2020worldwalk

end-first thinking

2012-01-27T08:46:00.000-08:00

One line of thinking has arisen, and mentioned in the last section, that of thinking of the end. It goes along with the notion of a name being attributed to someone’s actions retrospectively [like the teacher who can only take the role once a student makes them so]. Similarly, at the highest level, is it possible to think of the end of the whole entity? Or at least, if it scales to a global entity, and there is more money at the edges of the entity, contained within this scalable invitation membrane, than money in the outside world? Is this kind of thinking useful? It is a type of thought-experiment called backcasting, but I have never attempted this with numbers, at least, not to this extent.

The total global trade of the world was estimated to be around $27 trillion in 2010. This does not include the ludicrous amounts of money transacted on stock exchanges, the futures markets, and all the other absurd money-on-money games. I believe this figure is as close to the ground as is practically possible to compute. The amount of money to keep the world going round with regard to the distribution of things, foodstuffs, and the like.

So, if our entity is to exist at that level, then it needs to have this amount of money at the boundary, and contain half the population of the world, or there-abouts. Can this be a useful consideration? Can we plan ahead and consider that this entity reaches this point sometime during the 21st century? This allows funders to play at the century level, knowing full well that they are funding a possible transformation of the social world. And if this is stretching things, my intuition threw up an even more unrealistic date of within the decade.

As yet, this level of thinking might be best suited for wise^0, though it may give us some useful figures even at the outset, with the kinds of guidelines if we are to hit certain beautiful and optimistic results.

(from 4.35 end first thinking from the eco^2 entity)

eco to the power of two

2012-01-20T09:14:00.000-08:00

inducing a new economic entity

This work-in-progress ecological economics document describes a new economic entity, a non-bounded non-group, the moneyflow around it, and the internal network of relationships that encourage subjective evaluation, as well as how members of this non-group interact financially with standard groups such as corporations, government bodies, educational centers and so on. In terms of culture change over the next decade, this entity effects a transformation of money-making into value-creation in a financially viable way.

There are four main elements (and two optional ones) to this new economic entity:

self-selecting filter to the non-bounded, or non-group

regular non-directed group meeting

established action cycles

scalable invitation

(tracking subjective enumeration, as part of the confluence model platform)

(macropatronage to inject money into influential individuals)

The fourth, scalable invitation, is the main operator of eco^2 since it combines the functions of funding, buying-selling, and investment all in one scalable “transaction”. We are working on a maths equation for this moneyflow. By modelling it theoretically, we can estimate the ideal funding to initiate the system. Once functional, it can be coded in order to track the moneyflow through operational practice on an hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month, decade to decade and even century to century period!

provisional proposal

This system is to be proposed initially to Westminster Hub (“hubminster”), and their associated bodies, with three levels of initial engagement:

honourary guarantors, where they enable the process at the hub

minimal guarantors, in the order of £2k funding

optimum guarantors, in the order of £30k

(optional guarantor, fulfilling one of the tests, which is to attract a £1m-decade guarantor)

We’d like to give the system a run for its money, for a month or a season. It is projected that the system will reach break-even within three months given the optimum initial commitment in terms of funding and time.
Because the subject matter has multiple-aspect within deep subjective experience -- we are offering an alternative way to deal with money after all -- this document consists of different people’s contributions. Rather than producing a mashup, each persons section is their own, offering written descriptions and graphics to explain the concepts, processes and mechanics of the new entity. The one consistent format we are aiming for is a mathematical description of the movement of money.

eco to the power of two provisional proposaldavid’s intuition a little more detail on the eco^2 entity a little more detail on the eco^2 proposal explorative engagement at hubminster 2012 0117 explaining the elements of the eco^2 entity 1) self-selecting filter 1.1 Pam’s Landscape of Change 1.2 Subjective Tests 1.3 action cycle 1.4 Data Entry 2) regular non-directed gatherings 3) establishing action cycles 4) scalable invitation 4.1 fundamental generalised contract - “double your money” 4.2 moneyphilic and moneyphobic aspects of being 4.3 scale of contract 4.4 how is the money guaranteed? 4.5 is the money that people bring used in any way? 4.6 what are the dangers involved? 4.7 who is empowered to invite? and how many? 4.8 general equation of “incoming” 4.9 operational model and outstanding questions (5) subjective enumeration 5.1 subjective enumeration 0-10 5.2 relative to total evaluation over a period 5.3 value is experiential 5.4 sharing the surplus 5.5 weighted moneyflow 5.6 outstanding questions (6) macropatronage explaining the elements of the eco^2 proposal what the eco^2 entity is not! glossary otherwiselloyd’s consideration

Do yourself a favour, and take a peek at the future... This thing needs to be mathematised, please recommend any mathematicians who may be up for the job. The base relationship is pretty simple, but the dynamics are mind-bending.

time and value

2012-01-06T06:10:00.001-08:00

As usual, the big posts, when they come, come of their own accord. This being the first of 2012, a big year mostly because it is self-created by social movements, a collision between different cultures (mayan? who would have guessed), and suffering from the ignominy of not having a nice round figure, like 2010 or even 2000. In this post, we will find ourselves contemplating self-discipline, the necessary conditions that give rise to it, and how these has been displaced by the illusion of money and the authority of position. This has direct impact on my own personal life, and how alone I am, and how my social value is next to nothing, a good thing to contemplate at the beginning of the year! As well shedding light on the most exciting possibility of creating a non-bounded group, the birth of a new politico-economic unity -- perhaps the first and last of its kind! But first, a monkey beside a river...

a monkey beside a river

A beautiful river. Wide, so wide as to be mistaken for a lake or a sea. Clean, open horizon, uncluttered by mountains, trees, anything, almost mathematical in simplicity. The complex sparkling, the sun reflecting off a million waves, an ever changing pattern. A living thing, this river, unique with each passing moment, like the monkey on the bank observing it.

So the monkey plunges its hand into the living thing that is the river, and pulls it out, grasping tightly. It relaxes its hold, opens his hand and looks there -- no river. The monkey plunges his hand once again into the river, and pulls it out, but no matter how tight its grasp, the river eludes capture. So the monkey gets frustrated, gets excited in turn, jumping away from the water's edge, now hopping back, this damnable snake, this river, so obvious and big, so elusive and ungraspable.

Exhausted finally, lying on the bank of the river, an arm falls to the side, the hand slips into the water. Noticing the passing of water, the movement of the river. Feeling the passing of time, with this river, this living. Being part of the water, the moment of the river. Finally, being human.

conditions for self-discipline versus money and position

People have jobs. They work for the money. If the money was not there, then they would not work. For some people, or some of the time, we do the work and that's it, glad when it is over, washing the dishes, cleaning the toilet. For some people, some of the time, if you are going to do something, you might as well do it well, cooking food for others, fixing a car, teaching another a skill. However the job is done, people return to do it again and again. The necessary condition for getting a job done is it needs to be done, perhaps repeatedly. I have a blocked toilet upstairs, and if this continues, I will be taking a dump in already blocked toilet. Not good. It needs to be cleared, for it to be use sustainably as a toilet. And pooping definitely needs to happen.

Necessity is what is required to sustain living. This is the required condition for self-discipline. Because of the complexity of our social living, such necessary conditions have been replaced mentally with making money. We need to make money (to pay for food, electricity, sewage services), and thus, mistakenly, we perceive a need to do the job. But of course, do all jobs need to be done? Perhaps the toilet needs replumbed, perhaps the car needs repaired, perhaps the phones need connected, perhaps the proposal needs to be read or written. Or perhaps not.

Consider, for a moment, the necessity that is born with a mother's love to care for their child, of the love that Jesus or Mohammad demonstrated for their people. Consider the devotion that monks have to their order, or the incalculable acts of generosity demonstrated by people all around the world today. There is a necessity somewhere in here, a necessity that encourages us to be human, to exhibit qualities of ourselves that we can term self-less or virtuous. To live a principled life, to follow not the external form of law, or position, or money, but an internal and invisible form that poets might reach in exalted and agile leaps of faith, their their spirits outstretched, only to bring back words, baubles of air for they capture nothing, words such as principle and hope and love. There is necessity here, and we feel it, all of us, at one time or another, to return to this, to being human.

my social value is next to nothing

When I was a student, I did my best. Not with any particular amount of effort, just being attentive, doing what was asked of me. Some things need to be done, so do them, and do them well. My social value was high, as a student, because I accepted the collective wisdom of adults to learn maths and science and english literature, and sports too. And it was also high because I had groups of friends and we played sports and games. So, when I reached adulthood, the end of a twenty year journey, a whole generation had passed away, and my social value was high, locally, and presumably, globally.

In the adult world of work, there seem to be a lot of jobs that are being done, but purpose of doing them is not entirely clear. Digging oil out of the ground, so we can form plastics and drive trucks around so we can distribute food, makes some kind of sense. And I found, after twenty years of playing adult games and working as a math teacher, another generation has passed away, and it is clear that the global situation is terrible, at least environmentally. The toilet is blocked, and we keep dumping in it. Not good. The world of work, and this includes education and government and even religion, the adult world is broken.

My social value is next to nothing. I have used what social value I had to draw attention to alternative means of approach, from problem-solving to problem-prevention. In effect, I have exchanged the denomination of social value from information, knowledge and skills, from business and work, into a denomination of social value of wisdom, awareness and sensitivity, of responsibility and play. And this social denomination is hardly worth anything. Honestly, my social value is next to nothing.

my social value is near zero

Let me emphasise this point, perhaps too much for it makes for painful reading. It is a rather sad one, but only if we take it personally. At the time of writing, I am living alone, and this a consequence of the decisions I have made. I do not own a home, or even rent one. I do not have friends who call me up to see me. And I do not have a fraternity of colleagues, who respect me professionally. Honestly, the only people who actually look forward to seeing me, are my mother and my father, and the rare exceptional bod. Really. Not my siblings or their off-spring or partners, not my old school friends, certainly not their partners, not my old tango partners, not recent partner entrepreneurs. Not those I consider wise, not those I consider bright, excepting children. Only a couple of parents invite me to their home, for they witness the liveness evoked in their children. Next to no-one, a twilight zone of social spirit.

There are few adults in this twilight zone I frequent. The only people I have met and spend any time with, are the destitute insane, and I have met two in my wanderings. Those who take regular walks from their warm and comfortable homes because they are so unbearably unhappy with their partners and are in desperate need of human companionship. Or those pitiful ghosts who drone and wheeze their endless angst because they are "trapped" at work, even when that work is actually self-selected -- and I have met plenty of these. Or those blind optimists who dream of utopias out of reach, sing the praises of long-dead visionaries and poets, or from the comfort of their armchairs cheer mistakenly for reactionary conflict (eg arab spring) and then turn away from the consequential, bloody mess of fall-out. And a few high-flying geniuses so pre-occupied with pure things of mind or spirit that they shine with their own light and find their own way in this shadowy no-man's land.

I have been mistaken for a lunatic, a forlorn lover, a complaining worker drone, a misguided idealist, and even a genius! I only wish I was, because then I would have some comfort in some kind of fraternity, albeit a mutually deluded one. No, I have chosen the path, or it has chosen me, and I have been shaped by the love of my parents, the warmth of family, the self-selection of friends, the administration of teachers, the mutual growth of friends, the inspiration of adolescent students, the rare wandering genius, and this has resulted in the exchange value of my social worth to be near zero. I am alone. Which is ironic, tragically so, since my solution is entirely social! But this only makes sense if one understands why I have not found my place, why I have not found contentedness with some group, politically bounded as a UK citizen or culturally as a Scot, professionally as a math teacher or personally as a friend or a father, within a business of my own making or a fraternity of entreprenuers, or with like-minded hobbiests of GO or tango -- the only group that I identify myself with is, humanity. No less (however all-encompassing the intense worlds of children may be), and no more (hence no religious brotherhood either, alas).

the world's first and only non-bounded politico-economic group!

My solutions over the years reveal a certain pattern. It is evident to them all. It is to do with this singular identity, as being human. And thus the main problem to be overcome is miscommunication. Miscommunication of word between us as individuals, miscommunication between our social institutions, and miscommunication embodied as the mis-distribution of our natural resources. We need to realise the wisdom between us.

To this end, I am aiming to approach the top of our social pyramids, our executives, namely Richard Branson of the Virgin network. I am engaging low level entities, our colleges, with non-linear learning lessons. On the entertainment side, we are approaching tango communities to improve social dynamics, diminish the calcification due to cliques. And we shall propose a working methodology for business to conduct itself, using Pam's filtering process, Lloyd's non-directed group, Tav's or Wahome's trust metrics, my action cycles and perhaps macropatronage. If it works, we shall have formed a non-bounded entity. Something like the internet, or Facebook, but in the real world.

I shall find happiness, as a human being, once we are communicating well. My range is expanding from the middle frequency of adolescent, slowly into young adults though they can hardly believe what I am suggesting, easily into the mystery of the young like Anna and Joe, Wendy and Steve's kids, and the veritable wasteland of the old, and shall ever-so-slowly dawn into the adult world of my peers. This rate of communication, personally, shall be determined only by personal capacity (and I have even given up on buddhists to escape the mental contraption they have for a headset), something ineffable, something like innocence. AND, the rate at which companies and governments and various crystalisations of human minds dissolve, something I shall attempt to address over the next few months in this portentous year of 2012. AND, as a consequence, though we may only see the beginnings of it this year, the equable redistribution of resources, of food, energy, communications, commodities, service and experiences.

the timing of this year and our ultimate social value

So, pulling it all together in some kind of terse conclusion. I require discipline from others, merely to be human, that is all. And for myself too. To allow our souls to lift with the qualities of spirit we are gifted with, all of us, but not in some religious house, not in prayer, but in our homes and factories and offices. To bring ourselves to presence, to allow possibility to grow where we least expect it, to plant seeds in the concrete of our daily work. And should we manage this miracle, the harvest shall be a blossoming of our souls, a blooming of consciousness on this planet. But this can only arise if we exhibit the same kind of discipline we apply to work, more precisely that internal sense "work ethic", a strict self-discipline that will enable us to over come the challenges we will face not merely physically, but psychically. Money, work, institutions, governance, all of it, takes on different form, and this can be quite unsettling to the part of us that likes patterns and comfort. We must be comfortable with not understanding, and still giving things a go. An adventurous attitude. Courageous. Determined in not knowing.

I have been describing myself as hard-nosed recently, evoking the manner of Alan Sugar or Steve Jobs. I shall not suffer fools gladly (my teaching experience was a strange mixture of im/patience) and though it is against my nature, which is rather forgiving and laise faire, I shall allow personal responsibilities to fuel this drive. My parents' condition is deplorable, for his genius and her heart. For my personal love for the next generation, and the love of their mother, I direct this personal motivation into my action, giving it momentum and force. It may occur to you that expressing my vulnerability in this post is foolish, such self-disclosure in a business or even a personal setting is social suicide. I have nothing to lose, for my social value is next to nothing. We have nothing to lose, considering the cesspool we are making of nature's divine garden. Indeed, we have everything to gain, or re-gain. The beginnings (for it is a result of so many beginnings since we invented computers) of a non-bounded political-economic unity, in this year, 2012.

I shall be calling this entity ecological economics, eco^2. It has a boundary of engagement that is like a living thing. Starting as a trickle, you may feel its movement as a stream with each new person who aligns, and with all the momentum of a river, it will make a sea of us. Don't try to grasp it with your mind, merely add to it your humanity. It is a social unity bounded by humanity, a natural boundary. It is a living embodiment of our social value. It is our home; as our individual consciousness has made a home our individual body, so our social consciousness has made a home of our planet.

Be human! Be well!

old age and denial

2011-12-29T10:38:00.000-08:00

Denial mounts, builds, encrusts, and is the very thing that makes old people old. So, whatever your age, if you haven't cleaned your teeth as often as you should, you will have a build up of plaque. If you haven't cleaned your mind as often as you should, your mind will have a build up of routines. If you are busy, you have regular responsibilities that have just become part of the mental furniture of your life, whether they take the form of children or jobs or whatever social behaviour you participate in, then you are old, or are in the process of ageing.

What's the way out of this? Regular cleaning of the mind. What's the test that you are not old? Open mindedness, an ability to see what is before you. The world is changing, and if you are old, and living in denial is part of your operating system, then you won't be able to see the changes. They just build up and up, until massive changes, just don't impinge, because you live in a such a tiny corner of the world, a bubble, a cave. That's being old. And whatever your age, if you don't wake up to this, you will grow old, you will be old, you will be treated as we treat old people. Which is disgraceful.

Where does this come from? Living with my parents for a week, noticing how disconnected they are from the state of the world, and how isolated they are in relation to their own family. And allowing my subconscious to bubble away with some ideas, and let this manifest as a mindflow that involves my brother, an old friend, and a person I respect.

mindflow
This mindflow worked as far as I allowed it in my mind, waking me up and getting me out of bed to make a note of it at 7am. I was so enthused I sent off an email to three people who might be interested. And got nothing back. Nothing. Of course, it is the holiday season. People are busy. As busy as they are when they are at work? Wait a mo! Is that a good thing??

For some reason, my mind turns things I have heard or witnessed, about the quality of life people have, and somehow conjures up a possible new formulation, a thing of beauty. It converts negative into positive. I did this with kids, and it worked wonders. I do this with adults, one-on-one, and it can work wonders too. But, my god, with family and friends, it is damned tricky.

the lesson
Be careful about what one dreams up. I am attempting to become harder, more concentrated, to be able to go in the direction I wish to go in. This means more will. This means making decisions. This starts to invite judgement, dissatisfaction with what is.

Creating opportunity is an art. And I am pretty good at it. That's what I do. And I am free enough to do it. I am directing myself to the executive approach, and the college one, and perhaps a little with tango and with business hubs, and I have a soft spot in pulling together an opportunity for Westminster Hub just because it is fun.

I must be self-disciplined enough to not allow myself to veer off from any of these. Simple as that.

old age
So, my mother would like to think that things are ok, with the world and with her family. Se is in her seventies. The world should be ok, and her kids should be too. But for some reason, whatever the reasons, the world is falling apart, she sees this on the news, and her family members experience troubles. The challenges they face, whether it is my great niece divorcing or my brother not meeting with critical acclaim, are things she feels very personally. She can't help it. Their sorrows are her sorrows, their happiness is her happiness. That's the way it works. And so, at her age -- and rightly so! -- she would like to share the happiness, and not suffer the sorrow.

My father is different. He gets angry. He feels for them, for sure, but converts the feeling into aggression. That's the way it works for him.

As their kid, I played around with conversion, keeping my eyes open and translating this into a win-win for us all. This hasn't worked. It has left me with the response which induces "bad practice" -- to engage others with possibilities and then being dismissed. This is makes for powerless relationships. Energy goes nowhere. It just dissipates. It evaporates. Hence, opportunities are lost. This is something which is not good to repeat.

So, how does one keep young minded, open minded, and yet directed? Be responsive and yet focussed, without just getting into repetitive cycles of behaviour and thinking? I need to learn a way of dealing with dismissal that does not involve me being confused, and just waiting, wondering what on earth is going on. I did that for a decade. The only other way I know I have is to be aggressive, as demonstrated by my father, or super entertaining as my brother which can get rather harsh. It is not asked for, hence the required energy levels, just like what happened in classes. The dynamics get a little heated, but if it works, the results are rather spectacular.

the answer
Can I do this? Well, watch out! If I don't take it personally, and end up in self-pity and confusion, then it comes across in a different way. My natural conclusion is people are too busy, they are confused, blind, maybe even ignorant, incompetent. Even idiotic, imbecilic! In a funny way of course. I never used these terms in my classes. But I made it quite clear that certain behaviours were unfavourable. I will turn up the positivity, but just like a class that doesn't go for it, and the few individuals who want to drag us into tedious social dynamics, one has to bark a little. And with adolescents, the desire to play is a lot closer to the surface. With adults, it is buried so deep under so much crap, the volume levels required to wake the soul, can be rather loud, the light rather sharp. That's the way of it.

Female violence wreaks as much damage on the soul as male violence, if not more so. But that's for another post. Be awake! Be alive! Be well!

money games

2011-12-22T15:21:00.000-08:00

This post is about two topics, money and games. I've written up some alternative ideas about money in Dunno while in Madeira, and while being back in London, several ideas have come together which seem to form a system. I'd like to present a proposal for Westminster Hub, or Hubminster, but I'd like to put the ideas out there to see what people think. You see, there are bits missing, and I am not sure if my mind can come up with those bits. I've put some ideas past Piers, a friend of Steve's, and Steve, Wendy's partner, and they have little understanding, which is understandable. I need some peeps to contribute, even though they may not understand... their contribution needs to make sense of it. So, perhaps my brother, Ricardo, perhaps Iain, perhaps Nick from 00, perhaps Liam, perhaps Mamading, perhaps Pam's collective, can contribute the bit the elements that are missing... or perhaps you?

gamification
There is a big trend in new edge thinking, probably headed by Jane McGonigal. I've even played in one of her games, Evoke. The basic idea is to somehow make use of the skills games players develop to fix the world. So you make a game of saving the world.

This is closely related to applying gaming design to business and environmental efforts. A crappy example of this would be gaining points, just like in a game, adults collect nectar points for some kind of loyalty scheme.

This seems to be the general gist of the gamification movement: to use the skills of games players, and to use game techniques in business. It's big business. There's a lot of investment in this direction. You will see more and more services which work in this way, both in the virtual world and more and more in the real world. Have you seen the new mercedes advert, "get me out of this map", or "trapped in street view" or some such?

But what if this is just a temporary evolution, a culdesac of memes, something which will die out because it has limited effect? What could evolve as a result? And how would I know?

social evolution of gaming
When I was a kid, I played roleplaying games. I got into them because my brother, eight years older, got into them. We were playing computer games as teenagers, as my brother was designing them. My peers were generally not interested in computer games. Now look at the situation, with fullblown ads on christmas tv for playstation 3's, xboxes and nintendo wii's.

Our interest in games took us from roleplaying to "live" gaming, where we took over a house and pretended to be people in a situation, in a spaceship in orbit in the corona of the sun, for example. Just after that time, dinner table game boxes came out. We evolved from games in our little team, to more wide-spread games. You can see this with social games like sf0, and other sites.

Hmm... this was not the objective of this post, or this section. I wanted to explore a development that suggested that the next thing is not to do with with gamification, points etc, but with direct social engagement. It's not to do with points, or cards, or these elements we are used to in games, but that we are willing to play. And all it takes, is a bunch of people.

evolution of gaming
I came up with action cycles in 2009 when I saw the problems faced by entrepreneurs, and the classic silo problem, as well as the problem facing graduates which has caught our attention recently. I call it a game, and people weren't willing to take it into businesses, possibly because of the term "game". People didn't take it seriously. As things get more desperate, as institutions clamp down on costs, it is going to be harder for entrepreneurs and free-lancers, because getting their foot in the door will be harder.

So, seems to me, that gamification is going in a direction which is as fibril as the crappy games the masses are playing. As those kids who played games as teenagers grow into their twenties and thirties, it is reasonable for the quality of game to be childlike, like the "gold stars" and "merits" and "badges" that are awarded in primary school, or boys and girls clubs like scouts. But this kind of artificial reward is seen through in adolescence. It may sound good, to have mozilla's open badge development, because the "rewards" methodology appeals to educators because it is so easy. It is easy for amateur or even professional theorists and social media pundits, or culture designers to come up with this stuff, and we will see how worthwhile, how deep, how significant their influence.

I suspect, and hope, that gamers who reach their forties and fifties, or the new youth, reject this quite frankly silly and juvenile bag of techniques, and adopt a wiser and deeper approach. That is, to play games that go the heart of the matter, that merge money and social value, that reject all manner of category and distinctions, so that we can just go ahead and get things done. The game, is life, is the world, and it is serious. It's about life and death, and the future of our environment. If we are not careful, we will end up winning games, and losing the world.

money
Which leads us to money. I've explored some ideas which seem to me reveal aspects of how money actually works. Eg, we can't save money, it is always something we use. We don't get paid for what we did, but the money goes forwards to buying things we need or want. You can read about this in Dunno.

More recently, I had this idea while I was being interviewed by Anna for her phd project, book, documentary, Rethink Work: what if people who turned up at Westminster Hub, came away with double the money they took? Seriously.

In fact, that same day, I ended up meeting Tav and Nick and Tav gave me £60, and so, that day, I came back with 12 times the money I had spent to get there.

Think about it. When someone goes to the office, or factory, they do something, and then they are given money. The money they take home and spend as they like. That is, they do something useful, produce something of value, presumably, and in return they are given money. Could a similar thing happen with the Hub? Or an extended network.

Or think about social capital. What is social capital? Well, map it to monetary capital. How does that work? Amass money, and then lend it out, and expect a return with interest. Well, if you think about a company as being a certain amount of social capital, what is the turn that comes with interest? Think about the social value. After all, the structure of a company allow people to trust one another, so that one department trusts another, or one person in one company position interlocks with another person in another company, the seller and marketeer, the supplier and the contractor.

That is, free your mind from thinking about the roles and categories, and just examine how money flows. If we are to produce an alternative system, there will be equivalent aspects to sales, marketing, etc. They may fulfil these functions, but they won't be "sales" and "marketing"... more like "honour payment" or "donation", and "recommendation". Remember multi-level marketing? That fad was riding on the notion that people could make a little money from recommending a thing, a toothpaste they used. Of course it turned people into salespeople, which wasn't good. So, this new form is not about turning people into salespeople, but recording how things happen, and making sure money flow appropriately.

transitional games
These are transitional games, at least on my time-map. They are temporary measures, experiments, so that we develop the skills and attitudes necessary to be able to play some really serious trust games, games that will deal with the level of environmental degradation, that can resolve our massive social disorders and injustices.

Currently, organisations cost a lot of money just to maintain the organisation itself. Effectively, if we produce similar effects without organisational overheads, a lot of money is saved. But we should be wise with this, since as we know we don't save money. We just reduce costs.

However, think about how factories changed, replacing eg 10 men with a robot. Even with the costs of robots etc, the total cost goes down. The company appears to "save" money. And ten people are made redundant. (Of course, this is replaced with other people getting work, the robot manufacturers, but perhaps as a whole, the robot manufacturers cost less than all the workers the robots replace.)

Now, when we make managers redundant, and various roles, it may look like the same kind of thing. We replace manager hierarchy with horizontal self-organising systems. For some reason, I don't think it is the same. What do you think? And if it does "save" money, what should a company do with this money?

Basically, in this transition period, we are moving from positional contracts, to ones that are more related to genuine trust. It is all to do with trust, it is just we don't need the organisational scaffolding of qualifications and roles, just the direct engagement of people doing the job.

hubminsters
I haven't collected together my thoughts about this, because they are so varied. I am hoping that by presenting them to the right people, elements will be contributed that are essential. If we pull it together, we might be able to present a proposal so exciting, so reasonable, that the powers that be will be willing to play.

I'd like to take three levels of game play. Option One which just involves the hubminsters saying yes, and enabling it with their permission. Option Two which involves the hubminsters actually putting their name to it and leveraging a little money from them and with their partners. And Option Three which involves getting a reasonably high investment to see if we can get a substantial result. Think about it as manually kick-starting a bike, or the old rotatary handles on the first cars, or pulling the propellors to get the airplane engine revving. Or, having a small starter motor, to get the engine moving. Or, actually unleashing the power of an atom, to start off a chain reaction.

So, here are some small ideas:

getting paid, like in a company, but as a network
playing scalable games, from £10, to £100, to £1000, to £10,000
invited to play, pay nothing; but self-selecting to play costs
initial self-selecting filtering process implemented by hosts, eg pam's 20th/21st century thinkers
non-directed relationship building, eg lloyd's tuttle club
super-lean business practice, eg david's action cycles
social value tracking, eg tav's system
ipool, the non-bounded network, which grows into people's social world, like the net
credits, being paid in closed black (money now) and closed red (expected return)

The trick is to come up with something that is ecologically sound. The money flow is sorted. The hubminsters have something already set up, a business model of some kind. Something about the sale of desk-time as membership fees, and the space to host activities. This shouldn't interfere with it. It should complement it.

I came up with some formulation, which probably fits in to Option Two or maybe Three from above. It is preliminary, and has something missing. Basically, we give £10 to 100 people who turn up at the hub a day. This is funded by eg unltd. Why? Because it is effectively funding Pam's filtering process. Is her process worth £10? If it is, the trick is to roll it out to 100 a day. In addition, we give £100 to 10 people, people who are invited to play based on their self-selection and what they give to the hub in their involvement. This can be paid by a company. And a final payment of £1000 to one person.

It is all scalable, and it needs to be done based on results. That is, people invited to the hub have to come up with some social value that is worth more than £10. And they need to convert this into more money than £10. The initial £10 is for expressing that there is trust that a person has value, and because the hub have no idea, they are given the benefit of the doubt. That is, it is the opposite process that currently happens with funding, which is to be suspicious, and force organisations to compete for funding, and this builds up to ludicrous sums of money. Here, we are talking about giving small amounts of money right from the start.

How can people turn social value into money? Well, for a start, they could use pam's technique, or perhaps david's action cycles with colleagues and companies in order to produce results -- will their colleagues pay them for taking them through pam's filtering system, or david's action cycles? Since the materials are open source, and concepts, they can use these freely. The flow of money is pure. There is no extra money being absorbed by the machinery of the organisation. There are just individuals aligning to do things, collectively, and for one another.

The trick is relating social value to monetary value. We do it in companies already, apparently.

launching WISDOM

2011-12-20T06:31:00.000-08:00

Most of this will be about the london book launch for WISDOM, a conversational tango. Some will deal with fiddling, computer fiddling. Oh, and I guess the directions my life may take for next year. Actually, I may leave that for another post.

The main portal for happyseaurchin is complete, and I have decided to put it as the root for the happyseaurchin.com site. Most of the time has been taken up making the non-linear site. I will be using this site to approach colleges, but more of that later. Take a look, tell me what you think.

There is also an executive section. This is based on an idea from Steve, to approach executives, namely Richard Branson. Looks a bit odd, and it is. Perhaps it is too much. What do you think? It is not a business approach, at least not in the traditional sense. I don't want to explain, I hope the pages there do that. Do they, I wonder? Or is it all just too enigmatic? That's the problem with reflective spaces, co-creation, and wisdom... which brings us to the book launch.

the book launch

About twenty people turned up on a cold, winter's evening at the Westminster Hub. Remarkable, really. Some were Wendy's family, partner Steve, mother and father and their spouses, and some of Wendy's friends. And a few distant connections on my side, and a few old-new friends like Tav, Mamading, and Sofia, who actually brought her dad, Hugo.

