The BOB Project

What's gonna happen? One day, at the same exact time all over the place, myriad blank journals, clearly marked as an interventional public art project mysteriously appear in various locations – coffee shops, museums, universities, community centers, and other public places likely to attract attention.

Each self-mailer journal has a description and instructions for use:

Respond to the Big Questions, and pass the journal to the next person. When the journal is full, the last person seals it, and drops it in the nearest mailbox. Whatever journals are recovered come back, and material is reviewed, possibly analyzed statistically using quantitative methods, and a selection of responses is compiled and published as a book.

Additional components of the project include the preparation phase, during which publicizing and planning takes place, the release and follow up period of 3 months, during which journals are circulating and there is an internet-based social media mirroring process (e.g. people can go to our social media channels and post pictures of themselves writing, or whatever they like), a media component with the news media picks up and amplifies the story, a return and analysis phase, during which the results are compiled and sent to press.

The intent is to combine elements of public art projects (e.g. the 1000 Journal Project), psychoanalytic intervention via posing key questions and evoking thoughtful responses and then sharing those responses, and social responsibility, acting on a collective level to raise awareness about pressing issues which we all struggle with together.

The project will be overseen by an advisory board comprised of 8-15 individuals from different professional backgrounds, to provide an interdisciplinary perspective and pragmatic guidance. The journals will be released in major cities on the same day, with the help of project managers and volunteers to manage the logistics.

Big Questions

1. Compassion / Suffering

2. War

3. Starvation and Basic Human Needs

4. Human Rights

5. Collective Trauma / Collective Morality / Collective Family

6. Religion and Spirituality

7. Family and Children

8. Health and Wellness

9. Socioeconomic Inequality

10. Future of Humanity – Why can’t we get our act together,

or are we doing it?

11. Environment - Renewable Energy and Climate Change

12. Human Relatedness

13. Human Cultural Evolution

14. Communication and Collaboration

15. ???

Why?

It is with concern for the future in mind that I envisioned the Bright Orange Book Project, so named after a journal I was using in March of 2009.

This orange journal inspired me to cook up the notion of reaching out to people on a mass scale, in the real-world, combing elements of public art, psychoanalysis, and social responsibility by creating a collective journaling project addressing Big Questions facing humanity.

Grant

Global Emergent Consciousness.

"The GEC"

This is a fanciful notion with serious overtones, more allegorical than otherwise, a pre-cursor to the BOB Project.

As a consequence of the ongoing process taking place on this planet, it is inevitable that if there is no cataclysm, then complexity will continue to expand as it inexorably does in natural systems.

Interdisciplinary theory and human experience unswervingly lead to the conclusion that the interactive network of individual Brains and minds, information technology, including information transmission, storage, and processing, are just now achieving a necessary and sufficient complexity to produce a planetary Mind, a unitary consciousness the derivative of which heretofore has been called the collective unconscious.

However, because of the evolution of culture and the encoding of increasing complexity both in individuals in societal and technological structures, the unconscious is becoming conscious; the brain is the same in terms of genetics, and the plasticity of the biological brain allows the development of Mind over generations of people. While a global phenomenon is beginning to awaken, the experience of the GEC experiencing itself is arising spontaneously within individuals and groups. As you read this passage, you become aware of the derivatives of the GEC, the global Mind, as being experienced through yourself.

The state of the world today is one of chaos as different embryonic self-states within the GEC vie with each other for dominion, for example governments, social groups, religious factions, and any other group entities over complexities of scale.

The GEC, like any other Mind, seeks stability and peace, and therefore may define an Idea to achieve that end. The Idea embodies by self-definition several principles: 1) virulence - the Idea spreads itself via different channels with enthusiasm, 2) compassion – the Idea moves the GEC to care for itself by encouraging caring of its components by its components, 3) inclusiveness – the Idea includes all belief systems even those that disavow participation in the GEC and negate the idea of the Idea, 4) mystery – the Idea is beguiling and yet intuitively experienced and therefore known as real, 5) persuasiveness – the Idea defines itself as being inexplicably appealing, perhaps due to its recursive, self-referential and humorous nature 6) passive authority - the Idea rules by not ruling 7) conservation over scale - the Idea maintains its integrity within individuals and organizations and 8) adaptability - by definition the Idea adapts in order to survive.

The Idea conveys that it is the integrative part of the Mind of the GEC; the Idea is subversive and benign, coming from no one person but arising spontaneously from many sources. The GEC knows itself as it experiences itself through its parts. You will experience the GEC in your own awareness; you may be consciously unaware of it right now, and unconsciously aware, or perhaps you are consciously aware and unconsciously unaware; it doesn't really matter anyway.

The Idea of the GEC spreads by word of mouth and information technology. The GEC can only be known by direct experience; to describe it is to allude to it only.