Shalini is walking out of the shadows
JM
Shalini is walking out of the shadows, finding her voice and walking the talk
Join her
http://shaliniwithpoems.gaia.com/blog
JM
Access: PublicThe seniors shall inherit the earth
JM
Can one grow old and young at the same time?
Some people, a small minority, do it. They mature like old whisky and still remain young, challenging common wisdom that old dogs can not pick up new tricks. New findings suggest the opposite
For some seniors growing old and growing young are parallel processes.
They challenge their brain with continual learning. The result, plasticity of the brain improves. Intelligence too has the same character. It improves if one keeps challenging it against problems. When the brain remains young and one is driven by work that is motivating on its own merit, the body grows young renewing itself continually like a river which is not blocked from renewal by our ecological footprints. One grows old and young at the same time.
Olive Riley, the world's oldest blogger, passed away at 108. She must have picked up blogging when quite old by our usual standards. I also know some very smart, much younger people who boast of not using the internet or the computer claiming that they are against too much of technology. I am afraid it is a camouflage to cover up the resistance to embrace the new. In my search for the old and young on this site, I met Joseph Smith. http://inlink.gaia.com/. He has weathered many a storm - literally and figuratively on the high seas and on land for 82 years and graduated from the school of hard knocks. He is both old and young, more active and concerned than most of us about the way the system works or does not
The ‘old and young' need closer attention because they are travelling a different road which is likely to be a mega trend, gathering momentum.
Elsewhere there is a conversation going on the future of social enterprise http://www.hbs.edu/centennial/conversation/futureofsocialenterprise/. I am convinced that the future of business is in the enhancement of community, global and local. I spent four years as a student in two B-schools. Both claimed to be teaching management but proved to be just business schools. Some of them have an identity crisis like many of their clients. I would prefer to believe that every business, including the business of religion and non- profits, is about creating community within to connect to the community outside and business performance ought to be measured by the enhancement of community or net value addition to the community capital. Many of them very successful by conventional norms could be destroying community. They survive and grow by reinforcing the business of Shadows and Substitutes
Established religions have stood the test of time, but have a shadow side to their existence. They appear to be more successful than most business organizations in promising the most intangible with the lowest cost of production, manipulating masses on the fear of death and retribution in next life. Priests and politicians play god and peddle dependence. Many of them love to be worshipped and are on a drive to fulfill their own power drive distortions.
Will insurance companies have any business if people have no fear of death or the future?
If people are anchored to their true SELVES how would the fashion and cosmetics business respond which often assumes that the cosmetic is more important than the content?
Would there be a fall in demand for big screen heroes if we reframe our notions of the hero to the real meaning of the term, conquering one's own fear?
If people redefine work as self expression, will they continue to suffer from boredom and consequently will the market shrink for entertainment products and services?
The entertainment industry stretches itself to keep boredom at bay. The demand is a derived one from the inability to find a purpose in life and work that is motivating by itself.
How would lotteries and the stock market fare if more people put an end to the wait for a better day game and start living in the present?
Would sex and porn continue to drive the economy if we connect better to the spirituality of sex?
What would be role of charity, other than as a measure of guilt associated with wealth when every business redefines its mission as enhancing global community?
These are landscapes that one might come across on the two roads, one by design and one by default.
One can go on ad nauseum about the shadow side of every business profit or non profit. I believe more than the religious, business will take the road to spirituality. I have experienced better community in business than in religious organizations. Business will be more pressed to reinvent itself as enhancing community within to connect better to the external community locally and globally in a borderless world.
It is neither easy for business or for individuals to walk out of the shadows, because we will have to turn against our own vested interests, the shadow side.
