Authoradigms

This is a strong focus of my next book. Thomas Kuhn set a trend by writing about the paradigm and what this concept means in respect of setting and dealing with vast change. He provided an idea and a model for grand conceptual change.

The given way of thinking, held by the authoritative thinking in sway, undergoes transformation in the following way:

There's an emotional element to this, though, and I see it dancing in the box of authority.

I am an ultra-expert on authority. In my fourth year of this lifetime, I took on God, which is daring, to say the least. What this means is that I refused to back off from any particularly strong sense or feeling. I made enemies early.

However, they refused to be enemies. Whereas they spoke condemnation to me, as I was way beyond the pale, their hearts were kind, and I could sense, feel and know this.

It was a difficult situation.

Whose authority was in charge?

I made it mine. No matter how much their thoughts and attitudes gave me eternal damnation, mine would give them freedom. I wanted this for all, even them, it didn't feel as though, at bottom, they were a "them". They felt closer than that, although I could not easily reach them.

There is one verse in the book of Revelation that still tugs my heart:, and is echoed in "The Holy City":

"and all who would may enter there, and no-one was denied..."

This is echoed again in a mantra that was indelibly written on the wall of my five year old soul:

"He drew a circle that shut me out;
I was a heretic rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We made a circle that drew him in."

I was taught this by a gleaming, smiling Irishman who was one of my father's best friends, from his :"bachelor's club".

He put the heat on me when I was an innocent four to five year old.

"Young Walter, are you saved?"

"Yes!"

"Ah but are you properly saved? Can you feel it like I do?"

"Yes!"

"Are you sure you're going to a saved and not a lost eternity? There's no mistake in this, y'know."

"Yes!"

"Can you feel the call on you? It's a mighty call that knows no saying no, y'know!"

"Yes!"

"Take it clear now: eternity's not a long time: it's forever!"

Well if you've got that in your personal account, you've got balance if nothing else, because it's a great depth to know, inviting vertigo, at least.

From there I made it my business to know where I stood with eternity.

I learnt the following:

Humans don't know who or what they are.

If they progress, ego will usually get in the way.

Eternity isn't an out there waiting for you when you die, it's a here and now.

Eternity has started already, and if you aren't deliberately participating, you're losing ground.

Presence is everything.

Surprising presences are present.

Acceptance and forgiveness are also everything.

Back to the authoradigm:
Approval doesn't make you competent.
Acceptance doesn't make you authentic.
Acknowledgement begins to realize.
Alignment creates.
Action prescribes.

Human authority is a nonsense. History should have taught us this, by now. The endless circle of payment, certification, registration goes in the opposite direction to the circle of attention, modelling, competency, growth, recognition and admiration.

Authority is an emotional negotiation. If you back off before you begin, you're not the author of the story that's going to happen. If you take charge as an opening gambit, you may not author the final version, but at least you'll have a voice.

An authoradigm exists where there's a bubble of non-negotiable competence. If you can do cobbling, book-binding, surgery, sewing, sport, spelling, admin and apps, there isn't a great margin for error. All of these have to work well, and you will soon be told if you aren't doing it well. Poetry, music, cooking and sex are more open to criticism, and taste matters more, here, than finding a solution.

Even leadership has an element of taste to it. I spent two years in one of the most efficient armies of the second half of the twentieth century. There, I learnt about teamwork, brute force, precision and deadly intent. I know how to apply these, but not many in my university department had the taste for such leadership. I also had the good fortune to spend two years under the tutelage of one of Cape Town's foremost educational managers who taught me about research, unflappability, self-discipline at the core, creative and accountable problem-solving and professional cheerfulness. These have been far more to the taste of all I have met, but I have one problem with this set of skills: I am more than this.

The "more" to which I refer connects with the business of coaching. I am convinced that coaching is primarily about growth. Who can be said to be an authority on growth? For me, growth is different to mind-tickling. A lot of gurus write and speak well enough to make you laugh, get fascinated, look for more, and then have a need to scratch the itch, the memory of which can last quite long.

Growth means irreversible change, because not only do you not want to go back, in fact you can't. It's new wine in new wine-skins, and no longer 750 ml but a litre. You can't fit back in, like T.S Eliot's Journey of the Magi. "No longer at ease in the old dispensation".

