synergystics

Self

2008-04-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

"Everyone needs a strong sense of self. It is our base of operations for everything that we do in life." — Julia T. Alvarez

Long Now

2008-04-22T23:39:00.000-07:00

"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility—where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries." ― Stewart Brand

Understanding

2008-04-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." — Upton Sinclair

Courage

2008-04-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

"People, especially Americans, most often think of courage as something physical -- mountain climbers, soldiers on the front lines, and so on. There are elements of courage that manifest within such activities, but there are other qualities of courage. Sometimes courage is a balance between external and internal, like medical care workers who travel to dangerous war zones to help the hurt and suffering, sometimes working with the victims of contagious epidemics -- that sort of compassionate courage. Then we have those facing no direct external danger, who dare a deep inner exploration in order to discover some tangible relationship to the spiritual source of existence. But this too manifests in a complex, somewhat wayward variety of attitudes and approaches. Still, when it comes to self-discovery and inner exploration, there is always a kind of inner courage called for because one becomes aware of risking one's sanity, perhaps even one's soul, and under certain conditions, one's life. And definitely one risks the security of mass somnambulism, because the quest demands a stepping away from acculturated formulas of belief. Such exploration demands a willingness to give up all in order to find some deeper more substantial meaning to one's existence." — Lew Paz, Press interview for Pushing Ultimates: Fundamentals of Authentic Self-Knowledge

Architecture

2008-03-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

"Architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies, as physiognomy is the expression of the nature of individuals. However, this comparison is applicable, above all, to the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals). In fact, only society's ideal nature—that of authoritative command and prohibition—expresses itself in actual architecture constructions. Thus great monuments rise up like dams opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak to and impose silence upon the crowds. Indeed, momuments obviously inspire good social behaviour and often even genuine fear. The fall of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things. This mass movement is difficult to explain otherwise than by popular hostility towards monuments which are their veritable masters." — Georges Bataille, Critical Dictionary

Symbol and Signal

2008-03-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

"Not to be at home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be in its center and to be concealed from it." — Charles Baudelaire, Symbole und Signale: Frühe Dokumente der literarischen Avantgarde

Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-18T15:25:00.000-07:00

Arthur C. Clarke died today. His writings took a seriously critical look at our civilization and its follies. He will be missed.

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." — Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space

"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information—in the sense of raw data—is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these." — Arthur C. Clarke, OneWorld South Asia, Dec. 5, 2003

Arthur C. Clarke's Last Message to Humanity

Cooperation

2008-03-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

"If you want to be incrementally better: be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better: be cooperative." — Unknown source

"Factors affecting effective regional cooperation are mindsets and perceptions emanating from the past." — Khaleda Zia

Humility

2008-03-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

"The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery—not over nature but of ourselves." — Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

"… most of our energy goes into upholding our importance … if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe." — Carlos Castenada, The Art of Dreaming

To realize that our small home in this vast universe is but a tiny speck of dust taking flight upon the infinite cosmic winds is to see our lives in some perspective. If the size of the earth alone is enough to humble us, to look out at the expanses of stars in every direction is to have the fact driven home.

As human beings trapped in our own heads, it's very difficult to escape the self-consciousness of this arrangement. All of our senses are personal and localized, all of our thoughts and feelings are contained within our own conscience. We would be fools not to concern ourselves with the relatively trivial details of our life.

At the same time, however, it is hard from within this maelstrom to maintain a sense of perspective and detachment. All around us: cell phones are ringing, friends are talking, all kinds of demands on our attention are competing for our time and energy. These demands and stresses can overwhelm our thoughts and unbalance our emotions. Worse yet, over time these patterns can create rigidities and habits that can become our masters and keep us from our true potentials.

The word humility comes from the Latin, humilis, with the connotation of being "of the earth." Humility has been revered in spiritual traditions for tens of thousands of years, if not longer, for the sense of perspective and clarity that comes when one is able to step out mentally from their own limited self-interest to see things in a larger context.

Immanuel Kant, viewing humility as "that meta-attitude which constitutes the moral agent's proper perspective on himself as a dependent and corrupt but capable and dignified rational agent," suggests a central place in a larger system of ethics through which human beings can hopefully become capable of compassionate and thoughtful action towards others.

In this digital age, with email, youtube, myspace, facebook and even blogs like this one, it's easy to lose a wider perspective of the world outside of the network and to become enmeshed within a web of self-promotion and isolation. The reflections of ourselves in the digital realm have a certain hypnotizing power, and the limited circles of contact are capable of trapping us within artificial mazes of our own creation.

It requires a serious effort to maintain this sense of perspective in our lives, even on the best of days. Particularly when one is driven by the feeling that everyone else seems to be getting ahead or taking what could have been ours. I know this feeling all too well. I fight with it almost daily. It is difficult to step back, to take a deep breath, and to realize that we sometimes need to let those feelings go. We would do well to learn to trust ourselves and our own vision, and our own pace.

We are not in a race with anyone else, whether they did this thing or that or were recognized for this thing or other. To chase this kind of recognition can only disfigure our own unique language. We are who we are, we have what we have, and we can learn to work with this in our own way. We each have a personal voice inside of us and this voice can speakly humbly and proud.

Humility is not to count one's worth as nothing, but to count it with an understanding of its true value, to yourself and to the people you care for. The media would like to sell us all the idea that fame is what we should all want to seek and that it is the ultimate recognition of your value as a person. How convenient for the ones who have ad time to sell!

