Preparing for Luminous Ground – searching for stillness

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Alexander, stillness

Last year around this time I was in Coles Bay on the east coast of Tasmania with all four Alexander books, using his eyes, heart and spirit to view this holiday destination anew. this year I am here again, just with the fourth book. However, I feel the need to prepare myself, to find a space of stillness in which I am able to look at the world with the depth and appreciation that his  approach requires. It is more than reminding myself of aspects of his pattern language – deep interlocking, roughness, borders, centres etc – or the criteria for spaces that are luminous – ones that are a mirror to the true self, in which god is seen. It is about entering that space, that world. I decide to explore stillness, sensing that this is the quality that will get me there.

Magellan Courses

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about, Christopher Alexander, Magellan Courses

I am about to embark on a conversational journey with other fellow travellers in exploring a new way of engaging with the notion of wholes, life, feeling, beauty and being…. and in the doing perhaps reaching towards a Gebserian (The ever present origin) notion of integral consciousness.

Bonnitta Roy is our pirate captain taking us into unknown waters:

“The Magellan Courses is a curriculum of studies across domains that engage an emergent type of post-rational reasoning. What makes this type of reasoning post-rational, is that, unlike all levels of rational thinking, it does not originate from dualistic categories, but rather from onto-logical ones. The term “onto-logical” references thinking that arises whole,  from the creative source of being (in-becoming), and retains the structure of  dynamic wholeness, rather than being split up by the rational mind into opposite, albeit complementary, pairs. Therefore, instead of reasoning in terms of static conceptual categories, onto-logics engages dynamic properties and their relations, building systems from originary generative processes. These generative processes can be linked to the kinds of structures that arise in the conceptually dualistic, rational mind, by referencing the nature of order internal to the creative whole. The nature of order in a generative process, is never dualistic, because it itself is a living, dynamic whole system.”

I will be exploring the Christopher Alexander stream based on his books The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.

While I am waiting for his books, I have discovered this presentation on his life works which has given an overview but I am waiting to dive into his own texts.

The task – to post excerpts from my reading and then to comment on these and invite comments from my co-travellers.

Processes for conversation

What self-reflective processes might a conversation have which considered Bonnie’s 5 generational streams (G5) -  construction, development, evolution, autopoesis, emergence - and the notion of hybrid objects? What might this look like in context to assisting or applying to organizational improvement?

In observing the dialogical processes that Jean, Bonnie and Sue were using in engaging with a newbie (Sue) …. Jean proposed the elements in the above diagram. Bonnie suggested that depending on which G5 frame  you might be situated in you might consider them as linear progression (development frame) or  synergistically relational (emergent frame).

The tools are the G5. The key question in terms of applying these to an organization to ask: How might we use the different generational streams to work synergistically with each other? What are key drivers that are already present? Are you treating them as obstacles, or recruiting them?

The dispositions relate to the orientation of the dialoguing people to the process… curiosity and openness that drives a willingness to let go of previous thoughts and able to inquire felixibly, playfully and creatively. And a caring to the other members – so frequent member checking … and some of that will be pausing and reflecting on the meta-cognitive processes that are being used and how we might be even framing our thoughts within narrative structures.

We realised that is hard to have a conversation at merely the abstract level – there need to be some real problems and contexts around which we can inquire. And these need to be known intimately by one of the people, not just being hypotheticals. This then enables inquiry into the feelings and cultural hiddens. Perhaps it is this embeddedness into the problem that reveals the hybrid objects – the intertwining of the subject with the object which creates a specific meaning for that particular context.

But why are we doing this? What are the affordances that such a process might reveal? So there are intentions that are providing the driving tensions to this – creating greater meaning…. achieving usefulness… it is purposeful.

End note: From William Doll:

Conversation can be derrived from two notions:

conversaire – turn oneself about,
converge – to approach the same point from different directions…. to tend towards a common conclusion

Through personal conversation we turn ourselves about and converge or come together… we become transformed as our differing views converge on what is presently beyond us…. and the situation changes or becomes transformed as we go through this convergence process.