reframe

The Power of Myth

// May 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

We use “The Hero’s Journey” module in many of our programmes that focus on individual transformation. It’s based on Joseph Campell’s work on the monomyth, or the idea that there is a common archetypal structure to our hero mythologies, across world cultures and millenia. Using the lens of the monomyth we can examine stages and elements in our own journey of discovery, development and bold action.

In 1949, Campell, an autodidactic with an incredible journey of his own, published his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It launched comparative mythology as a field of study and has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists, including George Lucas in his Star Wars Trilogy. In fact, in 1986-87, over the final two summers of his life, Lucas hosted a six-part conversation between Joseph Campell and journalist Bill Moyers at his Skywalker Ranch in California around his core ideas and the ongoing role of mythology in scoeity. Aired in 1988 as Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth the insightful talks are available below on google video and highly recommended.

Episode 1: The Hero’s Adventure

Episode 2: The Message of the Myth

Episode 3: The First Storytellers

Episode 4: Sacrifice and Bliss

Episode 5: Love and the Goddess

Episode 6: Masks of Eternity

Unveiling the Cosmos

// May 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

I recently trained at Solution 2009 in Vienna, co-delivering with my old friends from Emersense and some great new additions, forming as deep and diverse a learning platform as I’ve been a part of. My first session for the conference was meant to be a paradigm shift in understanding. It aimed to provide a guided tour to some of the big questions in existence, to the world outside of ourselves- something like this…

Only bigger… I wanted the participants to realise that their story was far larger, far more connected that they had possibly imagined. That their story was truly universal and loaded with everything that implies. The vast structure and interconnection that we are part of can seem so vague and unspecific. I wanted to get beyond that to a glimpse of a place that moves beyond the rational understanding of what is, and into the awe of what we are apart of- and even simply- what we are.  Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, expresses it perfectly in his journey of realisation- offered as reflections at the close of the “Beyond Belief” conference in ‘06.
(Start at 4:05)

And from this perspective, with these different kind of eyes, I attempted to bring the audience to  reexamine our world- and indeed ourselves. Astrophysicist George Smoot gave a TED talk that had struck me powerfully, pulling back the veil to reveal the design in the universe, for those of us with the inclination to see it. I borrowed heavily from his models and presentations, although I expanded into our planet, our history and our singular moment of existence.

It is a hard-line to walk between George as Scientist and Neil as Storyteller, and I probably hit too full an explanation before moving into introspective reflection and the later half of the session. Yet for me this is not just a tool to inspire awe, it is some of the greatest truth we can know. It is not just a metaphorical story, but a literal one, more intricate and complicated than can be imagined. And it is because of the fragility of our imaginings that I wanted to bring this content to the rather unsuspecting audience. It was because we were about to engage in deep self-discovery, that it seemed even more important to be well rooted in the real; to see our story as part of what we know the greater story to be, to see our conception of self in the context of the structure of our greater identity, to see our subjective limits and absolutes in view of true universals.

As Ibn Arabi writes, “Perfect knowledge of Reality involves seeing with both eyes, the eye of reason and the eye of imagination”.

Three Marks of Existence

// February 11th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Leadership Development

I’ve been enjoying the Buddhist Geeks podcast over the last couple of weeks. It features great interviews with luminaries from a range of traditions, the hosts bringing a healthy skeptical and practice-focused attitude. In one recent edition they dialogue with Jun Po Roshi, an American Zen Master in the Rinzai Zen tradition, about his history with entheogens and a new form of Koan practice that uses NeuroLinguistic Programming techniques to help anchor spiritual realization in one’s linguistic structures. He also shared a remarkably clear explanation of what Buddhists consider to be the three universal characteristics.

“No matter which tradition, go back to the foundational teachings, that are the three marks or the three statements that the whole Buddhist system is built upon.

(The first is) impermanence. How wonderful! Get impermanence: nothing lasts. If I truly experience impermanence then I’m in gratitude for whatever is, because everything’s on loan. And its a temporary relationship. That’s a shift in understanding. He said that needs to be tasted and understood. If you really grok it, then you don’t grab any more. Clinging and attachment is the problem.

The second is that with life comes pain. Stop running and hiding from pain. Bring it on! How interesting? Wouldn’t that be different if I stopped ducking and hiding from pain.

And then finally, Knock, knock. (Who’s there?) Nobody… The centre, right now, of your personality and your being is absolute pure emptiness or shunyata. The idea of a soul or the concept of a continuing thing is a neuro-linguistic, philosophical construct that allows you comfort, but it’s existent there only and it arises in the absolutely purity of your being.”

- Jun Po Denis Kelly

Wisdom Book

// December 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

“Inspired by the idea that one of the greatest gifts one generation can pass to another is the wisdom it has gained from experience, the Wisdom project, produced with cooperation from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, seeks to create a record of a multicultural group of people who have all made their mark on the world. Presented against the same white space, all of the subjects are removed from their context, which not only democratizes them, but also allows for a clear dialogue to exist between them. In an attempt to create a more profound, honest, and truly revealing portrait of these luminaries, the project encompasses their voices, their physical presence, and the written word. This comprehensive portrayal of such a profound and global group is an index of extraordinary perspectives.”

Andrew Zuckerman has produced a short-film and scans of his Wisdom book at www.wisdombook.org.

Many thanks to Rudi for the voice calling in the desert.