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got." — Janis Joplin

"Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." — Helen Keller, The Simplest Way to be Happy

Tolerance

2008-03-05T16:50:00.001-08:00

"What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly—that is the first law of nature." — Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary

"Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival." — René Dubos, Celebrations of Life

Sometimes the rigidities of our maps can become a hindrance to creative growth and positive collaboration. Rigidities of all kinds can cause brittleness, splintering and other types of structural deformation. As it is with bridge spans and house frames, so it is also with human psychology and, for lack of a better word, that unidentified spectre, the soul.

The belief that there needs to be an explicit metaphysical ground upon which to base this soul concept seems to me nothing more than a wishfully thinking knee-jerk reaction to the incomprehensible position we are in as living beings. Which isn't to say that there's no reason to wonder or speculate about the possibilities.

We experience strong feelings throughout our lives! They are point-sources of psychological development. Freud took a powerful leap in correlating the emotional experiences of childhood with the personality that ultimately arises from them. Freud had his own particular attachments to the model representing the id, ego and superego, from which he interprets the significance of the observed phenomena.

We don't need to accept his personal theories as to what mechanisms are at work and what that means, to see that it is self-evident that these events would shape our psychological development, and that these primal human experiences are not just simple, rational, and conceptual learning processes, but a potent cocktail of mystery, wonder, bewilderment and the unfortunately ever present: disappointment.

By recognizing that the shared physical and psychological experiences relating to our human condition (birth, nursing, growth, maturation, aging, sickness and death) are many orders of magnitude larger and more significant than our specific social and genetic differentiations, we start to see where the commonalities can be bridged, and where our differences can be respected and worked through.

Ultimately, fairness needs to be negotiated. People are quick to complain about lawyers, but the legal system is where most of our contemporary societies have agreed to work out our differences (abstractly, and imperfectly, through the so-called social contract). There's a desperate need for a common language and a reasonable legitimacy that can be relied on and trusted by all.

It is perhaps a tendency of all human beings to magnify and exploit differences. When we look at the social behavior of other primates, we almost always find typical dominance behaviors. If we are ever to see anything in human consciousness approaching unbiased reason, we must certainly try to compensate for these known limitations as much as possible and try to think beyond them towards what is possible with cooperation and coordination.

There is no simple utopian method for ensuring fairness and humanitarian behavior. It currently is and has always been a struggle, at times flaring into violence, with the inevitable damage that results. Our models for the management of human relationships are incomplete and often times misleading. This is an area where much could be gained by throwing out some preconceptions and finding the structural similarities between cultures.

Perhaps it inevitably comes down to how well we're able to communicate with each other, and what position we're all in to respond.

Maps

2008-03-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

"Maps are often used only to locate places or political boundaries, but geography and cartography go far beyond such basic information. Modern maps contain a wealth of facts which lie untapped if we do not know how to find them or how to read them." — Herbert Bayer, Preface to World Geo-Graphic Atlas

"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness" — Alford Korzybski, Science and Sanity

Wikipedia describes a map as "a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions and themes."

Maps are commonly thought of as representations of terrestrial landscapes, but there are many other types of maps that are not often thought of as such. Consider maps of the human genome, maps of the subconscious, maps of mathematical functions. Maps can be constructed for almost any type of relationship, whether between physical and spacial objects or even the invisible and abstract objects of our very own thoughts. The usefulness of these representations is only limited by the general understanding that these maps make possible.

In 1946, after the horrible devastation of World War II, R. Buckminster Fuller created the Dymaxion Map (shown directly above). Driven by the understanding that the traditional map projections created severe distortions in the representation of the earth—helping to feed stereotypes and misconceptions—and a desire to create a map that would show the earth as an uninterrupted whole, the Dymaxion map was created specifically to address these issues. In Fuller's own words, he created it "as a precise means for seeing the world from the dynamic, cosmic, and comprehensive viewpoint," as opposed to other maps that "appear inherently disassociated, remote, self-interestedly preoccupied with the political concept of it's got to be you or me."

One would hope that the image of a unified earth, as one giant sprawling land mass, which carries all of us upon its surface, might help people to see more clearly the interconnected nature of our world and what that necessarily means to all of us as passengers together on this spiralling spaceship earth.

It takes a visionary leap to get outside of the predominant models, whether of our space in the world, or of the space in our heads. Particularly in a global village saturated with images, advertising, as well as propaganda, it is of the utmost importance that we create accurate maps that model our environments and realities in such a way that we can address problems, create beneficial social and economic networks, and above all, acknowledge the rights and responsibilities of world citizenship on this finite and limiting planet.

It is my hope that through the organization of accurate data, and its transformation through applied knowledge into the much more valuable information, that certain habits and tendencies of human beings on this planet can be slowly but surely changed into a more enlightened, informed and deliberate manner of living, and that these choices, building upon each other over time and generations, will create an environment in which our artistic and social abilities can grow into a sustainable and interesting culture of equals.

Science alone is not the answer, and neither can we consider solely the physical requirements for continued survival without addressing the psychological and emotional dimensions of living. There is no true life without love, no true happiness without reciprocity, no future without dreams. I hope one day for a world where, as Fuller himself dreamed, "Selfishness is unneccessary and unrationalizable. ... War is obsolete." We are each a small microcosm of the world, alone but connected to the earth and to each other through our bodies and senses. We have this interface for what it's worth. Hopefully we can learn how to use it to improve our shared circumstances in this world.

We all know there are no easy answers. Perhaps the real trick is to look for the small solutions that add up to big changes in the long run.

"The key to happiness is having dreams" — Fortune cookie message

Above: The first image of the whole earth from space.
Taken November 10, 1967.