TIME How we screwed up our relationship with the universe and how to get it back, Part 18 By Dr Eric Zabiegalski and Per Brogaard Berggreen

“If you can turn the clock to zero honey, I’ll sell the stock, we’ll spend all the money, we’re starting up a brand-new day. Turn the clock to zero mac I’m begging her to take me back, I’m thinking in a brand-new way” - Sting

By all accounts Sting, English musician and frontman for the 80’s new wave band The Police is singing about love lost and wishes for second chances, all the usual trappings of our physical human lives.? But when I hear Stings voice in my head singing this song, I hear another message, and meaning, one of energy, one of Einsteins “clock time” and Bergson’s “lived time” and talk of consciousness. If you know anything about Sting’s songs, you’ll know that his lyrics often (always?) have deeper meaning, a double entendre.? He brilliantly canvases the mundane and pedestrian with the wisdom of the ages, humanities struggle, and the big questions are hidden there to be discovered. No different from the great masters of poetry, painting, and music, this is a thoughtful guy who does his homework in a life of introspection, and it shows. So why does Sting wish to turn the clock back? to reverse time? And if one were truly able to change their thinking, would that also alter time? ?Listen to the song HERE and turn up the volume if you’re able. The harmony, the rhythm, the dynamics (the haunting whistle of music legend Stevie Wonder’s harmonica) will affect one part of your brain in a dramatic way and the words will affect another. Together, this pattern of vibrational energy and rational thought just might get you thinking in a brand-new way. ?And you may even turn the clock back to zero, starting up a brand-new day. How does Sting suggest one does the things he sings about, and why do them? We’ll discuss more on this it later, but the video gives us a clue as to the meaning and purpose of life according to Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner (Sting). I’ll see you after the song.

Theres been a lot of exciting talk lately about topics seldom discussed.? The subjects of “emptiness” have come up, unconscious human behavior, as well as

black holes, AI, creativity, and purpose, and how we look at the world around us.? Join us once more as writing partner Per and I attempt to tackle the big questions about the nature of time, the universe, and consciousness with the gracious help from academic heavy hitters like Professor Emeritus Robert Chia of Glasgow University, philosopher Luciano Floridi of the University of Bologna, writing partner Per Berggren of Denmark and IT entrepreneur Mike Cameron of the United States. Enjoy, and feedback welcome! Eric and Per.

Players on the field of life

Last month we talked about structure introducing you to the ideas of field theory, habitus, and structuration. This is the idea that we are patterned beings who create and lay down structures in order to bring viable order to an otherwise disorderly chaotic universe.? In conversations with professor researcher Robert Chia, he suggested as much saying the universe was a chaotic place and we humans do our best to order and organize it to our sustainability, survival, and purpose, commenting: “from a processual worldview, chaos is the ultimate primordial condition, and order emerges out of chaos. Order is thus a secondary, temporal stabilization that is in fact changing infinitesimally in relation to our own durational consciousness, we see it as relatively unchanging. A thoroughly fluxing and chaotic reality is eminently unlivable. As humans, organisms stabilized from this primordial soup, we crave stability and order so we can get a grip on reality to bootstrap ourselves to higher degrees of freedom from environmental constraints. Consequently, we make artificial and oftentimes arbitrary distinctions to create temporal order. Organization, as such, is fundamentally a process of cleaving out order from chaos. So, it’s true when Prigogine's book Philosophy of Instability says, "order floats on disorder."

Chia goes on to say “The very Ordered and highly organized world we apprehend on an everyday basis is of our own collective and oftentimes unintended making. Organized phenomena like language, cities and civilizations are unintended effects of local practical coping action, not deliberate design; organizational order mostly emerge undesigned.” Chia’s comment that order “mostly emerges undesigned” is an idea we will touch on later.? The idea of organization being the exception rather than the norm, taking effort and thought, is a perspective I may have felt intuitively but never consciously. Now I see it, order does “float on disorder.”

Regarding structure, lets finish our discussion begun last month by looking at two players on the field of organized structures and the impact they have on time, space, and reality.? Fellow curious traveler on a quest to become learned, Mike Cameron says, “we need organizing principles to make sense of an otherwise chaotic world around us, our past shapes our view of the present, and our actions in the present influence future opportunities.” ?

