International Centre for Co-operative Inquiry, Italy: Inquiries
1990-99
This report was written in 1999
Co-operative inquiry rests on a participative view of
the world, a world not of separate things but of relationships which we
co-author…On this view, participation is a way of knowing in which knower
and known are distinct but not separate, in an unfolding unitive field
of being. (Reason and Heron, Co-operative
inquiry, 1995)
There are many fields
of application and possible topics
of co-operative inquiry. Being highly participative, it has a micro-political
format and is important as an educational and politically liberating process.
It empowers autonomy and co-operation among people over against any kind
of oppressive, authoritarian social process. Hence its strong link with
participative action research and liberationist inquiry in the third world
(see Peter Reason, 'Co-operative inquiry, participatory action research
& action inquiry: three approaches to participative inquiry', in N.
K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, Thousand Oaks, Ca, Sage,
1994; H. Bradbury & P. Reason (eds), Handbook of Action Research,
London, Sage, 2000).
One field where the appeal to authority, in one form or another, has
held constant sway from the remote past to the present day, is in the field
of human spirituality and religious association. Creeds, cults, churches,
occult groups, spiritual schools of all kinds, east and west, ancient and
moden, ultimately appeal to the authority of a charismatic teacher, a written
revelation, or a spiritual lineage (in this world or the next). This long-standing
habituation of the human race to spiritual authoritarianism has had, and
still has, a vast and subtle impact, in my view, on all other forms of
social oppression.
Here at ICCI, I have a particular interest - as a fundamental part of
the wide field of liberationist action research - in inquiries that focus
on spiritual and subtle experience, and am joined by people with similar
interests. We seek the internal authority of personal experience, honed
by the exercise of discriminating judgment, and refined within the
crucible of rigorous peer process. We are also intentional in inquiring
into our own sociopolitical reality, living and working together for the
duration of the inquiry: I call this process a self-generating culture.
For a full account of the issues involved in spiritual and subtle inquiry,
and for reports of eleven co-operative inquiries in this field, in the
UK, Italy and New Zealand, see Sacred
Science:
Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle.
Four of these eleven inquiries have been with members of Co-counselling
International (CCI), founded by Dency Sargent, Tom Sargent and myself in
1974. CCI promotes co-counselling as a form of peer self-help personal
development, in which people take it in turms to be counsellor and client,
and in which the client is significantly self-directed. Already an incipient
process of participative inquiry into personal unfoldment, co-counselling
has readily lent itself to fully explicit co-operative inquiry into the
human condition.. While I have been launching human condition inquiries
here at ICCI, several other people have initiated co-operative inquiries
in the UK into different aspects of co-ounselling theory and practice.
Fields of application