A spiritual grounding

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.
Part 4 – Meeting Our Future (part 1 of 2)

(Image: Namaste, 1994, Alex Grey)

Charles Taylor argues in his book A Secular Age that the Industrial Age changed the way we conceive of ‘meaning’, that it became inextricably linked with ‘progress’. “‘Somewhere in the last generation of two,’” says Senge, “‘the very word “old” became a pejorative term. Now it’s synonymous with worn-out and obsolete, and ‘new’ automatically means improved and superior. This might be perfectly fine in talking about machines, but tragic for living systems” (178). So this section challenges this formulation of meaning which we instinctively presume to be true. The authors quote Debashish Chatterjee in his opening remarks for a seminar on leadership at MIT: “‘I’ve been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it’s been submitted to many tests – which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We’re fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance’” (179). Some would disagree with this, I realize, but it is perhaps a partial justification for turning back to spiritual traditions for inspiration and guidance.

Perhaps this modern predicament could be characterized as a lack of grounding. This happens when you are constantly into the future; you are simultaneously running away from the past, where your wisdom is located. The authors quote a “senior officer from the United Nations” who ended his presentation to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis with this harsh evaluation: “‘I’ve dealt with many different problems around the world, and I’ve concluded that there’s only one real problem: over the past hundred years, the power that technology has given us has grown beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, but our wisdom has not. If the gap between our power and our wisdom is not redressed soon, I don’t have much hope for our prospects’” (187).

The authors see some hope in the trends in modern physics and the accompanying changes in the modern scientific worldview. The rejection of the vision of the world as “Newtonian billiard balls”, and the embracing of electromagnetic and quantum fields “transformed the Newtonian worldview of isolated particles, [and thus] potentially transforms the particle nature of the isolated self” (188). I, too, find this hopeful, in that we are beginning to wake up (again – for this was what various religious traditions told us) to the truth that we are all connected. “Connectedness is the defining feature of the new worldview – connectedness as an organizing principle of the universe, connectedness between the ‘outer world’ of manifest phenomena and the ‘inner world’ of lived experience, and, ultimately, connectedness among people and between human and the larger world. While philosophers and spiritual teachers have long spoken about connectedness, a scientific worldview of connectedness could have sweeping influence in ‘shifting the whole,’ given the role of science and technology in the modern world” (188). I cannot prove this, but I imagine that this worldview made it possible for us to embrace the Internet as a means of connecting to others in new ways. And I’ve been asked to justify my decision to focus on the Internet as a technology that I want to design more ‘spiritually’, and I think this is as good as any: that this utopian vision of the Internet as the great connector of humans amounts to huge spiritual potential, potential that I feel we have not fully realized because we have settled for it as it was first conceived.

Physicist David Bohm is quoted here saying, “‘The most important thing going forward is to break the boundaries between people so we can operate as a single intelligence. Bell’s theorem implies that this is the natural state of the human world, separation without separateness. The task is to find ways to break these boundaries, so we can be in our natural state’” (189). (And, ““Einstein spoke of the ‘optical delusion of our consciousness,’ whereby we experience ourselves ‘as something separate from the rest.’ ‘Our task,’ he said, ‘must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty’” (203).) What does this mean if we were to apply it to the Internet? Does the Internet really connect in this way? – or does it in fact entrench our separateness by alienating us first from ourselves (requiring the creation of avatars) and then from each other (avatars relating to one another)? The question we should be asking is where are the opportunities for diminishing the illusion of separateness?

This section also seems to justify my mission in a more fundamental way, i.e. it calls for interdisciplinarity as a means of assuaging the problems that arise from siloed thinking. “The basic problem is ‘fragmentation,’ said [physicist David] Bohm, a way of thinking that ‘consists of false division, making a division where there is tight connection’ and of seeing separateness where there is wholeness. Bohm called fragmentation – in our view of the universe and of ourselves as separate from one another and nature – ‘the hidden source of the social, political, and environmental crises facing the world’” (190). In a sense, my research would amount to a blending of technology, modern scientific thinking, psychology, sociology, management, design and spirituality. Consider this:

“Master Nan said, ‘What has been lacking in the twentieth century is a central cultural thought that would unify all these things: economy, technology, ecology, society, matter, mind, and spirituality. There are no great philosophers or great thinkers who’ve been able to develop the thinking that unifies all these questions.’ The decline in integrative awareness and thinking has been replaced by a focus on business and making money as a default common aim. When Otto told Master Nan he thought human culture was on the verge of a new spiritual awareness, Nan agreed but said that it might not develop as most expect. It ‘will be a different spiritual route from that of the past, either in the East or West. It will be a new spiritual path’” (211). “Or, as Otto puts it, ‘What’s emerging is a new synthesis of science, spirituality, and leadership as different facets of a single way of being’” (212).

I resonated with this quote, because it seemed to imply the need for something like the HighWire programme, but also assert the need for spiritual thinking within academic discourse.