Posts Tagged ‘Cycle’

The Relationship between Chaos Theory, Fractals, Lyapunov, Minkowski and the TAO

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

chaotic attractorChaos theory is the theory of Dynamic (Non-Linear) Systems. Dynamic systems converge to a state called an Attractor.

A fractal is a shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is a copy of the whole. This property is called Self-Reference.

Self-Referencial Dynamic Systems are represented by a Strange Attractor .

I want to start with a few citations of HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF CHAOS THEORY: Consciousness, Physiology, Perception, and Psychology by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, ©1992.

Chaos underlies the ability of the brain to respond flexibly to the outside world and to generate novel activity patterns, including those that are experienced as fresh ideas (also fresh behavior, emotions, belief systems, mythologies, etc.).

Chaos results in meaning-laden perception, a gestalt, that is unique to each individual.

Chaos is implicated in human perception as a multi-sensory phenomenon. The controlled chaos of the brain is more than an accidental by-product, like “putting your brain in neutral.”

Indeed, it may be the chief property that makes the brain different from an artificial-intelligence machine. One profound advantage chaos may confer on the brain is that chaotic systems continually produce novel activity patterns“.

Research may reveal that assessments of personality or a personality trait over time generate data that leads to a fractal correlation dimension. Such evidence would confirm that personality or that a particular personality trait may be desribed as a strange attractor of associated behavior”.

In the article they apply Chaos Theory and Fractals to the Human. What they are showing is that Self-Reference (A Fractal) is the Result of a Chaotic Process.

Out of the Chaos of Creativity a Repeating Pattern Emerges.

Chaos is not total randomness, but implies an implicate, “hidden”, or occult order within the nature of reality“.

point attractorThe Repeating Patterns looks Chaotic but when we find the Right Fractal behind the Order in Chaos we can know where the Path is Moving to (the Attractor).

To dig deeper into Chaos we have to dig deep into mathematics. We have to dig so deep that the language becomes almost incomprehensible but let us have a try.

A citation out of More than Synchrony: Chaoticity may be necessary for conscious brain functioning (Juergen Fell ea): “Indeed, estimation of nonlinear EEG characteristicslike dimensions and Lyapunov exponents revealed a pronounced decrease not only of complexity, but also of chaoticity during unconscious states like deep sleep”

 ” Sufficient dynamical complexity of brain activity, seems to be one more necessary condition.

Without chaoticity our brains might be unable to switch immediately between different oscillatory patterns and thereby different modes of operation”. 

A citation out of Some Thoughts on Time, Quantum Mechanics, Geometry and Free Will (Linas VEPSTAS) : “The strange thing for us is, we live in this hyperbolic Minkowski space, but we don’t seem to notice much positive Lyapunov exponents in our lives.

 Other than that nature all around us seems to be fractal and self-similar … other than that, we don’t notice.

I sometimes wonder if the quantum-entanglement problems of quantum-mechanics are really some manifestation of life in Minkowski space, some deep connection we haven’t noticed just yet“.

The Lyapunov exponents determine the predictability of a dynamical (Chaotic) system. When we don’t seem to notice much positive Lyapunov exponents in our life we experience life as a “random” process. The main reason that we don’t notice the self-reference is that we are stuck with our own attractor. We are repeating our own patterns all the time and are unable to resonate with the pattern of the Universe.

When the exponents decrease Life become simple again. This happens when we dream. So dreaming is a way “to make things simple“, to “understand what is happening“.

Minkowski space is a four-dimensional space. It was used by Einstein to describe space/time (The Chronotope).

When Space/Time contains positive Lyaponov exponents Space/Time is highly predictable.

This happens when Quantum Entanglement takes place.

cycle attractorQuantum Entanglement (QE) is the Union of seperate Parts into a Whole. QE makes it possible to be in Two or more States at the same moment.

It even makes it possible to Unite with Everything.

QE gives us the feeling that there is something that is connecting us to an Entity on a Higher Level.

When QE happens we are in the AND-state and experience a feeling of Harmony.

When we are not in the AND-state we are in the OR-state.

In this OR-state there are Four “Fractal Attractors” possible. They also give us a “feeling”.

We feel we are Stuck” (Point-Attractor) or

we feel we are “Going Round in Circles (Cycle-attractor)” or

Spirals (Torus-Attractor).

The most Attractive Fractal Attractor, the AND-attractor gives us the feeling that “We are in the Flow (Tao) or in The Now (Chaos)”.

Our Universe is “looking” for Quantum Entanglement. This state of Harmony cannot be perceived in our current 4D-Reality (The Minkowski-Space).

According to Tiller our Unconsciousness connects to another 4D-Reality that is highly related to what the Scientists call Dark Matter.

Out of this Reality The Force of Life (Chi, Prana) is moving into our Body.

If we look at the current state of our World it does not feel as a Strange Feeling that we have to connect to the Force of Life again.

Connecting to this Force is Difficult for us (and me).

Strange attractorThe knowlegde about it is hidden in old “Mysteries” and “Magical practices“.

Many people don’t believe in this or even don’t want to believe in it because it is connected to the Dark Forces.

Strangely enough the Force is also connected to Dark Matter.

It seems we need to enter the Dark to find the Light.

We have to fight and embrace our Dark Shadow (Jung).

 

 

LINKS

About Chaostheory & Evolution

About Chaostheory & Psychology

 

 

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.

About InterPersonal Theory

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

interpersonal

World Views are Perspectives on the Inner and Outer World. “Every man has his own Universe” so there are so many Perspectives as there are (and were) Humans. To communicate we have to decrease the Amounts of Perspectives.

Will McWhinney has found a model that covers most of the perspectives of the Human Being. It contains Four Perspectives circulating around a Center. His model is Self-Referencial (A Fractal) which means that the Model can be Applied on its Self.

It can be expanded to the Infinite Perspectives of all the Humans on Earth by detecting the Right Enfolding of the Fractal Pattern.

When I was working with Will McWhinney on his theory of World-Views I found many theories that could be mapped to his Theory of Change. The World Views proved to be a generic explanation of almost everything. This was a big surprise.

One of the sciences that interested me the most was Psychology. I studied Philosophy, Psychology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics and kept my knowledge of these fields always Up-To-Date.

My main problem with Psychology was the conceptual  mess it was in. I read book after book and all the time new ideas came up. It was fascinating but also frustrating.

