Triversing Uni-Verses

At a recent meeting of the Evolutionary Leadership Initiative hosted within the Syntony Quest we reflected on the learning that occurs when we pause to look at the possibilities occurring within a process. Even sophisticated models for dialogue, that operate more as a dance than as a march, lend themselves to this process of meta-reflection. So I offer our precious Learning II moment as it appeared.

Because I walk and swim the beach (and the ocean of thought) each morning, I have the habit of mind to often spot these gifts, to pause, stop and bend to look at them when they appear in an inquiry of delight. The ocean always offers up new treasures, even after decades of walking the same section of shore, disclosing the unfamiliar newly seen, on every morn. So I paused this day to ask: ‘What was this strange creature?’

Bateson (1972) describes Learning II, deutero-learning, set learning, learning to learn, transfer learning as: “Learning II is a change in the process of Learning I, e.g. a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or it is a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated.” (p.264) This is … ‘a change in the manner in which the stream of action and experience is segmented or punctuated into contexts together with changes in the use of context markers’.

Far too abstract to have meaning?… perhaps, but this is because Bateson is talking about the flow of time that is above the time-pressures of the doing in the now. Simply, it is our agenda for our agenda. It is watching the flow while in the flow. Its surface technique is the meditation bell, its skill is in what occurs for mind within its ringing. It is what occurs after the bell has rung. It asks: How in doing do we want to be in being, in this which we are about to do? It is the practice of the cognitive pause.

The learning for us is simple. In seeing segments of an agenda, are we able to see them as separate contexts, or are they just one flow of content? If we can see no difference between timetabling and appreciation, between content updating and deep purpose presencing, between clearing the plates and clearing out of the place, then there is none – and none will be made. Yet if we see in each carefully chosen segment the need for different contexts, then there will be a difference. Different results, will then result.

In discussing this openly, we surfaced the skill of traversing the tensions that exist from within this terrain, the expressed feeling of time pressures, task outcomes and dealing with the present, while mistakenly releasing of the time for being present. These are not tensions that are resolved at their level of creation. They are the precious basis for the more profound question that arises from their generation.

Our answer to these tensions … as Learning II, is rather than traverse this difficult ground, with difficulty, we as evolutionary leaders, when engaging in that unique and special role (which is not always) must learn to Triverse. How are we to define this new word?

~ to Triverse : v. to speak in three temporal realms at the same time, three universes of meaning as one flow, in three times, as one meaning set.

These three temporal universes of meaning are:

Forward-verse: the need to take a question from the past and our totality of experience held and move this forward into the future to generate the new.

Neutral-verse: the centering to hold a question in the present moment, without content of the past, or projections into expectations, vulnerable in the indefiniteness, to generate the now.

Within-Reverse: to discern how we are going to become and to decide to experiment with how it will be ‘to be’ that in the now, for that is the only way of truly knowing.

For in a verse is found words, communication, meaning and most importantly … song. In a Tri-verse is contained for us three temporal worlds, three uni-verses that as evolutionary leaders we must learn to sing, in one time, at the same time. They are:

Our world of our past ~ which has served us well.
Our world of the now ~ which is all we have to be well.
Our worlds of the futures ~ which is where we fare well.

This is a song in verse used to sing a world of worlds into being. It is an old skill. Older than all of us. Shown to us again with the high tide of our thoughts. How then will we learn this new-old skill of the Triverse? How do we learn what no-one knows? Where is our teacher? Who of us knows its words?

If this idea of Triversing is a principle that resonates, one that finds a place in certain moments, those moments when our former ways of knowing will not fully serve our necessary ways of being in the completion of our doing in moments of unknowing … we will go find it’s tune. If not, we won’t.

For there is no need for trial and error, to try and err in error, in the invitation to try and learn … in playfulness. There is only the expectation … of play. Perhaps we simply need to play with this, and each other - with the presence to uncover all, within a wider (Learning III) principle of discovering together?

Come play,
within this,
within us,
with this
in celebration
of our discovering together
once more this joyous day.

Similitude

I haven't posted recently about art and music. This is not for lack of joyous experiences as the local international arts festival has just completed. Perhaps in the post-concert chats I had exhausted my commentary ~ in opinion, observation, criticism and critique (the four dimensions of integral commentary).

Astounding was the performance of Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato for five pianos, the Hilliard Ensemble (with an honoring Consort) performed Arvo Part's Passio passionately, the Australian Brass Quintet exhibited virtuosity, fused arranged with ambition dramatically and the Branford Marsalis Quartet challenged impeccably. Yet it was a familiar piece I want to reflect on.

My beloved WASO (who have given me thirty years of listening pleasure, and my mother thirty before this and my grandmother thirty before her) chose the sea to behold for their 2010 opening concert, including the world premiere of Andrew Ford's evocative commissioning, A Dream of Dreaming evoking the breath of life into Tim Winton's dream. On the program was also Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony, which I last saw performed by WASO in 1994, recalled as if it was yesterday. Yet, last night I heard the libretto inspired by Walt Whitman with new ears.

The second movement On the Beach at Night, Alone extracted from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass opened up vistas of the 'similitude' this night. Here are the words again, as used by Vaughan Williams and performed by the colossus (in voice) Teddy Tahu Rhodes:

"On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All distances of [space] however wide, All distances of time, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, All nations, all identities that have existed or may exist, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spanned, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them."

May art in nature, prose and music's muse, make us reflect in smallness, on many a wondrous day.

What holds the universe, the universal all held?

