Crossroads Dispatches

Beyond Cluetrain Conversation: The WE Story

I need a larger canvas, but this itty-bitty postcard-sized blog will have to do for now. I want to present the tiniest of snippets of a powerful chapter "Telling the WE Story" in the book, The Art of Possibility. This is true conversation. It's beyond Cluetrain. As Drucker notes, you can be having a conversation - yes, even with a human voice - and yet no communication occurs.

I often struggle to connect two disparate (divisive entrenched) sides - build bridges - evangelize - market - relate. So the timing is impeccable. I'll draw from it again in more posts I'm working on. If you have a chance, read at least this chapter in its entirety - I've had to leave out all the stories and anecdotes and so much more. Snippet below:

More often than not history is a record of conflict between an Us and a Them. We see this pattern expressed across a broad spectrum: nation to nation, among political parties, between labor and management, and in the most intimate realms of our lives...What can we invent that will take us from an entrenched posture of hostility to one of enthusiasm and deep regard?

To begin the inquiry, we have distinguished a new entity that personifies the "togetherness" of you and me and others. This entity, the WE, can be found among any two people, in any community or organization, and it can be thought of, in poetic terms, as a melody running through the people of the earth. [Is this amazing, another musical metaphor?] It emerges in the way music emerges from individual notes when a phrase is played as one long line, in the way a landscape coalesces out of the multicolored strokes of an Impressionist painting when you get some distance, and in the way a "family" comes into being when a first child is born. The WE appears when, for the moment, we set aside the story of fear, competition, and struggle and tell its story.

The WE story defines a human being in a specific way: It says we are our central selves seeking to contribute, naturally engaged, forever in a dance with each other. It points to relationship rather than to individuals, to communication patterns, gestures, and the in-between. Like the particle-and-wave nature of light, the WE is both a living entity and a long line of development unfolding. This new being, the WE of us, comes into view as we look for it - the vital entity of our company, or community, or group of two. Then the protagonist of our story, the entity called WE, steps forward and takes on a life of its own.

By telling the WE story, an individual becomes a conduit for this new inclusive entity, wearing its eyes and ears, feeling its heart, thinking its thoughts, inquiring into what is best for US. This practice points the way to a kind of leadership based not on qualifications earned in the field of battle, but on the courage to speak on behalf of all people and for the long line of human possibility...

Usually what we mean by the pronoun "we" is "you-plus-I," so the questions "What shall we do?" or "What will work for us?" generally refer to a compromise between what you want and what I want...

The practice of the WE offers an approach to conflict based on a different premise. It assumes there are no fixed wants nor static desires, while everything each of us thinks and feels has a place in the dialogue...

Traditional methods of resolving conflict, all the I/You approaches, tend to increase the level of discord because they attempt to satisfy the dictotomous positions people take, rather than providing the means for people to broaden their desires. I/You methods deprive people of the opportunity to wish inclusively. They do not give people the chance to want what the story of the WE says we are thirsting for: connecting to others through our dreams and visions.

While the WE practice can enhance any aspect of your life, it also poses a risk. It is not a technique for arriving at a decision based on known quantities; it's an integrative process that yields the next step. It asks you to trust that the evolution you set in motion will serve you over the long line. What happens after that is not in your control, but springs spontaneously from the WE itself.

Marginal Zones and Third Places

While I may have more to comment on the Friendster blogger and its implications, I didn't want to dilute this message. The sad irony of all of this is of course that Friendster is purportedly an online social networking community. It's an ecosystem of people and the myriad of relationships that coalesce into hopefully something greater than the whole. The only thing that holds relationships and meshes of relationships together is trust, empathy, respect and love not technology. The entire glue that binds Friendster isn't in its architecture or speedy infrastructure. A social networking site's assets and sustainable competitive advantage mostly lies in its critical (and growing) mass of networked users.

As much as I've tried to use these social networking services, I really find only blogging to offer any depth to nurturing and sustaining relationships - something practically unexplainable to a non-blogger as I know I didn't grasp it until I started myself. We become transformed and expanded by the sighs, laughter, brilliance, and synchronicities of others. It's not a media, it's much more than a network.

A medium's job is to deliver a message. It does its job well if that message is delivered intact. But that's not how media actually work because we are not passive containers. Rather, in the process of understanding something, we let it affect us. It shapes us, and we shape it. We absorb it into the context of our lives. - David Weinberger's blog

Yes, and it goes beyond the process of understanding something. But also understanding someone.

