The Dao of Diabetes
Copyright (c)2003,5,10 D. V. Williams All Rights Reserved
Published by Vic Williams at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Contents
Chapter 2 Holistic Happy Health
Chapter 6 Cycling Beyond the End
Chapter 1 Introduction
Feeling stressed? Anxious? Waves of tension? Worried?
Are you sick or hurting? Feeling defeated? Amputated? Desperate? Lost?
You can fix your problems step by step from the material here.
Start now for immediate benefits.
Grow them as you walk into the program.
The greater your engagement into the program the greater your benefits.
Others have so you can.
This program aims you at:
Avoiding way-too-late dialogue at their knife's edge
Nuking type II diabetes. It's also very useful for type I and a whole range of circulation disorders - hypertension, arterioscherosis, heart disease and so on. Variants of it have been successfully used by people with a huge range of other problems. It works. It even reduces cholesterol at least as effectively as taking drugs.
Smacking 'Diabetes the First Year' (google on that if you're a new diabetic). Even when it's really your fifth year, and suffering with late diagnosis.
Enriched understanding how-to take care of yourself, both by yourself, and as part of the larger world. A holistic solution.
Creating your own custom program, tailored to your mind, body, spirit, and community situation. You're starting that process right now. Keep going.
Forming a buoyant community, beyond a support* group, to help you. For one example, see Seeding and Growing Groups.
Please read it fast and lightly – skim it. Mindmap it as you go. Maybe use the opportunity to learn to read fast. Then re-read it again to enlarge your understanding. That's right we're giving you a basket of benefits - repatterning as you learn to fly.
This program is Daoist by simply highlighting and following natural patterns. It doesn't explain or explore Taoism as such. If you want to do that you might google for “tao” or “dao” or the “tao te ching.” Some people might look at the book “The Tao of Physics” to explore the links between Daoism and how our world works. More dedicated patterners might google on “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander, or “software patterns”, or “The Structure of Pattern Languages” by Nikos Salingaros, or perhaps follow the patterns in Edward de Bono's book “Water Logic”. It's all communications. Our cultures are patterned communications. Even our facial/body languages reflect our various cultures.
(* Support groups tend to be 'anti' or against things, which perpetuates the situation. Anxiety groups maintain the anxiety pattern. See the three demons and the three main ways we envision things. As you'll see, a 4th way works best.)
“Spiritual bypassing - a widespread tendency to avoid dealing with certain personal or emotional ‘unfinished business.” -- John Welwood
“The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.” -- Anthony Jay
“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make arrogant.”-- ancient saying.
“We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us.”-- La Rochefoucauld
“Out of clutter, find Simplicity. From discord, find Harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." -- Albert Einstein
Please keep reading, cycle around another time instead of trying to understand everything now. Please aim for the wisdom of larger understanding, over simple agreement (or disagreement <grin>). Repetition grows you.
Stories
Al told us that he'd fought a helluva battle with type II diabetes for thirty-one years. He was badly overweight and had a distressing list of physical problems. He didn't, wouldn't, tell us his diet or exercise or other treatment habits, but reaffirmed that his diabetes was an awful battle to fight.
Walking through a forested park in the Pacific NorthWest, I noticed a series of small plastic pipe culverts under the trail. A storm event had washed a mass of debris against one pipe and plugged it, causing flood damage, and some crew had put in another pipe alongside the first. Then another storm had repeated the performance. I was now looking at the third pipe, dutifully waiting for its storm event. It made me think of some people and circulation problems, coronary bypass operations and such. But this was out in the open where many people could see the situation.
George had been diagnosed with type II diabetes and had immediately taken on a vegetarian diet - with some free range meats, mostly chickens bought alive in rural Mexican villages. He now looked quite fit after three months walking and traveling along the coast in Mexico. He'd just been checked again, and had just been told that he should never have been diagnosed with diabetes, that that had been a mistake. He was quite happy and satisfied. I checked, he happily ate chicken organs, but not the head or feet.
