Has Toronto Newspaper blown the Secret of Occupy?

NOW is Toronto's largest circulation weekly newspaper.  Its where all the event listings are available in one place.  The paper was started by several people heavily into women's liberation.  And this week there are seventeen pages of colour ads for prostitution services. 


Liberation?  Any spiritual group will tell you that freedom is our future.  Hey, why wait another decade when we can work towards freedom NOW?  I mean, ...TODAY?  


It seems that NOW's head news editor, Ellie, the writer of the attached article, now knows the secret of Occupy.  We're not talking chocolate bars here.  This is not about using pre-chilled blocks of caramel that turn liquid at room temperature.  No.  This is very serious stuff.  We're talking about groups of humanity doing things to get to the next step in society's evolution.

http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=184946 

But there's a lot more to Occupy than Ellie knows, or that she's letting on about... yet.  

Its really quite brilliant, the way that Occupy is named.  And Occupy is much more than what goes on in the city gatherings. Some people work alone and plug in over the net. In fact Occupy is self-organizing all over the place.  What I've been able to see reminds me of a monastery or ashram for people who may not want to appear dead within organized religion / spirituality.  

Occupy is here to take us further than your average 'shram.  Its a conveniently located international chain of urban resorts for the discerning adventurer within consciousness.  It's for experiencing accelerated evolution together.

Way to go, NOW.  Wow.  Way to go, Occupy!

Hello, Occupy! What you doin'?

To better understand how the Occupy Movement is so different, here is an email a devout Christian land developer friend of mine sent.  It's about a seminar that was being offered to North Americans about opportunities to legally evade paying national taxes by using tax havens in the Caribbean.  


My friend wrote:

These tax schemes are only one way that the 1% have legal ways to get further ahead of the rest of us. This is an actual example. If you were an accountant, you would know lots of other examples. The point is that the high net worth of the 1% does not come from just being industrious. If they paid their fair share of taxes, this would be a start in moving all of us towards equity.

This was great fuel for the Occupy conversation that the mainstream media has now engaged the broader population in.  


In response to my friend's request to pass forward something ‘that might be of interest to Occupy’ I sent the following email: 

Thanks for pointing out a real way in which the 1% gets ahead of the 99% with little effort.  This is a great idea that could turn into an action that Occupy takes, or at least enter the general discussion within the movement.  However, I've since discovered that there are no means for me to forward this suggestion on your behalf to, say the Action Committee for consideration.  


You are part of Occupy.  Sorry to have to say this... it’s either of interest to the individual or not.  It can't be 'of interest to Occupy'. 

Expressive movements fly in the face of everything we're taught about organizing.  They start with trust.  Trust is earned through experiences of working together.  'Organizing ourselves' as a corporation doesn't give us options, like choosing to only work with, or under people we trust.  Instead we pay ourselves to show up, and when we show up, we work.  That's part of what's usually called the 'command and control' model.


However an expressive movement bases collaboration on trust, sharing, caring, kindness, respect... and even more advanced values.  Together we become an embodiment of ideals, and compassion.  Delegation is out the window, and it’s more about freedom or expression, not imposing our individual ideas or ideology on someone else, or suggesting our ideas are things that others could be attending to.  It's about freeing ourselves from chains of command.  

The combination of community, creativity, and compassion results in something that no--one can command and control.  All this is relatively new and something I am still struggling to get my head around.  So far, I know this way of doing things is life affirming.  Both life and light are allowed in.  It's an enlightened development that goes beyond 'organizing ourselves' as a corporation.  Perhaps we're allowing God to step into the middle.  

An 'expressive movement' is special and very different from a single-issue movement or a corporation. The culture in Occupy is that something happens when someone decides to move it forward and it gains wider support.  Otherwise it languishes by the wayside.

To move forward with this valuable idea of doing something about tax haven seminars, you'd either take it as a proposal to a General Assembly, or, more effectively, join the Action Committee by signing on to their Googlegroup.  The info is given under the 'Committees' tab on  the main OccupyTO.org web site.

All the best to you, and heaven help us all.

Understanding How Occupy Works

To even better understand how the Occupy Movement is organized, here is an email another friend sent me.  He is retired from the US army and is quite philosophical.  He attached a link to an article from a magazine and said, “Please pass this along to the organizer of Occupy Toronto.”

I replied, “As you know, there are no Occupy organizers.  Whoever shows up can voice their opinion.” 

He replied:  'As to no "organizers," someone or a few must hold the centre and focus.  Therefore the concept of "No Organizers" is flawed logic'.

Wow.  For the logical part of the brain, all this seems flawed.   But I suggest that, for people who think cosmo-logically, or in terms of the wholeness of a system, this idea of ‘no organizers’ is not flawed at all. 

A cosmos is a whole system.  It is naturally occurring and therefore self-organizing.  The basic challenge that society faces is that we are moving from looking for logical solutions to becoming cosmo-logical adaptations.  And I like the idea that we need to 'become the change we are looking for'.  