Wendy was a little nervous because her family would see her in a way that she is not often, in a following role. She has a strong character, quite willful, familiar with making decisions, a strong and capable woman. And here, she would be employing all of that but in a follower's role. Afterwards she said she had understood something deeper than she had before the event, and it was simply the importance of following, "It is all about the follower", she said. It takes a while, it seems to me, for people to spot this.

the first tanda

We started the evening with a tango dance. Wendy and I just started dancing, hoping that people would notice and sit down to begin. Sofia was encouraged to get people sitting, and we asked people to remark on what they saw in our dance. When people shared, everything that needed to be said, was said. Some said it was not tango, others said they saw the unity of our movement. I felt like there was no need to add to it. Nevertheless, the plan was to finish the hour with a tango, and perhaps there would be a change in the way people were looking, not externally, but in a mutually internal way.

Of course, I don't expect anyone else to spot our internal tango, about the primacy of following, in the first engagement. It is too easy to slide into judging the dancers, the speaker, the leader, as being the primary or most important role. I saw Wendy's mother look down a few times through the event, which made me try harder, and which sunk me further in the "bad books". And indeed, I had a few comments at the end about "control issues". And it certainly does look that way. It certainly looked like I was in control, and few got a word in edge-ways. And this is true. However, the objective is not to lead, it seems to me, but to follow.

Hmmm, I am making a meal of this. It sounds worse than it was. But then again, leading and following, talking and listening, reading and writing, is what the book is about, and clearly what a book launch about this is about. It is all about immersion. And talking about reading and writing, or talking and listening, while people are talking and listening, can seriously test an audience's ability. They have to make a choice about following the object of thought, that is, what the person is talking about, or they attend to what is happening, that they are listening and someone is talking. That is, between "about" and "actual". The confusion arises when too many people chase after "about", "about talking and listening", "about the book", "about wisdom".

The first half of the launch went well, really well. We did a few physical exercises, we connected them up pretty well. We related the importance of internal sensation, and about the importance of partner work to correlate experiences. And we even led all the way up to the importance of sublimating, or subsuming, the leader-follower dynamic with a purely following-cycle or fellowship. The quality of listening in the group was heightened. I could tell by the acuity of mind, there is a sense in the room, and when you talk, you can sense the attention. It is not hard, it is on me, or my mind, nowhere close to attention on my ego, or my motivation, it is quite effortless. People are really listening. They are listening within, at their awareness. New thoughts have arisen, or rather, they are listening to their listening mind. It makes the talking a lot easier.

a change of direction

However, someone wanted this to be directed towards the book, and the second half began. And I botched it. I changed gears, and we entered into chat about talking and listening, and writing and reading. It got confusing. My reading went too fast, and our relationship was not established strongly enough, so I blithely wandered through the mindfield of too many people and it was innevitable that one would go off. One did. It was the phrase "editing is a kind of cheat". I remarked on it in a dismissive way, and one of the members of the audience happened to be an editor, professionally. Despite my attempt to allay the insult she had taken, and directing it purely to my incapacity to edit my own work, and how we had designed a way of co-authoring the book in a flowing kind of way, Wendy's editor friend could not let it go. And people rallied, and there was confusion.

This is the problem with listening. And with most talking. Groupings in the west tend to father speakers who are competent or slick, those who do not step on people's toes, who as a result don't really say anything much. Whereas, it seems to me, I would like a situation where the emphasis is not on the talker, as listeners we forgive their lack of skill, their inabilities, and whatever emotions arise personally, we deal with internally without affecting the listening of others. Not in a dispassionate way, but on the contrary, in a much more engaged way. The trick is to appreciate the responsibility of listening actively. Such active listening, attentively, patiently, with forgiveness, allows us to fathom much deeper space individually and socially. I have experienced this with kids a lot, and sometimes with adults, with listening evenings, or just in pairings. This is an experiential fact for me. That we starve ourselves of this as adults, seems strange to me. And I am not willing to enter into buddhist circles, or otherwise, where such deepenings occur. I hold to the possibility it can be done in mainstream, and not in some small group. The world, after all, is burning.

I have been asked to write a blog post for the hub, but I think this is not what is asked for. This is more a record of my thinking, and response. I would like to have included a few comments by the important people, the listeners, the people who came, but Wendy has been overwhelmed with work and kids at home, and we haven't got round to getting feed-back/forwards. I have fired an email out, and those who respond relatively quickly may find their comments here.

"some comments"

the last tanda

So, on the whole, it went well. It was a learning experience, for sure. I wish I could do one of these a day. I am sure Wendy would relax, and we'd get a handle on what can and can't be done. We could explore. It is not a matter of getting it right in terms of a specific delivery or schedule of points. It is about getting it right with the specific group of individuals who have gathered that evening. To take the time to come, for whatever reason or purpose, is remarkable, and I am deeply thankful. I can not express this in words. I get close to tears, but I know in this day and age, people are still afraid of such simple self-disclosure. I hope I never meet with sufficient success that I can not perceive and feel deeply the appreciation for people who give their time. There are so many things in the world, so many disasters, so much entertainment, so much comfort, so many more deep practices, that to take time out to play the strange game we are suggesting, the space between us, the tango, is... quite, quite remarkable.

Wendy and I finished the evening by going to the Dome where we danced tango. We danced when we got there, and it was good, not amazing, but good. And we danced again in the last few tandas at the end of the evening, and this was quite remarkable. Wendy was speechless. Doesn't happen often. It was nice to have a confirmation that what we had been talking about earlier that evening, we could actually do. A very satisfying way to end the day. I only wish that others had a similar experience, and they felt satisfied with their following for the day. As Wendy has remarked, it is all about following. Deciding what we follow, a talker, our mind, an idea, a hope, god, our partners, whatever we follow or whoever we follow, is the defining feature of our cultural movements, the symphony of humanity of which we are part.

scotland's peaks and valleys

2011-12-07T08:30:00.001-08:00

What a two weeks! Quite remarkable. Starting with Colin's Assist Social Capital event inviting me as a pioneering educator, a resulting action cycle at Scotland Colleges responsible for 43 scottish colleges, and the tango festival, Bailongo, held in Edinburgh, the book launch of Wisdom, a conversational tango, and unbelievable social dynamics at work and at home. Words will not do the experiences justice. I shall remark only on those elements which might surface something useful in the mind, the uplifting peaks and the rather bleak valleys.

action cycle peak

Colin's Assist Social Capital event was interesting enough. Plenty of people, very open, and some people on the edge of social development. One of the presenters, Adrian, actually had "non-linear learning" as the title of one of his slides. The "action points" that came out of the day were a little weak, mostly general sentiments of positivity, apart from the very concrete invitation by Leigh Brown of Scotland Colleges to conduct an action cycle the following week. Amazingly, it happened, despite terrible rain and floodings in the area of Stirling, and national strikes which meant that one participant couldn't make it.

Amazingly, we achieved two wows during the first hour, and we are very close to completing the third wow, which means our idealistic objective is actually achieved. What did a bunch of strangers agree to do? Listen to this! Produce a video which records "future evidence" of the "Edu", an educational currency transactional within all Scottish educational establishments. Not only is the video made by Iain at Media Education, but a dedicated website, and an appointment with one of the shakers at NESTA. All in a week. Unbelievable, actually.

book launch peak

The book launch went well enough. I spent the entire day on the Thursday before wandering around Edinburgh wondering who might be interested in coming. I went to the university departments of Philosophy and Social Anthropology, a couple of meditation centers, and a few church organisations. Also, laid some flyers at the Bailongo event run by my friend Ricardo. Nevertheless, not one person came whom I didn't know. Not one new person. I had started to think it might be possible to tour the UK, use couch-surfing, and sell enough books to make it sustainable. But I can't see this happening with this lack of turnout.

The event went well enough. I got a little hassled at the start because people feel they want to contribute and guide the direction of the event. It is not their fault, because there is an invitation, and some participants are not aware of how heavy their mind is. Still, I need to sharpen up our act for the next book launch in London. The physical activities were fun, and people's attention attuned towards the end, but I am not sure if the physicalised experience of tango actually connects to WISDOM in the mind's of the participants. However, the objective is to give enough for people to want to read the book. If that objective is met, then the launch works.

I'd like to go into the experience in a little detail, mostly for myself. It was very interesting. I mean, very, interesting. I started with a quote from the I Ching, a book I have only recently got an angle into.

Writing can not express words completely. Words can not express thoughts completely. Are we then unable to see the thoughts of the holy sages?

I have often made the distinction between the spoken word and the written word, and it is affirming to see it so clearly described. We are a society that takes the written word as central, logos, the objectified account. This is not the path to wisdom.

So, when starting the book launch, it was interesting to point out the parallel relationships between writing and reading and then the added experience of listening to someone reading the book. It became clear the only authoritative account about the reading of the book was Wendy, something which I found difficult to hold in people's attention for long. I tried to draw attention to the importance of the reader, the listener, the follower, but in doing so, everyone feels a right to contribute. Perhaps I should emphasise the importance of the "first violin" in an orchestra?

Many dynamics occurred throughout the event, so numerous and subtle, I think only a recording could capture them. I'd like to make sure that we start the london gig with a similar sensitivity to written and spoken and thought, move a little quicker through the background of the book, and then approach some really "solid" ground, which is rather contentious, the third extreme on the psycho-social continuum, the space between us.

river of shit valley

The engagement with my estranged brother was... tricky. Despite a deep conversation initiated by Robbie on the Friday night, extensive discussion throughout Saturday ably moderated by Wendy, and the rather revealing event of the WISDOM book launch on Sunday, Ricardo and I ended up on either side of a river of shit on Monday. From an invitation to jax, born out of a simple appreciation of his commentary to a piece of Bartok and then some rather sauve Indian music, I tripped up on the usual: a single no, backed up by the weight of mind. I took Ricardo's further postponement as what has happened in the past, which is a permanent delaying tactic when nothing actually happens, and I am yet again inundated with his heavy-handed projections whenever we engage whether in person or over the net. It makes seeing him rather heavy, and I am reluctant to visit him. This would not be a problem were it for his centrality in the family. His souring has resulted in various relationships souring. I could not bear this happening again, and I allowed the dynamic to escalate into a torrent of abuse.

I was hideously ugly, and pointed out things that he had not seen over the years, and I tried to be as negative as possible, something I find tricky. I did pretty well, though, and eventually I got chucked out of his house. His house is in the middle of nowhere, so he kindly offered to drive me to a nearby village. We sat in the car for a while, the river of shit between us. He kept on asking me what the point of it all was. I had no idea, because in conditions like those, I am merely a passenger, it is just happening, and I must see it through to the end. It can only be broken by the power, the insight, the wisdom of the other. And luckily, something happened, and Ricardo became vulnerable. And for a brief moment we hugged and cried together. I do not know if he was sad for me, or for himself. I was struck with grief for the behaviour I had demonstrated, for the state of our relationship, for the difficulty he has with sharing vulnerability. I cried for us, two intelligent, heart-ful, brothers, who had managed to create such a mess of our communication.

So, something, in that dark valley, across the putrid content of the river of shit, brought us together. Someone had to climb out of the trough we had descended into, and by my going deliberately deeper into it, Ricardo decided to take an opposite direction, out of it.

peak or river, you decide

There is so much shit between us, don't you think? So much reason to distrust, to question one another's motives or perception. We are so divided by systems, by social structures. So many of us are alone. And I am willing to be alone rather than suffer the rather cold embrace of a "friend" or the welcome of an old "colleague". I insist on real engagement, real friendship, real collaboration, or nothing.

I notice that I am attempting to sharpen myself for the happyseaurchin site, and the approach to executives. I am finding myself being more brutal, more unsatisfied with people, situations, tango. I am permitting myself to be very, very edgy. I am honing myself to be very dangerous, as a result. So that I can match the ability and perception that we might expect from self-made executives. They have led a life of decision-making. I need to be able to match that kind of engagement. And as a result, I am only safe with kids and with those who love and forgive me, and those who hold the higher ground through their toughening experience, like Richard Branson. Everyone else better watch out.

recent confluence and approaching tipping point perhaps?

2011-11-13T16:13:00.000-08:00

I've noticed something on being back. My ideas are not so alien. Of course, I should expect this, if what I have been playing around with is beyond the bleeding edge, then at some point or other, the actual leading edge of innovation will come across the same material.

There's much more on the ground, from the deep practice and methodology of people at the spring gardens, not least of which is their spring project which is about graduate training, but in a way which is way deeper than finding people jobs. The people there are on point. They are taking aikido as their central practice, and applying in their engagement with people and influencing how they they are conducting business.

I met quite a few people at the Westminster Hub opening night, some of whom are really sharp. Nic from the architectural company /00 who are one of the partners running the show, is the most precise conceptual bod I have met in a long while. His observations of social form are quite splendid. I also met others, smart cookies, who find my engagement resonant. This is uplifting.

I have just been to an event called the cooking pot, hosted by Wahome and Ben, two people from the wowsociety. Pam was giving a talk about her workshops, and I also connected with a guy who runs Circle Sports, where sports retail shop is run as a social business and profits are ploughed into training NEETS to find jobs. Also got a chance to meet Doug from Mardi, another idea what is about creating a cross-curricular and indeed cross-organisational network. (Doug's card has two words on it, "doug" and "minimalist"... google it :)

Seems to me that the ecology is just about coming together. We have particular people on the ground doing community projects, we have social business slap bang in the middle of london just up from the houses of parliament, and we have entire companies running on the new methodology (a methodology embedded in WISDOM btw)... We have bright minds, young and old, honing in on the necessary concepts, and more and more people with pieces of it floating in their heads.

Practically, I am inviting people to The Spring because they are actually doing it, and I believe the team there can hold to their principles if things get exciting and things escalate. Let's hope so. I just want to bring a few people together, and let them see how they can collaborate more effectively for everyone's mutual benefit. It's about creating a vertical solution, from top to bottom, from being to action, intention and social object. Not just one person, not just small teams, but enough teams working at different aspects and angles and niches, appreciating what everyone else is doing and connecting up powerfully.

I am on point, or at least, I can be. While around the table discussing things at the cooking pot, people wanted to conclude with the usual words of advice, this time to Pam: could Pam be clearer about what she was doing, since they felt they still didn't understand. I took exception to this, and said it was not about understanding, it was about doing, experientially, and as a result understanding may arise. Another guy defended the advice and he said he would also like some more concise info so he could understand. I repeated my objection. I knew it is harsh, but such is life.

After the event, and stuff had been tidied away, and we were the last to leave, a woman who had been at the table, and who also had indicated she did not understand, came up to me and said that there was truth to what I said. Simple as that. She had objected when she heard me say it at first, but then she realised that was the only way we actually learn, is by doing first. It was "just true" were her words.

So, here we are, ladies and gentlemen. Are we witnessing a potential tipping point, the breaking of the wave that has been so long in coming, that many of us have felt, have motivated us far deeper than anything we have thought or read. Where do you stand? I'd like to bring all the people I have mentioned into this post together and do an action cycle (and some people's description of it). I probably don't have the trust, power, or evidence for the people mentioned to come together, all I can do is ask. How about this Thursday or Friday?

Of course, I forgot to promote the book launch at the event this afternoon (sorry Wendy), and so on, so I suspect I am not positioning myself very well in terms of "networking" and "politics" et al. But it is nice to see the wave rise slowly, and see a potential breaking point. Where it actually breaks, here in London, or in west coast america, or in india, who is to know. I am not talking about reactionary expressions like the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, which I think I have addressed in an earlier post. This is about deep preparation, and putting things into action that actually creates opportunities. Co-creation is the current buzzword for it. I will stick to emergence, and results. Or collective strategy, where we do not act relative to ourselves or the organisations we have formed or work in, nor create an umbrella organisation, or attempt to understand each other's position and then attempt to work out a possible strategy in one's head.

I can spot the opportunity, a real one, with the real people I have met, their vectors of intention and experience. The last time I saw one like this was in January 2009 after the credit crunch. I suspect this will be the last one of this kind I will see. I may not have captured what I see in words here in this post, and I suspect I won't in person either. The proof is in our action.

WISDOM - the methodological shift

2011-11-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

How does that sound? "WISDOM - the methodological shift". Is it better than "WISDOM - a tango"? You see, when we introduce the book, the title just doesn't work. We need a new title. We are open to suggestions.

Having had quite an eventful bunch of days since being up in scotland. Wendy took me to Tango Mango, a festival in devon. We enjoyed it, and Wendy managed to discover a way into a deeper way of moving, a very rare type which I have only experienced in two women in the ten years I have done tango. The effect is such that you can feel your partner's leg through the movement of her body. The relaxed leg, not the leg which is carrying the weight. It is like syrup, or treacle, since the body is all connected, bones and tendons, in a very relaxed yet alive way. Sweet.

BUT, the event didn't end well. On the last two nights, Wendy was hardly asked to dance at all. Our dancing must have attracted some attention for there were plenty of women who were wanting to dance with me, and of the few I danced with other than Wendy, I got plenty of appreciative noises and quite intense hugs. But I couldn't enjoy the last two nights because the men were not asking Wendy to dance. This is something of a bore. Why wasn't she asked. Clearly our dance was noticed, even though we mostly just walk around. And quite frankly, this is only possible because of Wendy's slick movement, not mine. So, although the women wanted to dance with me, neither myself nor they could produce the same results. The men would have had a better result. And indeed, when she returned to london, Wendy reported that several men were bowled over by the quality of the dance they entered into with her.

The art of following is invisible. Even in tango.

I went to see Harriet in Salisbury. That was an event and a half. I can't really talk about it much for now, but her daughter, Morgan, is such a wonder. She makes us adults think we are good with kids, when of course, it is her who is good with adults. She is so warm and friendly and playful. Loving, a very loving kid. And she's not even three.

Back in London, I went to the Westminster Hub opening event last friday. Met some incredible people. My language is meeting with better reception, indicating the ideas of emergence, consensus and so on are becoming more popular. Not quite got to the level of non-organisation, though Indy who is one of the co-founders of the place is keen to try an Action Cycle. We will see.

Because of things, I am attempting to rack up a bunch of experiences which hopefully will result in something substantial before christmas.

We've got educational potential through Graham Leicester of the International Futures Forum who wants me to meet the visionary head of Monifieth High School, and Chris Campbell of Assisted Social Capital doing an event which brushes on education on the 24th.
I hope to organise a book launch in Edinburgh at the end of the month, as well as one down here in London. Hence, the need for a definitive title. Perhaps it remain open, to be decided at the book launch! My ideas are turning from a straight book reading experience, to a demo of tango, to participant workshop, thus demonstrating the practice and principle of the book.
I've just about delineated an operational methodology that allows us to engage companies to produce socially astounding results, inviting money flow, without falling back into the methodology demonstrated by traditional capitalism and organisational thinking. I am putting together a confluence week starting on the 15th. I am inviting people of quality to take part. You automatically qualify if you are reading this, so get in touch :)
Wendy and I are contacting journalists through our respective networks to find a writer who wants to produce a feature on us wrt tango^2, perhaps the book, or even my self-discipline educare experience, or even XQ. Anyone who knows someone who might be interested, please get in contact.

Just went out to meet a person I met through The Next Edge, that virtual facebook group I encountered and then left because they tend to talk and theorise too much. The setting was not ideal for an in depth engagement, being at a pub, and there being a three-way dynamic. However, I can verify that the kindness visible in Kate's eyes is backed up by a loving heart. Her ideas, and indeed her practice, will have to wait until another more opportune time arises. I felt like I was doing that "directed" thing, with pace, with invection, a necessary consequence to attempting to ramp up the pace to see a substantial result by christmas.

I warned Wendy, I am in a dangerous state. I believe I am. Only Wendy has brought me back, who verified the truth of tango and was willing to explore what this implies, what we explored in our book, WISDOM. I certainly do not want to suffer the same miasma that occured in 2009 and 2010, in the bustle of headless chickens distracting our attention in a thousand different directions while the world degrades, denatures, and defuncs. Yes indeedy, I am dangerous. I am willing to describe my ideas and their potential implication, and there is nothing but world-change or extreme dismissal and nothing in-between. Watch out.

mindflow - "door"

2011-10-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

Several threads to this one, several trajectories of thought like comets, like planets or suns hurtling through space whose subtle play of gravity may open or close doors. This has a high level of metaphoric blending. It is grounded, though, in feeling too. An entire spectrum of existence, a full colour chakra spread. To summarise, in reverse chronological order that they came, at least tonight, though one or two are returning orbits from last night:

the gatekeeper at 2020, profounder

door, several degrees of open, states of closure, wrt 2020, wrt personal love

my dangerous state, out of orbit wrt 2020, slingshot around harriet

the escape velocity beyond my skin, landing with a bump

making love, completely non-sexually, but the rise of spirit through the nerves of the body

the inevitability of 1 from a state of non-zero

the missing frequencies, jumps to mp3 experiments versus experiential nights, consensus at occupy wallstreet versus the "edinburgh wave" in 2003, the mp3 bank versus apple itunes store, organisational collaboration versus individual

missed opportunities
Watched three videos tonight that recalled some experiences or thoughts I have had. A video called "swallowable perfum", which happens to be the next article that Miranda is meant to write about in TBD storyline Trancebible; written in 2003, I called this "ingestible perfumes". A video covering the eighth mp3 experiment, and how this contrasts with the experiential nights I introduced to my friends back in 2002. And a video called "consensus" about Occupy Wall Street movement, which starts with messages being transmitted through a crowd through non-electronic amplification; which is exactly what I suggested to friends back in 2003 when the G8 met at St Andrews and we went on the anti-war march, to turn and send a message to the front of the march, something like the audio equivalent of a mexican wave.

I shall be experiencing this kind of thing over the coming decade. Seeing versions of thoughts and experiences we tried locally. I can mention these things, as I did to Chris, and it can be heavy, for it appears to pull to the past, the gravity of guilt, that we did not manifest what I called the "edinburgh wave", which might have accelerated the process of self-organisation, so that perhaps we might be more sophisticated by now, 2011, rather than the rather reactionary, groping in the darkness, that is the consensus discussions in New York at Occupy Wall Street.

Definitely missed opportunities. Chris did not know what to do. He does not work with guilt either, so he can only stand and wait for me to use this fact, which I did not. Only in the low orbit of sleep could I see that this recognition be presently used. Imagine, I can see such things like those mentioned above emerge over the next decade and know that we are on the right track. This is assuring for me, in some gentle sense. And should my material ever be found, this might serve as evidence, that I was on the right track. And as we approach 2020, or as we decend into social collapse, the consequential steps I have taken with XQ may be of sufficient depth that we might be able to pull out of whatever negative asymptote we may find ourselves in. Which means, as I continue this line of thought as I write now, that it might be useful for me to consider the social implications or reflections of XQ. I have been quite exclusive in considering psychological dynamics, what with negative numbers/experiences and the mental operation of multiplying by negative one, and what the subjective equivalence of this might mean; what may the social manifestations be? What might constitute social objects from the collective exploration of XQ?

Returning to the original thought trace as I lay in bed, the opportunities we missed means that we jump to solutions that appear good, but are not in line to create the necessary conditions for 2020. Instead of manifesting the "edinburgh wave" in 2003, we have such dynamics in 2011. Another way to think about it, perhaps more presently, is to notice how most people seem to still be content with organisational collaboration, still thinking "organisationally", rather than attempting to collaborate individually, based on real one to one relationships. Such actions and thought mean that there are spectrums of experience missing from us, personally, and thus socially. Experiential nights, or its more recent reinvention as the action cycle, was designed at the granular level of the individual: we learn in groups of ten, and perhaps, experientially, learn how to expand our trust games to hundreds and millions. The mp3 experiments show how we jump to larger scale social movements, rather than work at the small scale. This means we get large numbers of relatively passive paticipants at these mp3 experiments, or indeed Occupy Wall Street rallies. We have not developed the skills individually to interact in small groups, let alone such large groups.

Nevertheless, these incredible developments are steps in the right direction. It will remain to be seen, as a species, whether we are content to travel at the rate we are, which might see us patch oureselves together in a pseudo-self-organised way that can cope with the environmental disasters we have participated, or whether things get so bad that we are forced to follow emergency behaviours, a miracle of social alignment unseen in history so far.

the inevitability of one
Another trajectory of thought, influence of which might be discerned in the above writing, perhaps in the manifestation of collective unity. I remember talking with Yinka at the Elephant House in Edinburgh in 2002, the first person I spoke to about 2020. She already had pieces in her mind, because she was conducting the Human Ecologies course, and once she saw the possibility, she said it was inevitable. She actually said she that, that it was inevitable. I remember correcting her, saying that seeing a possibility does not mean it will happen. But perhaps she was right.

Recently, just this weekend, I encountered a woman who remembered a conversation she had had with me as far back as 2003 or 2004; an unusual experience, to be sure. Laura recalled a conversation where I ran through my thought experiment about the probabilities of the state of the world by 2030, whether we will have destroyed ourselves, whether we will have maintained some kind of unequal status quo, or whether we will have achieved sustainability, a healthy, peaceful world. She admitted to saying she had said zero. I am sure I remarked on my existence and the thought in my head, and thus the chance was non-zero. But, actually, it has turned out -- so far -- that she is right.

How can both be right? Well, it's to do with the effect of non-zero.

To see a possibility, is like seeing a star in the dark, perhaps the first of the evening. At some stage there is nothing, a blank expanse, perhaps a high state of INERTIA. But once there is enough light, the eye is drawn to it, and suddenly there is a direct awareness of a sun billions of miles away. Literally in the blink of an eye, a direct path through all probability space, what may constitute "insight" if this were directed within to psychological realms, and perhaps "revelation" if directed out to the space between us.

So, when the mind see this possibility, however small, it immediately escalates to one, conscious appreciation. Well... something like this. No-one saw the possibility of 2020, apart from Yinka. But I lost Yinka when she broke her neck. Her spirit was taken up entirely with brightening the dark place she had found herself, so bright she was that she was the only one that I nearly fell in love with.

Yinka demonstrated it. She saw the possibility, and when she saw it, like a distant star, she recognised the equivalent "sun" that it was. She was not blinded by the "way things are" currently. She saw the possibility and thus for a moment, saw it as inevitable. The trick, of course, is to realise its relative size, or distance. I saw the chance as tiny, but I also saw it as possible. To see it as possible means to experience the one-ness of it.

And this is true of mental states, as it is true of social states. Having revised my language through the experience of writing Wisdom, I can say that the buddhists centre on a state that is far deeper than is required for social peace. The depths necessary individually to maintain a socially balanced world is merely at the recognition that we are one species, of humanity on this planet. This is a level of awareness that is becoming quite widely recognised. Something over-emphasised in my opinion at peace rallies, a frequency of our social chakras if you like that is over-bright, "love as power", and that kind of thing. A necessary voice, a necessary awareness, but one band of the spectrum. We need others. The kind of frequencies I am mentioning here.

making love
The other night I had a fitful sleep. It was not troubling. It was not an intellectual energy, like the energy that eventually got me out of bed tonight to find myself writing this in the dark at chris' at Roslyn at 4:43 in the morning. (I've been writing for something like an hour and a half... this mindflow is a marathon... I can't expect anyone to follow it!)

I slept fitfully for a few hours. It was not sourced physically, neither in my skin discomfort, nor in any sexual desire. However, it was related. I really felt an urge to make love. Strange. It was like the sensuality of tango, that is also non-sexual for me. But it was a different approach. Meeting Laura had a strange effect on me, and it manifested in this fitfull period of sleeplessness.

As I say, it was not sexual. I was not excited, sexually. But the energy was full, it reached my body. With tango, there is very much grounded in the body, in the sensation of proximity, the feeling of movement, of a sense of mutual existence that permeates the skin, the customary boundary of distinct selves, or personality. There is spirit, a mutual presence is arrived at, which is an acute tango, but arrived at through the body, through its interpretation or mutual response to the music, concurrently. It happens simultaneously, so I don't like to use temporal sequences in my description. But it is like a zip whose fastener starts at the bottom and is pulled up, from the base chakra up. Again, not that it is rooted in the sexual, but the sensual.

So, lying there, alone, there was no physical presence to zip up the chakras to some higher state, like in tango. It started from a different place. And it manifested in my mind as a desire to make love. Again, non-sexually. Even though that was the object, the taste of it, the approach was not through the senses, was not even sexual. So it was not frustrating. I did not have any desire to relieve myself of any pent up energy. It was enough to keep me awake, and fantasise, perhaps, and I did not wander off and start thinking up something.

To bring mind, such a resolution of mind, to touch. To bring consciousness to each and every nerve-ending, to dissolve this focus of attention so entirely that is like the sea traced through every river of the world, through every stream, to each trickle of a source, to bring this queen of awareness to such utter, utter abandon. If mother nature is the personification of the living world, then my sense, my intention, was to bring this entity alive to my senses as a witness of this flower, this leaf, this raindrop, this tree, this hillside, looking over this valley, beneath this sky. To be entirely swallowed up in the moment, in this tiny pocket, to bring to awareness the very living wonder of it all. To admire, to witness. That even my conscious brightness, no more than this, certainly not the lazer strength of will, but as gentle as the light from a single candle-flame whose warm orange light may set a room's surfaces defined, as gently my consciousness witness the expansive corona of your existence.

I have waxed lyrical... It was not this that murmured my mind to wakefulness. Though there was something of the dim glow of a candle flame. A gentle thing. And yet, so full, that I wished to make love, madly, passionately. I was all the light in the room, etching every surface, edge and corner. Happy, in some way, that just as I was contained in that little room, sleeping beneath Chris' mezanine bed platform, so the room, the space, the pocket, that my little candlelight of my mind imaged was only a tiny corner of something so vast, so full, so rich.

Nope. Can't put words to it.

landing with a bump
The following day, I ended up talking with Laura for a good few hours. It was delightful. Laura is clearly interested in Chris, something I was aware of before. So, I was greedy, not to have her in any sexual way, but I wished to see what her response was some ideas. We talked perhaps too much about my book, TBD, and then I gave the most general description of XQ possible. And somehow, she made sense of this! She has both linguistic control, far greater than me, and also a strong background in mathematics, which she humbly disavowed. I wanted to finish the evening with a few simple thought experiments, to make the generalities real, but we never got round to it. Nor did we enter into any physical experiments to see if her resolution of mind translated to her body, something she was adventurous enough to consider.

It was a strange conversation, in that I was directing the energy between us, something which had echoed as the fitful sleep the night before, towards a healthy engagement, that of tango, that of XQ. I eventually managed to put to words something of this process, this energy that we had felt, this energy of attraction, and Laura's response was rather... abrupt... no, not abrupt, but I certainly found myself self-contained. Because we had moved through such spaces, well beyond anything physical, I was brought back to my body, my skin. This may not have been her intention. On the way back to Chris', in the car, she wondered whether I wished a response to my commentary, regarding our attraction and my direction to XQ and tango, and she said that she did not wish to pursue anything romantically. Perhaps I had thought there was a possibility of this. No, certainly, I did, in some sense, but none of my actions, or even thoughts, aimed this way. I had certainly had a feeling of making love, but as I have tried to describe, it was from a strange, non-sexual, and non-intellectual, source.