The authority for this is in the doing of it. The eye of each needle has a different shape, when you pass through it, and each moment is an eternity unto itself.

Whereas authority depends on ownership of a grand narrative, or at least, a short story, an authoradigm holds the proficiency, competence and clarity of a given alpha through omega. Threading the needle, writing the book, completing the sonata, sharing the meal, opening the present, filling the grave, firing the rifle, hitting the target. Style as well as substance. I remember the look on my GP's face when he was taking out the stitches that my plastic surgeon had put in: "Wow, these stitches are so small and perfect, Wally!" I'm glad, because they were on my face, and cost about a thousand rand, each.

But I'm going too micro.

Authoradigms are the emotional platforms for paradigms, and paradigms don't change often. Human emotions are fairly predictable, and whereas an individual may convert, manifest, individuate or otherwise grow, global patterns are slower to change.

Taking charge, telling the story, creating the narrative, supplying the uncreated loop: these are not merely cerebral activities: they necessitate daring, conviction and felt purpose.

The authority of many spheres is facing challenge: naturopathic and homeopathic vs allopathic medicine; orthodox religion vs personal spirituality; gender issues; capitalism vs neo-capitalism; modernism vs post-modernism; open-mindedness vs closed-mindedness.

The book on all this will have to go into much detail. This is the point to make now: what you accept is what you allow yourself to feel. Change your emotional permissions by losing your need to be accepted, approved of, even loved, and you will change by growing and grow by changing. Acceptance and authority are first cousins at least, sometimes twins. The sense of one depends entirely on the sense of the other. Pathological acceptance of external authority defeats consciousness. Criminal rejection of external authority kills conscience. Somewhere in the middle we walk a tight-rope of permeability and resistance.

 

Checking in and checking out of civilization

I've been traveling. For two and a half weeks I've moved into tomorrow, come back to today, slept through yesterday, caught up with three decades ago, dreamt that I died and set my Swiss watch through a number of time zones. I also checked in and out of airports and hotels.

The checking in and out made me think about living in South Africa. I grew up in a first world, somewhat British South Africa, in the southern suburbs of Cape Town, where the neighbourhood was safe, friendly and things were quite different to what was happening a few miles away in Langa, Nyanga and Gugulethu.

I wasn't checked in for that, didn't have a boarding pass. I grew up in a civilised neighbourhood where the neighbours were always polite (although the Greeks were a bit noisy from time to time). Across the road they were English, other side of the block, Scottish, next door, Jewish, down the road, Australian, a few blocks away, Irish. Swiss down the way, and so on.

We drove to work, we caught the bus, we caught the train, we paid our bills, the toilets flushed, we celebrated Christmas, Easter, New Year, went to each others' funerals and went to the local schools, and knew which wind would bring rain.

We were checked in. Our parents had supplied the boarding passes; history, pioneers and governments had provided the social and material infrastructure, and we were on that side of the line.

Now, in South Africa, that zone has been declared exactly that: a zone.

"Please board in the following order" said the official voice: "First class and business class, then families and disabled passengers, then economy class, zone d and c, then zone b."

If you want to be dispassionate about the zone you're in and the zone you aren't in, you have to take a look at the aeons of civilization that divide historical awareness. The first and third worlds are time-curves of proficiencies that have come and gone. Proceeding from pre-history, the Cro-Magnons made it through to digital software in plasmic screens and beyond. Pyramids were the apex of civilization once, although not many owned one. Geometry and standing stones both carried weight. Algebra and astronomy discovered a spherical world that has proceeded in more than one straight line.

Now you tell me how to balance out macadamised roads, the Wellington boot. the chip, (of a fried slice of potato, not a silicon one) with a president who has five wives, twenty-one children and wears a suit but not a condom, and is in charge of my ex-first-world country. No-one will believe me when I say that this is not a complaint. It's a statement that I have not checked in to where he is, and he has not checked in to where I am. Neither of us has the boarding pass.

Civilization is not continent specific. It's a big word that refers to aspiration of magnificent proportions. I am not necessarily anti-Zuma. I just do not prefer to wear a leopard skin, dance and sing monotonous rhythms for hours on end when I lose an argument and walk about permanently wet in the showers of transparency.

