Don’t Panic.

This is a tangental rant but it does tie back up together, (hopefully) in an illuminating and kite flying way. You just may find yourselves at times having lost the original circle. Even if you are, enjoy it. I have put many references for you to chase if you have the stamina to go deeper. If not, just enjoy my brain spaghetti. It is al dente.

The last days I have been (re-)writing my professional bio. Can’t I just send in my digital story? I suppose I am blocked on the fact that I want to write for every possible man and their dog who could read it. (yes yes, I will focus it to people who want to pay for my thinking and speaking services aka consulting and workshop/facilitation/communication services…)

Anyway, in doing so I have achieved peak proportions in procrastination prowess - I definately am ready for tenure in my Professorship of Procrastination, thesis area as yet unspecified, let alone incomplete. 

The benefit of course has been the beautiful nuggets mined in the anals of blogsphere today, via a scent from  my flatmate following my comment on film editing. 

[Should you wish to walk down this tangent: the conversation was on the speed at which frames flash by in today's world. Not just because technology but because we have the 'language' and ability to piece together what we see (disparete bits of narrative) and build the story in our heads...compare this to the early films which look 'slow' to us (because they are) which had people cowering under their theatre seats in fear that the gun pointed at them from the screen was going to shoot them. More or less]

This led him to suggest this man: Steven Berlin Johson - who incidently I know I need to meet - I think we have a lot to talk about including whether he wants to sit on my PhD thesis board, fractals and also, language. Ok, I have a lot of questions but if someone knows him and is reading this, I promise he will enjoy the conversation!! (Any semiotics experts out there?)

Anyway, Steven (via this post) pointed me to a beautiful word: 

‘consilience‘ -  The fact of `jumping together’ or agreeing; coincidence, concurrence; said of the accordance of two or more inductions drawn from different groups of phenomena.

It is a word I am going to try to incorporate because it is actually something I think (I am about elevating, and elevating together…not in isolation), and something I am working on: integrating puzzle pieces, the various perspectives out there…working in opposite direction to science, or in addition too it (modern science being about breaking things down into managable specialisable bits and viewing them in isolation, which doesn’t quite ‘fit’ with my world view that everything is connected and we are all part of the same system …and a myriad of systems, folding and enfolding…) It also fits with a quote I received last week:

"To climb upwards will be easier if you take others with you. When I think only of advancing myself, life is filled with obstacles, of other people, of challenging situations. However, when I think about putting others first and helping them do well, I find my life is full of support and everything becomes easier. Today let me think of the benefit of others as well as my own benefit." Zeynep Mufti - You can get such quotes emailed daily to you. Do email me if you want the details).

Synchronicity being rife in my life at present, or perhaps it being always there and my having a sudden appreciation and trust in it, I followed through some of Steven’s archives and found a beautiful comment on fractals written for, of all reasons, to comment on the show ‘Lost‘ (which is how I feel sometimes lately but have decided to enjoy the experience as time, nay, space to let things are emergie,and as such have found this wading/between place a pleasure!) source [note to self; write up my fractal theory of organisations!!!]

"The genius of Lost [life] is that its mysteries are fractal: at every scale — from the macro to the micro — the series delivers a consistent payload of confusion. There are the biographical riddles…There are geographic riddles…and historical ones…And then there are existential riddles [why are we here at all]

Narratives by definition work by withholding information about future events; you tune in to find out what will happen next. But with Lost [life], the mystery lies in the present tense: half the time, you have no idea what’s happening right now."

The other interesting part of this particular little Lost rant was that it was framed in the context of a ‘wierd coincidence’. This leads me down a much more beautiful tangent to something Paul Schumann wrote to me last week "We live in chaotic time. But chaos is not randomness, it is just order of a higher degree. We can’t always see the order, but it’s there. What we call beauty is often chaos that the right brain comprehends but can’t articulate to the left brain." 

Words like ‘coincidence’ seem to diminish the beautiful unfolding that is occuring around us. Unless we would like to see coincidence as the intersection of things. In which case my life and dialogue project is especially coincidental.