I guess I was brought back to reality with a bump. I had forgotten about my appearance. My skin condition, primarily. Perhaps my age. Perhaps my balding head. Who knows? But something closed, and I felt it as we drove back to Chris. I guess I had assumed that this attraction, this energy between us, would naturally have some sense in her. Her phrasing indicated that it had not. Perhaps it did? Perhaps, like me, it had, and, like me, she was directing it into an intellectual engagement, with eg XQ and potential writing projects, and physically with tango? Perhaps. But whatever the goings on in her head, I sat there in that car, bound physically once again, brought to reality as easily as a bump on the road. I had reached an escape velocity with her, but it had passed.

And we never got to consumate our general flight in any way. Not with written words, though that may come; not with some tango-esque physical calibration experiences, though I am sure that Iain will invite her to tango; and not with a simple maths thought experiment. We flew. We never landed.

a dangerous state
I described myself to Laura as being dangerous, or being in a dangerous state. I think this is true. I have been out of orbit of 2020 for a year, and I have been open to all kinds of possible developments, and this includes personal ones. The engagement with Harriet has effected me strongly. I feel I am slingshotting around her. I was aiming for her, but there is now something of higher gravity nearby which has altered my course, and I am slingshotting out of any recognisable orbit whatsoever.

I will be seeing Harriet soon, I hope, to see how she is, and how she is with me. I do not know how I will be afterwards. If I can not bring to bear my responsibility, then there is a strong sense of increasing irresponsibility. That accounts for the energies that awoke that fitful night's sleep. It was a positive energy, no doubt, but it was directing itself towards making love to a woman I hardly knew. This is dangerous. Luckily, I was responsible enough during my waking life to direct it towards tango and XQ and future writing projects.

And this is true not only for local concerns of heart, mind and desire. This also holds for my larger horizons, the globe and "work". I am in a very open state. Very vulnerable, possibly very powerful, whatever the grounding bump that I experienced subsequently. A dangerous time for all concerned. This might last weeks, months, maybe a year. Depends very much on what people do and say around me. What opportunities arise, what I attend to. Being aware I am in this place, with so much uncertainty in terms of location, is good. I am ready.

the degrees of openness of a door
A door exists in time. When it is closed, it is a wall. When it is open, it is a hole in the wall. Some animals can understand doors, in some sense, like cats and dogs. There is a temporal dimension to it. A door does not exist "now"; it is of the mind, a process, a range in time.

I have known about this for some time. What was different this time around, while I lay in bed a few hours ago now, was that I became aware of the number of degrees of an open door. How open it is. However, when we talk about closure, it appears on first appearances, to have a single state, as closed. But on closer inspection, we might see a door as just being closed, as beind closed with a latch, click, or being locked. And then you get degrees of how well locked.

Map this to thoughts about zero and one, about non-zero. About possibility, awareness, probability space.

What attracts my mind is the click. When a door is open, and then, click, it is closed. We might have different degrees of openness, and I think this is quite different about the resistance a door has to being openned in terms of lockedness. But that difference between open and closed seems to my mind to hang on that click. And that seems close to that notion we explored before about non-zero and the inevitability of one.

I am in a high degree of openness. I seem to be increasing this. Whereas, as it happens, because of the state of the world, there are a lot of people which are increasing the state of closedness -- of battoning down the hatches. I guess it depends on whether people feel they have something they want to keep for themselves. This time is definitely polarising us. Do we give more, or take more.

Such thoughts fray from the "click" moment, the cleaving edge between open and closed, individually in the cleaving moment of our mind, as Laura and my interaction demonstrate, and in the bifurcating effect at the collective level, as a species as our politico-economic structures undergo transformation.

gatekeeper
When we hit 2020, I shall most likely be in a monastery. I have said this before. If I feel perturbations in me when I see simple things like consensus processes at Occupy Wall Street, if I can see the rebound off the wall that is Chris, it is definitely something I shall need to attend to with my full attention when the actual year passes, should I still be alive.

Nevertheless, just as my awareness can turn the backward recollection of missed opportunities to be signs that we are going in the right direction, this may manifest along the 2020 route too. How so? I do not hold the possibility as open any more. This does not mean I am negative. It means that I am no longer emphasising idealistic, but realistic. I have passed through the action of a decade, where I applied myself to increasing the chance of a realistic opportunity for peace for the year 2020.

Most people who have seen their dreams shattered, become depressed or disenchanted. Witness so many adults who believed in true love, and somehow are wandering through relationships in their thirties and forties. Witness so many adults who dreamed of changing the world with wide eyes, now with blinkers of almost blinding positivity. Witness adults who dreamed of idealistic professionas, who have given up their dreams for years of over-work, who live off the open-eyed wonder of dreams that their children bring to the world.

To have lived the possibility of 2020, and to end with it, is no bad thing. I am in a good position to give relative comparisons to currrent actions, as demonstrated above. I am not like most futurists and pundits who rally to the Occupy Wall Street like enthusiastic teenagers, who take any social movement to plant their flag of anti-capitalism or peer-to-peer dream, who move on from social disruption to social disruption with such enthusiasm and who seem to be ignorant of the actual disarray, destruction, raw uncertainty that follows, such as from the movement "the arab spring". My observations are quite clean because they are tempered by failure. 2020 has failed, in my personal experience, in my mind.

My mind is closed, in this sense. The door has closed with a click. But it is not locked. It merely requires evidence for it to open. Not things like Occupy Wall Street, nor many much more powerful social events we will see over this next decade. I shall respond with measure, and the door will only open in 2020 if there is sufficient evidence. Thus, I am fulfilling something I intuited in the 2020worldpeace network of ideas within the "actuator ladder" nexus: I am a profounder. I have already lost. We have everything to win. I am not going to be blinded by positivity. But neither am I going to be weighed down by negativity.

As far as I can tell, there are plenty of opportunities ahead for us to get our act together. We may have missed 2020, but who knows what will happen? And perhaps we may see some marvellous changes for 2030, or 2040 or 2050, as most serious futurists working in government or NGO's envision. The door to 2020 may be closed. I am part of the click that constitutes that closer. Not my friends and family and their past behaviour. Sure, they were part of the wind that pushed back the door. But I, in my mind, made the closure. It has never been open, in a way of thinking about it. Laura, for example, saw the door as closed.

There never has been a door. Only Yinka saw it as open. But she did not see a door, she saw an opening, a hole in the wall.

I still have the door in my mind. It is closed. Sure. But it is a door. It can be opened. It is not for me to open it. As a profounder, I shall only open it if there is enough evidence. And by evidence, I mean the conditions set out in the 2020 nexus.

Quite remarkable, if you think about it. How many will be willing to see 2020? How many will fail and become profounders? Yet another win-win. For even if we pass the door in the year 2020, and it is closed, we can still offer service to the world and remark on how close we are, presently, both in our social forms and in our individual awareness right here and now. Useful to have such people hanging around, don't you think?

So, are you looking at a wall? Or do you see the edge of an opening? Will you actually look at the possibility? Will you read what I have thought about? Will you consider where you are, what your experience has been, and consider the rates of changes of social events, technology and so on. Or can you actually see the door?

subtle stresses

2011-10-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

It has been a rather stressful time, returning home. I used to look forward to it. Before the thought-experiment of 2020worldpeace, it was simple. I don't expect it to return to simplicity now that I have given up on that possibility. Perhaps I did, simplicity is built in to me, a kind of innocence, or gullibility. I suspect this will remain with me till I die. I hope it shall never be replaced with cynicism.

The stresses are subtle. I am sensitive to them because of my time away. I have had very little social engagement over the year, though I have had communication links over the net. Engagement with Wendy's family has gone well. The kids are lovely, we've had a really fun time. Wendy and I have continued to have nice tango, off and on the floor. And conversations with Steve have lightened somewhat as he realises the limitations of my skills, and perhaps recognises how we might work together. But this has definitely been the tough bit, the confrontation with current business practice, as Steve has taken its position rather forcefully because he has been up against it for some time, and now that the recession is deepening, he is feeling the pinch. We shall see if that softens any further, or if when I return to London it has reinforced. If it has reinforced, I shall give up on it, as I did after our first engagement half a year ago.

No, the stress has occured as I return home. It was such a relief to see my parents. They were happy to see me. However much my mother needs forewarning, to prepare more food, clashes with my desire to surprise them and my dependent state, it was really lovely to see them on Saturday night. They are incredible. No doubt about it. Considering what I have done, that I have not fulfilled a regular work/life pattern, and how this worries them, they are still glad and welcome me into their home. It is a wonder, and it verifies the love I had as I grew up, and the strength I had to attempt the things I have attempted. I wish I could give them more, either in terms of money and security, or social respect and the satisfaction that their son is doing alright.

The stress is subtle. I mentioned it in my last post. This excited a response on FB, not only from my brother, but from a good friend Mike. I thought I had woven a way through the unfortunate mismatch of our standards of living and how we live, but they took this as an attack on them, personally. I address this in the book, Wisdom (which I finished editing at 3am Saturday morning!), though I suspect the point will be lost somewhere in the rather large tome it has turned out to be. It is about detaching from institutional behaviours, and in this case, our locked in behaviour with the clock and with calendars, a pervasive problem which we will never see a solution to unless we tackle it together, collectively.

Anyway, the stress of dealing with their response has been taxing. It shouldn't be. No doubt about it. I should have spent more time meditating, fathoming a security in my "self", but the book has reinforced the volatility, the fragility, the vulnerability of the path I take: to be sensitive to the space between us. If I had more going on my life, in terms of social dynamics, then I am sure such storms would appear in their proper place, as storms in tea cups... deep cups, for sure, but pretty small. But clearly, the dynamics with Wendy's family are not enough. Perhaps if Steve and I do something and prove something between us, equivalent to the tango with Wendy, I may feel more secure and satisfied. But I have nothing else. Whereas before I had teaching, I had the ballast of real, genuine engagement, now I have nothing. If TNE had produced a book along the lines I had suggested, that might have felt like proof, as evidence. Even the talk with Maureen, however uplifting, has not been enough. For the storm returning home, however small and incidental, has been too much like a squall. I am sea-sick... psyche-sick...

My brother's lack of respect is like the south-westerlies, a daily occurence, in breezes, gusts and gales. Add to that, the secondary effects, from friends, and even from my mother, and it can be entirely exhausting. I am now thinking that the experiencing of being with my family might not be pleasant. I hope one of two things will happen: that I meet with enough positive social dynamics in other environments such that they may spill into and counter this rather terrible state of affairs, or that I undergo a change of mind that I just let the storm rage without standing against it. There is still something in me that makes me affirm the space around me, that confirms the reality, the truth of my engagement with eg Wendy and her kids. But maybe, I should just give up. Let the version my brother paints be the true reality. Or failing that, accept it without remark, let it happen, let myself be treated badly, let others think negatively of me and indeed themselves.

I don't know. I am too old, perhaps. I don't think I can learn to live as normal adults do. I don't think I can take a normal job, a normal flat, and live a normal life. Accept the norm. I used to be able to live it. I did so up to 2008, in order to effect the change that was possible within the system, as it were. I don't think I can return to that. I suspect I have to go through a period where things are messy, while I learn how to simply sit still and be and behave as I do, without causing too much disturbance to others. I really think this is about giving up on family and friends. I know I already have, by giving up on 2020, and I did not do this lightly. I definitely found leaving TNE relatively easily. It is a tough lesson, but I think I have got over the toughest one.

So, these stresses, I have brought upon myself. I should only engage those who I know will respond positively. I am in my forties. I deserve an easier path now. Perhaps that is foolish of me. But I do not want to be fighting all these realities, that compound to reinforce the terrible state of affairs we see in the world, the confusion, the continued environmental degradation and our social denial of it. If I am to tackle it, let me do so with fiction, with stories. Not directly. That is the way I set myself, and I have been stupid, or perhaps unwise, to attempt the book, which has done nothing but bring me face up to the deplorable state of our social fabric.

It is subtle. Drawing attention to it, doesn't work. It might, but only with careful, generous listening. And even then, it is like drawing attention to a cloud, the specific aspects of a formation, a formation in flux, that is gone, that passes as easily as it comes. There is artistry in it, no doubt, and perhaps I may translate this into "fiction". I don't know. We shall see. But it is impossible to do this in a gale. This is for certain. Perhaps on a summer's day, or a calm autumn evening, when the air is light, the clouds hang as if for eternity, their shift and flow so subtle to the eye that they look still.

Yet again, I have said nothing. Nothing at all. There is grief, felt, these days, the sorrow of something passing. I can not see any direction of change for my family. It shall hit the same rocks that all families will face soon enough, as the tectonic plates of our social structure shear, as the tsunami roll through our meme-space, as everyone fights for survival, clutching for comforts they have got so used to. I must let them go. I must give up on confrontation, leave "conversion" to my earlier days. Let me seek the sun. The warmth.

Again, I am thankful to my parents, and to those friends who have forgiven me, for my friends who accept the shape I am, and those whom I meet who are taking the shape of what is to come, not in terms of doom nor blind positivity, but simply as a recognition of the conditions and what our next step may be together. Simple.

wise monkey human fool

2011-10-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

That's my current self-description in the new website I have joined, quora. It fits. I am writing this post to mainly give voice to the response from a portion of my family and friends. I'll cut to the chase, giving away the usual mystery of my writing ("what is he talking about?"): by judging me relative to their own values, or perhaps more correctly, their own behavioural patterns, they lose the value of what I am.

The details are not important, suffice to say, I have no home, little ownership (this computer, an ipad), and little money. Although I travel light, the cost of travel can be prohibitively high. So, when I propose that I would like to see people in edinburgh, I fire out a general request hoping that someone will share a similar desire. Failing this, I send a group message with the declared hope that something can be arranged so that I get to see people without being too much of a burden on anyone.

One friend, Keith, reprimands me, saying that communication is key. Indeed it is. He is clearly not happy about how I communicate. And he is right, of course. I don't plan in advance, I don't really work with a calendar, I don't give clear-cut options, and I don't seem to be constrained by deadlines of various kinds. All of this is true. When I work, then I can play this game much better. Given my conditions, I can't. But there is something deeper, deeper than this mismatch of living standards.

Wendy has welcomed me into her home. I had such a laugh with her kids the other day, it was hysterical. But not just empty lunacy, but meaningful too. I had a friend over to visit, Liam, when Wendy called for a potential business meeting with us and her colleague. Sometime later in our conversation, my mind got caught on one of Liam's phrases, when he put me in the same category as another of the chaps he respects, a guy called Paul. I know of people like Paul. They are isolated geniuses, they have trouble communicating, but have built enough of a world around them that they survive. This irks me, because I don't have walls. I don't have a self-bounded universe, and thus I am completely vulnerable. Out in the open, as it were. There are many faults, not least the one that means I can't "communicate" in the way the majority of western adults do. The benefits is that I can communicate easily, naturally, with kids.

And so Liam was enjoying himself, watching this incredibly crazy engagement between me and Anna, who is ten. It was quite amazing, I have to say, from beginning to end. The slightly uncomfortable way I introduced them, Anna and Liam, which laid the way for her to be relaxed with this stranger (Liam) in her home, so she could produce her genius. She flew. Her mind is sharp, quick, and approaches things from all angles. She is already starting to get into oppositional state with her parents, but if it is directed in the right way, this opposition can be really playful, creative. That's the trick, as far as I can tell, is to play with "seriousness". It doesn't work, sometimes. Like when Anna stormed out of the dinner room because she was in a huff, but I encouraged a way around it so that she couldn't help but break into a smile. She literally had to leave the room because she couldn't hold her "huff". Get this, she couldn't hold the huff internally; something internally, joy, spirit, happiness, laughter at her own being, frustrated her. These are big learning experiences. Clearly, in that situation, she wanted to save her social face, in some important way against her parents. Perhaps she is just picking stuff up from tv and school, but there might be something quite direct about what she is doing here.

Anyhoo, we had a marvellous riff when Liam was about, and I even got to the point that we produce a podcast, so hilarious it was. You see, it wasn't just a 10 year old, but a 41 year old. Between us, we were doing something which Anna's brother Joe, who is 6, thought was hilarious, and Liam at 26 could see as being humorous. Think multi-million dollar disney film that has to have something for everyone. Think that, in the realm of awareness.

It is not that I am just a clown, a kid's entertainer. Or that I am a teacher of adolescents, and I should go back to that, which is what so many adults sage-like advise. While swimming around with the kids and bringing their attention to things at one extreme, I am also engaging Wendy's partner Steve, a life-coach, team-building professional who hires himself out for £1000 a pop. The conversations with him have been outrageous, because of the difference between us, our modus operandi, manner, senses of humour. We are such different people, and I am going right up against not only common business behaviour, but my ideas and practice also contravenes leading edge stuff about leadership, sales and pitching, and even lean business. So, Steve brings out all kinds of big guns and has no moral dilemma about letting me have it. It's been like war with him. And yet, we are civil with one another. It's the other extreme. From kids who know virtually nothing, to adults who know virtually everything.

Now, Wendy knows I am being of value to her kids. She knows this. She doesn't trust, believe, hope, she knows, because she witnesses it. But for it to happen, I need to be invited. Otherwise, if it is not invited, the dynamic is just as live, but has more dangerous elements, flavours, and we might even say, demons. Self-denial, in a dynamic with other, manifests in ugly conversational dynamics.

So, when it comes back to my friends and family, I can see it a mile away. It is like dark clouds looming on the horizon. It is not sunshine. And presumably, that is what they see when I say I am coming. They must, mustn't they? Only one chap, Chris, responds cleanly, simply, openly. He is single, that's true, and he operates in a rather different way than many people. Everyone else seems to live in the past, or in the future, with various forms of anxiety and "responsibility". I can not offer much, and I know this. Not only because I happen to be living in a different way, not working, living close to subsistence (just below these days:), but because I am choosing to live in a way that keeps something alive. Something valuable, I hope. Only a few have been able to benefit from it.

So, I am not going to visit edinburgh. I'd love to see my old friends, and family members. Though my sister Teresa has made it clear that she wants to live within very constraining limits, and I know that my openness is threatening to her, so I can not impose myself with her. My brother lives in a constant state of worry, and this recent opportunity he has doing a paper in a conference has thrown him into high anxiety. I certainly don't want to burden my old friends who have toddlers to take care of. Only Chris, it seems, for now, and if the money works out, I might be able to visit him on the way back down. I shall have to wait until such times that my friends may actually be happy to see me.

It pains me to write this. But I do not blame them. Not at all. It is just the conditions of the world we live in. I only wish we have the opportunity to re-engage sooner rather than later. Because if the various bits of unrest socially seem to indicate, inner-city riots and financial centre sit-ins erupting like vents, as well as the major financial displacements resound like tectonic shifts in our global politico-economic landscape, we are all in for a rather bumpy ride. It may serve us well to reinforce the relationship we have forged throughout the years, and reinvest them with trust, with new experiences, such that may make the decent that little more humanly bearable... let alone create the opportunity for us to actually reverse the course we are taking.

the wise enter, the fools leave

2011-09-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to take that title, and you will have to make up your own mind as you read this. Think of a building, think of people entering and leaving. Are we talking about the same man, the wise transformed to fool? Or different people, as the wise enters so a fool leaves?

I am going to write about my experience with The Next Edge, a facebook group curated by David Hodgson, but this could apply to any group that is exploring the frontier of self-organisation. Three caveats.

First, it may appear damning, a collection of complaints, a list of failures, but I trust the generous reader to align to the purpose of this post. Hence the formerly entitled "we're doomed!" has been replaced with the knife-edge title that the reader must decide upon, as s/he reads. Just like the observations listed below were experienced at the time, the opportunities lost or gained presently. What may be skim-read as yet another pseudo-intellectual paper of ideas, was actually experienced by people in real time, with plenty of opportunity to decide presently, consciously, as to what to do, simply. It is in these instances, as we read, as we listen, do we exert the power needed to align us and bring a better world from us.

Second, I had planned to leave this document at the end of my time at the group as way of explanation, but this smacks too much of adolescent behaviour, the scream of self-expression and immediate slamming of door without having the courage to face the response. This is not like that at all, though I risk the accusation by denying it. I am not afraid of response, indeed welcome it, even if it risks an immediate, knee-jerk response, a negative reaction to what may appear to be my rejection. The rejection, if there is any, is of the group dynamic, of the role I played, for I see all the participants as marvellous, well-meaning, insightful and powerful in many and different ways beyond my vista. So I post this one week or so before I leave, which coincides with the time I leave Madeira. And in case this is thought melodramatic (after all, who cares who enters and leaves a bar in some virtual town on the frontier of self-organisation?), it is a return to the respectful, slow way I entered the group.

Third, I know this will read too slow, appear to go into too much unnecessary detail for many, especially the younger amongst us. I am fully aware of the overwhelming "resolution" of awareness that comes with age, something which exasperated me when I was in my twenties when reading the extensive apologies and caveats in so many substantial texts. At least this is only a stand-alone chapter. Nevertheless, this material is useful for me to summarise and describes the kind of group we shall one day experience. Thank you for your patience, the timing of your attention.

a change of plan!

I started writing about various points... but when I returned to it, I found myself reluctant. They were less points and more overweight suitcases. And if I am reluctant to write, I can only assume it won't make for good reading. So -- bugger it all! I'm just going to write quite lightly. This is not to say the experience hasn't been significant or deep, only they don't transfer well to retrospective post writing.

So here are my points.

I am used to people making things heavier than they are. This stifles movement, it cloaks spirit, it obfuscates trust, reduces flow. So, keep it light!

If people respond positively, presently, continuously, then there is a chance of a "critical fantasy chain reaction", another description from another link on the wall. This is the beginning of it. If we enter too early into how and what, things get bogged down. So, the trick is inspiration, enlightenment, collective realisation, and *then* the practicalities. We need to have some shared sense of an ideal, close enough in time for it to mean something. For me, this means a week. We need to get skillful in achieving idealistic objectives in a week. This is the benchmark by which social movements progress. Otherwise, flash mob reactance will distract us, and blue-sky thinking will seduce us.

There is always opportunity within the collective present. Always. The trick is noticing it, teasing it out perhaps, or just pointing as quickly as possible when it appears, like a bird landing on the ledge outside. The trick is being present enough to listen, to look up from whatever concerns you chronically, to notice it. The trick is to avoid being numbed by people appealing for attention, pointing at this-that-thenextthing all the time.

Aha is the way I roll. Seriously. Kids hone your skill with their questions, their attitude, with their lack of history and knowledge. You can't rely on stock answers, because each inquiring mind is different and the situation too. You must deal with attitude, otherwise one has to enforce through "authority". You can't rely on previous experience because the kids are naturally present and future-orientated. And you can't rely on established knowledge because you end up talking to yourself, with a bunch of sheep following or reluctant wolves. We adults are made of the same stuff, though we tend to attach to repeated behaviours, accept status quo, rely too much on shared history, and often virtualise our engagement to an exchange of information. Ho--friggen-hum.

I don't like to repeat myself -- who does? This turns me into an automaton, my grip on an idea becomes tighter, I become deaf to genuine response, and I find myself contributing to an escalation in the overal noise level. Not good.

I do not like when I object to another person's singular item. An item is merely a point in the constellation of their thought, and I would prefer to engage the whole system of who they are. This might be impossible in the fast moving stream of The Next Edge facebook wall, then I must trust that it shall take me further to where we need to be. I like white-water, I like the speed, the uncertainty, but not if I end up in a lake when I want to end up in the sea.

I would like to be willing to risk change, even deep personal change, for the betterment of all. This might be possible in significant one-to-one meetings, or master-students relationships, but for mixed collectives, it is feasible to reflect upon one's own ideas only in the result of a social manifestation. A conversation stream is not enough. That is, for the social-self feedback loop to inform us individually, we need to induce a social effect beyond the immediate participants. Thus, action beyond writing to one another. But what do I know? Very little.

If I remain in the stream, I shall become distracted, as I follow the constant stream of links, and attempt to engage where people are at the moment with their theory and lives, which are all too often, abstract, heavily doused in organisation thinking and/or tied to such specific here and now uniqueness elsewhere in the planet I can do nothing about.

At a base level, I have no way of making a living; I assume many participants have alternative means of income. Or at another level, most participants may be satisfied with their efforts in the real world, whereas a few wish to inject urgency into the stream. I do not want to be such a person that puts words to an urgency that is beyond words. I must wait for the level of urgency to rise, which I must dryly admit, will be too late.

I suggested intensive techniques that could accelerate social results. I then shifted from offering complete processes to little games that might alter the means of discourse to some little effect. I am not satisfied with personal influence, none of us should be, but in social result.

I look forward to being part of a "group" whose living edge grows into the space of the newcomer, rather than absorbs the individual into itself. Such a collective may move in the direction of the newcomer, simultaneously spreading its network by the genuine engagement of the perspective and skill and wisdom of individuals. For this to occur, the freshness of engagement with newcomers is essential, and those who listen constitute the living edge of such a collective. Not the talkers, of which I am one. This is one way for wisdom to come to the fore; the alternative is unthinkable.

Even when people volunteered their time, it was not taken up. I suspect this is an indicator of the strong practice of independence, however much the talk of interdependence. Interdependence is not linkage between discrete entities, but the sharing of the same of which we are constituted. I look forward to experiencing the same sense-quality as I have when I engage family, where the beings and doings happen within the "family" and not between discrete units.

Experiments in following the follower, thus making the follower leader, failed. The leading follower dithered, their word and deed mismatched, and I ended up bumping into them. I attempted to take the next step for that person, towards the goal they had set themselves, but I felt like a nag. Subsequent reminders, or attempts to help that person fulfil their word, met with no response. Having gone mad with it when engaging people in the real world for a year and a half, I only wish to engage others where word and action meet. Here is honour! Here is a target for our respect!

There is a lot of talk of whole systems, global economics, or pervasive systems which could effect many people if adopted. But I need to have scalable solutions, from present conditions with the people I am engaging now, so that a contiguous subjective experience can stretch from now to some distant future, from the few to the billions. Detached systems thinking is bad for my soul. I need for it to be practical now, for it to make sense now, for me to see the social results now. It is only in the now that it happens. Not later, not at some larger, disembodied, social scale.

Leadership is a very strong meme. A lot of contributors see themselves as leaders more than followers. This sucks. I think the same people might align a lot easier if we thought of ourselves as followers. Pioneers are different from leaders.

A lot of future-orientation, which for some reason is termed future thinking, when of course any kind of thinking, or doing for that matter, is happening now. Yet despite this, the heaviness of reputation, of those we know, blunt the leading edge. It is who we know, not what fits current conditions. I consider this an indicator of a lack of self-discipline.

I've said it before. Such venues still emphasise the talkers, not the listeners. This is the toughest one to crack. We need a means of drawing attention to the silent, unlock the wisdom of space and peace. I know, because I fail at it so much! I started off very respectful and gentle, but as things became clear, I took on the form of a fool, making more noise, attempting experiments that of course would fail. I end up howling at the moon!

If a new contribution repeats something known, then guide the newcomer to enter that stream, but if it is new, this *demands* attention, the *newness* demands attention. And by association, if we are interested in whole systems, the person who came up with the newness, to see if it forms part of a larger system or if it happens to be a single lucky shot in the dark. Both are good. The former might reveal an integrative wisdom.

Plenty of motivational compasses, plenty of private navigation charts, but not enough actual lighthouses, shared points of reference for our future navigation. Lots of knowledge, lots of look-outs, links, and I am meant to make sense of it all. Too exhausting by half! Not enough time to swim! Dance tango! Play Go!

There's a hairbreadth response in our reading which leads to frustration or inspiration, presently. I either read openly, which leads to distraction and spin because there is too much, or I make a judgement. Judgement sounds good, but it leads to the non-reading of an individual's comment in the numbing cast of familiarity OR I attribute it with success *before it is even read*. The collective result of individuals making their own judgements tends to "reputation" in that field (in this case words on a virtual thread). Is there any way out of this? A paradigm shift, a social hack: change in the conditions of that field; in this case, the way people engage in the virtual thread as it pertains to conditions externally, ie manifesting social result. That's our choice: to either succumb to judgement, or we hold ourselves accountable to social result.

A buddhist might say that relativity to self is entirely and equally valid, indeed, subjectively true, and the dialogue proceeds with mutual respect. The problem of our communication gets wicked, when we evaluate one another's evaluations, a comparison of values. What tends to happen is attraction, exaggeration and super positivity, or evasion, again exaggeration and negativity which results in parting. The current movement consists of positive disruption, which is just an elevated description of interruption, which is pretty far from the dynamics of inspiration and real social construction, cohesion, surge, and transformation. More like a hiccup.

One of the worst effects I feel arise in me, is that I appear to be part of a conversation, of a flow, but only when I talk. Although my comments get a "like" here and there, I don't feel enough feedback. This is definitely my problem, because I expect an immediate response from people, throughout my childhood, my young adulthood, and especially my experiences in school as a teacher. This goes for the whole cycle of engagement, whoever is talking or listening, whose-ever line of thought we are following. I am not used to the lack of engagement. And I hate the feeling that arises that I am missing something. It is something that I do not want to be motivating me in my contributions, and I already see it leaking through. Nope, don't want to be "pushing" or "complaining". I must exhibit the self-discipline to be a nobody, regardless of how "important" the thought or feeling within me appears.

A collective can't escape from momentum of current practice, so the social patterns repeat themselves. I have seen little that would avoid the same kind of catastrophe that occurs in any revolution. The replacement by another set of elites, even philosopher kings. There is not enough death, end, completion, job done. Endless multiplication of opinion, constant growth, endless "more". Opinions are encouraged, the are just too "more-ish". And this is leading edge. I was inspired when I joined, to meet so many with similar pieces in our heads, and a lot of good practice. I even thought by 2015, this kind of thinking could be mainstream. But, like everything that is unformed and is in the process of becoming formed, it looks like it will take the form of the institution, of capitalism, ownership, leadership, egoship, individuality, and so on. It does not look good, ladies and gentlemen.

where am i now?

I have edge, that's the truth of it. Perhaps too much point, and not enough edge. Too pointy, too challenging. Not me, per se, but where I am. Anyone experiencing what I have experienced, would make them challenging.

If the Next Edge is a watering hole, I am a crocodile. I got here through the water, not over land.

I have edge, but it only works if people appreciate what is left, not grab on to what has been cut away. They enjoy lean.

I am sticking to the methodology I learned from my school experience: not known, not expert.
1 not known, not standing on letters, on reputation, but drawing attention...
2 not expert, just pointing out the obvious, which does not bear repeating...

The wise man speaks but once. The fool repeats.

learning to swim

2011-09-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

I have been swimming every day, about 3km a day, and there's a swim test coming up for 4km.. The trick is to maintain some steady state, even though it is in the sea and it is a little choppy. I have only just looked for videos to see if I can improve my technique; so far I have been going on my childhood training, and exploring what feels good. Then I came across "total immersion swimming" which looks quite bizarre to me, since it involves a few things like maintaining the catch for longer. I have been playing around with more rotation and glad to get that affirmed, while I shall be re-adopting the open hand to catch more water, which I let go of more recently.

