Oh Nate this is so helpful to someone like me. I studied history and anthropology in college and then went right into the peace corps. Followed by graduate school and 25 years in the Foreign Service with the State Department. After I retired it took me several years to deprogram myself from USG-speak and various Embassy mission performance plans, which were atrocious, especially during the lead up to Iraq. I worked at a couple of universities, took a course on indigenous worldviews, did a lot of reading, and became a human being again. Being back in the U.S. has been challenging since people overseas are nicer, kinder, much better informed, and not so full of themselves!
I started following the great simplification almost two years ago and have greatly benefitted from your interviews and roundtables (OMG they are all so good!!) and the Frankly’s. My husband and I are raising our two Gen Z granddaughters which makes the information you present even more relevant and important as we try to help them be ready to navigate their futures. Have been wanting to share this for some time. Thx much. Aleta
I so appreciate how you reframed these as polarities that can be harmonized. Whether we think of it as the Law of Three, the Hegelian Dialectic, or the integral approach of Transcend and Include, there's so much more we can access when we shift from oppositional thinking to synthesis.
I know I'm not the only person who has an aversion to the language of battles and war, but even that presents a polarity that I now believe must be synthesized, integrated, harmonized. These are the times we are living in, and the battles and the wars we are within look very different than the historical record.
So I am very grateful that you both had the morning after reflection, and also that you shared this with us all the same. There is a lot of wisdom in how you organized your thoughts here for us.
In light of the election, I've been revisiting Meg Wheatley's book "Who Do We Choose To Be?" this week and finding more guidance and wisdom in the warrior archetype than I personally have in the past, as she frames what we are called to as being "Warriors of the Human Spirit." I so deeply appreciate your emphasis on effectiveness here and in all of your work. Whoever we choose to be, whatever roles we take on, be they warriors, hospice workers, midwives, or scholarly wizards, or any of the other archetypes our times call for, I'm grateful that the work you are doing is bringing much needed clarity, perspective, and essential questions for us to work with as we move into the times to come.
I had to go back and listen again to your opening apologia, Nate, because as I finished I was indeed left unsatisfied by your framing, even as I'm sympathetic with your intellectual and emotional concerns. Always best to reconsider in the morning what you've proclaimed at night! Indeed, approaching problems as sets of binaries is not a recommended systems approach, if I remember my Meadows correctly - there is too much left out contextually, the boundaries of the issue/question are not defined or problematized, and the outcomes in any case are almost never victories/defeats, as the framing of "battles" presupposes. SO it was great to note that you reframed afterwards, and moved it to your intro - well played!
I'll only add that our single great hope in overcoming the default settings of our hereditary biological hard-wiring and our inherited cultural assumptions remains - education. For all its comtemporary weaknesess, indeed harms (recall Zach Stein), education is still our singular opportunity to turn the development of human beings into an ecological design challenge (versus the manufacture of an industrial widget).
Thanks Nate. Been a while since I have listen to your work. Reminds me to listen more. We arexs bit short of the level of discirsecyou offer down here in New Zealand. Thanks for your clarity of thought. Joanna Macy talks about the great turning and which didecof that will we be on. She like you poses the question "what is mine to do". Go well. Michael
Nate describes humanity as a hardwired mechanism. Yes, we are subject to our evolutionary biology and biochemistry. Yes, we live on a finite planet in a finite physical universe. Yet, we are not as hardwired as we may fear and the ratio between what we know and do not know is closer to 0/1 than 1/1.
Taking Occam's razer to Nate's polarities, it's useful to see how most of these battles arise from unfettered human Ego, which is the subconscious fire within ourselves that sees the world only in terms of itself. Fortunately, Ego is a small part of our humanity. Most of our potential experience of the divine can only be experience without Ego. Yet we live in an Empire of Ego giving Ego full reign in the pursuit of power over life.
Fortunately, human nature is not fixed in stone. Ego can be directed to identify, sideline, see-through, tame, and even participate in the annihilation of itself, creating a world Ego can't conceive but is an eminently possible paradise.
Seen with Ego, we live in a world of polarities. Seen without Ego we live in Oneness, which doesn't mean everyone is the same, or unmotivated, or weak. Like nature-itself, Oneness is creatively dynamic with many unique individuals and elements.
Left untamed, Ego is the source of our brutality and fights tooth and claw to protect itself, but like the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz, once revealed, the foolish face behind a curtain is capable of being dismissed.
Non-Egoic society won't happen overnight. If the species survives, it might take millions of years. But it's possible. History shows it's possible with the right knowledge.
