This is a collage or compendium of idea <> E-mails from over the last few
weeks. The "Beautiful Mind that Thinks Mathematically" segment and the "You
Are an Actor" segment are courtesy of a Paper at SoL entitled Learning to
Exercise Timely Action Now, In Leading, Loving, Inquiring and Retiring. by my
friend William R. Tobert. "M: is a code for an agent of good;-) If you do not
appreciate long collage like posts please press delete or esc. now;-)
[Host's Note: Bill Torbert's very interesting article on "Timely
Action.. Now" is at http://forum.SoLonline.org/WebX?50@@.ee7ffa8
There is no cost, but you do have to register on the SoL site.
..Rick]
Dear Learners,
M wrote...
Andrew!
Our email is now back... it went away for a couple of weeks. So now I can
respond to your emails - sorry if I'm behind.
You say....
>I know a young heroin addict. He is on the 'treatment'...methadone...so he
>takes both the methadone and the heroine. Both/And.
>I wonder, ... does he see God's face in dawn flowers. Miriam can tell us
>better;-).
((The reference to 'seeing the face of God in dawn flowers' is threefold;-)
one it is part of a Haiku poem by the Master Basho, second I have an image of
a rose in which countless faces appear that look like angels to me
and.....;-))
Heroin, of course, is an opiate, a derivative of the opium poppy. Poppys are
strange flowers - I find them staggeringly beautiful, yet I am allergic to
them to the point that not only do they make my eyes and throat sore, but if
a brush past them or pick them, they irritate my skin to the point of
bleeding. Beauty and yet poison. In our culture and our time they are a
symbol of death and remembrance, and heroin of course, a symbol just of
death... yet are they not themselves "dawn flowers"? And does your friend not
take them ultimately to return to that dawn, to remove all that obscures the
face of God?
Apart from my clients, I too had (have) a friend who was a heroin addict.
Alec. Alec once cried because I cooked him dinner. Actually I was cooking
anyway, and added a couple of potatos - yet to him that was a dawn. Alec used
to spend hours, days, playing back gammon and talking with myself and my flat
mate Stu (the unemployed artist I told you about ages ago... remember?,
popping out for his fix, and I have to say he was closer to that dawn than
most. Heroin has a strange effect, in that somehow, people spend so much time
out of reality that their development seems to slow, as if that time is lost
from their progress towards adulthood -- that, combined with the inability to
recognise and deal with the harshness of their situation, produces a kind of
childishness, or child likeness - innocence in the place of bitter
experience. The tragedy of Alec was that when he died, he was 'clean' and had
been for six months. He had just enrolled on a music technology course at the
local university, paid for by his father whom he had been reconciled to after
a seven year split. He died alone in his flat, aged 24, of flu. There will
always be so much profoundly wrong with Alec's death. a flower whose dawn had
arrived, but who learnt too early that flowers wither in the heat of noon.
On a practical note, you and your friend probably know this - sorry to
patronise - but if he is taking methadone and heroin, as almost every addict
does, he needs more methadone. The idea is to steadily raise the dose until
he doesn't need heroin, and then steadily reduce it (methadone). Sometimes it
works, sometimes it doesn't - in any case, if it never gets reduced and he
ends up taking methadone for God knows how long, it's still an addiction, but
at least he knows what he's putting in himself, doesn't have to break the law
and as it can be taken orally, doesn't run the risk of Hep. C or Aids. Tell
him to see his GP or whoever is prescribing it, and get his script increased.
It's up to him. On the off chance that he wants any help with the whole
thing, give us a bell and I can help him get whatever help he needs.
See ya - soon I hope.
M.
> Dear ---- and dear all Friends,,
>
>
> SNIP I saw you mention ---- , and I thought, "Wow, me too?" I would love
to meet >face-to-face.
> I laugh. This is quite a far flung group. I'd be angling in my mind to
> figure out how to meet you wherever you met, but chances are remote that
> I'd be able to pull it off.
>>I am dedicating what i write now to ...snip... two little ladies, "the
>>grrrrrrls".
>>Earlier in the last year I began a series of images about angels. Sometimes
>>I
>>write 'angles' instead of 'angels'. It took a while for me to come to the
>>connection between 'angles' (orthogonal) and time/\space culminating in
>>angel
>>space...(well maybe...) I haven't got that far yet...as Gandalf said,
>>"All we can do is decide what to do
>>With the time given us."
