reframe

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.

The Dream That Must Be Interpreted

// September 27th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, Leadership Development

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there’s a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted…

And this groggy time we live, this is what it’s like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living in another town. In the dream, he doesn’t remember the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

That’s how a young person turns toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”

Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

Artwork; Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above a sea of fog

Animated Alan Watts

// August 7th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

“South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and their pals animated several audio recordings of Alan Watts (w’pedia), an iconic philosopher and writer who turned scores of people on to Zen Buddhism.”Link (Thanks, Anthony Hall!)
posted by David Pescovitz on BoingBoing and stolen by my cunning ctrl-v strategy.

A Man with a Plan

// July 16th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Leadership Development

Over my past five years in leadership development I’ve read a lot about the importance of building a vision, laying a sound plan, of taking clear and decisive action, of delivering success. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the case-in-point, Mr John Robert Patterson of Sydney, Australia.

A FORMER Telstra worker (Australian telecoms company) stole a tank and used it to demolish six mobile phone towers as he led police on a wild two-hour rampage through western Sydney last night…

His former boss (and owner of the tank), Greg Morris, said the man had a beef with mobile phone towers…

“He used to work for Telstra and told us he was going through a medical claim for his head injury. He said something about the radiation from the towers had caused it,” Mr Morris said.

“He actually worked on the tank he stole, doing a lot of wiring and putting the engine in.”

“The problem he’s got is not with us. It’s just that it’s the tool he needed to do it.”

“So he planned out a map of where the towers were that he wanted to destroy.”

At its maximum speed of 52km/h per hour, it continued on through the suburbs of Mount Druitt, Dharruk, Emerton, Glendenning and Plumpton with 10 police vehicles in pursuit.

The joyride ended at 4am when the vehicle stalled as the driver attempted to destroy a seventh mobile phone tower.

His defence lawyer Ivan Bertoia told the court that in a police interview his client” suggested he had the authority to behave in such a manner”.

Extracts from news.com.au

He had a clear and relevant vision. He built a plan. He developed the necessary tools. He operated at maximum efficiency. He succeeded in surpassing the goals he set. He said that he had the authority to drive a tank around Sydney and smash down mobile phone towers. Many are called, few are chosen. Tank Commander Patterson- you are the leadership hero of the week.

Christopher Hitchens on Religion

// June 19th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Leadership Development

During the canonization of Mother Teresa in 2002 British columnist Christopher Hitchens was asked by the Vatican to testify against her. Author of “Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” he was well prepared for the original role of “Devil’s Advocate” (advocatus diaboli), in which he claimed Theresa was a political opportunist who had adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism.

In the lecture below Hitchens presents the case for his latest book, “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, a title well representing his abrasive, atheistic anti-fascist stance. Arguments can be made that he is inappropriately inflammatory and insensitive in a cultural landscape that is fiercely volatile, but my larger problem is that he ignores the inner development of psychological/existential/spiritual awareness from which religion derives it’s energy yet so corrupts through institution. On the other hand his argument is humanistic, libertarian, informed, articulate and entertaining.

A Sidenote on the Emotions of Materialism

// May 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

“A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into everything that we know. If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher.

His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those absolute little passions.”

Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.
The Life of Reason, by George Santayana, 1905.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, closes a conference on science, religion, reason and survival. 2006.

Self Scrutiny: A need for Democracy

// May 7th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

“The democratic culture is nurtured by the aspiration that all individuals shall have the opportunity to progress steadily toward increased measures of freedom. It must keep itself under constant scrutiny. It can never afford to become careless on this score: nor dare it become callous. Where men aspire to freedom they are obligated to create the conditions from which there may emerge a continuing stream of citizens who understand its meaning. Habit-ridden individuals will not do. Nor will fearful individuals. The case rests with individuals who have gained the ability to think- however awesome the problem- and who, equally, have gained the courage to deal with ideas- however strange they seem.

No school is quite good enough for a culture that prizes the free man if it uses anything less than all the ingenuity of those who are responsible for its character in its effort to solve the problem of how to make critical thought prevail in all the aspects of its activities. Nor can any school give itself fully to its proper work when the culture as a whole, or any portion of it, place a checkrein upon its effort. The role played by those who are concerned with education in a democratic culture is therefore vital to the strength of that culture.

All of this is of particular significance for the educator. The very nature of his culture makes him the guardian of it. When he fails to help each individual find his special strength and capacity, the culture is the poorer in consequence. When he fails to help each individual gain in ability to deal with ideas critically, and with relative calm, the culture is weakened.”

“Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education”, G. Hullfish and P.G. Smith, 1964.

The Dying of the Light

// April 26th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Leadership Development

It is a strange cocktail of love and selfishness we dwell upon, when truly incredible people disappear well before their time. When we cannot stomach further sorrow we find it, this sense of loss that is at once completely personal and felt for the human story as a whole.

Both Bruce Lee and Jeff Buckley died suddenly in there early thirties just as they were completing the work that would have seen their mastery revered in their own lifetimes around the world. Posthumously, the creations and abilities of both men have inspired massive audiences who can only grasp at the reverberations they left behind- their magnificent ripples in the pond of human creation.

I am especially sorry we did not get to see a later date Bruce Lee (1940-1973). I fancy that were he alive today we would not be calling him Bruce Lee, nor would his fame be centred on the films of his “younger years”, rather Master Lee would be renown as bringing martial arts and eastern philosophy to a renaissance unknown in our modernity. I imagine he would have taken a form somewhat like Morihei Ueshiba, the sage-like father of Aikido, acknowledge as the finest martial artist in history- a living embodiment of somatic harmony. Bruce’s unrealised later years would have been a blossoming of his philosophical side, as his study of formless form (Jeet Kune Do) expanded mental heights upon the rarest of physical perfection.

“I have not invented a “new style,” composite, modified or otherwise that is set within distinct form as apart from “this” method or “that” method. On the contrary, I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns, or molds. Remember that Jeet Kune Do is merely a name used, a mirror in which to see “ourselves”. . . Again let me remind you Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one’s back.”
-Bruce Lee

The “Lost Interview“. An unedited 25 minute interview with Bruce Lee on the Pierre Berton Show. Recorded on 9th December 1971 in Hong Kong. Google Video.

With Jeff it’s harder to gauge how his future would have unfolded. Too quickly we think that rockstars don’t age well- and hold secret solace that Hendrix did not go gentle into that good night. But Jeff was far more than a rockstar. He was a composer, a guitar virtuoso, a three-octave voice of serenity. An eclectic and multi talented musician from whom it is impossible to guess what forms, what layers of harmonies and pure streams of emotion would have manifested if he had lived past thirty-one.

I will always recall a piece on his album “Live at the Sine”. During a folk-rock set someone in the audience calls out the name “Nusrat”. Jeff replies by performing a spontaneous version of the Urdu Qawwali “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai”- stating that it’s original singer, Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, “He’s my Elvis”.

A beautiful BBC Documentary on Jeff Buckley. Google Video.

From their art and their practice it is clear that Jeff and Bruce both had a deep spiritual awareness. An awareness which emerges as the mastery of the one- the one discipline or field- slowly becomes the mastery of the many. At this level it seems the differences in paths fall away, and the common summit of human potential is laid bare. If only they were spared the years to speak to us from these lofty heights and teach the lessons open to so few in human history- how the way can become our way.

旅に病で
夢は枯野を
かけ廻る

Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
the withered fields.

-Basho’s last poem