Peter had woken up blind in one eye. Obviously he'd had diabetes for years before being diagnosed. When we met he was on some strict medical - gym - dietitian treatment scheme that wasn't working. He had a growing list of problems. We couldn't fit any changes into the rigid gridwork formed by his medical – diet regime, and he just kept getting worse.
We looked at family support and habits, and found that his kids were mimicking him in their diet and exercise patterns. They were following his heavy patterning. He was getting worse and his family had already acquired the same ways.
'Everybody' knows that calcium is added to milk because our wealthy meat-milk-egg eating society has problems with calcium deficiency. Let's consider that meat-milk-egg inflow as something that alters the pH/acidity of the human innards. We, our bodies, are adapted to a high vegetable diet, but our minds, the modern way/culture, is to snarf down lots of meat, milk, fats, and eggs in amounts that largely mask the benefits of the vegetables and other things that we eat. Worse, our convenience society provides these meat products in so many hidden forms that we can't manage our intake very well.
Play with the idea that the meat-changed acidity washes things like calcium out of the body, and our society's answer is to put a bit of calcium in part of the inflow that's causing the problem. Think back to those culverts in the forest, only just throw the new culverts into the flood this time. Your innards are more complex than a simple acid balance but the point holds that a minor input isn't going to do much when it's added to the flood going the other way. This whole mess is called a crisis of perception.
"The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
There are deeper social causes for many problems, including diabetes.
As the next diagram shows, we're suffering from drastically decreased interactions with nature and natural systems. Most of us might have known something like 1300 useful plants in the past, and now we are more likely aware of 1300 product brand names. Our interpersonal connections in community/family/church are fragmented. We don't do things ourselves anymore. How many people build their own houses now? And at the same time our individuality is celebrated. We habitually opt for instant fixes, habitually whirring along clockwork-like culturally imposed patterns.
Observers have pointed out that the local Army and Navy commanders had the appropriate information to prevent the Pearl Harbor disaster in WWII. And the commanders who replaced the ones turfed out by that failure indicated that they would have done the same things (basically nothing), because the structure of their organizations held them in place. Only a great whack like the Japanese strike allowed their replacements to change the way their organizations interacted with each other.
"Whatever happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping." - Frank Knox, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, just before Pearl Harbor
The act of slicing the Titanic across an iceberg followed a similar pattern lock. Perhaps akin to using an old map, a bad map, or subconsciously simplifying the map to match one's views. There is a basic pattern match between the dominating arrogance in the Titanic pattern and various forms of subconscious rankism or bullying to maintain certain cultural conditions.
The Maginot line, and similar walls through history, show how groups of people set their thinking in place, often only to have others bypass the walls with other ways of thinking and acting. Of course many past societies walled themselves into certain ways of thinking and just died out. Many, many, individuals subconsciously do that today.
Contemplate the idea that tall office towers isolate people and groups in much the same way. Worse the floor plans in such towers now often follow generic office-factory designs designed for efficiency instead of good interpersonal interactions. That they are in no way sustainable social structures, but they do put a few people at the top while cutting visible ongoing costs.
Individuals internalize the same isolating patterns. In “Intimate Behaviour” Desmond Morris points out that we subconsciously lower our body defences with overstress-overstrain (and excessive hygiene) caused by the pressures of urban life, then become ill and seek attention from others – all in ways to get socially acceptable intimacy. We have strong natural intimacy needs, fenced off by social boundaries, that we only overcome by getting sick, in a kind of subconscious trick.
“If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber.” -- Albert Einstein
His background and successes encouraged him to think freely, but various organizations worked hard, pushing at and walling him in, to keep that thinking out of social affairs.
Those cameras we erect in schools, school buses, and along streets, extend and proclaim the teaching-classroom dominance pattern subconsciously absorbed and replicated by the school bullies. We say one thing and demonstrate its opposite with such cameras. Worse, our physical teachings teach better than our vocal ones. Bullies are people who have been bullied; they're successfully mimicking others. Following the same pattern, fundamentalism rises naturally in people who have been demeaned by war and cultural dominance.