Suddenly I found a book that helped me to see everything from one Perspective. The book contained a Model and I was able to Map the model to the World Views with ease.

The book I found was Horowitz, L. M. (2004). Interpersonal foundations of psychopathology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Interpersonal theory looks at the world from the perspective of Relationships.

According to attachment theorists, the infant’s attachment system keeps the child close and connected to the adult, thereby increasing the child’s chances of surviving infancy. As children come to feel sufficiently secure in their attachment to the caretaker, they separate from the caretaker and explore the environment, a first step toward autonomy.

When a person initiates an interaction with another person, the other assumes that the behavior is motivated (purposeful). When an important goal is satisfied, the person experiences a positive emotion; when it is frustrated, the person experiences a negative emotion like sadness or anger.

Internal motivations can be conflicting. This can result in serious mental disorders. The interpretation of the motivation of the other is often ambiguous leading to misunderstanding and even conflict. To resolve these potential conflicts an open dialogue is necessary where people make their motives clear to others (and themselves).

Motivational constructs (desire, motive and personal striving) can be conceptualized in two very broad, abstract categories, namely, Communion and Agency.

A Communal motive is a motive for a connection with one or more others; it is a motive to participate in a larger union with other people. A communional motive can range from Indifferent (no connection) to Love (a complete connection).

An Agentic motive, on the other hand, emphasizes the self as a distinct unit; it focuses on the person’s own individual influence, control, or mastery over the self, other people, and the environment. An agentic motive can range from Dominating to Submitting.

Interpersonal behavior can be described with the so-called Interpersonal Circumplex (a Cycle). This is a widely tested model that predicts the reaction of a person to a Motive (a combination of agency and communion) of the other.

The motivational behavior of a person is more or less determined in his youth. People that are extreme in the connection/agency-matrix (e.g. indifferent to the other, too dependent, very dominant or submissive) are unable to work in a collaborative manner. They are Psychopathic.

Interpersonal Theory is very helpful to understand relationships.

interpersonal2

The Interpersonal Circumplex or Interpersonal Cycle suggests that there are Infinite Types of Relationships. Some of them are named (Friendly, Dominant) most of them are not named.

When two persons are reacting according to the complementary expected behavior of the Other they feel “Related“. A highly dominant partner, a Master, needs a highly submissive partner, a Slave,  and vice versa.

By using the World Views Interpersonal Theory can be easily mapped to other Psychological Subjects like Learning. When we use the method of Mapping it can also be transformed to Art, History, Ecology, Mathematics and Physics.

To use the Four World Views (Unity, Sensory, Social and Mythic) we have to Map the Matrix of Horowitz to the Matrix of McWhinney .

Sensory people (Experts) are disconnected from their Self (Ego-istic). They are focused on the Senses (Facts).  An addiction to the Senses is called Schizophrenic.

Mythic (Artist)  is a Union with the Self. Mythic people are highly Imaginative and Creative. An addiction to the imagination is called Histrionic.

Social is a Union with Others. Social people are highly Emotional and influenced by the Other (Status). An addiction to the emotions is called Dependent.

A Unity (Master) is disconnected from the Self. Unity people want to control the Future. They are planning and expecting. An addiction to Control is called Paranoid.

Consciousness, the Observer,  the Center of the Cycle, is a Balance between Communion and Agency. People that are Constantly Out of Balance are called Neurotic.

What is Happening?

Paths of Change explains why Life is a Paradox.  It is a Paradox because the World Views are completely independent. They are valid ways of Looking At the World.

Normal” people combine Two or more Worldviews and are able to Switch from one View to the Other but they always look with one View at the Time.

Normal” people are mentally ill but we don’t see their illness because they are Switching all the time.

The Switch is called a Relation in Interpersonal Theory.  It connects two parts that are disconnect and will always be disconnect.

Is there a Structure behind this Structure?

Behind the Four WorldViews lies a much simpler structure. This structure contains just Two Views, the View of Control and the View of Desire.

Control is the proces of Compression. Control makes thing simple and essential. It brings everything back to the Void, the state of Infinite Potential.

Desire is the process of Expansion. Expansion makes things more complex. It generates an infinite amount of new combinations. It moves away from the Infinite Potential.

Control and Desire are Complementary Powers. When they join they are annihilated. If this happens They combine and become the Void again.

Control and Desire are constantly moving around the Void to A-Void that they move back to the state of the No-Thing, that is Every Thing.

The Four Views are nothing but Four Combinations of the Two that are Avoiding the Void which is the Center, the Connector, the Relation, the Switch, between Every Thing.

LINKS

A website about Interpersonal Theory

About the Interpersonal Circumplex

About Learning and Interpersonal Theory

About WorldViews

About the Void and The Logic of Creation

About Wordviews and the History of Literature

About WorldViews and the Cycle of History

About Mapping

About Pan and Anarchy

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

panIn 2002 the book Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, (Gunderson, L.H and Holling, C.S (eds)) was published. To my knowledge this is one of the most important books of our time.

Panarchy is the first theory that is able to explain the behavior of complex ecosystems. It is an integration of many former theories in economics, biology, ecology, sociology, mathematics, psychology and other sciences.

Have a look at RA to learn more about Panarchy. You will be surprised by the amount of interesting articles and insights.

In this blog I will use long citations: “The world has not collapsed because natural ecological systems have the resilience to experience wide change and still maintain the integrity of their functions.

The world also has not collapsed because of human behavior and creativity. People do learn, however spasmodically. Change and extreme transformations have been part of humanity’s evolutionary history. People’s adaptive capabilities, have made it possible not only to persist passively, but to create and innovate when limits are reached.

The controls determined by each set of biotic structuring processes within terrestrial ecosystems are remarkably robust and the behaviors resulting are remarkably resilient. That robustness comes from functional diversity and spatial heterogeneity in the species and physical variables that mediate the key processes that structure and organize patterns in ecosystems and landscapes.

The stability domains that define the type of system (e.g. forest, savanna, grassland, or shrub steppe) are so large that external disturbances have to be extreme and/or persistent before the system flips irreversibly into another state. Except under extreme climatic conditions, Mother Nature is not basically in a state of delicate balance. If She were, the world would indeed have collapsed long ago“.

panarchy model

The books starts with a description of the five metaphors or world-views that are used to look at Nature. These metaphors are the same metaphors Bhaktin uses to describe the proces of the evolving narratives in human culture.

