The Observation Deck

For anyone interested in the conceptual scaffolding that informs the practice at the Lakewood Observer, Steve Calhoun, squareone-learning, provides a valuable outline of the project thus far.

Here is a sampling:

“The model of the project is open source to a large extent. This means that ideas, conversations, documentation, planning, is shared freely, and, overwhelmingly, the project's internal works and generativity do not attach themselves to particular persons over time. This means the project, in effect, owns the creative capital. Crucially, the LO project is necessarily fueled by volunteers vitalized by the collaborative and cooperative ethic.â€Â￾

For more see: http://squareone-learning.blogspot.com/

Kenneth Warren

My goodness, Mr. Calhoun, you are trouble-maker of the first order, and you pose a refreshing number of startling questions. My highest compliments.

What is spiritual materialsm? Trying to cope with adolescence and mid-life crisis by buying cell phones and sports cars? Fetishizing the latest consumer electronics or franchised movie merchandise?

Steve,
Your ambition to liberate people from "inside the box" thinking, from stale social conventions, and from constraining social roles which reinfoce them is indeed radical, and it reminds me of a classic passage of Western literature--Jack Nicholson (George) in Easy Rider:

George: Oh, they're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to 'em.
Billy: Hey man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut.
George: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about.
George: Oh yeah, that's right, that's what it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it - that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. 'Course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.
Billy: Mmmm, well, that don't make 'em runnin' scared.
George: No, it makes 'em dangerous.

http://www.filmsite.org/easy3.html

I'm not so pessismistic as Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, but this does underscore how rare a thing it is to act out one's freedom. . .

Thank Tom. Actually, people liberate themselves from their boxes. I have a little facility in being able to point out that "it seems to me there is a box there, you know the one you're in, do you see it too?"

Everything transformational comes from experiencing one's box (or grid, or trance, or worldview, or prejudices, or habitual approach, or favored way-of-knocking about). Sometimes it's a good idea to get in a bigger box, change boxes, run between them. Sometimes its a very good idea to remain in one's own box. I know I favor my own very much much of the time.

***

We talked at the Bella about the fact of culmination. Thus we talked about every single person being in the present moment the culmination of their own personal chain of events, their experience, vast arrays of serendipity, good and bad fortune, fate, relationships, knowledge, capacity, choices free and forced, and awareness. (!)

I suggested that a community is, in the light of this, the human aggregate of culmination. Obviously nobody is excepted from this for these are commonsense, everyday vectors, i.e. intersections of categories which provide for understanding of, as Marvin Gaye put it, "what's goin' on".

In the moment what results is our individual awareness, consciousness. We're all in a box of some sort, the question is: what's the purpose of our box?

And, this, Tom, is one of the key even primal questions. (At least it is to me.) Every single person is oriented to reality in particular ways. But, not everybody is deeply interested in their own orientation. Being aware of one's own orientation is the platform for learning and growth. If I have any ambition at all with respect to this challenge of orientation, its loosely focused on its dynamicism, the space it provides for growth of awareness.

Yet, I would not myself highlight this in terms of ambition. I keep an eye out for peoples' factor of playfulness and enjoy the playful dance of collaborative inquiry, mucking about in, between, among the boxes. But, the point of my own capability is also to be tender toward the value of the box, whatever it is, too.

So, a prejudice I hold: norms are good when they serve a good purpose and they don't cause terrible harm. This is the Buddhist Puck speaking here. ':roll:'

***

As social conventions and constraints, they often serve vital purposes. Again, the big question is what is their purpose? Does one have an answer, or, is one uninterested in the question? It's okay to not have any interest in the question.

Human life collectively has been doing a meta-experiment for over 4.5 million years (Orrorin tugenensis, Kenya). I might ask somebody whether they know that they are doing an experiment or not?

The person might come to grips with the idiosyncratic terms of the question and answer 'yes'.

The next question is, of course, "how's it going?"

***

As I wander around the model of a transformational anthropology, given my own disciplinary prejudices, (adult learning and depth psychology and 'ancient technics,') it can be roughly boiled down to 'how's the experiment going?'.

It is an ambition to learn of the answer where it is made available.

***

At the level of community, the operant metaphor for me is music. We are each a member of the greatest orchestra ever assembled. Perhaps it is improvisation rooted to the formality of vibrational structure; to melody, harmony, rhythm.

