Blog Posts — Page 16

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the landAnd don’t criticize what you can’t understandYour sons and your daughters are beyond your commandYour old road is rapidly agingSo get out of the new road if you can’t lend a handThe times, they are a-changin’.” Yup, the times are a-changin’. Bob Dylan wrote this song in 1964, and change has continuously accelerated since then. For example, the world population, when he wrote the song, was about 3 billion. Read More

“We always belonged to this mystery, and maybe we can begin to find our way back, even if it means following an almost hidden path.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee I just completed a 60 day course entitled “Harmonizing All with All” conducted by Artie Vipperla, a Harvard trained polymath and Ph.D. psychologist who happens to be a Vietnam buddy of mine. The course consisted of two cycles – the first to present and give people an experience Read More

Our small town of Elk Rapids (ER), Michigan is embarking on a bold experiment. We are seeking to find common ground across divides while welcoming healthy conflicts and respectful disagreements—not exactly what we are seeing around the world.  WHY? We want to demonstrate that it is possible to bridge divides in the pursuit of creating healthy, innovative, and thriving communities, and that is possible for multiple community agencies to engage constructively and collaboratively to accelerate Read More

“We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.”  Mohsin Hamid Humans are complex systems – so complex that it is tempting to reduce experience into simplistic dualities.  A great case in point are the conversations about gender fluidity and sexual orientation. It is so easy to confine the human experience into the binary of male and female.  These handy Read More

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.” Sigmund Freud  Gurdjieff often stated that his mission was to mercilessly destroy the illusions we have about ourselves and the world.  He is getting a lot of help these days from three major disruptions on Read More

“The authoritarians tell a simple story about how to restore order — it comes from cultural homogeneity and the iron fist of the strongman. Democrats have a harder challenge — to show how order can be woven amid diversity, openness and the full flowering of individuals. But Democrats need to name the moral values and practices that will restore social order.”  David Brooks Practices and behaviors are simply manifest values.  That’s true on an individual Read More

I spend the first two hours of most mornings reading the New York Times.  It’s a marvelous paper covering monstrous stories.  In order to recover from the depressing pall of what’s happening in the world, I meditate for 30 minutes to ground myself in the current reality and to experience the boundlessness that mediation brings.  It’s a marvelous way to deal with whatever monsters are still lurking in my mind from the morning news.  I Read More

“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.” Lao Tzu   I just finished watching season 3 of Succession.  It was the culmination of 29 depressing episodes of shameless depravity.  The series is a spoof on the Rupert Murdoch family dynasty and their polluting effect on the news media.  As the title suggests, the plot revolves around the children’s jockeying for power to assume the throne of Read More

“Is your glass half empty or half full?” asked the mole.  “I think I’m grateful to have a glass,” said the boy.”  Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse My family has grown accustomed to me going off on tangents in which no one is particularly interested.  On a recent vacation, as I was thinking about this post, I suggested a game we could play to expand aphorisms related to non-dualism.  Surprise, Read More

In my last post, I wrote about collaborative communities which elaborated on the process for engaging collective intelligence to achieve sustainable growth across organizational boundaries.  I alluded to the fact that creating collaborative communities required a new type of leadership – not the heroic, hierarchical, humorless, and hubristic type, but more of a servant leader type who humbly hosts welcoming spaces and who inspires people to come together, connect deeply, and commit passionately to a Read More