I walk into a room and there is an effect. It seems impossible to avoid … not that I’d want to if I could.
I affect others … and in turn they affect me.
It seems that this is what it may be to be human, i.e.: humans affecting other humans … the human condition. Maybe we are built to affect one another, maybe “rubbing up against one another” is the essence of what life is about … life rubbing up against life.
To me, this seems at the heart of the human condition.
This is where I constantly find myself drawn. I spent years learning about and studying individuality, i.e.: “the way of the individual.” Even though much of what I was learning about in my reading and study gave lip service to the group – despite the name given to it, e.g.: family, organization, community, society – the focus and emphasis was on the individual.
The sources I went to were divergent … texts and teachers in the domains of psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy – Eastern, Western, Meso-American, Middle Eastern … and where that led me I followed … theology, spirituality, mythology, therapy, cybernetics, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, economics, organizational theory, leadership … on and on I went. Despite my reach I continued to find myself stumped with few exceptions.
Let me reframe my comments for a moment before going on …
I was trying to figure out what it meant to be human, i.e.: how to do “human” really well.
I was trying to figure this out first for myself … and then how to engage with others who seemed to be asking the same fundamental question in so many different ways and personal languages of their own, “How do I do “human” really well?”
These folks were colleagues and clients. Sometimes they were in consulting situations I worked in with business outcomes and intentions. Other times they were direct therapeutic type interactions where a client was stumped about how to move on in their life … or what to move on to … what to be doing next with themselves.
In most cases I noticed that many of the folks I encountered seemed lost and hurting, even suffering by some accounts. Yet, in the work I offered, this was rarely on the surface. Rarely did my clients come to me with the expressed intention of relieving suffering per se. Instead my clients wanted “strategic” help … “Joseph, how do I achieve the next goal?” Whether that goal was making more money (often), becoming more successful (even more often), finding a relationship, fixing a relationship, finding peace and comfort in their life … it always was about the next thing and what to be doing about it … what to be doing to achieve and attain the elusive “IT” they were searching for in their lives.
Fortunately for me I met and trained with someone who actually had something to offer. I sat at the knee of the master for many years, decades actually … studying and learning, absorbing his wisdom and tricks. He redirected me and my attention with these clients to help them re-focus themselves to attend to where they were in the moment, and only then moving onto what was next for them.
I called this (following the style of my mentor) an ontological approach, i.e.: attending to the experience of being in the moment … a critical distinction.
My mentor, and I following his lead, distinguished the idea of an ontological approach from one that was epistemological. The distinction was the focus on the nature of being versus knowing, or maybe more simply experiencing versus thinking.
I followed this lead further beginning to develop my approach with further distinctions, e.g.: the distinction of experiencing versus thinking about experiencing. I found that many of my clients, despite the particulars, were confounded by thinking about experiencing instead of experiencing their experience.
Then I found two more things that fascinated me and led me further down the rabbit hole …
That most people aren’t having their experience, they are having other people’s experience that had been imposed upon them. Most people start out living their parents’ dreams and not their own. Neither they nor their parents recognize the imposition or insult – until they begin to rebel (it’s typically called “adolescence”). Yet, despite the grand protestations they continue living the life imposed upon them, even if they leave behind the impositions of the parent.
An interesting side note here …
I’ve noticed that many folks I’ve worked with who believe they are leaving behind the impositions of the parent/parents spend the rest of their life in rebellion, not free of imposition, just transforming the imposition into it’s opposite.
Instead of accepting and becoming the vision of the parent they spend their lives becoming what they believe will free them of that imposition by becoming it’s opposite … never once even considering becoming themselves.
Back to our story …
Then life imposes further … schooling telling the child what to do and who they are to become, followed by society … and then the work environment and colleagues … and often life partners, spouses, children … an unending stream of impositions about who you are meant and destined to be … an overwhelming avalanche of impositions burying and suffocating who you are yourself. This is what I found again and again in my work with clients. Then, when I encountered them about the idea of simply being … NOT DOING (a very Zen, Taoist, Yin kind of idea BTW) … they fell in love with it.
The ones I worked with who got ‘IT’ began to rearrange their lives around being, often leaving significant aspects of doing behind. Sometimes leaving behind the contexts they had built their doing in as well … organizations, businesses, families … even whole communities … left behind.
Others sought new contexts to support their new found “freedom” … the groups I ran, organized religion, causes … something to hold onto that would confirm and reaffirm their sense of self.
What I began to notice was the need to be given permission to simply be … to relieve themselves of the obligations of the impositions they had carried for so long, who they had become. For some this meant exploring the other side of things … their suffering instead of their freedom. What some call “shadow work” … the repressed self.
Yet for my mentor, and for me as well, this was a path without reward. Of course there was and is great emotional experience there, a charge to be gotten from experiencing the suffering, the sense of coming to terms with what had been and may still be repressed in one’s self. But we agreed there was no way out of the hole by digging deeper.