To consciously be in this orchestra is be in the web of musical relationships emergent out of the 'ensemble of players'. This would seemingly require being able to closely and generously listen to what each of us is playing. And, from this awareness of the musical nature of the marvelous social combo, to respond in kind, to integrate all the songs.

My associate Abdullah Ibrahim, in speaking of his own music, put it this way:

SOURCE (a glimpse into the soul of REAL africa) look with truthful eyes at the REAL africa and you will see that we are not bloodthirsty savages when the khoisan people (the so-called bushmen and hottentots) of southern africa perform their "moon ritual" it is not because we "worship the moon", but that we recognize THE SUPREME LIGHT we know THE SUPREME we have known HIM since CREATION TSOIEKWAP...THE SUPREME HETSI EBIB...THE PROPHET when "explorers" landed at the southern tip of africa and amongst other "strange" things found us sitting in dark caves with eyes turned toward the heavens and with them mark of the cross on our foreheads they could only conclude that such was the "behavior of a savage" but know now that yoga is a prayer we know THE SUPREME we have known HIM since CREATION e=mc squared TSOEIKWAP IS LIGHT energy into mass and mass into energy HE CREATED ALL AND UNTO HIM SHALL ALL RETURN the basis of all human knowledge is belief if this is so (mathematics-science) THROUGH BELIEF IN HIM YOU SHALL GET KNOWLEDGE OF HIM the electron consists of vibrations IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORK there is no such thing as "one" we know THE ONE-NESS the smallest and biggest unit is "three"

...SOURCE - ACTIVITY - RECEPTION

ACTIVITY the impressions on this album have been "recorded" out of and in compassion in the mad whirlpool of "professionalism" the "artist" is driven by an almost fanatical compulsion to "get himself recorded" he is obsessed with an immediate distribution and if possible - assimilation of "his original work" all his efforts are directed by, for and towards that elusive mythical ghost known as "the general public", the artist is convinced that TIME is a clock AND HE CREATED US IN HIS OWN IMAGE everything that has ever occurred is recorded in THE SUPREME MEMORY can you deny then that GREAT-DAY when the GREATEST ALBUM EVER is released complete with liner notes and personal instant replay

There you have it, are we not charged with making the greatest album ever?

Hey, this is just one box one can play in. But, it's a very BIG box and there's a lot of music happening in real time in IT.

My own preference? Play me the love songs.

---

http://junior.apk.net/~hoon/6Mantra_Modes.html
http://www.abdullahibrahim.com

Steve, thanks for the thought-provoking reply. Several reactions:

The idea of community as a bundle of individuals' culmination seems pregnant. If we are a gathering of unique, individually-crafted creatures streaking into the present from different histories, than a community is indeed alive and crackling with possibility--not a sedate herd. This depiction is refreshingly hopeful!

Awareness of one's box is a hallmark of western civ (or at least the skepticism to begin to become aware). Perhaps a step beyond is what you suggest--mucking about in between boxes. To be able to play with different perspectives requires first a suspension of judgement about which box is "right" and thus acceptance of other possibilities. As a recovering Puritan, I perform unevenly in this respect...

Can you give an example of "a norm serving a purpose"? I'm curious as to what you have in mind.

Human life as a meta-experiment: I'm reminded of a description of humanity in a National Geographic video as the animal in the midst of spectacular creation which sees, observes, measures, remembers, marvels, prods, and does everything which a capacity for curiousity and wonder prompts us to do. What a beautiful image: we're that layer of the ecosphere which is self-reflective, which can understand, and which can experience beauty.

I think your image of society as an orchestra of players building up sound and riffing off one another is a beautiful metaphor.

I love the explosion of normal concepts of time in the excerpt on recording *the* great album: if "everything that ever occurred is recorded in the Supreme Memory", then nothing is lost, nothing insignificant, and I can slow down and enjoy the exquisiteness of *this* experience, not chase the phantom permanency of vinyl, or binding, or stone, or least of all fame.

I wonder what music it is that I send off to other people...

Stephen Calhoun wrote:At the level of community, the operant metaphor for me is music. We are each a member of the greatest orchestra ever assembled. Perhaps it is improvisation rooted to the formality of vibrational structure; to melody, harmony, rhythm.

To consciously be in this orchestra is be in the web of musical relationships emergent out of the 'ensemble of players'. This would seemingly require being able to closely and generously listen to what each of us is playing. And, from this awareness of the musical nature of the marvelous social combo, to respond in kind, to integrate all the songs.

