Posts Tagged ‘central Theme’

About the Infinite Game

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

In the Western World many people play the Analytic Game. The Analytical Game resolves the conflict between the Facts of the Senses and the  Models, Rules and Norms of the Human Prediction System, the Expectation (often called Thinking).

The complementary Game is what Will McWhinney and his friend Burkhard Sievers, called the Game that Creates New Games.

James P. Carse (A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility) calls this game the Infinite Game. Perhaps a much better name would be the Game of Life.

Life is a Journey

Infinite players play with rules and boundaries. They include them as part of their playing. They aren’t taking them serious, and they can never be trapped by them, because they use rules and boundaries to play with.

The players are always busy to continue the Game of Life by creating new Games.

They love to play but the aim is not to win because winning ends the game.

The Infinite Game is a Game where the Imagination and the Emotions are playing their roles. The Emotions e-valua-te and the Imagination creates.

A very important distinction between the two Games is Context. The Analytic Game is “above the Context”.

It uses the Abstractions of Maps and Diagrams. When you use a map to travel you will never see the real territory.

The Game of Life is “in the Context”.  In this game Life is a Journey. You will meet people you will never meet when your life is completely planned and you will see places nobody has seen before.

Life Above the Context is dull and predictable.

Life In the Context is an Adventure and Full of Risks.

Evaluation is a Context-Dependent Process. It takes into account that every Situation is unique and needs a unique approach.

The Game of Life is an Improvisation

The Game of Life is about Improvisation. You listen to the Rythm and the central Theme and start your own variation that is “in line with the flow”.

Sometimes you are the person who starts a new rhythm and a new theme and others follow you. You are there at the right time and the right moment.

Timing is essential in the Game of Life.

The Game of Life is about the Tao and Synchronicity. Things happen by accident but the events are meaningful. They are created by the Imagination.

The Game of Life is about Magic. You are the creator of your own reality and your creation bounces back on you. Reality produces signs but the signs are the result of your own creation.

Your personal Magic becomes much stronger when you have a vision and you believe in this vision.

The Game of Life is about belief and not about truth. You know there is no eternal truth because everything changes but behind the changes is an emerging pattern.

The pattern is chaotic and structured. It arise out of the Whole and moves back into the Whole.

The Game of Life is the game of AND. Life is a contradiction, an eternal conflict, a dilemma because meaning is created by “making the difference‘. It is the Comm-Union of Diversity.

The Game of Life is about Spirit (Imagination) and Soul (Emotion).

The Game of Life is Immortal. When the Fire of the compassion of your soul and the Light of your spirit becomes One with the stream of Creation  you will live for ever.

The Game of Life is eternal and new Games are created all the time.

The Games are not competitive but collaborative.

The Game is fueled by Ideas and Ideas are abundant. Some of them stay for a long time. Other ideas just arise and move away like clouds in the Wind.

The Game is Life is a Field. It contains (Standing) Waves and Waves merge without any problem.

dance

The Game of Life is the Game of Music, Dance and Poetry. It does not force. It gives you the freedom of your own interpretation, your own mood.

The Game of Life is a Spiraling Spiral.

The Game of Life is about Values and Quality.

Your personal Values help you to evaluate and Quality is what you want to accomplish.

Quality is the complement of Quantity.

It is something the Numbers and the Names are unable to Express.

LINKS

About the theories of Will McWhinny

About Buckert Sievert

About the Infinite Game of James P. Carse

About Boundaries

About Context

About Adventure

About Synchronicity

About Collaboration

About Fields

About (Standing) Waves

About Music

About Poetry

About the Spiraling Spiral

About Values and Quality

How Socrate changed the Cycle of Western Civilization

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

SocrateMany people Project their Knowledge of the Now to History. They Think that People Thought the same Thoughts many years ago.

To understand the Spirit of The Time we have to understand the Historical Context People lived in. One way of doing this is to look at a shared foundation and study the Historical Variations on the Central Theme.

This idea corresponds with the Insights of Micheal Bahktin. He called the central theme The Chronotope, “The place where the knots of narrative are tied”. I used his theory to have a look at the Cultural Cycle of History.

I combined the theory of Bahktin with the Economic Cycle Theory of Kondratiev. To my big surprise Kondratiev and Bahktin use a different periodicity (50, 250 years) of the Cycle but the stages of the Cycle were the same.

What surprised me more what that the periodicities of the Cycles where related by the factor Five. When you know the basic periodicity the only thing you have to do is multiply or divide by five and the same pattern, the Basic Fractal of History, emerges. The Five or the Pentagram shows itself in every culture on Earth. When we transform this structure in three dimensions it shows itself as a Spiral or a Moebius Ring.

A beautiful example of a projection of the Now on History was a visit to the Cave of Lascaux in France. An anthropologist was explaining to us what we were seeing.

The Cave contained many Spiraling Abstract Paintings. She told us that the Cave was used for rituals and the many pictures we saw had a symbolic meaning. I did not believe that because the theory of symbolism was “invented” by de Saussure (1857-1913).

