Monthly Archives: June 2014

Bio

Downtime Update

This is the first anniversary of my retirement.

Since then

I have been certified as a Permaculture Designer

I have been writing more story, parable, and poetry

and less program and research proposals.

I may also be updating Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetic Theory of Regenerativity

by adding to his conversation, largely with himself,

more recent work in geometry’s Group Theory

and further evolution in Information, Communication, and Polycultural Systems Development, and

the positive teleological assumptions of metric and normative/ethical systems.

 

Writing poetry is therapeutic.

Designing cooperative network proposals is exhausting,

and too often exciting more than gracefully accomplished.

 

I appreciate sharing some of what I am doing with you’

and would prefer to err on the side of sharing too much

rather than excluding you from this life at this time.

It would be helpful if you would  let me know what you like

by clicking “Like” in the top, left, corner, as I recall.

And, if you REALLY “Like” what you find

I invite you to also choose “Follow”,

to be found next to “Like.”

If you would do that,

then I don’t have to continue publishing this stuff on my blog-site

and then sending a copy to family and friends who also won’t see it on my Facebook page.

 

So, if you just cannot miss my next posting

please “Follow.”

And,

if you have a blog-site that I don’t know about

please fix that so I can “Follow” you too.

 

I want to know EVERYTHING!

 

Thanks

 

Gerald Oliver

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Flying FreeForm

Unfettered flying floats free

of restraint

of containment or even contentment

of boundaries or coincident direction.

Free of focus,

free to be…

 

Trapped!

in unboundaried integral potentialities

unwilling to choose

to decay further into disrepair

disrepute

dissipating

self-denigrating purgation.

 

Haunted

by dreamy flights

of birdsong

chirping a rhythm beyond open-minded

grasping sensory values

to anchor what must fly

not quite so freely,

with graced discipline of practice…

Raven never roars;

Water never soars.

To fly sufficiently fulfilled

purge “might have been”

from falling memory streams….

 

Flying freely

implicately tethered

to soulful vortex of gracious improbabilities.

What goes up

must come down;

so what comes down

still blows up

in recent failing memory of bliss.

 

Flying left to right

and back again

too far

one way

or the other…?

 

Lost;

forgotten forward eye

bicamerally fixed

on future

as past

soon to be revisited

as frequently as crystaled flight

follows synaptic holes

through binary time

remembered as permaculturally predicted.

 

Blinding enlightening beam!

soars through clattering calcium

searing spacious vertebrae

of awareness self is Self

too stingily

too despairately

too much too often

careless of hubris

in the peacence of SuperEco Self’s constant passion.

 

Love fulfilled

regenerates…

 

unfettered flying freely floats;

bi-focused….

 

 

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CT-ReGenesis Network: Reconnecting People, Place, and Planet

TO:

  • Habitat for Humanity Bridgeport, Cromwell, Danbury, Hartford, New Haven, New London, Salisbury, Waterbury, Willimantic (HfH)
  • Connecticut Council for Interreligious Understanding (CCIU)
  • Connecticut Food System Alliance (CFSA)
  • Melville Charitable Trust (MCT)

 

FROM: CT-ReGenesis Cooperative Network Developers

 

6/25/2014

 

At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient…only the universe rearranging itself.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

CT-ReGenesis Project’s proposed mission is to rearrange our State more nutritiously and equitably; one home, one neighborhood, one cooperative moment in time.

 

We believe Habitat for Humanity, the Food Alliance, Council for Interreligious Understanding, and the Melville Charitable Trust already participate in this mission, as do we all. Some more intentionally; some less so.

 

This communication will introduce each of us to the others, within a proposal to design a cooperative network together. This cooperative project might have the potential to significantly expand how we define optimally supportive housing and homes, nutrition, and healthy well-being.

 

A summary outline of our initial infrastructure might be pictured as a tree with two balancing main branches, each reseeding the soil of future generations:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Habitat-9 CT Chapters/6 ReStores                         Council for Interreligious Understanding

Restoring materials, homes, neighborhoods               Restoring people and communities

Formation of renewed places: hope                            Formation of young people: faith

 

 

 

Food System Alliance

Restoring well-being, nutrition, health

Formation of healthy CQI[1] systems, individual and corporate

Melville Charitable Trust

Restoring supportive homes/environments

CQI supportive habitat development for optimal sustainability of at-risk people

Root system leading to a support network of CT social investors/philanthropists/public-sector investments

 

 

Who is in this CT-ReGenesis Network?