How is this related to what is going on at the Next Edge collective, or on the net generally? Well, it is to do with knowledge, and there is a hell of a lot out there, and anyone can just look it up and effectively train themselves. This seems to support the auto-didact. The problem is, after too long, i find there are constrasting techniques, alternative opinions, and so on. So, how can I determine which will work for me? I think this is a problem we face a lot, especially when we face problems that not only face oneself, but all of us collectively. That is, how can I determine what will work for us?

This is not an academic question. I am not interested in swim technique because it is my job, or because i am an observer -- I may even be attempting the swim to the next town east which means a round trip of 10km. One hundred 100m. That's a lot of strokes, and I count each one -- it's the only way I can get a reasonably accurate evaluation of distance. The only reason I can do this is because of technique, not force of will. And if I can improve my technique further, then this 10km will be more a pleasure than a slog. One way is to adopt techniques that feel good to me, that seem to work, and another is to find a source who has integrated it well and then helps me personally. I don't have the liberty to find such a master, so on this side of the rely on myself, my subjective sensation and the objective measure of a time.

Similarly, we face major problems, as humanity. It is not an academic discussion we are having, even if appears to be in the same mode, of words, writing and reading. I am going to put those techniques I saw to test -- what is the equivalent of the models we pass before one another's eyes so often? What can we test? Most people think it is about getting along, being smoother with one another, feeling good about sharing, etc. Of course this is nice, this is important, but really, we want to have an external measure of whether it works -- the timer for swimming, the ease by which I complete the 10km swim. What are the equivalents in the real world to our chat/training/techniques/links?

the result... and a swimming cop-out

2011-09-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

After five hours posting the previous post on the Next Edge, I got no replies and I was ready preparing a filure summary. But then a few people responded, and people actually to the time to read the post. Gasp! Splutter! Cough! One person was considering offering their time free, and another wrote a post offering his services completely free and invited anyone to call on him. Marvellous. I did mention in the ensuing comments that it was all about timing, how people turn this into a positive cycle.

Meanwhile, on other posts, people were talking about collaboration, about offering help, and even today a spew of posts are to do with gift-giving, and people quoting Gibran, about the greatest gift being yourself. The contrast is incredibly palpable. Those who talk, and those who do. It is amazing. Of course, these people who talk are doing, it is just that they are doing somewhere else.

A few days later, it has died, as far as I know. The influence lingers, a few posts pop up, and I have been mentioned positively, which is nice, and some small forms of collaboration being offered. But the experiment has died. It didn't help that when Suresh was asked about his long-term objectives, he responded that he was busy in the real world and needed to attend to things and he'd be back. We shall see. If you remember, it was Suresh who took it to the plate, who was the original person to offer 4 hours of his time, albeit on the condition that another's project aligned to his long-term goals. As far as I am concerned, as Curtis also implicitly suggests, our long-term goals are the same. What differs are our strategies. And clearly, all this talk of gifts and alignment and flocking, is harder to manifest than it looks. Even I haven't taken up Curtis' offer of his help. It runs contrary to our sense of independence, and it also demands that we define as carefully as we can the kind of help we need.

It's been interesting. It is not the end, but... it has faded away somewhat. It didn't catch, let's say, we didn't flock. Ho well.

I've had some further ideas about Harding, though they are more closely related to zero and one and their significance in maths, so I shall put that on the XQ blog.

The other day I swam from the rock, to the neighbouring pier, then across the bay, the same bay of Santa Cruz that the competition was held. The total is distance covered was just over 4km, and my time was one hour and a half. This isn't bad, considering the stops I made. The 4km competition is held in a week.

Today I was going to conduct the swim to Santa Cruz from Machico, 10km return. I took the day off yesterday. Trouble was, I had a slight twinge in my shoulder, so I decided to return at 1.5km, and I was glad because it was against the waves. The strange thing is, once you get a rhythm going against the waves, your attention is taken up, or the whole body is used in a more energetic way, that it feels better, and I end up putting more into the pull, and yet I don't tire. So the last km back to Machico felt good, so good that when I came out and found that the 3km has been done in the hour, I decided to go for another km. No twinge. What's that about? It is as if going against the waves brings out the best me. I felt really good at the end of it, not tired at all. Could do it all again.

Perhaps I missed an opportunity? Perhaps I should have just pushed on? But then again, it wasn't that sunny. And I'd rather do the long journey when it is super-pleasant. Fair-weather swimmer, me. Would be nice to have a partner, I'm sure I'd do it then

another mindflow and another end in sight

2011-09-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

So a run of events have conspired for my rising from bed at 6.37am to write this. For hours I have lain in bed, at first because of the irritation of my skin and then because of ideas, and finally because so much has coallesced I know it shall be lost in the mist of sleep. Here are the threads that compose this twine, the currents of this mindflow:

invitation to immigrants to our nation, as children to this world

education as factories, the mass production of awareness

an end in sight for the next edge group, the failed experiments, a demonstration

reading harding, then compounded by talking with wendy

Reading "The Science of the 1st Person" by Douglas Harding has been good so far. It has affirmed my own indepenent exploration, the basis for a science of the subjective which contains within it the quite distinct methodology of the science of objects. It has stimulated my memory of the heightened state I was once in, of having nothing inside, the state of no self-reflection. It has challenged my position, sharpening my sense of now while I visit my favourite spot, the rock. My mind is in flux as I try to resolve the relation between zero and one and where my identity is located. His position is radical, so radical, it is reminiscent of the state I was in. Resolution may settle before the end of my time here in Madeira.

And if this was not enough, I had a conversation with Wendy this evening and we talked about Harding. One thing is to engage a book, left to one's own devices, however challenging that may be, it is quite different from engaging another mind. And Wendy is bright, sharp, inquisitive, spacious, gentle, yet defined. She seldom enforces her knowledge upon me, and is generous enough to allow my mind to confront her understanding. So a space is created in which we explore the full implications of Harding's position, and this led to talking about my experience, as well as the 2020 scenario. She acts like an accelerator, because she allows presence, and in presence the connection of thoughts, past and future weaving, and between us, the space between. I do not want to have Harding's work an item in my memory, a dusty memory of a book I read months or years before. There is quickness here, and it needs effect in presence, now, nowhen else.

I have recently been engaging a group on Facebook called The Next Edge. At first it was a joy to engage others who already comprehend notions such as flocking, who engage directly and openly, and have the capacity to swing between content and meta-discussion. But this turned a little sour when it became clear that it is operational as a talk shop, for that is the only thing that seems to be supported by the technology of FB and perhaps the motivations of many of the participants. Those few who have indicated a frustration, who wish to do something as a collective, all go in different directions, and though there is talk of alignment and action, there is not enough concerted effort for any actual steps to be taken. I can now see an end to my engagement with this group, because I know how chat is a subtle devourer: however nourishing it might be to be part of a group, to speak and actually felt heard, without social manifestation beyond the participants, it is as insubstantial as an opium dream, a preparation for what could be, a preparation I am already familiar with.

Yesterday a new idea came to me, which I thought tied together various intentions various people had expressed, a meeting of chat and action. There is a lot of recycling discussion about the limitations of Facebook and how the group might migrate to another platform, or wiki or more formal forums. Indeed, some of these spaces have been created, but the movement does not manifest. The thought was, how about we gather together suggestions of improvements that would facilitate our engagement, simple, elegant design, and submit this to Facebook itself. This happens to conform to my "design ethic" if I have one, which is to improve the system in which you find yourself immersed. I got a little response, but nobody was taking it further, it was not catching. Then a chap called Suresh, who I've actually met in real life, who was one of the early adopters of flocking as far as I can tell, looked like he took the next step and had compiled a provisional list of improvements. But when I checked, I was disappointed to find he had shoehorned my new idea into an old document that dealt with the design principles of a collaboration system. And I said as much as a comment in response. I would not have minded if he has directed me to exactly the same question which had been asked by a previous Next Edger, but to shoehorn to an old item was beneath us. It was a bit sharp, but it was accurate and there was no ego attached. Suresh responded simply that he himself disliked the experience of shoehorning a new idea into an old format when it happened to him. What happened next was amazing. It may not sound like much, but you can tell that when I go into this level of detail, take this amount of time to describe something, there is something that is worthy of our attention. As I write this, it is live, and which way it goes is still to be determined by people's conscious responses. Not an academic interest, but a genuinely real one, which has significant potential consequence within and beyond this group.

Suresh writes a new post saying he is willing to give 4 hours of his time a week to a project by another Next Edger. Here he was combining the little interactions we had, both about the shoehorning and the difficulty of doers to align, and he was stepping up to the plate. This is rare. Very rare. I was surprised, and immediately wrote this of course. And as I wrote I found myself writing that I would offer 4 hours of my time to whatever project he decided to help. We shall see if anyone takes up his offer, and in turn offer projects for him, for us, to assist on. That much is obvious, offering our service. What is not so obvious, and only became clear as I told Wendy later, was that I was doing exactly what I do, which is to follow someone else who was following my lead, and the group would prove its quality if others join in and offer some time to follow a project that Suresh decides upon. This is quite remarkable. He is not putting himself as a leader, but as a person who is being of service. We flock around him. He is an emergent leader, potentially.

But will people notice? Will a flock of followers arise? And if so, will Suresh honour his position, not as a leader, but as someone who happens to be followed because he is of service to another? The dynamic is so different. It is beautiful! And it is so rare. I wonder if members of this group will notice!

And here is where I see the end of my engagement with the group. I started to imagine a post I shall write. Hopefully when the time comes, the wording will come well. It is not to be taken personally, unless positively in the sense of my intention in writing. I shall part from the group because I have demonstrated, not just described, but demonstrated, how we can have action through our words. And it hasn't worked. And I do not want to settle for anything less. As mentioned I do not want to settle for huddling around a fire with like-minded thinkers, as the world gets torn apart, nor am I wanting to be the person who introduces the discomfort of time-pressure, the need for urgency, nor do I want to go repeating what I have said and demonstrated. It has not worked, and I need to accept this, and leave it. If a thought occurs to me afterwards which I can usefully contribute, I shall return, of course. But I shall be awaiting the time that a group is ready to engage in a way that I think collaboration works. Presently, in increasing time periods, getting feedback from what actually works socially beyond the participants.

Right from the start, I have been completely transparent in my response and intention to the group, to manifest collective result, energised as I have been by meeting such vibrant, open, and experienced minds. A rare environment. But again, something I can not seduce myself into living in, however satisfying it might be intellectually, and nourishing emotionally. So, I came up with various solutions to the gripes voiced by various parties. I invited people to contribute to writing a non-linear book in a week. No takers. The idea for improving Facebook. A few nibbles, likes, but no takers. Now this move by Suresh, a demonstration of flocking, which by the way is another recycling post; the contrast between actual doing and talking about could not be made more consciously, even though it is serendipitously presenting itself to members of the group. And one more suggestion I shall make to the group, or in fact, I shall put into play to see what happens, and this leads to the final thread of the mindflow, that of inviting new people to the group, immigrants to our nation, and children to our world.

The first person who responded to me on Next Edge was a guy called Curtis. I noticed his language, it was fluid. I asked to befriend him in Facebook. And I was right, he has noticed and pieced together many similar things, as well as placing himself experientially. He is not just a talker, or a category-box-pusher, but a real man, it seems to me: empassioned, solid core, open-minded. And I remember in our first correspondence mentioning to him about the importance of how new people in a group are responded to.

I then later consolidate this thinking in a post on the Next Edge wall, with a description of the living edge. Just as a tree has a cambium layer, or a flock takes its cues from those at the edge, so I have imagined a collective where the edge of it is the living part of it. It is not the old guard, the familiar faces, the established voices that determine the direction of the collective, but the new voice, the person just arrived. It is not that the new person "joins" the group, has to learn the protocols etc, but that the network listens to he newcomer, and in this way grows into the space that the newcomer is in, their social context, their problems. That is, the entire collective is geared towards solving the problem of the person who arrives, not the other way around. I've described something like this as tuttle=twitter or ipool in various books, but here it was emerging in situ with this group resulting from some discussion, emerging with precision because of the conditions that only actuality can present.

So my last effort before parting, will be to invite newcomers to view a post, and the post will be an invitation to play a thought-experiment/reality-experience. Namely, if all the members of the group were here to serve them, providing access to their innumerable resources, money and contacts and skills, what could the newcomer hope to achieve within a week? Or what about a day, when I think about it? I usually like a week because there is a reasonable amount of time to actually do something. A day seems too short. So, the newcomer is invited to write a response before unadulterating their reading of other people's responses and getting a sense of the group -- a naked, first wish response. It is a gauge of the next edge, or any collective, to see how far it is from fulfilling these wishes, as well as a learning experience for newcomers to be able to verbalise accurately what may actually be achievable yet idealistic enough to catch the dreams and hopes of others. Like a pitch, but better. This is real stuff here.

I like the sound of this thought-experiment. There is something pretty deep about it. I think, if it catches, it might allow people to hone in to the space between us more accurately. Of course, the thought-experiment is open to members, but they have the advantage of already knowing how the group works, what does and does not pass. And another edge, as you might appreciate, is the distinction between a thought-experiment and a reality-experience. After all, what happens if someone actually says something that is so... attractive... exciting... sensible... that members of the group actually attempt to fulfill it? What happens if it actually works? What then? Will it be an isolated case, or can it happen again? Not replicated -- hideous term. Then it will become important who is invited into the group. It might even become strategically important who is invited in. I haven't invited anyone in. I'd like to invite Wendy, but I'd only like to if this living edge was actually implementable. She might suggest something about improving her work, perhaps inviting members of the next edge to visit her workplace, conduct some kind of discussion, workshop, event along the lines of Insite. And thus, the next edge, is the edge that grows into our lives, into our workplaces. It is no longer a meeting so minds in the comfortable confines of a virtual space, or the rare and artificial spaces of a conference, but completely immersed in the contextual social lives of people, conversations of action.

Which leads to the widest ranging spiral of the mindflow, immigrants and children. Imagine a nation where immigrants are invited in, giving tours, given time to explore, and provided for while they get accustomed to the way things run, for them to come to an understanding of how they can contribute well. Imagine. No, not work, nothing like it. A privileged position, not knowing, exploring, and finding one's place. To be useful. To find one's place. To make one's home.

Where is this nation? This is the nation of the future. The global nation. Newcomers are invited in, and bringing with them, new solutions, a new voice, a new perspective, and the other members of that nation are attentive, are welcoming, are celebratory. For they themselves went through such an experience. They were respected for what they brought. They were welcomed, given time, and listened to.

Is this what we do with children now? As they enter into the global nation of the world? Are they listened to, acknowledged, celebrated for their different perspective, while being introduced to current practice? Imagine a school where the primary objective is the mass production of awareness. If we are still going to have schools, if w are to have factories, if we are to somehow normalise the wide-ranging social conditions in which individuals are born into. To become aware of themselves, their skills, and mutually. By the time they are adults, they are rooted in the hearts and minds of their companions. They cherish the vitality of difference, of confrontation, and are self-disciplined enough to avoid too much comfort, too much self-similarity. The taboo of social self-similarity. The tendency to gather in like-minded groups. A taboo. Heh. That just came to me. The equivalent of not marrying your sibling, or close cousins. Similar enough, but not too similar.

So, that's the mindflow. Clocking out at 8.16am. I will post a link to this in the Next Edge group, and of course it will pop up in my Facebook feed. I suspect only a few eyes will read this. Very few. Maybe only one pair of eyes, maybe none. And if anyone from the group does read this, it must be because there is enough evidence from my comments that it is worthwhile to spend five minutes reading as I have spent an couple of hours writing. But where are we then? Will they become followers of Suresh's offering of service? Perhaps they already have, in which case you are leading! And knowing a little of my future steps, what then? There is always an invitation, if we are sharing our intentions for the future. Will it influence your actions? Will you try to influence mine? Are we getting closer to constituting "we"?

two swimming events and a failed social experiment

2011-09-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

Walked out to the beautiful point yesterday. Only one fisherman because the water was wild. Wonderful, for me. So I dived in a swam around the rock. Decided to go for a swim to the next pier which happens to be the coast-guards, about 1km along the coast. A good swim. A lot of wind, reasonable waves. When I returned, on my approach to the rock, a coastguard boat appeared and made a bee-line to me. They told me I had to leave the water, that someone had reported that I had gone missing. The fisherman had lost sight of me behind the rock and thought I had succumbed to the waves. So, no more exploring for me, and they were wanting to take me back to town, though I persuaded them to let me back into the water and for me to crawl out at the rocks where I said I could. Which I did, of course. There were two police and two paramedics on land. I apologised to them of course, for their unnecessary call-out. All this, and the water wasn't half as violent as I have been in before. Tricky spot, admittedly. Didn't take my camera, stupidly. Some of the waves were leaping 12m into the air when they hit the rock. Hopefully another day like it will come. Lovely.

Today, decided to swim to the next village, canical. I can't get a map up on my ipad that has a distance scale on it, not google maps, not apple. Terribly tedious. I counted my strokes, which gives a reasonable indicator of the distance. 3,000 strokes, equivalent to 3km. The trainer of the young triathlete, Bruno, said the competition swim from there was 3.2km. I sat for a bit on the pier, then swam back. About 6km. I thought I would be quite tired, or achey coming back, but nope, it was fine. I think it is like jogging. Once you get a rhythm you can run for hundreds of km.

My aim, though impossible to do alone, is to swim 42km. I will need a boat or at least a dude in a kayak to supply me with food on the way. About 15 hours swim, I've estimated. Here to Funchal. Will the opportunity arise before I leave, in three weeks?

Another post on the Next Edge group on FaceBook complaining about how difficult it is to keep track of the discussions. So there was a call to transpose it to a wiki, or some such. Again. Typical. A bunch of switched on people with a stream of engagement, and they want to slow it down, tabulate it, kill it. So, as usual, I suggested that we should make use of the speed. Why not challenge ourselves to write a book together, along the lines of a non-linear book, with contributions being only a few paragraphs long, all within the week. It would be like a snapshot of the stream, and it serves the purpose of producing a social product.

And then I realise I was doing what I usually do. Suggest something, and then wait to see if anyone wants to lead on it. So, I broke the pattern, and set up a project page on the next edge wiki, that nobody is using because it would be another repository for stuff said. 5 hours after posting up an invitation to contribute, and there are no responses. No comments, no likes, nothing. Beats me. I would have thought that bods who wanted to action the group, do something more than words, could see this as an initial stepping stone. If we can write a book together, then we might action something else in the real world. But so far, the usual response, complete dismissal.

Why can't adults realise that we actually have to do something together, and not as a bunch of like-minded people who happen to share a hobby, or as an organised group in a company or government branch. Bunches of friends get the idea. Happens all the time. And here we are, a collective of next edge thinkers, experts in the field of facilitation, and nope, they just can't do anything together. Well, they do, but I think only in terms of engagement with traditional hierarchies in the role of advisors (as per previous post). They are between corporate and friends, and they seem to be happy chatting. Well, some at least. And those who want action make a few bleating noises, and then concern themselves elsewhere.

So, it looks like the Next Edgers have not quite gone far enough, and their edge is still within the remit of chat, and within the system as it is. It was close though. I really thought they were beyond the edge, and were into experimentation, conversation through action, collective strategy and those things that I started verbalising two years ago, and initiated with my magnus opus in 2003 with the whole-system, socially-orientated, reality-experience, 2020worldpeace. Ho hum. Maybe in a couple of years. Or maybe there is a collective doing this already? Several probably. And one of them will hit on the right way for it to scale, for example following the energy and drive of those who join (that's right, at the edge :), because we will only need one of these open collective networks (cf ipool in Dunno, or tuttle=twitter in small book BIG THINK).

current players of the global game

2011-09-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

Started off thinking how we have shifted from following people who think they have the answers, to facilitating others to find their own answers. Problem is, if we are all facilitating other people to come up with their answers, we never come up with answers. This seems to be the state of affairs with the leading edge of thinkers at the moment, as it shares the edge with community building. I was going to produce a simple quadrant of distinctions, but when I started this post, and the title indicated I should take a different trajectory.

There are people in power. That is, working. They have their hands at the wheel, or on the mop, or on the gun, or the money, or whatever. They make a decision, and money flows. Most of these organisations are hierarchical, and most people are somewhere embedded in this hierarchy. There is a remit of control, of decision-making, of effort, and the consequential result. Thus the micro-transmission-unit of power that maintains the system. And self-employed dudes, owners of companies, are included in this too; from this perspective, they have less flexibility than most because they are answerable to the entire direction of the company.

Then there are bunches of people who advise the people in power. Experts, pundits, consultants, intellectuals. They don't do anything except talk, and their talk can of course be operational through a person in power to effect significant change. In this way, a company outsources its knowledge, and perhaps even decision-making, and perhaps even the transmission-unit of power.

I remember in my early twenties hearing about the fisherman cleverness: give a man a fish and he eats for a day, give him a fishing rod, and he feeds himself and his family. Something like that. Seems to me, we are obsessed with this. And clearly, this is a world gone mad, because surely the kids just want the fish given to them because they're hungry. Or traded with someone who doesn't have the time to fish, but has grown some potatoes, for example. There are so many fishing rods being pushed around, nobody is fishing, just empowering each other with fishing rods. Seems to me, this is what the entrepreneurial edge is like. And this market of fishing-rods is sustained because of cash injections, various forms of governmental funding, and investors, and speculative evaluations of the market, etc.

It is like the problem of management, where a company, or a government, becomes fat with positions that do nothing but increase the size of the company or organisation. It sounds good, innovation, entrepreneurialship, all that, but it is essentially privileged. Outsourced management. Outsourced fat.

So, what can we do? Either you are in the system, working, doing something, or you are helping someone improve what they are doing, and living off what they are doing. A kind of lateral hierarchy. Power doesn't operate as it does in the traditional doing-hierarchy. And here's my suggestion, at least as it occurs to my mind now -- and I wonder if it relates to anything which this line of thinking reveals in your mind: can we come up with a system that is entirely consistent within these "lateral hierarchies"? An economics and structure that matches how the micro-transmission-units of knowledge (as opposed to power) operate? Recommendation systems spring to mind.

You see, I believe we have all the skills, the answers, the wisdom, already. It is like what happens when we study for an exam, and we go too deep into the answer for the first couple of questions, when really, it is much easier than we think. This is the main problem we are facing. So, let's stop looking for new answers, assuming those around us don't have them, but confronting one another with our answers (our fish) and seeing which we should be eating NOW, and which can wait a bit, which preserve well. Being part of the Next Edge curated group on Facebook is interesting, as all new experiences are, but I can't help but think it is a talk shop. A high level talk shop, and I am sure plenty of people are learning through their conversations. But as a collective, it is not moving, and I am certainly not making a living out of it. Nothing to eat. Just a lot of fishing rods. Incredible people, and I think most are making money somehow, as advisors mostly, I think.

What would happen if we simply tracked our likes? Not only those that are attributed to us, but those we attribute? What if we did some maths, and came up with an algorithm that could give us a... rank, like google's pagerank? The factors would have to worked out. The equation designed, and the results interpreted and tested. A subjective test, of course, like matching what we think the rank is, to the rank that the algorithm produces. After all, the stats are based on subjective evaluations, whether we concur or not with a post or comment. Not so much a currency of likes, though perhaps we might have a daily ration of them, perhaps a like costs one, a comment three, a new post ten, that kind of thing. The trick is, it has to be so simple, that it does not interfere with the natural flow of the engagement. It serves no purpose to game the system. No purpose whatsoever.

I've thought about this before. I called the points "wyse" in a book 10 years ago, though I had no idea of the system. I tried to think about it when I was teaching maths in my last year of work because some classes were just not getting it, naturally as it were. The trick is, for any enumerated subjective value, you are not trying to win them. You are trying to give them away. Fractions of a whole rings a bell, you can't gain more attention, you just divide it on a daily basis. Or, when two masters meet, it is an engagement of apology, and he who gives most in some way, whose ego pulls least, is somehow acknowledged. That is the trick of it: to ascribe attention without it becoming too heavy, without it becoming accretive.

Strange post this. Wanders a bit. Sorry. Can a system like this be developed by 2020? Before? Who might be interested in discerning the factors? Tying it into an equation? Working out the non-accretive, or non-accumulating value of it so it doesn't bend the natural engagement of the participants? And then testing it within a collective?

ponytron

2011-09-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

It was cloudy, so I stayed in bed till it got sunny, and while waiting for breakfast to get beyond the two hour safety limit before swimming, it has clouded over. Again. Such is living on an island in the atlantic. So, a little virtual engagement and finally a useful spark from my engagement with my brother, a rare thing since so much of it is mired, utterly mired, in past oppositional state which is resurrected like some kind of unruly zombie, b-movie variety, interminably tedious, appearing in the wrong scene, that kind of thing. So, tron.

One of the reasons why I loved armagetron advanced, fortress server, was that it was the minimal virtual team game, a nexus of open source, introduction to the deeper heritage game of GO, referred to the 1982 film we watched as kids and is now remade for the next generation, etc etc. But the play of it, is so simple, left and right, every child can understand and play. The trick, the real trick which fools adults and is challenging for kids to learn, is teamwork. Let's just focus on one thing, so simple it is almost stupid.

When you grind a wall, you accelerate. It's like entering a slipstream made by another player. By accelerating, you reach speeds that confer an advantage over opponents who are travelling slower, enabling you to cut defence and enter the enemy zone for example. Now, let's say you are grinding another player, it is critical whether they are on your team or not. Why? Because if they are opponents, as you accelerate up to ovetake them, they can throw in a kink, and you are cornered, coredumped. Whereas, if you are following a teammate, they will let you overtake them so they end up grinding against your wall, and so they accelerate; so you end up taking it in turns, accelerating past one another, building up speed.

This is like reading/writing, listening/following, and is so simple a dynamic you can find it everywhere. For example, it can be found in football, another team game, where it really does matter if you are following the opponent or a teammate. With the former, they are liable to throw in shimmies and thus wrong-foot you to their advantage. With the latter, we learn how your teammates moves so that you can play off them better, to your mutual advantage.

So, with brothers, for example. Family relationships are often downplayed in our culture. They used to be strong, but now, with subnuclear families, with childless gay couples, and single-parent childhoods, it is easier to be alone, or to surround oneself with selected friends, like selected furnature. Nevertheless, you don't rely on your friends when the shit hits the fan, and if we do not strengthen our family relationships, the only alternative is to trust "organisational" ties. And just look how we are treating old people, our parents, living so much in isolation, they are like in prison. Do we want the same fate...?

So, with my brother. Do I follow him like a teammate or as an opponent? Do I expect him to throw me a shimmy in order to trip myself up? Or should I trust him, and whatever he does, I am assuming is good for me and for him and for everyone else? Oooo, I let that one out of the bag: in terms of the global situation, there is no opponent, no enemy, we are actually all on the same team. Which begs the question how brothers could ever possibly think they are on opposite sides. But this is the strength of family ties, and the weakness. We don't choose brothers, or sisters, or parents. Even as parents, we don't choose our children, however responsible we might be in the formation of their character or personality. So, to make enough space for our family members, to acknowledge their difference, not as threat but as a benefit of species diversity, is a thing which is powerful, natural, and very very helpful, given our current global conditions.

And this goes for everyone we meet. Are they teammates? And if so, in what way? What level of game are we playing? My thinking is, start with something small, like tango or tai chi, or Go, respectful reading and writing, listening and talking. If we get those right, then we can move up to play with more players simultaneously. Teams of ten. Once we get that, we'll be fine.

Final observation which just appeared while I wrote that last paragraph: we think that writing a post or a book, it being read by ten or a million people, is a collective experience. It is not. It is simply dyadic relationships multiplied up. It still only consists of the meeting of minds through the medium of reading/writing. We still have very little social movement that is collaborative. It still follows the old marxist-social movement from one to many. The trick, and it is a trick, is to read as it is written. And to write with the freshness that invites the reader to be aware of their presence now. That is, the next word is blank. It may appear that there are words there, from the point of view of an "objective" reader, but while writing, honestly, it is blank. Reading in this way, writing in this way, makes the connection between reader and wrier more... imanent. The connection thus between readers should also have a different quality, and the gamees they are willing to play together might also have a higher collaborative quality.

Thanks, bro, for the spark. And for those wondering why "ponytron", it relates to the initial topic my brother posted, about my little pony, of all things!

it's time again

2011-09-04T05:18:00.000-07:00

I've a lack of books here, so while I am not staring off into the space of nature, or looking through that strange window of film, I am reading and editing my books, in this case Buddhism is Not. Been reading it sequentially, alphabetically, which has actually hung together pretty well, at least in my mind, and just hit the sections to do with time. And thus, my mind orbits around the same old same old that it has been for decades, and because of the the combination of fishbowl memory and kitten curiousity, I end up considering something which I think is new, but probably isn't. Specifically, relativity.

Specifically, when time stops, phase of consciousness, and rates of consciousness.

I was so young when I heard about relativity, about the consequences of time travel. You know, the closer to approach the speed of light, the slower time becomes, time dilation, so that you can never reach the speed of light (at least not incrementally). So a spaceman who has been travelling for a couple of years in his super-fast space rocket, returns to earth to find 20 years have passed.

Seems to me, while writing this, this description is an interpretation of the logarithmic function in reltion to time. When you map powers, so that an increase of 1 to 2 in base ten means a step change from 10 to 100, and from 6 to 7 means 1 million to 1,100,000. That is, the step change is not a fixed number, but itself increases. That is, it is a description of a mathematical function, not a description of space-time, whatever that is.

The new question that occured to me was, how are the subjective and objective aspects of time different in relativity? Or are they not? You know how objective time can be recorded with a clock. A certain amount of fixed time passes, the interminable ticking of the clock, the thing we have chained ourselves to in the west. And we know about our subjective sense of time, how it appears to drag on when we are sitting with a bore while we'd like to be chatting away with someone else nearby. And of course you've got the buddhists who are slowing down their internal subjective sense of time so that when they return to "normal" engagement, they are completely high on the simple observation of a flower. Eternity in the grain of sand, and all that. So, how is out experience of time relates to the objective measuring of time, with respect to relativity? What is our subjective experience as we accelerate to the speed of light?

Which brings into question a few things. Like, if time slows as we approach the speed of light, does that mean is speeds up when we approach zero? What is our current speed and experience of time? And I mean this to be answered by physicist experts.

You see, the bizarre bit that my consciousness has hooked on from an early age is, why do we exist at the same phase? This moment? Today, right now, as different from yesterday and tomorrow? How is it we all seem to exist at the same phase? We get lost in space, go to the wrong house or street, do we ever get lost in time, get the day of the party wrong? How come, we all seeem to be in the ame phase in time? Tricksy.

Is there some way of ddetermining the, or linking, the phase of our conscious experience in time, with the subjectiveless description of relativity. Oh, and that reminds me, that Einstein's equations differs from Newton's mainly because it DOES include the observer. The observer, that is, the subjective viewer. So,... there should be a connection in there somewhere...

swim and thought

2011-09-03T05:50:00.000-07:00

Swam 3.2km yesterday. Nice. Only felt a little weary at the end of it, tendons a little rare. Met an old dude of the sea the other day that says there is a 5km competition swim sometime soon, hopefully before I return to UK. That would be nice. To see how I compare to others, the other oddballs who enjoy sea swimming. It's a solitary sport, swimming, not much going on while it is happening. A lot of sploshing. Not really that easy to think...

