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Intention as Crucible

I was stimulated today by three thoughts coming together.

I’ve been keen on the Alexander Technique in the last few days. Sore back, and also watching my son josh with a crippling sore back has led to a renewed interest in this approach. I’d read the book by F Matthias Alexander (Wikipedia) in the early ’80s. It got me to walk without a limp after an accident.

The aspect of the philosophy on my mind today was what they call “end-gaining” ie focusing on the goal or outcome rather than the process. Yet the method certainly has goals; reduction of pain, better performance, less stress, productivity. Like much of the method, it’s a bit paradoxical. The couple work I do with clients involves slow conscious dialogue: I say slow is fast. It is a bit similar. I use the phrase “goal shadow” to describe the negatives of being too outcome focused.

This was on my mind when I heard the phrase “holding the intention” in relationship to art. That puts the same idea in an active way, rather than not “end-gaining”, hold the intention. Intention is significantly different from goal, purpose or solution, not much but enough to give me a whole new feel, there is no sharpness in it, it is soft focus.

The third thing was reflecting on the sacred space of the therapeutic hour. How framing the work in an hour created a holding space. (Lacanians may differ). I think of that hour, the psychodrama stage, the Imago dialogue and the canvas of a painting, as alchemical vessels within which transformation can happen.

Then it occurred to me that intention far from being a wishy-washy thing could be an alchemical vessel. Holding the intention creates a space in which the intention is held, a space for the work to cook through all its stages. I like it, it complements GTD.

Later:Changed the title from vessel to crucible, and noticed how firmly this related to an earlier post. Being & Doing.

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DCA Cancer Cure?

Ok, big pharmaceutical companies are not picking this up, but surely if there is something in it, some sort of open source thing would do the trick? Kickstarter?  And if the FDA wont approve it, there are other countries who will, surely?

socialscapegoat.com » DCA Cancer Cure?:

DCA Cancer Cure? Posted by Claire Connelly in Technology Leave it to pharmaceutical companies to prioritise profit over curing the second leading cause of death in America and third leading cause of death in Australia alone. Dr. Evangelos Michelaksis discovered that Dichloroacetic Acid (or DCA) – an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule which was once used to cure rare inherited metabolic diseases, could potentially be used as a non-invasive cancer cure that has zero side effects. When he added it to the water of mice and rats who were given human cancers, Michelaksis found that over a period as short as three weeks, the cancer growths had shrunk by up to 70%. Unfortunately, because DCA isn’t patented, the pharmaceutical companies have no interest in producing the drug:

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iPad Art

Went to the apple store in San Francisco today and heard iPad artists talk about their medium.  I particularly liked the work of hgberk in flckr   There is also a show on in San Francisco I might try to get there next Tuesday.

Future/Canvas – the emerging medium of ipad art:

It has been just over a year since the release of the iPad and already it has inspired an exciting new world of digital art. Artists and programmers are using the iPad as a digital canvas and are creating radical new artwork that pushes the bounds of imagination. Future/Canvas showcases a variety of different artistic pursuits involving the iPad from interactive art to photography to painting. Taking place during the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, this is a must-stop destination for iPad enthusiasts who are interested in art. The original Future/Canvas was the first ever multiple-artist iPad art show held in December 2010 at The Box Factory in San Francisco. Our goals is to encourage the creation of iPad art by bringing together the diverse range of people necessary to create it in an environment that demonstrates the possibilities of the medium.

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Next

Evolution does not happen evenly. It may be gradual, but it goes step to step. Sometimes a small change opens up a whole new range of possibilities.

• the opposable thumb

• fire

• alphabet

• law

• printing

• Internet

• next?

I’ve left out a few, but you get the idea, some things change everything.

Ways of organising ourselves into groups to educate and heal have evolved over centuries. There are modalities like psychoanalysis, and TA and Alcoholics Anonymous and the Red Cross and so on, that all have methodologies and the persist with a sort of DNA that allows these ideas to hold together and spread. My hunch is that one of the big changes coming up, and needed, is that there will be a new way to speed up the process that has been working in an ad hoc way. Imagine there were ways to find tool kits online for running groups that were freely available and could be edited by their users (Wikipedia style). Imagine that these could be classified and rated, and they each had their advocates and practitioners who beleived their group could make the world a better place.

I can imagine such a social network emerging from the need to change on the one hand , and our ability to learn from Wikipedia, Facebook and Linux on the other as well as the fact there are already thousands of thriving forms that each in their own way work towards major social change. Could there be one network that transforms all of this into something new? I say one network because some things tend to towards there being only one, and one works best, for example Google, Amazon and the Internet itself is the best example.

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Holon

It is nice to have this idea, that I use all the time, spelled out so clearly.

Holon (philosophy) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

A holon (Greek: ὅλον, holon neuter form of ὅλος, holos “whole”) is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The word was coined by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967, p. 48). Koestler was compelled by two observations in proposing the notion of the holon. The first observation was influenced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon‘s parable of the two watchmakers, wherein Simon concludes that complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms present in that evolutionary process than if they are not present.[1] The second observation was made by Koestler himself in his analysis of hierarchies and stable intermediate forms in both living organisms and social organizations. He concluded that, although it is easy to identify sub-wholes or parts, wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere. Koestler proposed the word holon to describe the hybrid nature of sub-wholes and parts within in vivo systems. From this perspective, holons exist simultaneously as self-contained wholes in relation to their sub-ordinate parts, and dependent parts when considered from the inverse direction.

Koestler also points out that holons are autonomous, self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence and handle contingencies without asking higher authorities for instructions. These holons are also simultaneously subject to control from one or more of these higher authorities. The first property ensures that holons are stable forms that are able to withstand disturbances, while the latter property signifies that they are intermediate forms, providing a context for the proper functionality for the larger whole.

Finally, Koestler defines a holarchy as a hierarchy of self-regulating holons that function first as autonomous wholes in supra-ordination to their parts, secondly as dependent parts in sub- ordination to controls on higher levels, and thirdly in coordination with their local environment.

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Crazy World

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% | Society | Vanity Fair:

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

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Devotion

Eric Maisel is inspiring. No doubt about it he gets me to the next phase. Devotion not discipline, that does it for me. I am devoted to my work, and naming it like that might even get me up an hour earlier!

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Word processing on the iPad

I find the actual typing ok, and it can be even better with the bluetooth keyboard. The problems lie elswhere.

Pages

Apple’s word processor

Pro:

It works.
I can use styles that convert to Word.

Cons

No Dropbox or other way to use the file in two places. The ones offered are not ones I want to use, like iWork etc. get terrible reviews. iTunes is clumsy. Maybe it will be the #1 way access the file from any device when iCloud arrives. Just a few hours before we hear!

Documents to Go

Pro

I can see the files I have stored in there on Dropbox. Sharing works well.

Con

Looses style formatting in Word format. Makes it unworkable for the work I do.

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