 

We are an informal cluster of individuals, three of whom are currently working part-time to propose that the four organizations (counting HfH chapters as representative of one international organization) could form a Core Network Team:

 

Mary Millican is a parent, former special needs school administrator, former owner of vintage retail enterprises, estate staging and closure experienced, master gardener, avid recycler. She wants to help Habitat ReStores, and other non-profit materials recyclers discuss how they might optimize their individual effectiveness for clients while minimizing transportation and acquisition expenses through cooperative networking and resource sharing.

 

Janet Tanner is a real estate agent with ReMax, an international brokerage firm. Her eco-justice and social justice experience includes advocacy for affordable housing, Habitat volunteer, horrible gardener and cook, shops at thrift stores because it is the logical thing to do, parent of a fully employed ADHD young adult. She wants to help people who are selling their houses get rid of their unwanted resources as generously, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible, recycling goods into a cooperative distribution network where each item will return highest and best use where it is most needed in the local community. Habitat ReStores would be ideal organizing anchors for local gathering and distribution networks.

 

Gerald Dillenbeck, M. Div., MPA in Community Development, Permaculture Designer with special interest in the economics of ecological and nutritional development for at-risk populations. Interreligious EcoMinistry Chaplain at the Sustainable Farm School. He is a Taoist Christian, more or less; Ph.D. candidate in Holistic Teleology, occasionally; dissertation research is relevant to the mission of the proposed CT-Restore Cooperative Network. He is a former Habitat Board member (New Haven, in the 90s), sometimes a not-so-great community gardener, and vegetarian cook, member of the Order of Universal Interfaith, former President of the CT Housing Coalition, former grants administrator for Covenant to Care for Children, which, among other things, distributes clothes, and sometimes nutrients, through a network of faith communities, to at-risk kids throughout Connecticut.

 

Jerry (seldom “Gerald”) would like to help form religious and secular youth leadership teams to discuss and grow toward CQI standards for optimal nutrition, home environments, and sustainable vocations in a globally “rearranging” self-awareness. This requires formational environments mindful of the diverse and mutual well-being of all individuals, and all species. His favorite story is Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, “A person’s a person. No matter how small.”

 

 

Readers are encouraged to first look at the section pertaining to your own organization. If that makes sense, then reading the other sections should begin to articulate how the Core-4 could fuse high CQI eco-equity and nutritional outcomes throughout Connecticut.

 

 

CT-ReGenesis Network’s potential value for HfH and ReStores: Two Scenarios

 

First Scenario

 

Each Habitat ReStore is loaded with great resources including many that have filtered through various Youth Transition Teams, sometimes as community improvement volunteer projects that have led to establishing entrepreneurial cooperative enterprises, vocations, and guild associations. The Americorps/VISTA programmatic platform has been tailored to support challenged young adults move into sustainable Transition Team vocations.

  • Full kitchen sets
  • Bath fixtures
  • Good reconditioned appliances [entrepreneurial venture of a Youth Transition Team]
  • Furnishings, including refinished/painted by a Transition Team(s)
  • Interior décor
  • Window treatments
  • Organic compost [entrepreneurial Transition Team]
  • Mulch [Transition Team entrepreneurial opportunity]
  • Gardening equipment
  • Seeds and plants, seasonal [Transition Team organized and produced]
  • Fencing
  • Bicycles [Transition Team refurbished], urban cargo-bikes

 

Most of the more established real estate agents in Connecticut are supporting the ReStore Cooperative Network’s expenses to pick up their property sellers’ unwanted items prior to closing, then distribute those goods where they will return the highest value. This follows the CQI value template for greatest effectiveness in response to trauma, potential pathology, lack of well-being, with least overall resource loss. Resource investments include living-wage time invested by cooperative worker-owners, and energy/nutrient depletion.

 

Also available at the ReStores, or other neighborhood/community center space, are Restoration Incubators for homeschool education, training, recreation, and vocational development space. These Centers are home to the HfH, Food, and Housing AmeriCorps/Vista youth leadership and internship programs, and may provide after-school Deep Learning activities available from the Sustainable Farm School, Gaia University, etc. AmeriCorps stipends are initially paid through a Melville Foundation grant, and eventually through ReStore sales and cooperative exchanges within the Network.

 

Additional classes, cooperative employment, activities that might emerge from these Incubators, depending on local interest and needs:

  • staging services for real estate sales,
  • solar and wind energy production,
  • Community Farm Association transactions, food banks,
  • designing organic, edible landscapes and gardens, and installation support services,
  • mural design teams,
  • cooperative stores and exchange centers for clothing, toys, books, tools, seeds, organic fertilizers, mulch,
  • child and elder care,
  • tax assistance,
  • classes in nonviolent communication, writing, entrepreneurial development, natural construction and crafts, permaculture design, interfaith dialogue, cooking, preserving, yoga, Tai Chi, meditation,
  • support for the formation of residential cooperatives, partnering indigenous tenants in multis with property owners looking for a buyer.