So we sought a different way, first his decades of work and then, standing on his metaphorical shoulders, I began climbing myself.
The first thing I noticed (my second insight … the one that began to lead me up out of the rabbit hole I’d fallen into, the first being the lack of people having their own experience and substituting doing for being to compensate for it …) was that the shift from doing to being was primarily organized somatically. To become yourself you must first learn how to inhabit yourself.
That must sound strange to someone the first time they hear it I imagine, i.e.: “… you must first learn to inhabit yourself.” But it is the key in the work I have been doing for the last two decades with my clients, i.e.: repositioning them in their body in relation to themselves.
This work is about moving from intellectualizing experience to instantiating and inhabiting experience … to feel it … to see, hear, smell and taste it fully. To let the sensations of life wash over and in turn wash away the stench of abstraction for the sweetness of being present to life.
Again, I find myself coming to the idea of “life rubbing up against life.”
But still … for decades, I found something was missing in the puzzle that had and continues to consume me.
The somatic piece was and is indeed critical, powerful beyond the imaginings I could have held before I encountered it fully. Recognizing that we respond, as incarnate beings, to our lives and the experiences we engage in was immense. Recognizing further the dynamics of interaction, how we respond to one another responding was even more powerful … mesmerizing me into a kind of stupor.
I had climbed out of the rabbit hole for a moment only to be drawn back down. This time via another tunnel, the tunnel of somatics. So I went all the way … submerging myself into the study of the interaction between the mind and body, until I dissolved the separation of the two for myself … a body-mind emerged.
A singularity that has been my domain of expertise for the past twenty years, i.e.: the body-mind and how it manifests ontologically, forming the essence of who we are and know ourselves to be … the return of epistemology and the integration of it with the ontological consideration.
Yes … the body-mind … I worshipped at its magnificence.
When I worked with clients, exposing them to themselves via an new found integration of the somatic form they had repressed into a barely acknowledged part of their experience of themselves, they often blossomed into new beings … a kind of metamorphosis. Like the seed becoming the tree, emerging from themselves in a new form that had been barely contained in the kernel of themselves they had known and expressed previously.
As my clients learned about noticing the body-mind themselves via the somatic path I was sharing with them, they began to notice others differently as well. The noticing became subtler and subtler until they could and were adumbrating entire groups of people they encountered day in and day out, and for many they flourished in this way.
But I noticed a different kind of shadow too. The more they fell into the rabbit hole themselves, the more they became observers of life, playing less with others and more with themselves.
In the best cases they removed themselves to tiny enclaves of others who shared their new sense of awareness, a kind of “insiders” club about the wonders of the body-mind experience.
These insiders noticed the interplay between the somatic forms and the semantic forms that people expressed, and they would delight in their noticing and the sharing of it with others of like mind. But they were also somewhat removed from the messiness of life, somehow trying to remain out of the reach of the stench that arises when bodies truly rub together. Yet it was exactly in the space that ceased to exist between bodies with life that life was most evident … where life is both conceived and consecrated from what I could tell.
So my insights had led me out of the hole and then right back in … only with different illusions, not illusion free as I had hoped.
However, I was helping people. My clients were actually achieving and attaining more of what they were capable of and desired … more success, better and fuller relationships with others, a greater sense of coming to peace in their lives.
So for many years I continued refining the models I had been designing and developing. These were the models I used when I engaged with clients to provoke the critical transformations they desired, and in many cased we were successful together … and that’s where the new opening appeared for me … in the “together” I’ve only come to most recently.
All the years of learning, reading and studying had helped, but left me in some ways as lost as I had been when I first began. The abyss was individuality, the illusion of the individual.
I realized I had moved spasmodically away from anything resembling what I though of, and continue to think of, as false community … the lip service given to inclusiveness, plurality, diversity and all the socially, politically correct ways of thinking about communities of people. It all seems to be so much bullshit! When it comes down to it in those communities the folks who are so outspoken about their caring for others simply take care of themselves. Frankly, it disgusts me.
So I ran in the other direction. I renounced anything to do with the prophets of community and their false doctrines. The entire “New Age” movement and everything associated with it, including the meta-magical thinking and “love talk” that spouts from the mouths of every prophet espousing their wares nauseated me to my core.
The endless stories of the gurus with their perversions, the socially minded entrepreneurs with their addictions, and all the rest of it wasn’t what I was searching after … it was something more, something undefined, some call to something else .
I cannot conclude my tale here with the revelation of having found “IT” yet. I may be as delusional as the false prophets I so detest. But …
There is something that has been emerging from the manure piles the prophets have left in their wake, something more wicked than they ever imagined coming I think. Maybe the end of society as we know it even … but I both digress and expose myself too much without evidence for my philosophical meanderings.
