Category: Edited

• Bob Stilger on hearing family in Japan: What’s happening in Japan reminds me of basic human goodness. Perhaps it is present everywhere.
• From the weekend, top of Sundance, Utah for spring skiing (first in about 4 years). Fresh air, fresh spirit. http://yfrog.com/h4tsqhmj
• Emily Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops — at all.
• Louise LeBrun: “There is no business ‘out there’ – there is only YOU in relationship with others and the quality of your own life!“
• Lynne McTaggart on Noetics: “Living consciousness somehow is the influence that turns the possibility of something into something real.”
• Lynne McTaggart again (Dan Brown mixed in): “The most essential ingredient in creating our universe is the consciousness that observes it.”

I am beginning to write now about some things that have long captured my attention. Quantum physics. Intuitive intelligence. These are two in particular. I can feel a huge incompleteness in my knowing and understanding. It is the kind of not knowing that in the past would have deterred me from writing and sharing. Yet, these two areas have gone well beyond cognitive interests for me. They have become ways of being and ways of seeing in the world. They are ways that I’m aware require me to be different in not just the “what” of knowing but in the “how” of knowing. And enough so that “knowing” itself comes to mean something quite different than what I have been schooled to believe it is. From an objectification of fact based inquiry to a relational co-creational dynamic construction, or revealing, of reality, that has been here all along.

Woosh! Yes, it feels like a lot. I feel a bit crazy. Dizzy even. And I’m holding myself to go further into it rather than running from it (oh, and good to have a few key friends to help watch or guardian the process). It is not my desire to become the science expert and acquire those degrees. Thank you to those who have done so and who have shared your learning. It is my desire to apply insights from those studies to the process of working with groups and human beings in those groups. I want to connect the ideas, like some of the good people I’ve been able to learn with for many years now. Meg Wheatley is one of these people — she began doing this very kind of work twenty years ago when she published Leadership and the New Science. I feel the call to build further.

I suppose if I were looking for a couple of anchoring points, for me, all of this feeds two inquiries that have lived me. Two questions.

What could real also be?

What does it mean to be human anyway?

This feels like a life bridge for me. Not to be made sense of  all at once. But not to wait for all of the pieces to fall into place. One of my reasons for writing in this blog has been to learn in public. Express ideas. Invite reflection. Here I go. Again.

Many worlds. I am aware of this as a concept in physics. As I understand it, that all realities exist at one time. Perhaps it is more accurate to think of all forms of energy existing at one time, that when observed by a consciousness (people or other conscious beings), become form (what most call real). There is a classic illustration of this referenced as Schrodinger’s Cat. Hypothetically, a cat is placed in a large box unseen to an observer. The cat is given a pellet, with a 50% chance that the pellet is poison and will kill the cat. From a quantum perspective, the cat is both alive and dead until observed by the person. Both realities exist. Both potentials exist. If observed / expected as dead, the cat shows up as dead. If observed / expected as alive, the cat shows up as alive.

For me, scaling the many worlds dynamic out has felt quite gummy in my mind. It is so attractive as a concept. And actually simple in principle. And quite crazy at scale. Infinite realities have always been that way for me. I’ve experienced it as an overwhelm of trying to imagine myself shifting amongst these many worlds. Or even to shift into one world. My thought has been, “maybe if I can shift reality just a bit, then I can begin to imagine or practice shifting to World 2 or World 3. A small start to understanding infinite worlds. ” I’m just parking that awareness for now.

The insight this morning is from this. If many worlds exist, rather than the enormous effort and focus needed to make just one shift from one world to another, what if part of our nature is to effortlessly shift between all of those worlds all of the time? I don’t know where to find the constancy in that — I realize I look for it. But what if that is what all of us do, even though we don’t see it as such?

There is a problem that a team is trying to solve. Multiple realities exist, including the problem is solved and the problem is not solved. Let’s say the problem is solved. One way of looking at this would be, “Great, we did it.” My added lens is that we did it in this world. This his how I and I believe most would say that “we did it.” An alternative way of looking at this would be “Great, we did it because we invoked or presenced another world.” We imagine it as all here in this world that we reference. Yet, we actually shifted worlds. Effortlessly. Because that is what we instinctively do, even without knowing that we do it. It is part of being a conscious being interacting with energy.

My starting place for the value in this reasoning is the thought that we could begin to construct realities. As I continue to learn, I wonder if the value is in releasing the lock, the trance, the script of seeing just one world. And I wonder what unimaginable creativity arrives, becomes accessible, in the unlocking, the untrancing, and the unscripting.

Maybe. Maybe. The sciences of these times make me feel a bit crazy. But then so do the old scripts.

The author of this poem, Wislawa Szymborska is Polish. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.

I find myself returning to poetry more these days. It is one of the things that I do when I need to find, amidst the learning that I am in, the ground underneath my feet. I return to beauty, sometimes starting in others, to remember a beauty that I am too.

I am drawn to this poem for the simple references to life experiences, followed by the last line, the simple experience of “not knowing.” That too, is part of life, despite my efforts and others to break it down into knowing.

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to see the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember a moment,
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up drenched in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

I was in conversation today with my friend and colleague Jonathan Gilburg of Gilburg Leadership. It was followup to the Boston Art of Hosting Training that we co-hosted earlier this year.

As we checked-in we shared our awareness of big events happening in the world. In Japan, earthquake followed by tsunamic followed by the potential of nuclear meltdown. In Lybia, further civil war and the impact on democratic uprising in neighboring Arab nations. This is a conversation that can go on, the naming of significant happenings (which also are happening at the level of scale of self, team, community, organizations).

Do they call for us, all / many of us, to be in a different paradigm of thought, understanding, and practice?

I liked Jon’s description, from others that he has read, that perhaps we are in a generational cycle. It is the idea that, when tracked over civilizations, when reaching a significant enough level of crisis (and I believe hope), a new consciousness is born. But that with each shift, the crisis must appear (to help illuminate the accompanying dream). It is not to impose crisis, or intellectually understate the realness of what is happening in day to day lives. It is to notice some of the conditions for emergence.

This is one I’ll continue to watch for. Including the offerings of new thought, understanding, and practice.

Thanks Jon for this stirring.