Last night, a little more development wrt XQ, but it is not strictly XQ and more fanciful thought. My mind was trying to map the psycho-social dynamic to the riemann sphere. This is a little tricky. Not sure how useful this might be for a reader, but it is interesting within one's head.

From 0 to 1 is the psycho part, the bit that happens in personally in the head. The 1 to infinity is the social part, the bit that happens out there in shared social space. Now, we don't actually hit infitinity, the top would be 7 billion. We are not even very good at organising ourselves in small groups. We can hit 2, making love, small families 4 say, but anything bigger, company etc, is a simulation, not a real sense. We have nations, for example, with hundreds of millions of citizens, but this is boundary definition, nothing like the joint sense that comes with making love, or even tango. We also don't get close to zero, most of us aren't even aware of our beliefs.

This suggests an event horizon, or at least limits, and this in turn -- at least in my mind -- suggests a torus, where infinity and zero meet in the middle. So, there I was, folding the reimann sphere into a torus.

It gets tricky, since the 0 to 1 is unique to every one of us. Just imagine a few, your friends for example, let alone 7 billion. Whereas the 1 to infinity is shared, to different extents. For example, the use of money, is fairly wide-spread. So we have aspects of this thing that are unique to individuals, bleeding into a field which is shared by many. I can't do this in my head. There are as many dimensions as people, feeding into the same social shared sea.

Can't do this in my head. Visual representation just doesn't do it. The easy bit, is to see there is a relationship, reflective for some, between the material in the 1 to infinity and the 0 to 1 in your head. How accurate this is, how reflective of the conditions that are, is one thing. How connected they are, how the individual influences the conditions, is another. That is, the image/model we have of this torus, is dynamic. It changes. There is circularity, psycho-social feedback loop, and hence this is how the torus becomes more like a smoke ring, turning in and around itself.

Phew. Get your head around that one. It's a deep construct. Will take years no doubt, before it become well formed, if it ever will, and potentially useful, which would be a miracle.

why i live where i do

2011-08-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Well, at least I managed to discover it, just as a year passes and only one month left to go. Haven't been feeling all that positive recently, the age vector I am sure, and not being of best use to others. It was a lovely day and I only rose from bed at around 1pm. That's not good. Not if you are living in a place like this. Whatever the skin trouble and getting to sleep, staying in bed till the afternoon just isn't good. Went to bed last night listening to israel kamakawiwo'ole over the rainbow... a lovely track, just lovely.

Anyhoo, it was 2.30 before I got my act together, and I had decided to go for a walk for a few hours along the coast, explore. I walked by the concrete jetty here at machico and was nearly tempted just to dive in there, but I had the momentum of my conviction and took the walk up the ridge, along the cliff edge, and along side then under the airport runway. I have taken the walk a few times to go to the airport or pick people up. I went beyond the point I normally take to cut into the airport, and just two hundred yards further, there's the airport car park and near the back, is a little stairway with rusty iron banister. Very unassuming. But it was the first down to the sea I had come across, and WOW, what a lovely place.

There's a rock jutting out of the sea some forty yards out, and the water was heaving its way one way then the other between the edge and the rock, wonderful dynamics. I sat and watched it for an hour. But not before diving in and swimming along the coast. The cliff-face was pitted with caves, what a wonder, and there were little jetties further along with narrow stairwells with gates to private hotels I think, and then a coastline until the next little port, perhaps 500m down the coast. What a lovely swim. But the best bit is the dynamic of water around the rock.

I have found my place. This is why I live here in Machico. It's one of the closest towns to this place. Marvellous. I just want to invite everyone to come now, just to experience this little bit of heaven.

Why do I like it so much? It's not the rocks at the bottom of the stairwell. There is such a mess made by fishermen, broken bottles, plastic bags, fag butts, that kind of thing. Closer to the water, it is clean enough, of course, washed by the sea. It's the underwater architecture! It's marvellous. I spent an hour just marvelling at how the water heaved its way around. The swell has picked up in the last day or two, not enough to produce waves in machico, but enough of a surge to notice. And around this rock pillar... I will be going back, of course, and I will record it. But a small screen just won't do it justice.

Why do I like it so much? Most people are happy to be on land, nice and stable. Or sail on boats, against stable. A lot like beaches, I mean it is heaving in machico's little golden sand artificial beach. A few kids play around the quay. Only yesterday, a bunch of adolescents had discovered the push and pull of the sea around a corner where they normally play. They were really playing, like otters, like children, holding their breath and holding on to the edge of the peer as the water heaved one way then the other. They had discovered it, and they were all loving it, as a group. A few men leaned over the protective railings and smiled, remembering the way they were when they were young. Well, it's like this, but because there is no straight line of a quay, concrete angles and all, the water currents are phenomenally complex. Beautifully complex! Unpredictably complex. To risk yourself in the ebb and flow is not wise, even if it is quite shallow, or precisely because it is. Such movement. Such large amounts of water flowing suddenly. All curves. Oh, do I love it!

And all because of the underwater architecture. Unique to that place. Unique to that time. The thought that occured to me was, if gaia is more than a concept, then what is happening right there, at that spot, is joy. Unadulterated joy. The sea meeting the land. Of course, it is unique all way the way along the coastline, around the coastline of all the land masses of the world. No rock formation repeats, like the wonder of snowflakes. And it is unique each day, depending on weather currents, the movement of the sun, cloud cover and convection. Each surge is so unique, each wave. It is a wonder!!

And this is what I am interested in. I am not interested in the garnd theories that people produce, Marx et al, including the peer-to-peer folks, or the virtual online worlds, the social media highways. I am interested in the simple engagement between two people, between three. It is utterly complex. Utterly fascinating. My classrooms, any classroom of kids for that matter, has this unique spillage of psycho-social dynamics. Not the staid and stagnant waters that we make of our companies, or the relative safety of socialising streams. This is the great meeting between strangers, between groups, between us where all the joy occurs. I was privileged to teach kids, I have said this before. I don't mean it as a platitude. I mean it as a fact, experientially, ethically. It is the same wonder as I had sitting and watching the water flow today at this spot.

And how many other people were there? None. Only a few at the concrete jetties further along the coast, a private affair. There was even a sea-filled swimming pool. All to make things simpler, easier to navigate, safer. But I am going back, of course, and I will be going under the water to explore further why the water moves the way it does. To be part of it. Even the brief moments I had trying to get out of the water, I felt the surge pulling me one way then the other. It is such an amazing experience. Love it.

The social sea. I love it. But I need it to be more natural, like with the kids. More spontaneous. Less safe. More into the unexplored regions between us. Too many people playing it safe. There aren't that many who seem interested in this space between us, conducted in this rather raw, chaotic way.

And a nice point for me was that what I was witnessing could not be mathematised. Not at all. It was all being determined, but it was completely unpredictable. Something like it could be modelled, so it looked like the sea, and you've probably seem water simulations now that look quite realistic. But it is just a simulation, and example. Can't dive into it, man! And that's where it is at! And same goes for simulating social engagement, which is what some of the smart set of social engineers/designers are wanting to do -- producing a game about social cohesion, about world sustainability. Absurd! Absurd I say! But they will get their money, because it SOUNDS like such a nice idea. If we can get the kids to play at being sustainable, then surely that will translate into really being sustainable. Ho hum.

And on the way back, energised by this little spot of heaven, I rethought what I am doing, about the book of beginnings, and I would love to invite people to write even this first parts with me. Sadly, people will be too busy, and my projects are just not visible enough to win commitment. I have not done enough, got enough social credit, or enough money, for people to take what I have done seriously. But, I shall put it out there, risk the waste of energy that might result from dismissal. Life it just too wonderful, and by life, I mean the space between us.

swimming genius

2011-08-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

My parents were geniuses to teach me swimming so young. I love it. However sploshy it is, and hard-work, here are moments of glide that are sublime. Two things in this post, one about swimming and one about genius.

I was swimming across the bay the other day, when I noticed that some kyaks were having trouble. There was a bit of a breeze, and this was felt quite strongly on the other side of the bay. I approached two that were making their way back to the bay, and I asked the only adult on it, and he said the others were "ok". I estimated the distance, at it was further out than I had been. I decided to try it a little, and sure enough the waves got bigger, and the wind more forceful. I had no idea how I could have been of help, perhaps I could have applied a bit of adult muscle?

I got pretty close to them, but didn't have to make a final approach because a large fishing boat had been called out to rescue them. I watched this massive boat pick up the two kayaks, and I decided to swim back. It was quite a push. During the swim, I started to get a nerve twinge in the centre of my left hand. Very strange.

That night, I could hardly walk. Even the next day, swimming was next to impossible. Strange how a real-world situation can take more out of you than a standard competitive swim. I tried sprinting against a young triathlon athlete, but within a hundred strokes was sick with exhaustion. This wasn't exhaustion, not the critical sense of it... more like a chronic sense. Took me days to recover.

Completely unrelated, I read two independent posts recommending VInay Gupta, the second of which called him a genius. And I am sad to say that in both readings I felt hot and bothered. I remember when I was young and good things were said about my friend Mike, and I felt proud. Why am I not proud, happy that Vinay is getting the attention he deserves? Tis a terrible thing in me, no matter how I justify that his version of future developments is more attractive than mine because he spells out the disaster that is to come. And that he did not have the courage to carry out the confrontation he demanded in our first meeting, preferring to fire shots across my bow later.

What can I do with this feeling? Is it merely an ego-response, that others are recommending him and the same people dismiss mine? Or is there something more important going on that I should be listening to? That more attention paid to him is less paid attention to solutions like mine? Well, whatever the truth of it is, I'd rather not feel it. And I look forward to a time when my genuine response is happiness for him.

The thing that annoyed me was that he was termed a genius. And later, the person who attributed this reveals that Vinay "had got" what he was all about. This really annoyed me. Can we really apply genius to someone who can verbalise our own thinking? Isn't that just a little self-serving? I'd rather apply genius to people we don't understand. I saw genius in many kids I taught. I'd like to meet more adult geniuses.

so, what's next?

2011-08-01T07:47:00.001-07:00

2011 0801 1258 what’s next?
Well, we have failed. From what I can tell from my family’s, friends’ and Wendy’s response. And on my side, it did not feel like a spectacular climax, though I was pleased to come to the end of it. Perhaps I exercised too much self-restraint, and did not let myself go, or if I did, the music I was listening to meant small, respectful moves, nothing flashy. Even if we have failed, there’s always the prospect of another dancefloor, another Go board, another blank page. There was never any pretense that I knew what I was talking about. It’s not about talking, and it not about anything.
Let’s hear more from Wendy, and my relatives.
For you, Wendy, no dramatic lean at the end. You have been away for a few days, you gave as explanation, and though you have kept up with reading, you have felt a little lost. And it didn’t help that the last section was a return to abstraction. Where were you, in that? And where the wisdom?
Where, indeed, is the wisdom?
My brother made an interesting comment which reveals something of an answer to this question. You said that it hadn’t anything to do with you, and it came across to you that it was nothing about the family and all about me. This echoes my niece’s slightly heavier handed view that I am unloading in order to relieve myself from my internal warring.
My old school friend Keith could not read through the sea of words, and the sheer length and uniformity and lack of structure outperform the content. Another school friend, Mike, got a sense of evasiveness heightened by the use of neologism, and pointed out, as others have, the rambling nature of the next.
I apologise for the lack of response: there was a the small window of opportunity available to us, just a day or two, and I am sure I will get further responses later in the week. I find that amoungst friends, as opposed to work demands, the request to respond quickly loses its urgency, especially those old friends distanced by dwindling communication over the years. I put this down to my increasing isolation as time goes by.
Of equal importance, perhaps more so if we are to think of commercial success, I wonder what a third party made of it? Unlike my friends and family parachuting in at the end, you will have taken the path that Wendy has, from the beginning. The same path, yet different of course, in that Wendy has been able to influence the direction of the text, the explanations given in our shared experience of tango, for example. And further, though the path is the same, the journey is different for each of us. So, I wonder what you have made of the end. Are you left slightly disgruntled too? Or did you manage to pull it off?

Briefly then, in response to observations made, all of them valid.
To Mike, the target of our interest is elusive, and thus it may look like in our approach it is we who are elusive. The central point of the book, made in the centre of the book as it happens, is that we need to experience things together, words and reason alone will not further our understanding or awareness. The neologisms are temporary, a house of cards within which the mind may play, nothing more. Better to evoke what we have mutually experienced. Have you forgotten how direct I am in person? How we adopt whatever language is required to communicate at the time? I look forward to our future intellectual rambles, perhaps fortified by awareness of our mutual presence.
To Keith, despite the text you read being poorly laid out, the material we are dealing with is not about presentation, nor even about content. The means we use to communicate scientific fact or information, an area of your expertise, does not lend itself well to what was attempted in this book. Nor does poetry, for that matter. If either of them had, we’d be living in a much healthier and peaceful world. You know, more than anyone I grew up with, how important aspects of communication are neglected. I look forward to sharing time with you and your family.
To my family, you do not seem to be present in the reading, literally. Historically, you did not bring your presence to what I had to offer ten years ago, and thus there is an emptiness or one-sidedness to my account. My description can thus be mistaken as being about me, that the problem is mine, that the war is mine. I offered a gift, and having not been taken, I have been left with it. It was not a weapon, it was not the language of war. Dealing with this has been challenging, and has informed me and the writing of this book. I suggest in earlier sections that we should stop putting the fault into the person, but rather keep it between us. And if we are to have things between us, let them be gifts, let them be light. I look forward to meeting you when there are no battlelines drawn between us.
And to Wendy, where is the wisdom? And where were you? I let go, I dived in, and thus I did not address you directly. This would mean separation, a recognition of you as distinct from me. Granted the family chat was in my world, and the ability for you or for any reader to follow me there with their own, was too much to ask. I chose not to represent my family members, at least only glancingly, and perhaps if I had more skill I could engage you more emotionally, and at the same time, not you. It didn’t work, that is all. And the last section indeed smacks of abstraction. It wasn’t fanfare, huge claims, inspirational, nope, not at all. But you didn’t like that earlier in the book, neither did I, at least not for the subject matter and the direction we were going in. It was a subtle tango, with small steps, quick, hard, staccato. Fitting for the end, perhaps? The real stuff happened earlier. I really do look forward to dancing without words, it has been too long.
Beside, like a lot of readers no doubt, I think you were looking for a punchline.

The question is not so much, did it work or not, did it fail? It is to accept the failure of it, the entire enterprise of the book from the start was doomed to failure, and did the ending justify this failure appropriately? The responsibility has always been yours, as the living reader; the illusion has always been the authority of the author, and the mis-attribution of power. Accepting the failure of the end and the book in general, have you been able to convert it into success? If you have, then Wendy and I will be happy in your achievement.
The strapline for the book is, Can you recognise someone wiser than you?
I have never attempted to answer that question. It is the posing of the question that is enough.
What question we might be able to answer is, Have we had a good dance? Sure, there have been mistakes, but did we tango?

So what next?
For me, I have started to read Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What a ride! I am halfway through the second part. Pirsig is definitely a rare wisdom, the result of an individual journey. Now that’s a well written book by a fine mind in tireless pursuit of wisdom. Falling short of taking up bike riding, I wonder how many people have taken his advice and reading the old classics a few lines at a time, frequent punctuated with discussion, as he did with his son?
This time in Madeira is coming to an end, and the next step I can not see yet, but I have a month or so to go. There was a possibility that this book fulfil the necessary bridge to “normal” book-reading, readers, but from what I can gather, it does not. So, I shall probably go east, a little ahead of schedule (I thought perhaps in my fifties I’d get out there), live in rural China. I shall go alone. Despite the intensity of love I feel for others and I am blessed to receive, my experiences have fashioned me into a strange shape. We go alone.
I have done enough groundwork on the Book of Beginnings, and it will just be a matter of whether I manage to convert my mind fully to writing fiction, and creating believable characters. In terms of serious thinking, I really do wish to give up on all the ideas and talk about social change. I think I will be satisfied with further exploration of XQ.
Or perhaps life will take a completely different course? For me, and for everyone? Who is to know? We are living during interesting times, and increased virtuality is like a show, a grand affair with the unimaginable effects of robotics, nanotech, and quantuum computers, and we may be present to witness an incredible climax in the next couple of decades.

I leave you, Wendy, to give your summary in your own words, as a splendid preface. It has been a remarkable experience, writing this book. Your reading has been a wonder, and sets a precedence it seems to me. If I do progress with the Book of Beginnings, I would like invite readers to participate in the writing. As you know, one of the stories centres around tango, and indeed, I hope you will find time to contribute towards writing it with me. Ideally, I’d like to write all the stories with other people, but it requires a certain kind of self-control, doesn’t it Wendy, a certain quality of demand that can not be imposed. An intense experience of we, is what’s needed, otherwise the forces become too powerful and we split apart. Poise and posture, the contract of embrace, and the music -- perhaps you can give a hint to the prospective reader what these have meant to you in terms of your reading?

There, I think I have returned us all back to our seats, back to ourselves. Until the next time.

a word to the wise

2011-07-31T15:03:00.001-07:00

2011 0731 1929 a word to the wise
Welcome.
It has been quite a challenge, has it not?
Overcoming the rebellion of mind, transcending the oppositional state. Cultivating an empty head. The birds land on a wire above. They are well designed for movement, and the gusty wind can not blow them over. Only for a time do they rest there. And then they are gone.
Possessing the patience to wait, while those around attend to the suffering, unaware that their behaviour elsewhere causes it. Aware that one is as responsible as everyone else. After the bomb, there is panic and fear. Before the bomb, ignorance and business as usual. Nowhere the forethought to disarm the bomb, the greater prescience to prevent the bomb from being built in the first place.
Answering the questions which point with humour, and drawing attention to those whose questions reveal of themselves. The madman runs to the east, his carer after him; both run to the east but the purposes of their running are quite distinct. Has this been said already?
Avoiding the pull of mental objects, the gravity of ideas well composed and convincing. No constellation of thoughts exist that can orchestrate the human race. Such dense collections generate an event horizon of ego from which they can not escape.
Avoiding the push of social objects, against the pressures of conformity, and the shadow they cast in the mind. The current of the mainstream is strong, and there is no hope of redirecting it alone through force of will or command of a critical mass. It is enough to swim, neither fight the current, for it is too phenomenally strong, nor swallow it, for it is inconceivably vast.
Thank you for being well.

May the scientist and the buddhist continue their good work, located where they are, at the edge of self and object respectively.
May those recognised as wise, those independent gurus, whose awareness shine like beacons, may you cast sufficient light to achieve minimal alignment rather than maximal enlightenment.
May we leave whatever institution or role or flavour of personality we take, and bring ourselves to the edge of ourselves. Between us as partners, between us as families and teams, we find all the resources we need.

I respectfully offer my contribution. From where I stand, we does not exist. There is no such thing.

We is as much an illusion as I.
Beyond everyday appearances, there is no such thing as I. It is temporary flux, a wave in time, whose material is not only flesh and bone, but also the energies of feeling and thought, and as such are rooted in the body and shared of mind. Such is the path of actualisation of this understanding, the path taken by buddhists.
The depths to which buddhists fathom is not only to experience an end to the illusion of self, but to share awareness with all sentient beings. The path of the buddhist is not for themselves, not to see an end to their own self, but for the benefit of all sentient beings.
The deepest respect for those who take this path of renunciation, and the most heartfelt gratitude. The social object they create, that of buddhism, acts like a social damper, a check that inhibits wreckless behaviour. It is far wiser to send young men to be a monk for a year or two of their lives, than to send them to be soldiers.

We as boundary is a mistake.
We think of ourselves of members of a family, of a classroom of kids, as players in a team, or employees of a company, inhabitants of a city, citizens of a nation.
We mistakenly define ourselves by the context of which group we identify with. We define ourselves based on the boundedness of a group.
The boundedness is an illusion. There is no boundedness to the group. Boundedness is an imposition of mind.
From the child’s point of view, there is connection, mutual growth, the branching from a tree. The tree is the nuclear family, the extended family, the community or tribe, all human beings. The limit or boundedness is copied from parents, unthinkingly copying the boundedness as re-inforced by society.
So we have seen a reduction from tribe to family to nuclear family, to radical single parent particles and their single particle children.

Science conducts itself in sterile conditions, eradicating all sign of self, denying the underlying assumption and operation of belief, objectifing its practice. And so it eradicates politics from itself.
The success of science has created copies in all areas of knowledge, adopting the scientific methodology evolved from the examination of objects, to the complex system of life and social behaviour of which we are part. The analysis of categorisation and reasoning, kills the living, making the living thing an object, making it a thing, while dehumanises that which is doing the analysis. The frog is killed and we feel nothing, the person is studied and we feel nothing.
We relate to abstract categories such as boys and girls, later men and woman, father and mothers, or the scientific designation by genitalia, of male or female.
We adopt abstract categories like customer, and fulfil roles like architect, engineer or construction worker, therapist or social worker. We associate ourselves in guilds and unions and professions. In this way, we dehumanise ourselves. We perform functions. We facilitate the oiling of the wheels of finance.

The politics of categories has a bloody history, whether christian or muslim, whether religious or scientific, whether royal or ???, whether capitalist or socialist -- whatever the field of groupness, there is conflict. This conflict is in the space of reasoning. Only in the realm of science can the conflict of reason be resolved.
We by category, by boundedness, by grouping, marks out its differences with battlelines. We draw battlelines politically. First world war is an example of temporary political boundaries killing millions of men, whose sons now live and work together. Seen in this way, we have lost every battle with ourselves.
We have battlelines drawn in school between adults and children. Children enter school and adults leave. The battle is with ourselves.
We safely expunge energies through the artificial battlelines of games, either on the board of chess or Go, on the pitch of football or rugby, or in virtual grids of Armagetron or World of Warcraft. The olympic games were the main reason that brought the warring greek tribes together and ushered in western civilisation as we know it. With the advent of powerful computer games and networks, we have the opportunity of virtualising politics.
The most damaging battleline we have drawn is with nature, a battle we can not afford to lose. And since we have lost every battle with ourselves so far...

Non-western, or non-civilised, politics are based on blood. Not on definition, not based on group boundary. Because it is based in blood, it is not chosen.
If africa discards the western model of politics, that based on categories and group boundedness, recognise their racial branch, and unite as a super tribe, they will demonstrate a way forwards for us all. If they generously forgive the wrongs done to them by other racial groups throughout history, and recognise our shared humanity through their blood and being, not category and reason, they offer us all a path to global unity. Africa leads.

We is everyone.
Every group is a temporary instance.
Water drops are temporary instances of water. When two drops merge, it is a temporary instance of water. Scientific measurement describes the differences in terms of volume and surface area, internal pressures and surface tension, and the molecular arrangement of water free standing within the drop, and arranged at the surface. These are just instances of the behaviour of water, and more science is required to describe freezing points and boiling points, the effects of salinity and electromagnetic fields on water structure, different types of ice, and so on. The science of water is incomplete, it is recognised as such, and yet we can recognise it, whatever its form, as water.
Human beings, whatever forms we take, colour, creed, age, gender, race, political or sexual orientation, personality type, living condition, whatever, we can still recognise as human beings. Whatever groups we may be, whatever living conditions, in houses, hotels, offices, factories, skinny-dipping in the pond, in a space station orbiting the earth, we are recognisable as human beings.
Any group is a temporary instance of we, as in all of us. We transcend other through our social presence.
This is our starting point. We are human beings.

Thus, I humbly suggest that we concentrate on the second law of subjective reality.
The first law of subjective reality (cogito ergo sum), is the path of buddhists.
The third law of subjective reality (the universe exists, how do we share it?), is the path of science.
The second law of subjective reality (I am over here and you are over here), is the path of subjective science.
The second law is not about relationship or representation. It is not a thing to be modelled. It is to be explored and justified subjectively. And if we wish to get to the point of reaching we, as the whole of humanity, we must conduct experiments that accelerate our understanding of we that is not based on category, representation, or reasoning.
The continguity between I and the whole of humanity is broken by too many categories, too many differences, theories, identities, group divisions. We need to learn an embodied sense of togetherness.
When I dance tango, I cease to exist. I do not represent us, the couple. We exist, but it is not something that I experience independently. I am immersed in it. This is the politics that we seek, this is the politics of blood and being.
When I meet someone, and we align and follow one another well enough that it does not matter who is speaking and who is listening, I cease to exist. The speaker does not represent the participants.
When a team plays well, at the level of players, the individuals cease to exist. The captain does not represent the team while the team is playing. It is a mistake to “play for the team”, playing is the team, if all the players give themselves to it.
When dancers in a club rise in euphoria to a tribal beat, they are a temporary instance of we. None of them represent the whole club.
Should we talk to one member of an instance of we, then they are an example. They do not represent, they do not think in relation to the whole they are part, they are not thinking boundedly or organisationally. They are being, contiguously from their subjective core, to the social object of which they are presently immersed. Their words are an instance, their perspective is an instance, that is all.
Our attention is on the space between us, and having navigated whatever context and conditions exist, an instance of we is manifest.
At a political rally, a dated thing if ever there was one, participants should not shout “we shall not be moved”, but rather, “I am the answer”. We indicates a separation from those those shouted at. I inticates the individual, and the fact that there are thousands saying it, is enough to indicate there is an alignment. In addition, anyone can add their voice to the crowd, be it policemen, or those shouted at. The division of those present of self to other is transcended.

The buddhists say, if you meet buddha on the road, kill him. This is to say, you can not meet buddha, he is not a person, or a thing outside of yourself. Buddha is a state of mind where one has sublimated categories of distinction, sameness is realised, and the person on the road is buddha, as you are buddha, all sentient beings are buddha. Separation is transcended, mentally and emotionally, at a deeper level of being, at an acute sense of presence.
The same can be said for we. No group. No group boundary. Only the temporary instance, the people in the room.
The use of we should have the same care and attention paid to it as the use of the word you in conversational dynamics. You is often used as anyone, you know, and when imbedded in stories, it can contribute to major fraying of a conversation, like the time I saw my good friend and I asked them, do you underrstand?
If you hear of anyone say we and they refer to people who are not present, and they do not mean everyone, then they are talking and thinking and relating to categories. It does not matter what you talk about, what the object of thought might be. The conversation will only give rise to partial view. It is useless.
The use of we to refer to a previous instance of a group can be quite innocent, like the group I was with when we went canyoning, but care must be taken that the person does not begin to represent any of the thinking or actions of that group.
If you hear anyone say we and they do not include everyone present, then they are talking and thinking and relating to categories. It does not matter what you are talk about, what the object of thought might be. The conversation will give rise only to partial view. It is useless.
If you hear we being used in any other way other than the people present or everyone, then invite the speaker to participate in some mutual experience. Only then, based on that experience, do you have something to talk about.
Neither of the two, the we meaning all of us and we meaning the people present, takes president. Indeed, neither should be used exclusively. Ideally, they are used simultaneously, as in, we few as an instance of all of us.
If we are disciplined about this, we will learn the skills necessary to be part of a group that is subjectively contiguous with our own subjective being. we will learn how to be able to talk in larger and larger groups.

Thank you for your patience and for taking the time to read this. Thank you for your attention and the quality of your reading.
Be well!

none remarkable all exceptional

2011-07-31T06:54:00.000-07:00

2011 0731 1210 none remarkable all exceptional
The trouble is, how do I talk about my family and friend without going backwards? Without talking about the past? I could reminisce about the happy times, three decades almost. The only trouble I had was with my skin, a medical condition called eczema, and racial abuse when I was in primary school. Mostly everything was pleasant, easy, nice. The hardship I faced was not at home, nor with my friends. I never had fallings out with any of them. I never rebelled, and never grouped with kids who were rebelling. And the social group I landed in, and helped form, was hosted by two of the loveliest people I had met, Ali and Davie. Of course I noticed the problems in the world, the kids around me at school who seemed troubled by maths, the news stories covering the politics, the wars, the famines. And since I did seasonal work, an easy thing of science explanation, the world of work seemed a distant thing, like a machine or a factory that lived at the edge of town. I lived with friends, and we lived well. A bohemian life, perhaps?
Truth is, I would have to talk about the past because I am living alone now. My contact with people has diminished, mostly through my own doing. I do not know how to talk about my family, my school friends, old friends, more recent friends without putting them in a bad light. A bad light. No, not a bad light, because that involves judgement. There is no judgement, no blame. I am happy where I am, personally. There is nothing within me that...
This is a tricky issue.
Moths are attracted to the light, but in their confusion mistaking a flame for the moon, they circle too close and die. Animals are wary of the fire, they keep in the shadows afraid to approach. And then there are those strange animals, who are also wary of the fire, but are simultaneously attracted, they approach but keep a respectful distance, humans.
Oh dear...

I had the idea of writing about my experiences, and attributing various responses I had to the people who influenced me. You know how sometimes you notice mannerisms in yourself that you recognise come from another person? Like that, but deeper. That is, follow on from the last section, to go beyond relationships, to notice how we are made of each other, to dissolve the discrete boundary of self we pretend to have of ourselves, a sad story of billiard balls bouncing off one another, and reveal the more organic protein growing around one another, neuron network, mixture that we actually are. How we are braided together, our fibres the same.
This would be a task, something I doubt I would be able to do justice. I have so few new experiences these days, that there is little evocation of the being that I am composed of. And if I return to the past, I can not do so without talking about the social fabric that we were and how it was insufficient to support what I placed on it. It was my fault, the blame is entirely mine... This I can say, and to the deepest part of me accept, it is a deeply spiritual lesson to accept responsibility, and I have practiced its truth in tango. And yet I know, because of the mutualness of who we are, the responsibility of the tearing of our social ties is mutual.
Another approach that crossed my mind was to talk of individual relationships, take each in turn, and describe the current state of it. So many wonderful friends, so many marvellous qualities, I was privileged to know them. I can not help but use the past tense. When I speak to them nowadays, it is a thing of the past. They have moved on, we have all moved on. I more than anyone know what this means, since I have had to move on in response to the need in the world, a global need. I volunteered, and in my act of volunteering, I lifted up the parts of myself that were my friends and family. This was the source of tension. I did not place weight upon them, I lifted us. The weight is the world, and they are aware of the environmental problems, the lack of political solution, and the utter pervasive complexity of it all. The vastness. We have mentioned the inconceivable nature of the problem, and correspondingly, its solution.
I can not talk of them, without talking of our failure. It is a result of what I tried to do. If I tried to build a kit car, say, and it just didn’t work while others had got their’s working, we could all attribute the failure to me, my lack of skill. And the chances are, if it is anything as taxing as an engineering task, the chances are I would botch it somewhere down the line. But the task I set myself was not for me to conduct alone. I accepted a task it is all of our responsibility to take up. The telling difference between us is, how we take up the task of sorting out the world.
One person’s solution is another person’s problem. Therefore, it is a matter of coming up with a partial solution that is open to everyone. My solution was simple. Rely on your friends and family. After all, I only came up with this solution based on my experience, and my experience was formed through friends and family. They were simultaneously the cause and the effect, the reasons which contributed to the solution arising and the means by which the purpose could be fulfilled. There was a continuity between the love and strength of binding we had achieved, and the love and strength needed to sort out the world. We had it all. We are the privileged in the world, we are the ones living in the palace walls. We are the ones who buy the fruit that is flown in from all corners of the world. We have the vantage point to look down into the poor material conditions the rest of the world lives in, the open sewers, the long hours of factory work, the famines and diseases. We are the educated who are aware of the environmental degradation. It behooves us to act. The trick is, how?
I did not speak like this with my friends and family. Of course I didn’t. Who was I to speak to them about these things that they knew? I was no stranger to them, we lived and grew up together. We knew. It was not my place to point out what we knew. All I offered was a possibility of a solution, a solution that required their involvement. I never even put it this way. Listen, this is how it happened.

