Moderates United

Every authentic life is a rediscovery.

[I may have stolen this: but is that not perfect?]

I don’t remember if I have mentioned this, but perhaps 15 years ago I was certified to teach Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats program.  My license has of course long since expired, and in marketing it I found it to have been trendy for five minutes some time perhaps in the 80’s, embraced by a few large corporations like 3M, but mainly ignored.

I would submit that even today the basic idea remains useful.  That idea is that the work of thinking can be broken into parts, represented symbolically by hats.

The Blue Hat is the control hat.  It is why a meeting is being held, and what the problem is that you want to solve.  It controls how long the meeting/interaction happens, and how you decide if a solution or solutions have been reached. [I continue to believe, by the way, that setting up intranet project sites by Hat would be an interesting and useful approach.  You give a group a week or month or on-going access to add anything to any Hat regarding any problem.  This could not but be cumulative, and would represent a more or less standing meeting which would be highly efficient.  Setting up such software would be a good business venture for someone, I think.  OH: an APP.  That’s where things are going.]

The Green Hat is generative. It is throwing out all sorts of ideas, without evaluating them first for value.   It recognizes that quite often bad ideas lead directly to good ideas which could not have happened without the bad ideas.

The White Hat is all the information, objective knowledge, that can be spoken about a given topic.  In a political discussion, this would include things like “overall tax receipts went up after both the Reagan and Bush tax cuts”.  This is an empirical fact, even if one can argue whether or not the two are linked.  One could dig quite deep in information here if one wanted.  And in most cases, this is likely the quickest and best path to take, particularly in mature areas of human knowledge, like economics.

The Red Hat is how you FEEL about something, a discussion, even about the people conducting the discussion. It is a way to recognize, evaluate, and take into account your gut reactions, which can be both helpful and obstructive.

The Black Hat is all the possible problems with a given idea.  It is the worst case scenarios.

The Yellow Hat, the reason for this post, is all the possible POSITIVES.

Here is an interesting idea when doing visioning work, which I have been doing: write out a Best Case Scenario.  If everything works PERFECTLY, or nearly perfectly, what will happen?  Where will you be?  THIS is what you should be working for.  By definition, it is possible, even if it requires everything working perfectly.

Now, we all know things rarely if ever work perfectly, but here is the value of this: you establish in doing this a baseline ideal, and can view all imperfections as problems which can be dealt with, which can be handled, solved, in order to return to the Best Case Scenario.  This makes problems delays, not deadly.

For me at least, this is proving a hugely beneficial approach.

My symbol for progress is the turtle.  It came to me the other day.  Ponder: what is the task, but to take a few steps every day in the direction of your dreams?  I came up with a motto perhaps ten years ago: Embrace the Small; Nurture the Slow.  I still believe this.

Oh, as a turtle I too have slept.  But for every sleeping there is an awakening.  And fierce weather does make a difference.  One cannot ask too much of a turtle: merely movement when it is possible, and security when it is not.

But believe in life’s little tanks.

Has anyone yet proposed we speak of human BECOMINGS? It seems likely . Hell, I may have. But I wanted to be sure.

You cannot not become. What you can do is constantly stop and oppose your spirits natural exuberance, curiosity, and wildness. You can punch it down over and over. And what you become is lonely, irritable, and judgmental.

You can also accept accidents, intuition, and playful confusion, and see where they lead. This is the path of life.

“One carries one signature, self, vocabulary through life, and if you’re lucky you play on it and let it grow.” Helen Frankenthaler

I love this, except that I think luck has nothing to do with it, while granting some are more endowed with the time and opportunities that support exploration. This is the true value of money.

Does not every meaningful act of creation consist or even begin in the rejection of a former essence? Is this not the genius of Buddhism, rejecting Essence? And can there be an honest Buddhist who does not reject Buddhism? It is BuuddhismS. There can be no other ways, although the actual ways are infinite.

Does Goodness not consist in a relentless destructions of the selves that coagulate out of s primal murk? Does evil not consist primarily in rejecting the necessity of constant intrapsychic destruction, out of which flows a need for EXTERNALIZING destruction?

My first spirit guide was a set of five circular saws, upon which I have thrown myself countless times. Life IS death. This is their truth.

As an apparent non sequitur, ponder the logistics of moving the Pentagon half an inch.

It is a commonplace on the Left that the Right deals in FEAR.  Fox deals FEAR.  Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and etc and the other one deal in FEAR.

But who owns the Global Warming scam, now?  Who fears second hand smoke so much they act like little children when people light up in public?  Who is terrified of mercury poisoning, and overall environmental catastrophe?  Who panics when they find out there is aluminum in their deodorant?  Who fears families and overpopulation?  Who needs there to be racists so badly that they manufacture them out of whole cloth when needed ?  Who needs there to be a conspiracy of the rich to keep the poor down?  Who invokes fear CONSTANTLY?  Well, among others, the Left.

Fear propaganda is easy.  It is used on both sides.  Where and when it is appropriate really depends on the context–some of it is justified, on both sides; some not, again on both sides.  But to say that the Right has a monopoly on it is, like ALL left wing propaganda, very intentionally misleading, and injurious to sane, rational, goal oriented discussion.

And obviously the Left invokes “Science”, as if that were a thing, an oracle, a sort of All Knowing Being, and as if the manufacture of alleged consensus constitutes fact, when it obviously doesn’t: not in theory, not in practice.  Phrenology anyone?  Do you remember that the German universities were the best in the world (the American Ph.D system is taken from their model) when the Fascists took over, and that their BEST biologists by and large bought into Hitler’s use of Darwinian Natural Selection to justify and amplify his racism?