But the ‘young and old, might show the way. The most successful of them have no learning plateaus since they take their positions very early in life and they quit only when their mission is fulfilled. The others have successfully negotiated the learning plateaus at different stages of their life
http://firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/blue_ocean_people_bop. They live a life of their own design, their own heroes. They are frank and forthright. They earn credibility with their life and walk the talk. They are not looking for a secure tenure or driven by the need to perform in the marketplace where your future is as volatile as the stock market, where in the first 15 years of your career your fate is almost sealed whether you belong to the top of the pyramid material or not. Even Nietzsche fails my criteria since he died very young. The walk and the talk went in different directions.
CCQ, Community Consciousness Quotient
JM
Storytelling - Walking out of our shadows (part two)
Pygmalion coaxes Galatea out of stone and she comes alive. The Pygmalion position is that of the facilitator who catalyses performance, who has audacious expectations of performance, of sustained high performance, moving from peaks to still higher peaks. The expectation is not unfounded because Pygmalion has experienced the magic of sustained high performance. Every stone may not be good enough to be turned into a beautiful statue but every human has the potential to be an outstanding performer
How does Galatea respond to the hard knocks by Pygmalion in his efforts to coax her out of stone? If she can see the results of the hard knocks, she would certainly enjoy the process because she can see that between the caterpillar and the butterfly, the seed and the tree, there is the world of a difference. She knows that this is the moment of truth that she had been waiting for ages. Like what happens in the story of Ahalya and Rama. Ahalya has been waiting for that divine moment of Rama's coming. The process is certainly complex and miraculous and the catalyst is integral to sustained high performance. Pygmalion and Rama play the role of catalysts, facilitators, in the transformational process.
People are waiting like Ahalya. Nations are waiting. Billions are waiting - like the farmers and fishermen, at the ‘bottom of the pyramid' (sic), essentially because the top is unable to connect with the bottom in the exchange and valuation process. It is debatable who is at the bottom and who is at the top. If you change the criteria of measurement, the bottom will become the top and vice versa. For example who leaves a larger ecological footprint? The cathedrals (Taj Mahal - Gurcharan Das) remain to be built.
Sergei Bubka, Isinbayeva. They do it over and over. They take the position - I can and I will do it. I will outperform myself, again and again. Can we take the same position, as individuals, a team and as a community? Nations have taken such positions. Kishore Mahubani asks this question to all Asian countries - Can Asians Think? Like Singapore has been thinking together since 1965
As individuals we don't have to go on waiting, for miracles to happen or for another prophet to turn up. While billions are waiting we can have islands of sustained high performance around each one of us. The islands will eventually connect together for that defining era of collective transformation. We are in that transition phase of achieving critical mass and gaining take off velocity of the process, of more and more of us transforming our SELVES to catalysts for the tectonic shifts.
So what is your position? Pygmalion and Galatea got to come together on this, the alchemist's marriage. Later Galatea will take the Pygmalion position, and the process continues.
Back to Bubka and Isinbayeva, what is the pole that we are talking about, the lever? How long is the lever? Where is the fulcrum? How does a community of practitioners ALIGN and LEVERAGE themselves for sustained high performance. Longer the lever more is the mechanical advantage. The visualization tool, FD framework, helps to create a mental map of the process of aligning and leveraging
On the potential quadrant (conceptual, intangible) the lever has 9 levels and on the performance side (tangible) another 6 levels/layers. All these levels need to be in alignment for sustained high performance to become reality. At the centre of the four quadrants is the self, positioned to perform. The fulcrum is at the end of the lever, the threshold level of your previous performance.
