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November 2009 
The Eagle’s Gift – Our Models of the World
JM
The eagle lived on the tree beside a deep well and in the well a community of frogs. None of them had ever been out of the well. Every night the granny frog told her bedtime stories to the young ones in the well. The eagle could hear the stories. One morning when the thermals had begun rising in the air, the eagle swooped into the well, grasped one little frog in its claws and rose up with the thermal. The heights and the fear of death overtook the little one. Then the eagle let go of the frog from the heights above the well. While falling back, the frog had just a glimpse of the world outside.
The eagle went back to the tree and waited for the sun to set, to hear the story of the day. What will be the story of the day?
Tell us ?We have been collecting these stories for over 17 years now. Initially everyone connects it in their own ways.
Some identiy themselves with the eagle
Some with the frog and the fear of death
Not many with both, eagle and the frog
The big and the small
The telescope and the microscope, Hubble and the Femtoscope
Global and local
The connections in between
How mental models are formed
And revised and improved to mental maps - knowledge
How best to continually learn
How an old world of the frog has collapsed
And a new wold born
That we are all in that well - of Nature
We will never see all of it
But we can see much more now
Than it used to be
Let us move on , not get stuck here
Access: Public
I am average, in that I connected with one of the ways mentioned (though I did not read them before writing my story which appears below) - How an old world of the frog has collapsed and a new world born. We will never see all of it but we can see much more now than it used to be.
The young frog told this story -
Powerful pincers grabbed me and I flew to another world above this one. I thought it was the end of me but no, after only the briefest of glimpses, here I am among you again. I can tell you this, there is more than this well to our lives.
The next day the young frog began to climb. The other frogs yelled at him to come down, that it was not safe to venture beyond the well but he didn't listen. When he reached the top edge of the well, the Eagle flew down and allowed the frog to climb upon his back. He took him for a ride all over the country side and then put him back down on the edge of the well.
The young frog climbed back down into the well and that night told his story. The next day, half the young frogs climbed out of the well with him, never to return. They wandered the countryside and reproduced and now we have frogs everywhere.
Meanwhile, down in the well …
Hi
Now let us connect your story to the integral framework (see visual - profile)
There are four quadrants NW,SW,NE, SE ( North West, South West, North East and South East)
NW and SW are internal to the observer self – the eye at the centre stands for self
NE and SE are external to the observer, SE is the physical world, the well
At the centre is a lighthouse of nine stories. If you climb up you get the eagle’s perspective and then can take a position in life.
The first story of the lighthouse has all the maps in the world, the second story is about the clock and simple machines, 3rd advanced machines with self-regulation, 4th unicellular world, 5th world of plants, 6th animals, 7th the human, 8th the organizations, 9th the level of metasystems – religion , science, philosophy etc
Now the frog can see where it was prior to going out of the well, at the end of the line going up from the level of animals in quadrant SE
So the light house position ( invariant ) and the ship’s position ( variant) are known
The direction for the journey is to be set, the compass function. Towards bridging the gap between potenital and performance.
If there had been no gap you would have obtained a straight line in quadrant SE.
As the frog takes each step in that journey it needs to keep on checking whether any course correction is required, that it is on ajourney of improvement rather than speeding towards disaster.
SW is about learning, the process, the improvement and revision of mental models, models turning into maps and continual learning and improvement
NW – the frogs still left in the well, the external social system, history, barriers to transcend
Well these are some hints.
Bon Voyage
correction - nine levelsor storeys - not storys
Beautiful story JM!
I am also looking forward to crossing paths often as we walk on and on…. :-)