Man/Sha Legends

Professor Swan’s EcoTherapeutic Home

Although a post-millennial Taoist, I avoid pretending any authority within cultural, evolutionary, or ecological histories, or most any kind of history, except perhaps my personal story, with which, sadly perhaps, I do so hope this treatise will not overly concern itself. I am other things as well, including a gay white, rather grandfatherly adoptive parent of four African-American teenagers, ranging 13 to 19, and the youngest, my only girl child, Yang, radiant with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and Oppositional Temporal-Sequential Disorder (OD) when even at a moderate level of anxiety, which was, until the last few weeks, most of the time.

All that said, in my run-on sort of way, I have come back to the work of Laotse, and commentators, with some academic baggage including psychology, communication theory, philosophy, especially epistemology, holistic and panentheistic teleology (faith systems evincing meaning and purpose within the evolution of culture and information), systems theory, and then public administration, community and economic development, and, most recently, certification in Permaculture Design; which, at this point in our evolution might be more aptly re-labeled as Ecological Regenerative Development and Design because, while perhaps something may be permanent, it most certainly would not be culture, by definition a slow mutually-symbiotic radiant absorption of nutrients within an increasingly diastatic system, about to give birth to a transformed generation of reformulated function. Sounds like yeast to me.

My husband, and my second son, in their highly diverse ways, express concern about my memory and imagination juggling complex paradigmatic and temporal analogies, Alice in Wonderland conversations between mind and body, space and time, longing and belonging, physics and metaphysics, night and day, summer and winter, spring and fall, Yang and Yin.

I see Laotse as an Ecological Regenerative Designer-Shaman, writing an ecotherapy mentor manual to his intellectual and chi-optimizing organic progeny. Laotse feels informed by the flow and force functions of Earth’s natural systems, health and wellbeing, nutrition and values within not only moral/ethical frames of reference, but also metric, especially biometrically organized value-group systems and trends, like societies, and sages, and root systems, and rivers.

Pre-millennial astronomers were similarly fascinated by astrological patterns and rhythms. Perhaps my post-millennial perspective on ecological development and design derives from this same Original Natural Systemic Intent of Teleology, an intuitive responsiveness to icons of natural rhythmic change patterns and flow trends, development, and structure, regardless of paradigm, inclusive of psychotherapy, socioeconomic and cultural regenesis, economic and environmental therapy, but mainly about how to develop and maintain a safe and sane home with the capacity to grow organic wellness through incorporating global diversity.

I have been reading across multiple paradigms again. Apparently this is a bad habit that drives my husband nuts, or at least contributes to his dismay about my apparent lack of an appropriately prioritized, not to mention better organized, mind. Reading books about cosmology and psychotherapy and permaculture design, and economic policy simultaneously to see how they may inform each other, and the occasional Yes! or Scientific American magazine simulcasting, it’s hard to say exactly where this research project began. I might trace it back to slurping Mother’s nutrient stream of plasma, but something about reading Laotse, Julian Jaynes, Buckminster Fuller, and David Bohm together has shifted my perspective on my own retirement, and the apparent retirement from rationality of a too white Western wealthy male-dominant culture.

I  recall, about a year ago, discovering Positive Psychology. I first noticed the studies of identical twins, living with each other on a daily basis. They tend to look more alike than twins disassociated at birth, or even after reaching adulthood. More recently I saw pictures of long-time happily married couples, a whole lot of high school sweethearts who stayed sweet on each other for the duration. They tended to resemble each other, even facially sometimes, in ways that are more pronounced as elders than when they were young in their relationships. Not until a year ago did I notice that people who generally have positive, can-do, yet realistic attitudes (so mono-maniacal types are excluded), who tend to feel grateful within their relationships, for whom resentment and envy are anomalous feelings, anticipate their long-term prospects for contentment and success and joy, and continuing gratitude throughout their lifetime(s). These are generally happy, loving, kind people, often swimming in some nurturing form of learning/reflective culture, especially as they move into middle-age and beyond. These are the people with whom everybody wants to live. Or at least I do.

Perhaps significant, though, I find no evidence of white Western wealthier male dominance here. Although there are many with these Positive traits, these are far more deviantly shared with people who have had a more challenging time.

So, why do Positive people meeting this description, sidestepping viral irony, tend to live longer and healthier lives than the rest of us comparatively manic depressive and cynical “realists”? I read Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking when I was about ten, but I don’t remember anything that would predict why my tall handsome African-American husband would start looking and sounding more and more like me, and I, a not-so-tall and not so handsome white guy, would start looking and sounding more and more like him, and liking it less and less. This was not our plan twenty three years ago. We actually prefer our differences more than our similarities, I think. Or at least I do, or did, and I thought that was an illustration of my somewhat positive psychological health—attraction toward diversity.

Evolutionary psychologists explain why positive psychology is so positive, why happiness is healthier than ambivalence, at least in more chronic forms. They say positive is positive because we have better outcomes so this develops positive feedback loops that lead to more and better sex and progeny over more average years.

OK, so maybe I’m not as positive as I had positively hoped.

While this evolutionary ethology sounds right to me, it also feels like this alone would predict a run-away positive feedback loop. So happy kids would almost inevitably grow up to be successful, happy, contented, and grateful adults, and old people, and they would, by now, be in complete global control of our situation, and I could take a nap, without worrying about my grandkids’ future prospects. Maybe we have some systemic constraints on the density of positiveness that any one community or ecosystem, or white straight financially-comfortable Western male can realistically contain at this time. This evolutionary frame may predict survival benefits more humbly than actual flourishing outcomes.

Doesn’t Positive Psychology also at least imply that human nature is ecologically evolutionary, that underlying our individual ego-self identities lies our mutually subsidiary network of synergetic (0) sum eco-soul chi? Mutual confluence and gratitude resonates; while mutual immunity, tension, stress, dissonance creates considerable noise, decay, destitution, death. Is a positively balanced ego-consciousness a still-emergent formation foreshadowing our understory, an eco-network of well-rooted, positive/negative balanced, thermodynamically harmonious gravity flow and synergy? Are we body-ego-identified individuals exploring our positively intended evolution as mind-eco-cellular individuating (0)-sum chi soulfood for each Other, within our own bodies and merging minds, and environments, relationships, communities, language development, nutrient economies, our own homes and families? This sounds Positive, but also Permacultured, to me.

I suspect there may be some implicit Negative Psychology mixed in with our explicated Positive Psychology; a recognition of the therapeutic value of grief, of care-giving and care-receiving, of nurturance and heartbreak as a response to pain and loss, and extinguishment, or purgation, in some contexts, as a response to dissonance and turbulence; like when my teenage sons pop their ear buds back in and turn their backs—Cognitive Dissonance Theory at work.