The self has all these levels/layers designed into it. The levels are
That of the internal compass/gps, which gives us the position and direction - the map of the journey
The clock, which measures the process in time, quantity and quality
The thermostat, feedback system, which keeps providing the information for course correction and ensures that the process is in tune so as to improve on its pervious performance
The cell, the beginning of the organic level, self regulating, negentropic, maintaining itself, where the mechanical and the biological come together
Plants, Animals, the ecosystem
The human
Organizational
Accumulated learning, the knowledge capital, ‘Intellectual property'
The same alignment holds true on the performance quadrant (the physical world) till the level of the animal where there is no gap between potential and performance
The problem, gap, waste, unrealized potential, begins from the level of the human, because we are unable to see what leads to improvement, not that we don't want to improve. The drive for improvement is part of the design. Our uniqueness as a class of systems is our ability to IMPROVE and when we don't realize this possibility we become SUB-ANIMAL. This is where the fulcrum of the lever is located
Visualize Bubka or Isinbayeva, positioned, and aligned to leapfrog, in our context, an individual, team or community being facilitated to be positioned for sustained high performance. The rest of it is but practice, measurement (metrics) and continuous improvement, faster, better and still better, stretch and more stretch. Invincibility follows in our respective areas of practice
The quadrant SW is about continual learning and renewal, NE is about the environment in which we operate. Both impact on performance. The environment offers the challenges to learning (LLL). How best the self and the internal community respond to the challenge will decide the future.
Metrics - The Community Consciousness Quotient
Less is more. At 59, I am not a gadget geek. Yet I love my mobile and the way it has been shrinking over the few years that I have been using it, accommodating more and more of my requirements. I have accumulated a lot of electronic waste over the years like my compass, VCP, music player of progressively smaller sizes and better quality, the desktops. . Very soon my notebook too will join the list. We are consuming less of the material and deriving much more. Small is beautiful and smaller is still better. The tangible is shrinking and the intangibles are scaling up becoming more tangible than the tangibles. Capital too has been shrinking being substituted by intellectual capital, brawn by brains. My wants (not needs) too have shrunken, at least most of those that I considered important in my thirties and forties, like a gas guzzling SUV. Being glued to my LCD screen and not travelling to work I have earned a few carbon credits, not using my car except for the weekend shopping trip. (It would be much better to dispose it off and hire one when I really need it) But all needs do not vanish with age, perhaps they grow with age. The need for community (to be connected), quality and richer experiences, need to learn and express myself. Sometimes more is less. Intelligence has evolved into intelligences, multiple intelligences, emotional, gender, social and in the process we have become less intelligent in community consciousness. So the metrics need to take into account improvement in community within and without along with conventional measures of improvement in performance. Community Consciousness Quotient (CCQ) is an imperative for sustained high performance. The absence is killing us in many ways which I don't have to go into greater detail. The blasts keep us remindedWhat are we waiting for ?
Storytelling - Walking out of our Shadows
JM
Alpha to Omega
Beginining to end ...and...
A to Z and ....
To be human is to improve, increasing order in oneself, ORDERING ONE'S SELF.
Life is negentropic
Occult is the search for the unknown. When everything is ONE, nature speaks to us in the language of synchronicity- omens. There is no magic in synchronicity as the magician has no magic, the audience has. Joining the magician takes away the magic. Miracles are unexplainable by the known laws of nature. We will never explain all of it. There will always be some unknowable. Out of the shadows and aligned with the unknown the unknown works with us, our best ally. There are no miracles any more. nothing super- Natural, nothing above or below, only ONE. We join the path of the mystic, in direct communion with nature, connected to the source of all learning and wisdom. Managing our SELF. beyond win win, beyond all competition, the ultimate strategy
Shalini is telling her story http://shaliniwithpoems.gaia.com/blog. She frequents this space and we got to talk about dreams. I have been ‘dream catching' for over 27 years. In the beginning I was asked to recollect my dreams during my childhood. I could recollect flying down the mountains and over the peaks. As I grew up or down with a bloated ego I lost my skills to fly, grown heavy bogged down by gravity. Then I picked up the feathers one by one, assembling my wings to fly again. Shalini is a dreamcatcher and a storyteller as well. She gathers feathers and then gets a wing in her dreams. There is lot more to her story that unfolds. We collect dreams in our stretch workshops to show how the day's process spills into the night, to bring to attention of the participants that the process goes on beyond the hours that we work together, that the learning continues in sleep and that the unconscious our best friend works for us nonstop. Just listen and learn the language in which it speaks to us. In the process the unconscious becomes conscious and we walk out of our shadows
Here is one from our collection of dreams. Dan's mother had passed away a few years ago. He wanted an arranged marriage. The father went on the hunt with his son to meet prospective brides and their families. 23 visits ensued and both were becoming desperate. Then the father had a dream of his dead wife holding hands of a beautiful girl and walking towards him against the backdrop of mountains, hills and valleys. Then the 24th interview took place and the marriage was fixed. She was from the exact locale that was in the dream. The unconscious can be our best friend, a mirror, which can see the past and the future since it is not boxed into such divisions.
