Replying to LO29803 --
Good heavens reader, dear At,
Thank you for again raising an interesting issue and supplying an answer
to a few questions. And raising more. I'm still not fully aware of what
i'm trying to say still experimenting with the thoughts, trying to find
the best form. I'll just go with the flow.
First of all, i must say that i do consider us to be still rather
primitive animals (to avoid the word "creatures", is there a word for
entities that can develop themselves in large parts? "enactors"?). We are
born into to this world to live a life full of confusion. Who am I? Why
is this? What is happening? How do i do this? These blanks have to be
filled with what i here call a faith, some preliminary choices, a
personality. And we're doing this still in a primitive way. For a long
time, we assumed that once the blanks have been filled that that is it, we
could stop developing further. There might have been a good reason for
this: the wild nature is fond of contemplating meat, easy prey. So the
less we contemplating about who we are, the better the chance for
survival. We project our inadequacies on others, attribute the unknown to
god, schiksal, fortune. Not?
Secondly - or is the same - , i do think that we can believe about
everything. Just as we have a predisposition to learn a language - and
usually learn our mother's tongue - we have a predisposition for a believe
or religion - usually implanted by a father. It has always stricken me
that most religious leaders and founders of churches are men. Most
religions - at least those with a God - are too simple to be true. That
isn't wrong - as i told you we're simple enactors -. We need simple
stories, miracles, rituals, a list of do's and don'ts to make sense of a
complex world fast. And it serves another purpose: it maintains the
coherence of the faithful, the group. It enables you to stop an enquiry by
saying: well, this is what you have to believe or this is just my belief
or ... etc. Furthermore, most religion have a build in blasphemy module.
Now, my suspicion tells me that this faculty (or even a need: we need a
back ground, a set of rules and values, a faith in order to be able to
think and act) of adapting to a religion is used - or perhaps even
kidnapped (please notice the word kid) - for another purpose: to create
and sustain membership to a group. In the same way that we assume that
we're mature when we've learned to manage a complete personality - we
assume that we belong to a group after some rites of passage. We're only
dimly aware of our personal dynamics, our need for further spiritual
development. We're more unaware of the group dynamics. And the need for
developing further spiritual development of groups. There are not many
groups or religions that are organized around individual development.
Usually i notice that the founding fathers. monumental figures like Moses,
Jesus of Nazareth, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, were more focused on
personal, spiritual development. But soon after, that spiritual
development becomes victim of the apostles, the followers, the priests
that have to establish the new cult, a new subgroup against the tide of
the larger religions. It is as if the group think, the group pressure
takes over. The splitting of religions (heresies and schisms) is a very
interesting process. I sometimes get the impressions that this is fuelled
by the availability of free energy. But that's another line of thought.
We do notice the intergroup dynamics, however. It leads to the
devastations we can see, hear and smell around us. Most of the times the
other groups are seen as having an interesting "otherness", a list of
attributions, a set of peculiarities. We even need this otherness, because
it helps us in defining who we are. That's why we're so fond of
travelling. But sometimes it gets expressed as competition and war. And
the larger the groups and the more groups develop and the more we're able
to travel, the larger the changes are for intergroup problems. So in the
end, we'll have to fight each other within a frame that is sealed,
self-sustaining, covered up.
As Smith and Berg wrote in their Paradoxes of Group Life:
- since groups belong to a world populated by other groups, they tend to
be forever banging into each other, each struggling to find is own place
and identity
- each group - to maintain that identity, makes attributions about other
groups and encourages them to act in ways that support that particular
self definition
- there are multiple interests that may not overlap, creating potential
conflicts between groups
- how groups regulate their interactions creates a system of
interdependence that each comes to depend on for its own vitality
- the context of a group is not automatically given, for how a group
elects to act can create a context that is hospitable and sustaining or
hostile and adversarial.
- since it is internal conflict that members are tempting to manage or
avoid by importing external frames, it is understandable that what is
exported back into the environment is conflictual in nature.
Now, I assume that our poorly developed ability to learn who we are, shows
itself in our projections on the outer world and our organisations. We
need others to complement ourselves. We must work together. By organizing
in groups, we can work better, achieve more, without having to do too much
ourselves. We used to build temples and pyramids for our gods, then
churches and now we're building corporate head quarters. But we also have
a need to develop, to learn, to grow spiritually. We used to be nameless
in a church, now our churches have the names of persons. The very source
of the success of an organisations was, is and will be the cause of its
downfall.
