I’m off for 21 days of rafting the Grand Canyon… and will resuming posts upon my return.
meanwhile, be well, and stay wild.
larry
taking a blog break
April 1, 2009 by Larry GloverJoseph Campbell on Wild Resiliency
March 30, 2009 by Larry Glover“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment—not discouragement—you will find the strength is there. Any disaster that you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”
— Joseph Campbell
Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?
March 10, 2009 by Larry GloverThe John Templeton Foundation, as part of their Supporting Science – Investing in the Big Questions explorations, hosted this question as the third in their series of conversations among leading scientists and scholars. The archive for other hosted questions is here, and currently includes these:
Does the universe have a purpose?
Will money solve Africa’s development problems?
Does the free market corrode moral character?
Here is a sampling of the initial responses to the question, Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?:
Yes, if by… — Steven Pinker
No, and yes. — Chistoph Cardinal Schonoborn
Absolutely not! — William D. Phillips
Not necessarily. — Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy
Of course not. — Mary Midgley
No. — Robert Sapolsky
No, but it should. — Christopher Hitchens
No. — Keith Ward
Yes. — Victor J. Stenger
No, not at all. — Jerome Groopman
It depends. — Michael Shermer
Of course not. — Kenneth R. Miller
No, but only if… — Stuart Kauffman
You can download pdfs, view debates, and request a copy of the booklet, Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?.
I have intended to post this link for some time; the current timing is prompted by the recent AP, March 9, 2009 story, More Americans Say They Have No Religion
Also, the post on this blog, Albert Einstein and God: A Scientist and His Worldview, continues to receive numerous hits and I wanted to make this resource available to interested parties.
Our worldviews are the glasses through which we perceive both who we are, and possible solutions to our challenges, and so a literacy in worldview thinking is critical to our wild resiliency.
The Institute of Noetic Sciences is forging into this territory and you can read of their efforts here, as well as access videos on our transforming worldviews: Developing Worldview Literacy
Applied Perceptual Agility: Part 1
March 4, 2009 by Larry GloverGeorge Phillips , an elderly man, from Meridian, Mississippi, was going up to bed, when his wife told him that he’d left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window. George opened the back door to go turn off the light, but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.
He phoned the police, who asked “Is someone in your house?”
He said “No,” but some people are breaking into my garden shed and stealing from me.
Then the police dispatcher said “All patrols are busy. You should lock your doors and an officer will be along when one is available.”
George said, “Okay.”
He hung up the phone and counted to 30.
Then he phoned the police again.
“Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people stealing things from my shed. Well, you don’t have to worry about them now because I just shot them.” and he hung up.
Within five minutes, six Police Cars, a SWAT Team, a Helicopter, two Fire Trucks, a Paramedic, and an Ambulance showed up at the Phillips’ residence, and caught the burglars red-handed.
One of the Policemen said to George, “I thought you said that you’d shot them!”
George said, “I thought you said there was nobody available!”
Note: This story seems to be making the rounds on the internet and I’ve no idea as to its origins. It does however humorously exemplify George’s ‘perceptual agility’: the ability to see circumstances from another perspective, and in this case, specifically from the perspective of other people as well.
It’s a great example of wild resiliency, if you will, examplifying the capacity to let go of a world view that no longer serves while adopting a new perspective that does.
Personality, Resiliency and Transformation Part 1
February 28, 2009 by Larry GloverEach of us are born with our own genetic predispositions for, shall we say for sweetness or sourness, for bitterness or tartness, for openness or closeness…. There are physical dimensions to these propensities just as there are leanings in our spirit or soul as well.
There are those who say each soul incarnates by volition and in order for the opportunity to learn particular lessons. We do this they say, perhaps the way a deer is attracted to a salt-lick in the forest, or seeks out other minerals stored by particular plants but ached for in their deer flesh.
Thinking about personality and resilience in this moment: perhaps some personality configurations are attracted to particular ‘fields of experience’ the way a deer is attracted to the salt-lick. It is to be nurtured in a particular way or to be challenged by certain life circumstances and lessons, again and again and again sometimes; until we integrate and incorporate that which our own self-configuration hungers for… we resiliently seek it out in gutters and church pews, in forest glades and in corporate board rooms, in the cars we buy and the relationships we host.
Acknowledging such ‘patterns of personality,’ a model or scale of five dimensions is now often used in psychological research and practice. These are::
1. Extroversion: This trait includes characteristics such as excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness, and high amounts of emotional expressiveness.
2. Agreeableness: This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other prosocial behaviors.
3. Conscientiousness: Common features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviors. Those high in conscientiousness tend to be organized and mindful of details.