Dreams, Story, Fiction, Myth and Transformation- From the Unconscious to Conscious Evolution
Myths are immortal. We fail to forget them. So are the classics and the epics. To forget them we need to make it part of us, connect, understand and experience them. I saw the Pretty Woman again. We keep reinventing the myths, Pygmalion and his hoary audacious expectation, imagining, intenting and manifesting Galatea out of stone. When we keep expecting the impossible, the impossible is delivered because we are much more than what we have ever dreamed of. In Ramayana, the Indian epic, Ahalya a beautiful woman is turned to stone and remains a stone for a long long time. When the catalyst appears (Rama) she is transformed to the beautiful woman that she once was. Every seed is a potential tree and every stone a potential statue but all seeds do not become trees and all stones turned to statues. The stone comes to life just as the idea house becomes the house- abstract to concrete. Dare to dream, imagine, intent and then the manifestation happens. The setting needs to be in place.
Aligning with the unknown, walking out of our shadows and the death of heroes
Our shadows are most faithful to us. They hide behind us, afraid of the sun. There are other shadows, of the past, habits, history, death, the unknown and unknowable. They come bundled in one package, FEAR of the unknown, which kills. We can kill the shadows before they kill us. A hero is one who has conquered his/ her fear. When we don't become our own heroes, we go after the celluloid versions or go after the fakes. There are many ways to do it. One is getting connected to the centre in us, getting anchored to our lighthouse positions and to the centre of everything so that there is nothing outside it. That includes habits, history, the unknown and the unknowable. Dreams bridge the unknown and the unknowable. The unknown becomes our best friend and we walk out of its shadow.
Each of us has a story to tell. Telling it helps to find our voice and to walk out of the shadows. I once re-collected my thoughts into a journal which I called the Autobiography of a Manager on the lines of The Autobiography of a Yogi by Parmahansa Yogananda. It helped me gather my self over the years and sum up my learning from life. I burnt it because by then the purpose was met and since it is not right to dump my garbage in the market. The journey became lighter because the baggage went with the garbage. I started flying in my dreams once again. I found that all I wanted to say could be summed up in one page of semiotics, the First Discipline Framework. As facilitators we need to find our voice first to facilitate others to find theirs
What is your story, beginning from your earliest memories, thoughts and dreams? Let us RE-collect our SELF to bring together the scattered remnants to connect to the ONE
More
http://wanderer7.gaia.com/blog/2008/3/my_story_ages_0_-_10
http://firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/the_eagle_s_gift_our_models_of_the_world
The First Discipline Framework. 'Abstract to Concrete'
JM
Do we need another model of the world ?
Imagine billions of people continuing with a flat earth worldview and the reality we collectively create! Though we have 'progressed' a lot we have 'regressed' in our connectedness with nature. Deep down we still hold on to the flat earth static models. Better models would facilitate faster and sustained improvements, accelerate the process of co-creating a more desirable present and future by leveraging technology and markets which work in real time and help us to make more intelligent use of these levers with lesser damage. A real time evolutionary model of wholeness is one of the requirements to bridge the divides and disconnects. We have developed very sophisiticated tools for navigation over the planet and beyond ranging from the compass/ GPS to satellites and communication systems and mapped our immediate environs to greater and greater precision. The FD framework is a map to attenuate variety, reduce the babble, among disciplines that seek to offer solutions to the problem of positioning, fixing direction and self-correction for the process of continual renewal and improvement at different levels - individual, institutions, communities and community
Is the left top quadrant, NW, the ideal world?