If only the positive, happy, more enlightening, emotions and affect could lead to improved, more abundant happiness, then I would presume that those of us who tend to sometimes be at least a tad more dull, and blind to our own gratitude for belonging with each Other, would have long ago died out, probably before dinosaurs..Glee, success, happiness, brilliance, beauty, goodness do not fully explain personal and social and economic evolution, or we would all be a whole lot more positive by now.

A response may emerge by looking at why Positive Psychology bears the name “Positive” rather than other possibilities like “Therapeutic” or “Good” or even “Correct” or “True.” Or “Perfect,” why not Perfection Psychology or even Paradise Psychology?

According to Wikipedia.com, our mutual textbook in the clouds, “Positive Psychology…uses scientific understanding and effective intervention to aid in the advancement of a satisfactory life, rather than merely treating mental illness.” What distinguishes between an unsatisfactory life and mental illness? Why wouldn’t treating an unsatisfactory life also treat mental illness? Positive Psychology implicitly, or liminally, somehow, seems to respond to Negative Psychology, our cultural fascination with pathology as unsatisfactory.

The Positive branch complements, with no intention to replace or ignore, the traditional pathological foci of psychology. Those other, Negative psychologists, with remedial intentions, have their place inside our somewhat shared asylum. Those ready for, and actively seeking, the good life will learn about “using your signature strengths everyday to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.” (Martin Seligman, 2002). Presumably, if you want to learn to use your signature weaknesses everyday to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification, then you need to move over to that other Negative branch, which, unfortunately, is so embedded in its pathological silo that the two branches are too often not even on speaking terms within the hearts and minds of psychologists.

Kirk Schneider points “to a body of research showing high positivity correlates with positive illusion, which effectively distorts reality.” High positivity, or “flourishing,” can generate a positive feedback loop rendering some self-delighted sap “incapable of psychological growth, unable to self-reflect, and tend to hold racial biases. By contrast, negativity, sometimes evidenced in mild to moderate depression, is correlated with less distortion of reality.” (wikipedia.com, Positive Psychology, Schneider, 2011, Toward a Humanistic Positive Psychology). This reminds me of how psychoanalyst mentor Harold F. Searles responded to Edward Podvoll when he was unclear about what more he could learn, ”Your problem is that you’re not paranoid enough.”

Depression, to take a sometimes personal example, may be a correcting, or TrimTab, tipping point away from run-away positively manic delusion, just as flourishing affect and feelings associated with ego-identity and relationships can be therapeutic for all that sad poetry I write during the winter that no one wants to read, including myself, when I’m feeling Positive, “flourishing.”

TrimTabs, from B. Fuller, are small deviant adjustment dynamics that reiterate positive and negative feedback functions between Positive Psychology and Negative Therapy, showing up in the amazing outcomes of the Positive Deviance Initiative (www.positivedeviance.org).

Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges.

The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.

This is strategized and planned positive evolution, with regenerative neighborhood and community-level effects. It is, in Podvoll’s language, finding islands of relative sanity. For example, a few parents figure out how to grow well-fed kids without any more money than anyone else in a neighborhood of largely malnourished kids.  The Positive Deviance researchers interview those families as the first step in spreading their outcomes more broadly among the population. I presume the reverse-deviant behavior or affect or feeling, or all the above, truly is positive, and not involving flourishing kids in assaulting other kids for their school lunches. Maybe these kids are flourishing because they have better choices for breakfast and carry nutritious lunches from home instead of what everybody else at school is eating.

This idea of not only Positive Deviance but also, by implication at least, Negative Deviance spreading to optimize a mutually-valued level of long-term sustainability comes to mind as I look for Ecological Mentoring Communities and Homes. Like the Findhorn EcoVillage, for example. Where are our best therapeutic cooperative models for sustained intentional positive communal life? How would one go about replicating these cultural development models within a more diverse and inclusive culture?

Apparently not with Positive Psychology alone, but some TrimTab balance between the Yangish excesses of positively functional outcomes and the Yin negative-reflective mutuality of interdependent nourishment, economic subsidiarity. Loss, pain, dissonance, wilting flowers and thriving weeds, climatic distempers, violent and fear-filled communications acutely erupt into our lives, and sometimes chronically emerge into our relationships, our communally accepted norms, our willingness to compromise on our definition of “home” and “paradise,” and perhaps even “sanity,” due to realities of the moment.

I am looking for models to form and maintain and self-propel positively deviant residential communities. Three psychologists stand out for me. The first is Julian Jaynes. I may get back to him a bit later. The other two are psychoanalysts, Edward Podvoll (Recovering Sanity, 2003) with a Compassionate therapeutic model, developed through the Windhorse Project, and Laura S. Brown’s Feminist Therapy (Subversive Dialogues, 1994).

Brown is passionately eloquent about the dis-positive ego-softening state of listening and speaking awareness essential to empathetically resonant, resilient, sustained therapeutic relationship. “A feminist therapy ethics takes the stance that practitioner and client are allies in the process of transforming…” (p. 207). This idea of therapist and ally, as empathic mutual mentors listening for dynamic functionality within their cognitive and communication dysfunction goes by the name of Basic Attendance in Podvoll’s psychoanalytic model.

Basic Attendance may be to non-violent communication what compassionate mindfulness is to actively engaged discursive synergy. Perhaps Basic Attendance has more of a peace intention, while compassionate mindfulness carries a more Western linguistic preference for active love. All of these are born of the same synergetic fabric found ubiquitously in religious and scientific paradigms as mutually gravitational attracting energy, motion, time frequencies, integrative function and force.

Uncovering the existence of spontaneous, innate flashes of sanity can become the building blocks of recovery…. Learning the necessary skills of this approach, especially the methods of basic attendance, allows human intimacy to become the catalyst for recovery. (Podvoll, p. 318)

Human natural intimacy is basic attendance, which might also be defined as the implicated root, or enthymematic to, compassionate mindfulness, love, or even synergy—according to Buckminster Fuller’s original coinage of this term for negative entropy—the opposite of an established relationship is something different, and more “advent”ish, more actively hopeful, than the entropic absence of relationship.

Basic Attendance includes both an intention and a practice. Intention precedes practice, “In this sense, environmental [ecological?] awareness is not only the tool to create sanity in the household, it is also the fundamental healing discipline that the patient needs.” Basic Practice of Attendance evolves out of Compassionate Therapy as a “fundamental healing discipline” ordained, perhaps quite literally, by ecological multisystemic awareness, or perhaps even a more active prehension of “Other-ness” within. “The secret of such intimacy can be learned and practiced; it is called the discipline of ‘exchange’.” (Podvoll, p.. 318) This seems to more-or-less bring us back to Brown’s feminist and holistically integral empathy.

