Replying to LO27828 --
Dedicated to Peter Senge ***among** others;-)
Dear Friends;-)
Rick has asked,
> From: Richard Karash <Richard@Karash.com>
> Subject: Central Notions... Challenges... LO27828
>
> Who are the most responsible people who DISAGREE with the organizational
> learning field? Who are the challengers to these ideas?
>
> I received the question below and realized I don't know how to reply.
>
> I was going to reply, "Many people think 5 disciplines are not enough."
> But this is a shallow reply.
SNIP
> To answer this requires being clear about what are the central tenants of
> the organizational learning field. What are these central tenants?
>
> Being deeply involved can obscure the very thing you are involved in.
It was that last sentence/phrase at the end that made me 'buzz' with
excitement;-) Talk about synchronicity;-) Or be completely silent about
synchronicity;-). I was ploughing the fields of Jungian psychology --
listening as CGJung transdisciplines himself into the head of a 'buzzing'
Einstein (Yeoooouuuuch! Nagasaki and Hiroshima ;````-( ) here we go...blast
off into the eye of the hurricane...
--- would start such an argument that you would accuse me of the most
terrible obscurantism. These things really are obscure. I had to speak in
terms of the basic mind, which thinks in archetypal patterns. When I speak of
archetypal patterns those who are aware of these things understand, but if
you are not aware you think, 'This fellow is absolutely crazy because he
talks of mastodons and their difference from snakes and horses'. I should
have to give you a course of about four semesters about symbology first so
that you could appreciate what I said.
That is the great trouble: there is such a gap between that is usually known
of these things and what I have worked on all these years. If I were to speak
of this even before a medical audience I should have to talk of the
peculiarities of the niveau mental, to quote Janet, and I might as well talk
Chinese. For instance, I would say that the abaissement du niveau mental sank
in a certain case to the level of the manipura chakra., that is to the level
of the navel. We Europeans are not the only people on the earth. We are just
a peninsula of Asia, and on that continent there are old civilizations where
people have trained their minds in introspective psychology for thousands of
years, whereas we began with our psychology not even yesterday but only this
morning. These people have an insight that is simply fabulous, and I had to
study Eastern things to understand certain facts of the unconscious. I had to
go back to understand Oriental symbolism. I am about to publish a little book
on one symbolic motif only and you will find it hair-raising. I had to study
not only Chinese and Hindu but Sanskrit literature and Medieval Latin
manuscripts, which are not even known to specialists, so that one must go to
the British Museum to find the references. Only when you possess that
apparatus of parallelism can you begin to make diagnoses and say that this
dream is organic and that one is not. Until people have acquired that
knowledge I am just a sorcerer. They say it is un tour de passe-passe. They
said it the Middle Ages. They said, 'How can you see that Jupiter has
satellites?' If you reply that you have a telescope, what is a telescope to a
medieval audience?
I do not mean to boast about this. I am always perplexed when my colleagues
ask: 'How do you establish such a diagnosis or come to this conclusion?' I
reply: 'I will explain if you will allow me to explain what you ought to know
to be able understand it'. I experienced this myself when the famous Einstein
was Professor at Zurich. I often saw him, and it was when he was beginning to
work on his theory of relativity. He was often in my house, and I pumped him
about his relativity theory I am not gifted in mathematics and you should
have seen all the trouble the poor man had to explain relativity to me. He
did not know how to do it. I went fourteen feet deep into the floor and felt
quite small when I saw how he was troubled. But one day he asked me something
about psychology;-) Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage. It leads
you in way too far, so that you cannot explain any more. You might allow me
to talk to you about seemingly elementary things, but if you will accept them
I think you will understand why I do reach such and such conclusions. I am
sorry that we do not have more time and that I cannot tell you everything.
When I come dreams I have to give myself away and to risk your thinking me a
perfect fool, because I am not able to put before you all the historical
evidence which led to my conclusions. I should have to quote bit after bit
from Chinese and Hindu literature, texts and all the things that you do not
know. How could you? I am working with specialists in other fields of
knowledge and they help me. There was my late friend Professor Wilhelm the
Sinologist; I worked with him. He had translated a Taoist text, and he asked
me to comment on it, which I did from the psychological side.' I am a
terrible novelty to a Sinologist, but what he has to tell us is a novelty to
us. The Chinese philosophers were no fools. We think the old people were
fools, but the, were as intelligent as we are. They were frightfully
intelligent people, and psychology can learn no end from old civilizations
particularly from India and China. A former President of the British
Anthropological Society asked me: 'Can you under stand that such a highly
intelligent people as the Chinese having no science?' I replied: 'They have a
science, but you do no understand it. It is not based on the principle of
causality. The principle of causality is not the only principle; it is only
relative'
People may say: What a fool to say causality is only relative But look at
modern physics! The East bases its thinking and it evaluation of facts on
another principle. We have not even a word for that principle. The East
naturally has a word for it, but we do not understand it. The Eastern word is
Tao. My friend McDougaI has a Chinese student, and he asked him. - 'What
exactly do you mean by 'Tao?' Typically Western! The Chinese boy explained
what Tao is and he replied: 'I do not understand yet' The Chinese went out to
the balcony and said. 'What do you see?" I see a street and houses and people
walking and tramcar passing'. 'What more?' 'There is a hill'. 'What more?"
Trees' 'What more?" The wind is blowing'. The Chinese threw up his arms and
said: 'That is Tao'.
There you are. Tao can be anything. I use another word to designate it, but
it is poor enough. I call it synchronicity. The Eastern mind, when it looks
at an ensemble of facts, accepts the small quantities. You look, for
instance, at this present gathering of people, and you say: 'Where do they
come from? Why should they come together?' The Eastern mind is not at all
interested in that. It says: 'What does it mean that these people are
together?' That is not a problem for the Western mind. You are interested in
what you come here for and what you are doing here. Not so the Eastern mind;
it is interested in being together. It is like this: you are standing on the
sea-shore and the waves wash up an old hat, an old box, a shoe, a dead fish,
and there they lie on the shore. You say: 'Chance, nonsense!' The Chinese
mind asks: 'What does it mean that these things are together?' The Chinese
mind experiments with that being together and coming together at the right
moment, and it has an experimental method which is not known in the West, but
which plays a large role in the philosophy of the East. It is a method of
forecasting possibilities. - This method was formulated in 1143 B.C.'
How good it would be, wouldn't it, if Peter Senge would enter this wondow of
opportunity. I will commence with a form of barter;-) Peter, you help us with
this one directly and I will undertake to 'learn you to paint in a day.'...I
may grow to begging if we think it might help;-)
Look, listen, I like some of you may have heard the CEO of Enron Mr. Lay
today filmed covertly coaching his minions on the primacy of 'integrity'. I
have very powerful visions of people who purport the primacy of integrity to
minions and then plead the Fifth amendment. Lets leave the silence of sages
to the sages, and the silence of the lambs to the wolves. I speak as someone
who for nearly fifteen years took a 'vow of silence', so I may (may I knot)
speak with a little authority on silences;-);-)
I continue to skirt the ridges of my own authentic chaos;-) and came upon
this which for me sums up much of what I see all around.
"Technology promised man power...But as so often happens when people are
seduced by promises of power, the price is servitude and impotence. Power is
nothing if it is not the power to choose." Joseph Weizenbaum. MIT., Physicist
Maybe that helps...
Love,
Andrew
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