The World-Views are connected to Mathematical Models that are commonly used in Science to explain an Ecology. The authors show that every model has its consequences. The most beautifull thing they show is that these models are not wrong. They are needed to keep the Cycle of the Ecology running.

panarchy levels

What they also show is that a Panarchy-cycle uses a memory when the Ecology is collapsing. Somewhere a small area is preserved. It contains the “seeds” of the new Cycle. We have to look back when we want to move foreward. We also have to look back to learn feom our mistakes. “People do learn, however spasmodically”. Learning is not copying. We have “to create and innovate when limits are reached”.

Somewhere in History the Seeds of the New Cycle are available. A beautifull example is the Sacred Groove. It is a place where very old trees are preserved by the local community. They need the trees to aquire medicine to cure deseases or snake bites.

Because the new Cycle has to be based on Harmony I feel you have to have a look at China. China is not only the Economy Power that is able to destroy the World when it moves on the way it moves. It is also the Culture where Harmony was the basic Concept. When you read my blogs you will see that I use many Chinese Concepts to explain.

The theory is a Self-Referencial (“Fractal“) theory and uses the Moebius Ring as the central concept. You understand why I was flabbergasted when I found Panarchy on the Internet.

The last thing that made me very enthousiastic is the name Panarchy. It is based on the name of the Old Greek God of Joy and Nature, Pan.

Pan was “Goat-legged, enthusiastic, a lover of ectacy, dancing among the stars, weaving the harmony of the Cosmos into playfull song” (The Orphic Hymns). The myth was told in Early Creece that he had left the Earth. It is of a high urgency that we ask Pan to come back. We can only save Mother Nature when we become enthusiastic again to weave Harmony all over the World.

Pan is also the God of Dance and Rythm:

Complex natural systems work in rhythms – with a front-loop phase of slow, incremental growth and accumulation, and a back-loop stage of rapid reorganisation leading to renewal, to, collapse. The front-loop phase is more predictable with higher degrees of certainty.

In both the natural and social worlds, it maximises production and accumulation. The consequence of this is an accumulation and concentration of wealth, but also emergence of greater vulnerability, due to the increasing number of interconnections that link that wealth, and those that bear it, in efforts to sustain it.

Little time and few resources are available for alternatives that explore different visions or opportunities. Emergence and novelty is inhibited. This growing connectedness leads to increasing rigidity in its goal to retain control, and the system becomes ever more tightly bound together. This reduces resilience and the capacity of the system to absorb change, thus increasing the threat of abrupt change.

We can recognise the needs for change but become politically stifled in our capacity to act effectively. Wealth and broadening wealth accumulated to lead to our present vulnerability on a world stage.

We are entering the back loop of re-organisation that entails the collapse of accumulated connections, the release of bound up knowledge and capital. But it also opens a creative potential and the opportunity for ‘creative destruction“.

The World and Our Society is now in the non-predictable back-loop stage of rapid reorganisation, creative destruction, collaps and renewal. It will soon jump back to an early stage where the Seeds of the New Cycle of Creation are Stored.

Because the Long Term Cycle of Earth is now Collapsing we have to look back for a long time to find the Seeds. The most impressive collaps of our World happened when the Great Flood appeared at 3117 BC.

Strangely enough 3117 BC is the start of the Mayan Calendar and the Indian Kali Yuga (“The Dark Age“).  Before that time the Humans lived in the Green Sahara also called Paradise. At that time Pan, the God of Nature,  was still there.

Do we have to move back to Paradise to Start All over Again?

LINKS

About Panarchy

About the Great Flood

About Social Cohesion

About World View

About Chinese Concepts

About the Fractal Universe

About the Green Sahara and Paradise

The Wordwide Carnival: A Short Introduction into the World of Mikhail Bakhtin

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

The work of Bakhtin was disclosed to me by Will McWhinney. He used Bahktin in one of the many versions of his never published book Grammars of Engagement.

The discovery of Bahktin started with a book about Bahktin by Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson. Later I also read many other books and articles like “The dialogical imagination”, “Towards a philosophy of the act”, “Discourse in the Novel”, “Rabelais and His World”, “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” and “Speech Genres and Other Late Essays”.

Bahktin invented the term Chronotope, “The place where the knots of narrative are tied” or “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature“. Currently we use the term Content or Media for Literature.

A Chronotope is a Topological Concept

knotSpace (Place, Location) and Time (the narrative) are connected by a Knot. A knot is a complicated twist in a rope. The twist is needed when you want to close a system in itself. The simplest topological structure that visualizes twisted space/time is the Moebius Ring.

The Chronotope is the Centre out of which every narrative that we are able to tell is enfolding and unfolding. It produces narratives and absorbs narratives. Bahktin places Folk-Lore, Myth, the Language of the People, in the Centre.

Every narrative contains a twist, a moment where the expansion of the beginning turns to the contraction of the end. It is the moment where the narrative is balanced. The reader holds his breath. It is also the moment where the narrative is aware of itself. It observes the whole.

Sometimes the twist is in the end. You know “who done it”. Sometimes the narrative starts with the twist. There are even narratives without a twist. You know all the time what will happen.

Scientists don’t realize that a scientific article is also a narrative. They use citation to prove they are telling a true story. Funny enough scientific citation has created the Internet. A hypertext is nothing but a citation-structure.

Old narratives produce new narratives. This is always accomplished by Citation. “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language. . . but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own“”. The cursive sentence between brackets is a citation of Bahktin.

New narratives also oppose old narratives. They are Dialogic. “The entire life of language, in any area of its use . . . is permeated with dialogic relationships“.

Dialogues are converging (Socratic dialogue), diverging and conflicting (Menippian Dialogue) or one sided (the Magisterial Monologue). “Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth

The Centre generates new narratives all the time. They are a mix of the old and the new. The centre is the Centrifugal Force and this force is powered by Contradiction.

Roller_CoasterThe Institutions, the Ruling Power, are constantly trying to standardize (the Centripetal force). They formulate rules and try to transform the dialogue into a monologue.

The centripetal and the centrifugal force create a huge tension. This tension moves the Wheel of Creation. The wheel always moves through the stages of Order and Chaos. In the middle of the Tornado of Creation is the Centre, the Chronotope. In the centre you will always find rest and inspiration.

