John Griogair Bell - Arlecchino Malbenvolio

Here’s an article that I just had to send out. It’s about the difference
between what you see on a “real” television broadcast and what’s really
going on, how the war announcement was exposed as being a facade of
concern, etc …

http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/03/03/21_groom.html

And the traditional greeting when seeing someone for the first time or when seeing someone you haven’t seen in a long time is, “Shalom Aleichem,” which means “peace unto you.”

And the Islamic greeting is: Assalaamu aleykum

I don’t know why I never made that connection before.

When two people work in harmony, they bring out the best in each other. And when there is harmony in an organization or a community, everyone brings out the best in each other.

And this sounds like “alignment” … and “learning community” in the
second part.

And we are all very different at our best than we are at our worst.

And this mirrors the idea that we are not our worst acts, as in “Dead
Man Walking”

Cool.

On yesterday’s NOW with Bill Moyers, the author of “War is a force that
gives us meaning” Chris Hedges was interviewed.

I highly recommend checking out the transcript to this interview if you
didn’t catch the show. It’s quite relevant to our class and was a very
powerful interview. I don’t know if it will be as impactful just reading
it, but the interview on the show was very powerful.

Here’s the link:

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_hedges.html

Okay, I was going to cut and paste a few quotes, but it’s the whole
interview so I stopped. It’s all relevant. Check it out, really.

I have been gathering resources for Systems thinking,
and here is my in-progress incomplete list thus far.
Many of the book I have not yet read, and am in the
process of getting either through the library or by
sitting in the bookstore and reading them ;-).
Please look at the website and books if they interest
you.
Robin

Websites
Ecology of the Mind

http://www.oikos.org/psicen.htm

Mental Model Musings

http://www.outsights.com/systems/welcome.htm

LIFE’S NATURAL SOLUTIONS

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~jcull/

Centre for Systems Studies

http://www.hull.ac.uk/hubs/research/css/index.htm

International Institute for General Systems Studies

http://www.iigss.net/

Centre for Partnership Studies

http://www.partnershipway.org/index.html

Human Systems Dynamics Institute

http://www.hsdinstitute.org/about.asp#top

The International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/

International Society for the Systems Science

http://www.isss.org//

-Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee W. Hock

-A Simpler Way by Margaret J. Wheatley, Myron
Kellner-Rogers

-Billibonk and the Big Itch by Phil Ramsey, Robin.
Mazo (this is a childrens book, supposedly about
systems thinking)

-Principles of Systems by Jay Wright Forrester (Senge
based many of his ideas on Forrester)

-The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for
Our Time (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and
the Human Sciences) by Ervin Laszlo

-Small Worlds by Duncan J. Watts

-Emergence by Steven Johnson (about alignment)

-The Art of Systems Thinking by Joseph O’Connor, Ian
McDermott

-Systems Thinking by Jamshid Gharajedaghi

-Calling the Circle by Christina Baldwin, Colleen M.
Kelley (about dialogue circles)

It is much easier to tolerate suffering if prior to the experience you mentally visualize yourself in the negative situation and practice accepting it.

I’m sorry if this sounds argumentative. However, I’m having a strong reaction to this idea. Not only am I not sure that I want to accept suffering, I’m not sure that I want it to happen, and I’m not sure I want to visualize myself suffering.

I specifically don’t want to accept it. I want to have as my goal to work to address it.

I specifically don’t want it to happen, especially if I know it’s going
to happen ahead of time. I’m going to have as my goal to work to avoid
or change the conditions that are leading to that suffering. I specifically don’t want to visualize myself suffering. Why would I want to be so attached to suffering that I want to live it more than once? If suffering is going to be my experience, then I’m going to have as my goal to experience it fully and not let it re-live itself in me before or after by dwelling on that experience and attaching myself to that event.

To become so overly attached to the suffering that I live it many times instead of living it once and work more to accept it than to recognize that it’s wrong doesn’t make sense to me. It seems like a recipe for increasing suffering in myself and the world.

I wanted to share with you two links that were relevant to conversations
that happened in a combined small group discussion yesterday.

First, I had found and forwarded a spiffy site of linked poetry. It’s a
Labyrinth where many of the words in each poem are linked to other
poems. There’s items from modern poets like Ani Difranco, Judy Grahn and
ancient works like fragments from The Decent of Inanna which is many
thousand years.

The Maze of Murdered Poems

http://wso.williams.edu/~cbirtche/mpm/mpm.html

Specifically, there’s this one page of Judy Grahn which really hits me
in relation to the thread about Love we’ve had in e-mail:

http://wso.williams.edu/~cbirtche/mpm/grahn.html

–

And on the topic of Inanna, summerian goddess (also called Ishtar,
Astarte …) was imported to Europe as Oestre (from where we derive the
name mistakenly labelled “christian” Easter) and the word East.

There’s a beautiful tale of Ishtar and Enki where Enki, her grandfather,
gives her all the divine powers of civilization. At the end of the tale,
the really awesome part is that when she unpacks those powers from her
boat there are more of them than she had been given, so by bringing
together all these diverse powers they synergistically multiplied and
are stronger than they were when held apart away from each other.

Inanna and the God of Wisdom

http://www.reweaving.org/inanna3.html