDICATORS:
REACTIVITY
INDICATORS:
REQUIEM PROCESS
INDICATORS:
RESISTANCE DECISION MAKING
INDICATORS:
How do you know that a decision has been made? Everyone knows what to do next!
RULES OF CHAOS
INDICATORS:
TAR BABY PROCESS
INDICATORS:
UNMIX EMOTIONS
INDICATORS:
WEAPONS ON THE TABLE
INDICATORS:
INDICATORS:
INDICATORS:
Archetypal Lineages and the Torus
Our research is revealing that each person is born with a potential connection to their own unique 'Archetypal Lineage'.
Your 'Archetypal Lineage' is the service you were born to provide to your Village. Some people refer to your Archetypal Lineage as your 'calling' or your 'destiny'.
Your connection to your Archetypal Lineage is merely a 'potential connection' because your destiny is optional. This means that you have a choice about whether you live as your Archetypal Lineage in action, or not. Your life does not become the dance floor for your Archetypal Lineage until you choose that.
We are discovering that after you balance out the distortions from school and modern culture in your Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Energetic Bodies, then your 'fifth body' activates and comes online. Your fifth body includes the parts of you that naturally interact with your Archetypal possibilities, so we call your fifth body your 'Archetypal Body'.
Who would you need to become to have the capacity to choose to live as your Archetypal Lineage? (This is what we would classify as an 'interesting' question, one that it would be life-changing and worth finding an experiential (not theoretical) answer to.
Jacking-in to your Archetypal Lineage only makes sense after you have made some significant steps along your adulthood initiation path, otherwise, when your Archetypal Lineage sends a job down the tube onto your bench and asks you to give a talk to a group, or to go connect with someone you don't know to make them a nonlinear possibility offer, or to land a specific distinction in a space to make something completely different possible, and you are (your Box is...) too afraid to do this, then the assignment gets stuck in the tube. Another job comes down the tube and gets stuck behind the first not-done job. It does not take long before tube is jammed up with undone jobs from your Archetypal Lineage and it is a mess. Better not to jack-in to your Archetypal Lineage until you are willing and able to do the jobs that land on your bench.
Yet the potential connection to your Archetypal Lineage tends to secretly influence your preferences. In case you want to become more aware of what is going on in your Archetypal Lineage department, here are a couple of notes.
We are finding that Archetypal Lineages tend to fall into four nameable categories:
Our current research is showing that:
This would explain why when a gameworld gets to the size that it requires a Meta Ring to take care of the overall gameworld needs, when the whole gameworld comes together it is best to use a Meeting Technology that satifies both Uniform Teams and Transformational Teams at the same time!
Fortunately just such a Meeting Technology exists! It is called 'Torus Technology'.
In a Torus Technology meeting, you go into 'Divergence' and spend creation and private meeting time with your own Archetypal Lineage or specific projects, and then you come back into 'Convergence' and share decisions that were made, report on your projects, reorganize groups, and prepare fo the next 'Divergence'. In this way your gameworld lives because it breathes out through Divergence and breathes in through Convergence.
BUILDING A GAMEWORLD
"You don't change things by fighting the existing gameworlds. You change things by building new gameworlds that make the existing gameworlds irrelevant."
We human beings live, work, create, and play together gameworlds which we construct out of nothing and which we have decided to play in together. Checkers, soccer, school, religion, towns, government, money, insurance, property ownership, rent, taxes, driving licenses, banks, loans, credit cards, phone contracts, the grocery store, the post office, etc. etc. etc. are all gameworlds we have created out of nothing. They each have a context, distinctions, thoughtware, and rules of engagement written in a Codex.
We were not taught about our power to create and modify gameworlds because the gameworlds try to protect themselves from being changed. Knowledge about gameworlds is not presented in modern culture education, not even at the graduate level. That time is over.The secret is out.
To gain practical experience using distinctions about gameworlds, do the experiments in these three S.P.A.R.K.s:
Spark-057-en: A problem signals the start of the next gameworld.
Spark-146-en: Either you consciously design each gameworld you live in or you are a pawn in someone else’s gameworld.
Spark-170-en: You may fear archetypal love because it leaves civilization behind as a stupid gameworld.
More information and Experiments are at https://gameworldbuilder.mystrikingly.com.
You might even consider participating in a Gameworld Builders Lab.
If this stuff turns you on it could be that your Archetypal Lineage is in the Gameworld Builders category! Check it out at http://4lineages.mystrikingly.com.
A TORUS is a GAMEWORLD. Building a TORUS makes you a GAMEWORLD BUILDER:
Whether you are originating a new TORUS, shifting the CONTEXT of a GAMEWORLD, or are transforming one of your current GAMEWORLDS into TORUS TECHNOLOGY we wish you all the best.
Feel free to contact any of us from the TRAINER TORUS if you would like guidance or support. We definitely want you to succeed. We have discovered in our own experience that it turns out to be a rather big deal.
UPGRADING YOUR THOUGHTWARE
People have been meeting in circles for over a thousand Millennia.
This does not mean we can't improve the experience...
Skills for Negotiating Group Intimacies
Applying TORUS TECHNOLOGY involves improving certain skills, the so called Group Intimacy Negotiating Skills, for example:
•New forms of listening and speaking.
•Negotiating 5-body intimacies.
•Energetic negotiation e. g. “You are in my space and I don’t want this.”
•Intellectual negotiation e. g. "There is no debate during check-in."
•Emotional negotiation e. g. "There are four feelings, and a big difference between feelings and emotions."
•Physical negotiation e.g. "I wanna hold your hand."
•Accepting RESISTANCE and using it.
•Knowing what you want, and knowing which 'I' is doing the wanting.
•Saying what you want.
•Working out deals so stuff happens.
•Re-Negotiating. Making Do-Overs.
•Knowing how to land distinctions in a a space so the space changes.
•Identifying expectations.
•Name what has not been negotiated.
•Creating meta-conversations.
•Dealing with NOs and YESs.
•Asking nonlinear questions.
•Scanning for the three forces in the space (denying, assertive, neutral).
Further Resources
"Hey! A donut is a Torus!"
"May the Torus be with you."
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