In “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive”, Jared Diamond studies many failed societies and comes up with some major causes for social collapse, all of them amounting to kinds of failure to adapt to their surroundings, leading into a death spiral. Worse for most of us, it's normal for all kinds of individual problems to show up inside the society as it death spirals inward.
All of this means that individuals, groups, and whole societies can and do cause significant and life-threatening problems for themselves.
“The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal.” -- Malcolm Gladwell, The Vanishing, in “The New Yorker”
What instead?
Instead, our working maps should be mythic, vague enough to be adaptable to meet reality as it comes around the corner or over the horizon. If and when we become too literal we likely pattern lock ourselves, wall ourselves in, so we can't adapt well. Worse, the patterning affects both individuals and groups, and our group structures lock many individuals in place. Once locked in place, following social norms, change becomes a crisis instead of an opportunity.
An English research charity called Natural Justice specialises in trying to find out what causes antisocial and criminal behaviour. They have shown that good nutrition, the basis for our good health, also dramatically benefits behaviour. For everybody.
Other British work shows similar benefits for a range of other ailments. Many (most?) dsylexics benefit from diet changes. The Brits suggest first removing milk and wheat from the diet (Chinese Daoists suggested this a thousand years ago). A holistic approach might adopt a natural diet, then extend out to find problem foods. People don't naturally normally eat grasses-grains or suck cow's teats for years and years. Our binding of our social structures suggests why there is no surprise to read this, combined with no impetus for change. (Unpolished grains can dramatically help diabetes, over polished.)
“All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.” -- George Bernard Shaw
A solution is to be more adaptable, to engage with situations.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” -- Charles Darwin
It's also the change from problem based to opportunity based thinking. To build fingerspitzengefuhl.
Fingerspitzengefuhl is German for "fingertip feel," and it's usage is more like "intimate or intuitive awareness of a system, or situation, or environment that allows for effective interactions with the system or situation.”
Why not develop your awareness, your five senses and your awareness of larger patterns, to live a happier and healthier life?
Our worst shocks are sudden, violent, and unexpected, like some kind of crash.
Our worst risks are new, imposed, and gruesome.
If and when we're prepared we can adapt to our risks and shocks by using complex patterns, derived from 'war' stories - our myths/metaphors, adaptable culture instead of simple plans. People and cultures that can adapt can explore a web of options, stepping well beyond blindly jerking on the strings of one of panic's three choices,
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.” ~ Aristotle
Eisenhower echoed Montgomery's thinking with his, "Before the battle, plans are everything. When the battle commences, they are nothing."
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field - I'll meet you there - when the soul lies down in that grass, ideas, language, even the words "each other" don't make any sense -- Rumi
“My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” -- Peter Drucker
Perfect – one right way <--> Innovate – explore
Titanic, type II diabetics
. . .
A pole, or a plan without branches-options has no choices. It's unlike a tree and is unable to bear fruit. A tree grows mostly in one direction, with many options-branches. A Sun of choices often seems to lack direction, and even make lots of misteaks in the view of goal-driven pole/polar perfectionists. This spectrum from the pole to the sun, exactly matches our natural spectrum of human behavior, from perfectionists and our cultural tendency to generate perfective norms, through craftsmen (combine perfectionism and experiments/innovation), to 'sunny' innovators and artists.
Societies seeking perfection, one right way, are entrained, on a Titanic mission, and very different from mythic – wild societies that can adapt, play, with their situations. We need to be spectrum aware, to able to perfect, to be able to adapt, and to be able to grow new ways. Yet many of our ways, especially streets and large structures are logically separated - frozen in place and forbidding growth and change.
Do you have a choice. Are you entrained, or can you adapt, or learn to adapt? Do you follow fads, induced epidemics of the mind, or can you stand apart?