Checking in and out is both formal and expensive. You don't want to make a mistake. This is where I part company with that other zone in which I don't belong. I want to be in the zone that takes me to the destination in respect of which so many have made sacrifices, discoveries, journeys and commitments on my behalf.

Let Zuma (for the sake of argument) honour his zone and I'll honour mine. He has put himself in first class, using my money to pay for his ticket, and that skews the honour, already. Yet this is not a complaint. We're just checking.

Another thing about journeys is that they never end. We may pass through where we started, according to T.S.Eliot, and recognize the place for the first time, although if you do that, in my view, you're pretty badly jet-lagged.

The bottom line is that you can wear whatever you want, or not, you can prattle all the political rhetoric ever invented or to yet be entertained, but you can't pretend that first class is economy class or that economy class is first class when you're in the same Boeing together. I've been in both (thanks Howard) and I know the difference.

 

Learning and growing

The more I think about learning and growing, the more I think they're the same.

Formalized learning i.e. via the structures of education from pre-primary school to university tends to be really artificial. Sure enough, skills like literacy, numeracy, analysis, comprehension and many others are picked up along the way, and are not merely valuable but indispensable. Yet learning is a matter of conscious change, or put the other way, change of consciousness.

Not too many people look for change of consciousness. Although consciousness is essentially indivisible, being continuous and not discrete, linked by the imprint and impact of pre-verbal experience, a key vehicle of which is emotion, humans grow up recognizing little else other than the stark limits of being on their own.

Solitaire. Desperado. You're on your own. Best you can do is fall in love, and hope that it works both ways.

The bottom line works in these emotional barters.

It's not true, though.

The other day I asked a class, "Can you learn to be stupid?" A few of them caught the idea. Yes, you can. In fact, we do it a lot. We accept, adapt, and change to minimize ourselves. We obey. We don't dare. In short, we don't think through emotional barriers. We perform them, to our detriment and diminishment. We succumb to economic pressures, formalized demands, social regulation, spiritual containment.

Formal education puts you in the box and ticks off the box. Well done, now you're a lawyer, a doctor, a bus-driver, a masseuse, a plumber.

Learning, like living, is indivisible and continuous. But you have to choose it. There's a certain strength of character that grows exponentially once it gets given its head. You get really stupid people in all professions. They missed the bus somehow, they got the certificate, but don't use their services.

People in difficult circumstances don't need sympathy. I'm pushing a point, here. They need to be taught how to think through their difficult circumstances, make strategic decisions, pursue emotional breakthrough, find a way through.

The world we have created doesn't want us to grow. It wants us to be a market, a stamp of approval, a good citizen, a loyal member, a leader, any kind of a thing that makes the way smooth for others.

Emerson wrote "Take the way from man, not to man." Follow radiation, rather than inclination. The open door is dangerous, the closed door safe. The shelter of promise is desired, the quest denied by default.

If I open my heart, can I control the traffic?

The answer is "no". Control is a legend, and love is the proper opposite of this legend. This is why "love" is anti-conceptual and a poor word for a perfect storm.

In the current age, learning has missed the point if it depends on education. You learn to fly by being tossed out of the nest, by being on the sidewalk, by feeling the cold as well as glamour, by reading the stock markets as well as the tabloids. By seeing with the eyes of your eyes and hearing with the ears of your ears, e.e. cummings pointed out.

Is growing imperative? I believe it is. Neglect it, and you learn to be stupid. The majority do, not on purpose, but because the emotional patterns intimidate, demand and diminish. Some of these patterns are created exactly for these purposes, others simply arise. Within each heart, however, openness is possible and provides another pattern which ultimately changes everything.

Living in a sick nation, healing a sick nation.

I am most grateful for having learnt a few things from the medical world. Quite apart from medical systematics, metaphors of wellness and illness extend into the greater sphere of human communication.

Health is a balance. All physiological systems are working aspects of survival and wellness. At any given time an individual is potentially unwell. Action is taken, involuntarily and voluntarily to maintain wellness, by moving, eating, getting out of the way, smiling, shouting a warning, explaining, changing the tyre, hanging up the washing.