The monologue (the magisterial dialogue) is the dialogue of the Magister, the scientist, the manager, the judge, the physician and the teacher. They use science, the law, books or other Magisters to enforce their power. By formulating rules they try to destroy the creative centre (the context).

A context is potentially unfinalized; a code must be finalized. A code is only a technical means of transmitting information; it does not have cognitive, creative significance. Code is deliberately killed context“.

At this moment the Centripetal force is implemented in the Search Engine. Narratives are found by typing codes. This makes it very difficult to find a context. Companies like Google are manipulating the coding. They are paid by the Centripetal Force of the Commercial Companies.

The centrifugal force is never at rest. It always generates new alternatives. The creation of new literature is not bounded by rules. Every time a new structure is defined the Centre starts to play with the rules and generates a new combination. The Centre is not only combining rules it even invents new rules. The Centre is the inventor of new Games to Play.

Producing literature is a process of spiralling out. It follows a cycle but at a certain point in time a new Centre appears and the Cycle starts a new process of Folk-lore. The new centre is always connected to the old Centre. New myths and new fairy tales are created that are a representation of the Spirit of the Time.

Every cycle is governed by a Clock. The periodicity of the Clocks is determinated by the number five. It runs at a frequency of 1250, 250, 50, 10 or 2 years. There are frequencies that are moving faster (the Atom) and much slower (the Universe).

Bahktin has developed a very interesting theory about the development of the Chronotopes in history.

I will tell the Tale of the Chronotopes of Bahktin on the level of the Cycle of Culture (1250 years, 250 years per stage).

HunsBetween 450 and 700 the Roman Empire is destroyed by the Huns. It is the time of the Great Deportations. People out of Asia move to the West. They are the ancestors of the Ostrogotes, the Visigotes, the Franks, the Gauls, the Germans and the Celts. 1250 years later they are integrated in what we now call Europe. Between 700 and 2000 the Europeans explore and conquer the World.

Around 1200 the new powers have created many Kingdoms and have organized the Crusades to conquer the Holy Land. To show their power they build the Cathedrals. The Cathedrals are the instrument of the Education of the Masses. The old folk-lore is transformed to the new of the Christian Faith. The old-folklore is not destroyed. Many symbols and important events are preserved. They are cited. The transition of the Sun in Winter is transformed in Christmas. The new apostles are connected to the old animals of the old Wheel of Fortune.

Tristan IsoldeBetween 1200 and 1450 the Chronotope of the Greek Romance (Tristan and Isolde, Arthur and The Grail) appears. It is the Chronotope of Being and Destiny. “There are a lot of suddenly’s”. Everything happens. The actor in this Chronotope is without identity. He is tested by destiny. When he has passed the test he is not changed. There is no time and space. Time (“adventure-time”) is reversible. The actors are public figures and space is public space. In the narratives we are able to see and hear everything.

We are in the Middle Ages. In the outside world destiny is also playing its evil game. Western Civilization is almost destroyed by the plague, feminine and wars between the Kingdoms. Even the Christian Empire of Rome is divided by a schism (Byzantium). At the end only a few Kingdoms survive. These Kings become Emperors. They represent God on Earth.

copernicusThis (1450-1700) is the time of the Chronotope of the Adventure. It is the Chronotope of Becoming. The identity of the actor is transforming. He is responsible for his own actions. Life is full of turning points (twists). The actor wants to take control of the outside world. Space becomes “private space”.

To give the reader insight in what is happening the Observer is introduced. He is a voyeur, a prostitute, a rambler, a rover, a tramp, a spy, a servant or an animal. The observer is not influencing the story at all. He is just watching. Objectivity is also introduced in space (court).

In the outside world we are in the Time of Renaissance (the Era of Discovery). It is the time of new inventions in Science (Copernicus), Art (Leonard Da Vinci) and Religion (Reformation, Luther, Calvin). The Bible is translated in the language of the people. It is also the time of the Great Explorations (Columbus) of the world outside the West. Western Culture starts his quest to control Nature and eventually the World.

munchThe next Chronotope is the Biography (1700-1950), the praise of a public figure who has accomplished something in life. We are moving from the outside world to the inside world of the actor.

Inner space is closed. “This offers a new relationship to one’s own self, one’s own particular “I”- with no witnesses, without any concessions to the voice of a “third person“.

Outside events affect the inner world. The actor is not showing this. In the outside world the actor is judged by his actions and not by his inner space (his essence). “The essence of man is realized not by his condition but by his activity“.

To give the reader a view on the inner space the outsider is introduced. His outside actions are governed by a distorted inner space. The outsider (the fool, the eccentric) acts as a reference.

The actor is a pretender. He is constantly in doubt, grumbling, cynical and sarcastic. He is also passive. He is watching from a distance. Everything is Relative (Bahktin was a fan of Einstein). The only time when the actor is able to show himself is at the carnival. During this short period he is allowed to choose his own mask.

This is the time of the Industrial Revolution. It is the era of mechanization. It starts with the invention of the Mill and the Factory. It ends with the mechanized Consumer watching Television.

star warsStarting in 1950 we are again in the phase of Folk-lore. Western Civilization is moving to a new Centre, Earth.

New myths and legends will be created. They have to be based on all the tales, myths and legends that are available on Earth. Some of them will be a citation. Others will be an opposition.

All kinds of dialogues will take and have to take place. We will experience many conflicts (Mennipian Dialogue). We will also have to listen and ask questions to understand the other cultures (Socratic Dialogue). We have to stop our Western Magisterial Monologue.

In the beginning it will be a Heteroglossia (a many voicedness), a very complicated Knot we have to untie. When we have found the tread we will be able to weave a new web of narratives that will start the phase of the Greek Romance again.

Between now and 2100 “We must make the new by our own effort”.“We have to face problems of reality and human potential, problems of freedom and necessity, and the problem of creative initiative“. We have to become persons “who emerge along with the world and reflect the historical emergence of the world itself”.

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding — in time, in space, in culture. . . . Our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others

We have to write our own Novel. “There is no causality in novels, no genesis, no explanations based on the past, on the influences of the environment or of upbringing and so forth. Every act a character commits is in the present, and in this sense is not predetermined”.

We have to act without hesitation and leave history behind. There is no experience we can reuse. The future is unfinalized (open).