What I’ve begun to notice is the emergence of a new kind of thinking that transcends self-interest. Not the self-serving speeches of the socially-minded about being of service to others, of social and economic equality for all. It is not even the talk about the rights of the repressed that I am pointing towards …
My meandering is about an organism I’ve only newly begun noticing for the first time, despite seeing it forever (forever being the entirety of my lifetime). The organism of society itself … we are collectively the organism. The ontological form we are is social, connected … in the same way our organs, muscles and bones comprise who we are, we comprise the organism of society … a living, breathing thing unto itself beyond anyone of us.
Let me close for now with another reframing exercise …
I have long disagreed with the idea that some physicians hold of treating disease apart from the whole-form of the body in which the disease resides. Despite the successes that this approach has generated in some cases, I believe the cost to be higher than the gain. Only when we expand our perspectives to see the entire being can we properly treat the symptomology that confronts us.
For instance treating a persistent rash with cream to suppress it will not relieve the issue of what causes it if the cause is metabolic or environmental, even if the symptoms are relieved.
The individual may indeed have temporary relief from the rash, only to find that they given room to the cancer to form and grow within them. However, when the cause is contextual, say living in New York with all of the stressors there, environmental and otherwise, and to “cure” oneself means giving up all that you’ve come to associate with being in New York true healing may be impossible.
The individual goes on living with the suppression of symptoms, maybe addressing one symptom after another … first the cream for the rash, then anti-acids for the stomach upset, satins for high cholesterol, blood pressure medications … until the system collapses in utter and total disrepair … FUBAR!
You see it’s not within the individual that the issue resides … it’s in the system-at-large. The individual is an illusion as something apart from the system that contains them, in the same way that a heart or spleen actually exist but are meaningless outside of the system that contains them.
What is the heart outside of the body where it pumps blood that is not it’s own, and breaths oxygen it does not absorb???
This is the question I began to see about the “individual” … and I had had inklings of this before, inklings I suppressed and ignored because I didn’t have the insight or tools to deal with them.
Often, we as change agents try to fix the individual, or to fix the system via the individuals within it. We think that change happens locally, even when we think systemically the systems we think about are most often local … not total.
Now I’ve begun to think that maybe the only thing we can do is to relate the individual to the whole-form, to relieve them of their illusion that they are in any way separate and/or apart from the system, that they are the system in the same way the heart is the system in the body … i.e.: it is nothing without the blood it pumps or the oxygen it breathes, both of which are beyond it’s ken … the domain of the marrow and lungs.
I don’t really know where to go with this from here … but somehow it feels like I am once again standing in the sun, out of the warren that had trapped me into thinking I was home.
The “ontology” I am looking for is everywhere … now if only I had eyes to see …
Joseph Riggio,Ph.D.
Princeton, NJ
P.S. – FWIW I’ve incorporated all of the *new* learning and insights I’ve had into my current work, what I’ve begun calling “Foolish Wisdom” … maybe you’ll join me in becoming a “Wise Fool” yourself someday soon …
P.P.S. – HERE’S THE LINK TO FIND OUT MORE …
Sarah Lawrence Hinson says
Thank you for this description of your journey so far Joseph…I was gripped…many areas where it resonates for me.
How to reside as a human in the super-conscious, be aware of the self, smell the ‘stink’ and yet move on as a human evolutionary? I dunno yet…
Finding new energy and focus in working with the ‘Spiritual Super Conscious’ or Fifth Element, the Akashic Records or Akash. Clients and myself are gaining great results, becoming changed, readings are validatable either at the time of the reading or later. We move to a state of conscious awareness outside of space and time. Reading Ervin Laszlo’s book Dawn of the Akashic Age (New Conscious, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World). Can only digest a little of that at a time…recent material putting into words the multiple paradigm shifts (that even sounds old-fashioned now!) that we are rapidly moving through/into.
Where I am with this now (can not even call it ‘answers’ any more) – shift to the SuperConscious, work on clearing energetic patterns that no longer serve us (Power Over paradigms, ancestral patterns, family pathology, ‘beliefs’ and keep moving on in the reality that next presents itself.
I couldn’t be ‘here’ without having learned about the semantic and the somatic from you and sensing (most of the time!) that as you said many times we live in a friendly universe.
So thanks, and thanks for the writing.
Moving on….
Sarah
Joseph says
Sarah,
Thanks. I am truly pleased and impressed that you have found your own way to “move on” and help others …
I’m also a bit at odds with some of the particulars (as you might have suspected).
SPOILER ALERT!
You may NOT want to follow the suggestion I’m about to make if you want to remain uninterrupted in your pursuit of the path you find yourself on now spiritually.
However, it may also remove some of the mist that SOME spiritual writings tend to place in front of people, like the perfume of the lotus eaters.
That said …
I was inspired to write this next bit based on the link I share below …
Click on the link below.
Your clarity will be uplifting and allow you to transcend the limits of ordinary conscious awareness. When you’ve crossed this threshold the infinite energies of the Universe will be yours to wield as you wish, remaking you into a supra-human version of yourself. From there you can, and will, see the magnificence of others revealed in the vibrations that have drawn you together with them to remake the world in the image of the divine.