The 'similitude' ... in the guise of the all, as it appears to us mere passengers, within a farther sailing Soul.

Behold, each day, the sea.

Disclosing Apithology

We have been doing some theoretical modelling on the dynamics of psychological panarchy. This involves creating 4D models using a math algorithm to reflect apithological growth structures. It means we can walk around in the psychotemporal space of enfolded conceptions. I suppose we would call this the science of the apithography of thought-ecologies.

What does that all mean? Simply, we are asking the question what does generative health 'look like' in a psychosystem - and how can we see it? If we can disclose this at the simplest levels, and find how this is different to what occurs in reality (which we are more familiar with) - we might just be able to one day see ourselves as a 'thinking' society. It's really a model of what could be, that we can then compare with what actually is, so as to meet the real more fully. This is what good models are useful for - meeting our world innocently with expectancy (rather than trying to make reality fit our model, egoically).

We are some years away from doing this with real data for large scale psychosystems, and even though the conceptual problems are working themselves out, the methodological problems will take a thesis or two. What I am seeing already though, is that small variations in the initial parameters, create very different effects on the character of 'conceptions' - being the potential thought-space that results.

Simplifying the concepts greatly in metaphor, here are the effects of the loss of dynamic balance in traits of exploration, integration, orientation and coherence in very small timeframes for the initial cycle.


What is interesting is if we balance these psycho-parameters with generativity and take them to the limits of the scale, expanding health in time infinitely, what we get ... is the beauty of nature ...

View the apithograph (Link)

Ain't the universe a grand place ...

with we just as children in it, exploring continuously in ignorance and wonder.

Karmic Distortion

I have been playing around with a theory for a while of the effects of the translation of ideas. It relates to one of the nuances of meme theory and the myths of how social learning increases knowing. We believe the wisdom of the crowd captures and transmits useful information. This neglects the subtle ways in which sense is made of unfamiliar knowledge and the reasons for this. The effect is particularly acute across levels of consciousness. The process noticed is cyclic and self-defeating, and usually looks something like this:

Scenario: A genuine insight is generated. It is communicated with care. Where the concept is new, difficult, hard to grasp - a different version of it is generated by the new listeners. They (unknowingly) remove or distort the new truth, so that it makes clear sense to them in the way things are already known. The changed and simplified insight is then promulgated to like-minds with that question. The satisfaction of removing the tension of the question generates its own momentum. The distorted truth is then self-affirming. The insight itself, becomes the cause of the reason for its origination. The problem solved is reflected back as the problem's own response to the answer offered, affirming the problem, while hiding it further. The work created, self defeats. What we then discover is consciousness has, the consciousness it has. What we find, is we don't know enough, about how it is we come to knowing.

If I had to name this phenomenon, I'd call it the 'Karmic Loop of the Creative Originator'. There are many of examples of this. The provocative anti-culture artist who's work becomes fashionable in the group that it satirises. The innovative researcher who publishes early, only to have their work discredited, using the methodology they are trying to change. The politician making new policy, who finds its easier to agree with the people's hearing of the need, ends up getting a policy opposite to its originating intention. We see this in the media daily, catching ourselves in the act. Good truths are distorted in their communication and promulgation. The 100th Monkey research re-frame, the IPCC glacial retreat error, the comprehensive selectivity in Integral Theory, are all great examples ... the list goes on.

I remember reading a reflection by education researcher, Howard Gardner, explaining that he spent the first ten years of his work getting the idea of multiple intelligences into the education community, and the next ten trying to remove the distortions of the idea from that same community (1999, p.79). So the question is: Is that ten years wasted, twenty years or all of the preceding years of work? Or perhaps ... this is all good - and humanity is simply doing what it does with thought. Distorting it while finding its own clarity.

In recent teachings on Karma, (the Buddhist law of cause and effect) the complexity of the states and processes of mind involved was partially disclosed to me. I won't attempt to recite the principles seen with my limited understanding. To do so would only evidence the law proposed. That fault is waiting. This, after all, is a compassionate depiction of the entire system of all human (and non-human) thought across all times. It is stated, however, that there are different (future) environmental effects of each of the Ten Non-Virtuous Actions. For false speech, including claiming a knowledge one does not have experience of, one may find oneself living in environments of deception, where cooperation in work fails and there is no-one to trust.

And perhaps that is the simple learning ....

In the moment of promulgation of a partial truth (as I have just done), even with good intention, of something we don't quite understand, we may be diminishing the capacity of our community of knowing, to forever know.

On Dialogues and Desires

I have been a student of Bohmian Dialogue for a number of years now and have been fascinated at its dynamics, its effectiveness and its utility in practice. Having established various forums that use this skill I know it is valid, possible and immensely rewarding for the participants in ways that are (literally) beyond words.

What is much more interesting is how little-used this profound technology is and in a recent call with colleagues we asked the mysterious reason for why this is. When you consider David Bohm's biography, the nature of his inquiry into the phenomenon of mind and the profound perspective offered, we have so much to learn in discovering where he went. To see thought as a system is to be in and to see thought at the same time. An essential skill for aspiring consciousness evolutionaries. Yet as Bohm describes, thought doesn't want to know what it is doing and struggles against knowing this too.

What becomes more apparent is how we are individually fascinated with the journey (rather than the outcome). The narrative of our lives is a journey we want to witness unfolding and experience fully. One thing we do not welcome is the plot spoiler, no matter how well the paths we travel, have already been trod. We enjoy the thinking about our problems with the mind we presently have. The conflict is our entertainment. In the words of David Bohm:

"Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn't notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates. ... We havent really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process."