Hmmm, not a media, not a network. A platform? In tech speak, if one develops a platform it serves as a foundational piece for an ecosystem of additional third-parties to contribute and add value to the platform in a synergistic fashion. Still for a technological system, the platform itself is typically the hub. But in two-way communication, the hub is an third entity - an in-between place - a marginal zone - that didn't exist prior to the communication. Neither I nor you, but a we place.

One of the so-called offending posts that Joyce wrote about was referenced by Jon Udell, an InfoWorld journalist and a fellow-blogger. Where is the line drawn? Is Jon a journalist, a blogger, a friend - or more than any of these? Did Troutgirl speak to "the" press without formal PR department approval? Did she create her own press, er blog? Either way, Jon reminds us below all that we owe Troutgirl our thanks for contributing to the third place and the ever-ongoing and bidirectionally flowing conversation.

Ecologists know that life is most interesting, and also most dangerous, at habitat boundaries -- where the ocean meets the shore, where the forest meets the meadow. And in the virtual world, where the private meets the public. A healthy ecosystem requires that we colonize that marginal zone. When people get hurt trying to do that -- in the right ways, for the right reasons -- we should offer them not only our condolences, but also our thanks. - Jon Udell

Friendster: A Case Study on Resisting Conversational, Participatory Marketing

An employee at Friendster, one of the pioneers in online social networking, was fired because she spoke in the credible voice (via BoingBoing). She was not fired for blogging per se - but because the messaging was not a carefully crafted, sanctioned one.

I think if a company is that concerned in crafting their message the responsibility is on their shoulders to explain to employees the cohesive messages and objectives of the company, provide media training as well as to establish policies.

But things are a-changing. It's no longer a mass market, mass media world.

When June Cleaver wore pearls while serving dinner to Beaver and the family, "positioning" could work. Consumers had limited access to information and companies could generally control how offerings were portrayed within limited media..."Positioning" ignores a basic principle of communications theory. Communication does not occur just because the speaker (or company) speaks. It occurs only when the message is heard, and ideally, accepted....["P]ositioning is out of step with the requirements of the customer and demand economies. The interlinked imperatives of these eras are relationships, execution and the ability to do business on customer terms. It definitely is not, in Ries and Trout's words, "what you do to the mind of the prospect." A more powerful perspective is to enable prospects - and customers - to shape your thinking. - FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand For the Future by Nick Wreden

The post that probably got management riled (and caught the attention of Slashdot and Jon Udell of InfoWorld) doesn't reveal any deep dark company secrets. The original founder, Jonathan Abrams, had described the architecture previously; it was built more-or-less in a garage and no bootstrapped start-up creates Google's infrastructure from day one and ever gets a product out the door (this speaking from experience). Rearchitecting or refactoring in the future was a given and that takes time and effort. That the Friendster service was slow is hardly a secret to its users. It's certainly not the only web based application that is slow nor will it be the last. (Disclaimer: I also work for Pivia whose product accelerates dynamic Web applications.)

Others including Boing Boing, Technorati and Feedster have been dinged for their performance. It's the reaction to these 'dings' that is most illuminating.

Here's CEO of Technorati David Sifry's reactions in Jason Calcanis' post titled "Technorati down (again)?" Note that no one ends up being fired.

I'm really sorry that the service hasn't been up to expectations. We're working day and night to deal with the deluge we've been seeing, both in the number of weblogs out ther e( growing by over 15,000 per day), in the number of posts per day (over 275,000 per day), and in the number of searches per day. It is quite a technical challenge.

But that's not the point. The point is that we're not providing a service that is matching your expectations. And for that, there's no excuse.

Sorry.

We've got a team of folks who are working 100% of the time to (a) keep the service up all the time, and (b) make every search result return quickly and accurately.

Thanks for all the feedback and comments. I take your thoughts and comments really seriously, and I'll be passing these comments to the entire team.

Dave

Notice that speaking with a credible non-defensive voice has users speaking up on Technorati's behalf:

I think most people fail to appreciate what Technorati is actually doing, and how difficult it is.

They have to manage and maintain ~140 servers. Not an easy task for a small company.

They are adding a ton of data every day to their database, which requires more hardware as time passes (see the first point).

Google doesn't even come close to indexing as fast as Technorati does. The median time to index a new blog entry at Technorati is seven mintues!

Google's infrastructure is impressive, but it would be a challenge even for them to duplicate what Technorati is doing.