When you pursue my lead into the abyss of wonder you will have saved yourself endless amounts of money on any New Age book you might otherwise have been tempted to purchase, especially if when you get there you click repeatedly on the button at the top “Reionize Electrons” …
SEB-Pearce Bullshit
(sebpearce.com/bullshit/)
Joseph says
Also a worthwhile read IMO:
SEB Pearce Blog re: Bullshit
(sebpearce.com/blog/bullshit/)
zootsoot says
Funny, I find that stuff makes a hell of a lot more sense than most of your outpourings, ‘To become yourself you must first learn how to inhabit yourself’, being a particular gem.
Joseph says
Ta
Ray Dalton says
Congratulations and best wishes on your life’s journey. Have studued ontologies (plural, given that many have been artuculated over the centuries). As I u derstand it every ontology has its epistemology and I see no point in putting them conceptually in oposition but rather to harness them with questions like What is your way of knowin g who you are? Best wishes.
Joseph says
Ray … FWIW I agree. It was a relatively recent update overall, but the integration of the ontological and epistemological is significant in how I’ve begun to revise my thinking. Thanks for the comment.
Tim says
Great post Joe, thanks for putting it out there.
Society is an organism, and as is plainly evident Society is sick, insane in fact. As individuals, those of us who are being something other than our- authentic-selves are collectively generating this illness, and therefore, perhaps the cure is for enough of the individual ‘ cells ‘ of society to find and become themselves, thus curing the illness from within, one cell at a time, until the healing effect becomes for want of a better word, ‘ viral ‘. My gut says the Kosmos created this illness to induce a crisis, to force Society to make the transformative evolutionary leap to next level, or else burn up in the fever of its own madness. Well that’s the only story I can see at this time that’s worth living into.
Joseph says
Pleasure Tim.
I generally agree with your thoughts, and I think it’s less dismal in some ways. The system is intact, although it may be going through upheaval.
I think in terms of the virus being in the system and that there’s a fever heating things up to rid the system of the disease. However, we have also learned that viruses may have been essential in the evolution of the species …
So either way whether we are the virus, or the virus is in the system we are … the virus is as essential to the evolution of the system as the system itself so to speak, i.e.: the real shift is to see the virus as the system as much as anything else within it … as it seeks to regulate itself in relation to all else.
Just one example: Role of Viruses in Human Evolution
Stefania says
Thank You so much Joseph!!!! Your words are so ture & poetic! Yes, we are all One. I’d love to share with U a quote from Abraham and Hicks: “We are JOY, looking for a way to express. It’s not just that your PURPOSE is joy, it is that YOU are joy. You are LOVE & JOY & FREEDOM & CLARITY expressing. Energy – frolicking and eager – that’s WHO YOU ARE. And so, if you are Always researching for alignement with that, you are Always on your path, and your path will take you into all kinds of places.”
Joseph says
Stefania,
Thanks for your kind words.
I agree with the general sense of integration that Abraham and Hicks offer here.
Becoming the thing is the thing …
T-genic says
Hello all n Dr. mythos,
I like the elegance and simplicity of this piece. It reminds me of make it as simple as it can get and no simpler. Experience and thought as two different orientations in the world. I take it that being in experience your’e in the excitatory and being in thought you’re in the inhibitory? After saying that inhibitory experience is just as real as excitatory experience except for one being ill-formed experience and the other being well-formed experience. Can you help me integrate the distinction of excitatory and inhibitory into this new old conception?
Gracias,
T-genic
Joseph says
T,
Depends …
If what you mean by excitatory and inhibitory, yes. Otherwise, no.
The excitatory simply means the neural system is open, and inhibitory means it is closed.
Either the thresholds for exciting the system to response are reached and the signals flow, or they don’t. That’s literally what excitatory and inhibitory means.
Your descriptions of connecting the excitatory and inhibitory with experience and thought are not my experience or thinking about them.
Start here: Excitatory & Inhibitory Neurotransmitters
T-genic says
Thanks. Can you say what your experience is? I know you said it all in this posting and I’m curious what more?
Joseph says
T,
Take a look at some of my responses below, especially the one I wrote to Michael Davis, and tell me if you still need (NOT WANT, NEED) more.
J
Red says
So is the question then:
What is the system like when it is at its best?
(and we are those micro-muscular movements)
It’s no longer about any of us achieving any personal fulfilment-
it is – what do I need to be doing for the system?
Or
is the system working perfectly, beautifully, as it does,
and there’s nothing more to do but simply surrender to the recognition of aliveness – here and now, with everyone else on the planet – as imperfect as we all are?
In that sliver of space in the infinite Universe –
on our tiny Earth, for a tiny moment, in which humanity exists.
Pleased to Be here with you, Sir!
What a wild and beautiful journey.
Who knows how long any of us will be here, or how long our paths may cross for.
if we can give LOVE and KINDNESS to all we meet.
