Ourselves as This

Blue Fusion Image

Blue Fusion

All of us thinking together a clear blue thought; each nueron in resonance with the shape of the galaxies clustering

The universe is thinking

The shape of the galaxy super clusters looks like a human brain cell.

Prayer Wheel

A meditation on life. Tibetan prayer wheels are devices for spreading spiritual blessings and well being.

water and sand

here i watch my grandkids, callie, 8 and conrad, 5,  playing in a small bay at cape cod.  the salt marsh is not dense here and the small body of water is clear to the bottom where small crabs, snails, and all sorts of tiny living things crawling or swimming. many children chill their bodies in this body of blue and green, they scoop up little tiny crabs and are extactic with their finds. and the sounds of their joy filled the bright sunny day.

can we be content like the children at the edge of the sea and playing in the water and sand?? that questioning struck me because we have evolved as the most advance creature on earth, where story and play seemed to have gotten very complicated and burdensome. can we still find simplicity and peace without the constraint of our interllect? where is the beginners’ mind? how and where can we find that wilderness in our being? yes, i’m not talking about return to childhood, but a return to a kind of innocence that can unlock us and bring us closer to spontaneous play and response to the elements surrounding us. sometime i can get to that place when i do my paintings or write poetry, but most of the time, the simple water and sand are not attainable. my dream of meeting like-minded folks is meeting those who can inspire me to play, to embrace a kind of freedom that’s not really new, but ancient… a kind of Tao of living.

Alternative Creation Stories

At this time we only have stories (no confirmed scientific theories) about our “creation” (assuming that there was a beginning and not a “steady state” background for change) and our “becoming” (to where we “are”). These stories are “based” on some “accepted” “facts” of the cultures who live by these stories. There are no confirmed scientific theories about cosmological creation, although many good partial hypotheses. The Big Bang and the physical Evolution of the Universe hypotheses were not refuted by the “confirming” discovery of the “background radiation”. “SCIENCE” is a social-cognitive process in the (circularly based physicalist theories of biology and brain) that creates space-time causal models and associated narrative stories.

 

But, as pointed out by David Korten in THE GREAT TURNING, both the religious “creationist” story and the physicalist Big Bang and Expansion story relegate life, mind and spirit to late emergence, without “cause”. One of the universal assumptions among humankind today is that “time is one dimensional”. There are interesting speculation that life, mind, and spirit “were around” at the Big Bang and may have had some influence in cosmic evolution [but they still adhere to 1D time].

 

I encourage creating physicalist stories, as they do represent “one” possible theme of reality, and have powerful heuristic value. But the story should not be told so as to exclude other stories (the best don’t). Especially when they encourage a passive, go with the flow of evolution, perspective.

 

Consider a highly speculative story. Fact: most of what we know about the traditional physicalist, Big Bang and Expansion story is less than two hundred years old, most much more recent. Assume that some psi phenomena are real, such that collective minds might influence subtle variables in the matter-energy world. [I believe such phenomena have not been refuted by experimentation.] Our knowledge of the Cosmological Story comes from processed and interpreted data generated from complex physical instrumentation and computers. Imagine both the design and use of these instruments being created so as to create the Cosmological Story in the interpreted data. The origin or zero point of time is always NOW! We continually create both past and future! Our stories are fictional (created) reality! [I expect that this may be consistent with some spiritual-religious stories.]

 

The holarchical (nested hierarchical) story of living systems is a wonder totally independent of the cosmological evolution story. That is, just the story of steady (dynamic) state molecular-biological processes – without evolutionary change – is a challenge to comprehend and appreciate. Within accepted physicalist constraints, the field of creativity is wide open to life (mind and spirit).

 

SEED: The organization/learning details beyond viable communities and persons (from our evolutionary herstory) towards a global holarchical network of highly diverse communities, will need to be commensurate in complexity with the intra- and inter- cellular processes of known life. To date, we are orders of magnitude below this. In analogy, we individualized persons are as proteins, except that instead of being a 3D folded form from a linear string of molecular beads, we are a changing web of components with fractal-like depth – with high diversity. This is why viable and sustainable communities and awakened persons is necessary, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT, for long-term survival of Humanity/GAIA.

 

I conclude with praise for visual artists and other creators who celebrate the Cosmological Story. I eagerly look forward to viewing your creations at the conference. To think/speculate/plan beyond the Here&Now does not exclude augmenting and enjoying the present.

 

Larry (nuet)

I wrote this little poem at a retreat with Gangaji.  It’s an attempt to express something about the place that stories (and story fields) arise from.  I offer it in honor of that placeless place.  Lorraine Cook

Freedom in the Binding

My teacher told me to write about Illusion and the Truth. 
I wrote Illusions on the left side of my journal
and Truth responded on the right.