>>I passed a golden field laced with white, gold and green. In the field were
>>three young girls, each a wingless angel walking in bowing circles,
>>diminishing as they expanded. Allinthefield/was\joinedup. They were
>>cleaning
>>up the field of droppings for the donkeys in the refuge there.
>>I was once found wandering in a field, interlaced. White, gold and green.
>>Tramping hither and yon, waaaaaayyyyyyyyyy beyond in the hither and
>>thither;-) Bless your girls, bless Jessica, bless all the wingless angels
>>born and unborn who have to walk the fields, cleaning up the mess left for
>>them. How much will these children need the power to be found in the
>>'chamber
>>of altruism' in the house of the powerful ones;-) like Mr.Lay et al.
>>I sometimes feel I will remain lost and alone. I sometimes try and confront
>>that feeling. It must at one remove be intrinsically particle and part of
>>me
>>and yet a stranger to be met...what...halfway..."God is good Sir! That's
>>it...close the door now, Sir." (( said to me by an old Romany woman as she
>>sold me a lacy doilly (napkin) that was circular and which when I
>>scanned it
>>and required of it 'text' gave me "I AM" in 'enriched text';-))
>>I am sharing a secret;-) of a creative collapse, maybe not for the
>>first time (knot;-)...oftener than knot I find the answer just prior to the
>>arrival of the question. But to get ahead in the 'pressing games' requires
>>a very special 'creative collapse', and it costs me. Well. Mmmmm.
>>Here is a message for you by kind permission of an "intrigued" William R
>>Torbert of the Carroll School of Management, Boston College, US. (Maybe you
>>know where that is S?) with whom I just effected a collapse into the
>>chamber of altruism...
>
>>>You Are An Actor
>
>>>You are an actor
>>>You put on your mask
>>>You ready yourself for your task
>>>You'll be playing a stranger again
>>>And as long as you've asked
>>>You're in - The Theatre of Inquiry
>>>In front of the footlights
>>>And behind
>>>In and out of the dialogue
>>>Going on in your mind
>>>Where is that listener you've been trying to find?
>>>In The Theatre of Inquiry
>
>>>Is there a present
>>>To pull out of the past?
>>>Is there a feeling
>>>To make it last?
>>>Just what is this role into which you've been cast
>>>In The Theatre of Inquiry?
>
>>>You're playing the fool
>>>You're playing the sage
>>>You're acting just like a child
>>>Your acting your age
>>>All of a sudden you're on centre stage
>>>In The Theatre of Inquiry.
>
>>>(A song written and performed as a Boston Radio advertisement for the
>>>Theatre of Inquiry in 1978 by Jimmy Metzner.)
>
>>And my 'playing field' is whatwherewhenhowwhywho from which there is not an
>>empty return possible
>
>>Disorder
>>Order
>>Disorder
>>Mysterium...
>
>>..well, now the clock I cannot see has got an orthogonal and I have to go
>>visit the house where the drug addict sleeps...and he'll be asleep...and
>>when
>>I come home again...I will write a little... more ...by way of a gift
>>freely
>>given on the number three...a two parter...Mmmmmm become three
>>relationally;-) ?
>
>>Love,
>>To be continued....
>
>>Andrew
Post Script
Curiously, my sister Grace, (who has a strong allergy not to poppys but to
opiates, as she discovered following a recent hospital injection) has two
long haired lurchers, who are actually named after goddesses - Tara and Isis.
Intriguing, as my sister has discovered to her and her carpet's peril, that
even goddesses spend so much time eating s**t......
M.
> Part Two:
>
>The heroine addict heard me and got out of bed, he has a dog, a long haired
>lurcher (hunting hound) who has the countenance of a Greek Goddess...she
>should live in a palace and not the slum...she pushed her head up against my
>hands and unfurled her ***gemoetry;-)***
>>I'd be angling in my mind to figure out how to meet you wherever you met,
>>but chances are remote that I'd be able to pull it off.
>
>
>When a 'Beautiful Mind' Thinks Mathematically (title)
>
>I love to think mathematically. SNIP
>I won't repeat my love affair with parabolas a couple' of years later, and I
>can't imagine which question I missed on the math SATs. Geometry seemed to
>me
>like bridge (that card game old fogies like me and my ninety- and-my-newly
>married father still sometimes play): each is perfectly neat. (Of course,
>bridge blends in the intrigue of partners, opponents, and human differences,
>the existential math of which I had not yet even imagined at that time, much
>less exercised. Why I had no sense then even of perfect numbers, let alone
>the significance of primes continuing throughout the realm of magnitude.