"At first glance, this situation seems paradoxical. When we observe our natural environment, we see continuous change, adaptation, and creativity; yet our business organizations seem to be incapable of dealing with change." -- Fritjof Capra
In our modern society we're in effect trying to do things like take a chunk of a map of Sydney, and a chunk of a map of Beijing, and a chunk of a map of Amsterdam, and assemble them together as one whole map, just as we would a jigsaw puzzle. Too often our maps are frozen, broken up, with varying sources, and the reality they map is always changing. Mythic maps merge better into new reality.
An ancient mapping pattern, yin yang - can be seen as yin versus yang, merging into cyclic yin yang, and into five phases. Yin is more receptive and conforming. Yang is more assertive and exploratory. Both are ancient aspects of ancient Chinese Daoist ways, now adopted or matched by other ways all over the world. Extending yin yang into five phases matches our five senses, and the German fingerspitzengefuhl. (The Chinese sometimes extend the five senses to eight, and you can find directions with the extra three using your two ears, two nostrils, and two eyes.)
“If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door.” -- Joyce in Ulysses.
Please consider the five phases to be a way to intuitively extend out and use our five senses, our five fingers (counting, grasping, controlling), and the seasons, and five intuitive basic elements of the world (water, metal, air, wood, fire). Please think of them as a deliberate enrichment of our sensory awareness to develop greater situational awareness. The whole idea of this is to develop a much richer intuitive contact with the living world, enmeshing you in the living web of our world. Developing a form of holistic dialogue that deliberately includes and maps the seasons and the ebbs and flows of life.
The process really amounts to you developing a set of metaskills. Such metaskills are used by all kinds of adepts, from hunter-gatherers to cooks, coaches, and athletes. Metaskills are awakening clues to the shaman-trickster in our natural play pattern.
“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.” -- Sir Francis Bacon
It was yet another dank rainy day, one of months much the same on the coast. The drylanders and city dwellers were unhappy and depressed. But the dog I watched was very happy. It had a whole range of lively new scents to explore. The world was fresh and the ducks along the beach were perky, as if they were waiting to be chased. I grinned as I watched. The animals were using rich sensory systems, less tied to visual effects and 'things to do', while the humans were displaying learned helplessness and inability to adjust to the prevailing conditions. Which was the smarter way?
The version of the Generic Five Phases Diagram shown above combines Eastern and Western outlooks, and comes from the “Your Living Myth” toolkit. In that toolkit its main purpose is to help people discover and explore their unique high performance pattern, a kind of living myth. It works just fine for a whole range of other purposes. The explanation from that toolkit is replicated below:
I The Call to Adventure occurs when you discover some itch for change. Something,
some work project, some friend, some problem, some crisis, or something in nature attracts your attention.
II This builds in the Initiation where you develop an attraction and explore it. Developing your mission. Getting things going.
III This is followed by the Tests, Trials, and Ordeals, where things go astray. Lots of things don't work out and people don't understand each other. Muddling and chaos are common just outside the ring of light provided by the campfire of your planning.
IV Things come together in Fulfillment. A whole range of processes align as the project or scheme or however you envisage it, comes together like ripening fruit.
V Finally, for this cycle, there is Improved Flow of Life, where the results flow out improving other parts of your and other lives. Good flow keeps your myth growing and spiraling around, throwing out options like the limbs on a growing fir tree, endlessly repeating the five phases in a holistic dialogue with the living world.
Think of these five phases as you look at the five fingers on one of your hands. Hey, count the thumb as a finger. Wiggle them affectionately, as Buddhists recommend in this situation. Your fingers can write and type and help you eat, and even wave at friends, without your conscious attention to them. In this toolkit you'll grow similar capability with more of your mind and your body and your awareness of life. And you'll build various kinds of synergy, where one plus one yields three, by the way your fingers-phases interact together. You'll build fingerspitzengefuhl as you follow your growth spiral around and around the five phase cycle.
Stories
I was talking to Mary Liu on the phone and she mentioned that she had diabetes. She confirmed that it was adult onset type II and that she ate dried bitter melon for it. She also took daily walks and tried to only eat one bowl of rice at meal time. That was her basic treatment scheme. I've since found over a dozen Chinese men and women who handle diabetes with bitter melon, some exercise, and some care in their diet. I've also met many Chinese who are excellent at self-regulating their diet, it's a cultural enough-is-enough way they have, that effectively avoids problems such as diabetes.