Oh Nate this is so helpful to someone like me. I studied history and anthropology in college and then went right into the peace corps. Followed by graduate school and 25 years in the Foreign Service with the State Department. After I retired it took me several years to deprogram myself from USG-speak and various Embassy mission performance plans, which were atrocious, especially during the lead up to Iraq. I worked at a couple of universities, took a course on indigenous worldviews, did a lot of reading, and became a human being again. Being back in the U.S. has been challenging since people overseas are nicer, kinder, much better informed, and not so full of themselves!
I started following the great simplification almost two years ago and have greatly benefitted from your interviews and roundtables (OMG they are all so good!!) and the Frankly’s. My husband and I are raising our two Gen Z granddaughters which makes the information you present even more relevant and important as we try to help them be ready to navigate their futures. Have been wanting to share this for some time. Thx much. Aleta
I so appreciate how you reframed these as polarities that can be harmonized. Whether we think of it as the Law of Three, the Hegelian Dialectic, or the integral approach of Transcend and Include, there's so much more we can access when we shift from oppositional thinking to synthesis.
I know I'm not the only person who has an aversion to the language of battles and war, but even that presents a polarity that I now believe must be synthesized, integrated, harmonized. These are the times we are living in, and the battles and the wars we are within look very different than the historical record.
So I am very grateful that you both had the morning after reflection, and also that you shared this with us all the same. There is a lot of wisdom in how you organized your thoughts here for us.
In light of the election, I've been revisiting Meg Wheatley's book "Who Do We Choose To Be?" this week and finding more guidance and wisdom in the warrior archetype than I personally have in the past, as she frames what we are called to as being "Warriors of the Human Spirit." I so deeply appreciate your emphasis on effectiveness here and in all of your work. Whoever we choose to be, whatever roles we take on, be they warriors, hospice workers, midwives, or scholarly wizards, or any of the other archetypes our times call for, I'm grateful that the work you are doing is bringing much needed clarity, perspective, and essential questions for us to work with as we move into the times to come.
I had to go back and listen again to your opening apologia, Nate, because as I finished I was indeed left unsatisfied by your framing, even as I'm sympathetic with your intellectual and emotional concerns. Always best to reconsider in the morning what you've proclaimed at night! Indeed, approaching problems as sets of binaries is not a recommended systems approach, if I remember my Meadows correctly - there is too much left out contextually, the boundaries of the issue/question are not defined or problematized, and the outcomes in any case are almost never victories/defeats, as the framing of "battles" presupposes. SO it was great to note that you reframed afterwards, and moved it to your intro - well played!
I'll only add that our single great hope in overcoming the default settings of our hereditary biological hard-wiring and our inherited cultural assumptions remains - education. For all its comtemporary weaknesess, indeed harms (recall Zach Stein), education is still our singular opportunity to turn the development of human beings into an ecological design challenge (versus the manufacture of an industrial widget).
thank you
a) these are impromptu and just my off the cuff thoughts (after i create an outline)
b) I am still learning!
so thanks for your forgiveness.
onwards
nate
Thanks Nate. Been a while since I have listen to your work. Reminds me to listen more. We arexs bit short of the level of discirsecyou offer down here in New Zealand. Thanks for your clarity of thought. Joanna Macy talks about the great turning and which didecof that will we be on. She like you poses the question "what is mine to do". Go well. Michael
Nate describes humanity as a hardwired mechanism. Yes, we are subject to our evolutionary biology and biochemistry. Yes, we live on a finite planet in a finite physical universe. Yet, we are not as hardwired as we may fear and the ratio between what we know and do not know is closer to 0/1 than 1/1.
Taking Occam's razer to Nate's polarities, it's useful to see how most of these battles arise from unfettered human Ego, which is the subconscious fire within ourselves that sees the world only in terms of itself. Fortunately, Ego is a small part of our humanity. Most of our potential experience of the divine can only be experience without Ego. Yet we live in an Empire of Ego giving Ego full reign in the pursuit of power over life.
Fortunately, human nature is not fixed in stone. Ego can be directed to identify, sideline, see-through, tame, and even participate in the annihilation of itself, creating a world Ego can't conceive but is an eminently possible paradise.
Seen with Ego, we live in a world of polarities. Seen without Ego we live in Oneness, which doesn't mean everyone is the same, or unmotivated, or weak. Like nature-itself, Oneness is creatively dynamic with many unique individuals and elements.
Left untamed, Ego is the source of our brutality and fights tooth and claw to protect itself, but like the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz, once revealed, the foolish face behind a curtain is capable of being dismissed.
Non-Egoic society won't happen overnight. If the species survives, it might take millions of years. But it's possible. History shows it's possible with the right knowledge.