Sometimes it doesn't work out. By driving a man-made invention, you crash into another man-made invention. Sometimes a tooth breaks. Sometimes cells lose the plot. When this happens, unless circumstances dictate, you know something is wrong and seek help. Mercifully, medical science can do much to assist.

Political science is not as advanced as medical science. When a nation goes into denial and refuses to acknowledge aches, pains, even crises, the sickness becomes palpable. Whole sections of society may start screaming for attention. The national economy may be flat-lining. National education may have become a cadaver, offering no more than dissection. Yet those responsble dab the face with make-up and paint the toe -nails and finger-nails with self-congratulation.

I can't speak with any authority about countries I don't live in, but I can say that South Africa is a sick nation. It's quite bizarre, because while sections of the population cry out for help of various kinds, the leadership ignores this. In the human body the brain is wired to notice the moment the body goes out of order. In an ideal nation the cabinet and the presidency are there to serve the people. Not in South Africa. It's weird, embarrassing and frightening to live in a country where problems are not solved but actually created for political purposes. I've realised that it's too easy to blame a foolish president, a short-sighted cabinet and an incompetent leadership of state infrastructure.

 The national dynamic is more complicated than that. It's like blaming the ocean for having polluted drops. The answer to national illness is individual activism. This is where the metaphor of physiological repair is so different to social repair. The body's default is to heal. Human social consciousness may yet evolve to that, but it's not there yet. Individual consciousness hasn't learnt how to honour natural connection. Part of human nature is divisive. In The Bond Lynne McTaggart explains how human consciousness is, at bottom, oriented to bond rather than separate. But you have to get there. Louis MacNiece in Autumn Journal writes a line: "where the people are more than a crowd".

South African individuals are a mixed bunch. With them, conscience is not a moral issue but an individualized dashboard. The rule of thumb seems to be "whatever works for me is right". Whereas I might sincerely want to bond with the helpless AIDS orphans in my region, and offer whatever help I can, the taxi-driver who stops right in front of me and gives the finger has limited realization of any kind. No matter how much I want to lead by example in the school, the curriculum reduces my efforts to idiocy, by decree. The social signals, in general, are disempowering. If you allow yourself to be disempowered, your energy is sapped. Living in a sick nation is energy-sapping, soul-destroying.

Rx:

The first remedy is stick with what's true and what's beautiful. That's a tall order, but look at what Victor Frankl did with turning his experience at Auchwitz into logotherapy. Look at what Nelson Mandela did with his time in jail, The bottom line of that tall order is not what happens to you but what you do with what happens to you.

The second remedy is action. Inaction breeds despair. Acting as a matter of personal discipline easily overlaps with spiritual discipline. Act from the heart. If your heart is overly angry, you will learn much from the consequences. Greater strength produces more incisive gentleness.

The third remedy is presence. Your greater presence in action will produce deft movement and influence. Spirit is a matter of concentration of presence, neither too much nor too little, but apt for the moment. Great moments are about powerful concentrations of expression. Not the loudness of the notes, not the histrionics, but the filling of the moment. Spirit communicates.

The fourth remedy is to practise expansiveness. Whatever diminishes your energy, twists it, contains it, produces illness of the soul and the body. Grow your soul in quiet, concentrated presence and it will pervade the world: there will be no need to invade society with an agenda.

The fifth remedy is to create peace. Whereas peace with God is found, by grace, peace with people is made. The taxi-driver, the curriculum and the thief have no interest in making peace with me: I have to test myself in making peace with these.

The sixth remedy is to lose fear of confrontation. Demonstration, the kind that closes the N1 and the N2 goes beyond confrontation. Confrontation encompasses not only standing against, but also standing for.

The seventh remedy I'm going to leave blank. When people speak from the heart, sooner or later they get onto love. I have no clear understanding of love because I don't know how to begin to word the intensities of my heart. I have the sense of something overwhelming pouring through me, a kind of crossing through history, time and experience: a crazy space occupied by an emerging surprise of materialized spirit: a story the core of which holds a deep ache and a healing presence simultaneously.

I think Alan Paton had a similar experience in writing Cry the Beloved Country. 

There is a mist outside, as I write. In an hour's time, as usual, it will begin to lift. It will lift as individual molecules, it will lift as a mist.