4. Neuroticism: Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness.
5. Openness: This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight, and those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests.
Each of these traits exist on a continuum and most of us are capable of swings to their extremes given the right circumstance. Our own range of comfort however becomes what we perceive in others as their personality. I tend to think of this ‘personality’ or ’self’ as ‘our domesticity,’ the corral of the familiar, our ‘home range.’
Our wild resiliency often lives asleep until life circumstances call us out of this corral, or provokes us in some fashion to a deeper embracing of Life itself, a surrender perhaps to the mystery within and the one without as the same. From this alignment of Oneness, not only change but also transformation becomes possible. Take happiness, for example.
Pull ‘happiness’ out of the above amalgam of personality dimensions, just because there is a lot of current research and interest in this area of our personalities and lives:
“…while the genetic influence is strong, about 50 percent of the differences in people’s happiness in life can still be chalked up to a variety of external factors, such as relationships, health and careers. Research…finds that the happiest people have strong friendships, for example.” — Happiness is Partly Inherited/ Live Science</a
The good news in this dynamic and individual balance of personality is that we are left with significant room to swing ourselves toward the leanings of our disciplined choice: to the degree consciousness of choice awakens within us, to the degree we learn the skills of self-regulation and ’self-soothing,’ to the degree we follow the wild joy of our hearts…we increase our experience of purpose and meaning, of the flow of emergence in life, of happiness….
It was a reader’s recent request that I write something about Personality and resilience that led to the emergence of this post. I’m honored on the one hand that a reader would ask such, and the arena is sooooo large that… what can I write in a blog post that has significance?
My best contribution summation might be this: I’m learning to think of personality in much the same way as I think of ‘the self’ and of resiliency too. They are ‘field phenomena’ rather than objects, processes or ecosystems, landscapes, rather than rocks.
Rocks are in truth, however, processes as well; they will become soil again on their way to becoming rock again. Yet they have a kind of tangibility that we too often falsely ascribe to personality, which we also tend to perceive as our ’self’. And when we think of our self, our personality or our resilience as an object… we make rock-like objects of them; we be-come how it is we think of our selves.
Rumi articulates this well: (acknowledgments to Angeles Arrien for this)
If I see you
I will laugh out loud (with delight)
or fall silent (because I have been so deeply touched)
or explode into a thousand pieces
( because I have been so inspired, and elated and empowered)
and if I don’t see you
I will be caught in the cement
and stone of my own prison
We transform ourselves and support the transformation of each other as we are willing to risk seeing the wonder and beauty and mystery of who we each truly are: the cosmos awakening into itself. Our personalities are but the characters or ramets through which this awakening yearns for its wholeness. They give our deep Self a field in which to play the games of stasis, change, adaptation, balance and transformation.
Part 2 will be a more personal look at this theme of Personality, Resiliency and Transformation.
Resilience poem, “Optimism” by Jane Hirshfield
February 25, 2009 by Larry GloverMore and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and
over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the
light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs—
all this resinous, unretractable earth.
“Optimism” by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt. © Harper Collins, 2002.
You can listen to Garrison Keiller read the poem at the February 24 archive of NPRs Writer’s Almanac, in honor of Jane Hirshfield’s birthday. Here is the direct link to the audio; the poem is at the end.
Thanks to friend and colleague David Markwardt for calling my attention to this poem.
Jane Hirshfield:” born in New York City (1953). When she was in first grade, she wrote, “I want to be a writer when I grow up.” She went to Princeton, worked on a farm for a year, and then spent the next few years studying Buddhism at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in northern California. She didn’t write at all while she was there, almost eight years, but since then she has published many books of poetry, including Of Gravity & Angels (1988), Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), and After (2006).”
Resiliency and Business Schools and Recession 101
February 23, 2009 by Larry Glover…Western civilization must withdraw from its efforts at dominion over the Earth. This will be one of the most severe disciplines in the future, for the Western addiction to economic dominance is even more powerful than the drive toward political dominance. — Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future.
It is interesting to compare these words from Thomas Berry, essentially on the resilience of Western economic dominance, with these on social systems / ecological resilience from the book, Panarchy: Understanding Transformation in Human and Natural systems.
“For a time, at least, the Soviet Union was an immensely resilient ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’…. Its very resilience preserved a maladaptive system. What this suggests for social systems, as well as ecological ones, is that resilience is not an ideal in itself… Resilience can be the enemy of adaptive change…. (Emphasis added)
The challenge, rather, is to conserve the ability to adapt to change, to be able to respond in a flexible way to uncertainty and surprises. And even to create the kind of surprises that open opportunity.”
