Unfettered Mind 

Dear Ken,

I’ve weeded through this as much as I’m able at the moment; rife with pattern projections, but maybe useful.  I’d need to go through it again with a printout to get specific examples.

The more I contemplate the choices being made in reorganizing unfettered mind the more it seems a good approach for what needs to be done amongst limited choices.  Language doesn’t do well with expressing new ways of doing things.  Nor are there adequate new organizational models outside the techno-corporate ones.

However, I’m not sure a fine model, and new language to support it is much better than feeling one’s way along.

A network is, I think, headless.  Does a network move in a direction, or is it simply a container and communication-path provider for those within it?  How is overall direction and intention decided?  How are decisions made?  By groups that arise within the network; overall direction and intentions often turns to mush. 

The experiences I have had with attempts at hierarchy-free, democratic, or network based systems/organizations has lead me to distrust their promises.  They promise much but seem to act primarily to hide how things actually work.  Any organization comes back to the people in it.  While the idea of flow and reconfiguration based on intention is a good one, in cases I’ve experienced it quickly devolves to those with the most charisma running things, but without clear responsibility.

In unfetteredmind it would undoubtedly be different, as all involved are practicing and working to be present to the best of their ability, but I think with aware people any system can work well.  I think it’s better to have the structure of power and decision making clear, with people with clear function.

Techno-corporate language has become accepted as the language of getting things done.  Techno-corporate language gets certain things done in certain ways, and does so by leaving more or less out, as science does.    Too much of the language in the vision/mission statement sounds like the language being used in the reorganizations of universities, government and corporations, with an already perceptible growth of jargon that creates a sense of ‘us’, ‘insiders’.  This is dangerous, as you noted at the last teacher’s group while we were talking about potential hazards in teaching.  This is easy to gradually forget. 

Why not have poetics in the language from the start?  Does language that alludes to mystery really get any less done?  Is it really less clear?  Or, is language with the surety of science/technology really more clear?  Why must a vision/mission statement be in a language that doesn’t adequately convey what it contains?

notes:

Jotspot as a management/communication tool throws things further into a techno light.  It works by breaking things into parts, so information is found in pieces, responses are given in pieces, fed into channels with no person at the other end.  The form itself has a great impact on the information it contains and conveys.

It is a useful tool, but dangerous.  Don’t try to make a disembodied process do more than it can usefully do.

.Possible Remedy:        don’t rely upon jotspot / internet for decision making

                                    Tip balance towards embodied meetings

                                    Why not have it clear who the channel goes to?

Vision/Mission/Network

Why global?  What’s so great about that?  A word’s meaning lies in actual current use.  ‘Global’ has become a corporate marketing word, no way around it.  It contains irresponsibility within it.  Why not ‘far reaching’?

What is the difference between a network and an institution?  Assumptions, projections, and expedience can just as easily characterize networks as institutions.  The form does not automatically provide difference in action.  Networks as systems of management and interaction hide the power that actually mediates most interactions – the institution within the network.  They remove responsibility and access to power.  They create opacity.

‘requires participants to…. develop their own path’  how is this different than new age shopping?  I know plenty of people mired in patterns while ostensibly ‘developing their own path’.

When I returned to teaching at a small university after an absence of 5 years I was astounded by the dullness and narcissism of the students.  The university had changed its mission to one of organizing itself around serving the students’ perceptions of their needs.  The students were taught they could decide what they needed to learn and how and expected the teachers to deliver it to them; if they didn’t learn what they wanted to learn in the way they wanted to learn it, it was the fault of the teachers.

I seek the dharma because what I have known no longer works.  I seek a teacher for the same reason.  The power in this relationship is in the teacher, the teachings, and my continued application and interest.  In the new mission statement, if the language accurately expresses intention, students’ patterns are given a lot of power.

The way it is unfolding is getting weighted more and more towards the conceptual, both in the form, jotspot, and the language.  Anyone not wired to work primarily on an idea level and through the disembodied medium that is primarily an expression of ideas, computers, is filtered out.

Is changing unfettered mind into a network a way of creating a fort, a structure of barriers, filters, correct doorways?  Feedback must come through the proper channels – talk to the correct Minister.

Language and forms function as filters; they keep out more than they let in as they create levels of value.  This can be good, but dangerous.  the unfetteredmind network, in its structuring through jotspot, seems akin to a medieval system but with the people invisible.  You still need to see the proper Minister, whether it’s the right place to submit a comment or the right process to submit an idea.

You must be within a certain economic group to participate.  Expenses are mounting, if one wants to participate in more than a retreat now and then. 

‘Self regulating system’.  Natural systems regulate themselves through periodic disasters.  Systems cannot be self regulating within larger systems.  Human systems are regulated, to a certain point, by those who control them, either openly or from behind the curtain of the system.  Until they become so out of balance that they function more like a natural system and disaster reorganizes them.

‘Changing roles’.  This is to create a system like in a monastery, where everyone shaves their heads and wears robes to erase distinctions, yes?

Web proposal process on jotspot

There are unacknowledged assumptions underlying the process proposals must under take:

            - ‘wild’ ideas (or it may have been ‘wacky’) and ‘play’ are primary to creating

            -group process is better than individual development

            -authorship is bad

            -useful experiences can be created in a shared process where all communication is disembodied

Why not make it simple?  ‘Got an idea?  Propose it in whatever form seems best to convey the idea’, with perhaps some simple pointers about creative process (see below).  Propose it to someone, not a disembodied ‘place’.  (a ‘disembodied place’ is not more neutral than a palace Minister; just different, maybe.)

Rather than making ‘play’ and ‘wild’ into imperatives, remove the obstacles that prevent them cropping up in the moment – primarily self editing and misunderstanding the stages of a creative process.

            Simple description of creative process:

                        Generating possibilities (ideas, color, movements, sounds).  (Storms are not necessary unless they happen).

                        Sweat – working with them to give them shape

                        Polishing – fine tuning; this is where editing comes in with loops that go back  to sweat and generation.

Creative process, in whatever form, is often encouraged, practically required, to be ‘play’.  In my experience it is closer to what we call ‘thinking’; a way of working with, engaging, inspiration and helping it find form.  It frequently involves hops, leaps, sparks, odd connections.  And can be playful. 

Encouraging people to ‘be playful’ is like encouraging them to ‘be present’; it’s a result, not a method.  I have never experienced anything useful coming from people ‘being playful’.  Attempting to play makes the act self conscious.  Actual play is not.

Back to the Vision/Mission:

Unfettered Mind is not headless; Ken provides the vision and direction; which keeps things clear.  The organization-as-network becomes a container and communication-path provider for those involved in helping to shape and manifest that vision – under the leadership of Ken.  A modified-network.  The network is a means for getting things done, a means to manifest the vision and for new ideas to enter; within the overall vision that Ken provides.

The language is important.  The structures used are important.  The means of communication, organization, and managing are important.  The views of all involved are important. 

Jeff