Treat each other gently and with honour.
What more is there to do?
Love is the answer. Love is the way.
Xxx
Joseph says
Red,
IMO the system works perfectly “as is” … there’s simply nothing we need to do vis-a-vis the system.
However, getting that there’s nothing to do is the work we need to do.
Joseph
Francesco says
Ken Wilber, following Graves, has an intriguing answer: http://superhumanos.net/
Joseph says
Interesting … one of my students from many years ago, and now masterful in his own right, Devon White has been at something similar for many years himself … Human Operating System
Shyaam says
Dr. JR,
I was waiting for a long time for a post and this is perfect!!
As I read more and more – I see that I can resonate more with what is being pointed out.
I have a couple of questions and I will try to put into words as best as I can:
I see that anything that I try to do has a shadow to it –
I do *something* but I do that because I can get *something else*. Then, I thought it was my ego and started searching for IT/Liberation. Ofcourse, it was driven semantically, I always tried to move somewhere other than here and now and was in an endless loop… (and developing aversions to a lot of things in life on the way)
The idea from your post – “The “ontology” I am looking for is everywhere … now if only I had eyes to see …”
is too simple for the mind…
which brings me to my question.. Can I actually do something to get IT (without developing a shadow)? Or should I go through a lot of training to get this simple way of life…
and the other question, I see that I have come back to the place where I started during my journey (some 5 years ago) – If the Purpose of life is to just Be and Live, and the System is Perfect *As Is* why to live at all?
Hmmm
Thank you for sharing, as always!
Awaiting your reply 🙂
Shyaam
Joseph says
Shyaam,
You have a lot of questions, so rather than trying to answer them sequentially and individually let me see if I can address them globally.
The “shadow” IMO is a kind of attitude, something we apply to ourselves, others or a situation rather than it being there as an ontological constant.
Whether the shadow is there or not is irrelevant in the work I do, I can accept it either way, i.e.: that it is there or that it is not. The bigger question for me is how does a person relate to what may or may not be the shadow.
I’ve found in a lot of work people want the emotional charge that the shadow offers them, the build and release … like watching a tear-jerker romance or horror movie. But IMO, just like when you’ve left the theater the effect of the movie wears off the effect of encountering the shadow wears off as well.
There is another aspect that is played upon by clever practitioners regarding the shadow … the ability to use the emotional charge to generate movement towards change in the system. If you time it properly you can connect the charge that’s released when you encounter the shadow and link it to a positive algorithm for change in the system.
For me, within the construct of my work, linking desirable change to negative emotional charge has consequences I’m unwilling to deal with, so I don’t do it generally, and virtually never individually … i.e.: I will on occasion generate powerful responses that are not about the individual to create the charge in the room towards positive movement using a compulsion strategy of towards-away-towards, BUT I always establish the excitatory premise first.
Make sense???
Shyaam says
Dr. Joseph,
Thank you for the response.
Makes sense to a certain extent.. But, Eh.. I am not able to relate it to my questions..
Shyaam
Joseph says
Shyaam,
“If the Purpose of life is to just Be and Live, and the System is Perfect *As Is* why to live at all?”
To have the experience of perfection (you read my book The State of Perfection … yes???)!
Shyaam says
Thanks for the quick response!
Yes Dr.Joseph.. I have read TSOP…
I experience Perfection and then, Be in it… Is that all?..
Joseph says
You want more than Perfection????!!!!??!
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
Hello Joseph. I share your nausea about the prophets. I may have mentioned this before, but let me say that I can’t help getting it when exposed to the Graves model. I haven’t studied it, so misunderstand me correctly. But on superficial reading, it’s like the perfect map of so much of the hypocrisy in the world. All the talk is at one level and all the action is at a different one.
I suppose that just proves the relevance of the model.
Joseph says
Dagfinn,
Thanks for the comment.
You have been in the room when I’ve been ranting about the knee-jerk reaction that some folks have to the Graves Model, wanting to deny or dismiss it as irrelevant or perverse.
In my experience most of these folks are coming out of a Graves Six framework and are hellbent on finding plurality and equality in the systems they operate within, as well as tolerance for others as they see it.
Mostly this tolerance is framed something like, “Those poor lost souls, they just don’t get it, do they … so it’s up to us to show them the way.”
However this is not about the model, it’s about the way someone approaches the model IMO. The model itself is largely either descriptive or analytical depending on whether you come to it in a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional way.
If you approach the model in three dimensions as Graves Five and Six frameworks allow there is an analytical opportunity, but the response remains associated with the framework you operate from despite your analysis.
In other words, a Graves Five framework gives rise to someone using the analysis to frame and manipulate others to their own ends, a Graves Six framework allows someone to frame others and approach them to help them rise to the Graves Six value set themselves.