 

Second Scenario

 

Each Habitat homeowner receives a broader scope of services, as needed and welcomed.

  • Recycled, natural and low carbon-footprint building materials and  systems design;
  • Optimized functional, aesthetic, and ecological site planning and landscape design;
  • Access to cooperative-subsidized alternative energy [a potential Transition Team enterprise];
  • Green/natural/recycled/refinished/repurposed furnishings and interior design, new homes fully staged in consultation with homeowners [Transition Team enterprise];
  • Edible landscape design, including organic gardening, on site, or within a nearby community garden setting [Transition Team enterprise];
  • Full garden-to-table-to-compost nutritional loop support system—implementation and/or maintenance, as needed and wanted [Transition Team service];
  • Functional bicycles/tricycles, cargo pedal systems, possibly battery-fueled vehicles eventually [Transition Team services and/or entrepreneurial enterprise];
  • Access to organic CFA cooperative;
  • Access to treadmills, exercise bikes, aerobic equipment connected to electric meters [Transition Team enterprise];
  • Solar panels, wind/water turbine energy production system on site as feasible [Transition Team enterprise].

 

In addition to these two scenarios, HfH relationships with constituent faith communities may be enriched with enhanced youth ministry connectivity and a broader band of useful volunteer skill sets, more inclusive of all ages and genders.

 

 

CT-ReGenesis  significant values for the CT Council for Interreligious Understanding (CCIU)

 

This opportunity framework is somewhat the mutually symbiotic reverse of the Habitat possible futures scenarios.

 

Adolescence through young adulthood is the stage we are increasingly losing kids from intentional faith communities, and other formational systems, such as schools. Perhaps even more true in a globally interfacing culture, young adults are discovering their life journeys informed by the “Religious Commons,” what is held as sacred by all faith traditions, including those that have become secularized, like science, the arts, humanities.

 

Resilient, “deep learning” development systems help us understand ourselves and mature most effectively in an intentionally diverse environment, with others we may primordially see as not like me. Deviant frames of reference, appreciatively facilitated, become richly valued diversity for better understanding the range of assets, resources, and nutrients in Universe. Cultural strengths and challenges inform each other through the individual’s original lens of meaning and value. This seems to be true in all regenerative economies, whether they are pedagogical, spiritual, financial, communication, ecological, or possibly even genetic information systems.

 

CT-ReGenesis is informed by a combined economic, ecological, and social justice agenda long familiar to the religious sector. Faith community participation in this cooperative network may increase interreligious opportunities for dialogue, understanding, and cooperative neighborhood improvement projects. Those with skills and interests in alternative energy, new economics, eco-justice, international justice dialogue and discernment, gardening and agriculture, nutrition and food preparation, therapeutic and nutritional education, permaculture design, holistic therapies and medicines, planning and design, nonviolent communication and living, group facilitation, compassionate therapy, are a rich source for mentoring, team leaders, and skill-shares.

 

Faith community members may want to consider stronger nutritional and environmental standards for their own properties. For example, more edible plants and less grass, buying into an alternative energy cooperative, harvesting solar and/or wind power on-site, group purchases of local CFA contracts, investing in local cooperatives, organic farms, and intentional communities, responding to local needs for more affordable and sustainable habitats.

 

Faith communities may come to think of their HfH affiliate as the local religious sector’s incubator for housing, economic and nutritional and vocational development, and neighborhood improvement partnerships. Individuals may discover that their religious tradition is more dynamic and compelling within a more inclusive polyculture. If participation in this cooperative network transforms Habitat’s Restores into incubators, participation by CCIU may transform this platform for mutual understanding into more of a positive teleological laboratory. CT-ReGenesis network developers may want to consider the Interfaith Youth Core (www.ifyc.org) as a rich resource for linking youth ministry to interreligious understanding and housing/human/environmental service projects. There is also a federal initiative for interreligious cooperation and community service that may be useful for drawing higher profile momentum.