I wrote a book over five years between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-three. This book was a monster, a leviathan, a labyrinth, an impossible thing to read and write. But I wrote it, as yet it is unread. It remains unreadable. When people asked me what I was writing, I would say, I am writing a book that someone in the year 2020 might understand. I didn’t say this out of arrogance, I said it out of innocence. Honestly, I had some ideas what it was, but as a whole it was inconceivable even to me. You may have some insight into this through our reading, since you have experienced, and I hope still continue to have experience, of the openness of my writing, that we are exploring this together, live, at the same time, that neither of us know what is ahead. How this section shapes up, is anyone’s guess. Imagine five years of this, and the first book of a life time of experience, albiet only twenty-eight years, and the dangerous cocktail of enthusiasm, ignorance, skills and willpower of that age.
When I finished this gargantuan task, I set it before my friends and family and said, That’s five years of the prime of my life, and one idea in there is about world peace. I was proud, no doubt about it. I was proud for us. That they had helped me write this thing in all the inconsequential and significant ways throughout our lives together. The dedication in the book goes primarily to my father, mainly because he had gone through a series of seriously crippling physical and emotional and psychic hardships over the same five years, though in fairness, my gratitude went out to everyone equally.
I was innocent. I honestly thought this would be enough. I honestly thought with the strength of relationships I had, with family and friends, this would be enough. But it wasn’t. They congratulated me, there was a party and all, but nobody took the time to read it. And they asked me when I would take it to a publisher, and I replied that I wasn’t going to. It was written in the book. There were several alternative means by which the book would be published, one of which was an invitation to friends, or indeed anyone, to take the book to a publisher, arrange a book deal and secure themselves the 10% agent’s fee. I thought it would be an adventure for them. The sections to be read by my friends was in the book, along with the sections to be read by the receptionist, editor and publisher respectively.
After a year of no response, which utterly confused me. No talk, about the book, the content, or about world peace. Life went on normally. I had a relationship, met friends for films and so on, but my main course of sustainence through this desert was my engagement with kids in school. The genuine, real, inspirational experiences kept me alive. At the end of a year, I did a book reading, two in fact, for friends and family. Another year passed, I was at my wit’s end by this time. I did not understand how it could so easily be dismissed. I thought that my friends would be interested in what I had spent five years of my life doing, or if that wasn’t enough, a possible approach to creating an opportunity for world peace.
This may all sound strange. When I write it, at least those last words there, it sounded like a bizarre story. It isn’t a story. It happened. After two years I hit upon the idea of doing a limited book run if my friends put up the money buy buying a copy ahead of time. I generated around £700 in sales and got a print run of 100 books which back then cost £1000. The original book was a manuscript of A4 pages, huge book, a tome. Here was a book which though dense, like a brick, was much more manageable.
A year past, no response. Nobody said anything about it, apart from my mother who said she liked sections of it. She kept getting lost in it, however, and I kept telling her that’s part of the book. If she read the sections she was following carefully, followed the right page jumps, she would complete whatever story she was interested in. However, she kept on being distracted by sections nearby, and she ended up following their page jumps, and so, as you can imagine, got lost. That was one of the intentions behind the book: to mirror how people lived life, getting lost through following too many distractions.
I started to reduce my engagement with friends and family. I did not know what to do. They seemed to think that everything was running along, business as usual. Not only did we have the state of the world falling apart, the increased evidence of environmental catastrophe, and the general rapacious behaviour of modern living, we also had this great thing between us. Both untalked of. I had hoped that by stepping back from standard social engagement, my friends would take the step to approach me, to meet me in the deeper space I needed us to be. For us to communicate about the state of the world, we needed to fathom our friendship, to go a little deeper.
My mother warned me. She told me that I was risking my friendships, and I replied that yes, I was, but there was just cause. I saw the possibility of a solution through friendship and family. I was not going to pursue what history has shown time and again, the aggregation of like-minded strangers to effect social change. But these like-minded strangers have partial solutions. There are always other groups, and thus there will always be conflict. The path to a sustainable global future was through family and friends we grew up with. The proven trust, the love, the acceptance of difference. If we would make peace in our families and leverage the strength of our relationships, if we drew strength from our roots, in each other and in ourselves, our very being, then this is all we needed to see a solution come to the world. Of course, we needed to practice a few skills here and there, learn how to deconstruct institutions how to interact with other social groups, that kind of thing, but all experiential, and always together. I knew this because of the experiences with kids in my classes, my awareness throughout life as to what didn’t work, and the roots of my being so composed of friends and family.
I had to risk everything. And I could not talk about it. I tried, a handful of times over the years, but when I brought it up, it was invasive or intrusive and the dynamic would be all wrong. I had to wait until someone asked. That is the way of it. If someone asks, then you can attempt to answer. You can not answer a question that is not asked. Or at least, I didn’t have the ability to do it. So I left. After four years, I left. The clock was ticking. The chance of creating a realistic opportunity for a sustainable world for the year 2020 was tiny, impossibly small. That was part of the task, the mental attitude to attempt something your mind knows through all manner of calculation is impossible, and yet you try anyway. This is what the kids taught me, this is what they showed me. We were no different. We just needed to conduct this social risk. The risk of attempting the impossible.

I left my home towns, left my friends and family, and took the path I knew would not meet with success, but at least there would be some comfort in it. I met with other like-minded people, social change agents, people who were dedicated to improving the condition of the world directly. Here at least was camaraderie, a deep resonance. Most came from difficult family backgrounds, most were equipped with that drive, the drive to prove something. I told them at the outset I was not there to make friends, I was there to get a job done. But, of course, we are human, we make friends, and the politics of alpha-males, the gravity of attraction to those who think they can conceive of the solution, was too strong. They are doing well, but the target for 2020 passed away. I could no longer hold the possibility, however small it was.
I returned to my family and friends to ask for forgiveness. For everything I had put us through. I apologised for giving up on them. I saw my parents first. I sat with them, and told them I had been wrong. My father wanted to reinforce one of his principles, to get back up and fight, but I calmed him. It was not about fighting, at least not one another. I had held out for as long as possible with them when I lived with them, and then pursued what I could with self-discipline in schools and then with entrepreneurs. It had not worked out. I had to give up. It was becoming too heavy for me. What had begun light and lovely and inspiring, had died out in the looming darkness of dismissal, lack of trust, fear. My mother cried, and my father fought hard to control himself, as he did, but I felt what this defeat meant to him. He saw his son defeated, and all his training at trying to toughen me up with his criticism, something he had to come to terms with. They are old now, it is easier to accept things the way they are.
I saw a few friends during my short visit. I apologised to Keith in his home, after spending some time with his wife Julie and their wonder, their baby daughter Abbey. I found it hard, to give up, to ask for their forgiveness. It was a world that their daughter was going to inherit. I felt responsible for this. This was one of the motivations that pulled me through the lean years, when I stepped out of school and tried working with adults directly. The world that our children will inherit. I had been responsible for so many children as a teacher, and this responsibility transferred easily to the children of my friends, to the children of my nephews. I was doing my best to ensure we could pass on the world in a better condition than we found it, and not by shouting and screaming about it, not by painting a better vision of the world and attracting people to what I thought, but in the way a teacher is meant to do. Lay out the pieces of the puzzle and let them work it out themselves. Only in this case, I didn’t know what the solution was, and the solutions people piece together could fit to others, and somehow the inconceivable solution would be found, would be lived regardless of whether any one of us understood it.
It was difficult to give up on Abbey and Keith’s family. I tried to apologise to Mike, but his family was not present, it sounded how this reads, probably, a thing of the mind, a representation, a story. It is a deep thing. A thing of blood and being, beyond words.
That is why I consider writing to be a failure. I had failed with all the love a mother and father could bestow on a boy, growing with friends, strongly, a team, educated to a high level in social theory, strengthened by a healthy, extended friendship group, and inspired by just normal kids in normal classes. None remarkable, all exceptional. In the end, I failed. I failed to draw attention to a potential solution -- or rather, a means for us to approach a possible solution. And if the blood and being of life are not enough, then what chance a few words in a book?
This is what got a rise out of me in our last conversation with Wendy. This is what caused the trip. Your reading revealed the realness of what this book represented, in the sense of a potential readership. A book called wisdom will only attract those people who are interested in wisdom. Seekers, you called them. I flared. I know that this is not the path. For someone who seeks wisdom, the path is buddhism, as far as I can tell. The wisdom of self, its transcendence. It is a long path, and the buddhists have been walking it for over two thousand years. I thought the world demanded something else. An inconceivable wisdom, the wisdom born out of interaction, the spill and suck of the coastline, the uncertainty of engagement, the play of a game that is outwith our control.
That is why I wrote the book I did back then, and buried world peace within it. After all, a book called world peace and how to get there is only going to attract a certain type of reader. The plan was to immerse it in a text, so much fiction and fact, and accidentally, almost, a reader may come across a section and wonder, that is all, wonder. And slowly, different parts would coallesce in people’s heads, influencing their daily behaviour perhaps, perhaps an experiential night thrown in here or there, and slowly the social objects we are used to might be replaced with more organic forms, forms contiguous with our being, less mechanical and automatic, more human and surprising.

The writing of this has been challenging. There is hardly anything there, hardly even an impression of people. I have always found it hard to gossip. In fact, I just can’t manage it. Something’s missing in my brain. So, in writing, I can’t just talk about my people. When I do talk about people it is because I am engaging someone and for whatever reason an incident pops into my head and so it is related. And we are in the unusual position of this book and I should be able to address Wendy. But to do so would mean bringing your life come to the fore, and the various trials you are undergoing right now, and that is not for public consumption, and it should be you talking. Thus, between not participating in gossip, and not having a real relationship to relate to, I find it hard to simply describe my family and friends I grew up with. After all, why? Why should I describe them? What would be the point? You don’t know them, after all.

Which begs the question, why write about it at all? Why has my mind settled on this event to put into dark relief my family and old friends?

Let’s look at the idea itself for a moment. When going to a party, we need to know when, where, and perhaps the purpose of it. 2020 was the date, the world was the place, and peace the purpose. Let’s take each of these in turn.

2020 seemed like a good date from the beginning of the millennium, a decade a head, a generation. 2020 also refers to normal visual acuity at 20 feet distance. As more of us start thinking about the future outwith our work parameters, we need a way for us compare and contrast them. 2020 seemed like a nice date to hang our shared visions on. I mapped out some space of what needs to be covered if it is going to anything close to a realistic, if the party is actually going to happen by then.

The location of the world may sound large, but it simply meant an invitation to participate at a whole-system, global level. We are all involved. It is not an exclusive party. Since the 60’s we’ve had photographs of the planet, this one singular globe, and we have a choice now of shifting from making a home somewhere on this planet, to making a home of the planet.

And the third part, purpose, hangs on a suitably open and vague word, peace. What does it mean? What do we think might be practical by 2020? Here is the challenge. It is not a request for a definition, nor is it a request to imagine something fantastical, as if we are all going to be wandering around with white robes and praying to the wonder of the world. Instead it invites a process of collaboration as each of us marries our idealism to what is practically possible. From my own experience of self-organising in my classes and the strong roots of my upbringing, I extrapolated the potential social change if we switched from trusting external authorities towards mutual, peer-to-peer networks like family and friends.

That was it. 2020worldpeace. Simple enough for any child to play. It was not a vision in itself, but an invitation. The chances that we might be able to pull it together by 2020 were tiny, but mathematically speaking, possible. It just depended on how many people “see” the date. What I found was that my friends and family didn’t have 2020 vision, more like 2010, perhaps 2015. Naturally, then, they placed this idea “in me” which I have gone into in some length in this book is a mistake. The idea is something between, not in a person, just like tango, Go, and all the exercises, practices, games described throughout this book. As we approach the date, more people will see the year 2020 as an opportunity or us to align. I just happened to see it in 2000, that was all. It wasn’t a personal thing.

That was the insight, or rather the “outsight”, the perception of a social object we might be able to create. What did it mean to me to put this idea to rest? It meant I had to put down this beautiful idea. This thought motivated me. It allowed me to operate as if we are already connected, we are already part of a large family. Of course, we are, it is just that most people think we are not due to the confusion of so many distinctions and categories we carry around in our heads and put into play in our daily behaviours. To give up on this deeply connected level, was and will continue to be, a difficult thing to do. It is like intentionally imposing self-denial, or we-denial. That it has been my friends and family, the people who contributed to the strength of my home roots, that have contributed to this is a double-bind that is inescapable. They are innocent in it, as I was when the idea of 2020 came to me. I responded to it, they didn’t. That is all. But it is a spiritually challenging task, and should I survive this shock by the year 2020, I am sure the condition of the world will torture my mind with images and thoughts of “what could have been”, something I shall have to take adequate precaution to contain, possibly with a vow of silence, probably in a monastery.

But what does is mean now, and what does it mean when I interact with who I love and have loved me? When I see them, we can be civil enough, they are all well disciplined in the arts of denial, which is fine with me because we can get along nicely. The problem occurs when we talk about anything close to the condition of the world, or if they wish to press upon me their versions to justify what happened. When this happens, I can not help but confront them, assert my experience. If I don’t, they will continue with their mistaken impressions, and that runs contradictory to my deepest principles -- to risk confrontation in the pursuit of truth, in this case, the relative truth of subjective experience. It is a fine line, requiring a sharp edge, and I have had years of practice wielding it for the betterment of others, cutting away self-delusion and so on, with kids for example.

The wisdom, if there is any in this section, is that I must learn to trust my family and old friends deeper. There is a buddhist story where a girl becomes pregnant and blames the local monk. The family turn up, blame the monk for ruin of their name, and give the baby to the monk, who simply says in response, Is that so? Months pass, the monk is treated with disrespect, received hardly any alms to eat, and takes care of the baby. Eventually the girl admits it was not he monk who made her pregnant but a young man in the village. The family turn up effusive with apologies, and lay gifts for the monk and ask for forgivenes, to which the monk responds, Is that so?, in exactly the same manner, while returning the baby. He had to trust that she would come to terms with her deception. The story is not to match what hapened, because my family and friends have not done anything bad, they just didn’t act with respect to 2020. The story matches what they continue to do as a consequence, the negative ramifications of inaction, the projection of justification. If I do not attempt to stop their projection myself, then I must trust that my friends and family will stop stop themselves. And I can build on my acceptance that I was wrong to think of 2020, that they were right to pass it by, so that one day a more appropriate solution may come to us collectively.

This is the single most important factor that prevents the true power of family and childhood friends from being realised in the world: inhibiting projection within the family. This allows us to see our brothers and sisters, parents and children as we are, rather than treating them as who they were. And because families naturally generate a wide range of personalities and interests, the recognition of such diversity with the undeniable unity of blood, is one of the strongest lessons for sustainable living on this planet that we are all given free. This lesson of diversity in unity begins with parents as their children grow into adulthood, and should end with children recognising the equality of their parents when they reach adulthood. We live in a world which is highly categorised, highly fractured, and the projections of media and politics and academia are pervasive and powerful, and so it is not surprising that this lesson gets lost in the confusion.

So, finally, perhaps I can now address those who seek wisdom, as Wendy has implied. This is not a general book of interest, but will attract only those people who are already interested in “Wisdom” as a topic. And to seek wisdom indicates a certain kind wisdom already. So I might address the wise amongst us. Let us pretend, at least for one section, that we are wise. From someone writing a book called wisdom, a foolhardy task if ever there was, it has been challenging. I have had to deal with so many mental objects, and keep at bay the social objects that press in on us. But if there is any validity to the observation that there must be some wisdom in a person who picks up this book, then it is this reader I may address. For this reader may see the wisdom of what I say, and in their reading is wisdom. It would be a mistake in attributing the wisdom to me, a generosity I feel I am not worthy of, and in fact, it is a mistake that can lead to the kind of social object that we wish to avoid.

It is not what is written but what is read that matters. This is the way all my books have been written. I only hope this is the way that they are read.

[is this the beginning of the next section or the end of this one?]

So, finally, perhaps I can address those who seek wisdom, as Wendy has suggested. And to seek it indicates a certain kind wisdom already. So I might address the wise amongst us. Let us pretend, at least for one section, that we are wise. From someone writing a book called wisdom, a foolhardy task if there ever was one, it has been difficult. I have had to deal with so many mental objects, and keep at bay the social objects that press in on us. But if there is any validity to the observation that there must be some wisdom in a person who picks up this book, then it is to this reader I may address. For this reader may see the wisdom of what I say, and in their reading is wisdom. It would be a mistake in attributing the wisdom to me, a generosity I feel I am not worthy of, and in fact, it is a mistake that can lead to the kind of social object that we wish to avoid.
It is not what is written but what is read that matters. This is the way all my books have been written. I only hope it is the way that they are read.

[is this the beginning of the next section or the end of this one?]

roots

2011-07-30T17:22:00.000-07:00

2011 0730 1842
If we are all actors, of a sort, “all the world’s a stage”, and if the buddhists are right, we are taken in by the illusion of our own minds, then perhaps we may get a clue of our future if see how actual actors age. Many who aspire to be actors, don’t make it, and they end up relegated to acting out a humdrum existence without the attention they seek. Thankfully only a few people find no stage whatsoever, whatever work they do goes unacknowledged, a mismanaged cleaner perhaps, and they play an equally miserable role at home, cleaning up after the kids, their partner never demonstrative of love and so the children do the same. A very poor quality of life, unacknowledged by anyone, an object.
Meanwhile, a few actors survive at the edges, supporting their minor parts and amateur productions with jobs, living a double life, a painful one, in the twilight of their dreams. Do you know anyone like this? Unfulfilled, unsatisfied with their lot, grumbling and moaning at their lot. Even when they are centre stage, they resent the limited scope of it, perhaps a parent commanding the family around them, or an aging manager well down the rung on the corporate ladder.
But of course there are some actors who actually manage to scrape by, living a relatively stable life, a regular job, playing supporting roles, never enjoying the limelight but for a rare mention in a critic’s review, a dutiful audience member where the rest of us do not even acknowledge the person behind the act and certainly can not recognise the name. These are those successful amoungst us, those happy parents and employees, whose role is determined, a kitchen sink drama kind of life, nothing too out of the ordinary, nothing exceptional. And when praise does come, a comment of love from a child, a positive remark from a boss, like a jewel caught in just the right light, a private luminescence is enough. This is the norm, I think, where most of us live. Happy to play our part as children to our parents, parents to our children, brothers and sisters, employees, customers, citizens. Sometimes the part demands a loud bellow of indignation, a rebelion, at others a quiet whisper of resignation. Most times we take our part seriously, our work after all takes up most of our time.
Of the few actors that meet with real celebrity, what of them? Flash in the pans, one hit wonders, who make enough money to surf a lifetime of lesser roles, a character too big for the producers and directors and fellow actors, and too small to regain their former glory. Do you know people like this, and when I mean people, I mean normal people acting our the lives as we are all used to? Their egos too large for the part, pontificating on this or that, their sense of self-importance often eclipsing the pregnancy of a moment? Touched with importance, some official position perhaps or some accidental heroism, they carry this with them everywhere. They are often easy to spot when they are in the presence of children, taking the limelight even there, churlish if they can not.
And the few actors who meet with such success that they live on the stage, such love and admiration follow them that not even the doubts behind the scenes can darken their performances? They carry little with them through life, shedding roles easily, no worry of the future, a wardrobe of characters offered to them daily. Who are these people amoungst us? Who lead such full lives, so busy, that they are always on. Perhaps the president of a country, always in the public eye? No time to reflect, life has been a preparation for this continuous press of social engagement. Even their children and friends deal with them differently, always on, always luminescent. For if there is any darkness in such people, and in their manner with others, there must be a supporting cast of assassins to cut short any voice of dissent, any misrepresentation of what can only be a consummate performance. Our leaders, permanent, fixed, like stars, so far removed from daily life and yet visible from all corners. They have become social objects, and people talk of them so intimately and exhaustively, they are emptied of any humanity.

But what if we are not actors at all? What if this metaphor has been driven so deep into us that we take it for granted? That we are so immersed in a world of representation that we actually do act out our lives, unaware that life could have been lived fully, presently, without guile or subterfuge, without hiding from ourselves, without masks?
I was lucky. I had the role of teacher of teenagers. This was the social edge where the adoption of the role is questioned, and in questioning the role of teacher and pupil, so all roles are questioned, that of child and parent for example or citizen and state. I always liked the kids who kicked back, because of the cracks in their family life at home, or because they had met with the cruelty of peers and had found a power to fight back.
I liked them because they were alive. And I would meet them in this state, between roles. I did not answer them as a teacher normally would, nor as an adult sometimes. I saw them as leaders, as their peers often did, though their excesses often led them to self-detrimental and socially disruptive behaviours. The trick was for the rest of the class to see what was being exposed, the hypocrisy that they were aware of at some level of their existence, whether it was the juxtaposition of no to violence in the playground and yet war on the news, or the lesson of fair sharing and yet people were clearly starving, and perhaps the most recognised: the imbalance of respect as their maturity went recognised at home or abroad.
Given the freedom to play in the space between roles, there were always a few kids who attempted to reinforce the roles they had been taught, that they had thoughtlessly adopted. They argued with me that the world should run this way or that, I remember one boy even at logger heads with me because I wanted to play a game. Imagine, a teacher wants to play a game, the rest of the class were up for it, and this boy was taking the “adult” role and being serious. There was more to the drama, of course, he was making a play for the interest of a girl friend, he was threatened by power I was threatening to unleash amoungst his peers: he wanted to exert authority, to maintain the status quo where he had power, a bullish quality. The more the argument continued, the more people laughed of course, after all, he was arguing about playing a game in a maths class!
He deserves more attention. He happened to walk by while I was having a conversation with a colleague, and he showed some striking sign of disrespect. I made fun of his swagger as he walked away, saying how much a man he was. This riled him, he swore back at me, and then would not return when we called him to. Another teacher’s head popped out in the corridor and reported his name. Everybody knew about him, he was trouble. Because of the public display of disrespect, I had to go to the office to report him and on my way there, we crossed paths again. I opened a door for him politely, and in a moment of confusion he thanked me. By the time he had reached the other end of the corridor, he had thought about it, and he turned round to and told me he wanted to talk. As it happened, there were two sixth year girls seated on the floor and one of them reprimanded him. If it had come from anyone other than other students, these older girls, these women, then we would have lost him. As it happens, it was perfect, and he dutifully came walking down the corridor.
I asked him where he was meant to be, and after his initial suspicion, we ended up walking and talking. I acknowledged how hard it was for him to become a man, where in some cultures there is a ritual and the responsibility of manhood is signified by other men. I candidly told him there was no need to compete with me, certainly not before his girlfriends, and in fact there was no need to compete with other men. They were doing their job. It was a matter of mutual respect, that was all. I put words to his experience, as I had seen it, and he seemed happy enough about this that he turned up in my classroom sometimes when I had a free period just to say hello. He was like that, wandering the school during lessons. He was that kind of kid.
In this case, I helped this young man who was finding it difficult to locate where and how he should be asserting himself. It was an unusual experience for the both of us. Normally I avoid the complexities of gender and dive straight for what it is to be a human being. You can find more altercations like this in Inspiring Change.

When the buddhist say we are taken in by the illusion, they are not talking about the roles we play in society, such as teacher or parent. Well, they include this, but this is a shallow level of appllcation to the truth that they are attempting to convey. When they talk of the illusion, they mean the neuro-biological level, where we respond to our senses and not an event or thing out there.
Let’s leave the buddhists out of this, for now. We are just talking about roles we play. You probably let it slip that I equated teacher and parent. In what way are these roles? There’s two ways of taking them. In one way, we can say they are job descriptions, and indeed, one can find the job desription of a teacher listed on government sites, and the sad thing is, you can also find specifications for a good parent. Things have got so baad that we do indeed need parenting lessons. And considering how badly mathematics is taught, I dread to think.
The other way of thinking about them is not as job discriptions at all, and not even to think about them as being categories. People who happen to teach, people who happen to be parents. A parent is merely a descriptive way of pointing at the relationship between a blood mother and father with their children. This relationship. Seen from the kid’s point of view, they are parents. It doesn’t matter to a kid what category this might be part of. They know nothing of categories when they are a baby. These people are more like gods than parents at that age.
Kids have the relationship they have. That’s it. Sure, they may engage other kids even as young as three and there is some kind of comparison going on, but only in the sense of a mucus of words, remember that we are talking about a two year old when wording is magical. Comparisons are made only when there is something wrong, like the parent is missing, or if they are being maltreated in serious ways. With most of us, the differences between the way we are brought up is only incidentally noticed.
Ok, maybe I didn’t notice. I never met my friend’s parents until late into teenage years. I was always amazed at how tidy the living room was, and the quiet sterility of the dining room. They hardly felt lived in. I seldom visited a another kitchen. Most interaction happened at school, in classes and at sports, and in my own home when my friends came over to play some computer games, for example. they experienced what it was like to be in a different house, and they interacted with my parents, mostly my mother.
My mother once asked my friends if they wanted any biscuits. My friends just looked around sheepishly one another, and they pointed out that she had begun her sentence in english and finished it in portuguese. I hadn’t noticed, and neither did my mother of course, and she laughed. That was her response most of the time whenever mistakes were made, laughter. It wasn’t a major mishap, my friends got their biscuits, and I inherited the ability to not hear words, but the meaning that was conveyed. Turned out to be very useful when teaching. I remember this kid attempting to put to words an idea he had, I encouraged him to say more since I hadn’t quite got it, until I was able to reflect back his idea in more refined words, and the amazement, pleasure, energy, satisfaction was palpable. It did not matter who spoke, or how it was said, it seemed to me. What was important was that the meaning was conveyed in some way and we both had the same idea. A miracle.

We all have roles, and we all have stories. That’s what we are told, these days. To compete for out attention, we are told the story about an african suffering from drought, the bagladeshi women who works on a fair-trade tea plantation. We buy a goat and get updates of the personal lives affected. Names of real people.
As if we didn’t know. This continuing trend of dragging us into representational worlds is a fool’s path. It will never compete with the latest games or films. Now 3D, now augmented reality. Our hearts will never be touched via a technology that has already made us numb. That’s how our brains work: a nerve cell in our butt screams that it is feeling pressure as we sit down, thus we come to understand we as indeed sitting down, and the nerve cell continues to shriek with the pressure, but our brains just turn down the volume. That’s why we won’t change via a medium that we are used to. Take film: people ran screaming out of the auditorium when the Lumiere brothers first screened their films in 1896, the first action movie consisted of a train heading for the camera. Now we have 3D films that invite us into an immersive experience. Soon we will really be immersed in a virtual world, we will end up in a hall of mirrors without knowing the way out. It is a little like the frog who does not jump out of the boiling water since the temperature increases too gradually to alarm it. We will be cooked in our own imaginary juices.
Is there any way to escape this? We have asked this question before, but I can not remember the answer. A way out of the representational trap. Here we are in a book. A technology hundreds of years old. We are doomed.

My mother is real. Please believe me. Yes, I have told a couple of stories about her, but this does not capture. Just like a photo does not capture her. I don’t want to represent her. I don’t want to contain her here. I would only have some words, words refering to a person I know, words you would have to compile a new person, from bits of people you have known, perhaps from bits of your mother.
This is no way to honour my mother.
And she is not a relationship to me. Mother. Such a word repeated so that it has a set of meanings. I challenged my friend who just could not forgive her mother. I have heard a buddhist saying that everyone has been our mother at some time in the endless cycle of rebirth. Ah, what purposes we put our mothers to!
We know the science. From a single cell, doubling, specialising, carried in my mother. Born, swaddled, held, carried, always nearby, hugged, always loved. And reaching a certain age, a social parturition, no less painful than birth, perhaps the equivalent emotional pain to the physical pain endured at birth? I was the last to leave the home. I did not know what this meant to her, how could I know? I visited, and accepted her love, always on tap, no resentment, the efforts of putting me, taken for granted as a child. I returned to live with my parents a few time in life, due to my various exploration of the soul. I even tried to thank her for giving birth to me, for bringing me up, for everything she had done. And by everything, the countless feeding, cleaning, caring, administering, help. She could not accept it, of course. I was the gift. She was not doing things for me, for I was of herself. It can not be thanked, of course. It is so vast a service. No economic equation has yet been able to include the cost of the reproduction and care of the next “workforce”; we could calculate the childcare costs, but what payment for gestation, for birth?
Gah, I distract myself again with another idea, another social observation -- my mother is real! The living I have is from her, of her, and it is not a story, not a representation of anything else. Do you know how she answered when I thanked her? The only thanks she wants is to know I am happy. It sounds like a platitude, a clique. It is not. It is a genuine sentiment. My happiness is her happiness.
This is love. We can classify it, this is mother’s love, but this would be to take it in the wrong direction. I know this love. I knew how deeply rooted I was in my mother’s love. Unconditional love. Never in question. Never rejected. I tried to offer her something, to treat her like an adult, to help her regain some balance. She has made her motherhood the definition of who she is. Indeed, a life’s work, her children. But it is not her entirely, and I attempted to give her the space to be an adult, an equal in my eyes. Of course she is my mother, nothing can change this fact, but I saw her as a person, as someone independent, and thought it wise that we both have a sense of this before she leaves, before she dies.
I was lucky. I was aware of how lucky I was. So, when I hit trouble in my late twenties, and by trouble I mean the suffering of the world, I was aware that I had some of the deepest roots a man could have. Whatever storm would take place, I had a chance of weathering it. Not just weather it, but in the glance of leaf and direction of branch, I could in some small way avert some small part of this storm. And were there enough of us trees, directing the wind, so the storm would not wash away the undergrowth, the soil, and a new day may break, a new sun.
She was the strength in me. This is not a story, though it sounds like it. I would like to say something that relates to your own mother, to know you have experienced the same, but we live indifficult times, and the love we have, even as innocent as a mother’s for her own children, has become part of the confusion. So many films, so many books, so many stories and representations, and our real, live mother, the one who gave us life, becomes as distant as a satellite. I seldom see her, something she accepts of all her children, and when I do, it is not enough. Only living with her will suffice, will repay the service. But things have not gone well, and I have not been able to honour her love.
My father’s love was also unconditional. He was there, always. It took a different form, admittedly. He drove me to football and hockey games at inter-school matches. He drilled me with his intelligence at the dinner table, though I must say it was my brother who got the heat of it, both intellectually and the pressures of being the first son. I was the youngest of four, and he remained fairly distant, giving me plenty of space to make my own decisions. He led by example, as my mother did, though I never saw his day to day practice as I saw my mother’s. He fought, that was his manner, he fought for us out there in the business world. He said it himself. He had fought his way through life. His own father had left when he was a child, and he took up work at the age of eleven. The force of his mind was severe. He was never sick. “It’s all in the mind,” he would say.
When I hit the trouble of the world, I knew my roots were strong in him too. He had taken up the responsibility of father where his father had not. He had to learn on the job. He made mistakes, more with my brother than with me, but I think that is true for all first time fathers. He was battle hardened by the time I became aware of the subtleties of him, how his manner deflected the slights of the world, how he turned hardship into adventure. I was thankful of his lessons, those unintentional lessons, the lessons of an exemplary father. Though my roots grew from him too, he was responsible for my branches, the direction of my growth, my overal shape.
In this regard, my brother was highly influential. Mathematics, awareness, sensitivity, these things were honed qualities in him, and as a brother eight years older, I was blessed to him as an example too. He was more conscious of his influence, at least in later years when I reached towards the end of adolescence. He invited me into his circle of friends so much older in life experience, practiced adults, they were all generous for taking me in. They treated me as an extension of my brother, never as an independent person. This had mixed benefits, a certain degree of respect, and avoiding a direct confrontation which would reveal my youth and inexperience, things I could possibly not know about, protecting me or them I am not sure.
My older sister I had little contact with until later in life. She was busy with her, marrying young eventually bringing up three kids by herself in a city miles away from her family. My other sister, only two years older, was much closer. I was a brat to her, as young boys are sometimes, despite the obvious care she had for me. It is taken for granted at that age, and whereas mother gets some obvious sign of gratitude with hugs and so on, an older sister is just a temporary stand in, in some sense, and got little credit.
I don’t want to represent these people. I don’t want to relate little experiences, as if to sum them up. My descriptions are almost as void of detail as my description of ideas. I hope we find a purpose for this to justify it, otherwise I feel as if I have done my family an injustice with this glancing account. I honour them as they live and breath, and their futures concern me. What little I report of them, the more they are in my heart and mind, not so much as representations, but as parts of who I have become, my roots, my trunk, my branches. That is why I do not write with pop-up descriptive verve, nor have I the ability to invent characters. I do not represent people in my head, I carry no model of them. They lie dormant in my memories, and living in my presence.
So too with my school friends, every one of them. Jason’s punk, his irreverence, his rocous laugh, his cutting jokes. Keith with his sensitivity, his gentle care, his inclusive laugh. Mike with his sardonic wit, his pithy put-downs, his keen intellect. Alan’s self-consciousness, his over-bearing alter-ego, his peculiar manic laughter. Greg with his pedantic attention to detail, his myopic concern, his courage.