The sick nation will heal insofar as there is enough intention for it to heal. That intention arises individually. It's a choice.

Clarity is a feeling

When I began writing poetry in earnest, and my efforts were scrutinized by others, one comment stood out from the rest. Robert Berold, editor of New Coin at the time, after reading some of my poems, simply muttered "Cerebral".

Having one foot in the academic world, and the other in business, I realize more fully that cerebral means neither intelligent nor effective. It means that your sixth chakra is working at the expense of the others.

For better or worse I was born with a strong instinct for clarity. This is not an easy instinct to practise. It estranged me form my parents, took me away from my spiritual tribe, journeyed me through other spiritual tribes and has eventually brought me to a place of peace, where I can practise this instinct with conviction and commitment.

The question "What do you mean?" quickly brings a conversation to bafflement unless the participants have put a fair amount of cerebral activity into their homework of self- knowledge and knowledge of the world.

If you want to know anything about anything you have to think at least a little and reflect on your experience. When you reflect on experience, you create patterns of increasingly aware emotions. As humans we're far more emotional than cerebral, and as a species that's our downfall, because we believe that we're more cerebral than emotional. We're quick to protect individualism, integrity and dignity without doing enough personal scrutiny. We're quick to group, without putting enough energy of insight into group awareness.

We feel, spontaneously. We are aware, spontaneously. Thinking is a choice. We can pilot a way through emotions, choosing where to go and where we refuse to go.

Clarity involves congruence, assonance, agreement, co-operation, kindness and courtesy. You can't say that my clarity is better than yours. A clear word is like a two-edged sword. It will divide as well as create recognition, respect and reciprocity.

To reason is not merely to invoke the rules of logic. Reasoning involves the seat of response, the deepest and most resounding emotions a human is capable of, instinctive and enduring.

Reasoning, in its simplest sense, is thinking with all your heart. It's a meeting point between deliberate thoughtfulness and conscious emotion at the junction where decision is made possible by this exciting confluence of energy.

I love the feeling of reasoning, and I have found myself to be quite alone in this. I expected that in the academic sphere I would find similar intentionality in others, but indeed that experience eluded me more than not.

I am no mountaineer, but I would use the metaphor of having reasoned something through to a satisfactory conclusion as being similar to reaching the summit. Enjoy the view, bask if you wish, but you know that there are so many more to attempt.

There is no conquering of the self. There is no end to stirrings that emanate from the actvity of the imagination, the plight of humanity, the story of this planet, the jumbled emotions of the individual soul.

"Are we clear?" the master-sergeant shouts into the face of the recruit. The recruit knows what the answer has to be.

The living God asks the same question, in a different but no less challenging tone.

Responding is one thing, wording your response another. The link between these is another thread of clarity.

Biofocusing, yantras and imagination.

If I understand correctly, a yantra is an image of the activity of the universe imagining itself.

Or perhaps, the image of the universe enacting itself. Language will baffle the meaning of what I'm trying to say, because "universe" is extremely vague, and the very next point I want to make is that the basis for any activity and imagination is the same.

Just as biofocusing focuses on and focuses from, and both are equally important, the yantra points to evolution and involution of humanity. Evolution in this sense is not of the Darwinian kind, but of human extension into the material and social world. Involution takes human consciousness back to its starting point, and evolution takes human consciousness to ever-increasing perceptual finesse in the "real" world.

 

 

 

 







The yantra is an objective portrayal of the path from the inner to the outer, the merging of the subjective with the objective, the geometric metaphor of body, soul and spirit as one.

 

Looking at a yantra, we see evolving and involving patterns. Our lives reflect the same, more mysteriously. Can we understand our lives? No. Can we live our lives knowing peace and fulfillment? Yes. What are we to make of seemingly random acts of horror and loss and mankind's abominable cruelty? From the outer perspective we can't make sense; from the inner perspective nothing is lost.

 

 

 

 

 

My essay into making links at this point is to suggest that what we experience in respect of imagination is yantra at work. Our eyes see the graphics here, our souls experience both the vey inner and the extremities of the outer when we expand our consciousness into active imagery. As we go towards the point of origin, we expand. As we journey into the physical world, we concentrate. The geometry of the yantra reflects that these are made of the same movements.