These two frames on resilience, the first from a philosopher and the later from the ecological reference book on resilience, are worth keeping in mind when reading a recent Wall Street Journal article on the rise in attention being given to resilience in business schools.
Recession 101: Courses for a Crisis – WSJ.com: “Addressing prolonged uncertainty is another hot topic. Leading a Resilient Organization, a new course being offered at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School next fall aims to help participants analyze their own organization, as well as develop a culture of leaders in a challenging environment. Kathy Pearson, a Wharton adjunct operations professor, has been involved with executive education at the school for 12 years. She says the demand for courses like this is unprecedented. ‘What’s different now is that companies are absolutely failing,’ she says.” (Emphasis added)
This failing of business and of the economy as we know it offers us a great opportunity: it is to recognize that not all resilience is created equal. Business and Life itself now invite us to seek the resilience that is not simply reiterative, not simply repetitive of a thinking that sustains an ultimately unsustainable economy.
The real questions and opportunities now have to do with how we move forward toward thrivability in meaningful and substantive ways; there is no going back. Moving toward a ‘green economy’, toward triple bottom line accounting…these are vital and generally recognized forward moving steps, even though not yet widely implemented. Business schools can teach these ‘models of resilience’ from textbooks….
What is more vital and challenging for the schools and businesses to address is resilience from the perspective of Rumi, recognizing that there are Two Kinds of Resilience, a domesticated variety and a wild variety. And it is the wild within that is calling to us now.
It is that wildness within, that very wildness within that is not separate from the birthing of the cosmos itself, it is that capacity for spontaneous and creative regeneration we now require. When the system you are in is collapasing, it is not simply resiliency that you need… but the remembering of your wild resiliency, your love of Life, that you require.
What kind of resilience is your business school teaching? What kind of resilience is your business nurturing? What is it that wakes you in the night? Rumi, perhaps?
Culture Change – Our World Crashing Around Us
February 19, 2009 by Larry GloverThe value of an accurate worldview during times of turbulence is particularly critical, to individuals, businesses, and to nations. Distinguishing the ‘Chicken Littles’ from those praying for Armageddon from the prophets… is now more vital than ever. It will be our worldviews that set us up for how we will navigate what, in the wild resiliency model, I reference The Winds of Change: Dancing at the Edge of Chaos. Navigating the Narrows is a related theme and category on this blog.
Below is an excerpt from a view I suspect is on the prophetic side, from a self-described “optimistic” perspective. And for the fear such scenario worldviews might engender in us, I offer this as perspective and antidote: Life’s Two Fiery Questions.
Culture Change – The old world is crashing down, welcome back the older: “”
This is the time we have been waiting for. Some of us, anyway. We wanted a better world, and we might just get it. The old one had to fall and get out of the way, and this must be finished for the sake of our faltering climate and for our own sakes. Meanwhile the old guard is floundering around and is as useless as tits on a bull, as my father used to say. People are still mesmerized by power and imagery, but the luster and facade are fading. While some government spending can be along healthy lines, it is certainly not “the answer.”
We have entered the time of the most rapid, sweeping change in culture. Great changes are in the works for the way people live and think. We are just beginning to see the failure of not just easy credit and overspending, but the failure of living for money and material things. Granted, most participants in the growth economy thought that’s how things were supposed to work, and now they feel at a loss. These are people who have had little use for traditions of their ancestors. They thought nature was something to dominate into submission and rape for pleasure and profit. They thought technology placed us above all life forms as well as primitive peoples, and that we could cast any number of them into the extinction bin. For we could continue to extract resources forever and solve any problem.
Now the humbling has begun, on several levels. By now only an idiot isn’t worried about climate change. Now that we know full well what we’re doing to the ecosystem, how can any sane person put the economy first instead of integrating it with ecology?
…
The older world we threw out — when our parents and grandparents embraced techno-conveniences and slacked off on the responsibility of educating their own children to learn what the great-grandparents knew — is going to return shortly. Preserving food, repairing things, sitting down to all meals together, amusing ourselves with creativity and conviviality (instead of with machines in isolation), knowing our relatives well, respecting the land and waters that give us life — such traditions are not choices but requirements for survival. And it’s fun to survive, or more fun than the alternative. The individual will again feel pride that what one does matters to the community while not harming the planet. This does not mean that there won’t be opportunists and mistaken people obstructing positive change. But with the end of the old order and its narrow mindset of paving over the farmland for “progress” — largely because it will no longer be possible — we can’t help but restore our village ways and tribal ways of mutual aid, once again serving the common interest over personal gain. For we have just seen the era of personal gain start its free fall to the trash heap. Stimulus? Too bad there’s not any discussion on what might be stimulated for the needed fundamental change.