But, it's a very BIG box and there's a lot of music happening in real time in IT.

My own preference? Play me the love songs.

Dear Steve,

This is lovely. The music is more than a metaphor to me. It is reality. I've always been of the belief that Life is a Musical. There are melodies, rhythms, both harmonious and discordant all around us, and in us.

A favorite from the book of Isaiah, chapter 55, verse 12

"For you shall go out with joy,
And be led out with peace;
The mountains and the hills
Shall break forth into singing before you,
And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."

The soundtrack in my head is now singing "The hills are alive...with the sound of music..." One song leads to another, there is almost always a song to go along with living in the moment.

I like your idea about the orchestra.

If, as you wrote: "We are each a member of the greatest orchestra ever assembled..."

Is there a Conductor? Who is the Conductor?

Dear Tom,

After reading the exchange from "Easy Rider", I couldn't get "Born To Be Wild" out of my head. It is the theme song for the Emerson Jazz Band, and we've heard it at every concert for the past three years:


Get your motor running
Head out on the highway
Looking for adventure
In whatever comes our way

Yeah, darling
Gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once and
Explode into space

Like a true nature child
We were born
Born to be wild
We have climbed so high
Never want to die
Born to be wild
Born to be wild[/color]

Stephen Calhoun wrote:...it's a very BIG box and there's a lot of music happening...

Amen.

Hi Ellen. Music.

"See deep enough and you see musically;
the heart of nature being everywhere music,
if you can only reach it."

(Thomas Carlyle)

What we call music in our everyday language is only a miniature from that music or harmony of the whole universe which is working behind everything, and which is the source and origin of nature. It is because of this that the wise of all ages have considered music to be a sacred art. For in music the seer can see the picture of the whole universe. --Hazrat Inayat Khan

as the animal in the midst of spectacular creation which sees, observes, measures, remembers, marvels, prods, and does everything which a capacity for curiousity and wonder prompts us to do. What a beautiful image: we're that layer of the ecosphere which is self-reflective

A notion in Islamic metaphysics is that we were created so that God could know himself. A slightly more eastern version minus the deity (!) is: it is through our original consciousness that the co-originated cosmos creates the conditions for its unitary 'Self realization'.

The most un-metaphysical, naturalistic view is: the universe is only deeply known by virtue of the unfettered curiosity which, apparently (!), comes with the self-reflective 'program'. No matter where it is found.

Some Christians call this the problem of knowledge and tell a story about an apple. To know is is a great responsibility. Some questions are: how, to what end?

A norm that serves a purpose?

How about the yellow line in the middle of the road? How about something consentual but not normative as a matter of law? If we're standing together talking and you get a good look at my wisdom teeth, I'm standing too close.

Norms, to be norms, have to be purposeful for we humanoids aren't too inclined to modify our behavior for no good reason!

Tom. All. /// Culmination is pregnant. This is an excellent way to put it! Let me fit it into the musical metaphor. To do this we’ll wander through the sketch of the theoretical framework.

To do this, by way of setting up this wandering through ideas, I’ll identify the triangulation of my own prejudices. (The concept of triangulation is foundational in the symbolic sense too: the Lakewood Observer ‘pyramid’ has symbolic gravity.) The three conceptual schemes of my own approach are: constructivist, (eg. the cognitive formation of a ‘grid’ through which our experience is found to be meaningful,) phenomenological, (eg. the terms of experience are ‘just so,’) and radically empirical, (eg. what exists as a matter of experience earns its own account simply as a matter of its existing). Alternately: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

The triangulation funded through a transformative anthropology:

1. INCLUSION

Interpersonal experiential engagement without prior qualification. So: our specific engagement in relationships comes about only through what relationships present themselves to our experience. We are each, in this model, related to each other, only as a matter of the encounters which happen to arise. Encounters can be both minor, such as passing one another on the sidewalk, or major, as are the relationships we are in some way committed to.

2. CULMINATION

Every relationship, regardless of where it stands on the continuum between minor and major, is pregnant with the possibility that it could be about the sharing of culmination. Because every person stands ‘at the head’ of the unfolded events of their individual life, is the culmination of those events, every engagement of relationship can be about the mutual sharing of those events. Obviously, such engagements are also events.

3. PRESENCE

The attitude in this engagement that best describes the ability to be attentve, perceive, gather in, and, enhance, (rather than collapse,) our experience of each other.


Key Positive Concepts.