 

 

Regenerative Nutrients for the CT Food System Alliance

 

Food systems are nutrient systems. Food, power, medicine, health are words that have been closely associated with each other since early symbolic communication, and these are all about nutritional flow. The Permaculture Design principle of greatest effect with least effort is all about optimizing the improvement of quality, measured in nutrients, energy, vigor, thriving, rather than the lower qualitative standard of survival of the fittest. Regenerative evolution of nutritional flow aspires to abundance, resilience, healthy sustainability far into our future. The evolution of nutrient systems becomes revolutionary as our focus moves from survival toward global thriving.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh understands communication as a type of nutrition. What we sensorily absorb from our environment, whether through taste, sight, insight, or hearing, lies on a spectrum from abundantly nutritious to offensively toxic, even poisonous in sufficient amounts. Substances, sounds, views, fragrances, feelings, ideas, informationthat we are drawn to because they enrich our selves, and our Universe, are nutritious; those we avoid have proven to be toxic.

 

Both science and religions agree that our neural and nutritional systems evolved through natural systems experience, following natural principles of thermodynamic balance and development, regardless of the polynomial, polycultural, paradigmatic, or power/energy frame through which we have learned to comprehend Universe. Our most permanently-encultured (PermaCultured) frames, or narrative strings, extend back through our proto-history toward an even more Primal Root in the form of shared RNA Codex.  RNA-coded nutrient-fed-and-yielding development systems define the form and function of all living cells. In a sense, natural sciences recognize RNA as our universal progenitor of life, and each neural/nutrient system is an articulation of that global, natural, and primal plasmatic river. Our neural systems thrive with natural nutrition abundance, and avoid dissonant, toxic, anomalous, and entropic dissonance patterns (negative deviance, in Group, BioEvolutionary, and Cognitive Dissonance Theories).

 

Forming a newly-activated intentionally designed polyculture with affordable housing developers, neighborhood organizations, interreligious intentional communities, and post-millennial young leaders, heads of young families, populations at-risk of homelessness and poor nutrition, promises greatest inclusive effectiveness, with least redundancy of organizational and program-delivery expense. Strategies that are more academic and school-based tend to be less effective and well-sustained at the family level because these are not responsive to the specific situations of each household.  Program delivery limited to school-based participation seldom engage at-risk parents in the sustained and holistic way that would be most helpful for family well-being and health, including mental and economic health.

 

Organic carrots, even habitually devoured, will only go so far in meeting the full nutritional needs of a family living in a chronically stressed environment.  On the other hand, a family suffering from PTSD eating organic carrots will probably do better than the neighbor devouring the equivalent weight of quick-fix toxins and sugars.

 

Youth EcoMinistry settings are also ideal opportunities for all of us to teach each other about our growing awareness that nutrition v. toxin is a range of resource variables that crosses all sensory receptors, from touch through sight. Both positive and negative deviance information travels across all natural systems and paradigms, sometimes enriching, sometimes decaying, adding further dissonance, sometimes adding great beauty and grace and feeling to a growing global comprehension of our nutritional vocation to be sure every individual’s health and energy developmental needs are met. Nutrition optimization is healthy self-care (greatest effect) and dissonance prevention (least resistance).

 

 

Regenerating CT’s Optimally Supportive Habitat with the Melville Charitable Trust

 

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Henry David Thoreau

 

Community and Economic Developers, and Permaculture Designers, come to the topic of nutrition from an unusual position, especially if they have watched and listened to the nutritional flow of our global wealth evaporate.  While research funders are finding significant productive value in cooperative-learning structures, philanthropists are finding the competitive grants economy unsuitable for encouraging cooperation and networking. This dissonance becomes more urgent as social investors of good will are confronted by the viral growth of the non-profit sector, each becoming increasingly skilled as a special interest lobby for its exclusive domain, territory, and mission.

 

Adding considerable climatic cacophony to the evaporative trend of philanthropic dollars: When investment markets do poorly, the suffering of competing worthy missions raises to a higher pitch. Generous social investors’ wealth deposits shrink, and calcify, deplete, and become of incrementally less functional value in the face of further climatic change. The nutritional power of the grants and research economy wanes as need becomes more acute, critical, dissonant, chaotic, moving toward despair. The nutritional wealth of our communities ebbs as our communication resonantly echoes and flows with the discord of not enough, and exclusion, and not in my backyard.

 

Diverse theories and practices of systemic change frequently note that enduring transformation is more likely in the presence of both (a) a compassionate sense of urgency, and (b) an inclusively mindful intention to develop resilient cooperative relationships. The greatest compassionate effect, in the face of increasingly critical global suffering, is to be and do the opposite of what is least mindful, most exclusionary and competitive—creating a vacuum of subcultural, exclusionary, chauvinism. Housing is the Answer! when our questions are provincial, rather than mindful of whole household-systems analysis.