I for one always succumb to this. I would much rather go back and work on something from first principles, read the source work, and walk that path, step by step, than get someone's summary version. I do so because I am not sure that what others have seen, is always what there was to see. By this process you also get to recognize true guides along the way, those seeing beneath the personal content and self-affirming interpretations. Signposts and stage guides are always welcomed, as bystanders. They are there to serve us. They inquire of us - 'Where was it did we think we wanted to go to and how do we want to experience that journey along the way?' They don't take us on their journey, they inspire us to continue ours. This acceptance, is often within our thinking, not for our thought, and so is acceptable. What is unacceptable to us, is the presumption of the mind of unknowing. I think this is where Dialogue comes in. It allows 'thought to see itself', and to experience itself, in that rare moment of unknowing.

My reflective observation about the global sustainability and leadership initiatives I am involved in is that, other than our most enlightened collectives, we are (at present) at the early stages of playing the games of holding and revealing individual perspectives. This feels to me much like a combination of the children's card games of snap and concentration. Each time a perspective is revealed or offered, another is immediately placed over it in a game of recognition and automatic supremacy, in an equality of partiality, until face cards appear. At the same time, we turn over these cards repeatedly, learning about them, seeing their position, forgetting about them and then remembering them anew. Only to then forget them again. This mixing of games satisfies a feeling of utility and yet is so vast, we get lost in its complexity.

While there is some progress in the aggregation of these perspectives, mostly what we are doing in our global understanding is enjoying the puzzle and the game. The objects of our interest is other people's suffering. Resolution is promised. The play continues.

About eight years ago, in realising the complexity of Bohmian Dialogue did not lend itself to easy explanation, I wrote a description of the stages of the process in metaphor. This was to assist in making the practice, and its practicing, more intentional and less accidental. It also helps with understanding how evoking the process itself, makes us vulnerable. As a contrast to how our global collective actions seem to be doing above, I have dug it out, to offer this as an alternative to our familiar processes of collective seeing, using that which is already there, discovered once more. A different approach to the game is proposed, perhaps only for those who are ready to play:

"A number of people are playing a game of cards. Each person lays their cards on the table one at a time. Each new card is placed so as to obscure the one underneath. As soon as a card is recognized the next player rushes to play their card. When two cards are seen to be alike – snap – the fastest to notice wins conclusively. That winner then lays claim to holding all the cards already played.

However, while winning that passage of play, they notice the full deck has not yet been played. So the process repeats until all the cards have been seen. While many of the cards played are similar, the players notice that the cards are also distinctly different. Because the aim is to have cards that are identical, no-one is seen as a clear winner. Even the player holding most of the cards. An impasse results. The cards are shuffled and the game repeats.

Upon becoming frustrated at this, the players then try to sort the cards consciously and collectively, immediately noticing similarities in both face value and suit. When all the cards are spread on the table, face up before all players, it is recognized that while there is some obvious pattern and way of ordering, no two cards are precisely the same – none are truly identical. No player can find a match. For any one card, or for all.

The players then choose to change the game and combine all the cards together. They begin to collectively, and carefully, lay the cards out to form a pattern. Only when all the cards are arranged on the table face up, and the players stand back, can they see that the pattern of similarity they are looking for has been completed in a beautiful mandala they have unconsciously created, which perhaps was already there.

With all the cards in place the whole pattern unseeable, beyond the cards, is now able to be seen. It is only at this point that they realize that if all the cards are again turned over, that the pattern on the reverse face of each card is identical. The underlying truth discovered is that all the cards are, and always have been, all the same." (Varey, 2002)

Zen and Samu

I finished my Zen garden today. There have been many chores to do over my break and one appeared to require action above the others. The horizontal rocks came to this house four and a half years ago and had been placed waiting for the garden to appear around it. In the end this all occurred in two days.

The result was blessed in the Shinto tradition last night purifying the space and self, generating the seeds of generativity and welcoming flow, sanctuary and potential.

In the end this little stone garden (kare sansui) contained the many elements of a traditional design in a modern confluence. The tsukabi (water basin) is found adjacent to the ishidaro (stone lantern) which sits behind the hindo seki (prostrate rock triad) as framed by the sode gaki (bamboo screen fence) led to by tobi ishi (stepping stones) from the chiriana (refuse hole) at the entrance (with apologies for Western translation that loses the wider meaning of these terms).

Overall there is a feeling of a safe haven 'resting place' in an archipelago that winds through islands in a vast ocean. The smallness of the place summons the elements of a world lived elsewhere. Inspiration came from visits to Halong Bay in Vietnam and the Japanese Tea Gardens in San Francisco.

What surprised me most in this practice was the engagement with sitting contemplation (zazen) prior to execution in meditative action (samu), where what was envisaged after inquiring into the form of the space in relation to the surrounds of the house was enacted simply by following the steps.

Rock was split, earthed moved, kilograms of stones carried, bamboo transported, piping laid, screens built and sand spread. The work was the practice with the main effort being in the effortlessness in the selection, orientation and placement of each feature stone (ishi-otateru).

The place is a space for contemplation to return to when creativity and sanctuary escape me.

shujo muhen seigan do
bonno mujinseigan dan
homon muryo seigan gaku
butsudo mujo seigan jo

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all,
The passions are inexhaustible, I vow to cut them off,
The Dharma is unfathomable, I vow to master it,
The Buddha’s way is supreme, I vow to attain it.

A Forest Blue Moon

I celebrated New Years Eve watching the moonrise. This was a blue moon, which heralds nothing more than an attribution of special meaning to a natural world that does not fit into the 29.5 day configurations of the man made calendar.