It is a map of the ideal, the deep structure, the conceptual, pure potenital, design and the world of ideas .The order, hierarchy, increasing complexity and potential with each level, alignment and connectedness need be re'cognised to understand the performance issues in the external world mapped in the bottom right quadrant,SE.
First Discipline is the study of the self, about the learner in us, and the process of lifelong learning, LLL, regardless of our different walks of life young or old, or young and old. Since 1990 we use the FD framework to hang our different hats as practitioners of various disciplines, ‘social programmers' - parents, pedagogues, priests, and politicians. It helps to connect the various disciplines and put them in perspective, see and show how everything, living, nonliving, internal and external- is ONE, a continuum,in process, evolving. The framework helps the observer, self, to connect with the observed SELF, position oneself, visualise the gap between potential and performance, fix the direction for the journey and make sure that one is on the path of continuous improvement. Metrics - measurement - of true progress becomes possible. We developed an action learning approach and used the tool and methodology in schools, for coaching, enhancing employability and productivity in corporate contexts, in developmental contexts of self-help and microfinance communities. The approach facilitates accelerated learning, sustained high performance and enhancing community. Details vary with the contexts. These notes accumulated over the process and evolves as living document of the work. With going online from June 2008, we have a much broader participation. Your queries and comments would further accelearate the process. Every blog continues to be improved but the essential content is retained.
The four quadrants are like the four wheels of the car, a learning engine which continues to improve its performance as it goes forward
The eye at the centre represents self, the observer, the driver of the car
The wheels must be aligned for the car to move on
But there exists a conflict between quadrants NW and SE, ideal and the operational
Between internal self and the external social system, quadrants SW and NE
It is for us to create the alignment so that the car moves on
First step is to see the interconnections and see the whole as one system in process, evolving
What makes the human unique as a class of systems is the potential to improve. There is ‘no' gap between potential and performance up to the level of animals (see quadrant SW)
The gap begins after the level of animals. The gap can also be seen as the waste in the system, the unrealised potential, the root cause for problems. In terms of potential vs. performance the human is sub animal
Corresponding to the total potential/performance gap, there exists a gap in every one of us which forms the personal sphere for improvement which would lead to the question - what is my potential and my performance?
Quadrant NW represents the ideal, perfect, conceptual, pure potential, internal to the self and in perfect alignment at all levels starting from the maps to Meta systems (represented by the umbrella). Quadrant SE represents the physical world, measurement, performance. Mirrors NW up to the level of animals. The knowledge gap is the major reason for the gap. There will always be a gap but it is feasible to narrow the gap and bring about sustained and continual improvements
Quadrant SW is internal to the self and NE represents the external social system. While learning is a pre-requisite to improvement, history and habits encourage conformity. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. Self could be the individual, team, organisational or community self. Complexity increases with levels
The map facilitates positioning, fixing the direction for the journey and measurement of progress. It is possible to visualise the nature of the journey as an ongoing process of continual improvement and renewal. The first step is having a map for the journey. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Confucius. To take that first step we need to know where our position is and the direction in which to take that step, to be on course.