 

Solving the problem of homelessness, especially through diverse forms of Supportive Housing was a strategic choice at a time when the philanthropic sector was investing in food and nutrition, but not so much in shelter. The scandal of people without shelter in the midst of affluence appalled the Trust’s Founders. This combination of urgent compassion and holistically mindful strategy has superlatively served the MCT in achieving remarkable socioeconomic influence for a more inclusively equitable society.

 

This cooperatively intended proposal celebrates a watershed moment in the possibilities for achieving realistic CQI outcomes for eco-justice and for humanity, for inclusively restoring people in a place of increasing climatic vulnerability.

 

Until recently, social investors have been offered opportunities to invest in prevention of loss strategies or more urgent intervention to remediate critical losses already incurred. Supportive Housing has usually been an intervention tool, while affordable housing projects, more broadly argue that local access to affordability helps prevent homelessness, as well as having other well-being benefits.

 

Based on the symbiotic principles of Permaculture Design and Buckminster Fuller’s Theory of Regenerativity, the CT-ReGenesis Cooperative Network seeks a more inclusive regeneration strategy. Restoring value in people, places, materials, thoughts, actions, words intends to prevent decay of our commonly held values (air, water, soil, nutrients, communication, information, beauty, gratitude, love, mindfulness, equity, integrity), one moment at a time heuristically assumed as an eternal positive teleological place. Somewhere within our network of diverse repurposing, we can help each other find our most mutually confluent home and purpose, if we choose cooperative rather than the more competitive side-by-sideness of walled missions designed to support institutional survival more than shared vocational purpose.

 

Restoration intervenes at the first identified risk of loss and disvalue, minimizes loss by identifying highest potential purpose through existing relationships, reorientation, reuse with least economic and ecological cost to our present and future. This seems like an appropriate metric for Continuous Quality Improvement within any system, set, or universe.

 

Cooperative polycultures are more productive of positive resources, nutrients, information, more resilient, easily and inexpensively maintained, resistant to dissonance and disease, mutually enriching, mutually grateful for nutritious diversity, than the competitive economies of scarcity in monocultural self-preoccupied identities.

 

A pre-development grant to mutually design the CT-Restore Network from three individuals to four, and more, cooperative, mutually-investing, organizations would be helpful. More significant in the larger picture, perhaps the MCT could invite other New England/New York social investors to discuss and discern the possibilities for supporting cooperative enterprises informed by regenerative values, intent, and practice. Our path is recycling; our goal is profoundly deep socio-ecological regeneration.

 

It would be extremely helpful if the MCT Executive Director and/or Trustees could collaborate on a media plan for this project and the ecology of cooperative economics, social investment, and philanthropy that forms this cooperative project’s theoretical infrastructure. This might conceivably be of interest not only to the CT Council for Philanthropy, but also communication outlets beyond Connecticut.

 

Our philanthropic foundational question becomes “If we are not 100% invested in cooperative and community-based regenerative initiatives, then on what basis would we expect highest CQI sustainable return on our investments? Is it ethical, is it morally appropriate to the needs and expectations of future generations and species, to settle for anything less than our 100% commitment to a regeneratively equitable and inclusive economy and ecology; bringing us the biggest bang for least bucks?

 

At the end of the day, each era, each project, we are each and all recycled nature, restoring our pilgrimage home, where past greets future, with gratitude for what we have started, and what may further evolve from our own endings.

 

[1] The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in response to ongoing social investment optimization objectives, to achieve both sustainable positive outcomes AND cost effectiveness, has led an initiative for program design and reporting metrics that meet Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) standards. The long-term comparative trend analysis by the Tellus Institute (www.tellus.org) defines a constellation of global economic, political, and ecological values that project optimized long-term viability outcomes through the year 2100. They call their highest performing algorithm the “Great Transition.” This CT-ReGenesis proposal heuristically assumes that Tellus Institute trend analysis is appropriately responsive to social investor’s urgent search for CQI program design and reporting standards.

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Wild Wealth

My home is rich and wild with possibilities

rushing and swooping through my mind

like twin tornadoes

spinning values left and right

then back around again

to revisit my next era,

incarnating possible futures

presented once more in new dress.

 

With comprehension, these fleshy predicating birds

slow down and linger in deep imagination

dwelling in this nascient possibility place

rich and wild,

growing potentiality.

 

Brilliant doors open

to self-staring species’ glare.

 

Earth grows rich and wild with possibilities….

 

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Following Revolutionary Dialogue

Back in the day, a “follower” was someone who had faith in the leadership of another person; a leader trusted, in part, due to their adherence to some faith in a solution to dissonance. Mystics and prophets, politicians and mobsters, tycoons and polymathic geniuses, teachers and ministers had a “following.” Since the internet, this Transitional Generation and their allied elders would add to this list: bloggers and on-line journalists.

