As Michael and I make some progress on our writing, I find that I have been assembling together bits and pieces of writing I have done over the years and putting some papers up at my site.
Today I want to invite you to have a look at a new paper called “Six observations about seeing” which is composed from some blog posts I made 18 months ago or so.
As always, comments are welcome.
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It’s a beautiful spring day on the south coast of British Columbia. Today I flew to Victoria for some meetings with friends and partners. I sat in the co-pilot’s seat on the Beaver floatplanes on both trips and had a great conversation with the pilot on the way home about the coastline below us, alternative power generation, near misses and whales.
I am so grateful that partners becomes mates, clients become friends and strangers become great conversation partners. I just feel like expressing some gratitude and giving thanks to all who touch my life in big and small ways.
Chi meegwetch!
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I have been listening this evening to a podcast (.mp3) by Buddhist teacher James Foster on the single most important question in any spiritual path: so what?
That’s it. That is the question. It is neither a trivial question nor one that is completley cavalier. In fact it is a profoundly important question in very many realms and it is the utter foundation of the grounding practices that take facilitation, leadership and work from the esoteric to the real.
So heading into a week of teaching, I think I will anchor a lot of what I am doing around this question and play with the way in which the energy of this simple inquiry grounds everything.
[tags]James+Foster, Buddhism[/tags]
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I am thoroughly enjoying the podcasts of Alan Watts’ talks at the archive of alanwatts.com. Today, on the bus into Vancouver I listened to part four of “Seeing Through the Net” in which Watts talks about trust and control.
The essence of his argument is this: in Judeo-Christian societies, humans are said to be born with sin, and are therefore inherently untrustworthy; to be precise, humans are unable to rely on their own judgements to make good decisions and decisions for the good. And so the way to deal with a population of largely untrustworthy neer-do-wells is to create an eleborate system of controls in society to ensure that behaviour is managed and the chaos doesn’t get too overwhelming.
In contrast, Watts says, many societies, including traditional Chinese society and, I would argue, many First Nations societies see humans as essentially good and capable and trustworthy. If you can view humans like this, then you can see a room full of people as a roome full of potential, and an organization of people is one essentially capable of doing good in the world. All you have to do is trust these inherent capacities.
This control issue crops up everywhere. If humans are essentially untrustworthy then we need laws to keep the peace and agendas to keep them on topic. We need rules, regulations, measurements, standards and assessment and evaluation criteria that judge the largely untrustworthy human against the perfect ideal, in order to see how badly they failed to achieve perfection.
The kicker for me in listening to Watts comes when he says that the problem with this logic is that if you believe that humans are inherently untrustworthy, then you cannot possibly trust your own thoughts about that. It takes you into a strange loop that is inescapable. On the other hand if you begin with the assumption that humans are good and can be trusted, you can trust that assumption and engage others in your work and adventures.
It seems to me that this is a critical part of the infrastructure that underlies how we choose to be together in organizations and communities. If we can trust each other, then we can trust that any sticky place we come too will be resolved by the people we are with. If we can’t trust each other, then we can’t trust ourselves first of all, and the world becomes a sad place full of controls and statistics and punishment and devoid of the life and creativity and passion that we see in places where people are truly alive.
I try to work with people who believe in people and who trust them to find their way. It just sank in today a little deeper how profoundly this either/or really is. So here is a renewed call for a practice of deep and radical trust in the person sitting next to us. To the extent that we can trust them and validate their agency and potential contribution as a human being, we can do the same for ourselves. And vice versa.
[tags] alanwatts, trust, control[/tags]
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It’s a nice mild spring day here off the west coast of Canada. I’m at home with my kids, and we’re playing games, baking bread and making soup.
In fact, today my daughter cooked her first soup from scratch, an improvised Broccoli-Asiago cheese creation that tastes great. And so, here is our first ever Aine Corrigan-Frost soup podcast (with bonus dessert recipe).