The Magisters are not able to tell us what to do. They are out of tricks. We have to put off our own masks and take responsibility for what we are doing. “There is no alibi for being”. We have to stop pretending and use citations of others to prove we are right.

carnival of fools

We are now part of the Worldwide Carnival of Fools. Choose your mask out of the many masks that are available all over the world. Listen to the stories of other cultures and be surprised about the beauty and the experience they are containing. Give the Fools and the Eccentrics, the Outsiders, a chance to help you.

Laugh.

It will be fun.

I want to close with a citation of Paul Feyerabend (Killing Time (1995)): “People, intellectuals especially, seem unable to be content with a little more freedom, a little more happiness, a little more light. Perceiving a small advantage, they seize it, circumscribe it, nail it down, and in this way prepare a New Age of ignorance, darkness and slavery. It is rather surprising that there are still people who want to help others for personal reasons, because they are kindhearted and because they have not been intimidated by principles. It is even more surprising that some of the people can work in institutions despite the greed, the incompetence, the power struggles that seem to surround the noblest cause.”

Do you want to know more about Feyerabend read The Act of Creation: About Fusion and Con-fusion

LINKS

About the Cathedrals

About the Fool in African Myths

About Fools, Pyramids and Bubbles

Why Fools always Lose

About Very Long Cycles

About the Cycle of Culture

About Mapping

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Many people think I am a very intelligent person. I am able to solve very complex problems in a very short time. In reality I am a normal person. I use a trick. The trick is called Mapping.

I map a complex unknown domain to a well known simple domain. I solve the problem in the well know domain and map the solution back to the unknown domain. When I do that the unknown domain becomes simple again.

The well-known domain I use are the Seasons of The Year. People don’t believe the Seasons are a representation of the world we live in.

About a year ago I discovered the reason.

Everybody in the West believes the theory of reasoning of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. The theory of Aristotle is called causal reasoning.

I use causal reasoning when I am writing this article. I need causal reasoning to convince you. The only way to convince Western people is to use causal reasoning.

What I will show you is that causal reasoning creates many problems that are unsolvable. To solve these problems you have to move to another way of reasoning. What Western people don’t want to accept is that there are other and more effective ways to reason. The other way to reason was used before Aristotle was born.

This approach is more than 2000 years old. It originated in the Middle East (China & Persia). Western people don’t accept this. They are trained to believe that the people that used these “more advanced” approaches were stupid. They believe “The West is the Best” in everything.

They also believe that when we go back in history we see a down-ward spiral of knowledge. Western civilisation is always “Going UP”. We will become better and better and better until infinity.

What they don’t see is that Causal Reasoning creates a big problem.

When you believe everything has a cause you start to look for the cause of the cause and when you start to look for the cause of the cause you never stop looking for the next cause.

Because you don’t have infinite time to look for the infinite chain of causes you have to find a solution. The solution is named “Creation”.

Somewhere there is a beginning and in the beginning something or somebody is creating “Something out of Nothing”. When you are religious you name the creator God. When you are not religious you name the first cause The Big Bang.

After you have named the creator you stop wondering what “creation out of nothing” really is. You force yourself to believe. You force yourself to believe the Church or you force yourself to believe Science. When you believe the Church you have to believe in a Supreme Power.

When you believe in Science You have to believe Others. Most people believe the Others of Science are very intelligent. If you believe these others are very intelligent you have to believe there are also people that are not intelligent. We have named “not intelligent” “Stupid”.

The Belief that causal thinking is the only way to think does not only generate the idea that you are stupid. It also generated the idea that you are guilty of something. You are guilty of something when you are the cause of something that went wrong. When a human is doing something wrong it is named “Sin”.

When you believe in Sin and you believe in causal thinking you have to believe there is a Creator of Sin. The creator of Sin is named the Devil. Because God created everything you have to assume God also created the Devil. When you believe in a Supreme Power you don’t understand why a Supreme Power is not able to beat The Devil. Because you are “stupid” you stop wondering. You have to believe.

A “creation out of nothing” is a Miracle. When you believe in a Miracle you believe in Luck. You hope you will be lucky someday. When you are religious You don’t understand why God is helping the other and not You. To explain this You believe you are doing something wrong. You are stupid or sinful.

When you believe the intelligent people, you have to believe in the theory of probability. To improve your behaviour you start to collect data. You use statistical packages to find the pattern. This is not helping you at all because still some people are lucky and you are not. You are doing something wrong (you are stupid) or you do not believe in Him. You are sinful.

If you use causal reasoning you are able to find a solution. You have to assume that the beginning is the end. You have to close the causal chain in itself. When you close the chain the chain is transformed in a circle. If you do that you have moved to another way of thinking and the other way of thinking is “impossible”.

It creates a problem you cannot solve. In a Circle it is very difficult to find the beginning. Every point in a circle is a beginning. If you assume this point is the beginning it is also the ending. The causal solution is to assume that the circle is contracted into one point. Everything is one point. Everything is One.

This violates your Sensory perception. You observe Many Many Others. This is a contradiction and you stop this path of reasoning.

The “old cultures” have found a solution. They use the principle of unfolding and enfolding.

A Flower is an unfolding of One Seed. A Flower enfolds in Many Seeds. In Spring the Seeds grow into a Plant. In Summer the Plant produces Flowers and the Flowers produce Seeds. In Autumn the Seeds are covered by Earth and in Winter Earth protects the Seed.

What we observe with our Senses is a Cycle and the Cycle contains Stages. If we look around we see many Cycles and all of the Cycles contain the same stages.

If we look carefully we observe five stages. We observe the Four Seasons and a Fifth Season between Summer and Autumn. In other climate zones the fifth season is easy to experience. In the US it is called Indian Summer.

Before Aristotle the principle of unfolding based on a cycle divided in five stages was the most important theory to explain the world.

To explain the world every thing that happened was mapped to the Cycle of the Seasons.

The solar system, the universe, the body, the state, history and every else was governed by the same cycle. They are Wholes that are moving around Wholes that are moving around Wholes …..

They are The Same because every thing is moving through the Same Stages. They are also Different because they operate on a different Level.

Levels are a problem Western Civilization cannot handle. We believe in one level, the chain of cause and effect. We are constantly connecting different levels. Connecting different levels at the wrong connection point is really the main cause of the mess we are in.