The dynamics between us, like the dynamics in our family, were too detailed and sticky, so enmeshed in the experience, it was as if we were part of an organic thing, an on-going happening without beginning or end. Roles? Too liquid, shifting, the separation of who we were was not complete. Actors? The play was being written, directed, by each of us, for one another and ourselves. We were like galaxies in formation, bending space-time as we exploded from the big-bangs of our own births.
Aye, I am them. I merged with aspects of them when we were in person, as we grew as children with my family and as teenagers with my friends. We adopted aspects of one another when we parted, bringing out the best of what we admired. I still bear their shape. I need not represent them, I never did, I can not now, and I never will. I never manipulated them, never asked them to be other than who they were. Which is why it was so easy. Aren’t family and friends all like this?
Because of the decisions I made, they have become more distant than I would have liked. Partly because in my twenties I was pursuing the standard trajectory we expect of young males, to go out in the world, make friends, start a career, explore relationships and find a wife. Family had little to do with it, and they were distributed throughout the country in different cities. But when I hit the world at the end of my twenties, around the turn of the millennium, my thirties would turn out to be quite different, in terms of the standard trajectory of life. I found myself in a strange orbit, the horizon of which was the year 2020.

[strangely vacuous wrt family second half... what do you think?
When I returned to earth and eagerly shared what I had seen, they ]

making love

2011-07-30T09:33:00.001-07:00

2011 0730 1358 making love
Tracing an arc over skin. My awareness at the tips of my fingers, the tracing of a curve over the skin, curved itself over flesh and bone... no, just the surface, the curved surface. Like a standing wave, like a still of flowing water, the curves. And knowing that she is there too, her mind below the surface, just beneath my fingers. So, our mind meet in the motion of fingertip and skin touch, either side of the divide, where nerves meet. It does not work if you are still, there is little sensation, though stopping is good too. The mind dissolves away from the touch, sinks back into itself, and then as soon as we move, there again we are brought together.
Where do we exist at that moment as a finger traces a curve over a shoulder, a hip, under the concave hollow of throat, the soft hush of belly? A scientist may say we are still living on either side of our bodies, my feeling the sensation through my fingers, she feeling the sensation through her skin. No, not at all. We are there, at the touching of skin. We are this mutual thing, the world has gone, bodies have gone, there is only this shared dance, an intimacy of touch.
Forget the drive of sex, the obliteration of self, the zero gravity of mindlessness, leave that to when it comes. For now, only the faintest touch, a breath of mind keeping us awake. She is there, beneath my finger tip, the spirals traced the spirals of movement in her mind, simultaneously the actual movement of her mind as embodied as if she were dancing. A single point dancing, then two or three as finger tips touch and swap place and we are following another fingertip, another path, like skaters gliding on one or another foot. And then the palm, a surface, we swell, our presence strengthens, we are drawn together more solidly, a heaviness to us, a pressing. And then as surprising and inexplainable, the lightest of touch, to finger tips once again, and the spirit falls back into itself, the comfort of sleep like a pillow, hanging on to consciousness through this single line traced, this point drawn across the skin.
I love this sensation. It is not the raw feeling of nerves signal from the tips of my fingers or the palm of my hand, but the response, how the murmur rises from the body, the languid thrill. We extend from this touch, this moment on a curve, is the same arc of breathing, an involuntary turn of the head, a resettling of the body, a new sensation of leg against leg. The surface of our skin becomes a mutual floor upon which our minds dance. Not merely a single point of contact, or two, but a whole ridge of length as arm meets her back, lifting her, the surface of chest against chest, an ovation of sense. The heavier the touch, from fingertip glance to palm press to firm grip, so mind takes shape, edge-like thin, limitlessly flat, and then embodied, right here right now, this animal.
Making love or having sex? Masturbation is having sex, taking your sex and gratifying yourself. This is pretty close to taking someone else’s sex and gratifying yourself. Mutual masturbation is not making love.
I am a bit of a prude. A good friend used to be an art model, so public nakedness was not an issue for her. Because of my skin condition, I have been very conscious of my appearance, and certainly when it comes to revealing your whole body. So, to be naked with another is a very intimate thing, for me. It is not a body thing, it is a perception thing. To be accepted in the eyes of another, is one of the ingredients of making love. Acceptance is not required for having sex.
To have sex. I know what that is. It is bare, raw, animal. I have not let the animal of me determine a relationship. Only once have I had a one night stand, and really it was because I was driven nearly mad by my hormones. I tried to engage the woman over the next few days, but found it next to impossible. Her personality, mannerisms, attitude, did not match, and neither was she that interested in me. Another disinguishing feature of making love: it is personal, we wish to transcend the skin and touch the personality, to drink in the person, to savour them.
I have been lucky. With my first love, the drive of my sex could not match the love I felt for her. The stronger the drive, the most animal, remained within the bounds of affection. It was a million miles away from teenage masturbation. This was the expression of love. This was the first outing of sex with other, the mystery of woman, this was mutual acceptance, willing, where all the daytime chat, the glances, the times apart sweetening her presence the more, this was the world contained here in the making of love, or inversely, a gateway of our mind to explore the world in a different way, in such an unknowably different way, through her. Here were words, here were phrases, here was an endless book of flesh and blood, and smile and tears, the sharpness and gentleness of mind. Ah yes, for a year, first love....
I was careful to not go around trying to repeat it, or recreate it. I entered into a sexual relationship after this, with a french woman who had a boyfriend back in france. We would meet, have some tea, made sure both were well, and then we’d turn to the bedroom to begin. Sometimes we didn’t even make it that far, and on one occasion a key in the lock of hall made us leap from the floor and crash through the bedroom door, thumping it behind us and we would all be still, us two holding our breath with embarrassment, my flatmate key in hand wondering what had just happened. It was graphically sexual. The beast of me was let loose. We ravaged one another. We screamed through our bodies. We swallowed the moon. We tore ourselves open. It was visceral. And all entirely mutual.
This was having sex, and yet within a gossamer of acceptance with no danger to anyone. I met her boyfriend at the end of her year’s visit. I was surprised at his gentle nature, and wondered what she saw in him and how they made love. That was it, they made love, with all of themselves. She chose him, it was clear to see, she loved him. It was nice to acknowledge this, from the outside, that making love was more powerful than sex, however powerful and guttural the calling.

Pornography can capture the act of sex. There is so much of it now, so readily accessible on the net. I have no idea how anyone makes money from it, but then again I have little idea how Facebook or Google does since I personally never click on advertisements. The most basic of sites aggregates free videos from the net of whatever taste you may have, but ultimately it comes down to a lot of sucking and fucking. If the theory about the slippery slope of drugs is true, then many young minds will have got caught on a similar slide to various forms of depravity. Again, in this regard, I have never pursued any imaginative course, what with costumes and role play such as doctor and nurse or teacher and pupil, nor played around with gadgets, either sex toys or performance enhancers; perhaps I am too old for the former and not old enough for the latter.
Pornography works, at least in the sense that it arouses the animal. At least it works for me, speaking as a man. I always had the impression that women worked differently. Clearly we are biased the most by our intimate experiences, and so I had the impression that men are touched easily by external appearances and women less so. My simplistic view led me to think that men were stimulated from the outside in, from looks to heart, whereas women were touched in the heart and accepted whatever physical form a man took. Men were threatened by the emotional relationships their partners exhibited with others, whereas woman were more threatened by the physical relationships of their partners. But it is an area of great diversity. Sometimes we fall immediately, whether for physical form or the intensity of presence or the exhibit of social power. Sometimes it creeps up on us, and we find ourselves in love. These dynamics of the heart seem so far away from pornography, unless one things of one’s partner a possession, a thing owned, a thing to have sex with; in which case, live is subordinated to an extreme like of a thing.
I have never quite understood moves, myself. Discrete positions. I have seen enough pornography to understand the standard positions, though I have no idea what names of them might be. Again, I can not associate them with my experience. Of course similar positions occur, but they are part of something meaningful. Do I have favourite positions? It is not a question I ask myself. It would be like asking do I have favourite personalities? Surely people are who they are, and you take them as they are. So, when we have the grace of engaging with them, different aspects of ourselves are brought to bear, a new combination perhaps, new words appear between us, new thoughts. This is the living edge, between us, regardless of our favourite moves, words, thoughts, aspects of being may be.
So, to take lessons in making love, is absurd. I mean, some people may benefit from a hint here or there, and I am sure an observed position has inspired itself to appear in my love making, and this is no bad thing. But lesson after lesson, today we are going to learn the arm across the back and flip onto front move. Absurd. And yet this happens with tango. This happens with maths. This happens with all manner of things.
Take kissing. This is a joy. You can tell a lot from kissing, can’t you? It is not merely the labial sensation, a thing of nerves and electrical impulses. It is not just the flavour, like we were tasting a vanilla icecream or a soft chocolate bar. No, this is a mutual event, a conjoin process. Our entire being can come to bear in a kiss, however brief. It can linger in the mind like a single flower on a dusty prairie. We find ourselves at play, at the choice of movement, the slide of pleasure, the nip of a bite, the lock of teeth. Not tried that yet? It is rare for the mood to rise mutually, for teeth against teeth to find the force of a bite locked. It is often too powerful to be contained within the radius of mouth and tongue.
And so, in the touch of tongues, the pliant firmness of lips, in the gentle caress of our skin and in the sensual unlocking of our bodies, we find ourselves liberated. No lessons, only learning. No judgement either, for that way leads to comparison and isolation; harsh become the passing years on those that judge in such vulnerable and innocent moments. No judgement, only acceptance. And so we divest ourselves in our love-making: we enjoy the body, we bathe in the emotional waves of mixed personality, and we surrender ourselves to one another. And if we are lucky, we transcend it all, our body feeling mind obliterated all at once in some timeless moment.
And where are we, in this? What do we become? Where all the argument of identity we so fiercely guard, our independence? This is the miracle of love, and we find its refracted form in friends and family. These two are nothing to do with having sex, and all that is left to us to conclude is that, without animal drive, they are the stuff of making of love.

seasoned summary: what's all this about?

2011-07-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

2011 0729 1655 seasoned summary: what’s all this about?
There’s more to look back as you get older. When we were children we were stuck in one gear, fast forward. We gradually slowed, and then there were those hiccups when life turns inside out in an instant, the slow torture as you bleed back to life, mostly at the hands of those we love. I was lucky, my childhood went along pretty uneventfully, with unconditional love from both parents though expressed in different ways, my mother’s care and attention, my father’s respectful distance, the two essential ingredients for a young plant to grow. I delayed relationships until university, and I had three long term relationships throughout my twenties, first love, mature love and spiritual love. Always looking forwards, always outwards.
But I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s leave that to when we are old, sitting under a tree in the town square, a warm summer sun reminding us of the fullness of life, when our hearts still beat with enough vigour, the fruits of our mind ripe for the plucking. Then we shall reminisce with one another. We shall be beyond words then. We shall sit together and wordlessly review our history, resigned to our audience of one. So many details, so many relationships, so many moments. We shall be surprised as they arise in our minds, and we shall shake our heads and smile, what were we thinking?
Oh, I don’t want to talk about that either! How about flip flops? Of all the footwear I have had in my life, the most impressive have been flip flops. For three years I wore the same pair of cheap flip flops. Incredible, elegant, simple design, hardy, allow your feet to breath and spread naturally. Honestly, a wonder. If I recommend anything, I recommend flip flops.
I am not one for giving advice. I am not a fan of advice generally. It smacks too much of opinion, of words formulated around second hand information, a plastic model, which should probably not have been invented in the first place. Although you encouraged me to write more advice when we hit a rare patch of it a while back, I don’t think I will. I can recommend various directions so that people might experience things for themselves, the depth of tango, the abstract patterns of Go, to experience near-chaotic behaviour so that they don’t just have it in their heads and some representational model, a jumbled thing of words, or even the acute precision of a mathematical description. This is as much advice as I am willing to give.
I saw a peach stone on the road yesterday. It reminded me of a trick my father showed me. When he was a kid growing up in the streets of Lisbon, they’d rub one side of the peach stone against the hard road, wearing it down till it revealed a hole to the inner core. If you shaped it just right, you could blow across it and you had yourself a whistle. A life rooted in this kind of experience is quite different from one where you hanker for plastic toys that are bought for you. Or when he showed me how to make a “tank” out of a single cotton reel, a match stick and an elastic band. No need to look back in history, there are kids in the world now who are making such toys now out of bits and bobs that they can scrounge from their environment. And yet these kids are growing up in a world with computers the size of a phone which foreigners carry around with them.
Ten years ago I lived for a year in Crete. I had an incredible time engaging nature, from noticing the sole of a snail’s foot, the tiny waves pulsing as it crawled across a window pane; floating in the sea, mesmerised by the iridescent edge of cilia pulsing in the sunlight on this transparent, flat thing the size of my little finger; playing with an octopus, its tentacles looping around my fingers, or hugging on to my shoulder as I swam. Incredible memories. But since then, I have not had the same luck. While in thailand for three months, the sea was a murky green filled with algae, a tinning factor at one end of the bay had cleaned the sea of fish; on one of the few clear days, I came across a huge jellyfish while I was swimming, the largest I have encountered, the size of my body, its tentacles trailing to invisible trills behind it. And while here in Madeira, although the water is clear and there are a few shoals of small fish, my attention has not been caught by anything except on the first few days where I saw what looked like an underwater bat, unfolding its way through the sea, to hand against a rock, black and alien. The marine biologists talk about a massive reduction in bio-diversity due to over fishing, pollution and mere proximity to human dwellings. There are a handful of untouched reefs in the world sporting the abundance of life the sea was accustomed to. A handful.
It is getting harder to find a quiet spot, cheap enough to live and close to an abundant and diverse nature. The mouth of the valley here at Machico has concrete from ridge to ridge, with a hotel at one end, a library beside it (can you guess how many people visit that?), a few restaurants and an artificial golden sand beach, and a sewage works at the other end where the marina is. And Machico was the first port of Madeira, landed in 1419. A friend Georgio told me that thirty years ago they were carting supplies up and down the ridges on their backs, mostly everyone was working in the terraced fields; today it is a sprawling town, a maze of roads, cars everywhere, two supermarkets, and the old church at the heart of it with its magnetically powered bells ringing every half-hour.

You may be wondering where I am going with all this. I am not. I am wandering. I am letting go. I wanted to write a summary of what we have covered. A summary, nice word that. In our minds, somewhere, recollections, mostly written documents, bullet points, school paper and pen, now blocks of electronic text, endless summaries for teachers to check, reports that only a few pairs of eyes will ever read. Is this what crosses your mind with the word, summary? Or the mistaken interpretation, grassy fields, warm air, perhaps the recent description of the old people below the tree in the central square I gave earlier? Summery. These thoughts are definitely passing through our heads, somewhere in our minds, the fraying and braiding of meaning. Punctuation, words, phrases, concepts, the endless flow of it all, and somehow we fix things from it, hammer out words, typographically lay out our logic, and reach some kind of conclusion, a sum total of our experience, a summary.
As writing experiences go, this has been some ride. The multiple contents pages: four times we have taken stock of our situation and reconfigured what we shall be dealing with. The categories are all boxed out neatly, but the liquid of our thought pours then gushes and spills and trickles, so a new arrangement is attempted. We are coming to terms with this roughness, as if we are following a stream through a canyon. Not the concrete aquaducts, the plastic pipes that supply this miracle on tap. Your reading may have been like the civic plumber annoyed that the pipes are always bursting, the leaks erupting, the unruly nature of the medium; either my poor workmanship is blamed in which case that reader has long gone, or you reframed your sensibility, sided with the freedom of the water, enjoyed the burst pipe, delighting like those kids on street corners releasing the water from fire hydrants, soaking passers-by on bicycles who whoop thanks in return. No pipes now, just a stream, the untidy rambling, the wild trickling between the rocks, pooling in green wonder.
My writing is interrupted by a natural wonder! The air is full of insects. Cloudy! The air is still enough for them to make some kind of progress. Thousands of them, perhaps millions. Where did they come from? Where are the going? I am off to investigate.

They have flown on. Flying ants. And so a colony releases its swarm of ants to seed other colonies. Out of the millions, only a few will survive. So much energy, so much preparation. This is what is happening in us subconsciously: millions of distinctions, and yet only a handful play apart in maintaining the flow of our singular attention. Every second. And if we amass the seconds, we reveal more of our thinking, our distinctions, until we have the hours of a book amassed before us. So many ants. And those readers who started to catalogue them have given up, unless they are forced by some misapplied bloody mindedness on their part or some teacher’s maybe. Again, the able reader learned the trick of sliding, of seeing general shape, not the exact detail, the cloud not the individual insects.
The book has been written in this way, for sure. A kind of journalese throughout, sprinkling of details to sparkle interest, giving way to more abstract descriptions. The details serve well as objects for the mind, baubles to distract the mind, to play with. But as we moved on, I gave less details, leaving us to hang in a current of air, few solid things can hold themselves here. Hypnotic, Wendy said, and read in this way, it is. Without the encrusted detail of my own specific observations, this abstract air is filled with your own thoughts, your own memories. They may not surface directly to consciousness, but they are at play. The stream is strong, it flows, and what has been demanding for attention to follow, even though the focus is almost entirely empty, is the real object of our enquiry.
I have brought these objects of thought to our attention, but pulled from subconscious depths, they take the form of principles, abstractions, and if we are not careful, words begin to stick to them, these fine, pure things as if slivers of metal, begin to rust. That is what fills the books of academic libraries, rust. Mountains of rust. So, we have had to be cunning, light of mind, learning a way of reading that is like looking at a stream without our mind catching at things that constitute it. Certainly not words. No longer sparkly things. Whereas in the original fraying threads we had plenty of content, sparkles, a journalese, in the later sections, we began to see a reduction of these things, and yet maintain a continuous, fast free-flow.
With these damned interruptions interspersed! Every so often, these abrupt changes of direction, or levels of scale or currents of metaphor. In this case, right here and right now, can you honestly say what the last few paragraphs have been about?
This time, give yourself a moment to attempt to put it into words.
Really.

Another part of our formal journey, has been the discovery of Wendy’s reading. This has been a remarkable experience in terms of writing. We have set up skype chats and I watch Wendy read, how contiguous the flow of reading seems, the double-takes, the paragraphs that require her to go over them again, perhaps a few times. Sometimes I go back and edit them, but mostly her reading influences the further course of my writing. Not in terms of content, just form.
Sorry for talking about you in the third person, Wendy. I remember the first time I did this, and how confused I got. It hasn’t happen often since then. Only once, that I am aware of, relatively recently, in order to reflect that we were out of sync. I wonder if that worked? I believe it was the one section you have missed so far. How appropriate, it seems to me now.
In terms of content, I would like to have got more of a raise from my intentional jokes, hardly jokes but the occasional patches of dry humour. Because I got little response, those have trickled away to obscurity. Instead, whenever you laughed, it was usually because I was displaying a rather facetious attitude, even scathing sometimes, but mostly cheeky irreverence. Irreverence, I think is the word you yourself used.
I have been mostly responsible for the content of the book. This is what a summary usually consists of. But as we have subverted the structural foundation that is the contents page, so you can tell we are subverting the summary. So far, it has been a random assortment of recollections, then a sweeping, almost cyclonic, account of the form -- even the ants were sucked into revealing what we are doing. And here we land on some firm content.
Our starting point was the adoption of the psycho-social dynamic, the on-going play of the world as we experience it now. This transformed into a discrete duality, how we model the world in our heads, as opposed to the actual social machinery of social life regardless of what you or I think. Then it transformed again into the psycho-social continuum, the multi-dimensionsal model with its ends in each of us extending out to the social sea that covers the world like the weather. We found representational accounts fell short, and we turned to the minimal descriptions of by buddhist and mathematicians. This let us to wonder where these people existed on the continuum, and located buddhist at one extreme of the psycho-social continuum, and science as a social object at the other. And then we postulated the third extreme, the point between us, the moment of mutual presence whenever we meet or engage. From here, the recommendation of practices like tango, tai chi and making love, the playing of Go, and the emphasis of reading/writing, listening/talking, started to make sense, to help us reveal the uncertainty of life to one another, and thus derive greater trust through mutual experience. The final abstraction has been the three laws of subjective reality, fine slivers, much finer than the earlier iron joists that framed the psycho-social continuum and the three extremes, and the backdrop of the methodological shift, a hint to the dynamic constellation of psychic and social objects that comprise the hidden attractor in which we are caught.

It just occurs to me that you may think that I have gone back to re-read the book in order to write this section. If I had, it would look very different. It would be a compiled summary. The content would have been first, and talk of the form would also become an item of content. Clearly, at least in my writing and hopefully in your reading, we are surfing form almost entirely, and the content is secondary, a heavy bag/blab/blob of a paragraph don’t you think? This is our final approach to wisdom. Not as the direct object of thought, since we revealed with a sword-stroke that it was empty, nor by the primary method of the buddhist monk, to experience body, feelings, consciousness and mental objects as subjective time tends to zero. We hinted at an alternative method employed by buddhists, a softer approach, the opening of the flower of awareness through mindfulness.
We have not talked about this in detail, so let us do this now. It is important, because this is what we shall be doing as I dive into the mindstream of my family, with all its detail, deep currents and powerful changes of temperament. We shall be moving with full and free momentuum as we have been accustomed through the more abstract, empty spaces, in order to discern some slivers of principles -- that would be the content -- and more importantly, to let the mind be comfortable with not knowing precisely what the object of thought is. So, hopefully, you shall be able to follow me through my dive into my family dynamics, conducted in such a way that is respectful to their privacy and revealing enough to show... to show what, I am not sure. It will not be content. It will be less about what is said. Although it shall be my family, I believe we might just be able to fly through yours. I will have to give myself completely to this dive, to hold no fear, no anxiety of who’s toes I may step on, or what thoughts might be triggered. I am to have enough confidence in our reading/writing to risk losing you. And it makes me smile, that the last time we talked, we had that trip. And it makes me smile also that we overcame it, and the danger of a fall shall be caught as a lean, and the loss of the concepts shall be a gain of the space covered, and we might, just might, fulfil the promise of the title of the book.
Mindfulness. To soften the primary focus, to become aware of the field of vision. Whatever is held in the mind’s eye is left there, while we become aware of the field of consciousness and the elements which comprise it. We can try this with our eyes now if we are not familiar with this sensation. Look at an object, I am looking at a light-bulb. Keep looking at this object, and attend to other things in your visual field without taking your eyes away from the bulb. So, while I look at the light-bulb, I can see the light-shade, the chair, a small bottle of lavander, the walls, the ceiling and so on. Try it.
Now, we have to perform a trick here. The mind is not like the visual field, although it is strongly influenced by its mechanics. Think about music. We may be listening to the melody of a violin or the arpeggiation of the piano, but we are attending too much, much more at the same time. Our body is picked up by a beat, our feet tap, it is a singular thing. When we hear something that lifts our soul, we are handled not tapped, the texture of the melody, the harmony of several voices, a combination of elements simultaneously at work. So, if we return to our visual experiment, it is not enough to keep our primary attention on the light-bulb and our third eye dotting around looking at objects in the visual field. The real trick is to soften the focus on the light-bulb so that awareness spreads to take in more of the field simultaneously. It is not about attending to another object with the third eye, but to soften the primary attention.
This softening of attention translated to consciousness, is mindfulness. Since, when we hold a thought in your mind’s eye, the mind’s eye becomes fixed on it. We can not do the trick we did with our eyes. Attending to another object in our field of consciousness will merely place it in the centre of our attention, ie it becomes the object of thought. By softening the intensity of our attention, the object of thought reveals its composition. I could say it reveals its subconscious composition, what I drew out earlier with the observation of the word summary/summery, and with the cloud of flying ants occurring at every moment. But it would be more correct to say the pre-conscious composition of the object of thought. We know about post-conscious compositions of thought, that’s reasoning and logic and metaphoric flow of thought, the conscious stream. Pre-conscious is the microsecond compilation of sense interfacing with our mind of distinctions as it makes its way to our primary conscious attention. Our eyes move across the page, and each time our eyes jump, the new sense data of printed squiggles is patterned as letters and words and associations and distinctions, meeting whatever was currently compiled from our last position our eyes were at. Continuously, in microseconds.
Mindfulness is a gentle way to be become aware of this preconscious composition. Or rather, becoming aware of this preconscious compositioning, we can call mindfulness. We begin to sense how full the mind really is, not in terms of a store of memories and such, but in terms of concurrent mental events. It is gentle because it involves slowing, relaxing, sitting back into ourselves. So a monk may become much more aware of the sense data coming at them, disentangling it from whatever the mind is projecting for the benefit of the mind’s eye, detaching from the feedback loop that we are so addicted to, the story that is the sequence of mental objects in our primary attention, as well as other sequence or streams which constitute who we think we are, send of identity, etc.
Hmmm... I think we went into too much detail there. Whether you caught it or not in your first passing, it does not matter. We are not quite doing the same thing. We are not sitting back into yourselves and thus becoming aware of the composition of our mind, we are not slowing down. Rather, we are speeding up, in a sense, so that what passes is just beyond our ability to comprehend. We have to lose focus, we have to use more of our preconscious processes. This is what is happening when we tango, or when we juggle, or when we ride a bike -- things are happening at such a rate that primary attention, and all the logic and reasoning that come with it, just doesn’t have time to process it, control it. And yet it happens. It is like magic. We are doing something we don’t entirely understand, and yet it is happening. This is how we learned to read. To speak. It comes naturally to us. We are phenomenal learning machines.
That is why I’ve been rattling on about the methodological shift, even in this final tanda. It is meant to overwhelm, in some sense, so that a general pattern may emerge, outwith the ability of your or my ability to concieve. The three laws of subjective nature is trying to pull these subtle things into primary attention, so simple they are. And yet, both attempts are doomed to failure, both accrete words like rust. Can you remember how you felt when you read those sections?
Be honest. Because that’s what those sections were about. They were about your response. Did you respond, this is too complex or too simple and got annoyed or frustrated, or did you merely dismiss them, not having touched the part of you that matters, your feelings, just a bunch of words? Or did you respond, this is too complex or too simple yet there is some sense to it, maybe resonant with your experience of tango or this reading/writing or talking/listening, perhaps even an uplifting sense to it, sufficient at least for respect. Only you can tell. Because if it is the latter, then we are mutually uplifted, and social effect is inevitable. If you wish to enter into further experiences of tango or Go or mutual presence or action cycles or experiential nights, in order to further verify whether the three laws or the methodological shift might actually be accurate enough to be useful, then we place ourselves well for wisdom.