(The potential performance gap is illustrated by life expectancy vs. longevity of exceptional people. Life expectancy in developed countries is around 75 which is an indication of performance. Potential is reflected in the exceptions, people living beyond their 100. The gap or the waste in terms of unrealised potential is 25 years, though life expectancy is not the only aspect to be taken into account. There are exceptions who achieve much more than average people with shorter life spans and those who continue to be much more productive in their second careers than in their first. We need to visualise human potential if we are to realise it. http://firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/blue_ocean_people_bop. On a global scale the aggregate waste is astounding. The estimation has to be on multiple factors to illustrate the issue better. A corporate would attempt to look at the issue from many different perspectives, in terms of market potential vs. performance or the human potential vs. performance. The same could be attempted at different levels- individuals, institutions, communities, nations, global)
More on the FD framework
http://firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/ppp_designing_a_learning_engine
Emergence - Attention to Improvements
JM
CCQ, Community Consciousness Quotient, Measuring Conscious Capital
CRCCCCC- Connect, reflect, catalyze, communicate = create consensus and community
We understand reality through the tools we use. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, and if you have a screwdriver ......)
When we shifted from hunting gathering to settled agriculture, the tools also changed. With the change in lifestyles and tools, the mental models, the way we see the world also changes. Farmers and fishermen respond to reality in different ways. It took me a while to understand the logic when I changed my domain from agriculture to fisheries. On the high seas one cannot hold on to much whereas for those of us on terra firma we have many things to hold on to. With the industrial revolution, the tools changed again. More and more people shifted from agriculture and with the expansion of markets, fishermen too were pushed to the boundaries. With machines, those connected with them rose to prominence and we started seeing reality through the machines. The agricultural revolution lasted for around 10,000 years, the industrial for around 500 and during the last 50 years we see the information revolution bringing in a new set of tools, the computer, and the web. We have come to talk about windows, vista, connectivity, community and home and if one is not familiar with the tools, your own mother tongue might sound an alien language. So the tools do influence language, world views and the way we understand reality
The history of lifestyle shifts get shorter. The new tools offer possibilities for a new synthesis, learning from all the major lifestyle shifts, for enhancing community and realizing the higher evolutionary potential of the species.
Paying attention to improvements, however small they be, is the road to emergence of a more connected world, community, because resistance leads to resistance. Good intentions do not always create good impact. Very often they create the opposite
Gates and Windows to Learning
Connect and Disconnects
Knowledge, Ignorance
Connected world, Digital divide
Developed, Developing
Rich, Poor
Every conflict, problem, duality is a gate, window , to an opportunity to learn
Devices, Drives, Drivers and Drive Distortions
What drives us also distorts, destroys community
Need to connect arises from the need to know and to express one's SELF
And work is nothing but expressing one's self, the most meaning driven
Creating meaning - the most basic of the survival drives and the most distorted, the primary distortion. Other distortions are secondary, derived from the meaning distortion
IF
life is not meaningful
THEN,
suicide, illness, early death, accidents are ‘natural' corollaries on the Road by Default, the other road is the Road by Design
Priests of science and religion explain the nature of reality in their own languages
The physicist in machine language and logic and the biologist in bio-logic
The BIO-LOGIC is of a higher order than the machine logic
They work in opposing directions, like quantity and quality, more the less
In bio-tech we see these two getting aligned giving us more leverage (longer levers)
In designing improvements
The semantic swamp of disciplines necessitates a new standard, interface, to connect, create community, cross over the semantic swamp, noise, babble, as we connected the machines to communicate with each other
Wanderer speaks, of being English centric,
http://wanderer7.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/being_english-centric We discuss the problem of being language and tool centric and the need for a meta tool, a tool of tools, a Babel Fish (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) to create consensus on the content so that the container - language - is not as important. AK 47 is a tool and the driver could be the terrorist or the peace keeper. What makes them act differently arises from the interface. If we have a Babel Fish, the Point of view gun prevails
Meanwhile let us pay attention, focus on CRCCCCC because what we pay attention to grows, emerges and we become gardeners of permaculture http://konsk.gaia.com reflecting and paying attention to sustained, perma, improvements
Buddha’s Smile................Silence IS
JM
1990. We had a Buddha’s picture and one of us would start off
Why is Buddha smiling?
Some of the answers were
“It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure it out. It is simple. If it is that complex God would'nt have anything to do with it - that only the ‘Einsteins’ would be able to figure it out.” ‘
It is all there in you. You don’t need me.”