I watched the elderly man gently dip his feet into the herbal foot bath. His wife smiled, she'd just put her fingers into the funny colored stuff to make sure it wasn't too hot. He relaxed as he wiggled his feet, and they started chatting in Cantonese. The doctor stood back alongside me, explaining that the prescribed foot soak period was forty minutes, and that the heater inside the foot bath was specially made in Taiwan to ensure that the temperature stayed high but not too high for the entire time.
It only took a few minutes for the foot bath's heat to raise a sheen on the man's forehead. Obviously his circulation was now working pretty well, carrying the heat up from his feet. Better yet, he was really getting some treatments in one. A carefully selected mixture of Chinese herbs in the bath for his skin, circulation, and diabetes, as well as the heat to move things along. The bath even provided exercise-type benefits for his whole body.
We talked about options like combining footbaths with foot massage, diet changes, and even television choices for those who self-treat at home.
“Nature evolves away from constraints, not toward goals.” -- Stewart Brand
Many people have observed that managers, doctors, and so on, are ills-avoiding - constantly working to avoid, pain, harm, and constraints. This generates consensus-seeking behavior so the larger group can get along. Maverick, new, and different ways threaten the consensus – the group norms that let people feel in control.
So what happens when a holistic solution emerges, that bypasses those controls that maintain cultural norms-dominance?
People who have survived nasty stuff like aircrashes, and various war or similar experiences often drop the 'little things'. They don't care much about the 'small change' anymore. They can simply shrug at a lot of problems that still bother others.
Optimists in death camps, where the vast majority of those around them died of diseases or later suffered lifelong debilitation, regained a healthy life once they were freed. Optimism benefits the whole mindbody and the greater group.
Some 'miracle' cancer recovery people deliberately dropped the poisons in their lives – food, ways, and thinking, cleansed themselves in various ways - inside and out, adopted optimistic beneficial lifestyles, and successfully eradicated their cancers. Such people sort of shrug at their medical problems and that whole problem-oriented/fighting/let's-find-perfect-factory paradigm, and seek ongoing opportunities in their lives. They didn't “think about it” or agree/disagree or right/wrong or possible/impossible, they just did it. Well? Can you adopt such design thinking?
We can all benefit if we can learn to adopt some of these ways. Most of us benefit from dropping barriers to enjoy more intimacies, various forms of play, and humor. Further, one can see our natural play pattern as the learning foundation for the genius pattern, for good strategy, and even natural health.
“I choose to question you and to answer you with no pretense of authority.” -- Galileo (bullied by authority in the same pattern as Einstein, and David Bohm)
“The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.” -- Winston Churchill
Mindmap, or just list, your examples out from each slice. Grow your self-awareness, then re-rate yourself. It's a very good idea to work toward some kind of balance, not just addictive instant fixes, instant food, and those instant absolutes gods. De Bono suggests that balance comes as a spectrum, alternating, or a kind of mix of forms of happiness.
Chomp at some kinds of happy slice, go beyond seeking pure sugars.
Chapter 2 Holistic Happy Health
If we step beyond our personal and cultural walls – barriers, we open up a whole range of opportunities for holistic happy health. Going outside society's lines is akin to a plant that doesn't grow according to the rigid rules of some garden. Weeds live outside man's rigid ways. And, it's kind of funny, it turns out that many natural health herbs are weeds because of the vitality found in such playfully wild plants. Which is why the big drug companies are now engaged in a form of gold rush to evaluate all kinds of natural herbs and weeds.
There are many things that are “unnatural and impossible” to people in one culture, and normal daily practice in others. The corral that holds people in place is in their minds, permeating their group culture. It's normally much easier to observe the corrals in other cultures because we're oblivious-blind-denying to many of our own ways.
Try walking in the wild where weeds roam free. Do it for a free life.