Stretching to include human nature’s full living and often quite deviant diversity, I suppose ecological natural system awareness disciplines would include intentional breathing together, and noticing the pace of our heart rhythms, perhaps movement, exercise, artistic expression, poetry and story-telling, but also the mundanely unmystical habit of listening in full left- and right-hemispheric balanced stereo, and perceiving and feeling and absorbing and generating full sensory nutrient positive potential in full left-right hemispheric balanced stereo.

Julian Jaynes’ evolutionary theory of left-brained emergent linguistic dominance might suggest a cranial understory of reiterative, double-boundaried, Eco-Connected-SelfOtherPrimeRelationship-Mind-Right and Ego-Self-Identified-Body-Left-Languaged accessibility to and from older-brain encoded information. R.D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, and Robert Norton all look at diverse paradigmatic relationships between double-bind prime identification duality, emergence of binomial—analogic and digital, bipolar, and dual-nature polarities, autistic dissonant communication silos, and the ethological emergence of ego-body-self-identity awareness seminally accessible with the evolution of double stimulation capacity. (See Robert Norton’s Communication & Consequences: Laws of Interaction, p. 101) Self and Other are mutually individuated by knowing not only that when Other touches my arm I can feel this on my arm, but also when Self pinches my arm I can feel this on my arm and on my hand. Self is both subject progenitive, predicative, and object, response, outcome, in some (0)-sum balanced ego-core identity; or Not-Self-Otherness.

Non-violent communication analyzes the distinctly pathological problems that emerge from listening only with one ear and seeing only with one ego-centric eye. Feminist therapy reminds us that optimizing therapists choose to give fully balanced weight and credence to any functional intention of Other’s voice and movement, through empathic listening and responding with a voice or movement, music, rhythm, pace, flow, frequency, force this particular Other, in this particular moment might be able to recognize as confluently responsive.

When my non-verbal son, Yin, screeches and shouts and pops his lips with a sequence of rhythms and pitches, creating a repeatable sequence, he listens more attentively when I repeat these sounds back to him, more or less the way they sounded to me. For my reward, he shows the dimple on the right side of his mouth. Because I frequently get to see this dimple, I recognize myself as a well-trained Ecotherapy student; but Yin is, so far, the only effective verbal-pattern linguistic teacher in our mutually-therapeutic relationship.

When my probably insane daughter throws her food, jumps up from the table and runs away, I have learned to stretch further to see and hear through her functional neural system. It looked rather like one of her internal voices sounded an alarm, “Oops, alien incoming! Run away!!!

The most positive response in my arsenal was to see this as time to clear up her mess and go read a good book. But, when she was ready to come back to the crime scene, she wanted to eat the food off our floor (not something for the faint-hearted to even consider) rather than clear it up with a broom and mop.

When I responded with a cease and desist!, her response ranged from angry panic, incessant wailing despair, to loud protestations to the effect, “I’m hungry! Not just hungry; but hungry for this food on this wall and floor!”

With time, and more reflection on what response might Basic Attendance invite to my daughter’s dysfunctional alarm, it came to me that the alarm itself is not dysfunctional; it is my interpretation of her alarm’s meaning that was too myopic. My challenge was to regain positive and active faith in her functional intent to take care of herself. Soon after I remembered that Yang will take care of herself before she will do anything else, because she is profoundly ego-identified, it occurred to me that maybe I should jump up and run with her to her bedroom sit down on the floor with her, hold her if she will let me, and ask her what happened and why were we running away from the mashed potatoes, with gravy, and butter.

While initially all I got was silence, this was already better than all that wailing and terror. Eventually we got to I don’t know. Shortly after that, to Who threw my dinner? I’m hungry! That was when I began to have restored faith that there was a positive, yet alarming, method in her madness. She began to teach me about oppositional temporal disorder, reversed memory of cause and effect when under moderate to high stress conditions, and confusion between agent and victim, Self and Other-ness.

Yang’s reverse-synaptic affective response to her environment as a negative and toxic place for living cells probably started with her first baptism in alcohol. As she has matured and found her moments of sane nurturing relationships breaking through the insanity of her neural-hostage environment, her anxiety level has dissipated. Yang continues to mature, helped along by some music and dance and game therapy, playing with cause, effect, and reciprocal, reiterative, and appositional-oppositional temporal sequencing. Reverse role playing, story-telling with peaceful and harmonious words but saying them mean and ugly, and vice versa, ritualistic absurd name calling all have become idiosyncratic to our mutually trusting, playful, often humorous, positively expressive relationship.

Ecological awareness is feeling and hearing and seeing Self and Other with both eyes, as interdependent holons within Earth’s positive evolutionary, explicating, incarnating order. Karmic purpose unfolds as grace’s meaning, as karma’s practice enfolds grace’s intent. Borrowing from Basic Attendance but also Permaculture Design, we can choose to optimize polycultural nutrient absorption by minimizing ego-dominating distractions, predators, and dissonant assumptions of malignant intent. Bicameral basic attendance learns that well-balanced egos prehend indigenously within self-perpetuating, self-defining eco-centric EarthTribe design and development natural flow trends, functions, information. We each evolve part of Earth’s way, truth, and life; each of these three words is used to define Tao and, by Jesus of Nazareth, to define Messiah, as a new millennial manna.

Buckminster Fuller might recognize mutually symbiotic Attendance within our multi-systemic environment as a metaphysically real true way, or Universal Intelligence.[1] Fuller presciently committed intelligent permacultured design to the core TrimTab balancing principle of Greatest Effect with Least Waste, or loss of value, or least retention of dissonant values and frequencies and functions. His TrimTab mechanism later was labeled as the “tipping point” within a dynamic system in process of reversing one or more energy or information flow trends. A Trimtab’s (0) Core Vector is a “digital” view of optimized confluent analogical frequency trends, and minimized dissonant frequencies; optimized energy and information. TrimTabbing predicates consciousness value-balancing within any dynamic relationship trending toward prime, primal, or seminal; a significantly harmonious threshold toward emergently confluent ways, or Tao. Tipping points are emergently diastolic balanced flow, with reduced dissonant turbulence, moving toward some new/old diastatic, mutually enculturing stage of systemic relationship, synergetically merging two interdependent but complexly diffused, and sometimes confused, entities into one organically evolving form of stasis.

TrimTabs are tipping points in cultural self-designing moments and eras, increasing our collective prime comprehension, conceivability, compassionate mindfulness. They are balancing trend changes of function and form and frequency generating new moments of mutual sanity, or at least reiteratively building exchanges of values, words, thoughts, conceptual forms and structures that appear to have harmonious resonance between communicating minds and bodies wanting to head in the same balanced direction.