Apparently, this common definition of a blue moon, being where two full moons occur in a calendar month, is not accurate. In the modern world of the wiki the popular mythos becomes the new reality. The more real truth is the one closest in popularity, rather than that more distant in history. This transforming of meaning is part of how post-modern subjective knowledge becomes structuralist in its teleology. Our evolving social reality will soon gain this perspective of seeing knowledge transforming in its own trajectory. It was a night of significance never-the-less. If nothing else this heralding of the new year was a spectacular sight.

My vantage point for this moment was Hester Brook Retreat, the integral ecology land conservation project in SW Australia. The stars and constellations appeared resplendent before being chased from the ever brightening sky. The forest was alive that night. A celebration of a different kind.

The reason for the post is I looked at my photos today and in the dark I had mistakenly changed exposure settings on one photo of the moonrise. The photo that resulted (below) made me recall the Howard Taylor Retrospective Exhibition Phenomena which I saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney some years ago shortly after his death.

His was a remarkable body of work, inspired by similar surrounds, immersed in the Northcliffe forest of equal grandeur, not more than 100 km away. Striking in its simplicity and the execution of form, light, colour in their essentialness. A quest over 50 years.

That particular reversed light image of Taylor's has stayed with me for years. In seeing it reflected in my own photo, the understanding of the ongoing engagement with that landscape, the simple inquiry into quite ordinary phenomena, reoccurred for me. Fifty years is such a short period of time to get something right.

If a blue moon occurs once every 19 months on average, I wonder how often it is we stop to take stock and see what is simply around us with a different lens, or a different setting (for that lens). Probably not more often than 'once in a blue moon'.

In the words attributed to Marcel Proust in the (again) popular (but inaccurate) re-quote "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes", which reads in translation (surprisingly also on an Icarus theme):

"... A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse infinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.*

Perhaps with pause we, occasionally, may behold the universes others behold,

... to see the familiar with other eyes.

*(Source: The captive. In C. K. S. Moncrieff, R. Kilmartin, & A. Mayor (Trans.), Remembrance of things past (Vol. 3) )

Old Roses of the Unborn

I have just returned from two weeks of teachings, discussions and meditations in the East. That is my East, so the very un-eastern coast of Australia. I took the time to take a break from my studies and work. I took the time to take a break from myself.

You might try this sometime. To take a break from oneself. To sit with the anxiety of not doing anything, nothing that you should do, you want to do, or ought to do. That defines you. It is profoundly difficult.

I realized in this practice that mostly what we create in creating a series of life challenges is a way of escaping anxiety. The subtle difference between fear and anxiety is written about by neurologist Kurt Goldstein in the now classic The Organism. Fear is that which we can name and face and anxiety is the unease for the sense of that which exists outside our consciousness.

Sociologist Niklas Luhmann also writes about this for social (rather than psychic) holons in Ecological Communication as the environment that exists beyond our language for the environment, which we cannot perceive and bring into form in language.

I realised in the teachings on Nagarjuna's commentary Awakening the Mind by HH the 14th Dalai Lama the previous week how it is we seek solace from the anxiety of ignorance in the creation of problems and their solutions. This is the nature of our avoidance. The problem is a named thing. Non-doing is the antidote to this busi-ness.

For my non-doing I had to be very clever. I had to avoid the doing of sitting meditation, experiencing, even zazen or practices of contemplation and writing. Instead I simply surrendered and succumbed to the inspiration of nature around me and the brushes in front of me. Art resulted.

The experience was .... in the words from a similar escape to Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, as if:

"I go walking towards Mien Mo mountain in the moon illuminated August night, see gorgeous misty mountains rising the horizon and like saying to me 'You don't have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking' so I sit in the sand and look inward and see those old roses of the unborn again - Amazing ..."

In this was the recognition of that which comes before thought, being the impressions of thought that precedes me and you and our doing together, prior to any action, which holds meekly at bay the anxiety from which we try to escape fruitlessly, what lies before being found only in the mundane and beautiful which quietly speaks of this ... comfortingly, enduringly and expressively.

How amusingly forgetful we are ...

... and I am.

Guiding Nature and the Human Soul

Our unusual book club, Club 451 (which has been going now for over four years) uses an integral post-metaphysics approach to literature. This reveals new author’s works we might not otherwise come across and from our discussions, perspectives previously unseen. We call it Club 451 after Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the fourth-person, fifth-person, first person perspectives we use to discover the book being discussed.

This month’s book disclosed a work of significance and perspective that requests comment. In Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin provides a guide to the unfolding stages of the eco-soulcentric human path in exquisite detail. His stages of human soul development are:

Stage 1- Early Childhood (Innocent)

Stage 2 – Middle Childhood (Explorer)

Stage 3 – Early Adolescence (Thespian)

Stage 4 – Late Adolescence (Wanderer)

Stage 5 – Early Adulthood (Apprentice)

Stage 6 – Late Adulthood (Artisan)

Stage 7 – Early Elderhood (Master)

Stage 8 – Late Elderhood (Sage)

While familiar with many soul stage development models from Joseph Campbell, James Fowler, Harry Moody, Jenny Wade and Carol Pearson something occurred in our discussion with the integration of these loops of circles that connect us and our paths that made me see these differently.

In each individual person’s biological and cognitive development there are parent guides and school teachers. In our soul journey there are spiritual and spirit guides and teachers. In our wider journey in our community there too are guides for the social evolution of society, such as those who lead in justice, equality and sustainability. Yet there are also the guides to our past societies forgotten, where we remember our indigenous knowledge and rites of passage (Plotkin’s own important contribution to our Middle Childhood learnings as a people).