Chinese maintain health with diet and exercise, adding herbs as necessary. If this fails they look to take Western-style drugs. Serious drugs and surgery come as a last resort. This gives them more choices and a spectrum of responses to issues.
Most modern institutions use hierarchy and perfectionism toward group norms to simplify their operations. The sorting process during simplification automatically creates forms of 'them' and 'us', leading into rankism – bullying - walls. We live within the walls while they're ejected.
A tidy (predictable, efficient) city or government will naturally mesh with a 'tidy' police force, medical system, and 'getting things done'. Such 'one right way' or one 'truth' systems exquisitely match the tidy thinking inherent in one-god religions, and both have long histories of helping each other succeed.
"When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship." --Harry Truman
Modern marketing creates a super-large global culture with its own reality, and many people subconsciously follow such marketing, and its fashions/fads.
“Fashions are only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.” -- George Bernard Shaw
Many 'too thin' or 'too fat' or 'fast food' or name-your-'crime' people are subconsciously following – locked into - marketing models. And many more people feel the imprint of others - peers, role models, and various kinds of authority images - who expect them to follow particular models. Many of us are happily domesticated into self-destructive lifestyles.
"Things don't change. You change your way of looking, that's all." -- Carlos Castaneda
One can hope that most of us might be able to cycle, between partially yin and partially yang, partially conformist/perfectionist and partially artist/innovator. Society needs to balance conformity and newness. The balance can come in the form of a spectrum, alternating, or some kind of a mix of ways of thinking and doing.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
The Expression Cycle
We see something and automatically react. If we're doing something like riding a bike we might swerve around it. Some of us might jump it. Others – distracted and untrained - crash into it.
We Read the situation/happening and go through a reaction process, that might or might not become a crisis. Our culture/training/experience governs our reaction, varying from lightswitch right/wrong to playful adaptable responses, matched to our awareness of the situation. If we need to express ourselves to others we do better when we can speak well with good body language and awareness of the situation and the people involved. Our ability to swerve, to adapt, depends on our awareness and our ability to play with, merge into, the situation.
In many cases we scapegoat ourselves and others into 'witchcraft' reactions that diminish everybody and everything involved in the self-group-induced crisis. This scapegoating-type process often has emotional and physical health consequences.
If you google on the “ladder of inference” you can find quite a bit on such reactions. Try this. It's a useful way to learn about oneself and others to put something like:
on a piece of paper during a meeting/gathering, then record what happens, and your reactions in the separate columns. Then later do comparisons with other people, share your records to grow understanding (not agreement). You'll find that people have widely differing reactions to the same incoming messages. People really do climb up on metaphoric ladders then wobble around trying to understand others who are up isolated on differing ladders. It takes sensitivity and understanding to bridge across to another ladder, or to some other ladders. We see this as a cyclic process, spiralling into greater understanding through developing dialogue, or spiralling into black holes of missunderstanding and difficulties. We call it the expression cycle.
We automatically react emotionally, assign meaning, and generate logical reactions to our inputs – to what our senses gather. We generate our awareness of the situation, filterered through our belief system and experience (and our five levels of awareness). We then express ourselves through an interpersonal mask, varying from no reaction through a wide range of other socially programmed reactions. Our feedback systems let us engage, adapting, automatically 'cornering' like we would on a bike, to generate, or forbid, changes in the situation.
Good strategy, really part of our natural play process, enables larger awareness and greater ability to adapt and do better. The populated expression cycle diagram, next, shows more of the process.
"I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody." -- Walt Disney as mentor
Models, metaphors and imagination enliven life into full flower.
What are the seven wonders of the world? What if you laughed at the question, and lovingly explored the idea with your five senses to create the seven?
Newfound diabetics often enter this cycle, and wonder about the meaning of “what's happening to them” in phase II, then learning and adopting medical rules in phase III. By phase IV they're interacting, growing their own awareness and either shedding/denying the situation or engaging with it. Their cultural molding has a lot to do with their reactions. Their reaction process, the whole expression cycle, follows the same pattern as someone adapting to a new culture.
