Replying to LO24680 --
Dear Organlearners,
Lana Choi <ecospirit@mail.com> writes:
>Sorry for this incredibly long and winding message. Clarity,
>focus and organization are certainly not my strong points!!!
Greetings Lana,
I begin by quoting your last parapraph.
You never need to ask me to forgive you. First of all, I love such rich
pictures as the one which you have painted. Secondly, you need to have
done something wrong. Painting a rich picture is different to drawing a
few lines and filling it up with a colour or two, but it is not wrong. As
for the cost of money to down load it, it will take locally about 15
seconds. In terms of local telephone rates, it will cost the same as a
slice of bread!
Dear fine lady, I like your "slice of bread"!
>But if I don't just write these thoughts and get them out there,
>I will never end up responding and may gradually disengage
>from the dialogues here, as I feel we move further away from
>mutual understanding and more towards eclectic soliloquies,
>such as mine!
Thank you for giving us this reason, so different from the previous we had
on why people leave the list. You use this reason in the following long,
but also very powerful sentence:
>However, I am also suggesting that we might want to explore
>ways in which 1) the forum might be expanded or rejuvenated
>to be more holistic and inclusive way (we need to keep
>discussing how), and 2) perhaps there is something deeper that
>no one wants to deal with because it may open up a whole box
>of social, political, cultural, gender, racial, and other issues that
>people may fear would cause division, "flaming", loss of cohesion
>or connection, and so on, here at LO.
You and I (and I wonder how many other fellow learners) need to
rejuvenate by expanding
connect to deeper things
How? By acknowledging wholeness. (As for me, there are six other
patterns togther with wholeness.) Now why wholeness? As I
understand it, rejuvenation comes through constructive emergences
through which we connect to deeper things. This is impossible
without "sufficient" wholeness for the "level" of emergence.
Lana, you also write early in the beginning:
>Unfortunately, I am still at the "trapped within my beliefs" stage.
I want to question you. Do all your beliefs "trap" you in? The reason why
I ask this is that you wrote the following to end the paragraph with that
long, but powerful sentence which I have quoted:
>However, I feel ignoring this covert issues means the learning here
>may slowly lean towards the abstract or merely the polite.
You write "feel". Should I have written this sentence, I would have easily
done the same, except for using "believe" rather than "feel".
If you are sure that it must be "feel" rather than "believe", then extend
the question to include feelings too ;-)
You also write:
>My concern here is that the diverse viewpoints challenging the
>status quo (even on this list, as there is inevitably one, even if
>does continually evolve) are not being fully understood or don't
>get the proper time and attention to be examined from a new light.
This is eaxctly what the LO-dialogue has to provide -- exploring the whole
and not merely a part, the category and not merely an identity, the
becoming and not merely the being, the begetting and not merely the
connection, the limit and not merely the quantity, the variety and not
merely the quality, the opening up and not merely the paradigm. And to
keep up the rhythm of the dance of change.
In your profound sentence there is only one word ("challenging")
which I want to annotate with what Jan Smuts wrote once to
Margeret Gillett:
...... [the human] has to learn to rise above the shortcomings
of a crude democracy and the evils of the competitive society
in order to form that society of ..[humankind] .. which is the
next stage in our social and communal progress.
He clearly saw the "evils of the competitive society". What is the
difference between "competitive" and "challenging"?
I think that in his own profound sentence he did foresee the evolution of
the Learning Organisation as the "next stage", especially since he uses
the words "learn" and "rise".
In that same letter he also writes:
Good AND evil are realities to be squarely faced and we
do not get at the real truth by ignoring or glossing over
evil.
So what is this "real truth"? You yourself write to Winfried:
>I believe here you are making an assertion that may perhaps
>be located to some degree in a personal socio-cultural
>perception, which may also be part of a larger socio-cultural
>perception and therefore accepted outright as being The Truth.
>It is one of many truths. Until we reach the place of oneness,
>there seems to be a dualistic reality--personal/subjective and
>external.
I believe that once we are closer to SEEING all the "many truths", we will
be closer to LOOKING at the "real truth". The LO-dailogue can take us
closer to seeing all the "many truths".
By the way, what is the difference between "many truths" and "many facts"?
Or is this a too intellectual question to ask ;-)?
You wrote:
>Until we explore, learn, and understand these deeper issues,
>then what I personally perceive to be the overall goal of learning
>organizations or communities remains an elusory vision.
Amen! (See my note above how we connect to "deeper" things!)
Dear Lana, thank you for you contribution. Because of my diabetes
condition, I cannot even eat one slice of bread any more -- unless I make
use of the technology of insulin injections. Your "slice of bread" was
most nutritionous.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <Richard@Karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>
"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.