December 2, 2023
A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.
Anxiety
In a conversation about a shift in culture that some of us are observing, or more accurately, if we are thinking of quantum mechanics and how there are no observers, only participants.
What is anxiety?
How does it make people feel isolated?
How do we cultivate a non-anxious presence?
What are some strategies for dealing with anxiety when it arises?
I asked some questions.
Is anxiety different from overwhelm? Is there a spectrum of experience from anxiety to stress, fear, overwhelm, panic, crisis, burnout, breakdown, and depression?
Systems Actualization
This week, in the Design Science Studio, Carol Sanford was interacting with members of coheART 3 in the Design Science Studio. She is dying with ALS.
She was talking about systems actualization as the process of self-determining epistemology in contrast to authority epistemology.
My own sense of overwhelm reached crisis level for me this past weekend. It had a lot to do with the ingrained habit of attempting to find authority outside of myself. Carol Sanford was pointing to something beyond self-actualization: systems actualization.
Paradigms of Reality Framework
Extract Value: Domination, individualist, return on effort
Arrest Disorder: Environment, stop waste, reduce harm
Do Good: Humanist, anthropocentric, ideals proselytized
Regenerate Wholes: Living systems, evolve capacity, essence expression, systems actualization through personal development
Her focus, then, was on the source of anxiety and the change that can be made through a paradigm shift.
When I was listening to Astra Taylor’s Massey Lectures, I noticed that she was defining the problem of disconnection, atomization, and the disempowerment of collective action as the manufacture of insecurity through the enclosure of the commons for the benefit of those at the top of the hierarchy. But ultimately, even they feel insecure. So, everybody loses. Everyone is in a state of anxiety. https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor
A couple weeks ago, I was recently introduced to a book to help me find my authority within myself by connecting to a higher power of my own understanding, The Loving Parent Guidebook https://adultchildren.org/literature/loving-parent-guidebook/
On Tuesday, I was in a couple meetings involving conversations about the potential and problems of artificial intelligence. We were talking about AI and the anxiety that this technology is producing about the value of being human and the value of work and creativity.
As I explore my own experiences in the outsourcing of work and creativity that has led to my own sense of disorientation, dislocation, displacement, and disintegration, this is the question that came up for me:
Our global society is a very dysfunctional family. Entire nations are in states of emotional insobriety.
A design challenge: How might we design a twelve step program for a world in states of trauma as a result of disembodiment, leading to physical, mental, and emotional insobriety (disconnection)?
For a social species, there is nothing more unsettling, more anxiety-producing than the insecurity that comes from disconnection. Ironically, the hyperconnectivity of our technological society has produced more disconnection, insecurity, and anxiety.
Carol Sanford might ask, “What is evolving in you? What systems are you actualizing?”
If we focus on the problem of anxiety, we are not regenerating wholes, evolving, and actualizing systems.
A group of us are exploring the possibilities of focusing on our inner and outer architecture. There is a tendency to focus on the artifact that solves a problem rather than understanding the source of the dysfunctional and entropic system. By focusing on actualizing a regenerative and syntropic system, the problem is solved through change and evolution, rather than an attempt to fix something that cannot be fixed. One cannot fix entropy. One balances that energy through dynamic equilibrium in the system that generates life and synergy and syntropy.
On Thursday, Alexandra Groome Klement from nRhythm was prompting the Design Science Studio to explore a shift in perspective from the machine metaphor to regenerative living systems.
Della Burford was pushing back on the word system. Well, system just feels like another word to describe a machine metaphor for life. Life is not a system. Life lives. So, it had me wondering, what word could we possibly use instead? And the closest I could get was a murmuration, because that feels much more alive. It’s all these individuals but then becoming a whole creating motion and life through their interaction, because they’re in tune with each other. They’re moving in concert.
Veronica Anderson, in my ensoulment session with her on Thursday, responded to this difference between a system and a murmuration.
“That’s wonderful! It actually illuminates the dynamic of codependency, because in a system, one part relies on the other part. They need each other. They basically don’t exist without each other. If one stops working, then the other has no value at all because the whole system stops working. And in a relationship which is based on codependency there’s a sense of, I need you to validate me and I’m going to validate you and that’s how we’re going to get our self-esteem needs met, because neither of us have internalized the function of esteem producing. And so we derive our value from each other in the system. In the murmuration, it’s like two trees that grow next to each other and they just are individuals being trees in the forest.”
Wholeness
Stephen: Seeing, even, feels like it’s a good metaphor. But I think it was being in that presence of experience of sensing and then having this immediate embodied response. Okay, so there’s an interesting connection that is happening. Where it’s mind, heart, body, perception, all coming together to recognize there’s this connection within to the whole.
Carol Sanford was talking about, “What are you actualizing? How do we regenerate wholes? The curriculum is all about these nested holons, in the Design Science Studio. So, that's been really I think, helpful for me as a model of I'm a whole being. How do I really embody that, in the here and now, in a way that is connecting to the whole that I already am?
Mark Wagnon talks a lot about, “We’re just trying to peel off the layers that are keeping us disconnected from what we already are. It’s peeling off those layers of perception. That go, “Oh, there it is. That’s who I am and who we are.” Yes, so that grasping. Why would I grasp over there? It’s here.
Veronica: So wholeness is a great subject. I read a version of Step Two recently, which is stating that we came to believe that there was a higher power who could help restore us to wholeness. And it's also stated, “restore us to sanity,” “restore us to clarity,” “restore us to wholeness.” These are all different versions of the same step. And that sense of wholeness that you feel comes from being contained by that higher power. So, when you’re embodying that sense of wholeness, it’s the ultimate paradox. You are whole, because you’re held by the higher power. So every time you can connect with that sense of wholeness, when you go into that, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” That “I”-ness itself is the doorway to your higher power when you’re in that state of presence.
There’s that very Christian adage of, I’m closer than your skin. That is what that’s referring to. It’s that, “More whole than whole.”
In Buddhism, the higher power is the total dynamic functioning or the whole thing. Once we acknowledge that that's there, then we’re willing to let go. And that’s step three. It’s not me. I don’t have the power. I can’t handle this messy financial situation. I can't handle the fact that I’m not getting the emotional intimacy I deserve and need and never had. I can't handle the fact that there are so many different things that I want to do, and not enough hours in the day, because I’m a gifted person, and I have so many talents. I have insane expectations of myself and I have identified with these expectations, and now I’m harshly criticizing myself. Instead of going into that overwhelm, and “Now I’m grasping for control,” we can let go. And that’s sobriety. That’s sanity.
Stephen: Yeah, so what Mooji was talking about, there's the identity and the ego. And what’s the consciousness behind that?
It reminds me of where I was going. It is just the being. Like the rods and cones in my retina in the eyeball that are just receiving. That’s kind of the image I had of being in the eye of the Divine and being one of those sensors. But then there’s all these other perspectives that are being held there. And so it’s the sense of, “I am divine, not the whole of the Divine.” I am a unique perspective on the world that is enriching the life and love of the Divine. And I can just be okay in that. I don't have to make things happen. That’s not my job. And if I just go into that place of gratitude, of, “Oh, wow! I get to have this experience!” And do it as a member of the Divine then that's enough.
Veronica: Yeah. Exactly. Through the pain, through the grief, through the anger, through the hatred, through it all. That’s all part of the whole and this is the place from which you take action. This is the place from which you move forward, and you do that based on what you’re receiving. In that receptivity comes the will of the Divine. Or the way reveals itself through you, and then that’s the action that you take. And that’s ensoulment.
A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting
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