Prime mindfulness emerges from a formative infolding/outflowing intuition: just as Self identity grows through successfully individuating Not Eco-Other, so Not Eco-Other reveals our universal prime replicating teleological and ecological fractal relationship, with 50% Yang Self-Body ego-identity boundary covering [positive correlates with geometrically convex, when you learn to speak Fullerian, or Buckminstermess] our 50% interior eco-Yin chi-soul embryonic mind [negative correlates with concave], together self-perpetuating interdependent individuation, lived in balance on the cusp of each interdependently eco-self-consciously eternal temporal moment, our  mutually symbiotic event of shared consciousness.

We need not deeply comprehend primal layers of Basic Attendance to understand  Fuller’s prime relationship of 4-based geometric dynamic physics, and the process of in-formating, and 6-based metaphysical prime stage-flow functions, like color and sound round octaves shaped by Pythagorean iconic codes of value, or 2-based prime temporal-ergetic polarity, +radiant Eulerian primal horizontal cross fractal-functional perspective OVER (-)ergetically gathering, synergizing, concaved frequency temporal trend, the dark bottom view of a tornado spinning away from you, temporal spin assumption of clockwise [temporal natural flow patterns “from below” would be the dark understory view of a tornado spinning a spiraling temporal-flow string of memory back in time traveling away from you] = Right hemisphere toward Left hemisphere across elliptical space, Left toward Right across polar-linear time sequence and appositional staging seasons.

Somehow it all feels like it is soaking into our global analogically saturating culture right now, this companionship between physics and math and teleology and evolution and ecopsychology and new economics and cooperative gaming theory, and then back to Bayesian trend analysis of QBits, or Qits, or whatever quixotic quarky name we have for implicately analyzed big data-set trend strings of confluent prime spacetime relationships within overall regenerative  Hilbert-space strategic development trend-normative story lines. This generates a permacultured nutrient rich and sustained well-being frequency, full-octave, with a sometimes alarmingly, and often surprising, bipolar temporal intent, and autonomic intuition of frequency polarities.

Temporally emergent functions and stage-frequencies follow an ecological rhythm and pattern like RNA, or the four annual seasons, or the light and dark sections of a day. In Dharma and Development, Dr. Joanna Macy discusses a development fractal following this same pattern:

  1. NOTICE: metta–loving kindness
  2. HOPE: karam—compassion and/or grief [I would translate as confluence and/or dissonance, within information and communication theory]
  3. FAITH: mudita—joy in the joy of others; confluence/sorrow in the confluence/sorrow of others; trust in the trust of others; informating through informating with others; incarnating through incarnating as Integral Eco-Other Positive mythos/logos, eisegetical/exegetical string species
  4. LOVE/ACTIVE PEACE WITH JUSTICE: uppekkha—equanimity/integrity optimized value balance; a great, and deep, peace Tao of balanced equity.

So, in Bloom’s Taxonomy of deep learning, we start with

  1. an enthymematically emergent noticing of potential information,
  2. through hope of confluence researched,
  3. through faith therein reported, and finally
  4. comparatively analyzed and synthesized for analogous ecologies and economies with prior regenerative memory cycles and metric systems and language paradigms;

Basic Attendance metta is to hope, as faith is to love;

as LINE is to COSINE is to LTR is to Fuller’s (0) Core Vector fractal prime relationship;

as winter’s advent is to springing hope,

as summer’s faith fulfills in abundant Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Permaculture Design and Development optimized prime cooperative information and functional-synergetic value harvests;

as Uracil is to Cytosine,

so is Adanine to Guanine;

as + is to (-),

so is Polynomial Yang+ QBit

OVER

Reverse Not-Polynomial Yin(-)QBit..

This EcoTherapy is symbiotically and binomially born of  digital binary information ecosystemic theory and from a deeply inclusive permacultured Golden Rule, expressing each person’s positive cognitive intent through Basic Attendance  described as our mutually enculturing, empathic, and intuitively enthymematic practice of reflecting each other’s sanity by discovering analogies within our own experience and imagination, our extant range of frequency and functional and formative awareness of natural/organic/holonic potential (e.g. role play, music, gaming exercises, movement, meditation, stress reduction and artistic expressive therapies). Basic Attendance is to actively peaceful, “safe” and harmonious expression what non-violent communication is to dissonant- and risk-avoidant information patterns, like the stuff of Cognitive Dissonance Research. Cognitive Dissonance is the opposite of Basic Attendance, which grows nutrient positive roots for growing more sustainable Positive Deviance trends, especially within currently abused and neglected populations, species, neighborhoods and bioregions.

Anyway, getting back to my crazy oppositionally afflicted reverse-temporal synaptic daughter, she and I were both able to laugh at our dysfunctional fears when I was able to share with her that she threw that vegeburger and ran away so fast, I was sure it had teeth and had bitten her on the nose. She found that image amusing, and perhaps humoring this pathology helped her loosen her fearful grasp a bit, to hang on to our shared intentionally co-passionate and mindful moment of positive integral ecotherapy. It helped each of us to hear the other, and ourselves, laughing about that fearsome vegeburger. Laughter, perhaps literally, absorbs dissonant information, it is medicinal, as is joy, and all those attributes associated with Positive Psychology.

Perhaps what is still missing for me in Positive and (negative) remedially-oriented  ecopsychology theory is something that might help explain why an old widow and her not quite so old boxer look like cousins sometimes. Can we predict the evolution of body and mind confluence by optimizing multisystemic information and energy confluence in each of our relationships, each moment, each choice of word and song and dance and value? Is this not what we mean by Basic Attendance, and/or compassionate mindfulness?

How might we spread this rich compost of Basic Polycultural Attendance throughout our most cooperative and permacultured enterprises? Throughout the places in time and moments in space where those who are not wealthy straight Western adult males, 40-70, will have one of Laura Brown’s Subversive Dialogues about ecotherapeutic cooperative care for homes and families, businesses and vocations, learning and designing and developing regenerative systems and relationships. How will you invest our wealth for yourself, your children, and our future generations of all EarthTribe?

 

 

REGENERATIVE WORK

Is work that reconnects?

I hope I am hearing voices from the future

not yet here.

But, I have a message from our past

that might reflect a positive intention

for continuing our epic journey

of regenerative pilgrimage.

Do we intend effective regenerative therapy

for straight white upper middle class

family value issues,

choosing segregated safety

over a more active adventure of integrative living

as a quasi-gendered Other of non-color

within a neighborhood

and school

and training workshops

led by straight white wealthier

family value issuers,

reformers,

ecotherapists?

Industrial Age Myth delivers

global value confusion

into an otherwise formerly sustained,

deeply green encultured,

Agrarian EarthTribal Age Myth.

