Learning to See

A summary of:
Senge, P., Scharmer, C.O., Jaworski, J. & Flowers, B.S. (2004). Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society. Nicholas Brealey Publishing: London.
Introduction & Part 1 – Learning to See

As I mentioned in my reflections on The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Wertheim showed how Giotto's art was the first instance of an entirely new way of seeing: with perspective, with depth. It was the beginning of representational art, and paved the way for ‘physical vision’ to supplant ‘spiritual vision.’ In other words, one kind of seeing came to dominate, while our ability to see differently eroded over time. The authors of this book seem to be making the case that we need to retrieve our old way of seeing, a spiritual way of seeing; and that this is the key to shaking off the shackles of modernity that prevent us from achieving our true potential.

The authors of this book take a systems (or even ecological) approach to understanding why change doesn’t happen… but how it could. They argue that resistance to change can be understood as an ‘immune system’ response, an inborn self-preservation mechanism that seeks out and destroys ‘otherness’ (35). This happens in organizations too: the members become ‘vehicles for presencing the prevailing systems of management because those systems are most familiar’ (9). The other way of explaining this same phenomemon is habit (or even Bourdieu’s habitus), which is easy, and comfortable, but dangerous: “As long as our thinking is governed by habit – notably by industrial, ‘machine age’ concepts such as control, predictability, standardization, and ‘faster is better’ – we will continue to re-create institutions as they have been, despite their disharmony with the larger world, and the need of all living systems to evolve” (9).

Another danger of this resistence to ‘otherness’ is that it prevents a healthy (and spiritual) process of ‘suspension’. “As the noted physicist David Bohm used to say, ‘Normally, our thoughts have us rather than we having them.’ Suspending does not require destroying our existing mental models of reality – which would be impossible even if we tried – or ignoring them. Rather, it entails what Bohm called ‘hanging our assumptions in front of us.’ By doing so, we begin to notice our thoughts and mental models as the workings of our own mind. And as we become aware of our thoughts, they begin to have less influence on what we see. Suspension allows us to ‘see our seeing’” (29).

Suspension helps us see clearly; in a way, defamiliarizing our reality so that we can see it differently. The authors argue that this new ‘seeing’ is necessary if we want to make major change: “Most change initiatives that end up going nowhere don’t fail because they lack grand visions and noble intentions. They fail because people can’t see the reality they face” (29). And in terms of businesses and organizations, the key epiphany they must experience is that they “become aware of themselves as living. Once they do, they can then become a place for the presencing of the whole as it might be, not just as it has been” (10). In other words, Step one: see reality as it is; Step two: envision an alternate reality; (Step three: start walking in that direction). (And notably, this is exactly the process that Corus underwent in the beginning of their cultural change program.)

Another important idea from this beginning section of the book is the notion of non-judgment. There is no point in self-reflection if you are going to be judgmental of what you see; otherwise you’ll just revert to your comfort zone and resist change. In fact, you’ll resist your own genius! The authors cite a study of genius which showed that “up to the age of 4, almost all the children were at the genius level”… but that by “over twenty, the genius level proportion of subjects sank to 2 percent” (30). The question is, What happened? Where did it go??? “It didn’t go anywhere; it’s covered over by the Voice of Judgment” (30). This is why people who write about “creativity” (Csikszentmihalyi, De Bono, etc.) try to get people to set aside their judgment: “What we’re trying to do is set up situations where people can attack the Voice of Judgment and access their deeper creativity.’ Ray believes that we can consistently bring our creativity into our lives by ‘paying attention to it’ and (30) by building the capacity to suspend the judgments that arise in our mind… that limit creativity” (31).

But of course we also see this idea of non-judgment in the practice of meditation. For example, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes meditation as a process of “‘purposefully refining our capacity for paying attention, ultimately to anything and everything that might be relevant to navigating in the world with open eyes and hearts’” (50). We might understand ‘open eyes’ to mean ‘suspension’ in Bohm’s terms (or ‘concentration’ in Kabat-Zinn’s: “‘When you begin to focus,’ he said, ‘two elements come quickly to the fore. One is that the mind has a life of its own and tends to go all over the place. By cultivating paying attention, you can become less reactive and agitated. That’s called the concentration aspect of meditation’” (50)). And then we might understand the ‘open hearts’ aspect to be this non-judgmental aspect, which the authors would call ‘redirection’ (51), and which Kabat-Zinn calls mindfulness: ‘Then, if you bring a certain kind of open, moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness to what you’re attending to, you’ll begin to develop a more penetrative awareness that sees beyond the surface of what’s going on in your field of awareness. This is mindfulness.” (50). And this combination breeds creativity, and perhaps even genius: “’[he continues…] Mindfulness makes it possible to see connections that may not have been visible before’” (50)…. [and the authors add] mindfulness explores the possibility of dropping ‘underneath our conventional and highly conditioned way of seeing that separates and reifies a subject and object’” (51).

