Since I wrote a review of Presence
(the new book by Senge, Scharmer et al) I have been caught in a
maelstrom of debate on the whole issue of whether personal
'consciousness-raising' (for lack of a better term) has an important
role in equipping us to deal individually and collectively with complex
challenges, or whether it is a distraction and detraction from
development of a useful 'science' of social complexity.
I seem to be just about the only fence-sitter in this debate. So this article is sure to get me in trouble with both sides.
My difficulty with those trying to integrate psychological self-improvement (and even self-mastery) into approaches to complexity, from the authors of Presence
to psychologists and philosophers like Ken Wilber, is (a) the jargon
used in their arguments, and (b) the arrogance with which they espouse
certain (often proprietary) methods and models. There's something about
terms like 'spiral dynamics', 'self-actualization', 'meditative spaces
of leadership' and 'decentered fragile flotation' that strike me as
deliberately obscure, and make me confrontational or (more often) just
turn me off from the discussion. And the apparent cliquishness of those
who espouse these models and methods makes me wonder whether the
objective is not enlightening others but rather cult membership or
obscure academic oneupmanship.
At the same time, there is no
doubt in my mind that becoming a better listener, learning to perceive
instead of always conceiving, and improving one's attention and
relaxation skills, are legitimate steps to becoming more open, aware,
collaborative and imaginative, and that that will necessarily make us,
and the teams we work with, better able to come up and develop useful
ideas and approaches to complex challenges. And I do not think there is
any science to this -- it's very soft, difficult, and can only be done
through practice rather than book study, and our left-brain
science-oriented human languages are decidedly unhelpful.
So I was intrigued when artist Andrew Campbell pointed me to a five-year-old set of eleven interviews called Dialog on Leadership (leadership
-- there's another overused word that grates on me: the people who use
it the most tend to use it as a euphemism for power, and to be
completely clued out about what it really means). One of the interviews
is by Scharmer and it's an interview of Francisco Varela, who wrote, in The Tree of Knowledge with Humberto Maturana:
Cognition
is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather
a continuing bringing forth of a world through the process of living.
The interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive
interactions, and the process of living itself is a process of
cognition. To live is to know.
The subject of the interview is
"Three Gestures of Becoming Aware", and despite the cutesy term
'gestures' I was inspired enough by the above quote to wade through
this substantive and expansive interview.
The thesis is that (thanks to our brains getting in the way) we are disconnected from our own experiences,
and don't really 'know' what is going on. We now objectify our
experiences through the numbing filter of conceptualization and
language, losing much of their nuance and meaning in the process. We
need to (re-)discover the spontaneous capability to be fully aware of
our experiences.
Varela builds his theory of awareness on
Husserl and Merleau-Monty's philosophy of phenomenology. I've written
about this before in the context
of George Lakoff's frames -- "abstract concepts are metaphorical; we
are only capable of thinking what our embodied brains permit" -- and in
the context of David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, where he quotes Merleau-Ponty as saying:
Synaesthetic
[involving all the senses together] perception is the rule [among all
life on Earth], and we are unaware of it only because scientific
knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist sees it, what we are to see, hear and feel.
Our
whole lives have thus become 'out-of-body experiences', as we quickly
learn to become aware of our conception of the experiences rather than
the experiences themselves. To shift back to awareness of the
experiences themselves, Varela suggests we need to develop three
capabilities:
- Suspension (of our habitual pattern of 'objectifying' the experience, instead leaving ourselves in the experience);
- Redirection (of our undivided attention to what is really happening, to the whole and not just to discrete objects in it and our conceptions about them); and
- Letting Go
(of the terribly human tendency to analyze, interpret, think about
meaning, and of our own perspective, so we instead 'see' what is
happening from inside it, rather than from our traditional position as 'objective' viewer).
A
lot of this sounds very mystical (and much of Varela's subsequent
exposition doesn't help dispel that impression) but this is not really
different from what Open Space (the process of opening, inviting,
holding open and suspending judgement) or meditation is about. And the
reason it is so difficult is that it is an unlearning
process rather than a learning one -- there is evidence that other
creatures (like the ones pictured above on our front lawn five minutes
ago), and humans until they learn language and conceptualization, do
this instinctively: They live in the moment and experience everything
synaesthetically as a 'totally aware' part of it. But the neurons in
our brains form patterns as we grow and learn language and
conceptualization and objectivization, and soon this synaesthetic,
holistic, totally engaged-as-part awareness of experience is lost.
Those neurons are very hard to reprogram once we have been taught and
trained that experience is an information-processing activity, rather
than a being-a-part-of activity.
Varela, perhaps taking a poke
at some of his more arrogant colleagues, says there is no one way to
relearn how to be aware, how to 'do' suspension, redirection, and
letting go, and that therefore it is important to look at alternatives
and converse and compare notes to find the commonalities among
approaches to doing so "and stop this silly thing about saying my
technique is better than yours".
If we can learn to do so, I believe:
- We will be able to learn more effectively
- We will be able to understand and appreciate other points of view and frames more easily and fully
- We will, by being better observers, better understand what is really happening now, in everything we do and every field of human endeavour, and why things are the way they are
- We will be better able to imagine what is possible
- We will become less selfish and more compassionate (because we will actually 'be' less 'self-ish')
- We will become more intuitive, more in touch with and trusting of our instincts
- We will become more committed to making the world, of which we are suddenly 'more a part', a better place
These
are certainly worthy objectives, and for this reason alone I think we
should continue to entertain and explore even the most jargon-laden and
arrogant approaches to this 'learning to be aware'. Its promise
certainly explains the fascination of so many people for the subject.
In
the conclusion of the interview Varela questions whether a formal set
of practices could ever be amassed that would let us all develop the
three capabilities. This is because we all learn (and presumably, unlearn) differently. Varela says the learning is all in the practice.
I know many who have tried meditation and yoga, spent time in
wilderness, taken courses with and read everything by some of the
people in the Dialog on Leadership interviews, and who still have not
been able to learn to suspend, redirect and let go. In fact I suspect
the majority of people who claim they have learned these capabilities
are like the majority of day-traders who say that on the whole they are
ahead -- somewhat exaggerating their capabilities and successes.
I
even have some sympathy for the skeptics, including some of those who
are pursuing more 'scientific' approaches to dealing with complex
challenges, who believe that the search for such capabilities is futile
and quixotic, that we cannot unlearn. But alas, I'm still on the fence. I can feel the volleys coming, from both sides.
I the meantime I will create a space in the AHA! instrument case
for techniques that may help some achieve these capabilities, so that
these capabilities can be used in turn as instruments to help us all
address the complex challenges of our time. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