The cycles on different levels are moving with a different periodicity (frequency). They act like waves. The Scientists of that time discovered that the frequencies were also related by a pattern of fives.

Thinking in waves is a way of thinking Western Civilization cannot handle. We think in particles that are colliding. Again this is a simple consequence of causal thinking.

Slow moving cycles are the unfolding of fast moving cycles. An unfolding cycle is a Spiral. Because everything is closed the Spiral had to be closed in itself. It is transformed into a Spiralling Spiral. The Spiralling Spiral is moving UP AND moving DOWN. This violates Western Thinking because we only believe in Spiralling UP. We don’t believe Western Civilization will disappear someday just like all the other civilizations before us.

We don’t believe the Spiralling Spiral works like a Clock. The cycles are moving in a highly predictable pattern. In the West we believe in statistics and statistics shows that every predictable pattern has its exceptions.

Every cycle is governed by a Clock. You are also governed by a Clock and if you don’t listen to your Clock you become ill. You get “out of rhythm”. Going “out of rhythm” is the main cause of all the Western diseases.

We really don’t believe Einstein. Everybody believes the Myth that he has failed. Many people don’t know that one of his pupils David Böhm found the solution. Einstein believed that “God is not throwing dice”. He also believed “God is a geometer”.

Although the new Psychics are showing that Einstein and Böhm were right and Niels Bohr (Quantum Mechanics) was wrong we are really afraid to believe this. It violates the foundation of Western Civilization.

We love the theory of Quantum Mechanics because it proves the world is a Miracle. People don’t understand Quantum Mechanics at all. Quantum Mechanics acts like a Religion and a Religion is based on the Mystery of “Creation out of Nothing”. Quantum Mechanics proves this is “really happening”. This gives us a good feeling. The foundation of Western Civilization is proved again.

We don’t want to believe that Civilizations rise and fall.

We also don’t want to believe is that long ago these civilizations were more advanced than our society.

What we really don’t want to believe is that they were destroyed because they fell into the same trap Western Civilization is falling. We don’t accept the lessons of history. We believe the old myths were fantasy stories. Just like the old civilizations we don’t see that we are now living in our own fantasy world. The fantasy of eternal youth and eternal life.

What we don’t want to believe is that the old civilizations even found a solution for this problem. The solution they found is not a material solution. They found out that the power of the human imagination is tremendous. When Western Science is proving this we don’t want to believe Western Science.

We are really very funny people! The solution for everything we want is round the corner and we don’t accept this solution.

Now I am able to explain my trick.

Step 1. Determine the level of observation. The level of observation is related to the periodicity of the cycle. An organization is often related to a yearly cycle.

Step 2. Determine the five stages in the cycle. Use the seasons. Observe carefully what every season mean to you.

If you want to reuse the knowledge of the scientists before Aristotle I advice you to study Chinese Philosophy. People with a mathematical interest have a look at Pythagoras or (better) Topology. People with a psychological interest read Jung, Will McWhinney or George Lakoff (!!). People with an interest in literature study Bahktin (!!). People with in interest in medicine study Acupuncture. People with an interest in Christian religion read the gospel of Thomas (The Essenes). People with an interest in Paintings have a look at Leonardo da Vinci. Physics look at Super String Theory and David Böhm (!!). Study Alchemy or the Zohar. Interesting philosophers are Erasmus and Schopenhauer. Lovers of music listen to Bach or John Cage. Cultures: Read Carlos Castaneda (!!). Study the Hopi’s, The Sufi’s, Zoroaster and The Mayas. Look at the Medicine Wheel. Study the old Cathedrals (Chartres!), Read Steiner, Blavatsky, Krisnamurti (a close friend of Bohm), Joseph Campbell (!) and Goethe. Read Poetry (!!). Last but not least Observe Nature.

Step 3. Connect the cycle to the cycle one level higher and the cycle one level lower. This shows the possible spiralling UP en the spiralling DOWN. The lower level of an Organization is called a Human. The higher level you could call a Value Chain (Cycle).

Step 4. Look for all the places where the Cycle is blocked or connected to the wrong level.

Step 5. Restore the Cycle and the Levels.

Step 6. Transform your observation in the language of the people that are paying you. This is the most important step. Carefully listen to the language. Everybody is talking in Seasons but we use many many words to say the same thing over and over again.

Step 7. Observe that most of them don’t follow your advice.

The reason? The solution is Too simple or/and Your clients believe in Luck or Destiny or/and They look for the Sinner and want to punish the Sinner or/and they Feel they are Guilty and Deny this or/and they want to use Statistics. If they do this they prove that the world is really very Complex.

Step 8. Try to explain them that they have fallen in the trap of causal reasoning. Tell them they are not Sinners or Stupid. Give them the feeling Life is meant to be a beautifull experience of the Whole.

Step 9. If they don’t follow your advide come back one cycle period later. The situation has surely increased in complexity. They need you again. Go to Step 1.

Do you want to read more about Cycles read the theory behind cycles (pdf). Sorry this document is written in the Dutch Language.

Do you want to know more about the Cycle in Litterature and Art?

Do want to know more about Reasoning and Logic?

Do want to know how Physics easily explains Acupuncture?

Why Psychiatrist are Unable to Cure their own Mental Disease

Monday, August 20th, 2007

psychiatry wardI have been involved with mental illness all my life.In my fathers family many people were mentally ill.

 

My grandmother was taken to a mental prison after the birth of her last child and staid there all her life. She died before I was born.

My aunt was sexually abused when she was young. My uncle was a simple friendly person who was only capable of taking care of animals and gardens.

He was really too friendly (not assertive). Many people took advantage of him. He ended his life in a mental prison where he was incapable of doing anything. His friends, the animals and the plants where left out of the prison because there was a shortage in specialists to “help him”.

 

The only thing he could do was sit, eat and worry. To stop his worrying he had to take pills. Many years later he died of a heart-attack. He never found the harmony nature could provide him with.

 

My father was a talent in handling people that were mentally disturbed. He understood what they were saying and what they needed. I have inherited his talent.

 

My father was born in 1909. Just like all his brothers he was a farmer. In 1940 he was taken prisoner by the Germans, escaped and found my mother far away from his home in a city called Leiden. I was born in 1951. I was their only child. His experiences in the War and Childhood had an influence on my childhood. He was never able to talk about it.