I have been following the NCDD discernment strings pertaining to the desire for a global political revolution and the more technical desire to facilitate large-scale grassroots  discussions about what we do and what we do not want as a global human species. In several of the senses of being a “follower,” I have also been following Joanna Macy’s peaceful revolutionary strategy as it unfolds internationally.  While I do not have any authority to interpret, or speak for, someone I greatly respect, and would not want to exceed my place as a follower, rather than a mentor, I think the connection between Joanna Macy and the NCDD listserve is that both urgently desire an internationally sustainable Earth ecological economic design system.

That gold-standard “design system” must be resonant and a well-patterned, balanced, theorem. More than a conjecture about what might inspire this peaceful revolution. A conjecture says “isn’t this an interesting pattern, a dynamic analogy?”; while a theorem adds “we have a positive teleological function for that form-pattern.” Conjectures are not yet polynomial memes. Theorems are polynomial, and binomial, patterns.

Faith in “ecological economics” fits more comfortably into Macy’s (0)-Centric Zen Theorem than into the NCDD discussion and culture. However, probably every NCDD member recognizes that the term “faith community” has an internal redundancy just as the term “faithless community” sounds oxymoronic. There is no community, no dialogue, no communication, no ecologic, no probability of cooperative economic intent where there is no faith that we are all in this mess together, whatever it may be, and that the primordial rules of discernment are best attuned to a radically inclusive “Golden Rule” that we must always treat others, regardless of species, and regardless of whether currently living or not yet living, as we wish ourselves to be sustainably and confluently, even therapeutically, treated.

It seems to both the Macy and NCDD Revolutionaries that there not only already is a global consensus in this basic positive teleological faith, but further, this global consensus is quickly learning to find each other across traditional divides of borders, water, special interests, and language–all we need, which we now have, is a global information system. The discussion has well begun, now it is time to move that from a perhaps sometimes too free-wheeling, and polarizing, discussion, to a positive discernment process. In other words, as a species, we are moving from our already shared positive teleological conjecture toward a positive teleological discernment theorem.

Perhaps NCDD culture is evolving this positive discernment theorem. As I have said perhaps too often, if we look at Positive Deviance, Appreciate Inquiry, Nonviolent Communication, and Dynamic Facilitation as each establishing a mutual discernment event culture that is the opposite of Cognitive Dissonance Theory [we tend to not hear well what does not fit with our current learned landscape; on the other hand we tend to learn quickly from what we all agree we don’t want], perhaps this is our Positive Confluence Theorem:

We hear very well, and revolutionarily embrace, what does fit most abundantly with all of our current learned landscapes. When we mutually acknowledge that we each do trust that we live in a positive-trending teleological economy and ecology. when that is our mutual intent and practice, then we not only comprehend, but incarnate and mentor, this Positive Confluence Theorem.

This Positive Teleological Theorem predicts that we will, globally, increase our investment in cooperative economies and pedagogy and design systems as three faces of one cooperative ecology.  As we do so, our current over-reliance on competitive strategies for learning, making a living together, building a polyculture together, will fade away into our collective memory of “back in the pre-millennial day.”

 

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Watching

Noticing each moment,

I feel watched.

Immersed in creation’s coincidental sea,

I hope to hear our past

folding back to inform a thought,

a memory,

a smile.

 

I become benign parasitic prey

of watchers’ redeeming faith.

Their grace absorbs

through warm karma skin

to warmer incarnate guts of hot synergy.

 

These are graced Elders,

watching predictably in my direction

only when I remember to notice them

waving, oscillating, spinning in and through me;

informing my inner space and flow,

settling Earthly tenacious infrastructure.

 

Elixir of breath,

breathing watchers in;

breathing watched insides out.

 

If I notice them

then I am gratefully watched.

When I am grateful for their diastolic prehension

then I graceful watch

together,

forever.