The people that lived in the Cave had no idea of Symbolisms and Symbols. They just painted what they “saw” in the Outside World and the Inside World. If I place myself in their Context I cannot Imagine they were Thinking a lot. I feel they were Experiencing Nature in all his states of Wonder and Terror. Imagine what a beautifull Sky they were experiencing every Night and you will understand why the Sky Father was the major Force they felt.

The people that lived at the time of the Cave of Lascaux always situated their Holy Places at the crossings of important Ley Lines. These Ley Lines represent the Spiraling Knots of the Electro Magnetic Field of the Earth (the Earth Grid) .

Highly sensitive people can still feel the PowerPlaces and it is not strange to assume that the sensitive people at that time (“the Sjamans”) could do the same. Just like the Current Sjamans they could travel Space/Time by performing Rituals (Spinning, Chanting the Sacred Tones), Lucid Dreaming or by eating Sacred psychoactive plants like the Peyote and the Amanita Muscaria (the Soma).

Symbolism was a theme of the Spirit of the Time of a stage in the development of the Kondratiev Wave that operated between 1890 and 1940. It was the time of Standardization (Control, Plan).

The stage before this stage (1850-1890) was related to Energy (Ego, Self, Desire, Fire). It was the time when the Steel Mills were created, the research in Chemistry started and Alexander Noble invented Dynamite. I was able to map every phase of the Kondratiev Cycle to the Cycle of Bahktin.

The 5 phases of the Kondratiev Cycle (5×50 =250 years) could be summarized at a higher level, the Industrial Revolution. I found out that the Industrial Revolution was a Social Movement. A Social Movement is always preceded by a Spiritual Movement, the Renaissance.

I started to map the Cycle again with a periodicty of 250 years. The time-interval between 1450 and 1700 is called Renaissance. It is the stage of the Spirit and Ideas. The model fitted.

I went back 5×250 years (200-450). In this time Christianity was created by the Roman Emperor Constantine I. He used the widespread Cult of Mithras to introduce Christianity in the Roman Empire. Again we are in the stage of the Spirit. The Model fitted.

I jumped to a higher level of the Cycle (The Cycle of Civilizations) and travelled further back in time. I arrived at the time of the Cave of Lascaux. At that time many caves contained “abstract pictures”. The pictures look like Spiraling Spirals.

Later the spirals where placed in a Medicine Wheel and connected to Animals (Eagle, Bull). The same animals appear in the Medieval Cathedrals but now they are related to the Apostles. Even the medicine wheel (a labyrinth) can be found there.

If you walk this wheel in the Cathedral it will point you to all the important stories that are told. Just like the Medicine Wheel the Cathedrals (build by the (Free) Masons) where an educational tool to tell about the Spiral of Life. Suddenly I saw the big picture.

Every step in the Cycle was nothing but a new way to show the “same thing” again and again. The spiralling spiral came back all the time but on a different level.

What happened around 550 BC?

At that time an Innovation in Religion came into the World. This innovation can be summarized by the famous statement of Socrate Know Thyself. The same statement can be found in the Gospel of Thomas and is also the central theme of the teachings of the Buddha. The Gospel of Thomas is a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Gnostic Library of the Essenes, dated 50 BC.

Jesus said: Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything . . . But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty“.

Boeddha became an Inspiration in the East. Socrate and Jezus were killed. From that time on an enormous amount of people were killed in the West when they wanted to Know Themselves, find the Whole in their Inner World.

They could not experience the Roman Religion through A System. Know Thyself was a huge threat to the Rulers of Western Civilization. Constantine simply took over Christianity to preserve the power and made it into a Roman System. A system of Laws to Obey. He practiced the old Roman trick of Divide and Conquer to save his Empire.

Between 1450 and 1700, the Renaissance, the tides started to turn. It took another 250 years (1950) before the people in Europe started to find their own Identity again. We are now in the Stage of Individuality of the Cycle and are slowly entering the state of Empathy. It shows itself in the many attempts to create Networks (Communities). The Internet is one of the major Western technological inventions to support this.

The Cycles of East and West (and North and South) are coming together. The Eastern Cultures embrace Western Culture and the Western Culture embraces Eastern Culture. We can create Harmony by a fuse of everything the Human Race has Learnt when a new cycle started around 550 BC.

The Cycle of The Earth is almost at The Breaking Point. According to many environmental scientists we will soon experience a very fast Reorganization on the Level of Earth. The long term cycle of Earth is restoring itself.

Not only Earth will restore itself. The original Spirituality of the civilization of MU, will be restored. An ancient Bhuddist prophesy speaks of the darkest hour of the Dark Age, when the rivers of materialism burst their banks, and plague, famine, greed and warefare beset desperate people everywhere.

That Dark Age will soon end and the new Golden Age will appear. Many living buddhas are now here to bring the precious healing Dharma to anyone ready to receive it.