wheatley cape cod 2012

Leadership and the New Science: 20 Years On

What’s going on?How did we get here?What is our role going forward?

1992 2012

October 2012

You are the result of nearlyfour billion years of evolution

Please act like it

Structure of Each Day

• Teaching from Meg• Small group explorations• Large group reflections• Personal journaling or reflective time

Who showed up as ‘you’ this morning?

rate yourself on a Scale of 1 to 5 1 = barely here 5 = best day ever

• How present and undistracted am I? • How open and curious do I feel?• How brave do I feel—to inquire, take risks?• How interested am I in others’ experiences?• How willing am I to support others to learn?

We cannot change the way the world isBut by opening to the world as it iswe may discover that gentleness, decency and bravery are available not only to us but to all human beings.

Chögyam Trungpa

Buddhist Teacher

Ground: We cannot change the way the world is

Path: But by opening to the world as it is

Fruition: We may discover that gentleness, decency and bravery are available not only to us but to all human beings.

Chögyam Trungpa, Buddhist Teacher

• Mon: We cannot change the way the world is

This Brave New World has emerged

• Tues: Opening to the world as it isNew Maps for Lost People

• Wed: Distracted by Distraction How technology and the

Internetare changing us

• Thur: We discover gentleness, decency, bravery

Restoring Human Capacities

• Fri: Right work, Right relationship

Describe something going on in your worldthat you want us to know about.

Write a brief headline on your paper.

Write large and clear so we can read it.

You’ll have time to describe this in more detail when we gather together.

EmergenceHow life creates novelty and change

through increasing complexity

The creation of new & complex systems through the interaction of multiple parts. The new properties and capacities created are properties of the system; they are not found in the parts.These properties exert control over the parts.

Emergence

ORIGIN mid 17th cent. (in the sense ‘unforeseen occurrence’):

from medieval Latin emergentia, from Latin emergere ‘bring to light’

Properties, Behaviors, Characteristicsof an Emergent System

– never the sum of the parts, nor more than the sum of the parts

– new and different than the parts– do not exist until the system emerges– system ‘supervenes’ on its parts—power over– cannot be undone. You can’t work backwards

or in a reductionist way

Emergent Systems

Cannot be changed.The only way to change what’s emerged

is to start over

"Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got." ~ Peter F. Drucker

“One cannot change an old system. Instead one must create a new system that makes the old system obsolete.”

~ Buckminster Fuller

When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Wendell Berry

Opening to the world as it is

New Maps for Lost People

Are we lost?

Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk, and this is the edge of the roof.

Rumi, Sufi poet, 13th century

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.

Hafiz, Sufi teacher, poet, 14th century

5 stages of being lostDeep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

• Deny you’re lost—press on with urgency• You realize you’re lost—urgency becomes

panic• Desperately seek anything that looks familiar• Deteriorate rationally and emotionally• Resigned to your fate, you admit you’re lost

“Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to where you started from; it is a decision not to be lost wherever you happen to find yourself.

It’s simply saying, ‘I’m not lost, I’m right here.’”

Laurence Gonzales Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

Being lost is a state of mind, not of geography

• It is outdated mental maps that keep us lost.

• We don’t have to change the situation. We have to change our mind about the situation.

• A world of emotions moving to extremes, where anger becomes rage, opponents become enemies, dislike becomes hatred, sorrow becomes despair.

• A world closing shut, where individuals, groups, ethnicities, and governments fortify their positions behind impermeable boundaries.

• A world where critical thinking scarcely exists, where there is no distinction between facts and opinions, between science and beliefs.

• A world where information no longer makes a difference, where we hear only what we want to hear, always confirmed and never contradicted.

A world desperate for certainty and safety, choosing coercion and violence as the means to achieve this.

A world solving its crises by brinksmanship and last minute deals, no matter how important or disastrous the consequences may be.

A world growing more meaningless as the values of consumption, greed, and self-interest take hold.

A world of people who formerly felt powerful and constructive now feeling powerless and exhausted.

Global WarmingJane Hirschfield When his ship first came to Australia,Cook wrote, the nativesContinued fishing, without looking up.Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

We are distracted from distraction by distraction.”