Logosing across economic,

ecological,

cultural,

linguistic analogies,

emerges a slow-evolving hypothesis:

family economic and ecological silent silos of abuse

and neglect reveal abundantly informative

confluenct Tao patterns and

permaculturally functional rhythms.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

  1. Industrial Age Myth of Global Progress

Leads to

  1. White wealthier Western

straight male-dominant

cultural and ecological

and economic pathologies.

AND

REGENERATIVE THERAPY DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN:

tipping turning vortex

Positive Deviance Therapy

confluently hearing

Positive peace-filling kind-kin logos orthodoxy.

A.(1) Profoundly inclusive diversity

(2) reweaving diastolic evolution toward

(3)diastatic fullness,

also known as

(1) Basic Grateful Attendance

(2) to Self, Other, Earth,

three faces of SelfIdentity balancing EarthTribal Co-Prehension,

(3) democratizes compassionate mindfulness,

also known as

(1) Eastern Yin-executively flexible

and reverse-hierarchically inclusive

polycultural information skills

(2) emerges ecological economic

and global-learning therapies.

(3) Leads To

  1. Sustaining Well-Being Optimized

Agrarian

Residential

and Trade Guild Cooperatives

Communities and Nations

planets and universes

with Therapeutic Ecological Econormial Values

These feed my permacultured Taoist soul story

that we are sticking with it

to fly together,

and not apart;

and I am not either just a straight white Western male old fart!

Gerald O. Dillenbeck

 

[1] In Synergetics 2 (1979), #987.075, p. 322, Fuller appears to conclude that Universal Intelligence is DNA/RNA design programming, the “cosmic-coordinate system to be embraced and accommodated by the epistemography of synergetics.” If so, then he may have been casting the role of uracil as “Yang”, +1 Eulerian QBit function, Bohm’s Explicate Order, and Polynomial spacetime information set, and cytosine as “Yin,” +/-(0) Core Prime Fractal-Holonic Relationship, Vertex/Vortex binomial, Not-Polynomial-dominant, reverse-temporal “dark/dense” string memory codex.

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Uncategorized

EcoSelf Identity

EcoSelf invites, stimulates,

EgoSelf’s range of power, responsibility, authority,

in response, reaction.

EcoYin hopes for gratitude

EgoYang hopes for love.

Right brain’s mythic memory intuition

can wisely speak through Left brain’s eco-logical logos.

 

Right brain hopes for confluent stimulation

through Left brain’s comprehensive gratitude

for belonging to all four seasons,

but especially the advent-ure of winter’s incubation,

springing permacultured dreams

unfolding and refolding within

EarthTribe’s eternally  regenerating season

of synergetically silent solidarity,

merging wounded wombs with Earth,

composting genetic sap for spring.

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Uncategorized

EarthTribe’s Beloved Community

Martin Luther King, Jr.,  and many before him,

and since, often preferred Beloved Community to speak of a time and place

and people and all our cousin species

that others might refer to as heaven, or paradise.

 

This Beloved Community knows our mutually shared hope for our future,

and our future generations,

but also faiths an interdependent present,

our cooperatively regenerating potential right now,

in this moment,

positively and contingently connected to all future moments,

EarthTribe’s Eternally Generating Moment.

 

This Beloved Community holds together tensions along the way:

diversity and interdependence,

complementarity and mutual subsidiarity,

Yang-productive energy and Yin-gravitational synergy,

compassionate orthopraxis and polysystemic mindful intent,

deliberately informed solutions and wildly eratic irresolution,

form and function,

immunity boundaries and community thresholds,

active peace and non-violent love,

economics incarnating ecologics,

faith and gratitude for purgation,

diastasis and stasis,

EarthTribe Prime Identity and EarthSelf individuation,

RNA encultured cells and DNA encultured minds,

polycultural development and permacultural design,

positive information and negative noise,

nutrition and thirst,

meaning and purpose,

belonging and longing.

 

Our Beloved Community evolving at hand.

Physical laws becoming icons of metaphysical principles,

thermodynamic balance as

greatest effect with least loss,

as Yang with Yin.

 

Metaphysical principles stalk liminal relationships

lurking within our positive teleology assumption,

that past meaning intersects future’s purpose

within present prehensile presence,

double-boundary,

emerging from past chaos and despair, noise and decay,

why we live between entropy and synergy,

regenerative systems evolving toward Omega Point,

revolving back toward RNA’s Commons Culture of Original Intent.

 

Human spirit emerges icons from Earth’s nature.

Earth and solar spacetime Universe our Mentors,

and Progenitors,

incarnating Time’s remembering cultural intelligence,

an RNA-latticed synergetic string

from Original Intent

Taoing forward, upward, onward,

relentlessly reweaving integrative love as

positive teleological intention.

 

Our Beloved Community gardens Earth

communicating active peace through nurturing mentorship.

Distinguishing mentor from teaching with words

the way Mentor practices and multisystemically intends.

Teachers talk as Mentors walk.

Non-violent communication evolves inclusive skills,

teaching capacity to articulate empathy,

growing compassionate mindfulness of, through, and for each EarthSelf Other.

Active peace emerges slow re-ligioning Mentor,

Exterior-Yang EarthTribe Identity conjoins Interior-Yin EcoSelf

balancing synergetic Tao

reconnecting

reweaving

mentoring

syncing with

Beloved Community lost.

 

Our Beloved Community sustains diverse living systems,

optimizes,

evolves universally inclusive co-intelligence

growing rebirth,

regenesis of natural information string principles

of thermodynamic and magnetic polar balance;

rehinging images of heaven’s gate closed,

recreating karmic devolution

spiraling too hot and fast into eco-dislogical hell.

 

Universal intelligence,

bipolar Tribal re-comprehension

evaporates as entropy if it were true that

nature’s systems are closed,

and binomial spacetime dynamics do not imply reverse temporal density,

explicating natural systems known through implicating metaphysical minds,

Prime-Rational (0)-sum RNA-fractal,

regenerative tetrahedral,

Fullerian bosonic QBit core,

where positive function Vertex intersects negatively dissonant Vortex,

born again in each moment’s phenomenal form.

 

Today’s Beloved Community replaces coincidence with creative intention;

an intersection of time and space,

of Yin and Yang,

of Eastern karma meets Western grace prediction,

heuristic potential turning oppositional dissonance

into appositional teachers,

held together to predict mutual salvation,

tomorrow’s global community.

Prophets understand time as only flowing forward.

Sages comprehend spacetime,

four equally balanced dimensions,

three spaciated-temporal,

and one prime-temporal polarity,

balancing radiant Yang

and gravitational Yin,

longing and belonging,

balanced Left and Right hemispheres

of exterior landscape deduction

and interior landscape induction.

