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CONTENTS
Issue 7
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Meditation Intentional
Community Humanure
 A young basketball player teaches the main character about the It had special effect for me, not only because it animated
so many of the ideas I have been covering in this project, but because
one of the talking heads, Dr. Joe Dispenza, actually asked for a sign
of what he his trying to bring into creation every morning when he gets
up. (He is trying to create his own reality rather than allow other forces
to do it for him.) I was reading the book, Presence (see below)
People
Involved with the WCP: Peter Senge has played a major role in the Worldview Change Project (WCP) and he isn’t even aware of it. His 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, was a worldwide best-seller. In it he expounded his theory of organizational learning. He argued that to effect true and positive change, organizations or teams had to develop five capacities: team learning, personal mastery, mental modeling, shared vision, and the fifth discipline was systems thinking. He noted how little good it was to have a vision if one could not understand a system enough to bring that vision into reality. Although I had already read John Sterman’s textbook on systems dynamics and thinking, Senge wrote his book for businesspeople, not systems dyanamics students, and thus was readily accessible. Soon thereafter, I took his approach to learning and applied it to training ecotour guides for a chapter I wrote in a book on Ecotourism Quality and Certification to be published this year by CABI Publishing (see the abstract). In a way it was one of the first significant writing products to come out of the research behind the WCP. Other works in the WCP archives include articles and interviews by Senge. One important idea of his that remains fixed in my mind is the notion that innovation usually comes from the frontline people in a company. They generate the new innovations, not business executives. But the diffusion of innovations of companies is often accomplished by informal connectors, people who can convene a meeting because people respect them and go because they want to go, not because they have to attend. Often when executives identify these people and then formalize their role, they lose the power, as people once again must attend. Executives then are not the innovators or the educators, rather they should have a system-wide perspective and set up the system so that this kind of learning and communication can take place. Adaptation and learning is ultimately the one comparative advantage a company has over another. In short, Senge has redefined leaders as people who promote group learning, not people who single-handedly make decisions to save the company (usually without regard to the systemic realities of how it functions anyway). Just recently I finished Senge’s latest book (co-written with C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers), Presence: Human Purpose and The Field of the Future (Society for Organizational Learning, 2004). Senge continues with his own personal transformation and takes a giant step into the spiritual realm, all the more giant in its appearance when one reflects that he is a business management consultant at MIT. The authors use a dialogue format to flesh out a process by which a person can become present in an emerging future. To do this requires first that a person suspend her normal way of seeing and thinking, to identify her own habits of thinking and her own mental models. Once she does this, she then redirects her attention and transforms her attention from focusing on fragments to wholes. (This part requires a complete critique of Western thinking going back, well, a long ways into the origins of reductionist thinking. This discussion reflects the systems thinking in Senge and company.) Then a person needs to let go of the fragmentary way of thinking and she will begin presencing, transforming herself into a part of a whole, being able to see beyond the physical form into the universal side of our being and feeling the emerging whole we want to create. We then envision what we want to create, crystallizing our intent to bring it into existence. To do this requires prototyping, which is a feedback-rich exploration that eventually leads to the institutionalization of the new reality. These different capacities are gateways through which one passes to reach the next step. The authors draw heavily on physics, Buddhism, and many other writings as they converse their way through this process. While some thinkers who have been working in spirituality matters for many years might think light of the book because it describes more or less what they know and write about from long ago, because it is written from a bastion of business (Senge works at MIT’s Sloan School of Management), it has a decidedly practical side to it as well and an ease of reading appropriate for most audiences willing and able to lay aside their habitual ways of thinking and doing through reacting, for a much deeper learning and personal transformation. The book has given me ideas about how to deal with the novel that will eventually come of the WCP, ideas about group learning and transformation necessary to recover the wisdom that a society bent on replacing skills with technology has lost.
Fecophobia or frigginfecophobia prevents most people in the West from re-connecting the cycle of poop-compost-agriculture-food-poop. Instead we develop expensive technology that most of the world cannot afford to deposit our feces in water (which no other land mammal does) to carry it away where it pollutes water, air, and spreads disease. What makes far more sense, Joseph Jenkins writes in his award winning (and very humorous) book, is to compost human feces as he has been doing for the past 20 years. He poo poos the misunderstandings about sanitation by explaining that a well kept compost pile designed to promote thermophilic bacteria (which can raise the pile temperature to over 140°F) and kill pathogens. Jenkins describes how to construct a simple sawdust toilet, a two-year rotational compost pile, and make great tomatoes at the same time. Once the reader gets past his own fecophobia (by sensing his own mental model of feces, of course!), the straightforward biology and simple design makes a lot of sense. He reiterates the main tenet of composting: if it smells or looks bad, cover it up until it doesn't. We underestimate the power of biofiltering of sawdust, leaves, etc. He explains the four ingredients of good composting: moisture, oxygen, temperature, and balanced diet of carbon and nitrogen (3 volumes of browns for every volume of greens, that easy).
Wendell Berry: “If I urinated into a pitcher of drinking water and then proceeded to quench my thirst from the pitcher, I would undoubtedly be considered crazy. If I invented an expensive technology to put my urine and feces into my drinking water, and then invented another expensive (and undependable) technology to make the same water fit to drink, I might be thought even crazier. It is not inconceivable that some psychiatrist would ask me knowingly why I wanted to mess up my drinking water in the first place.” |
The DVD comes out in march.
Peter Senge
Next issue: Diffusion of Innovations, Peter Forbes’ s “Lifting the Veil” |
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“Cosmopathy” is the pathology of worldviews, whereby a person suffers from competing worldviews or the need to change worldviews because the gap between the worldview’s beliefs and perceived reality cause a breakdown, a condition which the Worldview Change Project aims to help. Cosmopathy is distributed to those interested in the progress of the WCP. Your name can be added or deleted by submitting a request to the author.
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March 22, 2005