 

My father was never educated so he had to do dirty work. The dirty work generated a lot of stress. To find rest he created a garden. He trained me in his specialism. When he got old he could not work in his garden anymore. Just like his brother he became very depressed. He also died of a heart-attack. Many years later my mother died of Alzheimer.

All the time mental disturbed people appear in my life. They are diagnosed as paranoid, psychotic, schizophrenic, depressed, histrionic, autistic, dependent, Alzheimer, split personality, dissociation, ADHD and many other new terms. I am able to help some of them with my “para-normal” talent.

Later I found out that my grandmother was also gifted with the same talent. It was the main reason why she was put into the mental prison. At that time (1920) “para-normal” people were not liked. They were disturbing the System of Religion.

At the university I took many courses in psychology and philosophy. Psychology has been my main interests all my life.

I became befriended with very capable psychiatrists and psychologists and also with people that were also gifted with a special (para-normal?) talent to cure mental diseases

In this blog I use Self-Reference to show you what is happening in the Mental System. What I am writing about this System is applicable to all Systems. It is just an example.

 

In the current system you are officially mentally ill when a Mental Engineer decides you are mentally ill.

 

wardA specialist uses a questionnaire and out of the test comes a mental-illness-term, a procedure and medication how to treat the illness. Mental illness is standardized like many other areas in our society.

 

Standardization was invented by Winslow Taylor in the beginning of the 20th century. His invention created the factory and of course the computer. Standardization is possible when we look at the world trough the eye of the machine.

 

Mental illness is a defect in the control system of the machine. Somewhere there is a bug in the software of the mind. When we have detected and repaired the bug we are able to run the system again.

 

Another solution is to ReProgram the Operating System (Memory) itself with a new version or a completely new operation system. A very effective way to do this is Hypnosis.

 

The current theory about mental diseases has a lot in common with the Microsoft Operating System. It is very complex, contains a lot of bugs and the outside (the user-interface) is more important than the inside.

 

To become a Mental Engineer you have to be trained to acquire a certificate.

 

To get a certificate you need a certificate to enter the training. The process of certification acts like a filtering filter, a quality system. Only the perfect machines are allowed to leave the education factory. Its starts with many. In the end only a few survive.

 

This causes a shortage and a shortage creates a market. Mental engineers are highly paid like all the specialists that are able to move to the filtering filter.

 

To-earn-a-lot-of-money is the attractor of the educational factory. Parents that believe earning-a-lot-of-money is the most important thing in life push their children into the system and keep pushing until they are in the right production-line.

 

To help the System Banks and Governments are providing loans. This helps the System a lot because now the perfect machines have to stay in the System to be able to pay back their loans.

 

When you are a talent the theory is very different from what you feel you have to do, you become uncertain.

 

When you start to work in the System and you see that everybody is doing ‘it” you lose your “inner voice” (intuition).

 

Finally you are ‘one of them” telling others to do what the theory is telling you to do because “ everybody knows it works this way”.  The System is filtering out your talent and the talent of others.

 

A talent, a person being able to act without training, is most of the time not recognized in our society. When you are a specialized talent you are unable to get a certificate. You are not accepted by the System. Sadly enough some of them become mentally ill. When they go to the System for help they are programmed into a mental patient and they lose their “inner voice” too.

 

When you are a multi-talent you are able to move to the system with ease. Unfortunately multi-talents are scarce and equipped with a highly analytic mind. They don’t like the theoretical mess caused by the Microsoft Operating System Theory the Social Sciences is using.

 

When they stay in the System most of them are unable to change the Operating System into a simple system like UNIX. They are blocked by their colleagues. They don’t like to be shown wrong.

 

The last problem is that psychology is divided into many many separate specialisms (Word, Powerpoint…). The specialisms are related to other branches in science like religion, medicine, physics and mathematics.

 

They all use their own dialect and are therefore incapable to sustain a dialogue to become “One” system. This is also happening in Computing. There are thousands of computer languages that are unable to “talk” with the other.

 

On a higher level we see a very peculiar thing happening.

 

The System protects itself by leaving out everybody who is able to disturb The System.

 

psyTo put it in other words The System itself is mentally ill and according to its own terminology it is Paranoid. To cure the System we have to find out what helps a Paranoid to become “Normal” again.

 

To become mentally ill you have to go the specialist with a story and when the story convinces him you are ill.  The simplest way to become ill is that you (the Patient) want to be cured of something.

 

This something is a negative emotional feeling. You tell the specialist your sad story and if the story is convincing you are ill.

 

Funny enough the System is not going to a meta-Specialist to be cured. This is again an indication of the mental illness Paranoid. Paranoids want to control everybody and are unable to see what is happening. They use their theories to look at the world.

 

The only thing that “helps them” is a major event that shows them they are wrong. The System is only cured when it runs into a major crisis.

 

Funny enough the System is in major crisis but the only thing that is not happening is that the specialists are “feeling” this crisis. The only persons that are ‘feeling” the crisis are the patients and the patients are programmed into a machine. They obey the rules. Something more has to happen.

 

The specialist translates your negative feeling into a standardized term. This is sometimes very difficult because many emotional terms are not the main entrance to the standard.

 

There are many types of fear and combined with other issues you are given a different diagnoses and a different treatment. Fear is a simple emotional entrance and treating fear (a negative expectation of the Future) is really simple. Change your expectation and your fear is gone.

 

A paranoid “fears” change. So to change the System we have to change the positive expectations of the specialist about the Future. We have to show them that we are getting into a major crisis and they will also be troubled by the crisis.

 

One of the expectations we could show them is something the System believes in. It is called the Budget. We could show them that the amount of mental disturbed people will rise and rise and rise and at a certain point in time they will not be able to get the money to help everybody.

 

This is happening but again the System has already found a solution. The solution is “not helping everybody”. Not helping everybody is called a “waiting-list” and the length of waiting list is increasing.

 

To solve this problem the System has created a new specialist to tell the people that they have to wait. These specialists guide the gate of the system. They are called Gate-Keepers.

 

Sometimes they have to use violence to keep the patients out. In this case the Gate-Keepers employ other specialists called Security people. The Security-business is exploding because many Systems are in a State of War.