The authors of this book introduce a concept called ‘presence’, which is not so different from this meditation. This is how they define it: “We’ve come to believe that the core capacity needed to access the field of the future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control and, as Salk said, making choices to serve the evolution of life. Ultimately, we came to see all these aspects of presence as leading to a state of (13) ‘letting come,’ of consciously participating in a larger field for change. When this happens, the field shifts, and the forces shaping a situation can move from re-creating the past to manifesting or realizing an emerging future” (14). This presencing is the key to radical change, and innovation as well. This puts the following quote in some perspective: “As W. Brian Arthur, noted economist of the Santa Fe Institute, put it, ‘Every profound innovation is based on an inward-bound journey, on going to a deeper place where knowing comes to the surface’” (13). The lesson for me personally is that if I am going to come up with radical solutions, my process needs to be spiritual. Hence the decision now to use ‘creative engagements’, non-judgmental creations, as a means of accessing a more intuitive solution to the problem of merging the technological and the spiritual.

And furthermore, it suggests that the aim of my PhD, while admittedly incredibly ambitious, is potentially THE avenue to creating mass change. The technological solution I propose needs to engage people in a spiritual, meditative process, so that a shift occurs inside of them… thus facilitating spiritual growth. One author relays a conversation with a peer in which they discuss avenues for radical change: “‘[He asked]…How can we shift the whole?...; [the other answered] ‘After reflecting a moment, he said he’s become convinced that political, legal, and economic approaches don’t go deep enough. By themselves, they won’t bring about the penetrating changes in human culture that we need for people to live in true harmony and balance with one another and the earth. He told me that he is convinced that the next great opening of an ecological worldview will have to be an internal one…’” (56). And elsewhere, this same message is echoed: “‘You know,’ said Joseph quietly, ‘When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart’” (26). To reiterate, the lesson here is that radical, profound change, must involve transforming people in a spiritual way. This is why I have refined the aim of my PhD as creating a cyber-environment in which spirituality can thrive (or at least does not erode); but especially to begin a dialogue about why this spiritual technology is necessary, as a means of waking people up, i.e. beginning a transformation of the human heart.

I think it may prove crucial to my thesis to relate this (as these authors have done) back to notions of this ‘shift’ that come from spiritual traditions. I found this paragraph really helpful: “Through our interviews, we’ve discovered similarities to shifts in awareness that have been recognized in spiritual traditions around the world for thousands of years. For example, in esoteric Christian traditions such shifts are associated with ‘grace’ or ‘revelation’ or ‘the Holy Spirit.’ Taoist theory speaks of the transformation of vital energy (qing, pronounced ‘ching’) into subtle life forces (qi, pronounced ‘chi’), and into spiritual energy (shin). This process involves an essential quieting of the mind that Buddhists call ‘cessation,’ wherein the normal flow of thoughts ceases and the normal boundaries between self and world dissolve. In Hindu traditions, this shift is called wholeness or oneness. In the mystic traditions of Islam, such as Sufism, it is known simply as ‘opening the heart.’ Each tradition describes this shift a little differently, but all recognize it as being central to personal cultivation or maturation” (14). What’s great about this – i.e. situating these concepts within spiritual traditions and invoking their vernacular – is that it will help justify to my readers why I use the term “spiritual technology” rather than, say, “humanist”; because I am trying to convey this profound transformation that we can really only begin to capture with words like ‘spiritual.’

This has made me think that it might be a really good idea to structure my thesis into different spiritual steps, e.g. suspension, non-judgment, revelation, etc.; to relate the process of constructing the PhD to a spiritual process, and in doing so maintain a continuity between ‘subject and frame’, between what is described and how it is described, or as Frank Lloyd Wright might say, to achieve a certain metaphorical ‘truth to materials.’ One such section, for example, might be on ‘isness’, a term that I get from Meister Eckhart to describe the way in which all things are God; there is no differentiation (no otherness). A spiritual goal, then, might be seeing this profound ‘isness’; which you might also describe as cultivating holistic thinking (“Bortoff said, ‘You have to cultivate a quality of perception that is striving outwards, from the whole to the part’” (46); and “Dissolving the boundaries between seer and seen leads not only to a deep sense of connection but also to a heightened sense of change” (43)). This thinking is what allows you to see differently, for the “figure and ground to reverse” (49), which is a key to imagining completely new solutions to problems.