 

I have my hand on the steering wheel as I negotiate the traffic. I pressurize my finger in exactly the way the scalpel requires. Yet at the same instant I am at the very heart of God. I am in my home of homes.

 

Time as we know it in terms of days and hours is a construct: I imagine that when we leave the body, the journey takes as long as we want the adventure to last.

 

 



 

 

 

The logic of the body, the logic of mind and the logic of spirit are difficult to pin down as a set of rules. This is a ridiculous understatement, and that is exactly why the imagination is so quick, absurd and creative. At every instant creativity pours everywhere.

 

 

 

The Eastern mind will no doubt resonate more easily with this connection. For the Western mind, schooled for centuries in attitudes of rationality, be told that reason and imagination are extensions of each other.

 

I think of philanthropic statesmen and politicians, pioneering scientists, missionaries who have more than a cultural agenda, compassionate individuals everywhere, kindness made manifest in the human sphere.

 

 I think of intensity of purpose, clarity of vision, energy of action.

 

And then I think of an engine out of tune with its proper operation: the soul out of order with balance between the inner and the outer.

 

Etymologically, "yantra" means "support" or"machine".

 

The facility of the imagination is neither a thing nor objective, like a yantra. Yet is is a necessary mile, maybe ten or more, of the journey that we're all on.

 

 

 



 

Poetry demystfied.

People have a way of backing off from poetry. Not for me, only for clever people, I hate poetry, can't make sense, haven't got time, why?, not cool, not hot, what's poetry?

Poetry involves two steps: making meaning, and making meaning with language.

The bad news is that there isn't any ready-made, given meaning, which is really very bad news for fundamentalists, and the good news is that we make it for better or worse all the time.

We make meaning with whatever creative means is immediately at hand, with purpose, within a context. I have come to realize that the astute and creative business person is as expressive and produces as much beauty as any artist, musician and poet.

Language is the plumbline of human meaning since it's the most immediately available means of expression. The subtlest thought, intention, idea and action are birthed in language, as intuitive consciousness strikes spontaneously.

The difference between deliberate and intuitive consciousness is language.

An important aspect of my education began in my first year as an undergraduate when I reached for pen and paper and began to write my spontaneous thoughts. In the very first sentence I learnt that my spontaneous thoughts were rubbish. In my second paragraph I asked for wisdom. That was good, but it was a mistake. I should have asked for wisdom in respect of what to ask for. That would have put me in line for a more efficient introduction to deliberate consciousness.

Of course you can pay deliberate attention to anything you want, When you pay deliberate attention to uttering truthfulness from your core, you're doing poetics, which may or may not result in good poetry. If you ask an academic what good poetry is, you won't get a clear answer. As professor of English I would have brought the house down if I had tried a definition of good poetry. That's not allowed. As a coach I can state with much confidence that good poetry is poetry that creates resonance.

Words uttered (spoken or written) from the core that find felt resonance with the cores of others are much like music, in an objective sense. A,B,C,D,E,F and G are not only letters of the alphabet, they're particular sounds, too. As well as all the sharps and flats. Unlike writing, music is not an invention but a discovery. As Andre Rieu says, if we all made more music together, there would be more peace in the world. If we uttered ourselves more skilfully in terms of speech and drama on the everyday stage of soliloquy, dialogue and chorus, and spiritual, social and individual identity blended perfectly into an undeniable presence of character and character of presence, communication would regain much of its art, and lose most of its pragmatic teeth.

If you cannot find your presence in the street, you will not see your character in the mirror.

Are we doing poetry yet?

When I was explaining this to one of my classes, I put it in a poem:

Tree-Poem

Many leaves, one tree;
many people, one poem.

So, in a nutshell, poetry is very much about presence. You recognize presence more than you see presence. You sense presence more than you perceive it.

The five senses are good for physical survival, the sixth sense puts it all together and gives humankind identity in the cosmic scheme of things.

Truthskill.

He gently blows this smoke-ring
through the first.
I'm silent,
pretending to puff a pipe I don't have.

My colleague who teaches Afrikaans poetry has told me that the moment anyone opens their mouth to speak, he instantly knows everything about them. I think I'm going to test this today.