My friend liked my email response so I want to share it with you.

At Occupy I believe we are talking about self-directed action in an expressive movement, rather than managed action in a one issue movement.  

That requires self-organization, and coordination of emergent solutions that arise from the grassroots and gradually catch on.  

True, not everyone is sufficiently self-aware all of the time, to know what we want to express or do next.  So at times we may decide to follow someone else's lead rather than taking initiative, being enthused, following ideas and impulses that derive from our own centre.  (En = inside, centre.  Theo = god.  These are the roots of 'enthused').

Nature is all about self-organization.  Unless we think that only fairies and devas make flowers and pumpkins grow we have to open up to the idea that everything that surrounds us that is not hand made or technological has self-organized.  

If you wanna peek at who or what's organizing Nature or the Occupy movement I believe that to some degree it’s the Self, an archetypal pattern that the psychologist, Carl Jung writes about.  Some call it the Great Spirit, the Shakina or the feminine aspect of God.  Or it could be the goddesses Shakti, or Quan Yin.  These may be very real individuals or merely terms that were intuitively arrived at to account for the fluidity and beauty that happening all around us as a result of self-organization.

The Self is the pattern about which things organize. You self-organized in your mother's womb for sure.  You didn't come from on high by Federal Express.

As a chemist I've studied those simplest of self-organizing systems called atoms for years.  Each atom has a centre (nucleus) that arises naturally.  Social movements are similar, just way more complex.  

What makes human life weird is that when we choose to collaborate we soon begin to 'organize ourselves' rather than self-organize.  Organizations are not really organized at all.  They are orderly structures that we build from the top, down.  We impose order from the top, down.  This orderly approach defies life.  

When we get busy and 'organize ourselves' we instill our ideas and values on the outcomes which is terribly limiting.  Whatever regime we choose contains tyranny and oppression within the structure.  This limited approach is how we've managed to produce so much misery and tedium.  Darkness and distrust are dispelled from how we collaborate because fluidity and beauty come included with self-organization.

At Occupy we are not in corporate America or in the army.  In fact we're not trying to be life destroying and self-oppressive at all.  Delegation is 'out' and values-based action is definitely on the increase.  Think 'creative, responsive and lively'.

It’s a funny way to run a universe, I know.  But I actually prefer to align with life and the self-organizing principles that run the show. The pattern we call the 'self' is what's at centre.  

Hoping this makes the idea of "No organizers" clearer and easier to live with.

Andrew.

Leadership from the top! At last. And its from the bottom

Our most complex challenges can be addressed by working together in community.
Finally its evident that some folk in Washington looked into real ways in which we can adapt to the huge challenges we face.  

Leadership is coming from the bottom and needs to be encouraged.

The White House Council for Community Solutions was established by President Obama in December 2010 to share creative ideas and collaborative approaches for building healthy communities across

America.

One of its two key priorities is that, "Every American community will have the knowledge and tools at hand to create successful local "collaboratives" that are designed to catalyze large-scale change and address their most pressing community challenges."

The Council has just released three resources, the foundational one being the Community Collaboratives Whitepaper.

I don't think the word 'solutions' is the limit of what communities can provide.  Solutions are often a way to put off the inevitable need to 'adapt to reality', often referred to as 'evolving as a species'.  

Evolution requires innovation, creativity and soul searching.  Soul searching leads to aligning with higher values such as compassion.  Movements have soul or 'anima'.  Soul that animates  movements is missing from institutions.  Expressive movements that encourage self-directed action among participants are an evolutionary response we can all welcome.

Related Links:

• Download the Council's full Community Collaboratives Whitepaper
• Visit the White House Council on Community Solutions website

Environments that are Conducive for Innovation

Here are some quotes from this really great article that I think indicate ways of moving forward.  To innovate and accelerate positive change in neighbourhoods, any movement may need a strong internet-based component.  The conversations we have need to expand internationally to as big a network as possible.Please circulate a link to this post to whomever may be interested.I look forward to your comments.

New York Times, Sunday Review.

The author of the forthcoming book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” By SUSAN CAIN

Published: January 13, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=3&hp&pagewanted=all

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.”

Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. “The quantitative results of group brainstorming are beyond question,” Mr. Osborn wrote. “One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more blankets.”

But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

MY point is not that man is an island. Life is meaningless without love, trust and friendship.

And I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.

But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

 - END -


I think its fair to add that much of the innovation in terms of bringing compassion and environmental thinking to society is coming from movements.  


We need to bear in mind that movements:

• Never consisted of collaborations among Picassos and Buddhas. 
• Require input from everyone - doers, thinkers, feelers, inspirers, facilitators.
• Require collaborations among people of all generations.
• Encourage peer-learning for skills development, empowerment and leadership.

Andrew.