 

Our Beloved Community has no poverty vacuum.

Where there is poverty

there is not Beloved Community

as poverty starves human integrity,

a regenerative natural systemic designer species.

Poverty witnesses

teaches

insufficient nutrients to produce flowering human natured systems.

Mentor Earth lavishly waters Her grace-flowers.

Depriving Herself of a season of flowers

threatens our interdependent species,

threatens our capacity to sustain rich polycultural future generations.

Threatening polycultures is antithetical to permacultural designers.

Grace and karma float emergent issues, opportunities, risks,

not coincidences,

mentoring fertile outcomes while punishing stinginess,

tragic loss of buoyancy,

resilience,

sustainability,

balance;

pointing us back,

reconnecting us toward polysystemic regenerative design,

our basic compassionately mindful orthopraxis.

 

Each Beloved Community day

moment

life,

each vista,

each situation

gestalt

paradigm,

unfolds within our bicamerally bound storybook.

Our felt, seen, touched, tasted, heard, smelled messages

absorb nutrients

organized to feed future bicameral minds,

to recognize experience as confluent or dissonant

with past experience

within DNA’s exegetical messaging patterns.

 

Evolving sensory message reception

reads each moment’s page in my reculturing storybook.

Memory transliterates messages

between now

and our DNA/RNA’s string,

restricting prehensile neural response,

positively binding,

revolving longing for light of further growth,

evolution,

elongating toward sustained life’s Positive Teleology,

more fully understood in contrast to our Cognitive Dissonance,

regenerating strings

singing and dancing, often stumbling,

our Beloved Communication Community.

 

 

 

 

.

 

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Graceful Turkeys

The Eagle card is the first of my numbered Medicine Cards, as Eagle’s powerful spirit is #1 in our U.S. culture.

We hold eagle feathers as the most sacred of healing tools. Shamans used these to cleanse diseased auras. Eagle medicine is achieved through good old fashioned all-American bootstrap hard work and the personal power of completed production.

The issue for eagle medicine is right use. We have opportunity to broaden our sense of self, soaring beyond the horizon of what is presently visible. Myopic egotism and hubris are too narrow for the vast vistas of Eagle medicine.

If the Eagle is our nation’s Yang spirit, then he calls us to balance with the Give-Away Eagle; Turkey medicine is our Yin spirit.

Give-Away cooperation is the reverse side of Eagle’s Take-Away power. Turkey medicine recognizes that sacrifice to the bone of need is fuel for the fat of want and take and have and own and mine. The pot-latch redemptive ceremony is counter-cultural for Eagle dominance, played with win-lose game assumptions. Give-Away culture assumes no tribe or species can win our economy game unless all needs are met. Mutual subsidiarity premises our active peace principle of solidarity. Only win-win cooperative strategies merit Turkey’s Give-Away grace.

In Turkey’s hunted hungry haunted eyes, a person with wealth deposits has fat deposits which is not only selfish but insanely dangerous. Self-centeredness is bad for our physical and mental health, and not sustainable for the entire flock of flocks. Excess wealth is a cultural embarrassment within the Turkey Tribe. Where one bulges with excess power, nutrition, medicine, fat, others fade and strain in dissonant decay.

The word poverty is always relational. I am poor as compared to, well…., almost everyone, but choose any millionaire on up through multi-billionaire who comes to mind. My 19-year-old chronically unemployable son is poor as compared to my assets and opportunities. We do not use the word poor so much when we are talking about an entire tribe or species confronting chronic lack of sufficient resources to thrive, to regenerate. We are more likely to use words like epidemic or risk of extinction.

Turkey medicine reminds us that if our culture applauds engorged Eagles as normative role-models for ourselves and our kids, then it becomes less likely that these kids and their kids will sustain and thrive. Fat turkeys end up on other species’ thanksgiving tables.

Turkey’s grace is the understory of Eagle’s incarnational equity and strength for justice and liberty.

Give-Away Grace reminds us that an eye for an eye may be metric power balance but not social justice, or rationality.

Grace reminds us that an eye for an eye leads to bicameral blindness.

Grace sees that if you have lost an eye, then so have We.

Grace reminds us that we are in this mess together so justice always responds to injustice by asking “where did we go wrong together?”

Our loss of even one eye is a teaching moment for the human flock to rally, to gather and gobble our way toward protecting our flock. We are each responsible for containing the loss and giving the medicine of mercy and forbearance and regenerative redemption in the gift of our flurry of feathered response. Grace shares the turkey’s shyness by shunning where Eagle’s Law would punish with despair.

Turkey’s grace sees the wisdom of minimizing loss by optimizing effectiveness.

Grace recalls that my loss of eye is a stimulus that would also become a response only by doubling the loss and initiating an infinite reactionary string of unraveling disarray, chaos, dismay, death, declarations of war and malignant intent. Turkey grace pauses to recall that each stimulating loss is half of an emerging justice issue that need not be constrained by the failure of the first half. Grace further recalls that each stimulating loss was also a “second-half” response to earlier events or absences of giving when sharing was needed.

Give-Away Turkey culture compassionately shares our shame that we have created such an unfair flock and environment that we would rob ourselves of mindfulness in our rabid thirst for revenge. Turkey medicine remains mindful of the suffering, longing understory within compassion, empathy, synergy, belonging.  Turkey grace knows that victimizing others is always self-victimizing as well, it is a hurtful sacrifice to be avoided.

Active peace is non-violence of thought and word and deed, but it is also the relentless invitation to co-passioning minds, which Christians call love, and philosophers have called integrity, or even synergy.

We are an Eagle iconic culture started by a flock of active peaceful Turkeys. As before, so after. May win-win strategic responses to fear and loss and hurt fall like rain; may I begin again within each moment, thought, word, and mind-enriching action.

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Self Mind-full Therapy

What lies within my dark cave’s name?

What’s in a name?

A tropic nomial, perhaps.

Within my nomial, this Me

Self-identified.

If Me and Self

why not WeSelf;

half part of WeEarthTribe progenitor,

and You my other half?

 

Other, poly-nomials defining and refining

memes co-versing and conversing

bubbling troubling,

designing and divining,

noticing this paradigm’s parsing individuation,

appositioning bifurcation

born through positive dialogue

exchanging dissonant tipping points of view.

 

Positive, in Yin’s enthymemed intent,

incorporating Yang’s Not-Self peace-fully content

beating double-walled informating Boundary,

liminally breathing diametric heart.

Beating boundaries deductively induce

labored breathless recreativity.

 

Yet perhaps within our well-walled cells,

within (0) spatial skin between Self and Other,

we explore our double-bound revolving door,

DNA coded colors painting

our ecoequi-diversity.