In order to use the model practically you need to create a four-dimensional framework, which requires oscillating and relating it to at least one other perceptual system simultaneously. When you do this the model doesn’t prescribe it opens the user to a set of possibilities. IMO this is the distinction of four-dimensional models, they open the set of potentialities rather than offering prescriptions.
[NOTE: FWIW in the field of cybernetics this is what all models do, i.e.: suggest possibilities not prescriptions. Processes are about prescriptive approaches, and what many folks call models are actually processes when viewed through a cybernetic filter.]
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
Perhaps relevant to your main message, I certainly don’t pretend to know how to do “human” well. But I have reflected a lot on how most of those who try to rub up against the larger system are acting. And what it means to be systemically aware in that context. Let me use your example from the last time we met, the (presumably) deliberately provocative idea that it might be possible to do the human race a service by letting loose a microorganism that would wipe out most of the world’s population. The idea being that we won’t be able to feed everyone when the human population continues to grow, and that you spare lives by killing people up front instead of breeding even more people who will starve later. I don’t care how you meant it, I’m just using it as an example to make a point.
For the sake of the discussion, let’s ignore a couple of issues. First, I believe the human population is likely to peak at about the level the UN predicts, 9 billion. The world’s population is stabilizing, and the idea that it’s not is a relic of the 1970s. And I don’t think there will be a problem feeding those people. But like I said, ignore that for the moment.
Second, ignore the idea of ethics and “thou shalt not kill”.
Now consider what happens after the plague is finished. What kind of society will emerge? Probably a very different one. One thing that is almost certain to happen (and I admit this is related to the first ignored issue) is that people will start having more kids again. So will the decimation of the human race be necessary again 50 years later?
We have no idea, of course. Which brings me to a general point which is closely related to your way of thinking: the larger the change, the more unpredictable the consequences. In politics, it’s often called revolution, and to me the Russian revolution in 1917 and the invasion of Iraq are similar in a systemic sense. Someone has a grand plan, they implement it, and then they pretend it worked. They fail to have feedback about what happened. All sorts of mayhem ensues. (Not saying, by the way, that there was a good alternative to the invasion of Iraq.)
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” Doing things that prevent you from getting feedback along the way is a bad idea.
Joseph says
Dagfinn,
I want a “LIKE” button next time.
Joseph
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
Thanks. There’s the idea of updating when the world around you changes, which is another idea that was discussed when we met in London in January. Simplified, it went, “do you need to update all the time?”, and the answer was “yes, and it’s easier than not updating”. When I say “they pretend it worked”, that’s the opposite. They did something, expecting a result, got feedback and responded to the feedback by not updating their thinking. In other words, not learning. Same thing at hugely different scales. So my next question, which I’m not asking you to answer, is how are human systems similar and different at different scales?
Leonard says
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
My understanding is that an individual is the product of a society as much as it is part of a society. Even if an individual succeeds in knowing itself it will be worthless unless it forms part of a society – nothing of value exists in a vacuum. I think the trick lies in understanding who you are and how to manage your relationships with the community you are part of.
Joseph says
Leonard,
I “think” I appreciate what you’ve offered here.
However, it’s not what I’m writing about, which intends to offer a glimpse into transcending individuality.
I get the worldview of the interplay and interaction of the individual and society, and visa-versa. It’s an older model than the one I think I’m pointing towards.
The model I’m pointing towards is about “wholes” instead of “parts that form wholes.” This is really tricky in the current worldview that we’ve all been steeped in to date.
We think in terms of separation without noticing that’s what we’re doing. It just seems “natural” that there are continents and countries, and counties and such. Each with boundaries and separations that define them, and the people within them.
What I’m trying to get to, maybe less successfully than I’d like, is a pointing at the wholeform where we cannot find the separations.
NOT some platitude like, “We are all part of the same system.” of “From space there are no borders.” I’m not opposed to this thinking, I just think it’s outdated and ultimately limiting.
What I proposing is the consideration of the entirety as an organism that is perfectly designed and doing what it does. But the challenge is that the organism doesn’t get to see itself, in the same way you can’t see your own eye using your eye, you can only see out of it. (NOTE: In this reference seeing a reflection of your eye, or a photo of it, is NOT the same as seeing your eye in the way you can see your hand.)
Think of it like this … is a wave a part of the ocean or the ocean doing something with itself? In other words can you separate the wave from the ocean and still have a wave? I’m suggesting that humans are the wave and the system-at-large is the ocean. It’s only that the wave is limited to a local position that prevents it from knowing what it actually is and thinking that it actually exists.
Mike Davis says
I really enjoyed this post. I get the distinct impression you are moving from a Graves 7 to 8.
I’m sure there is a shadow side to this position as well. I’m realizing each way of perceiving the world through Dr. Graves’ filter set has one- and as I read it I was not having an experience of what you’re experiencing as somehow better- instead it allows for a wider angle.