Divergence, openness, flexibility, permeability, resonation


Ramifications of Civic Intelligence

At the most basic level, a category of civic intelligence with respect to engagement is all about the individual ability to intentionally tune their cognitive capability so as to optimize the quality of knowledge creation discovered through the interpersonal engagement.

The musical metaphor.

How do we best invite other people to join the ensemble? How do we make room for their own distinctive music? How do we come to the kind of collaborative relations through which the collective music is made glorious beyond the sum of the otherwise solo parts?

In the civic ecology, in what way is interpersonal knowledge creation able to effect a multi-phonic civic composition, interpretation, improvisation, and song?

***

Tom, one of the key factors is also how persons transform their own time commitments so as to devote time to learning how to become a more capable civic musician. There’s a lot underneath this kind of learning because it requires in most cases a transformation of commitments, capabilities, and, and consciousness.

I can't answer for anyone else why there might be good reasons to do this. Yet, underlying the vision of a community that came to know itself better than any other there is necessarily the role played by those in the community who have come to a higher key of 'civic musicianship' and, not surprisingly, this is a capability funded on much practice and self-knowledge.

The music metaphor is very helpful. It delivers for consideration aspects of civic intelligence and civic knowing alllowed for by its richer language. Above all this has to do with process. Process is itself hard to grasp because descriptions of interpersonal processes can’t do the actual experience of the process full justice.

I’ve never met a musician who wouldn’t verify this feature of musical processes. One can’t fully describe how it “all came togetherâ€Â￾ in a performance or rehearsal. (Psychology is getting better at supplying a conceptual framework for describing processes, yet, for example, even the term “flowâ€Â￾ is a reduction of the extraordinary feeling (experience) of atunement reached when a process falls into place in a deep way.

The attempt here to put multi-dimensional experience into the box of language has to fall short. Yet, for our purposes, the musical metaphor provides for all sorts of apt terms of description. (It’s better, as I see it, than the dry terms of learning or psychological theories.)

One concept drawn from learning theory will help our understanding. It will aid the way toward musical metaphoric equivalences.

This concept is Reflective Orders, of which their are three orders.

1st order: direct enactment (or participation) for which there is no reflective component. The best example is driving a car. We just seem to do it un-self-consciously and, as it were, seemingly automatically. Most of time it is human nature to go about our behavior business in 1st order awareness.

2nd order: direct enactment and participation with a reflective component. In effect one consciously observes their own ‘doing’. Also, in doing this, it is possible to feed back into our doing adjustments simply because we’re paying attention to our doing.

A nuance is that after-the-fact review and reflection is not quite the same as 1st order awareness. It’s somewhere in-between; technically if we’re not observing this doing of reflection, it’s 1st order, yet, because it provides for a possible fine tuning at a future point, it has some of the quality of 2nd order awareness.

3rd order: reflection on what the intentional aspects of 2nd order observation are to be. This is the “meta-orderâ€Â￾ of awareness through which the observer chooses from a repertoire of possible observational perspectives.

One of the challenging features in any concept of orders of awareness is the concept’s difficult relationship to linearity. The paradox is between the seeming linear aspect of human intentionality, and, the strange sum of 1st order and 2nd order that apprently has a person BOTH DO AND REFLECT UPON THIS DOING AT THE SAME TIME.

This said, most musicians understand that simple doing and active reflection do happen at the same time as one both plays, listens, thinks ahead, reflects on what just happened, feeds cues, (etc.) and, in doing any or all of this "at once", you keep playing!

On to a full musical appreciation next.

Where self-knowledge, knowledge of others, knowledge about the cosmos we are entangled with, can be said to metaphorically appropriate the themes and processes of making our own music then, among many questions, several key questions emerge.

(They emerge most deeply should we contemplate this metaphor. Short of the music metaphor, another evocative one regards: self-artistry).

What is our instrument? ...are our instruments?

How do we learn to play it, them?

What is the nature of our music?

How do we learn to be sensitive and responsive in the format of the ensemble?

What would be mastery in this context of knowledge-experience AS musicianship?

Are we open to being taught?

Are we able to devote time to learning more?

What foundations presume an ability to play lots of music?

What is satisfying about playing our own music?

Is there a bigger picture in all this? ...a grand ensemble?

Are any of the assumptions which underlie the initial answers subject to further refinement, transformation, or criticism?

What are the ways in which we can come to critically appreciate our own abilities, wishes, goals?

What kinds of other players do we most naturally like to play with?

(Etc.)