We individuate our karmic futures

of peaceful just exegesis

as inter-weaving Individuals,

binomial self-perpetuation,

mutually bowed gratitude,

be(long-com)ing.

 

Me Yin,

You Yang;

Interior’s Landscape.

reflects

Self-humane Nature’s meaningful belonging,

EarthSelf Exterior’s Physique

positive poly-nomial

bicamerally coded negative;

DNA-RNA fractal co-designing string,

Re-formive Genesis Order echoing

Original Intent

to mean our purpose

longing to belong together

abundantly bi-generative;

within three-dimensioned dimming womb

Self’s  constant longing absent home.

 

Hi.

Positive Polynomial here,

what’s your name?

 

Not-Polynomial Negative!

 

Of course, so sorry to intrude convexly,

but who are you, I might notice,

positively speaking, as wise  justice EarthSelf Mind?

 

Not You alone but Eco-We together,

I am EcoSelf

including your resonant tempered memory string

of EcoSelves used to be

and EcoSelf emerging once again,

through self-regenerative

UniversalInformation’s

still revolving,

stimulus-responsive

permaculturing door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Our Not-So-Noisy Nest

We don’t sound right.

Too left-brained I hope

better balance might cool our home

relationships

lives

words

as richly dense Eternal Moment compost

feeds diversely rooted populations.

 

Lake’s surface ripples with

leaf blowers whining

jets roaring overhead

cars exhaustively streaming by

like cheerless tears of toxic bubbles.

 

Beneath

before

this vaporous high pitched system

still lives mountainous resonant joy.

Birds still tweet,

not just people,

rivers trickle and spray white noise

ocean surf still ebbs and flows

within our circulating systems.

 

Our hearts and lungs and minds

remember catholic lotus root systems

recall bisonic natural sync between

nature made commodious spirit lakes

reflecting

revealing

flowering

EarthTribe discovered Orthodox Tao mountain tops

natural tree-lined valleys in

regenerative systemed (0) core Prime Relationship

of left-brained Yang remembering

Yin’s true value as

polynomial is non-polynomial reversed

is binomially balanced

compassionately deep lake reflecting mindful mountain

dynamically harmonious dance of

peaceful twinkling

rippling

lapping

laughing thermonormative warm and slow relationship.

 

Communication,

positive discernment,

our bicameral vocation’s peaceful yeasty nest racing

embracing

evolving

revolving

rhythming

beating

breathing

thinking

choosing

soaring through humanity.

 

But, quietly, please?

Some of us are trying not to sleep.

 

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Original Intent Practice

Permaculture design pushes backward

and outward

then inwardly

quiet as time.

 

Polycultures push down

beneath sight’s surface

then up

reaching toward light

then outward forming boundaries

following footprints of rock and water and sand.

 

Culture fuses inward

composting diastatic balance

then up and out

toward natural limits of effects

confluent

softly dissonant

rolling peace

informing equity

of sound

then sight

of self awareness

formed

full-functioned frequencies

of rhyming time

then spaciating

re-speciating,

tri-dimensional

til time falls back again

echoing ecodance

of bouncing

skipping

while whistling

radiant eternity of EarthTribe play.

 

Time to wake another day,

riding swelling surface waves

toward recessive rest

diastolic dreams

digesting this day’s mess

creating future’s memories

of permencultured cosigns.

 

Error

slip

misstep

sin?

slouching liminal boundaries

reaching toward each other

to care and cure disharmonious emptiness

longing

for full resonant wave of sound

dissemblingequilibrious

dawning day’s delight dilemma.

 

Permanently enculturing time

inkarmates design,

as Original Praxis

creates compassioned paradise.

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Functional Human Family

Real life is a graced ecology

in which we learn compassion

for Self and Other-EcoSelf

by growing in mindfulness

of Self as integral to Other,

and vice versa.

 

Growing in positive mindfulness

can feel more like work camp

than a peace-filled Paradise Ashram.

 

When I comprehend

Work Camp is the Trimtab,

trim-the-fat,

tipping point

purgative learning invitation

toward enlightened love full-promised,

then perfect compassion occupies my mind.

Longing sweeps in toward universal belonging.

 

When life together feels like

monolithic Boot Camp,

and not so much Campy Play

and it seems no way

it could ever feel another way,

then I mindfully reverse

so it looks like

sure-footed positive intent toward

compassionate campus of soulful practice

with each of us all day

OR positive intent becomes shared vocation

to help each other understand

when this golden feeling evaporates

and why

and how we might help each other

more mindfully approach our messy dysfunctions together,

a functioning natural family

called “human” nature.

 

If human life,

and other natural systems,

feels more like a root canal

than gold-capped stress relief,

then water the memories of past gold caps

by imagining how this root canal

already builds toward your sustainably

healthy tooth

in the mouth of this well-fed community

living in polyculturing planet’s

positive potential Eternal Moment.

 

 

 

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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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Regenerative Leadership for a Global Millennial Community

Robert Dale, in Leadership for a Changing Church, claims we want leaders who make sense.  At first blush, we might be tempted to respond that we also would prefer spouses, children, neighbors, and even books that make sense.  To be fair, Dale further specifies leaders in sense-making as those who can effectively translate across paradigms and eras, and maybe even people, and scriptures.

 

Leaders provide continuity frames for between-the-times eras by showing what deserves to be preserved from the past and by creating what’s required of us for healthy futures. (p. 101)

 

This normative hope for post-modern religious leadership finds echoes in unexpected places. David Abrams describes the tribal role of the shaman as

 

the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture…in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations…of the larger, more-than-human field. (The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 9)

 

In Genius 101, Dean Keith Simonton describes polymathic genius as an unusual ability to perceive patterns underlying paradigm perimeters. The polymathic religious leader maps patterns of confluence and dissonance across physical and metaphysical systems. Our Millennial shamans are paradigm and people transliterators in a Universe of symbiotic meaning development.

 

It is difficult to imagine what this string of abstractions would look like within one leader. William James argued that the incarnated definition of religious and spiritual genius is a renowned mystic or saint, or preferably both. For heuristic purposes, we might translate “shaman” as “Messiah,” operating within a defined historical-cultural information system.

 

  • Messiah:  Shaman, a transliterative adept with universal paradigms and languages, and diverse species;
  • Messianic Universal Field: Functioning optimally within an Open Set 4-dimensional sphere with (0) Core Vector soul  (see Buckminster Fuller and Gregori Perelman, and William Thurston);
  • Purpose of Religion/Spirituality: symbiotic meaning development.

 

Due to constraints of timeliness, let’s try substituting the word “compassion” for the two words “symbiotic meaning,” thereby synchronizing with the Dalai Lama’s, and perhaps Jesus of Nazareth’s teleological belief that “the whole purpose of our practice is to become more compassionate human beings.” (Beyond Religion, p. 183)

 

Messianic Leadership Purpose: development of compassion.

