Replying particularly to At, James and Scott.
James, you talk of your Buddhist friend, so I'm surprised he wasn't able
to give the answer to our problem. What's the cause of the inaccessible
paradigm? Like any good Buddha will tell you,it's inaccessible precisley
because we identify it as a thing, something out there, something we can
take hold of. The Buddhist doesn't break up his world into paradigms. He
doesn't mark off, measure, or weigh things. To him, any of these
accessible "facts" are an illusion (maya). Indeed, the "real" buddhist
can never actually explain the tao because to do so would mean he hasn't
achieved the tao.
That's why Scott's kids are able to learn the tao so easily, until we come
along and screw things up. Then the learning stops. It's possible that we
might never achieve the learning org, until we stop identifying a learning
org as something we can actually define and hold in front of us. We talk
of systemic thinking and all of that; but perhaps we're the same old
cartesian "pip-heads" that now draw circles instead of straight lines.
The paradigm hasn't just been discovered.
It's been around for billions of years, we just haven't noticed.
The ignorance At de Lange talks of, I take to mean, ignorance of
the patterns of organisation implicit in nature that we seem to fight all
the time. And that's why it takes more energy if not more to maintain
the status quo, because this status quo isn't the natural way.
I'm not sure At has attained the nirvana we all seek, but he may be closer
than he thinks. In South Africa we would say to At: " go for it...you're
a boykie"
[ sorry, something only At will appreciate]
warm regards
Jeff Blumberg
jeffb@illovo.co.za
--"Jeff Blumberg" <jeffb@illovo.co.za>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>