David Foster Wallace

// September 22nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

“(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005… There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.” 1

Three years and four months ago David Foster Wallace, one of the most important American authors of the last twenty years, stepped aside from his writing sabbatical to share reflections on the “capital-T” truths for living. A rare, intellectual and enquiring perspective “it was Wallace’s odd sense of double vision that most defined his sensibility. He was a humanist who could not help but see both sides of the story, who imagined himself into the gray middle areas of his writing.” 2

Ten days ago, this man who seemed so uncomfortable being cast as the troubled genius, lost touch with one side of the story, and hung himself. He had suffered from depression throughout his life and it had intensified deeply in recent months. In this light, the commencement address is even more honest, beautiful and true. It seems not so much spoken for the graduands, as it is a final attempt for this rational mind to teach his emotional self a lesson it refused to hear.

In a quiet time read the whole thing, or if it is you are so inclined, speak it out and be a vehicle for these words who have lost their source. Maybe we can hear the voice that he could not.

A wonderful interview below, featuring Wallace on the Charlie Rose show in 1997, soon after he had been awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

1: Keyton Commencement Address, 2005.
2: David Foster Wallace: Idealist Skeptic, LA Times

Return to Waldzell

// August 28th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Leadership Development

After a year, I’ve returned to reading Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. I’d put it down half-way through when I realised my mind was not focused enough on digesting and applying the deep lessons being so carefully laid out in his last and consummate work. On reflection, perhaps it was even more important that I continue. Nonetheless, it is a joy to return to it in these clearer and more fertile moments. A small extract that struck me last night;

“”Awakening,” it seemed was not so much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving oneself in the real world. When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your own ego to the momentary situation. You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not thrust your way into the center of the world, but into the center of your own individuality. That, too was why the experience of awakening was so difficult to convey, so curiously hard to formulate, so remote from statement. Language did not seem designed to make communications from this realm of life. If once in a great while, someone were able to understand, that person was in a similar position, was a fellow sufferer or undergoing a similar awakening.”

Last October I wrote of another favourite extract from the masterwork.

Genius: 2012

// November 22nd, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, talks about individual and collaborative genius in problem-solving, the importance of stubbornness and the “ten-thousand hours to mastery” rule. Presented at the 2007 New Yorker Conference, “2012: Stories from the Near Future” . If you are at all familiar with Gladwell then you might like to skip the introduction by David Remnick.

Gladwell asserts that, “the modern problems that we face aren’t two-page problems, they are two-hundred page problems”. An assumption worth delving into.

No doubt that the 21st century offers us an increasing list of two-hundred page problems; energy production/storage/transport/sustainability, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, gene therapy and neurotechnology, to name but a few. However, it seems that many of our really critical problems, the problems we have struggled with for centuries, do not need two-hundred page solutions. War and peace, international law and sovereignty, human rights and social welfare, can each be framed by a dozen volumes of debate, but no solution of such size will be applicable.

To mobilize large scale action, to maintain clarity of direction, to engage diverse interests in common benefit, requires two-page solutions. Or rather, they demand the ability to transcend the cacophony of spin and bias to describe succinct solutions accessible by the broadest base possible. Gladwell displays much of this skill himself- he has a rare ability to describe the simplicity behind a complex system, to turn two hundred page problems accessible only by specialists into two page problems available on any metro or plane ride.

Of course, we need all these types; the Ventrises to make the great leaps forward, fuelling and fuelled by teams of Wileses, and communicated to the rest of us by the Gladwells.

“A Very English Genius“, a BBC documentary on Michael Ventris and his “Everest of Greek archaeology”.

(Thanks, Tom W!)

Deus, sive Natura

// October 18th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Leadership Development

Lessons From the Magister

// October 16th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

(Hesse at Montagnola)

Thus spake the Magister,

“To be capable of everything and do justice to everything, one certainly does not need less spiritual force and èlan and warmth, but more. What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout and wave their arms. But I assure you, they are nevertheless burning with subdued fires.”

“Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”

The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The diety is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht – I can see that they already have begun.”

-Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game.

In his magnum opus the Nobel Laureate expands, clarifies and even further engages the reader upon the way. For those unfamiliar with Hesse, I strongly suggest to first read his elegant and succinct Siddhartha. As much as The Glass Bead Game is a masterclass of a thousand lessons, Siddhartha is an single and singular realisation.

Deep Listening

// October 4th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

An extract from an edition of the ABC podcast All in the Mind, on how non-Indigenous mental health professionals entering Aboriginal communities can be adequately equipped to work with the particular psychological distress they encounter. Natasha Mitchell interviews Dennis McDermott, psychologist and senior lecturer in Indigenous health at the Muru Marri Indigenous Health Unit at the University of NSW.

Natasha Mitchell: Well the key Indigenous way that you weave in to your workshops is this concept of deep listening — tell me what it is.

Dennis McDermott: It’s definitely not an original idea, definitely not. I’ve picked it up from a number of sources, most notably from a woman called Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann who is from the Daly River mob in the Northern Territory. But from her cultural group comes this notion of dadirri, and she describes it as a kind of inner deep listening, a kind of still awareness.

But there’s similar ideas I found when I started to look around, around various Indigenous cultures around Australia, in Sydney from the Eora language there’s a word called ngara. And ngara in this language means to hear, to listen. But with the added dimension of thinking at the same time, a self reflection. And as a Victorian Koori organisation board member pointed it out to me just this last week in Melbourne, it has the additional dimension of actually finishing off what you’re hearing with an action. So if someone is actually telling you something, your obligation, if you like, is to follow that through. So it’s a link and a reciprocity going on.

So from these and lots of other cultural notions I started to pay serious attention to this idea of deep listening, Indigenous ways of listening, that involve tuning in with the whole being if you like, of listening to the silence, or listening to that noise as well as the signal. It makes sense — the hiss.