This is how i interpret the definition you gave on KoH: know thyself. My
god - as a residue of what i'm not - resides inside me and he wants to
develop himself. Once i know (and this includes love, if you prefer it the
other way around: perfect: once i love myself) who i am, i can love others
like myself. It took me a while to learn that i need others to show me who
i am. We're each others mirrors. And that's what groups are doing to each
other too: reflecting to the other group what your group is, does,
believes, enacts.
What i find missing in every religion (explicitly, not implicitly, because
it is inevitable) - even the religions based on theories of organizing,
like the Learning Organization - is an account, a set of stories, rules
and rituals for intergroup dynamics based on personal spiritual
development. Systems Thinking comes closes, perhaps, to making explicit
the dynamics. But more often than not it is being made into a quantitative
model. And mental models hints at it. But without the paradoxical nature.
I suppose that the KoH - lacking intergroup dynamics - will be a dull
situation, but only for a short while. Human beings will mess up every
paradise. The LO is not a heaven, and even the KoH will not be a heaven.
Heaven is, like hell, the others.
What you describe in your situation looks to me like a schism, a
symmetrical split. In the words of Bateson: schism is the splitting of a
sect (section) where two subgroups end up having doctrinal similarities
but competing politics. The political struggles are internally focused as
the respective groups jostle for position and influence.
Thanks again, success
Jan Lelie
AM de Lange wrote:
>This essay is of a religious nature, but not intended to make a convert
>out of anyone. If it offends you, please forgive me because it was not
>intended. (I wrote it before Christmas, but due to computer problems at
>home I can send it only now, well away in the new year.)
>
>I began the essay after feeling an immense urge in writing it. Jan Lelie's
>summary in "LO as paradise lost and liberation LO29705" of an essay by
>Veerle Rooze shows how timely this urge was. He mentions
>
>>She notes that The Fifth Discipline contains all or most
>>of the important Christian values (integrity, freedom, loyality,
>>openness, forgiveness) but lacks a normative framework.
>>
>
>That is why i have linked this contribution to LO29705
>
snip
>
>The religion Christianity flowed forth from the work of Jesus Christ.
>Unfortunately, i think that too much of Christianity has made Jesus a
>stumbling block to the rest of humankind.
>
>Jesus healed people in body and mind. He also taught people about the
>Kingdom of Heaven (KoH). The KoH has a constitution which he
>summarised as follows from scripture:-
> Love God with personal wholeness and
> love fellow humans as one loves oneself.
>Does this constitution make the KoH a LO (Learning Organization)? I
>think that we have to learn more about the KoH before we can answer
>this question.
>
snip
>Peter Senge taught that a LO can be characterised by five disciplines:-
>Personal Mastery, Team Learning, Shared Vision, Mental Models and Systems
>Thinking. Let us see whether some of the sayings of Jesus on the KoH fit
>into Senge's disciplines of a LO.
>
>I intended to list only three sayings of Jesus himself for each
>discipline. More can be listed, but that would be an overkill. I have
>restricted myself to the four gospels which report him directly.
>
snip
>
>Jesus brought the Kingdom of Heaven (KoH) near with the individual
>learning of his disciples. His disciples then had to make the KoH an
>actuality with their organisational learning! They had to discover for
>themselves how IL (Individual Learning) extends into OL (Organisational
>Learning) and for that he selected the discipline Team Learning. That
>discovery began with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit like "tongues of
>fire" on the pentecostal day.
>
snip
>
>But what about practice rather than theory?
>
snip
> Six months ago we began with four "Care
>Groups" (CGs). Their function can be described as "cells of a LO". Each
>had about eight members and by now they average about twelve members.
>Should a CG become about fourteen members, we intend for it to divide in
>two CGs. We expect this to happen soon in the new year.
>
snip
>
>Is it unlawful or even immoral to do good what has not been informed in
>advance? I do not think so.
>
snip
--Drs J.C. Lelie (Jan, MSc MBA) facilitator mind@work
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