Many people glued to one logical or subconscious fixed Truth are unable to play, to yin yang, into adapting.
It takes time and effort and understanding to adapt to another culture or to adapt one's own interactions with one's own culture. Magic can help, and the results can be magical.
It's interesting that one definition of Magic, so closely linked to and often despised and persecuted as witchcraft, is having a Vision, the Will to work toward that vision, and an ability to mentally Merge into the prevailing environment to attune to what's going on. Magic then is simply a good success formula attuned to one's environment, as opposed to tuning to one's dominant culture. How might you use magic to grow beyond your current cultural box?
As you explore the five levels of awareness next allow yourself to visualise each layer. Think about the well-planned and zoned military grid pattern forming most modern cities, then compare it to other and older cities where the streets wander and people and their work and recreation all blend together. Modern grid-zoning and separated housing estates destroy community by severing ties, and generating us-them right-wrong views. The growing patina necessary for community lies stillborne without the warmth – the intimacy – of a living web of interconnections. Communities are naturally interdependent.
Create a simple mindmap of your community and its interconnections. As you do so, consider the ideas that we instinctively patrol our boundaries (and often just beyond), that differences among people are normal (often extending into symbolic war posturing), and that scapegoating-witchhunting is an inherent part of islolated groups maintaining themselves. And that we often deny-shun-shed parts of ourselves and our community.
Five Levels of Awareness
Zero, zero represents a holistic cyclic wholeness, as in mandalas, and comes before first. Please play with this idea, think in cycles, and with the idea that the following five levels of awareness actually cycle together as one whole in various ways. Include cycles through time and space as in physics and forms of mysticism in your thinking and doing. One can play with such cycles in terms of systems theory, elaborate them into ecological webs, and discover how they amplify or degrade each other. Cycles shapeshift into such things as lines, trees, and spirals, and under cultural and religious type pressures. One can plot a logical hierarchical tree-pattern of structural interconnections in many modern cities, reflecting planners' natural thinking. And one can find an enriched web of community interconnections, really a living patina of overlaid patterns, in older cities. You might explore how ancient appreciation of such cycles meshes into today's reality by exploring how Taoism meshes into quantum physics, as in “The Tao of Physics”. Such holistic thinking is related to holy thinking in how it meshes mysticism with physics. It's the whole tree and soil in which life grows.
First, habits. We have our mostly-subconscious personal and group habits, procedures, stories and myths – our experience. We have our culture, and its history, which includes a whole range of patterns – rhythms, including how we structure our language, body language - including how we walk and act in general, clothes, books, cities, buildings, and organizations. Historically, these intertwine with our religions and our environment/ecology. They generate our dominance – independence – interdependence patterns. And they link to ideas such as great machines or great clocks running an orderly universe. Alternatively, they also link to an unruly nature with its wild cycles, and wild/dangerous/helpful dragons. Some cultures live their 'great clock' type assumptions, and others live in more conscious dynamic balance with their environment.
We also have our individual and group tendency to perfect, or to innovate, or to do some of each. We have our perception of risk, its three worst kinds – gruesome, new, imposed, and the consideration of hazard. This forms the trunk of our living tree.
Second our living senses. we have our personal, group, and artificial sensory capabilities, including our five physical senses, and our intuitive gut feelings. And how they're affected by panic (archetypes), optimism/depression, addictions, our metaskills, and the three demons. We may eat with our fingers, a fork and knife, or chopsticks, and many of us notice the differing rhythms in all three ways of interacting with our food.
Our remote sensory capabilities offer enticing opportunities, and also threaten us by alienating us from our natural ways. Many of us now vegetate in front of televisions instead of interacting with others, and don't grow interpersonal interests. Our concepts of things as diverse as war, marketing, and play, are marching into instant-fix-for-me push-buttons. They are already much too far away from the natural growth and understandings that come from our seeing and feeling our friends, enemies, and playmates, face to face. We're no longer naturally developing diverse shared understandings. Instead, we're increasingly marching individually along linear machine-like paths. And we can easily enrich all of those connections. Our tree's branches (or fingers).