This cycles within cycles approach triggered for me the new role of the guides and teachers of humanity’s own evolution, beyond our societies, and the current journey as we move as one through our growing up to become self-aware enough to enter Early Adolescence as a humanity.

These cycles of body, person, individual, society, species and humanity development all need dedicated guides and teachers. There are guides to the collective consciousness that precedes us, there are guides for personal physical, cognitive and emotional development, we are our own internal guides to our interior development, societal guides guide our social development, stage guides assist our ego-maturity development, there are phase guides for the many transitions between ego-stages, there are elder guides that guide the navigation of the sequence of the soul phases, there are humanity guides that see the stages of all humanity’s faces … and there are guides for the phase transitions humanity navigates continually in eras, epochs and eons.

The difficulty comes in this last category of guides, because as a humanity we have not individually been here before. We are both within and guiding at the same time. This is how the Hero’s Journey of the individual, of the society, and of a humanity of which we are part has always occurred. But to see the path, one cannot see from within. To do this requires the Wanderer to explore, to come back and to leave a breadcrumb trail so that we might find our way to where we have never been, once more.

The question I ask myself continuously is who are these new explorers for humanity's next cycle of development, what will they need and can they go to this place alone. The stages of the Hero’s Journey and its dynamics (and its necessity), to see that which the world does not know that it has lost and have it returned, have always defined this search for that which is intuited and is not yet known. Our boon prize in this quest is the navigation of our own becoming. This is a quest worth undertaking.

Who then will take that path ...

A Fortunate (Surfing) Life

On a recent trip to the East coast for the ISSS conference, sustainable systems were firmly in my mind. While I would not fly simply to surf, to combine sustainability conversations and working on solutions with a day in perfect local conditions, made the trip even more memorable.

My love affair with surfing began about thirty years ago and I have been blessed growing up with uncrowded waves, clean oceans and relatively warm seas surfing diligently ever since. Paddling out at Tallows near Australia's eastern tip last week was a recollection of a perfect day had almost 22 year ago. It made me wonder which is more remarkable, that I am still surfing or the place is relatively unchanged.

A pod of ten dolphins joined us and on a few occasions surfaced all around me. Mothers and babies in the crowd. In my 15 hours in the water back home in the West over the last few days of classic calm and glassy unusual winter swells the same thing occurred and I rejoice in this relatively low impact surfing life.

As mentioned in this month's historic Australian Surfing Life's Green Issue (Issue 252) even the simplest and purest of sports have hidden impacts. Unsung surfing heroes of the environment (a close friend included) raise points in this issue of an awareness of joint responsibility impossible to ignore.

The impacts of our capacity to destroy what we love hit me hard in Byron. After several hours in the water the inflammation in my throat was so great I could not swallow a meal and the infection in both ears made my hearing vanish. Like the individuals in the protest of the pollution unseen of a coastal society I became deaf, dumb, and in pain.

Each time I surf and watch the coastline viewscape change with development, I think the more things change the more they stay the same. Interestingly, Tallow Beach is named after a shipwreck in 1864 which lost its cargo of 120 casks of tallow fat which then washed ashore. We bring our consciousness to every endeavour. If the consciousness is unchanged then the landscape too will become changed, simply by our unawareness.

For many reasons, mostly the joy of the clean ocean where I live - the Surfrider Foundation is getting my renewed membership today and a donation for every wave I have caught during that last trip.

Everything has a cost. The question really is, what needs to be our contribution.

Enneatype Bingo

I have been meaning to publish an article for a few years now on how meta-paradigmatic conjunctions occur. It appears that, over time, disciplines eventually develop schools of thought that become a conjunction of nine aspects. These aspects coincide with the viewpoints from the nine essential divisions of human consciousness.

If you think about it, this would be a logical emergence, as peer community responses to the initial thought leaders will begin to balance perspectival biases where there is a natural diversity of type. While this process takes time, it has a clear destination. In having a mix of views we eventually see the whole undistorted by the vision of the first to see. When this occurs this is a really healthy indicator of the strength and openess of the knowledge community and its engagement.

A.H. Almaas in Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas sets out the nine facets by which we distort reality, with a minimum of psychological pretension. Drawing directly on the work of Chilean psychiatrist, Claudio Naranjo, the spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo and relating the work to the concepts of Grudjieff's Fourth Way practice, this is an excellent source work on the essence of these Nine aspects. From this base, profoundly insightful descriptions using the Enneagram as a guiding model have resulted. The many other Enneatype characterologies subsequently generated are then only as valid as is the extent of the capability of our human personality to confuse the projection of reality with our own constructions.

Awareness of these distinctions is profoundly useful to the meta-paradigmatic practitioner.




The Nine Facets have been identified in theoretical convergences within the maturing fields of organisational development, systems theory, strategic management, futures studies, apithology and integral theory. Gradually over time all nine appear and the tenth is found in their convergence. So it was a surprise the other day to see at a Dialogue for Community Climate Change Action the nine faces of Climate Change already appearing. These are an extension and refinement of the already identified existing typology of frames from the science debate as it now moves to the problem of humanity's unified response to this global concern (Nisbet, 2009).

Here are the climate change themes spotted so far (for those so inclined) framed by their repeating theme and the facet they reflect. I wonder what they sound like when they sing in harmony as the voice of one choir:

One ~ Design in Sound Science: (Perfection)

"From good data we will gain a good picture."