Until it became obvious
they were opposing each other.

“Where exactly do you meet?” I wrote. 
And discovered, then, the binding,
A slit so narrow, there aren’t any words.

I will write you a book of Truth and Illusion
but where I rest is in the binding.

The place where consciousness is born and breathes,
writing out the pages of a story that
holds together only by what binds it.

 

Swarming as a Story Theme

Swarm Theory has been of interest since first reading about it in OUT OF CONTROL, and then elaborated on in SMART MOBS. There sure is a lot of story potential there. However, there are some ideas that caution me on over generalizing the phenomenon.

1. The tasks performed by swarms are specific problem solving. I am not sure swarming can be creative.
2. The ability to swarm requires the ability to emit/respond to signals from others in ways programmed by their genome. The individuals don’t make BIG decisions, but they do make decisions consistent with the program. Human can only swarm if they share the specific competencies to swarm – many which may not be in our genome.
3. The complexity of human minds may limit human swarming to specific prepared populations. The detection and repair of damaged infrastructure in human systems must involve considerable swarming; but probably made less efficient by other agendas of the participants.
4. Much of the behavior of cells of multi-celled beings may be patterns of swarming behavior, even if the cells aren’t very mobile with respect to each other.
5. Hive insects and our cells KNOW what to do, given an appropriate signal – the knowledge is within their systemic structure/process. They don’t usually need instruction. However, much of what human persons must do in collaboration requires that they first learn what to do. And the members may be doing different kinds of things in coordination, which is probably not swarming. This makes our creative emergence a greater challenge.

See PETE MILLER on Swarming – National Geographic
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/feature5/index.html

Personal Computer Learning Stories

I believe it would be useful if everyone would share their personal story of learning to use and using computers, and relating to other computer users. A brief summary of my computer story follows:

 

I am not new to computers, or as I prefer: Systems of Intelligent Tools. I only began to use computers when they could do something for me: word-processing. In the 1960-70s I knew people who worked on mainframes and later people who were computer hobbyists. An Apple II with a Z80 card for using WordStar was my first computer in the early 1980s. Today I have digital documents that would collectively fill many books, but they remain poorly organized. On a single day, in one issue of The Futurist I discovered hypertext (via Ted Nelson) and online conferencing (via Peter & Trudy Johnson-Lenz). My life changed. I soon had a new IBM to play MIST+ and was trying to construct a hypertext online seminar system. It worked, but was too complex to get others to use. I was inspired by the innovative software of Neil Larson (MaxThink, Houdini, Hyper) and the augmentation visions of Doug Englebart. I grew up with the technology, but never learned programming and adding a hard drive was my limit with the hardware.

 

Yet, I became a consultant for those who could use what I knew – which remains very limited within the whole field of Intelligent Tools. I was online before there was The Internet and the WWW – and from the beginning was concerned with how others learned to use computers. I presented (on the potential of virtual projects and communities) at the national meeting of ENA (Electronic Networkers Association) in 1987, where the theme was “Beyond Conferencing”. The commercialization of cyberspace accelerated the technology in many dimensions, but retarded it in many others.

 

As the decades advanced I tried and used a variety of intelligent tools. Yet, I seem to have fallen farther and farther behind in my competencies. I devote more time today keeping my PC functional than I did with my old DOS computers. Today I experience more crashes and slowdowns than ever before. When I try using tools advertised to improve functioning, things get worse. Each new app tries to take over my computer and compete with other apps. At this moment I am contemplating buying a new computer, or reformatting my HD – but I want a system that I can keep stable and I don’t know how.

 

I find that the help systems get more and more complex and difficult for someone with my learning style to use effectively. There are many features on my applications that I don’t make an effort to use, even though I know they would be useful. Recently trying to set up a blog on WordPress I realized that the technology of conferencing and communicating had advanced significantly – primarily by those whose primary interest is system functionality and elegance. This is great, but it has generated a new vocabulary, a knowledge of which is often implied in the help systems.

 

A final word, that needs further explication. I know that the contemporary technology is grossly underutilized by all users – and there is a wide and expanding distribution of uses and users, and levels of competency. The number of computers owned today, and the number of people who go online is a deceptive measure of our collective competency with Systems of Intelligent Tools. This issue appears to be invisible, probably because it calls for an education/organization effort so far out-of-the-box that few can imagine it. Yet, I believe it to be an essential theme in our new story of The Great Turning. A first start would be learning our collective levels of competency with Systems of Intelligent Tools, and what we need yet to learn.