Dr Clare W. Graves LO29066

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@postino.up.ac.za)
Date: 08/27/02


Replying to LO29063 --

Dear Organlearners,

Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > writes

(snip)
>So when a some friends and I worked together, i knowing
>their love of Graves' work rather intuitively opened the
>proceedings with that exercise...visiting his (?) web site I
>came upon this manifesto of what a human of higher
>purpose is to become/be. Here is what he points to...
>
>Conceptions of the Mature Personality from Dr. Graves' Research
>
>Nodal FS
>
>"I can say what is my conception of the mature personality
>in one sentence but it would take reams of paper to clarify
>what I mean. So I shall, in this endeavour, express my
>thoughts in one sentence and then elaborate only upon the
>basis of what I mean.
>
>The mature personality is a participating, creative personality
>which in its operation does justice to every type of personality,
>every mode of culture, every human potential without forming
>anyone into topological moulds.
(snip, wishing i need not do it)

Greetings dear Andrew,

Thank you for quoting this beautiful piece on the "mature personality" by
Dr Clare Graves. We need to study far more such lovely essays. They will
help us to understand the spirit of a Learning Organisation.

Jan Smuts, the father of holism, certainly fits this description of a
"mature personality". His greatest trial was to be a political leader and
statesman among others who had "juvenile personalities". By the way, Jan
Smuts believed holism to be the driving force of all evolution, material
and mental. He saw the evolution of personality as the ultimate in the
mental realm.

Graves came to the profound insight, while doing research under Maslow,
that the human personality develop in a cyclic manner into awareness of
higher levels of value. Should we try to picture this cyclic evolution
together with its increasing complexity, it is like a spiral (2D) or a
vortex (3D). Many consider, even dr Graves himself, this spiral evolution
a theory, but I personally think that it is rather a profound observation.

A theory would rather be to explain such a spiral evolution like, for
example, I do with entropy production swinging between its digestive and
bifurcative asymptotes. One cannot expect Graves to have done it because
while he was growing in his own insight, Prigogine was also growing in his
own that irreversibility (entropy production) is the heart beat of
evolution. It is the later generation which has to put the two together
and to find out what role wholeness has to play.

>One word of complex warning...beware those who
>would seek to manipulate and separate the divinity of
>words authored by free souls from the capacity to create
>meanings from them as a gift from a Creatorial self.

Dear Andrew, is it a coincidence that you should utter this warning? Here
in Pretoria we often talk how an entrepeneur or even big business would
take some part out of a complex system and then sell that part as a
"treasure map". The public is not aware that once that part has been
removed from the complex system, it has no relationship whatsoever with
the complex system. Thus it is not a "treasure map", but actually a
"refuse map". The divine gets displaced by the evil.

For example, an expensive "power drink" will be advertised as having all
the extra energy and minerals which the active person needs -- a "treasure
map". What a sham! The active person needs simultaneously extra vitamins
and proteins. But by supplying only the cheap glucose, flavour and
minerals components, a nutritional imbalance is set up so the product
actually becomes a "refuse map". Natural food is a divine gift which must
not be replaced by such a "refuge map".

Why is the public not aware of such "treasure maps"? I think it is because
they did not have the opportunity to create self something complex,
whether it be material or mental. Should they do so, they will learn by
experience that the complex is not created by throwing all its
constituents together and hope for the best. The result will have so
little value that it is destined only for the refuse dump.

The lesson which we can take from Dr Graves' work is that all complex
things in the mind are created in cycles, layer for layer. He focussed on
personality, but we ought to question whether this lesson should be
extended to the other mental faculties such as knowledge and character. It
is for us to observe whether it is the case or not.

With care and best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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