I was having an experience yesterday of moving off of my “self” (i.e. the identity I’ve been accustomed to) and really identifying with with the system I’m in as my “self”- something that’s been happening more and more the last few months… An experience I know really started moving along after a conversation we had several years ago in your car on the way to your then office in Mahwah… that dislodged a firm belief I had of being separate.
As always, I appreciate your candor and vulnerability. I know of no one else who walks their talk with such consistency.
Joseph says
Michael,
Thank you.
I don’t think in Gravesian terms so much these days … more in terms of the modeling of a fourth dimension that includes the Graves Model, so “Graves Eight” means less to me than for someone who is reading it from within the structure of Dr. Graves model.
The four-dimensional model I’ve been building I refer to as Performance Logics, referring to the idea of Performance as the only observable in the system, and the system beyond the observable as the “black box” which takes inputs and creates outputs but is itself indescribable.
The Logics part refers to the unique human way of processing information that connects things into patterns that are representative of the events we experience.
Therefore Performance Logics integrates the internal representations and the external events into a wholeform product that generates both our experience and our response. With the model in place it becomes possible to gain more elegant access to the actions you express, which within the model as I’m describing it define who you are, i.e.: the ontological stance you take.
I’ve been pulling these pieces together for more than a couple of years and I’ve begun to expose them in the Foolish Wisdom workshops I’ve been delivering. I just exposed the model in full four-dimensional form explicitly to a group I was working with in Dubai, and it really rocked the house.
T-genic says
HI,
“Performance Logics℠ Model The Performance Logics model model integrates the experience of an individual in the present with their intention to produce high quality performance in relation to creating intended outcomes. The model proposes that the integration of internal experience with external experience leads to the expression of behaviors that are highly aligned with creating the outcomes that are intended. This is our definition of “performance” – i.e.: Performance = the expression of behaviors that lead to outcomes. Performance Quality is a function of: 1) The quality of the behaviors expressed in the form of action taken as they relate to producing intended outcomes. 2) The consequences of actions taken to maximize positive consequences and minimize negative consequences, both for the individual and the systems they operate within. High Quality Performance: The process of producing intended outcomes while maximizing positive consequences and minimizing negative consequences. High quality performance begins with Situational Awareness, i.e.: – the intersection of Intrinsic Experience, Emergent Data (in Context) and Intentionality (regarding intended outcomes) in relation to expressing meaningful, positive behaviors that flow along the optimal line of action from the present towards the future, creating the intended outcomes, i.e.: a Moment of Action.”
In your four dimensional model you have intrinsic experience as one of the integrated elements along with emergent contextualized data, intentionality and “moments of action”. Does extrinsic experience come into play in your new model?
Thanks,
T-explorer
Joseph says
T,
Define “extrinsic experience”
As I hold these ideas in place today, all experience is intrinsic, i.e.: an internally held response of the individual. Intrinsic experience may be the direct sensory response to data that is either internally or externally organized, or the flow of responses to that data from the immediate somatic reorganization to the highly abstracted formations of representational patterns and mosaics.
The external form I refer to simply as data, i.e.: all the information in the system that is present in any event experience.
Sarah Lawrence Hinson says
Thanks for the reply and links. Guess I completely missed the point this time around. :-0 Did enjoy Seb’s site though. Made me giggle a fair bit. Two sorts of spiritual mist(s) can appear in front of the lotus eater (in my experience so far)…1 – the internal match with the teacher/guru is so strong that complete imbalance is achieved and the person loses the edges of themselves, becoming ‘like’ the teacher, filling in all their perceived shortcomings and lacks by energetic projection at the teacher, at least for the time being. 2. The teacher/guru type is in a Power Over play and is clever enough to create enough of a sideshow that the student is taken in…until/unless the student grows or the teacher is publicly found out, that is. Having experienced both so far…any new experiences I always take with a little spiritual salt, thank g-d.
Aforementioned book is a really fascinating discussion of how to shift our views and beliefs in order to survive as homo-sapiens. The title is in some ways quite misleading.
From chapter 4 ‘Shifting our values and beliefs’
Five lethal cultural beliefs
1. The Neolithic Illusion – nature is inexhaustible
2. Social Darwinism – the Idealogy of Competitive Fitness
3. Market Fundamentalism – the Market is the Answer
4. Consumerism – the More you have, the better you are.
5. Militarism – the way to Peace is through War.
Tis a really legacy-focused book.
Anyways, thanks as always for the discussion!
Sarah
Joseph says
Okay Dang It! I bought the book and I’ll read it (hahahaha … I really did buy it)
I get you’re points about gurus … and I’ve experienced both, and both in one individual too 😉
However, I think there’s at least one more possibility too …
The guru does their guru thing … i..e: teach and live. They are who they are, and giving the construct we live in within this Universe and Dimension that means being human, with all the foibles humans possess. Then the student needs them to be supra-human, beyond the limits of human frailty and the student imbues the guru with superhuman powers they don’t possess and never claim. Then the student wakes up … often with the guru pushing them to wake up intentionally … and they realize “SHIT! My guru is human!!! He/She FUCKING LIED TO ME!!!!” When in fact that’s not the case at all … in fact the guru just helped the student immeasurably by helping them to get over lying to themselves.