Two ~ Grass Roots Action: (Freedom)

"All actions, even small ones, can help."

Three ~ Great Leap Forward: (Will)

"Symbolic acts of leadership will show the way."

Four ~ Back to Source: (Origin)

"To listen to the earth is to find our guidance."

Five ~ Observe and Adapt: (Omniscience)

"Survival is found in our adaptive response."

Six ~ Mitigate and Protect: (Strength)

"Respond now before we cannot."

Seven ~ Combine Solutions: (Wisdom)

"There is no one silver bullet solution."

Eight ~ Oppose Perversity: (Truth)

"Push back and push on."

Nine ~ Love and Respect (Love)

"For our kids' kids, act in peace."

Our new game in the serious task of watching the evolution of consciousness is to spot when a field reaches this level of maturity, being seen when the conjunction of the parts reveal themselves as one undivided whole organized around human perceptions. When you do see this - shout 'Enneatype Bingo!' to win our prize.

The prize is - the wisdom perspective from the undifferentiated consciousness of the collective of human compassion acting with engaged concern.

Einstein Enigmatic Quote

There are many attributed quotes by Albert Einstein. When you consider his prolific output of commentary, particularly on humanity's future in the atomic age, it is not surprising that there will be some variations and contemporary reinterpretations. One important quote in particular keeps appearing in so many different forms it has become hard to isolate its source. It's five main variations often read something like:

"Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them."

"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."

"The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation."

"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them."

"The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them."

When I quote someone I like to know (if possible) the context for the quote and its source. I went looking for an authoritative reference for this quote: to the internet, leading reference works, bibliographies of materials, collected archives and professional librarians. The general consensus is that, having such wide variations usually means a quote is attributed and has no actual source. I did find this though.

In the interview by Michael Amrine titled, 'The Real Problem is in the Hearts of Men' (New York Times Magazine - June 23 1946) Einstein says: 'Many persons have inquired concerning a recent message of mine that "a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels".' (p.7)

The source of that recent message is quoted in an article that appeared the month before titled 'Atomic Education Urged by Einstein' where the mircofiche archive copy of the article reports on an appeal by telegram to 'several hundred prominent Americans' on 24 May 1946 in a 'Plea for $200,000 to promote new type of essential thinking'. The telegram was signed by the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists with Albert Einstein as Chairman and the Federation of American Scientists. The text of that telegram is quoted in part and reads:

'Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We scientists who released this immense power have an overwhelming responsibility in this world life-and-death struggle to harness the atom for the benefit of mankind and not for humanity's destruction. We need two hundred thousand dollars at once for a nation-wide campaign to let people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. This appeal is sent to you only after long consideration of the immense crisis we face. ... We ask your help at this fateful moment as a sign that we scientists do not stand alone.' (Source: New York Times - May 25 1946, p.13 - 'Atomic Education Urged by Einstein')

The question to ask ourselves is when did the call for 'a new type of thinking' to enable the move to higher levels, become reinterpreted into the need instead for 'a new level' in the same problem-based thinking - and what does this pattern of abstraction say about our desire to escape from our problems?

In chasing down the quote it was interesting going through the full copy of the paper of the day. Issues of global threat, scarcity of resources, neo-nationalism, absence of political confidence and concerns for the future. The themes are still familiar now. The context of this particular request was very different. A global threat was immanent. Other quotes of the time reflect this:

"Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars."~"The old type of thinking can raise a thousand objections of "realism" against this simplicity. But such thought ignores the psychological realities."~"We must realize we cannot simultaneously plan for war and peace."~"These and a hundred other questions concerning the desirable evolution of the world seem to be getting very little attention."

(New York Times - 23 June 1946 )

As an author I realize that my words will always be taken out of context, quotes will be made selectively and intentions expressed will be changed to reflect the intention of the reader, finding support or opposition in those words for a different purpose.

Yet, I suppose the grace in our ever changing sociological face, is the source of those words will always remain, ... for those who care to look.

Desired Visual Didaction

Recently I put together a library of audiovisual materials on sustainability. The aim was a 'passive research' resource to allow a group of people to dip into new perspectives on sustainability issues at their leisure. The collection is here as a guide for others looking to find a list of the Top 30 Sustainability DVDs. They are in no particular order:

1. The 11th Hour (link)
2. An Inconvenient Truth (link)
3. A Convenient Truth (link)
4. The Age of Stupid (link)
5. Manufactured Landscapes (link)
6. FLOW: For the Love of Water (link)
7. The Next Industrial Revolution (link)
8. Who Killed the Electric Car (link)
9. The Planet (link)
10. Crude: The Incredible Story of Oil (link)
11. Up the Yangtze (link)
12. Energy Crossroads (link)
13. The Great Squeeze (link)
14. The Power of Community (link)
15. The End of Suburbia (link)
16. Escape from Suburbia (link)
17. The Corporation (link)
18. Drowned Out (link)
19. A Crude Awakening: Peak Oil (link)
20. The American Ruling Class (link)
21. The War on Democracy (link)
22. Life and Debt (link)
23. The Unforeseen (link)
24. Big Ideas for a Small Planet (link)
25. Addicted to Plastic (link)
26. The Future of Food (link)
27. A World at Waste (link)
28. Garbage Warrior (link)
29. Spirit Stones (link)
30. Blue Vinyl (link)
31. [Your Suggestion .... ]

Trusting that you will support these documentary gems and artistic entracements. There is a month of viewing there ~ and lifetimes of peoples' works.