 

Even if all that does make sense together (and I have a dissertation thesis topic in mind that would investigate whether the hypothesis proposed is one that could be scientifically and religiously and/or metrically confirmed as “sense-making” or “True,” or not) what might it mean to say that our best and brightest spiritual leaders have the gift of transliteration?

 

To transliterate is to accurately exchange letters, words, information, thoughts, nutrients, into corresponding values of another language, or paradigm, person or information system. Transliteration is to translation as nutritious yogurt is towarm milk.  Transliteration unveils, decodes, what translation reveals. Transliteration comprehends the why of what translation understands as a correlation of meaning. When we put them together, something diastatically metamorphic occurs, a new pattern of symbiotic relationships across what had been two distinct entities.  Transliteration is the ability to translate, and accurately predict, emergent patterns across languages, individual organic systems, polycultures; each a type of Closed Set universe (or Group in mathematics and sociometrics) information system. The more adept at paradigm and person translation, the more compassionate becomes the leader; the more compassionate, the more adept at communicating with optimized sense-making, or mutual-meaning-creation, mindfulness, and effectiveness.

 

Christian Schwarz chooses empowering facilitative leaders as the first of his eight necessary qualities for Natural Church Development optimization. “These pastors equip, support, motivate, and mentor individuals,”…. “They do not use lay workers as ‘helpers’.” (p. 24) This is leadership operating in a cooperative transaction economy and ecology. Capitalists and socialists, government regulators and “free” enterprise advocates alike need not apply for the role of post-modern shaman. Empowerment optimizes as cooperation becomes equilateral, mutually initiated and received. This is a highly mindful and effective cooperative value exchange.

 

Leaders who realize their own empowerment by empowering others experience how the “all by itself” principle contributes to growth. (p. 25)

 

Mutually empowering iterative loops are the economic-ecologists way of advocating the benefits of local cooperative-based transactions with emergent win-win symbiotic value optimization. This is the kind of reality that sounds like our most abundant purpose is to grow in mutual compassion. The fruits of compassion are cooperative-oriented transactions and relationships of mutual gratitude.

 

Schwarz further observes that empowering sense-builders enjoy bipolar balance between “goal” and “relationship” orientations. In his theological paradigm, too many of us are either imbalanced toward a technocratic faith or a spiritualistic hope.  It is the adept religious leader who is able to consistently self-and-other empower, keeping both her faith-in-self goals, and hope for relationship development, in equipoised balance.

 

Our polymatic shaman maintains an internal and external landscape that compassionately balances faith in self as other, and other as self; a combination of the Golden Rule and the enthymematic awareness that “we are all in this together.”  This is a solidarity that echoes our theology of the marriage bond—but applied universally, radically, inclusively, embracingly to all species and all of nature.

 

Our millennial shaman transliterates the patterns within and between self and other during an inclusive pilgrimage toward a mutually discovered universe of ultimate compassion. This sounds like a good thing. But, is this theology supported by what we discover in natural patterns of healthy development? This, after all, is the infrastructural analogy behind Schwarz’s thesis; we are a system of nature. He implies that a spiritual and/or metaphysical information universe is incarnated as nature, so we can notice nature’s patterns to improve understanding of this metaphysical universe, and perhaps vice versa.

 

If an ecology of deeply balanced empowerment, internal to the religious leader, and external within the community’s culture, is fertile soil for our millennial shaman, then why,

 

Now for the good news: pastors of growing churches do not need to be superstars. Most of the pastors with the highest scores in our survey are little known. They generally provide us, however, with more helpful basic leadership principles than most of the world-famous “spiritual superstars.” (p. 25)

 

It would be interesting to analyze confluence and disparity patterns between “famous” spiritual leaders and “most helpful” spiritual leaders. On what basis does Schwarz establish transliterative ability; the gift of mutual compassion? Religious leaders are helpful, fruitful, to what end, for whom? Is the problem that famous-but-not-especially-helpful pastors are too goal-oriented or is the problem that the helpful-but-not-famous are too relationship oriented, imbalanced toward compassion for others? How do we  balance compassion for ourselves with compassion for others? The problem, and the opportunity, with polarities is they are mutually self-defining.

 

Even so, certainly the fields of geometrics, biometrics, permaculture design, thermodynamics, and binary systems theory would all agree with our Taoist friends that sustainable optimized values are richer when polarities are balanced, than when not.

 

Schwarz perhaps misses an application of an old design principle that favors greatest effect with least effort. It is only implied that the six phases of his transformative cycle may be as true for the shaman as they are for the shaman’s exterior landscape, the faith community. His Stage Theory is anciently known and recognized. Perhaps this is acknowledged in his Three Color Compass, but not mentioned in Natural Church Development. For simplicity, compare Schwarz’s Growth Spiral stage theory to Bloom’s Deep Learning Taxonomy and Robert Norton’s Laws of Interaction (Communication and Consequences):

 

 

Polar Alignment                      Norton                                    Schwarz                       Bloom


 

 

1. Yang (effective)                    Enthymematic                               Perceive                    Knowledge

Communication

 

2. Yin (mindful)                Prima Facie Validity                                 Test                       Comprehend

 

3. Yang (effective)                  Prior Dependence                          Understand                     Apply

 

4. Yin (mindful)          Idiosyncratic Understanding                      Plan                            Analysis

 

5. Yang (effective)           Sufficient Similarity                                     Do                             Synthesis

 

6. Yin (mindful)              Narcissistic Strength                              Experience                   Evaluation

——————————————————————————————————————-

Yang/Yin Deep              Existential Excitement                              Perceive                    Self-Knowledge

Ecology Threshold                                                                                  Self/Other                   Group Identity

 

Yang translates Schwarz’s “technocratic” and “goal-oriented,” while Yin translates “spiritualistic” and “relationship-oriented.”

 

The concept of leadership is directional and temporal, enhanced with analogical balance between one’s interior and exterior landscapes. This leader is pointing us to where or what end in the future, with what evidence that this direction makes sense? Schwarz is working toward regenerating a permacultured planet of post-modern leaders who are compassionate, cooperative facilitators. This translation expresses faith in leaders who share a deep eco-equity learning culture.

 

The millennial shaman’s mutual ministry is EcoMinistry. This core solidarity, that we are all gratefully in this together, catalyzes a synchronic evolution toward a compassionate mecca of mutual gratitude; in this life, future lives, a trans-generational continuity of re-ligioning, reincarnated from generation toward ReGenesis. To do as Jesus did, to in-form the Body of Christ, to be today our faith for tomorrow, we cooperatively incarnate into our regenerated future, with gratitude. Always with gratitude.

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