This has been the summery. And if you have enjoyed it, then it indeed is like feeling a warm, summer’s breeze. It is that easy. If you haven’t, then I have been too... too... too much, and the mind is still chained with the attachment to reason and control and understanding.
Whatever your response, make the appropriate decision about entering into this last dance. The streams of thought, the metaphors, the concepts, topics, ideas, all feed into the following sea.
I, for my part, am glad to see an end to it. I shall not be returning to these thoughts. I have been observant most of my life and it didn’t interfere with my enjoying it. I was a happy kid, a curious teenager, a sociable twenty year old. I had hardly a thought in my head, and even after I taught for some ten years into my late thirties, I had lived it, observed it as it happened, and never had to carry it in my head. Only when things didn’t develop, when opportunities were missed, did I take the road I knew would fail, I put things to writing. Since 2007, I attempted to engage adults directly. I filled my head with concepts and models because this is the language of the day. And I grew sick with them, too much, far too much.
The problems we face are beyond our ability to conceive. We just can’t hold it in our heads. The world is just too big. The politics, the economics. Just too much. And most adults interpret this as defeat, and just bow down their heads and get on with life. Anyone over the age of about twenty eight does this. Most of my friends have done this, certainly everyone in my family has, but two. The ones who don’t interpret it this way, are the one who over-estimate their own ability to conceive. They trust their models, their words, and these adults end up as “leaders” protesting this and that, arguing this or that, persuading this or that, charming this or that.
I was happier with the first lot, friends and family, and kids of course. At least they recognised the limitation of their ability. Here was a chance to inspire, to show an alternative way forwards which didn’t involve getting trapped by the arrogance of mind. I did it with kids, ten years inner city kids, front line, and they shone. But with adults, I didn’t get much opportunity. They had given up. The world was too big, the situation too terrible. They had lost their ability to play, to take social risk. The answer, my answer, my practice, was simple: to trust each other to overcome the fact that it was too much for any one of us. That’s what tango is, at the heart of it. That’s what life is, or at least, life if you are hovering anywhere around the third extreme of the psycho-social dynamic, the space between us, the uncertainty.
The second lot nearly killed me. For a year and a half, through 2009 to 2010, I tried to engage the adults who did not recognise the limitation of their abilities. Certainly they were all very nice, to a person, and they admitted limitations in various ways. But one thing was clear, they trusted the models and words in their heads more than the people around them. Or if they did trust people, they trusted those people who trusted the models and words in their heads. A chain of trust centred on “leaders”, leaders who haven’t recognised the scale of the problems, and the scale of the solutions, are beyond any one of us to conceive.
So really, I am glad to put all this behind me. I thought I had when I left in 2010, exhausted, spent, dismissed, disillusioned, crushed. It makes me laugh now. I was in a terrible state. I did three talks of an hour each, and attracted about fifteen people in total over the three days. They saw a wreck of a man. I compiled “Dunno” pretty soon after I arrived in Madeira, thinking that was the end of it. I have spent months lazing, and attempting to shift my thinking, processes, attention, to fiction, the Book of Beginnings. I am someway down that path, and hopefully the next thing anybody reads of mine will be this.
But because of one person, thank you Wendy, and the small chance of something business-orientated appearing in the adult world, I contemplated writing the Methodological Shift as a book. I am glad that didn’t happen. I am glad the motivation to write this book emerged. I am glad to put words to the methodological shift even if it is in a single section too vague for it to be practical. I am glad to leave all my non-linear books with their networks of thoughts and concepts and practice. I am glad to leave it all behind.
That is how I wish to write the rest of this book. Leaving things behind. Our models of the world, are too heavy. Our zombified versions of people we know, are too heavy. All that will be left of me shall be a few simple practices, enough to keep in touch. An enjoyment of tango, Go, swimming, reading, fictional writing, making love, meeting people presently. I hope you shall be lighter for it too, or at least whatever weight you have taken on in the reading, is laid aside.

[title not so good...]

small group social games

2011-07-28T23:28:00.000-07:00

2011 0729 0441
And so we arrive at the complete invention that are the social games of small groups. We have direct experience of tai chi, tango and the much anticipated section on making love: three practices which can give us an internal, non-verbal, non-representational, manifestly embodied sense of chaotic behaviour. And the core practice of writing/reading in this live, deep, concurrent way as exemplified in your experience of reading this book, the recorded talking/listening discipline of jaxing to share concurrent mindflow, and mutually experienced talking/listening that hones in on the point between us, revealing the naked joy that is the miracle of mutual presence. And to balance the exploration of the pure consequential game of Go, a minimal non-verbal, pattern-matching syllogistic practice, we have the social games in small groups that are letterbox protocol, action cycle and experiential nights.

One tiny observation which surfaced to my mind as I wrote the last paragraph, before introducing a further caveat to the social games we are proposing here: the talking/listening ratio. I have got into the habit of referring to talking and listening rather than words like conversation primarily because we wanted to honour the mutual writing and reading that is occurring while we experience this book. How do we go about writing this? What punctuation do we use? And since we are aware of our mind’s subconscious processing, what is the difference between talking-listening and talking/listening? It’s a tiny observation and may mean next to nothing, but the first pairing, talking-listening, is a positive and negative sum implying a zero sum game if they are equal, while the second pairing, talking/listening, implies a ratio implying one whole if they are equal. Which do you prefer, and does it matter? Such a small difference, but if this kind of decision is being made in our subconscious for something like punctuation, we can imagine the incalculable number of decisions being made with every choice of every word that comes to us in the braiding and fraying of thought we are following. Incredible. This observation is like spotting a butterfly in the ecology of the forest of our mind.

Team sports are possibly a more accurate equivalence to strategy games. The complexity of football in its various forms, american, australian, association (what most of the world plays), is fascinating, not only to watch but to play. I have neglected this area of experience, but it has strongly influenced my experience and thus thinking. I grew up in a period where computer games was in its infancy. Current computers and consol games support multiplayer environments, and team play can mean small groups to large political co-operation with thousands of players. Again, a minimal virtual game would not be out of place, and I recommend the open source game of Armagetron, specifically fortress settings. It is a team version of snake, is non-violent, gives rise to a depth of tactical and strategic play.
Clearly such games have been invented, including the more recent extreme sports of surfing, parapenting, canyoning, mountain biking, or based jumping. But leaving the abstracted field of board and computer and sport games, let us take a step further into our everyday, immersed social living. Can we be inventive in such spaces? Where the basic materials are not represented with bits of cardboard, wood, or glass pieces or 3d graphics on a screen, but purely the skills and attitudes involved talking and listening?
Let us propose three games, the first of which can be conducted as a paired exercise. These games are outlined elsewhere on the net and in my other books. I shall not go into detail in how such games are played, in the same way I have not gone into how tango is danced or how Go is played. All that we can do here is recommend them by outlining the experiential depth and benefit to participants, to further our agenda of socially generating a source for wisdom in our everyday lives.
The letterbox protocol is easy enough to describe: players can say only one sentence at a time. Thus, each sentence is said with the invitation for another person to continue. It is so simple it hardly registers in our mind. But then again, Twitter, with its letterbox caption of 140 characters or less, was ignored by my tech friends in 2007 when it came out, and in 2011 it has over 200 million users and it has penetrated business, disrupted journalism, and influenced largescale political events. So, how does the letterbox protocol influence a social dynamic? Try it.
A good friend Sofia and I used it when we just couldn’t help getting caught up in recurring behavioural patterns, namely accelerated thinking and talking, change of perspective and so on; it stabilised our communication. I also introduced it to my brother to interrupt our chronic miscommunication; although initially uncomfortable because it was so artificial, it gave rise to a more constructive discourse. I have experienced it in groups in different settings, and mostly it has the effect of improving listening skills in a group, which allows a deepening of the topic being discussed.

The letterbox protocol was an off-shoot of the more ambitious action cycle invented to help entrepreneurs and social business. Let’s say you know you are friendly with someone in a large company or government body and they have the power to set up a meeting where they can bring along two subordinates. You invite two friends who have proven experience with the non-hierarchical dynamics of an action cycle, and you open up the invitation to three self-selecting individuals from an open business networking club. In the meeting, the participants attempt to answer the question, What can be done by next week? What can the participants do that will see an obvious result in a week? There are some parameters set which help the players answer this question in the hour they set themselves, as well as three players who have embodied experience.
There are three phases to the process, three wows. The first is for everyone to see the benefits of a mutual objective, which is just on the other side of realistic; they can’t really believe it will happen, but if it did, that would be amazing. If the team doesn’t get everyone’s commitment, the game ends there. If they get commitment by the end of the hour, they achieve the second wow. The meeting ends, people return back to their respective jobs, access whatever resources they require, liase through social media, and attempt to his the objective, and if they do, well, that’s a third wow.
That’s it. That’s the action cycle, an hour’s meeting to reach consensus on a goal in a week’s time by a bunch of people have never met before, and may never again even if an idealistic goal is achieved. The action cycle works because it accesses the distributed resources of the individual players. The company who hosts the action cycle is thus accessing resources it can not normally access. Think informal outsourcing. Achieving an idealistic goal becomes realistic based on this non-organisational team. Think of all the problems in the world that have not been sorted, the thousands of NGOs and charities that attempt to reach and are just not cost-effective to traditional company structures because of their high operational overheads. Action cycles open up an entire area of social business; it’s like nonlinear maths application to the natural world as compared to the linear maths applied to the physics of objects. It’s a whole new world.
Another way to think about it is lean business taken to its logical conclusion. Lean business is where the prospective customer is included in the iterative cycle of development and production. Old school has a company develop a product and then go to market, spending huge amounts of money on marketing and advertising and then going through slow series of product improvement based on customer feedback. This is very expensive, affordable only to rich, or fat, companies. Lean business is the new school: a basic prototype is produced, early adopters give feedback immediately, and a rapid cycle of improvement is initiated until the company launches the product officially. By this time, you have a dedicated group of users who are your first customers.
If we can do this with the product, can we do this with the company itself? What if there is no company to start with? What if people gather together and if it gels and produces a useful social prototype which successfully engages users/early-adopters/customers/partners, then go from there. That's what the action cycle does. You know how brainstorming became a must technique for companies and social organisations of all kinds, including government meetings and even school classes? This is an in-house game, normally for stagnant environments, where its the same people trying to churn through some new ideas. The action cycle by-passes this by making use of the genuine new relationships formed in the meeting. No artificial creativity, which is very expensive on everybody's time, and like costly advertising and marketing, affordable only to fat business.

The action cycle was the business version of the experiential night, a game I invented for friends over a decade ago. If you are invited to an experiential night you need two things: some money, the cost of a night out, say £10, and an open mind. Even if you said yes earlier in the week, you only turn up if you have these two on the night. You meet a group of about ten players, and you know maybe three of them, the person who invited you, another friend, and a person you invited. Nobody knows everyone, but everyone knows someone -- this is structurally important: there is no host, no central figure, the group is actually circular, its centre is empty. The group is linked by friendships, trusted friends. This is not just a meetup with strangers. There are no outright strangers here, though there are plenty of people you haven’t met personally before.
The evening has three stages. First, break the ice. Someone suggests a game, you hold hands, entangle yourself in a knot, and then try to unravel it without breaking hands. It is fun, the group is formed. It becomes a thing. Second, time is allotted to come to a decision by consensus about what that group is going to do that night, say fifteen minutes. It is important to stick to the time, otherwise this could go on. Suggestions are bandied around, and because you’ve played the game, and the guy who invited you knows some cool friends, you end up contemplating an experience you’ve never thought about doing: making a couple of cakes, one for someone’s mother whose birthday it is, and the other to give away on the way to their house. Third, you do the experience. The ingredients are bought, the cake is baked, the visit is made, much fun is had trying to persuade random people to eat a slice.
Sound weird? Sound fun? It was. And the whole point about the experiential night is that you don’t know what is going to happen. You can go there is ideas, but you have no idea what is going to take. Perhaps your suggestion of visiting an out of town pier and skinny-dipping in the sea. Perhaps making some kites and taking them up a hill and flying them. Perhaps buying some yellow paint and painting a road junction with a big smiley. Who knows? You don’t. None of you do. And you only do what you are willing to do. The decision is reached by consensus.
That’s it. That’s the action cycle. A whole lot of fun. Fancy a film? Going out for a meal? Going clubbing? Prepackaged entertainment is ok. But how about going experiential....?

We are being inventive in social space. The results of experiments conducted in living rooms, in kitchens and bedrooms, in bars and hotel lobbies, by lean business pioneers are social start ups. The social start ups are equivalent to the garage startups in the silicon valley in the eighties, Steve Jobs and Apple, Gates and PCs and MS-DOS and Windows. They were producing personal computers, the hardware that seeded the internet in our homes -- and just look how the ecology of the internet has grown in just twenty years! How every corner of the world has been touched, how business and leisure has been influenced. Just think how the world may be when we become proficient with social technologies. A radical influence may be experienced not in twenty years, but in ten -- we don’t even need hardware to manufacture, the medium is entirely social.
Of all the games we are starting to play, action cycle and experiential nights constitute the minimal systems that contain all the ingredients for large scale social change. The action cycle is to organisations what the API is to internet sites. Before 2009, internet sites were mostly isolated programs working off independent servers. The advent of APIs, or Application Program Interface, enabled sites to interact, allowing facebook for example to offer games to its users, even though the games were being run by programs run on different servers and by different companies. Things have developed. In 2011 it is common to login into third party websites and leave comments with Facebook or Twitter accounts. This quality of inter-operatability is demonstrated on the net, and can be copied in real world applications. That is partly why the action cycle was invented, to allow greater communication between organisations by faclitating movement of individuals between them. Not data transferals, but human awareness and skills.
Experiential nights combine three factors: time, consensus between people who have not met, and a pot of money. Reaching a decision by consensus by a group who have never met before using up a collective amount of money in a short time, is the holy grail of social self-organisation. If people get better at this, society will transform itself. What is a company but a bunch of people making a decision what to do and spend some money doing it? For a company, the result is more money. For the experiential night, the result is a fun or enlightening or scary experience. What is government but a bunch of people making a decision with a pot of money to best improve everyone's lives? A government is representative, decisions are made for us. In an experiential night, we make decisions about our own experiences.
And how are companies and governments run if not by small groups of people meeting and making decisions together? Let's stop expecting our political leaders have the skills to make decisions about problems we face. Let's learn the skills ourselves. And if we can make decisions in small groups of ten, it isn't a stone's move away to connecting up with another group of ten conducting their experiential night, or ten groups through Google+ video hangouts, and one hundred people doing something that hadn't even occurred to them before they came along that night. Who knows, perhaps we may learn the skills to reach consensus with millions of us? But that's just dream-talk, unless you've experienced it for yourself.
It’s not about thinking organisationally, about theorising about large scale social objects that constitute politics and economics. In fact, can we stop thinking like Marx and the sociologists and philosophers that spend their day filling their heads with dreams and castles and words words words? What we need is experience. Period.
And you may be wondering, where did I get the ideas for the action cycle and experiential nights? I think it is obvious. I had fun in my twenties. We had a blast, my friends and I. So do a lot of people in their twenties. The problem is, or at least I found, when I returned to my old friendship groups in their thirties, they were stagnant, same people same gigs. Be careful, it may happen to you -- it may already have happened to you. It’s all about openness, and leveraging the excitement and buzz that comes naturally when you meet new people. Don’t just waste it with talk -- do something new together! Whether with friends or in business, this is the real edge, the space between us.

tango to the power of two

2011-07-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

2011 0728 1404 tango^2: to the power of two
This is not going to be easy. If you like tango, you may not like to hear about how I portray it in this section, as I relate the challenges I have had to and continue to overcome while dancing. And if you don’t like tango, you won’t like the excruciating detail I will go into regarding mistakes. However the course we tread across these next pages, rest assured that I shall not be repeating observations previously disclosed nor isolating insights like they were specific moves. It is fitting, don’t you think, that tango is immersed in the text? Reminds me of Master Toby who runs the Edinburgh scene: he never performs, you have to be agile of eye to track his movements through the crowd. But it is well worth it. I call him Master Toby because of the incredible quality of attention his partners give him: eyes closed, intensely concentrated and simultaneously deeply at ease. Attentive release.
We tripped, last night, Wendy and I. It was not a physical thing, but we tripped nevertheless. She has been away for a few days, and we were out of sync. Halfway through the section “being part”, I interrupted her reading and asked what she was thinking. The text had asked her to stop and ponder whether what was being written was true. It was a bold statement, something about adults being ashamed or defensive, you may recollect. I stupidly was not pleased with her response, it was too easy. I had skirted some difficult issues, it seemed to me, without being too heavy, about how drawn we were to stories of horror and destruction. I was not happy that Wendy was reading it so smoothly, so lightly, so easily. It too easily proved the point that we dismiss quiet, positive stories.
Well, you might think, what has this got to do with tango? Well, tango is not done for an easy ride. I know there are plenty of men who lead strongly, permanently from beginning to end. The woman follows, not necessarily attentively because the moves have been dictated, she is transcribing his steps. It is a fairground ride, perhaps mundane, perhaps thrilling, but always within the parameters of control set by the man who is always ahead, always leading. She is along for the easy ride.
I was wrong, of course, to draw attention to it so clumsily. I am sorry, Wendy. I struggled to put to words what your lack of attention meant, how we were in this last tanda, these final few dances in the book, and we were approaching topics so simple or vast -- the sections three laws of subjective nature and the methodological shift just passed -- and so personal and troublesome, the sections to come about work and family. The range is psychically demanding and stretches my already wracked skills to breaking. No easy close to the book, no simple closure to wisdom with some easy platitudes, resting on peaceful contemplation as the monk may in his cave. Here we are putting the entire content of the book to the test, immersing it in the flesh and breath of the living world; here the potential danger, risking the fire of passion and judgement of the reader, the smoke of which I detected so long ago. And you were reading like it was a fairground ride.
This was the trip, and it was my mistake.

You did not pause to think about it. I could tell by how you were reading. You just skipped through. Straight over the gap I placed like a toe before your foot, to stop you mid-step, to pause, to punctuate the continuity, to remind ourselves, this passes, this all passes. Not for you to quickly step over it like it was an obstacle, or engage a favourite choice of step, a decorative movement. The gap is to stop. To ponder. To lay down the book, take a breath, engage one’s own internal play, before returning to us here. For without a doubt, while I write, you are here. This is the magic of writing, the utter wonder that we take for granted. For you are here while I write, right here with each word, and I am with you as you read, right here with you as we approach the end of this paragraph and pause at the point.
It was my mistake, of course. We stumbled on, you took it personally, and we fell apart, back into ourselves. You felt bad, thought something had happened, that things were different between us. Yet we moved on. I wondered whether we could turn this mistake, this trip, to our advantage for I knew that today I would be writing this section, on tango. Perhaps an investigation of how we deal with mistakes in tango may be instructive for mistakes made in talking/listening or in writing/reading.
What are the mechanics of a mistake in tango? It is something of the past, it separates the partners, is judged bad or wrong, and locates responsibility or blame in one or other of the dancers. Let us say we find ourselves in front of each other unexpectedly -- a mistake? We move on, but our minds are snagged, part of us hang onto this mistake, this thing receding into the past, so we are no longer present. There is a pulling into self, and so the tango that was one become two partners, as one mind is caught in a whirlpool of the past. We judge this unexpected collision as bad, as something that should not have been; or more sophisticated yet, we judge our slipping into the past as bad. Perhaps we blame ourselves, perhaps we blame our partner, thus we make one of us heavier, the division to solitary confinement in one’s own body is complete. All in a few seconds, sometimes in less than a second.
And how do we prevent this catastrophic collapse? We concentrate on the present, we return our sense to now and let the past go; and in this forgetting there is forgiveness. We reinforce the tango, we do not back off into our self, but re-commit ourselves to us. There is no judgement, but pure evaluation, as the unexpected collision opens a new avenue, the happy chance of accident, and we discover a new movement flower. The responsibility lies between us, it constitutes us, neither one way or the other towards self.
And this was my mistake. For what I said and did led us to spin apart. You began to question your role, you took something of the accident of our reading together as yours, personally. The dynamic is the same, whether it is manifest on the dance floor as a physical mistake, or it manifests deeper as an emotional mistake, or as a mental or spiritual mistake. The mistake is to think it is a mistake. Once it becomes such in either mind, the tango splits, the continuity frays. The answer to this, whenever this happens, is to immediately respond to the present, reinforce the unity, discover the new, absolve responsibility either way. Do not accede to the split, do not accept it, for doing so -- apparently the choice of compassion and empathy -- only leads to separation and the return to isolation that neither partner wants. Remember this is all in seconds, not precisely conscious, not a force of will, the kind we see of the love-torn who deny their separation from their loved one and willfully reinstate with blind determination. This is dealing with a mistake, that is all, an accident.
Once a mistake has rent the tango apart, how do we make reparations? Attempt to re-enter the tango, within the few seconds it has split, or afterwards, consciously, with the assurance of the partner, a clear invitation once again to dance just like as when it all began. Failing this, leave with the feeling of mistake and turn it around within one’s own existence using whatever techniques one has, from meditation, therapy, the passing of time and forgetfulness, so that when you return to your partner, there is nothing of it left, no recollection, it has gone. Or, as a last resort outwith your influence, on returning to your partner to find the feeling hanging like a dark bag, a part of your mind in the past, hope the partner has enough energy and lightness of spirit that they lift the bag and toss it away as you re-enter tango.
The wisest strategy is the first, to deal with it immediately or as soon as possible, otherwise things-carried-within can interfere with the next dance with someone who is altogether innocent. Least wise is to expect that your partner will sort it out when you return. Never stoop to expect this; their act is a gift, the baggage of the past can only be removed with a sigh, with a smile, without any weight of expectation. And if it is not sorted it out at the time and not processed alone afterwards, such baggage can collect. They tie together like knots, using up energy, constraining choices, and life becomes a prison. I know this because I meet so many people who carry negative little knots around maths, and when I was a tutor, the untying of a single knot of confusion resulted in an explosive release of energy, enthusiasm, life. The tango of maths, perhaps.

We have had to perform gymnastic feats of writing and reading throughout this book, have we not? Wendy and Harriet and Hazel have all remarked on how hard the sections are. Not light reading, summer beach type. But I always thought this a little harsh. It is not so much hard, since I witnessed that your reading went relatively smoothly. It is demanding, for sure: the turns of thought, the explanation-light references, the abstract convolutions, the intertextual nature of writing and reading, the metaphoric blending. These gymnastics are not performed because we like gymnastics, but to overcome the psychic furniture which clutter our minds. If we do not attend well, we will end up sitting on all the jumble we have collected over the years pressed up against the ceiling of our lives breathing with difficulty. Or we shall give in and discard the book, dismiss it as lacking structure, that is matching the structure we are used to. For those still holding book, our mental gymnastics take on such flexibility of form that we become like water, and our mind may take the shape of anything it is poured into. Even wisdom.
My role as “leader” once we enter into tango, is to avoid other people, tables and chairs, and make sure there is a space before us to move into. Because of the nature of books, most readers are left to themselves, rearranging whatever they read to accommodate the state of their mind. Perhaps they like this book, so they shelve it somewhere. Perhaps they didn’t, so they threw it away. Books, treated in this way, read in this way, are things. They change nothing. Words change nothing. There is only the possibility of change if we change our experience of reading, and we have gone to some lengths to create opportunities for this: to match the immediacy of where you are right now, sitting reading this book, with the immediacy of writing right now. We are taking steps together, into the unknown, the next step is blank, the space is free.
An impossible task. Impossible. And yet the challenge is set. This is the demanding nature you no doubt recognise from your own experience of reading. These sentences that break grammatical convention, that seem like normal sentences, and yet... are not. More like talking and listening. Less about words, and more about meaning. Meaning and shared experience.
We have shared enough experience, and I would like to feel confident enough to let myself go, to give myself to the dance. To reduce self-consciousness to zero, to not have self-reflection, but to allow intuition free and meet whatever that comes. After our mistake, our trip, Wendy will no doubt be reading this with prime attention, once again committed to tango. Let us dance.
I recommend tango for mutual experience between two people because it is experientially rare. Danced in the right way, it allows chaotic behaviour. Most dances, and most people who dance tango, have a relatively easy or recognisable orbit. The patterns are obvious, repeatable. Tango can be learned and danced this way, but it also allows improvisation at the moment to moment level. Mind can not calculate at this level, when it is happening so quickly or so finely. Tango is a state that is beyond control. It contains a hidden attractor, with partners behaving something like the double pendulum: fully determined by the dancers and yet beautifully, surprisingly unpredictable. You can not practice tango, like you can practice moves. Tango is the practice, like meditation is the practice for buddhists. Done in this way, it is a life-long practice.
And in all this intimacy, of course, there is vulnerability.

I have given up tango a few times. Or at least, I did not dance much over a year or two in my ten year’s experience. I have never been addicted to it. This is a problem a lot of dancers face: they dance because they want to get the hit, rather than wish to dance with another unique person. Yet, it is only through another presence that the tango becomes. Yes, read that sentence again. Beware of addiction to the dance, of steps, words, behaviours. On my part, I demand that I take myself to the very edge of my self, my abilities so that I can encounter something new with my partner. Whether beginner or experienced, I want us both to meet newness. This is why I could teach: children bring us closer to the edge of ourselves. I am not into an easy ride, not for my partner, nor for myself, not for the kids I teach nor the people I meet. If I am addicted, it is to this being at the edge of self, and taking the step beyond, hopefully with my partner. (Though an opponent will do, even if tai chi is a trickier gig to pull off -- those hurtful words can be aimed with cross-hair precision.)
I have given up looking for tango on a number of occasions. I have been so despondent at times, I have turned up at a milonga and taken the floor only once. Why? Because so much of it is automatic. So many people moving, so many repeated moves. It is exhausting. I dance with someone, and I am not dancing with them, I am dancing with this articulated suit, this collocation of movements learned. I open up one side just as a suggestion, and suddenly there is a concrete move executed and I end up having to follow so that my partner can reach completion. Exhausting.
So I attempt to interrupt these well-rehearsed moves. A foot comes out at the wrong time, the angle of my body prevents smooth collection, she is left in awkward positions. These moments are telling. Does she resent them? Does she resent my interrupting her moves? Or does she wonder, what is going on? Am I really that clumsy? And to tell you the truth, it is mostly done by mistake. I have become quite refined in my mistake-making.
Or does she wake up slightly? This is the response we are looking for. A glance, a brightness to the eyes, perhaps even a smile -- and God alive! -- even laughter. Or an involuntary exclamation slide just under her breath; dancing chest to chest, you can’t see the expression on her face, only her breath by your ear.
Ah, how far from the regular shuffling and plodding of a standard milonga! But do not take me for a tango snob! Not at all. I enjoy dancing with beginners, as they are more open minded in the sense there is little furniture in their head to traverse, and older partners too because they are often more attentive and forgiving. But after you have been man-handled by someone going through the motions, I sit back down alone, completely dejected, without a feeling that I can dance -- in fact, it is worse -- with the undeniable proof just experienced that I can’t tango. And I can’t. I can’t dance alone. I can’t just whisk someone around regardless of who they are. I don’t have the skills, nor the inclination. I have to meet them halfway, and if that halfway is deep in the automatic world of rotating cog-wheels, I often get chewed up and spat out a bloody pulp.

“There is no other.” When we dance, there is only one person in the room, our partner. Somehow, if we are lucky, if we prepare, we sublimate our bodies, melt emotions, and a larger entity has become.
When it comes to relationships, I think simpler partner dances are very attractive, the motion of simple harmonic motion. A simple partner dance with discrete roles of leader and follower may hark back to a by-gone day, a day where women had less say and power regarding their own lives let alone the partnership of family. We have undergone quite a few changes to family and work life, though I am not a big fan of women who end up being dominant either. I like to think there might be something of a partnership that complements and yet equalises. Tango has this, if done in such a way that there are two followers. But tango is not the easiest thing to enter, and to return to. It requires present mindedness, a life-long self-discipline.
When we reflect on tango in the social context, we may end up dancing with several partners throughout an evening. Each partner is the only partner while dancing with them. To think of another person while dancing is a cardinal sin, and requires a powerful tango to contain it. It is tantamount to thinking of what the next move will be, which too easily disrupts the presence of being. Translating this to a world of relationships is difficult, and requires a supporting culture. And if we look at a normal tango salon, there are many, many problems to overcome.
Tango does not translate to larger scales that well. A woman new to a city can spend her entire evening seated, especially if she is not young. Even women who are regular to a place can find themselves ignored, dismissed, their role as passive followers carrying through to their inability to ask a man to dance. There are often cliques, groups of dancers that only dance among themselves, perhaps sorted by “level”. Sometimes people are trapped into dancing with the same dancers, having to fulfil expectation politely. The experience can be cold, sterile, with the incredible passion of a significant tango, immediately cut as partners separate to different seated locations. If the salon is not organised by a host teacher, the overal vibe can be edgy with competition between teachers as they vie for students and endevour to secure income. And because of the mechanical nature of so many learned moves from weekly lessons, the movement on the floor can be constipated, though the music plays for all, pairs of dancers are busily trying to incorporate new moves regardless of harmony.
Over the years, I have had some small experiences attempting to spread this zen flavour of tango, beyond merely dancing with a partner. Dancing with partners will not change the culture, I have found, unless the culture is very small. There were only a few dancers when I visited Malta, and they took to it very well. It was still restricted to only women adopting the method, and many women do not know how to teach it to their partners in turn. Many women still do not understand the power they hold in their following. Even Wendy, who has been undergoing something of a tango renaisaance since we met a year ago, probably does not know how to leverage her experience to help men give up their “leadership”. She gives herself so well now, men take this gift and do what they do. She has a quality they find attractive, that they want, as if to own, and I suspect they feel very satisfied they have danced their dance. The more gentle amongst them are aware that she has allowed this, in the sense of enabled with her body and permitted with her mind. But how many give themselves to her? Does she ever pull them up for not paying 100% attention to her? Well, have you? So far in our tango, you have not with me. Perhaps the day will come, when I am distracted, you can be as demanding of me as you are of yourself.
What would a salon be like if tango was allowed to spread from the confines of an embrace? We have thought about this, Wendy and I, calling it Tango^2, tango to the power of two... maths always enters in somewhere. We offer a little advice, here and there, between tandas, about what could be done, invite people to participate in some social art. So, we might remark on the dancers who are new to the floor, and how generous the regulars are in welcoming them, or we play a game where dancers are challenged to dance with someone they don’t often dance with. Or a progressive tanda, where partners are swapped between dances. Or for this particular tanda to really focus on dancing with the other couples before and after, perhaps setting some lead dancers setting the “pace” of interpretation of the music so that the whole dance floor might gel. Hints for women and men to learn the cabecao, to invite through the eyes, and to learn not to turn away automatically when you happen to catch another’s eyes, or when someone passes by one’s chair after a discrete glance, to track them once they are past to see if there is a second invitational glance. And for dancers not to dance unless they want to dance, to take a rest, especially after they have experienced a profound tango, and indeed encouraging partners to return to their seats together and further their tango in conversation. What would the effect of this gentle social art? Would such a salon feel any different from the norm? Perhaps they may take on the quality of a family salon we might hope to find in Argentina in some small town where everyone knows everyone else, and each evening is like a chapter in the history of the community, the love and partnerships and marriages, the passion and disputes? Ah, I am dreaming now...
After a friend, Steve, gave me an insight into tango, on his third attempt, I learned tango in the arms of women. Few lessons, and those I took were as detrimental as they were helpful. I have a few tricks to pass on, should anyone care to know. I have distilled the complexity to three principles that if conducted simultaneously by both partners, might create the conditions for tango to be experienced; you can find them on the internet, or you can call on me in person should I still be alive.
I have learned tango from women, as I have learned life from everyone I have met. This book, any of my books, is as much a compilation by the entire collective who have influenced me as the product a single person. Indeed, each one of us is the temporary snapshot of the flow of influence through us. Although people tend to look for answers elsewhere, in books, in lists, in programs and procedures, lending them a disembodied authority, it is mostly in the company of our friends, and the hearts of our family, and in the arms of our partners and lovers, that we find ourselves most touched, we allow ourselves to be shaped, to be changed. So our touch lives through us.
Wendy said this, after our trip yesterday: “Do not feel alone when you are in my presence.” And in writing this, I do not feel alone. Thank you, Wendy, and thank you, whoever you are, for the attention you have given this. May I extend Wendy’s generosity and add to it my own own voice.