But back to the Lost rant. The last line says "half the time, you have no idea what’s happening right now". I believe we are at a ‘time’ where that is happening. Actually, I don’t know that physics would allow this statement, but I think that time is actually looking after himself (we live a pretty timeless existance in some senses given the speed at which, say, information can travel…or an easier example, that I can talk to my friends in Australia in real time today, yet for them it is tomorrow) and we are finding ourselves at a ’space’ where things are being created as we name them.

More and more I believe that how we choose to ’see’ and ’say’ the world is the world we get. Reality is manifesting as we create language for it. Possibly one of the reasons we can’t see what is really going on is that we don’t know how to name it. We just feel it. Things don’t make sense the way they used to…in my mind we don’t organise in a way that makes sense to the time/place we live in. I am beginning to articulate these things in the only way I know how which is to start…and see where it unfolds, to see where people take it. And I am also collecting people and stories along the way to see how far/high we can jump.

Speaking of stories, it was in sharing a tale that I was able to learn a crucial lesson in my dialogue quest. I use story more than simply that I love them. There is an elegance to stories. Much wisdom sewn into the narrative. And as humans I think we have developed to remember stories. It is stories, and not facts, that embed within us. Perhaps DNA is nothing but a story, of collective and personal…

The Story:

I first heard it told in ‘what the bleep‘. Legend has it that when Columbus’ ship came to America, the native American’s could not see it. They could see the waves, and the winds, doing strange things. But they could not see the ship.

How is this possible? They had never experienced ships before in their history, they had no concept for ship in their language, in their memory. 

Whether or not the story is true the story continues that the shaman of the group went back to the shore daily and meditated on the area of the strange wave movements.

One day he had a ‘vision’ of the ship. And in being able to ’see it’ he was now able to say it, to tell people in his group about it. In trusting their Shaman as a seer, and in being able to say it in their own language, they could now see the ships…".

To me the issue of the truth of the story is irrelevant. It is the best way I know to highlight how the impact of how we language things brings about our world. The way we define profit is a good case in point.

In any case, in sharing this tale with friends over a bottle of wine (why on earth anyone thinks that ideas and knowledge come when engaged in rational iterative thought processes I don’t know), one friend, Muriel, shared a beautiful piece of knowledge. Having learnt from physicist and dialoguist, Bohm, that in latin ’dia’ can mean ‘through’ and ‘logos’ meaning word/language, I was taken aback to learn that in greek ‘logos’ means both language and reason. ie there is no distinction between the saying and the meaning/logic/reasoning behind it. This is not new to linguistic fields. "In language you have the concept of naming things…that in terms of timing, it happens at the same time as when you conceptualised it". This is consistent with thoughts of those like Ferdinand de Saussure: "A sign is the basic unit of langue (a given language at a given time). Every langue is a complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of langue." Who incidently is responsible for starting semiology (enter semiotics…there goes one thread tied back). This is also consistant with some of philosopher Kant’s work, which focused on synthesis - how the

 "conceptual unification and integration carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding", operating on perceptions within space and time, which are not concepts, but forms of sensibility that are necessary conditions for any possible experience." [thanks to Muriel for the quick upskill and synthesis/connections between these things upon hearing the story]

Now if we could only all jump a bit higher and see it all rom ‘above’, so to speak, we may actually be to enjoy this new form of order taking place.

This leads naturally back to consilience (jump jump…always better when you can stand on people’s shoulders or be pulled up…and can borrow various types of lenses/binoculars) and also, to the (re-)starts of my dialogue project.

I will write more on dialogue, master languages and the story of the Shaman soon. In the meantime read PS…

PS Just so you know I did find a wonderful way of writing a bio by David Weinberger via S B J* which integrates/offers the possibility to select left/right brain thinking styles. You’ll know your preference by which bio you prefer.

PPS On language - did you ever notice that the word ‘via’ means street in Italian. Ie when we talk about something coming via someone, in many ways it is as though a tangent emerged in the space between us that led us somewhere we needed to go.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 3:40 am and is filed under misfit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.