Replying to LO28009 --
Dear Organlearners,
Laura Peek <laura.peek@asml.com> writes:
>I'm a bit lost here. Maybe it's very simple but am
>I just missing the point.
>
>I thought Alfred's list
>
>>Do unto others
>>Do unto all others
>>Do unto all others unlike me/us etc......
>
>very illustrative of how a well meant rule (or
>guideline - Winfried :) ) can create fragmentation.
>
>But now you seem to agree that adding 'at least' is
>the next logical step... So maybe you were thinking
>along a different path??
Greetings dear Laura,
Thank you for asking.
If you are a little lost, then it is because of me not being able to
articulate what I have in mind. This is a big problem which I (and not you
at all!) have to solve. I have succeeded in solving it whenever I know the
person so well that I can follow his/her tacit thinking in terms of
his/her own articulations. What I then do, is to articulate the patterns
in my own thinking with his/her articulations rather than mine.
I have been thinking about "being" and "becoming" even before I went to
university some forty years ago. At univeristy I was trained in physics
that both LEC (Law of Energy Conservation) and LEP (Law of Entropy
Production) were two of the most "fixed" laws among all laws of physics. I
suspected nothing and thought of them in my usual manner as "beings".
Then, after university, I began with research into the physics and
chemistry of soils. Within six months I realised that most of my trainings
in physics and chemistry were useless in applying them to soils.
I would have thought that I was just a fool trying to be clever, but I
noticed that other researchers all over the world struggled like me to
apply like me physics and chemistry to soils. I then began to search for
"something" (and I really did not know what I was searching for, but I
knew that I would recognise it when stumbling over it in my search) in the
whole of physics and chemistry. Almost a year later I stumbled over it --
Ilya Prigogine presenting LEP not as a law of "being", but as a law of
"becoming". Thus the long path of bringing "becoming" and "being" together
rather than fragmenting them began. Only some twenty years later he
published his book "From Being to Becoming" (with too much mathematics in
it ;-) and together with Isabella Stengers "Order out of Chaos" (with too
much philsophy in them ;-) But in these two books I immediately recognised
the struggle of many others to bring "becoming" and "being" together. I
knew that my own efforts were not in vain.
Already at the university I began to struggle against prescribed training
overriding what I wanted to learn. But after beginning to bring "becoming"
and "being" together, the "true nature" of learning began to worry me
deeply. Training had to do with information as "being". Applying that
information to soils is to find a "becoming" for that information. But I
became too much aware that not only the information which I had to apply
had too little on "becoming" in it, but that information in general had no
innate "becoming". In other words, except for new information being added
to past information, information is a "being", i.e., a constant. Thus the
"true nature" of learning began to puzzle me more and more. What was its
"becoming"?
It is now more than thirty years later. I am not so much puzzled as then,
but I still find many puzzles.
Daan Joubert said that for him the Golden Rule (GR, "Do unto others ...")
is a constant. Now for me, whenever I have to work with any "constant", I
think of it as a "being" with no innate "becoming". But because the
essentiality liveness ("becoming- being") is so important to me, I will
immediately begin to search for that contant's complementary "becoming".
Once I have found it, I will begin to work with them both as a
complementary dual. In other words, I will try to prevent fragmenting the
pair into its "being" or "becoming" and then discard the other member.
Since I have found these "being-becoming" complementary duals a powerful
starting point in my creativity, I began to think of them and even to call
them EOs (Elementary Organisers). Once I have found the EO in any
situation, I will begin to use the other six 7Es (seven essentialities of
creativity -- liveness, sureness, wholeness, fruitfulness, spareness,
otherness and openness) to create out of this EO something complex. Should
I keep on focussing on liveness in this complex creation, then it becomes
a CO (Complex Organiser) for me. I then can use this CO for even creating
complexer projects.
Through the years I have became aware that many things which people (often
including me) considered as constants, are not for me any more constants,
but EOs. In other words, the "contant" is actually a "becoming-being" pair
of which the two members are complementary to each other. But I had to
develop a method how to make self sure that a constant is actually an EO.
Only after having discovered the 7Es, the mehod began to take form. What I
would do, is to bring into the constant simple words or phrases, each
indicating a sensitivity to a particular 7E
For example, by adding into the Golden Rule GR
"Do unto others as you want them to do unto you"
(as a supposed constant) the word ALL as indicative of
wholeness, I will get
"Do unto ALL others as you want them to do unto you"
Should this sentence have a deeper, yet sensible, meaning
for me, I will then begin to suspect that it is an EO rather
a constant.
When I add into the GR
"Do unto others AT LEAST as you want them to do unto you."
Did Jesus not say that when somebody wants me to walk a mile
with him/her, I should walk two miles with him/her? To which
of the 7Es does this saying refer? I think it is spareness. With this
AT LEAST I merely try to articulate my sensitivity to spareness
and not any to open up any next logical step.
It may indeed seem that by adding such key words into the GR, I am
fragmenting it into seven possibilities. But what I am actually doing --
and this may not work for any fellow learner -- is to search with each
such a possibility into my tacit knowledge of the GR. When each
possibility makes deeper sense to me, I then know that I have tacit
knowledge of that particular 7E playing a role in the GR. Should the GR
indeed be a EO ("becoming-being") rather than a constant ("being"), then
there will be only six possibilities rather than seven because the GR
itself expresses the 7th, namely liveness "becoming-being".
So what is the "becoming-being" pair in the GR? This is not easy for me to
articulate in English, exept by doing it with phrases. The
"being"="you-they-together" and the "becoming"="doing-to-each". I can
shorten the "being" into "being"="we", but I have no way to shorten the
"becoming"="doing-to-each" into one word. Perhaps I can use
"becoming"="perform" or "becoming"="transact" to indicate what I have in
mind. Thus the GR "Do unto others as you want them to do unto you" has as
its EO "we-perform". Actually, I should have written it as "perform-we"
because I have found that the "becoming" comes before the "being" in order
to function as an EO.
Laura, if all of the above appears to be gibberish or mystical to you,
just say so and I will try again another way out way to explain it. Just
before I end, what has all this gibberish to do with a LO? Well, in a LO
we have to keep learning always in focus. In rote learning (and
unfortunately too much also in training) the order is
"information-learning". But in authentic learning the order is for me
definitely "learning-information".
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.