Judy Wallace 79 Mt. Pleasant Ave. Gloucester, Massachusetts 01930 USA (978) 283-8183 ( 978) 771-5811 (cell) email

What is an underlying question that gives form to your work or interest in this field?

I am seeking to clarify the role of the individual in creating collective wisdom, and to understand how together, beyond the personal, we can collectively evolve consciousness itself.

What is your personal experience of collective wisdom in groups?

My experience of collective wisdom began in two very different ways - first through meditation group discussion and then in a more out-in-the-world way as I began participating in and facilitating small group community dialogues. This led to deeper experiences in Enlightened Communication groups convened through EnlightenNext and the evolutionary collective intelligence gatherings like Moving the Edge in Denmark and Evolutionary Salon 3 on Whidbey Island, Washington.

My personal experience has at moments been awe and wonder and amazement with emergent ideas and creativity, the bubbling up and quickness, like sparks igniting new ideas, expressed almost as one voice, as one being. I have also experienced the sense of oneness as part of a greater collective being, and becoming the voice, the instrument for expression and realization of this higher knowing. This goes beyond anything I am as an individual into something of greater dimension and purpose and mystery. There I sense unlimited potential for shifting and creating a new way of being for humanity and the planet.

What is it about the work in this field that excites you and connects you to your own deepest self?

I am very excited to be on the pioneering edge of conscious evolution and to help to create new thinking, new grooves in consciousness, that can bring humanity to the next stage. I have sensed for some time that we, as conscious individuals, have the potential and the responsibility to now evolve into emergent collective ways of knowing and being, ways that we cannot yet quite imagine. As fully developed individuals, we must move beyond our own personal agendas, limitations, and self-concerns. In this letting go we can together open the door to collective knowing and the limitless possibilities beyond.

Please provide a brief storyline or snapshot of what brought you to this work.

I have long noticed in business and society how we are so often stuck, so invested in our own views and ideas, unwilling to see the perspectives of another. My professional path began in teaching French during the civil rights era in a very racially diverse and turbulent school and later in a more middle income working class neighborhood. Multiplicity and discord abounded. Eventually I returned to school, got an MBA and navigated the corporate world in marketing, sales, and technology consulting in the US and Europe. All along the way this theme of our not listening to one another, not understanding, getting in our own way kept resurfacing. My international experience opened the way to promote understanding across cultures, work I have been doing for the last 9 or so years.

Sept. 11, 2001 really brought into strong relief how separate we as humans still really are. In addition to promoting cross-cultural understanding, I began to collaborate in small community dialogues where I live. It was a challenge to bring people together across political divides and to get them to even listen to one another. I learned a lot, and it seemed there was something special here to be discovered in the collective.

From a consciousness perspective the concept of collective wisdom has been with me for several years, but really became a very strong interest as I began to pursue a course of study in Conscious Evolution through the Graduate Institute and EnlightenNext. An article by Craig Hamilton in the May-July 2004 issue of "What is Enlightenment?" very much peaked my interest. I began to pursue this area more deeply. I ultimately decided to focus my masters culminating project thesis on collective intelligence. My thesis is entitled "Beyond the Personal to Engage Collective Intelligence." From an evolutionary perspective this work was given a developmental perspective through the lens of Spiral Dynamics Integral.

People who have assisted or been especially influential in this recent process include, in no special order: Finn Voldtofte, Juanita Brown, Otto Scharmer, Ria Baeck, George Por, Michael Jones, Rosa Zubizarreta, Chris Parish, Andrew Cohen, Don Beck, Ken Wilber, Elizabeth Debold, Sri Pingali, David Reis and the special cohort of fellow students who took this journey with me. And without question the Collective Wisdom Initiative site was a great source of wisdom and inspiration. My own individual spiritual development in consciousness, proceeding over many years, was most influenced by the teachings of the ageless wisdom and Donna Mitchell-Moniak, the founder of the Spirit Fire Meditative Retreat Center and the Center for Esoteric Studies.

How would you like to be available to others in this field?

I am available to talk or email with others, especially as it might relate to collaboration. I am very committed to conscious evolution through collective wisdom. I am still very much interested in how collective wisdom might be accomplished across cultural and religious differences. I am also very open to sharing my thesis entitled "Beyond the Personal to Engage Collective Intelligence". This really looks at how the individual engages and how levels of consciousness (as seen through Spiral Dynamics Integral) play a role. Is consciousness evolving in the process of the individual engaging collective intelligence?