Third, our situational awareness. We have our 3rd eye, and branch tips. Our fingerspitzengefuhl – fingertip feel (Slim, Rommel). And engaging forms of yin yang romance with our living world – our environment. Good military commanders focus with a 'directed telescope', aka metaskills, and some way of paying particular attention to particular areas as needed to perfect or to add new actions. We all tend to play between reality, what we see and feel here and now in our primary and secondary processes (those parts of ourself we normally 'shunt aside'), and what we want in our vision for the future.
Vision, our view of the future, commonly comes in one of three forms:
I Reduced vision, learned helplessness, under environmental pressure.
II Going 'anti'. Fighting something as a cause. As in most social causes.
III Willpower to get something done. This is the most common way to get things done, and lies behind the hero pattern.
Good living strategy, using the play pattern, forms an additional 4th whole tree option, meshing into the cycles in zero above. (Magic)
We perceive chaos when we go outside our existing patterns - current thought habits, and then we hide back inside those habits, or adapt those patterns, or work on creating new patterns. We become traditional, or modern, or creative in our ways. And we surprise ourselves by finding old ways in new as in the match of taoism to quantum physics.
Fourth, today's stories. We have our reasoning capabilities when we perceive a situation, recalling personal and group 'war' stories, and how to adapt our stories – procedures – (often subsconsious) myths, and experience, to the situation. We need to engage with our myths and our vision for the future. To envisage ways ahead, while recognizing that good enough is the enemy of perfect. We should aim to do the right thing over doing things right. This requires forms of assertiveness and leadership, even if it's 'just' self-leadership, which matches it up with the growing leader at the tip of the tree.
Northern Americans and Northern Europeans are mostly urban and tend towards monotime - monochronic ways. Do one thing at a time, and do it to completion, like an assembly line. You might consider this to also reflect more of a state orientation. It's like focusing only on growing the leading tip of our tree. Others, and people with rural or small business backgrounds, tend towards polytime - polychronic ways. They habitually do some things at the same time. This is a form of sharing, and is like growing and extending some branches at the same time. You might consider this to also reflect more of a process and relationship orientation. You can often see the differences between the two on their desks, and in their habits and hobbies. The average urban vegetable garden is monochronic, and a wild forest is wildly polychronic.
Polychronic people hold open meetings in, possibly rowdy or noisy, gatherings that amount to networking community, dialogue, and even akin to ecological webs. They recognize necessary relationships/order in what appears to be chaos to monochronic people.
Monochronic people tend toward individual offices, lines of communication, and silo type separation. They're more likely to have a single 'Truth' and a clean desktop, and 'have-to' finish things (including absolute victory/surrender in war, road rage, or 'going-postal'). A prime example is the guilt-driven judicial system.
Meshing mono and poly people is like meshing perfectionist-technocrats with error-generating artist/innovators.
Fifth, our resources. We need to actively use our resources, people and our own bodies, to match the task at hand. They need to be ready and available as needed. Military writings often indicate that logistics – supply management – does more to win wars and battles than tactics, which also reflects our propensity to beat things to death instead of eco-interacting, dialoguing, with them as good strategy. Good strategy includes an awareness of both logistics and tactics and their usage patterns. It's allied with the concept of sustainable development, and with forms of sharing. We can be spendthrifts, can accumulate, or can garden our resources in a sustained manner. We generate longer lives when we tolerantly interact with our environment and its resource/information flows.
Our living tree requires good nutrient flow, without nutrients everything fails.
Or, to put all this another way:
"My intelligence does not stop at my skin," writes Howard Gardner, the influential Harvard theorist. Rather, he points out, it encompasses his tools, such as his computer and its databases, and, just as important, "my network of associates, office mates, professional colleagues, others whom I can phone or to whom I can dispatch electronic messages." -- Daniel Goleman, “Working with Emotional Intelligence”