Roye said to me once, “Don’t trust me, trust my skills.” … a critically powerful distinction that immediately went in and stayed.
Me? I’m no guru … just a kid from NJ with lots and lots of observations and opinions, many picked up on the wrong side of the tracks.
Sarah Lawrence Hinson says
Hahahahaaha. THAT is funny! Hope you like the book heh. If not then it’s the perfect size to shore up a table leg I guess. Like v much what Roye said. Wish I could have met him. Always been turned off by gurus who get off on it. Remember liking Richard Bandler for being so down home and wondering why all those folk sitting at the front thought they would ‘get some’ or perhaps ‘get saved’. Just my observations at the time.
Great to know where one is from. Just a girl from a small English village who always ‘saw’ stuff and wondered why no-one else commented on it. Now I’m at peace with the seeing part which makes life a whole lot easier and a fair bit more amusing. The wild thing is, my kids are even more perceptive than I like to think I am.
The Akashic Age definitely does not need any more gurus or prophets IMHO…simply people who can learn to thrive together and not eff it up.
Ciao!
Ralph Klaassen says
I’m not sure if this fits but I’ll give it a try. This comes to mind after reading your post. I’ve heard contradictory viewpoints from people; one person is on one side of the fence and someone else is on the opposite. Neither can even imagine where the other is. I find myself sometimes in a unique place; I agree with both points. Somehow I believe in both things that are apparently contradictory. It’s like this. When it come to relationships I see them as a cake. I’ve heard people say he is the eggs and his mate is the flower. Not for me. Per your talk of a “body being a whole” I am the cake!! I am good and tasty as I am. Add a relationship and I’m adding frosting. It is now a completely different cake. The cake without the frosting was good and complete and enjoyable. But now the cake with frosting is a different good, complete and enjoyable.
I am happy and content all by myself. That’s not to say “changing the flavor” of the cake isn’t appealing.
There are many areas that I seemingly have opposing views but combing them together gives me a center and an objectivity that I don’t hear often.
Much of your terminology I’m not familiar with but it sounds like an effort to achieve a more centered view? Not centered in a new age way but centered in a pendulum way. ????
Joseph says
Ralph …
We largely agree … and I like your cake metaphor too.
Me personally I would have told it like this …
I met an Italian Pastry, a “baba” complete and whole until herself. Delicious just as is … cute as pie, like a “babka” by not as old … filled with the most exquisite ricotta cream filling … sweet and tempting beyond belief, and believe me, she didn’t need a thing more … certainly not me!
But being the rhum that I am I have to flow into and over her … ’cause when we met I couldn’t help myself, even though I know we’re too completely different things.
She’s all sweet and delicious, me I’m kind’a harsh and burn a bit if you go to fast with me.
But then when we came together something magical happened!
The infusion of rhum into baba made something that neither of us was separately … a freakin’ “baba rhum” … now that’s become my favorite pastry of all … man oh man, just thinking about it has my mouth all wet in anticipation!!!
But … you got the point … thanks.
Taso says
“Maybe we are built to affect one another, maybe “rubbing up against one another” is the essence of what life is about … life rubbing up against life.”
If you want “foo foo” try
http://wikibin.org/articles/human-design-system.html
Passenger->Driver->Vehicle
Leaving the homogenized world, the science of differentiation
16 min clip explaining the system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrChJPUYyi4
or explaining conditioning according to the system
7 min clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fzt3n-uiKc#aid=P-_TUal7V3k
Joseph says
I love the foo-foo voice in the YouTube clip from your third link … very uber New Age hypnotic `’~>
Joseph Riggio says
Michael,
BOTH!
Yes … again, both … the cancer that heals. It’s a question of perspective and only the fools survive 😉
I’ve been immersed in the Graves Model as you know … and in some ways it’s easy to get stuck in it (the model). But there is no way to go past it, except through it.
I just released some of my new material around the most current model I’m playing with “Performance Logics” … which is my response to the over intellectualization of the Graves Model that many folks who are pulled primarily by the gravity of Six tend to when trying to apply the model.
The model as Graves presented it was in fact an intellectualization of the evolution of values in cultures, and how the evolution of these values show up in individuals within those cultures … a descriptive model NOT an applied model.
FWIW I don’t think Graves ever intended it to be more than descriptive, or possibly useful analytically.
To make it applicable in a wellformed way it needs to reside in relation to something more, to move it from a a two-dimensional form (descriptive) beyond the three-dimensional form (analytical) to a four-dimensional form (applicable/pragmatic).
For the last two years I’ve been working with potential forms to find the relative form to move from the two-dimensions of the model Graves explicated to the four-dimensional form that transcends the analytical and leaps to the practical (i.e.: applicable/pragmatic).
FWIW I think I now have that in place …