 

We are one event,

become one verb…

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Positive Confluence Theorem for Optimizing Community Value Discernment

My work for the past couple of decades has veered away from group facilitation and detoured toward corporate grant and contract proposal writing, but I am struck by parallels between optimized proposal communication and community-building for wise discernment. Whether writing to public officials about policies and budgets, or to private sector philanthropists, the most effective way to open the doors of mutual communication are to show your constituency first that you understand, and share, our optimized outcome framework. If I start off advocating for a program, or a process, or a policy, or for money, then I am another “special interest lobbyist.” Not an effective way to start.
My still emerging theory about this dynamic is drawn from Positive Psychology and from Communication Theory.  Perhaps you are familiar with the Cognitive Dissonance Theorem: we tend to cognitively deflect messages that are dissonant to our salient gestalt. We just don’t build an iterative communication string off from messages that do not integrate with our existing gestalt very often. If we do start off dissonant and it works out, it is probably because of the appositional Positive Confluence Theorem [which doesn’t actually exist, except perhaps in Group Theory of Metric Structure–kind of a theoretical math thing] that we tend to consonantly resonate with messages that are intuitively synergetic with our Whole System value-gestalt. In Game Theory, this would be articulating the optimal and most inclusive Win-Win outcome accessible through compassionate, or appreciative, inquiry.
When the proposer of a choice-making process begins with where we most inclusively desire to Win-Win together, at the end of our rhetorical event [again, Communication Theory], then this establishes a broad, intentionally inclusive of both positive and negative deviance, framework. When the facilitator takes the additional step of proposing a rhetorical culture that values deviant inclusiveness and personal integrity, then this Win-Win Boundary Window begins to fill with the flow of a creative deep listening ecology. Individual monocultures in the room, or in the network, trend toward mutually nutrient-refining polycultures. We might think of this as the Permaculture Design’s Theory of Evolution. This requires design technology for iterative feedback loops that are accessible over time as  inclusively malleable communication strings. Positive-trending communication strings build communities of sustainable and inclusive discernment.
The theoretical limitation on Win-Win positive teleological culture-building, in anticipation of actually having the people in the room, or hooked up to each other on-line, is that procedural and normative values for mutual-flexibility [what Eastern cultures refer to as gratitude, and/or “namaste”] optimize when balanced with the value of personal integrity. We do not have an inclusive Win-Win positive framework for imagining long-term sustainable outcomes if we expect anyone to surrender integrity on behalf of flexibility, or flexibility on behalf of others’ integrity.
That last part, explicitly establishing a discernment culture that, in a sense, norms redemptive flexibility on behalf of others’ integrity typically, in Western cultures, falls prey to Cognitive Dissonance. We immediately get it that valuing mutual flexibility should not compromise personal integrity; we are fuzzier, with the possible exception of a feminist perspective, about the problem of valuing mutual integrity that compromises flexibility. If I yield to the Others’ need for personal integrity to the point that my flexibility is broken, then I have caved, lost. Flexibility will not tolerate the absence of mutual integrity, of establishing a relationship where we believe we have given at least as well as we have taken, and vice versa. The solution to both boundary issues may be to build an explicit discernment culture that holds the values of integrity-passion and flexibility-mindfulness in dynamic (diapraxis?) balance. This balance may be charted (I have not actually tried this), borrowing from Dynamic Facilitation, as a central vertical axis on each of four sheets:
Notice Concerns: how we are v. how we are not [shown appositionally on each side of the binary information axis]
Problems of Hope: what we think about v. what we don’t think about
Faithful ReSolutions: what we coincidentally say/create/design v. what we don’t say/create/design
Regenerative Data Harvest: what we have done v. what we have not done
The left side (bicameral-normative) is the Polynomial side; while the right side is the Non-Polynomial, or Reverse-Polynomial side, again, in information systems theory. The left side also emphasizes our collective integrity, while the right side emphasizes our collective flexibility to imagine what we might be together, but is not yet. In Taoism, the left side is the rhetorical event’s Yang trajectory, and the right side is this rhetorical event’s emergent Yin-balancing trajectory.
This emergent Positive Confluence Theorem predicts that when everyone can find themselves and each other within this holistically inclusive Win-Win Frame, we collectively begin noticing that the (0) Axials predict the most inclusively sustainable balance of both integrity and flexibility.

 

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The Taoist Doctor of Ministry Proposal