T. S. Eliot

The Internet is “a system of interruption technologies”

Neuroplasticity

Brains change continually to support our needs and activities.

There is no such thing as being “hard wired” if you’re a living system not a machine.

The brains of Internet addicts (more than 38 hours/week) resemble the brains of cocaine addicts and alcoholics. “Every time your device pings with a new text, tweet, or email, it triggers a pleasure response in the brain. You get a squirt of dopamine. The brain grows new neurons receptive to speedy processing and instant gratification.

Other structures shrink, e.g. concentration, empathy, impulse control, memory, pattern recognition, thinking, critical analysis, and more.

Epigenetics

Discovered in The Human Genome Project

• Genes are not switches• Genes are players in an ensemble cast of other elements (proteins and other biochemicals)• DNA is composed of these elements• DNA s affected by the lives we live • Heredity emerges from the interaction of these

many elements. It is an emergent phenomenon.

Technological Determinism

Jaques Ellul

• Technology, once introduced, always takes over. • It feeds on itself. Users demand more and more from it. • Social structures--values, behaviors, politics—become

organized around technology's values• Existing cultural values and traditions disappear--a new

culture emerges.• Gutenberg's printing press put information into the

hands of everyday people, credited with:• enabling the rise of individualism,• literacy, • complex language, • private contemplation, • the literary tradition • the advent of Protestantism

Marshall McLuhan: the content of a medium is just "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind."

How are we being affected by the process of text, post, connect, search, scan?

“in growing, technique requires that human values be in exact accordance with technical development and that social structures develop purely in terms of technique. This, I believe, shows that nothing in a society remains intact once technique begins to penetrate.”

Jacques Ellul

“In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) will list inits appendix:

“Internet Use Disorder”

“It’s this basic cultural recognition that people have a pathological relationship withtheir devices. People feel not just addicted, but trapped.”

Kelly McGonigal, Stanford U.

Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in more than 34 million articles published in academic journals and noted that the number of different citations declined after the advent of search engines.

These information-filtering tools, he observed, "serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn't."

The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing Our Brains

Nicholas Carr

Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work

Jacques Ellul with William H. Vanderburg

Alone Together: How We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other

Sherry Turkel

"Something that is worthwhile, wholesome and healthy exists in all of us.”

Chogyam Trungpa, Buddhist Teacher

Ground: We cannot change the way the world is

Path: But by opening to the world as it is

Fruition: We may discover that gentleness, decency and bravery are available not only to us but to all human beings.

Warriorship

'warrior' in Tibetan pawo

literally means 'one who is brave.’

Warriorship in this context is the tradition of humanbravery, or the tradition of fearlessness.

A warrior is one who does not accept the invitationor challenge.

There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Great barbarian powers have arisen. Although these powers spend their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that lay waste our world. In this era, when the future of sentient life hangs by the frailest of threads ....the Shambhala warriors go into training. They are armed with two “weapons”—compassion and insight.

The basic wisdom of Shambhala is that in this world, as it is,

we can find a good and meaningful human life that will also serve others.

That is our richness.

Chögyam Trungpa

I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope. . . there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.

Thomas Merton

Again and again,some people in the crowd wake up.

They have no ground in the crowd and they emerge according to broader laws. They carry strange customs with them, and demand room for bold gestures.

The future speaks ruthlessly through them. Ranier Maria Rilke

The warrior who is fearlessis not caught in the ambush of hope

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.

Beyond Hope and Fear

As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.


The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

Thomas Merton


Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Reinhold Niebuhr

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopefor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without loveFor love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T. S. Eliot

“As the warrior proceeds on the path, he or she may go through phases of intense fear. Frequently, such fear comes out of nowhere. It just happens; it just hits you.It may cause you to question everything in yourself: everything you have studied, everything you have learned and understood, as well as your general life situation. You feel the wretchedness of the world around you, as well as within yourself.” in Smile at Fear Chögyam Trungpa

wheatley cape cod 2012

Travel

internetare

world isthis

human beings

isnew maps

emerged tues

feelto inquire

buddhist teacher

thomas merton