 

They even have invented a very special type of mental ilness that is helping the Security Business to increase their Business called Terrorist. This proves again the System is Paranoid. When a paranoid is threatened he reacts with violence.

 

When we react with violence the system will not change. The System has found the final prove of its own theory. Paranoid people are always afraid of somebody that will kill them.

 

Their ultimate fear is the fear of death. When they are confronted with this fear they get totally “out-of-control”. They are insane.

 

The Mental System is preventing with every thing it is doing to become Insane.

 

MunchScreamInsane is a state where all structure is gone. Insane is the ultimate state of Chaos. Insane is the state where the Conscious is gone and the Darkness of the Unconscious rules.

 

The Mental System is desperately preventing it will have to stay the rest of its life in its own Mental Prison. It is taking its own pills and treatments to prevent this.

 

Now the Darkness of the Unconsciousness is not at all dark. It generates the Light of Insight and Intuition. The Mental System is really afraid of its own intuition that is telling the System it is not working.

 

To keep the System running the System has to prevent there is time to reflect and to prevent this the System is generating a lot of demand. It is generating demand by “not-working”.

 

When the System is helping people to cure themselves with ease the demand will go down. When the demand goes down the Shortage will go down. When the Shortage goes down the Salaries will go down.

 

When the Salaries go down the Educational System will lose its attraction and when the Educational System goes down the only people that are able to solve the problem are talented people.

 

What I am showing you is something that is called the Cycle. It goes up and down.

 

autistAt this moment we are in the downfall of the factory-model that is striving to make everything the same. It is aimed at Equality.

 

The opposite, Uniqueness (Individuality), is rising. Uniqueness has its own mental disease called Autistic. An Autist wants to do “everything on its own”. An Autist is incapable of Cooperation.

 

What we have to prevent is that when a new System arises it will again fall in its own extreme mental trap. This happens when the people in the System are unaware of the movement of the Cycle.

 

They start as Innovators and use their Imagination. When they don’t look outside they become highly Conservative people. Extreme Conservative people are by definition Paranoid.

 

The only way to keep out of a very high Up and Very low Down (called a crisis) is to balance the Extremes.

 

 To balance the extremes we have to find a balance between the need to create a Future that is Predictable (Control), the need for the Human to be Unique, the need of the Poor and Helpless to find Solidarity (Soul) and the need to find New ways to solve New problems by using the Imagination (Spirit).

 

A cycle is balanced by the Centre. The Centre is the Heart of the Cycle. It uses Empathy, the Mirror of the Other to learn about the Self.

 

Let’s start by doing it ourselves again and use our own abilities to help the other. When we do this we are in the right State of the Cycle. We move with the Flow.

 

When you have a multi-talent or a specialized talent just do what you feel you have to do. It will work out fine.

 

Everybody is equipped with a Talent. You can easily find your talent when you feel a positive emotion when you are doing the thing “you are good at”. You are in the Flow.

 

You are “good at something” when others become enthusiastic (Spirit) and want to work with you (Soul) to create something Beautifull. You can also join others who generate this feeling of excitement with you.

 

To create Beauty is al that matters. Beauty is the process where Spirit and Soul are active. Beauty is not the result of a process. Beauty is created when you and others become the Process of Creation itself.

A Practical Approach to Create a Balanced Community

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

The current generation of programmers are doing what Edsger Wybe Dijkstra hoped not would happen. They are the cause of the mess we are in. They forgot to keep the balance between structure (Thinking) and meaning (Emotion).

The Managers of the Programmers are “out of tricks” and have become cynical. They don’t believe there is a way out. They are “muddling trough”, reacting on every major critical event with an impulsive re-action. It will be hard to convince them that there is a solution to their problems.

The major target are the Users within or the Customers of the companies. They feel very stressed and don’t have a clue why this is happening to them.

Their asset is that they Know How they are doing their job and they are able to Articulate What they are Doing. The only thing they don’t see is the Cycle. They are Part of a Whole without seeing it. This is normal.

When we ask the User what they are doing we give them a simple tool to paint a picture of the flow of their activities. If they have done this we generate the processes that are supporting them instantly. This will motivate them to go on.

In the next step we make a connection between Action and Meaning. We ask the user to define the meaning of the terms they are using. We could use Wiki. Wiki makes it possible to start a dialogue about the meaning.

This dialogue will create mutual understanding (Consensus) and in the end a Shared Convention, a mapping of meaning from person to person, culture (community, context) to culture (community, context). The next step is to transform Meaning into Structure.

The person that was an expert in the transformation of meaning to structure was Sjir Nijssen. He developed a method called NIAM. NIAM has generated many dialects called ORM, FORM, RIDDLE, FCO-IM and DEMO.

The basic idea of all these methods is to analyze human communication in terms of the sentences we speak and the commitments humans make to the each other.

NIAM takes out of a sentence the verbs (Action) and the nouns (Structure) and of course the numbers and creates a semantic model (the so called Universe of Discourse).

What Nijssen understood was that a computer is able to register Facts (reality we agree upon). The facts are stored in memory. If we all agree about the facts we can use them to start reasoning.

When we know what the user is doing and what he means we can move to other actors he has defined in his activity-diagram. We just perform the same process over and over again. Every time a new user (actor, role) is added we restart the dialogue about meaning.

At a certain point in this process of inquiry we will notice that the meaning in the context is stabilized. It has turned into a shared convention. What we also will notice is that a faint cycle (or a cycle in a cycle) becomes visible.

It will be full of strange loops and useless activities. Some people in the context will produce and others will just throw away what the others are producing. They don’t know because they don’t communicate on the level of their community.

This is the moment to start a new dialogue. The dialogue of Reflection (Why?). We are able to show to the actors in the community the whole. We call this tool a Monitor.

We will give them the opportunity to start a shared process of innovation (using the imagination). We can give them tools to Explore, to Design new activities and to Analyze the Facts (find patterns). We can even give them tools to Play with (games, simulator). All the time the Monitor will show them the state of their joint effort. I am certain the community will clean itself, get into balance, with joy.

In communities and organizations and of course society there are many stable invisible infrastructures. The visual activities of the users have to be connected to these layers. This has to be done by programmers. They have to define interfaces. User-Data is converted into messages that jump out of the layer when a human interference (mostly a decision) is really needed.

The consequences of this approach will be enormous. Many people will be out of work but they will be needed in the next step of Collective Innovation.

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