Visualizing Knowledge
From the lowly perspective of a dog’s eyes, everyone looks short – Chinese proverb
From knowing to SEE ing
All dogs do not see the same
Stray dogs see better than domesticated dogs
The latter become less intelligent in the process. Leveling?
They may not be very ‘lowly’ as the Chinese say
We haven’t fared any better than them
On Community Intelligence !
Even the dog sees that we have gone astray !
Continued from Part 1. Freewill and the Immortality Quotient
The Shift
Religion owes its origin to immortality. I will always be with you till the end, said Christ. For ‘Peters’ the managers, institutional and personal self-interest take precedence over the conceptual and the visionary. Dependence is the fuel for survival of the pyramids. Hierarchic religion will be the first casualty of empowerment!
How do you select a facilitator, Guru or even your physician, the consultant?
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. There are no Buddhas any more.
Mintzberg says, “Coach our selves”. Gurus die very young.
If the emperor claims to be the emperor, he is no emperor.
We are in transition to the age of the common Buddha. If you are in doubt, check it up at the corner shop.
Let us bury the dead. Shun the angels of death not the devils of life. Is she healthy physically, mentally, spiritually? Does she believe in community and dialogue? Is she an adult on the path to immortality? Does she see the adult in you, even if it is a dormant one? What is her IQ, immortality quotient, commitment to the long term?
In 1990, Tara was attending the beginners program in yoga. The centre was part of a large international network. She was carried away by the ‘presence’ of the facilitator and at the end of the sessions wanted to remain in touch with him. In the twenty sessions that they worked together with around twenty participants he had never shared his name or any other details. She was curious and once the question popped out of her.
“How old are you?’
“I am ageless”
“May I know your name?”
“What is in a name”?
This was all the one to one conversation that she had. She continues to practice yoga. She returned to the centre more than once in search of the guru who had set her on her yogic path. He had left the center and they could not help her to trace him. But memories and the learning remain. His words to the group still echoes in her.
“All learning is in the body. The body is the learning engine”
What is in a name?
Pied Pipers?
Zuckerberg, it sucks
The millions averaging six hours a day
It sucks, is it social?
Bill Gates and Windows
Where are the doors, open or shut?
Obama and Osama, the double or the other?
Bush and ambush, plain vanilla bush
Swartzkopf and shotskop
Friedman, hot, flat, crowded, and fried?
Hawking, hawks?
Grand design
Or Grand default?
Satyam = truth, Adarsh = the ideal
Maytas, truth reinvented the Indian way
Just two from the Indian summer of scams
Skill + Killings, spice it with Layings
Enron follows and the others join
Mc Kinsey, Donalds and WhartOn All!
Hamels hammer?
So much for the talent hunt
What a hunt?
What a war?
Overdogs or underdogs
What do the dogs see?
Outliers or mainstream
Black swans or White,
All is not well in Gladwell’s well
Where the eagles do not dare
Connect the dots, says him
Patterns, puzzles, mysteries and the misery
It is a mystic mandala
Hi Charles
It is very Handy
To be appropriately selfish
Read Will
Durant the durable
Not the perishables
The case for India
He had something of freewill
Not a free wheeler
For a taste of your own medicine
Appropriate selfishness
Stay Hungry, Stay foolish
Says the richest from the pulpit
Wow, what a Job, Connect the dots
Echoes Bansal from the land of immortals
Meluha
The empty raincoat, making sense of the future
Let us make sense of the present
The future will take care of itself
Empty drums echo best
The new Brahmins
Brahmin = Knowledge bearer, Vidyadhara
Vidya = real knowledge
Vidyadhara = one who bears knowledge
Vidya was lost on the way
Knowledge bearers became plain bearers
A country went under
History repeats on other shores
Connect the Dots, Manuel
God is with us
Will the elephant dance?
Will it?
Wont it?
We Will
Freewill and freewheel.
The Shift
Ideas are like antibiotics. They lose their potency over time. Resistant/mutant versions of bacteria or virus surface and the search for more potent ones add to our ‘busy-ness’, a Pandora’s Box. Intelligence would have been an appropriate term to discuss what we are about to. Intelligence has become intelligences like one god in the west become many in the east. There are too many shades and versions of them. We too have contributed to the babble. Community and Gender Intelligence were our favorite buzzwords in this dialogue
So what is the new coinage? Why is it imperative?
The ‘Immortality Quotient’.
There are many reasons. First one is semantic. We talk about change, change is the only constant etc. Change can be + or – . The + and – might cancel each other out or what we now think + may be – in the long run.
We talk in such gross generalities that the word is killed and the talk only adds to the noise pollution. Our communication has no power. The word does not create and it is like a mantra chanted ad nauseum, without understanding the meaning of it. Had we been talking about improvement in place of change we would have been far better off.
Let us take a 2011 resolution that change is out and improvement is in?
Another one is our preoccupation with the immediate, the quarterly, playing Robin Hood and robbing peter to pay Paul, quick fixes that kill even the remote possibility of sustained or sustainable improvement. If we are driven by the logic of the market place and the best sellers, we will always be after a mirage, this format would not be necessary and no dialogue will be possible. We need a core of permanence, the center, to accumulate the pearl material. The best sellers are designed to be best sellers and the best of them are the result of some intelligent repackaging. This is what intelligence has come to.
Now that we have many an example of Skill + killings and layings, (read Enron and rest of the list) we know what the best and the most intelligent and the war for talent have come to be.
Why are we tagging immortality with freewill?
Free will is about choice whether to be an angel of death or a devil for life. The immortality option is seldom explored because we are bogged down by the burden of normality which has nothing to do with true normality. To conform is natural yet not ‘natural’.
To be immortal is to stand the test of time. The blue ocean people are pointers in this direction. Buddha, Christ and Mohammad continue to be immortal and alive to influence our dominant world views. It is not really a clash of civilizations but a clash between mortals and immortals. With the longer life spans and the late bloomers, we are about to face challenges of relative physical immortality and eventually the problems of physical immortality.
It is better to believe in life/immortality and die a physical death due to any number of possible causes, than to believe in death and die before physical death.
Do we really believe in freewill?
We may not but we would like to. An ounce of prevention is better than all the cures. We pretend that we have freewill because we want to live in free will while we continue to freewheel, like we pretend that we are working or adding value while we add to the semantic confusion, noise pollution and kill more trees. We don’t see evidence of anything free in the real sense of the term and it seems like the proverbial ‘eternal recurrence’.
It is a problem of what we pay attention to. We see brief manifestations of free will when we look at improvements over time and cumulatively we have many things to be put in perspective to build up a case for freewill.
It could be our 2011 resolution that we will work hard to develop a little of it.
So be it. Have a wonderful year ahead.
Ccontinued: Freewill or Freewheel
First Discipline 