Spheres of Self

Today I was working with international bubbleologist, Andrew Suttar, on our creative kids book project ~ The Bubble Story. We began the story a year (or so) ago and a recent trip to the Children's Literature Centre reminded me of the importance of the communication of the childhood knowledge that we carry with us forever through life.

Something as familiar as a soap bubble holds in Andrew's hands wonderment and creative intrigue, the essence of learning - and more importantly a path to self-reflexive meta-cognition, so important for personal development. How then do we find a way to see ourselves? The answer is in the metaphor of the bubble ~ for we are one and in one at the same time. That is the essence of the nature of consciousness.

I seem to be working more and more exclusively in the 'qualities' of consciousness, building on from an understanding of the structures of consciousness. In these 'qualities' hides the aesthetics of evolution. What then are the qualities of healthy human consciousness in its bounded form at different stages of development in apithological integration?

Here are ten to begin with:

1. identity - autopoeitic existence

2. integration - expansion and growth

3. coherence - solidity of efficable form

4. resilience - flexibility to externalities

5. stability - homeostatic efficiency

6. adaptability - morphology to circumstance

7. variability - empathetic reflection

8. permeability - encompassing change

9. interaction - energetic enablement

10. formlessness - effortless transmutation

Now to explain that for three year olds and under.

Birds and Boids

In recent work with a strategic conversation group formed for generative dialogues for sustainability, I noticed the pronounced difference between generative and dissipative conversations. What was interesting was how it only took one defeating dynamic, one small mistake, to collapse the systems dynamic of healthy open inquiry. At that point the conversations reverted to any usual opinion sharing session about an intractable problem. This resulted in a similar pattern of despondent helplessness in the face of complexity, notwithstanding very strongly felt desires towards achieving the contrary.

For the penultimate dialogue I wanted to help (if I could) with the awareness of these dynamics. To do this I turned to the principles of biomimicry. If you are not familiar with Janine Benyus work in this field, it is really quite beautiful in many intricate ways. For this situation I looked at the dynamics of bird flocks. How small groups come together for collective benefit, how the leaders guide the intention of the flock as strange attractors of collective direction and how the entire process develops its own complex form of greater mimic sentience avoiding predators ~ is quite remarkable.

The system rules that govern such complex behaviours are very simple. The three necessary elements identified using computer simulations of boids (i.e. virtual birds) (Reynolds, 1987) are (with a gross simplification added): 1. Separation (Don't bump into your neighbours), Alignment (Turn when your neighbours turn), Cohesion (Head towards the forward median direction). The three simple rules applied locally allow the each member of the flock to function and for the flock as a whole to generate emergent phenomena. If one bird/boid crashes, divides the flock or is without direction, the flock dissipates. When the system rules are in place, functional beauty results.

Applying the same principle of emergent trichotomies to conversational generativity, the system rules we used for our strategic conversations were as follows:

•Rule # 1: Offer additional information to enrich
(Not imposing alternative views in conflict)

•Rule #2: Acknowledge value and explain why
(Stay aligned and different, but not divisive)

•Rule # 3: Follow the theme that is occurring
(Rather than disrupt or break the conversation chain)

Essentially the system rules are the same for birds, boids and words. Try not to clash ideas, follow others' leads and go where the conversation is going. The question is: If something is so simple, why is it so apparently hard? In watching our consciously simulated dynamic we also saw the barriers to these rules. The barriers were:

•Barrier # 1: Own view privileged as most material
(Knowledge Humility) - Openness

•Barrier #2: Own values defended in primacy
(Respect Others Values) - Tolerance

•Barrier # 3: Own point of origin regressed towards
(Self-Education) - Release

A generative conversation requires a submission of the self into the intention of the whole. When we assert our own identity we cannot also operate for the benefit of the flock. The two intentions are in tension and become contradictory. What we do not see, is what we together will be missing. Things apparently so simple as knowledge humility, respect for others and a release into unknowing are elusive to the asserting individual mind. When held gently together they combine into something so rare and yet considered essential in the collectives of nature.

From Cradle to Graves: The genesis of health and psychopathology

For about a decade now I have been studying various nuances in the work of psychologist, Clare W. Graves and have recently been reading his original PhD thesis (1945). All of the positive qualities of intrigue and obstinacy in this brilliant mind are evident in this original source work.

Titled "A study of the genesis and dynamics of psychopathic personality as revealed by combining clinical case history and experimental approaches" he re-introduces the concept of "Anspruchsniveau" (aspiration level) while looking at why the different theories of therapy in sociology, psychology and physiology only have partial histories of success in very similar cases.

When you consider that Engel's essay on a biopsychosocial theory of medicine was not written until 1977 and the approach of triangulation in research methodology is still not often used, here we have a unique mind forming a creative methodology to an undefined problem of great importance.

In his doctorate Graves reviewed 1048 titles of theory, conducted five experiments with 94 subjects in four groupings, and reviewed seven case studies so as to highlight the difference and similarity in thirteen theoretical traits of the psychopathic personality.