Greetings:
I hope you might let me know if you have any interest in a Doctor of Ministry project that would essentially blend M. T. Winter’s work in Quantum Theology with the positive teleological assumptions implied by Buckminster Fuller’s “Synergetics”, which he defined as equivalent to an ecology of love, and/or grace.
While this may be more appropriate to the Doctor of Philosophy program, I am personally more interested in its holistic and feminist applications to at-risk populations in Connecticut, than I am Fuller’s Theory of Regenerativity, as an obscure, but certainly holistic, metaphysical system.
Whatever you think best for Hartford Seminary, and opportunities to link this dissertation/research project with current Hartford Institute initiatives, is fine with me.
Synopsis:
There appears to be a moment in every religious tradition when human enlightenment comprehends why the threshold to paradise requires absolute ego-purgation. Two metric systems theorists who may exemplify this level of comprehension are Buckminster Fuller and Gregori Perelman, of Group Theory fame. Yet the underlying positive teleological assumption that we are, each and all, better as holonically related to an omnipresent and omnipotent Universal Intelligence is as old and culturally pervasive as the Golden Rule. Doing to Environment as we positively hope, with gratitude, Environment will regenerate me is predicated on a rational belief that each of us is systemically related to Environment. The Universal Intelligence Brahman and the CoCreator Atmanic “Ego-Self” are primally related as
  • Yang to Yin,
  • quarks to leptons,
  • Positive-Deviant +1.00% trend-analysis to Negative-Anomalous (+/-)0.00% Axial Binary Assumption,
  • In-Formation is to Dis-function,
  • Explicated Polycultural Nature is to this implicately (David Bohm) structured PermaCultured Design,
  • Polynomial  regenerative energy string algorithms are to Non-Polynomial dissonantly irrational information dispersion, or decomposition
(0)-soul Vortexed Binomial Universal Balance (see Perelman and the (0)-soul Theorem of Group Theory).
If this adage-meets-analogy way of seeing the prime relationship between natural and spiritual systems proves to be scientifically and metrically accurate, pastoral and sociotherapeutic implications abound. One example of the richly abundant wealth of this perspective is the interesting work within Permaculture Design’s “Interior Landscape” of self- and people-care, and this Design’s economic/ecological equity-normative value system. Nutrient flows through our constituencies may be positive resources and/or negatively dissonant and toxic when sustained, tending toward systemic effects that are increasingly volatile, climatic, chaotic, and, in some teleological perspectives, even demonic. Positively confluent deviance is the opposite perspective from that captured in Cognitive Dissonance Theory. The socio- and eco-therapeutic advantages of a Positive Teleological Assumption run rampant through
  • Positive Psychology,
  • the brilliant Positive Deviance Initiative’s missional effectiveness for developing sustainable, indigenously-resourced, well-being systemic change (www.positivedeviance.org),
  • the Ecology of inductive Grace as profoundly balanced with Natural Law and deductive Logic,
  • and may even offer a theoretical and dynamic explanation for the apparent strength of Feminist Psycho-Social Therapy (see Laura Brown, “Subversive Dialogues” as an excellent example).
Financial incentives for Hartford Seminary may be equally generous.
  • The proposed CT Youth ReGenesis EcoMinistry Project may fit confluently with the Association of Theological Schools’ “comprehensive initiative on global awareness and engagement,” currently funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
  • An information systemic implication of Regenerativity Theory may be that Polynomial Information equals Non (or “Ex”)-Polynomial Information. A mathematically and teleologically satisfactory theorem proving this conjecture of metric equity could qualify Hartford Seminary for anywhere from one to seven million dollars in Clay Millennium Challenge awards, pending two years of juried acceptance. Research in this area would also be of interest to the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
  • Engaging the Hartford Institute as the research center for the proposed CT Youth ReGenesis EcoMinistry Project could attract both private and public-sector philanthropic and social-investor interest, and serve as an international prototype for synergetically developing interreligious communities of mindful practice and Appreciative Inquiry (www.centerforappreciativeinquiry.net). As an active member of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), I am certain that there would be considerable interest in many academic departments throughout Connecticut and beyond. This proposal is essentially about dynamically balanced communities of spirit-nature discernment. There are global and national political, legislative, policy, and public governance “practice” implications.
  • Finally, I believe it may place in regenerative context the issue of growing and sustaining faith-filled communities, individuals, and culturally-informed species. In this light, all the current Hartford Institute research projects might be theoretically informed by Regenerativity Theory and its Positive Teleological Assumption.
When I last talked to David Roozen about the feasibility of entering the Doctor of Ministry program, I still lacked two essential resources to proceed.  One is capacity to pay tuition and fees–which remains problematic, although I believe I could generate far more than that through research grants and fellowship income should you be willing to take that risk with me. The other was a ministry site. Last week I was offered the part-time position of Chaplain at the Sustainable Farm School, entering its fourth year with a relocation to the 400 block of Farmington Avenue, West End, Hartford (your neighborhood). SFS is an interreligious parochial–but never provincial–laboratory for youth formation in Permaculture Design, both Interior and Exterior Landscapes.
Attached is my final paper for Professor Roozen’s excellent class on change-agency within communities of faith. In it I took some analogous liberties with M.T. Winter’s Paradoxology, which I hope will resonate; and not cause more dissonance.

 

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