The Right invokes History, which is the same thing. It is the science of human behavior, which has to be understood as a matter of probabilities, and interests, both conflicting and aligned. One can see patterns happening, over and over, and can explain how and why reasonably accurately, if one is not trying to shoehorn data into a predefined conclusion.

Both Science and History can and have been perverted.  Both have uses.  Their utility depends on the goodwill and honesty of those using them.

I was laying in bed, pondering what to do. I am currently blessed with time, which is a luxury I would gladly pay good money for (and I suppose I am, in foregone business opportunities).  A voice came in my head saying “Get up and go run 26 miles”.  Now, I am not in any shape at the moment to run 5 miles, much less 26.

So, I ran it through my head, and watched a beginning and a failure, and a self recrimination, and a distancing.  And I asked that voice: what is this?  And it said: a disengagement.

And it occurred to me that this is how many people go about setting goals.  It is how I have gone about setting goals.  You SEE it in your mind, but it doesn’t have any life to it, any texture, any inherent vigor.  And it occurred to me that for me at least I need to feel a connection with the goal, that it has a life, that it is a child of sorts, needing nurturing.  I need to feel the growth inherent in it.  I need to feel a stewardship and responsibility.

I do not think it is overestimating the case to say that the points of life are love and goal achievement, which is to say purposive and effective work.  Freud got that at least right.

I have of course studied NLP.  I know the sensory modalities.  This sense, I think, goes beyond that, although I am clearly a Kinesthetic in most cases, and yes I know the words.

I really think sleep is the on/off of the human psyche.  If we posit that we regularly need “updates” and upgrades in our deepest emotional recesses, sleep is where it happens.  There will come a time when people do not remember this, but I remember when the first thing tech support asked you to do when your computer crashed was turn it on and off.

If you want to grow, if you want to prosper, sometimes you need long, languorous, outwardly useless sleep. You need it sometimes in large quantities, especially in the winter.  We need to be more like animals, because in large measure we still are.  Animals don’t live by clocks outside their bodies.

It is not true, as some say, that the worst is being alone with others.  The worst is being alone by yourself.  It is being with a voice within you that tells you negative things, which resolutely fails to give you support and comfort, which dislikes you.  This is the worst thing.

And if you fix this, everything else sorts itself out.  You CANNOT be alone with others, because you are never alone.  And you are much better able to find people with whom to connect.

I have odd and very abstract ways of expressing self pity.  I am this way, because I fight it constantly.  My principle is not “Be Happy”, but REJECT self pity.  This in no way assumes it doesn’t continue to come up.  It merely means you give it no space, no breathing room.

And persevering is both a negative and positive formulation.  It is positive in that you continue, but having begun, it really consists in not quitting, which also is a negative formulation.  It is what you do NOT do.

Only curiosity is truly positive.  Two Don’ts, and one Do.

In my life I have experienced many failures, many rejections, not least because I have tried and done so much.  I have ventured often, and as greatly as I could.  This has given me skin like leather, and I realize now my life has been a sort of “wax on/wax off” preparation for journeys I need to undertake.  It has been a kindness, a boon, a tonic.

Nothing is so, but our imaginings make it so.  There is not and never has been a NECESSARY linear relation between stimulus and response, other than in the most gross motor sense.

“Life is what you make it.  Always has been.  Always will be.”  Grandma Moses.

It continues to be a source of amazement to me how even groups existing in radical discontinuity with “mainstream” society can become profoundly conservative.  You have thousands of Buddhists out there saying regularly “if you see the Buddha on the road kill him”, who punish those who take this idea seriously.  Ayn Rand preached radical individualism, but exiled all those who thought differently from her.

The theoretical need for innovation and dramatically personal experience, radical honesty, is subsumed within a larger emotional need for conformity.  Courage is swallowed whole, digested, and dies in the process.  No one sees or says a word.  This happens every day.

We exist in fields.  I believe these fields are certainly psycho-social, and reach into the realms of evolution and biology.  In my view, they also exist in a much more “spooky” ways spoken of by Jung, Sheldrake and others.  We need these fields on a very primitive level.

But fields have levels too.  In order to reach higher, you must leave something behind. You cannot bring the bottom of the hill with you for comfort.  You must understand the need for the Middle, the “having begun, but not arrived”.  And this takes courage.  Very few have the ability to resist the siren songs of being sucked from one field into another.  You might trade one for another better one, but very few have the meta-skill of avoiding these entanglements.  First and foremost, it requires a capacity for solitude, for walking alone, with no reasonable prospect of being truly seen or understood, because in many cases I (changing voice) cannot yet see where I am going, or why I am doing what I am doing.  I trust, only. I have faith, only.  I feel a sense of duty.  I have the soul of a soldier, and this is my job, even though I cannot know what its cost may be.

Another meme one sees is that you should go where there are no footprints, and leave them.  This is a theoretical ideal.  But how many people merely mouth this truism, and consider saying it–repeating it–to be the same as having set out alone?

Radically original people are misfits because they cannot be categorized.  You are not an Is, but a Becoming, and most people fear beginnings whose ends they cannot see.

I would say this, though: virtually every large accomplishment in human history was accomplished one step at a time by people who had no way of knowing where their beginning would truly lead.  They simply saw a need, and set out to find an answer.