Cost/Benefit

Central to the way we function in the world is the idea of cost/benefit. We turn this measure on everything. There was a story my uncle Lionel used to tell. He was a dapper European Bourgeois of the mid-twentieth century. He had all the accoutrements: A position, he was a “Head of Department” in the

Investing in Trust

Investment is generally taken to mean following a strategy that allows us to siphon off value. A way of taking value from a living system and turning it into a quantity of abstract financial counters that we can then hold so as to use these at will to gain advantage. We strip a living web

How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

I haven’t got time for this!

This common complaint came to mind recently in relation to the resistance I often encounter to my interest in looking at the basics, at how we tend to glide right past fundamental discrepancies – incoherence – in a rush to “Get on with it!” What came to mind was how this had been the attitude

Coherence is not reasonable.

This statement demands clarification. Coherence it is not a synonym for reason, reasoned, reasonable. Neither is incoherence: unreason, unreasonable, unreasoned. The key to understanding coherence lies at the root of these distinctions. I’ve found this talk given by Anthony McCann valuable in illuminating this distinction. Anthony uses language centered around what he calls Gentleness. His

Staying in the Drama…

Whew, I’ve spent years thinking what synchronicity might really mean. It is an interesting topic, but difficult to discuss, as language is structured on something like causality. Poetry, maybe… Getting the outside and inside to resonate synchronously: making the outside like the inside and inside like the outside. This actually, is what is irking me

The Currency of Trust

The last post has brought us to the point of examining trust. This phrase, the currency of trust, appears to hold some promise. Let’s begin with another word, seriousness. Serious, trust, compassion; these are among a suite of terms we fear today, or hide our fear behind disdain at their current condition and denatured meanings.

Beyond the Thrall of Ego

We are raised to be Egotists and then resented for it. This is the means of our alienation. Our organism knows what to do and how to act. It has been functioning in this way since before we were born. Through the accidents and consequences of what we know as thought, and the pernicious illusion

Resistance

Nothing exists solely to fulfill a single purpose or to take a singular role in a single process. How can I realize that the “answer” is not to remake the world in my image, that no singular image of what the world “should” be is either possible or beneficial? If these are true, then what

Not Individuals, Not Groups

One open question around the brain/mind formulation is what it does to our conception of individuals and groups. It seems easy to criticize a practice of attention that opens us to mind and sees the conditioning of the brain – thought in Bohm‘s characterization – as an impediment; either as swallowing up the individual into

“Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality…”

Sentiment takes any criticism, real or only inferred, and turns it into an excuse for a reaction, anything to return the focus where we demand it belongs.

Mourning for the World

This has been the most recent example of the machine doing exactly what it does. It was the result of an arrogant and willfully blind way of being and acting, thrashing against very clear and visible limits, working to its fullest capacity to do nothing but lead to disaster. At this level, and coming from such a position of hubris, pleas of intentionality, that this was unintended, can have no sway, just as the pleas of a killer’s intent have no sway in a law-court. These are no more than cries of surprise at being caught-out when the perpetrators had always felt secure. Not secure that they were blameless, doing good; only secure that they were unreachable, that the consequences of their actions would only fall on others.