>
>In graduate school, What struck me most was that the statisticians and
>social
>scientists focused almost exclusively on the interval and ratio quality of
>number (its magnitude, as in my baseball averages, or even evanescent
>non-things like 'attitudes' that are assumed to be countable on scales that
>subjects mark). These scholars tended to scoff at the ordinal quality of
>number (where I is primary, 2 is secondary, etc.), susceptible only to
>non-parametric statistical analysis. But prioritizing is the most
>significant
>kind of numeration in everyday life, so I wondered... Meanwhile,
>mathematicians were wondering about the nominal theoretical relationships
>among different dimensions (what makes I one and how is it fundamentally
>different from 2? [When the two planes hit the two World Trade Center
>towers,
>was that one or two events? Insurance companies really want to know]) And no
>university scholars in Western science, certainly not Nobel Laureate John
>Nash, were asking how interval, ordinal, and nominal distinctions relate to
>one another and to the noumenal, non-dual presence of attention itself ...
>This is when I first learned to imagine the analogical quality of number.
>How
>would one learn and use a mathematics where zero (0) is not treated as an
>arbitrary point of origin in abstract Cartesian space, but rather as the
>origin in the present from which our attention flows as it constructs,
>prioritizes, divides, and multiplies units. How does one (1) become one'se4C
>(by atoning [at-one-ing, atuning)? And two (2)? How are two equal (=),
>mutual, opposite, rank ordered, rhythmic? How does each experience become
>twofold (e.g. foreground/background) and what 'third' will transform it?
>
>In my late twenties my interest shifted again from such nominal, theoretical
>concerns to exercises of my body, mind, and feeling that enlivened my
>conscious participation (my presence) in these four territories of the
>noumenal present. ...How really from moment to moment to turn my downward
>and
>outward flowing attention back toward 0, the origin? ... Through prayer,
>meditation, or dancing? ... But how in the midst of daily life? ... How when
>it seems I don't wish to? ... In the realm of 1, who am I? ... What is
>constant in me? ... And how am I eyeing (ayeing) at this time? ... How to
>name nominal patterns in speaking or writing in a way that enhances communal
>or readerly presence? ... Is this short piece enhancing your presence and
>wonder now? ... In the realm of 2, I've been wondering, ever since 18, but
>more and more in the present as I age: what is love? ... When and how is
>love
>working through me and others? When and how is my action toward another or
>others' actions toward me 'loving,' truly mutual, truly equal? Is true love
>rare, or all around us? How is love the same and different as a lover, a
>sister, a father, a cousin, a teammate, a teacher, a co-adventurer, or a
>stranger? How is love transformational? How is it foundational? How is it
>vulnerable? How strong? How blind? How seeing?
>
>And in the realm of 3, 1 have wondered throughout the 35 years since taking
>my first position of primary executive authority as founding director of the
>Yale Upward Bound poverty program at the age of 22, how can leadership
>action
>work effectively in relation to the three classes of superiors,
>subordinates,
>and peers? And, one can also ask a leadership question in the realm of 4, as
>I have been doing for about thirty years; how can leadership action
>effectively interweave the four (4) experiential realms of noumenal
>intuitive
>purpose, nominal theoretical strategy, ordinally embodied perfomance, and
>empirical outcomes, intervally countable and otherwise?
>
>
Sender: torbert@bc.edu
Intriguing!
Yes, you have permission to quote, with attribution.
Bill T.
On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 17:32:30 EST ACampnona@aol.com wrote: ...;-)
Dear D**, Grrrrls, Friends...In the field I saw a man coming straight at me
in a curving trajectory;-) hurled hither and thither thusly..."
>Andrew POTENTIA May I introduce you...stand in the middle of the field
>between the idea and the actual (event) EVENT I said...and there THERE...a
>STRANGE KIND of REALITY just in the MIDDLE...I said ...just in the MIDDLE
>....between POSSIBILITY and REALITY." Heisenberg;-)
>
>GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE ..Albert Einstein
>
>Y/our throw then...
>
>Love,
>
>Andrew
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