Anyone wonder if Google had trouble with their service when they were running on skeleton machines in the basement of Stanford? I bet they did.

There is a long history with Friendster however with control. I thought perhaps things might change with new management.

About one to two years ago they missed an incredible opportunity to learn from their users because they had a fixed mental map of what their product was. "A more powerful perspective is to enable prospects - and customers - to shape your thinking." The original founder was incensed (not an exaggeration) that early adopters (many of whom were influencers and bloggers) were using the Friendster service in an "unintended" manner. Rather than dig deeper, be curious, and inquire why there was a large group of users that preferred to use Friendster as a game with alter-egos and fake personas and engage them in a conversation to find out the appeal and perhaps leverage that knowledge into something valuable - it was out-and-out banned. Thus a battle was waged between the company and its most influential users. Let's just say the word-of-mouth I heard in the Valley about Friendster was not exactly Lovemark-quality. Friendster is very much in the zero-sum game, I versus you box in my magic quadrant (I'll be fleshing it out in more detail).

Unfortunately, I see this rift between the old marketing and the new marketing widening for the short-term (emphasis on short-term). The good news is the companies that actually embrace rather than resist the customer's (and other constituencies') role in conversational, participatory marketing in this meantime will be sweeping it up.

If We'd Won $93M Saturday

Well we didn't win the $93 million dollar jackpot in the California lottery this past Saturday (I threw in a few bucks at a client site employee pool). Although that's certainly not the closest I've ever been to being a millionaire (that was back in 2000), it made me question whether I would do anything at all differently in my life had I instantly been transformed into multi-millionaire Saturday.

I think the answer is no. I decided after the start-up imploded that I was done waiting to hit it big to do what it was I wanted to do. (Ughh, the next question is what exactly would that look like?) The money was supposed to buy freedom. I was going directly to freedom regardless.

I wasn't intending to write this post but it ties into Awareness Mondays. Matt at [non]billablehour's Think Tank Tuesdays question provoked me to write.

The first big question is: What one thing could I do to completely transform my business?

Good question. I think I'll hit upon the answers to these questions if I devote myself to doing what The Highest Goal by Michael Ray recommends trying for a full week:

Do only what you love and love everything that you do.

Yikes. Michael Ray, the Stanford prof whom teaches the Personal Creativity in Business courses has his students do this exercise, writes:

You don't need to do anything in particular. Just be fully in the world, holding your vision and allowing your purpose in life to come into focus. Throughout the week, or whatever time period you do this live-with, increase the amount of time (coming as close to one hundred percent as possible) spent only in activities that meet at least one of the following criteria:

the activity is easy, effortless and enjoyable;

the activity is intrinsically meaningful to you;

the activity feels natural to do;

the activity makes time go by quickly;

the activity is something you look forward to;

the activity makes you feel good about yourself;

there is nothing you would rather be doing;

you enjoy the activity for itself, not simply as a means to an end;

you have the sense that you are contributing to the fulfillment of your purpose in life.

[As for the love everything you do part; much more difficult for moi:] See difficult activities that you have to do in a larger context of your goals.

I challenge and invite you to try this live-with for a week. If that feels like too much, consider this sounding board practice this week:

Spend more time in attentive silence. Don't radically shift your schedule around to accomplish this. During your commute, turn off the radio and notice what's around you. Wash dishes without turning on the TV. While gardening or hiking, go alone and leave the Walkman behind - look around. Don't use this as an opportunity to have your mind race off to solve all your problems. Mulling, stewing, pontificating, strategizing, rehearsing scripts isn't attentive silence. Try focusing and observing what's right in front of your eyes. Next week I'll talk more about attentive silence and why it's a sounding board practice.

I'll report next Tuesday (after Labor Day) on how this particular live-with week went for me. Good luck if you accepted my invite!

Get On the Soultrain, Madison Ave

It’s not that people don’t dream anymore of being better than they are. It’s that where they want to be better is more inner-focused than outer-focused. - David Wolfe, Ageless Marketing post yesterday

We're Great, and Greater Than Ourselves

Jung’s sixth task of aging, is “determining the meaning of one’s life,” is about gaining conscious awareness of one’s purpose for being. It is a profound dimension of human behavior mostly ignored by marketers. - Ageless Marketing

"We each have an experience that we are great, that we have a connection with everything, that we have potential. That is the moment of exultation captured by Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself":

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
- The Highest Goal, by Michael Ray

I think we all have an inkling that are bigger, greater, deeper than what's on the surface. In fact, that's what saved Bucky Fullminster from the brink of suicide -- the sense that he belonged to something greater than himself.

We have an urge to merge with that possibility. Perhaps unknown and infinite.

Among all my patients in the second half of life - that is to say over thirty-five - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. - Carl Jung

Jung, whom lived from 1875-1961, viewed religion more in terms of this definition:

re-li-gion (ri lij' en) L. religio, religare, to bind back < re-, back + ligare, to bind, < bind together, to connect the lesser to the greater, the part to the whole

Albert Einstein had this to say about connecting and being part of the whole:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. - Albert Einstein

Whitman's poem sounds woefully narcissistic if you focus on the title: Song of Myself. Full of Myself? Like many look askance at blogs - they're self-indulgent, narcissitic, "like having a conversation with myself" - so too do many people perceive self-awareness and personal development as incredibly self-indulgent and distasteful. In a world that has so much sorrow and needs so much help, what the heck do we think we are doing 'following our bliss' as Joseph Campbell advised.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. - Isaac Asimov

Self-awareness and personal development often gets jumbled in as do practically all self-help, New Age, spiritual, religious, metaphysical and even psychology and philosophy content (and nowadays even neuroscience and quantum physics) into one big massive soup. It makes the task harder to pick out the nuggets in the goopy broth, but they're there.

In the second half of life, developmental tasks have a less worldly and egocentric mien. More of a person’s focus likely turns toward needs of the group. This change in focus makes narcissistic ploys that have been a large part of marketing genre less effective in a marketplace dominated by people in the second half of life. - Ageless Marketing

The focus towards the group doesn't arise out of a sense of obligation or duty solely due to one's mature status. (In my experience obligation breeds resentment.) It has more to do with an intimate sense of belonging and unity, which I know sounds radically counter-intuitive but it does not necessarily arise out of a willful focus on the group or others. Note that by the third line, Song of Myself has shifted from self-celebration to empathetic unity.

Self-judgment begets judgment while self-love begets love. The merciless can show no mercy. An empty vessel has not a drop of water to pour forth to relieve anyone's thirst. I realized I couldn't give what I didn't myself possess after years of frustrated activism and trying to help (read: change...force) the world.

I recently wrote a comment on Ageless Marketing that essentially says that if one continues on an intentional path of personal innovation, in my own experience, the result is surprisingly quite transpersonal.

Love yourself and be awake -
Today, tomorrow, always.
First establish yourself in the way,
Then teach others,
And so defeat sorrow.

To straighten the crooked
You must first do a harder thing -
Straighten yourself.

You are your only master.
Who else?
Subdue yourself,
And discover your master.
- The Buddha, adapted from the Dhammapada, translated by Thomas Byrom

Sounding Boards

I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung. -- Rabindranath Tagore

The authentic voice, the true voice, the wee voice. You may name it whatever you may would like. As I wrote before: "It is your inner compass. And it isn't necessarily a voice at all - but rather a form of communication that transcends language. It more closely aligned with music than words, as touched on in this resonance post."

This is the follow-up post to Exceptional People are Exceptionally Themselves:

"A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within." -- Anthony De Mello, Awareness.

Of course, that leads to the next question(s) and the next post: Uh, what tune is that - why don't I hear squat? Or, ah that tune, you mean that little ditty matters?

"The problem with our become-a-leader-30-days craze is that what worked for [Jack] Welch or [Lee] Iocacca is not readily transferable, nor are the secrets of their successes easily passed on in a book...I think you had to be Lee [Iocacca] in order to be like Lee; I don't think you could be Lee through study." - David Halberstam, "The Greatness That Cannot Be Taught", Fast Company, September 2004.

Isn't it curious that the title of that article is called "The Greatness That Cannot Be Taught". As I observe successful people the most consistent pattern I've noted is that exceptional people are exceptionally themselves.

Of General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, Halberstam writes: "He did what he did because to do anything else would have been less than who he was." Bingo.

I'll stick with the metaphor of the authentic voice as an internal tune. Imagine that you yourself - or your mind - is the tuning fork. Discovering more about tuning forks, Wikipedia tells us:

When [a tuning fork is] struck, it gives out a very faint note which is barely audible unless held right up to the ear. For this reason, it is generally struck and then pressed down on a solid surface such as a desk which acts as a soundboard and greatly amplifies the note.