“Stretch your lips. That is all it takes to improve the world.”
We took the game to our community stretch workouts which would go on for 8-10 hours for 3-5 days, to give us breaks in between. The game came to be called ‘The Buddha’s Smile’ and continues to evolve. Here is how it goes after a bout of questions and answers on his smile
Close your eyes. Stretch your lips just enough to feel the gentle vibrations around them when you smile. Be with it. Come back when you notice that the stretch is lost to regain the pleasant feeling. Observe your breathing as it goes in and out of your nostrils. Go with it, in an out. Observe the breathing becoming slower and slower
Imagine that you are lying down on the ground on a rectangular sheet of rubber with your hands and legs along the diagonals
Keep observing the stretch of your lips and the rate of breathing
Imagine the centre of the sheet, where the diagonals meet and the sheet being stretched evenly in all directions. The sheet is under stress and there is conflict all around. But the centre is not disturbed. At the centre, ground zero, is the lighthouse with nine levels
Keep connected to the stretch of your lips, breathing, the centre and the growing silence
Four garden plots of rectangular and equal size spread out from the centre
The sheet turns into a foot ball and is filled up. The centre of the sheet is shifted to the centre of the football. It is being kicked around but the centre is not disturbed
Imagine the football to be a living organism, an amoeba or a cell in your body capable of going on continually
Re-NE...Wing itself.
Observe the stretch, rate of breathing, the centre and the silence
Silence IS
This is a rough framework of the game. The details vary with the facilitator, community and from events to events
Buddha continues to smile
Stretch your lips. The body chemistry improves....
2. Silence IS
most eloquent
the space between every letter, word, sentence, but for these gaps nothing would be communicated
Aruna is beautiful, deaf and dumb, in her teens. She comes home with her mother in the morning to help Lizzie with the household chores. Liz makes a lot of noise with her mother, to get things done her way and often fails
Aruna is different. Nothing needs to be said. She connects directly to Liz - no noise - in silence. She connects intutively to whatever Liz wants done and always exceeds her expectations. There is perfect communication, best results and no noise. When they leave Liz makes a lot of noise. She is overwhelmed. All praise and wonder as to how she does it
We learn, communicate, connect and reflect in silence yet seldom do we recognize the power and value of silence and to be connected to the centre. Silence is the most powerful weapon, the communicator. We are afraid to face it and keep making noise to avoid facing it like an idiot box that can not be switched off
Connect to the centre in us, the silence, at the core of our being. At the centre there is absolute silence
Return to the Centre (Bede Griffiths)
Silence IS
Reflection
JM
Big THANKS to all of you
For the views, over 1400 in one month
There were 30 posts with an average of 47 views per post
The max views were around 100 for two of the posts, Year 2058 and Potter at the Wheel, some indication of what is of interest to most
Many of you wrote directly, came on chat and some left comments
The dialogue is on
Hope more of you would join on Gaia and leave comments. There is wisdom in being silent too. Because - Silence is. It is fine - not to leave comments
Thanks once again
We go on
Habits
JM
Amor is the Roman god of love. The root from Sanskrit ‘amar' means immortal and ‘amrut' is that which makes one immortal - knowledge. Work is love expressed - Kahlil Gibran. The path to immortality, exceptional performance, is possible only through transformation of work as expression of the self, an expression of love
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is then not an act, but a habit - Arostotle
Transformation
JM
Mastery involves going beyond the ordinary or common experience of time - the transcendental. The common understanding is very essential to deal with the day to day world but this is never the complete story. It is only a partial truth (illusion). Time / timelessness is another duality, gate, to learning the direct (mystic) experience, freeing one from the entanglement of a linear experience of time. (There is nothing linear in nature) Linear time kills in many ways. Timelessness (eternity) is a common experience if one reflects over all those memorable experiences when time stood still.
Mental Maps
August 2008 