I have intuited that the lumpiness of the universe is a function of the action of consciousness, which essentially is the tendancy to find balance.
I put pieces together myself, but I recognize that they are not mine, just as relativity did not belong to Einstein. As such, I made a bet with myself that I could google it and find this idea already out in the world. Here is the link that I came up with. I have skimmed it sufficiently to know that it corresponds to what I was thinking, but goes in more depth than I had originally. There are some very interesting implications with this realization. The first is, you must start the game at the beginning. Balancing is first learned by learning to manipulate your appendages and organs (mouth, eyes, etc.) to achieve worthwhile goals. Eventually, you learn to manipulate through space via physical balance. A few years later, you start learning how to balance emotional states. Then mental/cognitive states. There isn't too much new about what I've said so far. It get's interesting when we notice that organism's do this together. We re-learn the balancing aspects from another perspective as parents, and as teachers, etc. Learning to teach other's to balance (notice, they would do it on their own, we're just accelerating the process with skillful facilitation). In this way, Open Space Technology is increadibly advanced balancing. There are many lessons that I would expect to hear about learning to get out of the way of the process to let it happen (as I mentioned in my previous email). Without consciousness, we simply react to the situation. This results in apparent stasis. When all members of a group are acting in their own self interest, then the group gets to a certain level of sophisticated group behavior, and then it stagnates (by outside appearances). What is actually happening is the build-up to a state- change, just as when water goes from water to steam. The energy of the group increases but the water isn't boiling yet. You can even get interesting and complex behavior (hexagonal cells) before the water starts boiling under certain conditions. When the water is hot enough, when there is enough energy in the system, it boils. This happens on it's own. (Just let it happen). With the addition of consciousness, the energy can be harnessed for self-useful purposes (metabolism). This is what life does. It learns to balance. The earth is a complex ecosystem (GAIA), because life continually finds balance. With this simple definition of consciousness (consciousness = balance), we can see that balance happens all the way up and down the great chain of being. That means that atoms and molecules have a kind of consciousness, as do galaxies and superclusters. With energy flowing through the system, matter creates an equilibrium state in which certain things happen, like people and societies. Open Space is the way in which the human species organism (the group organism of humans) is learning to metabolise the energy that is flowing through the system. It's a natural process. The analog case, and the one that is very instructive for me, is learning to ride a bicycle. I didn't look at this case very closely when I was a kid, I just got on and did it. But as an adult, when I was teaching my son to ride, I noticed something interesting. His first inclination, when he went out of balance, was to turn the "wrong" direction. I tried to imagine why this was, and it seemed obvious. To him, it feels like the ground is trying to suck him down, and he is resisting that pull by turning away from the fall. But, in order to balance, you must turn into the fall! Turning into, not away from, the disequilibrium is the way to return to equilibrium. Another reason that this is so hard to grasp initially is that to the child, watching someone else ride a bike looks like it is just a matter of keeping the bicycle upright, and so, when the bicycle starts to lean, the temptation is to lean the other direction to get back to uprightness. We think balance means a static state of remaning upright, in actuality, it is a dynamic situation in which we return to uprightness. Once you start to fall, you aren't out of balance until you finish falling. You can come to within inches of the ground, and if you can turn sharply enough to return to equilibrium, you are in balance. And falling is no big deal either (well, except the skinned knee). Just get back on and try again. Here is the thing though, as the situations get more complex, we put safety mechanisms in place to allow people to learn the art of balance safely; training wheels. The problem is, if we never take the training wheels off, the lesson is never learned. And, here is the critical piece, if the training wheels are left in place, the rider is essentially crippled because they can't maneuver as nimbly as a rider without training wheels. This metaphor works at the society level as well. Civilization gets very complex, and the risk of failure for some activities becomes fatal, so we make sure to have safety mechanisms in place so that people learn (like laws). But again, the organism (life) wishes to find ways to push the system into equilibrium in order to learn to balance. It happens from moss to ecosystems. But if the laws become absolute, then the training wheels are never removed, and in some ways we are crippled. This happens in organizations which become hide-bound by their policies (schools in the US are very good examples). And the solutions that we come up with are exactly like the one my son came up with, lean in the wrong direction. Schools lean toward increasingly tight stricture (they move the training wheels out further so that the bike can't fall over), but the school system is really moving at a fast speed now, and training wheels are no longer appropriate, but dangerous!! It is hard to learn this lesson, and the school system may actually have to fall down and scrape it's knees (it may even get a concussion if it's not wearing a helmet). This is only a metaphor, but you can see the power of it. Let's take it another step. The political system is in a current state of intense disequilibrium. Conservatives believe, in general, that we should weld the training wheels on for life, and make sure they are reinforced so they can't break. Liberals, in general, think that we need to remove the training wheels to allow the system to do it's own thing. Both ways are right, and both are wrong. The issue is balance. We need the training wheels up to the point that we've mastered balance in an activity, and then we need to remove them slowly (or run alongside to catch them if they fall). But we don't want to just remove the training wheels altogether too early, or the reaction may be further shyness about trying again. This isn't intended to be an endorsement or criticism of one side or the other, we need both, and they need to work together to find interesting solutions to our increasingly complex problems. Note: we need BOTH parties to have balance. Conservatives tend to operate with a "protect the innocent and free the mature" mentality, while liberals tend toward a "liberate the youth, but keep a watch on the powerful." These look like they are diametrically opposed to one another from a certain perspective. And guess what, they ARE! Just as right and left are diametrically opposed to one another when one is sitting on a bicycle. You need both right and left to have balance. Try to eliminate or handicap one, and you'll go sprawling to the concrete as sure I'm standing here. - David Swedlow * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist