Alan Watts
Listening to some wonderful podcasts from Alan Watts. In the current series, Images of God, which is made up from talks given during his lifetime, he is delivering all kinds of angles on the divine.
In the third installment of this series, he was talking about school, journeys and the dance. The point of a dance or a piece of music, is not the end, says Watts. If it was, then we would only have composers that wrote finales and audiences would only go to hear great final chords, or see people in their final positions.
No, the point of a piece of music is the way one experiences time. It’s all about the journey, the movement from here to there, the texture of moments that music or dances imparts.
From this he draws a parallel with schooling. We school in this society as if there is an end in sight, a point at which we are heading. In so doing, we teach people to sacrifice the moment for the delayed gratification of the end. And of course the end never comes. One grade finishes and the next begins. High school ends and university begins. University ends and work begins and work is simply more of the same, chasing promotions, until at some point one wakes up and realizes that one has arrived. And in fact one has always arrived and always been arriving, but we miss it constantly, and we school our children and ourselves into missing it completely as well.
Life as dance. Life as the middle phrase of the middle movement of a violin concerto, moving right on to the next one..
[tags] alan watts, unschooling[/tags]
Back home now. I’ll blog a little more on my learning from the Evolutionary Salon, especially with respect to the notions of the bodhisangha that was raised.
For now here is a bit from an email sent by a friend who is a medical doctor, and who has been following along with the ideas raised in the Salon:
As far as my comments on the subject of evolution of consciousness goes, I have to admit that my thoughts are not yet formed enough for me to make a coherent statement about them. The whole idea of raising humanity as a whole to a different level of consciousness is fascinating to me. I have been starting to “plant seeds” about it in my daily dealings with patients, albeit in very minor ways. Sometimes the results are quite surprising. It makes me aware of how little our culture supports nurturing of each other, opting either for selfishness or guarded suspicion.
I think that’s very cool. My question to all and especially for my colleagues with whom I have been in dialogue, is how can we support that action in a way that amplifies?
Some amazing conversations today about how to move forward from this gathering, which is including questions of sustainability of movements like this, in financial ways, energetic ways and in reflective, inquiry and learning ways. I have spent the morning in small groups, informally constituted thinking about how to move a gathering like this into a “bodhisangha” and enlightened community.
One way we are thinking of doing this is harnessing the power of gifts, and today we are playing with three modalities of giving. There is the Buddhist dana, which is the gift given for the gratitude of teachings received. There is the gift that works in gift economies, the act of paying forward. And there is the gifting I saw happen in Maori hui in New Zealand, the giving mode of the koha.
As I understand it, and saw it practiced in New Zealand, koha is a practice that comes from agricultural times. “Ko” means “to plant” and “Ha” means “breath” or energy.” These days, at the end of a hui (or a meeting) the practice is that a koha is given and it often accompanies an intention. We’re playing with that idea today and we’ll see how it shows up in the moving forward of the “bodhisangha” and the other action requiring sustainability coming out of these conversations.
Last night in the closing circle, my friend Pauline LeBel offered an observation that so much of our conversation, informed as it is by the great cosmological story, is very human- centric. She asked “What can we learn from the great love affair between the sun and earth?” It is a love affair in which the Sun asks for nothing in return.
A group of us today took a walk on the land as a response to that observation. I posted a session in the Open Space today called “How does a forest change a mind?” We walked into the forest and spent time reflecting on what the forest was doing to have an impact on our minds, spirits and hearts.
As we continue to engage with the story the universe is telling us, my invitation extends to us to take time with other parts of the universe that are not human and inquire into how they teach us and shape us. I suspect that wise action may be embedded the way the universe self-organizes and teaches us about itself.
While we were on the land we had some wonderful conversation and perspectives shared with one another. One which made me smile broadly came from Tesa Sylvestre who noted that for the apparent stillness in the forest, there is a whole lot of growth and activity going on. Kenoli Oleari then asked us to imagine what that would look like if it was all taking place in one tree in front of us, how all the growth happening in the forest in that moment would send a tree rocketing skyward in front of our eyes and the heat and sound would be immense. Someone then noted that this was the energy of the stars, and how true that is.
As the Salon progresses I find myself more and more curious about this relationship between cultivating the growing edge for people and shaping the quality of the moment. In the forest the quality of the moment was markedly different from here in the hall, with the buzz of people and voices all around. The growing edge that appears in both of those environments are very different, but they invite my to find learnings in th emoment that bring my perspective more towards wholeness, in an every evolving journey to see what I know and who I am as whole and part of a bigger whole all at the same time.
I just had lunch with Jessie Sutherland from Worldview Strategies. It was one of those encounters that was a long time in coming: we both seem to run in circles that intersect and I’ve known about her work for about a year but until today we had never met. I first became aware of Jessie’s work through an email inviting me to join a conference call on residential school reconciliation. Following the links, I found her website and her company, Worldview Strategies.
Jessie’s life and work is about reconciliation and peacemaking and it intersects with my work on a number of levels. We are both interested in the power of conversation and relationships to build robust and peaceful communities, we are interested and work in the realm of aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations and we are facilitators. But deeper than that, Jessie recognizes that social transformation comes through cultivating practices that support our ability to engage and catalyse transformation.
She has just written a book, Woldviewing Skills: Transforming conflict from the Inside Out, which is all about these practices. I recommend you pick it up from Jessie. In the conclusion to the book, she writes about “the stone in our shoe” the work we have to do on ourselves if we are to do transformational work in the world:
No matter how committed we are to social change, justice, and ultimately, reconciliation, if we don;t do our personal work we will likely, despite our best intentions, contribute to the problems we seek to change. While a conflict with a neighbour or dealing with the pain of our past may seem insignificant in comparison to resolving historical and contemporary injustices, it is precisely “these stones in our shoe” that ultimately prevents many peace-building strategies from reaching the goals many of us strive for.We need to start with who we are, what our personal history and legacy is, and how we contribute to conflict or reconciliation in our moment-by-moment choices. It is in the juice of our interactions with others – be it a baker, a colleague, a grocer, or our partner that we can learn these skills. Our challenge is where and how we meet the Other. When we use worldviewing skills, what arises is a great sense of respect because on some level the Other provides an opportunity to either climb our mountain or become stagnant.
Jessie’s book details a model of doing reconciliation work that starts with getting “in” to the personal, developing ways of seeing and sensing oneself in the world, and then moving out to the political and the social. In this way it mirrors a lot of the work I have been doing lately on practices that support Open Space. Essentially Jessie and I are saying the same thing: your practice in the outer world must mirror your inner being, and your inner being is as great a practice ground as the outer world. It is Gandhi’s call to be the change you want to see in the world; it is the Shambhala warrior’s mandate to do all things with heart, to do nothing without caring, to be a “warrior of joy” as my friend Toke Moeller puts it.
In some ways this is as simple as saying “practice what you preach” but the challenge is to live life as the practice of transformation and change that we want to see in the world, our organizations, communities and families. It means living life as a constant practice, seeing opportunity in every interaction to, as Vaclav Havel says “live in truth.” It is to bind our work in the world to our selves, and live with authenticity and integrity.
It’s always delightful to find another soul out there that lives this practice of opening and invitation. I’m already looking forward to places where we can play together.