Dear organlearners,
Lon Badgett wrote on 23 Apr in LO13368
> Once there was a village in the wood. The people there made a
> living off the trees of the forest as woodchoppers, carvers,
> and lumbermen. But the woodland was dwindling and as day by
> day they watched it shrink they worried about what would
> become of them.
Lon,
Thank you very much for a wonderful metaphor and showing how to apply it.
In what now follows I am going to describe another metaphor by telling a
story of what recently happened between me and my granddaughter Jessica. I
call it the metaphor of the Blue Dog. I am not going to show how this
meatphor can be applied. However, I will put in some strange comments in
[] brackets, referring formally to the theory of self-organisation. I
prefer to call it the theory of "deep creativity". After a few weeks all
of you will have had your own Blue Dog experiences - I am sure of that.
Please remember two things: (1) Jessica is 4 years and (2) how she became
creatively victorious over her experience of the
THE BLUE DOG
A few days ago my granddaughter Jessica went with me to my nursery outside
our city. I have to go there after work every day. She usually helps me to
pollinate flowers, water plants, etc. But that day she was agitated. She
wanted us to visit every possible friend of mine which she could think of!
[Visits = chaos of becoming, the first manifestation of entropy
production.] I said no because we had to get back home early. I did not
want to tell her that we were invited by my eldest son to his wife's
birthday party. We wanted to keep it a surprise for her.
When we drove back to my home, I asked her what she did at the nursery
school that day. She said she made a dog. I asked her whether she painted
it or drawn it with crayons. She said she made it out of paper. (It is the
activity of pasting pieces of coloured paper together.) I then asked her
if it was beautiful. She said it was a blue dog. I then asked why blue.
She said with a dark broody face that they gave her only blue paper to
work with. [Use blue for dogs = strong force, each piece of paper part of
the flux, force-flux pairs create entropy.]
Then she continued, saying that the dog had died. I asked why. She said
that there are germs all around us. [Germs = things which impair
creativity, especially emergences, monoclour as the germ which impairs
variety as essentiality of creativity.] I asked her why she did not give
the dog some medicine like pills to keep it alive. She said that it would
not have worked. She then continued, saying that she made the dog alive
again. I asked her how she did it. She said that she put some yellow
flowers in its month. [Attractor state = yellow is the only colour which
do not clash with bright blue] I asked her why flowers. She said that I
have seemed to forget that flowers give life.
Late that night, after the party, she did not want to go with her mother
to their apartment. She begged me to go with us to work on my computer
with the paintbrush program. I immediately realised why. [Immediacy =
begging for the bifurcation.] I promised that she could work on it the
next evening. The next day I asked the teacher to see her creation. It was
indeed a deep blue dog with yellow flowers in its mouth.
That evening I allowed her to work with paintbrush on the computer. She
made many circles, eclipses, squares, and rectangles. She coloured each of
them differently by selecting all the colours on the colour bar (Win95).
She worked with intense concentration. After 30 minutes she exclaimed that
it is beautiful. [Making choices freely = Second manifestation as order of
being, first phase of bare emergents.] I agreed and asked her if we should
shut the computer down. She said no because she still had some work to do.
So I went to the TV room, leaving her alone, wondering what went on in her
little mind.
After 10 minutes she called me excitedly. She has coloured every figure in
bright blue and the background in yellow. [Making informed choices =
Second manifestation as order of being, second phase as digestive growth
of bare emergents.] She was laughing with great relieve. I asked her why
she was so happy. She said that it was because she had made it blue and
yellow herself. She said that I must go away because she still had some
things to do.
After 5 minutes she called me again. I looked at the screen. The paint
area was blackened by colouring every figure and the background in black.
A few blue and white pixels escaped her eyes. I asked het why she did
this. She said that she had to kill all the germs. [Victory = realisation
that she had obtained through her own self-organisation enough free energy
to tackle her next blue dog in live - resilience.] She then said that I
could shut down the computer so that we could play dominos somewhere else.
[Play somewhere else = inisialisation of a new cycle; black as final
stage, a mere and minor fluctuation, but it initiated the game of
dominos.] She played the dominos with flair.
She was very happy and very sweet for a couple of days. She had been
generating her own creativity. Her grandfather merely acting as midwife,
understanding after many years in a formal manner what she already knew
intuitively.
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>