In my Awareness Mondays post I will be giving out a myriad of techniques and practices that may prove to be good sounding boards for your own wee tune and serve to amplify it. Not all of them may click or work for you, but be open to experimentation.

What most experts and gurus will share with you is the music they hear when they press their own tuning fork to a sounding board. It's their tune, not yours. So Awareness Mondays and the companion email list (subscribe at awareness-practice-subscribe at yahoogroups dot com) are about is sharing ideas for effective sounding boards.

This whole topic seems to abound around mid-life or whenever we are making a transition or coming on inflection points or we just notice that something seems off or we feel we're in a rut or a creative slump. But it seems a shame to wait until any of these times to be exceptional and to accentuate ourselves.

In a recent email referring to mid-life (or existential) crisis, someone shares: I don't know what's going on, I thought I was so in-tune.

You are in tune. Listen to the tune. Don't use societal expectations, cultural norms, your parents' expectations, your partner's expectations, TV, the country club, or the Fortune 100 as sounding boards.

[This is outside the scope of this post, but adult human development is normal. Growth is natural. Suppressing growth is what hurts. "What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly." - Richard Bach]

If you don't believe that your tune can be heard or is even worth amplifying, all I ask is that you give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Let's say I'm no expert, but...

"Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier, could give some advice." - C.S. Lewis

Creative Age? Yep, I'm A Soulitarian

P-L-A-Y - it's another four-letter word in business. (Note play is one of the six attributes for the Conceptual Age.)

Curt Rosengren at Occupational Adventure points us to the new book, Play Ethic (U.K. only right now) by Pat Kane.

He [author Kane] identifies a new type of worker - the "soulitarians", who, if and when they work, shun high salaries in favour of "meaningful" work, are keen to experiment with technology and happily flit between start-up and corporation, self-employment and job-sharing. They are capable of hard work in the right endeavour and their creativity and technological skills make them increasingly sought-after. But they are militant about putting work in its place so they can have time for travel, personal growth and new experiences. - Financial Times article (via Occupational Adventure)

Soulitarian fits me to a T - especially if and when - except I'm working on shunning that "shunning high salary" part. Why assume there's got to be a trade-off? Sounds like mental map stuff to me (btw, been read more of The Power of Impossible Thinking at B&N cafe yesterday - great stuff.) Anyway, only thing that I'd like to clarify is that for me I try to bring meaning to work, I'm not seeking it from work.

So does this mean we should just muck about at work? Nope. Play is more than that. Kane takes his cue from the root-word dlegh (in Celtic, Germanic and Slavic), meaning 'to engage oneself'. - Management Today

'Soul engagement' is not just for brands but for all of us - in and out of the workplace. Toss out the guilt-ridden, work-is-supposed-to-be-soul-draining ethic.

As I mull over this, I had this feeling of gratitude wash over me. It's been a really good time. I've been a Soulitarian (snappier term needed) since June 1996. That was probably the first time I heard my wee voice (you're right Hugh, it's snappier than authentic voice) regarding work and I didn't second-guess it. Nope, I didn't muffle it for once. And I didn't listen to 'sane advice' from others.

I once read that humans are the only animals that second-guess their instincts.

I'd very much like to know if this Soulitarian thing is actually a trend...please comment if this resonates with your life or where you see yourself headed...and I'll write more about June 1996 in a follow-up post.

Strong Opinions Lightly Held

In the prologue to The Power of Impossible Thinking, also mentioned in Tom Peter's post, it states:

"Researchers asked subjects to count the number of times ballplayers with white shirts pitched a ball back and forth in a video. Most subjects were so thoroughly engaged in watching white shirts that they failed to notice a black gorilla that wandered across the scene and paused in the middle to beat his chest. They had their noses so buried in their work that they didn't even see the gorilla.

"What gorillas are moving through your field of vision while you are so hard at work that you fail to see them? - The Power of Impossible Thinking

I've been drafting this post since this book recommendation by Tom Peters stated: "No dogmatism. No mysticism." The trend continues with the recent aforementioned post where Tom indicates "that doesn't translate into goopy self-help jelly." Don't mean to pick on Tom - he's just prolific - as this is simply common business sentiment not at all peculiar to Tom.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The street is as false as the church. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I just love Emerson. One could easily substitute in 'dogmatic' for 'false' (for what is 'false' is often in the eye of the beholder.)