A common error is to promote sustainable systems in a vacuum as if their logical superiority over idiotic and subsidized capitalist anachronisms need only to be made available. It’s great to promote them, provided they are not pie-in-the-sky technofixes. The problem is that good models are suppressed as long as the dominant system is intact or while petroleum is available. Therefore, the right course of action is to pursue the kinds of alternative models that both starve the beast and educate people to reject the present system. Then people can start to glimpse a better culture of sustainability and all that goes with it: sensible economics, co-leadership, compassion for the rest of the Earth’s species, and the realization that we will never get another chance like now.
* * * * *
Jan Lundberg was an oil-industry analyst who ran Lundberg Survey in the 1980s. Since then, in addition to becoming an environmental advocate he became a generalist. In 1988 he formed the nonprofit Fossil Fuels Policy Action, now Culture Change, the longest running peak oil group.
The Survivors Club: Secrets & Science to Save Your Life
February 19, 2009 by Larry GloverWho among us is not challenged by the times we live in if not the adversity of a life circumstance?
I received a recent call from a dear friend freshly diagnosed with breast cancer. A brother in Michigan struggles with one of the most depressed economies in America. I visited yesterday with a Northern Cheyenne friend, one of the few survivors of a genocidal war that reduced a once populous people to around 35o remaining, before the US Government was pressured to grant the survivors a small piece of their former homelands for a now impoverished reservation. And who did not see the dramatic photos of the recent US AIR plane crash with survivors standing on the wings of the metal bird floating gratefully in the Hudson River? And then there are the droughts and floods and wars and… our challenges are daily and they sometimes seem and are enormous.
The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, is a recent book and web site providing tangible help and support for people facing adversity and challenge in their lives. Popular topics on the web site include alcoholism, breast cancer, foreclosure, job loss and more. The web site includes a survivors ‘personality profile’ readers can take, though I have no knowledge of its validity.
I discovered The Survivors Club through a 15 minute interview with author Ben Sherwood by Charlie Rose. The recommended interview is online here: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10088. I also suggest you watch with someone in your support circle for the conversation and explorations that may be provoked.
Sherwood speaks during the interview regarding the science, the genetic component: i.e. an identified gene you can be tested for. Here are some other observations and strategies he explores:
The value of community and support. People living in isolation are in greater risk of numerous kinds.
The will to live, “a fighting spirit,” is related to the quality of our lives… however its absence, hopeless and helplessness, are correlated with a reduced chance of survival.
Maintaining your relational and spacial points of reference are key to handling “a dislocation of expectation.” (Another term that might be applicable here is “economic melt down,” or try “social collapse”….)
Practice and plan for crisis. Chaos does not have to induce panic. Ten percent of us respond to crisis as leaders; Eighty percent of us look for and to authority for how to respond; Ten percent of us do the wrong thing. Survivors have a plan for what to do when things go wrong.
Situational awareness: Sixty percent of us pay no attention to the safety briefings on airplanes or to where the exits rows are. Holding an accurate world view, facing the facts, is vital.
We all carry “a mentality” inside us as resource for dealing with tough times, even if “we don’t know it.”
There is also a body of knowledge regarding thrivabiltiy we can acquire that will improve our survivability, and knowing our own personality and strengths is important too.
Related Resources:
See How to Improve Your Disaster Personality on this blog. This post was inspired by The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster and Why, by Amanda Ripley.
Deep Survival: Who Lives and Who Dies, and Why , by Laurence Gonzales, I consider to be a classic in this field.
The Shock Doctrine, by Naomie Klein, explores the practice of ‘disorientation and exploitation’ as a political strategy of achieving and sustaining power. An essential orientation of awareness for resilience in today’s political environment.
Fyera!/HeartMath, a valuable resource for accessing the power of the heart for healing and engaging with life and adversity.
The Science of Happiness: Positive Psychology Update
February 14, 2009 by Larry GloverA free and recommended report, The Science of Happiness: A Positive Psychology Update, is currently available for download through NICABM (The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine). The report is part of their free teleseminar series: New Perspectives on Change.
The Science of Happiness report is written by Bill O’Hanlan whose is known for the accessibility of his writing and speaking.
Here is more information on the teleseminar series from NICABM’S web site:
New Perspectives on Change
In this teleseminar series we’ll look at the process of transformation.
* What exactly happens when we change?
* Why is it so difficult?
* What causes relapse?
* Why do some not relapse?
We’ll examine change from five unique perspectives with a special eye on what the practitioner can do to facilitate this process. These teleseminars are FREE – all you need to do is sign up.
