Parable of the boiled frog LO21056

Winfried Dressler (winfried.dressler@voith.de)
Mon, 29 Mar 1999 18:07:14 +0100

Replying to LO20978 --

Dear At,

good to hear you again. And again, my mind is taken to the world of
imagination when reading your provokative questions:

>If so, are our organisations
>geared to deal with such an epidemy? What will happen to your
>organisation if one out of every three members are incapacitated in a
>couple of weeks while one out of every eight members will die?

For the survivors, there will be a before and after such an epidemy. No
one will remain unchanged. What are the threats, what are the chances? I
don't want to go into the threats any deeper. They are obvious and lead to
negative thinking. What about the chances? "Care and purpose" jumps into
my mind.

O.k. this makes sense to me. Those who survive and who are not distroyed
will have learnt powerful lessons on care and purpose. What a nice pair of
presents. With these, I can go back to the threats. Can death threaten
care and purpose? As long as death is caused by nature, like such an
epidemy, I feel quite safe that care and purpose are stronger than death -
even if nature is heating its water slowly. Did you ever imagine, that
before the next century ends, there will die much more than 5 billion
people, you and I being two of them? Not might, or perhaps, but for sure?

Man made destruction is much harder. I am thinking of wars like in Kosovo
today. We do not only have to deal with death, but with hate. And hate is
darker than death. The weapons of technological illness fight the wars of
mental illness. If meeting natural death is able to create care and
purpose, what might be hate able to create positively?

>Let us think of the shock of a spiritual birth -- the shock of an
>emergence in the world of mind. What future emergence will
>shock us so much that we will become aware how much we have drifted
>away from learning as individuals and organisations? What shut downs
>will make us aware of the dangerous path we had been following? What
>role will Internet be playing?

I cannot imagine such shock. It is somewhere out there, but I cannot reach
it. The imagination would be already the requested emergence. How can I
be sure about my learning? I don't know how to contrast learning from
not-learning. I think, I take learning for an axiom - the becoming-axiom.
Is not-learning the being-axiom then? No, this does not bring me closer to
the shock in the moment. After all, it need not be today.

Liebe Gruesse,

Winfried

-- 

"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>