Dogma is all around us. One definition of dogma: A tenet is that which is maintained as true with great firmness. I endeavor to do more to cast off my own dogmas from my mind than to defend against others.

Everyone filters and colors things according to their own perceptions and preconceptions and beliefs and agenda and conditioning. It's safest to assume you never read or heard anything truly objective. Be doubly wary of anyone that believes they're objective. But so what? I'm not exactly a big fan of extreme dogma myself, but like Emerson I would find I'd be turned off every few minutes if I let it get to me. There is often some value to be gained if one bores through the dogma and drills a little deeper (yeah, heaps of sawdust is the main outcome once in a while).

Be willing to be influenced. Be pliable, be flexible, be open, be curious. Yet don't buy into everything verbatim either. A friend told me that a motto of Paul Saffo, Director for the Institute for the Future, is: "Strong opinions - lightly held."

A former CEO was questioned about his choice of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on the list of (rather hefty-serious) business books that most influenced him in business. He said: "Welcome outside influences. One thing I learned from 7 Habits as well as my kids is how to be a better listener."

Another CEO allowed himself to dig further on his own terms even though a particularly dogmatic animal-rights activist bugged the hell out of him.

As for mystics, a mystic "plumbs the depths of the self and reality in a radical process of meditative self-discovery to discover the true nature of reality experientially." The key word is experientially.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason. - Leonardo da Vinci

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. - Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse

Wisdom is the daughter of experience. - Leonardo da Vinci

As Anthony De Mello says the best that sages (yeah, he probably meant mystics) can possibly do is point to the moon but that usually distracts most people into oohing and aahing over the finger. The truest mystics typically are not dogmatic because they realize they cannot convey wisdom through the conduit of language.

Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. - Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching

Just because it sounds woo-woo do not mistake it for the words of a mystic.

But why imprison your mind by constraining it and consciously filtering anything -- whether it smacks of dogmatism, mysticism or any category for that matter? I've waded chest-deep in "goopy self-help jelly" and still pulled out a diamond in the rough often enough. I'm getting pretty discriminating - but I'd say probably on the order of 5% of self-help books might be worth reading and of those maybe 30% is good content. And I'd say a fairly similar ratio holds for business books. Or blogs. Or you-name-it.

My point: Be open to everything. Sift gently, but comprehensively. Assume nothing. Question everything. Hold opinions lightly not firmly.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. - Francis Bacon

What gorillas are moving through your field of vision while you are so hard at work [at certainty, at avoidance, at blind-folded fear, at fill-in-the-blank] that you fail to see them?

If You Have the Chance, Go See What the Bleep

Before I let another weekend of film viewing slip by, I wanted to urge you to see this film-festival award-winning hybrid documentary that's out now called What the Bleep Do We Know (as with many independents, and documentaries it may not be available in your area, schedule here.) Supposedly there will be wider distribution this fall.

I have no time to write my own review, so I'll borrow snippets from Ric Giardina's email newsletter (not online) below. I'm going back to see it for a second time - I'm taking notes - this weekend. Just go with an open mind and I think you'll get a lot out of it. In fact, go in with an even more open mind than the filmmakers. There is no way to avoid seeing or reading anything without getting the interpretation - including the filters, beliefs, agenda of the creators mixed in - but they're not too heavy-handed. Besides, I'd like other folks to discuss it with. It packs what would equate to a lot of content in text (I know, I've read much of it) into a short film.

One reason I'm going back because it explains in crisp, scientific terms how the process of self-observation, which I speak a lot about, works in rewiring our neural pathways and thus, interrupting ingrained reactionary (stimulus-response) patterns. From Ric's Spirit Employed newsletter:

Quantum physics, neurology, and neurobiology are all beginning to coalesce their fundamental principles around concepts that would have been considered purely metaphysical only a very short time ago. The article directly below this one discusses the film, "What the #$*! (Bleep) Do We Know?" which explores the growing convergence of leading-edge science with notions traditionally relegated to the realm of spirituality.

The result is a stunning cinematic experience that has audiences gathering in the lobby and outside the theater after the film to discuss it. Many return for a second and often a third viewing. (Yes, I will definitely be seeing it again—and soon.)

People have been lining up everywhere "What the Bleep" has been shown. In Portland, the film was held over for twenty weeks. Theatres in other cities are having similar experiences. The film was picked up by Samuel Goldwyn for distribution, and this fall it will open in hundreds of theatres nationwide.