His conclusion on the preceding 136 years of confusion in the field of psychology is significant. His thesis was that: "although these individuals may have many traits in common, one cannot understand the meaning of the traits until the dynamics of their organization within the individual are known." (p. 108). His conclusion on the thesis was that: "... the results of all the previous observations are not necessarily divergent if one orients himself properly. In this investigation a simple proposal was made; namely, that all the points of view are correct for one or another psychopathic personality but not for all of them." (p. 126)

What Graves found was that within the homogeneity of traits was uniqueness. The arguments on the definition of what is a psychopathic personality by its causes of deficiency leads nowhere, but to opposition. His resolution was to see the initial whole and gather greater definition of the parts. He concludes:

"Let us classify first by the broadest common trait, then as experiment shows differences exclude, so that we finally arrive at a point where we understand what the person is like in comparison to others and also how his dynamic organization differs from others." (p. 135)

This quest for the broadest common traits led to another 30 years of research and the generation of the emergent cyclical levels of existence theory. From this we are able to create, with some small measure of informed understanding, the broad classifications that lead to the definition of individual dynamics. This algorithm of uniqueness is where human nature might be disclosed for all the forms in which it is made manifest.

The only question I have is why we still prefer a simplistic answer to a complex problem rather than simple answers within a clear solution. Graves' work was apparently inspired by the confusion he saw in what must be a solvable problem in his field. In his approach he embraced, rather than narrowed, the confusion. This tendency towards the simplistic is I suspect, our ultimate human failing and one that can be easily met with acknowledgment and self-acceptance of this fact, if only for its attempted mitigation within ourselves.

Child Nation

I recently found a copy of E.O. Wilson's edited collection of the four great works of Sir Charles Darwin (The Voyage of the Beagle, On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals ~ 1700 pages).

The observational powers of Darwin, maintained and extended over a lifetime of work, always amazes me. There is something resonant to me in his open inquiry without hypothesis that allows a question to be asked continuously and at the same time demands no answer. I suspect it accords with my own bias towards abductive logic.

One observation of his in The Voyage of the Beagle did strike me as both accurate, foretelling and slightly uncomfortable, particularly in the context of present discussions I am involved in on Australia's food security and water sustainability. On visiting the colonies in New South Wales, Sir Charles Darwin wrote:

"The rapid prosperity and future prospects of this colony are to me, not understanding these subjects, very puzzling. The two main exports are wool and whale-oil, and to both of these productions there is a limit. The country is unfit for canals, therefore there is a not very distant point, beyond which the land-carriage of wool will not repay the expense of shearing and tending sheep. ... Agriculture, on account of the droughts, can never succeed on an extended scale; therefore as far as I can see, Australia must ultimately depend upon being the centre of commerce for the southern-hemisphere, and perhaps on her future manufactories. Possessing coal, she always has the moving power at hand. From the habitable country extending along the coast, and from her English extraction, she is sure to be a maritime nation. I formerly imagined that Australia would rise to be as grand and powerful a country as North America, but now it appears to me that such future grandeur is rather problematical." ~ (22 January, 1836)

If we think about the oil vulnerability of Australia's road transport systems, its fertilizer and irrigation dependency in its agriculture, its relative position to the other commerce centers of SE Asia and its absence of maritime supremacy, our role other than as mine workers for removal of our commons for use by more creative others ... appears limited.

Evolutionary biologist and geographer, Jared Diamond, offers a similarly problematic analysis of Australia's prospects in his book Collapse, with great fondness. However, it takes more than fondness to alter our physical and structural realities. These are not without hope, only requiring great presence of mind. Diamond names the problems of 'Mining Australia' - in its oil, water, topsoil, biodiversity and minerals - explicitly. Parallels between Diamond's and Darwin's approaches are well made, reflecting both in a good light. Sir Charles summed this view one hundred and seventy years earlier with brutal poignancy and poetry on departing:

"Farewell, Australia! you are a rising child, and doubtless some day with reign a great princess in the South: but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret."(p. 388)

Personally, I am staying, not with naivete, but with optimism and a profound awareness of the questions that we have been hoping to ignore for our entire history as an emerging child nation, holding to a temporary belief in the role of human agency in geographic determinism.

Antigone's Anguish

I went to the preview performance of Eamon Flack's adaptation of Antigone at the Perth International Arts Festival the other night. This contemporary re-telling of Sophocles's 441BC classic Greek tragedy was visually stunning and compelling. It raised for me different themes in a re-visiting of this work of timeless conflict.

If you were asked to choose your allegiances to healthy old traditions or to an unhealthy new order, which would you choose? What happens in a time of crisis where decisive direction is required to prevent the schism of a state yet the decision itself is the cause of divide, dishonor and betrayal driven by the passion of love?

In Antigone, Kreon chooses to dishonor one of his two dead sons to unify a divided kingdom and in doing so divides his own household. Antigone's conflict is one of obedience to a law she believes to be wrong, even if for the good of the State, in loyalty to a now dead brother. In the classic tension of agency and communion, of the individual in society, the dissonance of evolution is reflected in every player's decision. Loyalty to personal principles highlights the poignancy of the tragedy.

This reminded me of the fallacy of the evolutionary developmentalists that higher order systems are by assumption superior. Their superiority is determined by their quality. We resist growth actively when growth is pathological. In the recurrent themes of the tragedies throughout literature, if the tyrant king is our only option to the chaos of competing factionalism, the moral wo-man ultimately chooses factionalism rather the emergent oppressive fascism. From Shakespeare to Serbia, from Ibsen to Iraq a populous may live in fear, but may also rise to liberation, when there is the slight prospect of the choice of health in its growth.

This version of the play reminded me again of the intricacy of transition in evolution and how structures that allow for natural societal emergence in health outlive the insistent fear of evolution by escape. The forces of phobos disguised as eros evoke thanatos as the expression of agape. These four way dynamics are now to be seen as one set in a single principle of many parts. What is invisible to many is played out in this play.

In the words of composer Rachael Dease's compelling chorus (that ends the play):

Time, age us, teach us.

We are still learning,

To be wise