Learning and thinking fast and slow

In 1975 a man named Robert Duncan came up with the concept of organizational ambidexterity, the ability for organizations to exploit the marketplace doing what they’ve learned to do well, and also explore, learning new things. This concept has been the focus of my academic research for the last 10 years, you can watch an interview on the topic HERE. ?In 1981, another researcher named James March came along and turbocharged the subject by introducing learning to organizational ambidexterity.? One of March’s ideas which is particularly intriguing and relevant to our discussion has to do with two of those players, fast and slow learners. We often have skewed perspectives of these types of learners and the contributions they make. This idea has caused many to take account of their organizations, looking under the hood at what’s really going on.?

In organizations, and I mean any organized human system, not just business, there are fast learners and slow learners, let’s call the fast learners jackrabbits and the slow one’s tortoises. ?As discussed last month, within each organization there’s also an accumulated wealth of knowledge called the organizational code. Think of the code like a cloud of learned practices, knowledge, and behavior floating above the organization, everything the organization learns and knows is stored there. Stories, techniques, processes, behaviors and habits, data, like the accumulation of a society it’s all there.? In the course of our daily work, and lives, members of the organization act and interact on the field and “take from” and “contribute” to this accumulated codified knowledge, the code (the cloud).

In regard to our different learners, March discovered something remarkable. Of the two types of learners (fast and slow), the slow learners contributed far more to the cumulative knowledge bank (the code) of the organization. Fast learners by comparison often contributed little to nothing while additionally taking knowledge from the code. This is significant in a business sense when it’s considered that fast learners are often celebrated and lauded as a company’s high performers (and contributors) rewarded with more autonomy, promotions, higher pay and praise while slow learners are seen as underperformers, undesirable, and detrimental, often being marginalized, punished, disenfranchised or dismissed.? Consequently, these slow learners are made negative examples of or pushed out of the company when their learning contributions to the company’s growth (and ultimately performance) are the greatest. Meanwhile their long-eared counterparts hop up all the glory while altruistically giving back little but a display of their behavior.? Such actions send a troubling message to an organization’s gritty learners and conscientious mistake makers regarding the value of learning, sharing, communication, contribution, and struggle. In defense of our jackrabbits, they may not mean harm or intend to behave selfishly, they may simply be pre-disposed to moving fast, working alone, and not sharing, completely aloof, it’s likely they know not what they do, or why. ?What are the lessons, the parallels of these organizational playing fields with the act of life? How do we treat our young, and our old, our slow learners and movers, the loiterers and lingerers, slow talkers, silent observers, the societally earmarked “handicapped,” the homeless, the blue-collar, and the ones who take longer to explore the maze? Do we disenfranchise them as well despite their contributions?

Akin to March's ideas in Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow, in which Kahneman says we think in two ways (fast or slow), we additionally learn with the same dichotomy.? Here’s the important thing, just like both types of thinkers, and learners, are required in organizations for healthy, sustainable performance and growth, the same is true with life. We must understand the purpose and value of each, of everything. From the janitor sweeping the shop floor to the CEO in the boardroom, from the elderly widow in the apartment beneath you, the child exploring a caterpillar on a leaf, or the people who fall on the edges of the bell curve, it’s up to us all to help everyone play their best game in life. A final thought. Are we witnessing the dismantling of old structures in our time? Is that why the world looks and feels so chaotic? I believe the answer to that question is yes and others would agree. The spiritual video HERE says that some will fear this change, seeing it as a threat.? Perhaps these changes are no more difficult or apocalyptic than an aging generation baby boomer population trying to hold onto old patterns and paradigms (and power and control) with five other generations viable today wanting (deserving) to have a voice and a chance.

We’ve talked a lot about structure over the last few articles, how we build them, and how we move around in what we’ve built. Perhaps the important thing to remember and take away here is that structures and their players are everywhere. They are us as we navigate through space and in time together with everything.

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?“We are not imperfect machines. Instead, we are perfectly human” – Dr. Z

AI, the newest shiny thing

I don’t know when we first strayed from the path of living our authentic lives and I’m not sure who’s to blame for it. Frederick Taylor and his scientific management movement (Taylorism), timing Sven the Swede with a stopwatch as he shovels coal as efficiently as he can, trying to meld man with machine? Or maybe it was physicist Albert Einstein debating philosopher Henri Bergson April 6, 1922, in Paris in which in an uncharacteristic show of emotion Einstein derided Bergson saying “there is no time of the philosopher” meaning that all we can do is mathematically express the mechanics of time in relative terms. Consciousness, metaphysics, or hints of quantum theory did not apply in this interpretation. Our self-perception as humans is changing in this new (but oddly familiar) world which we are continually emerging from and the newest game on the street, artificial intelligence, is already in play, inscribing the future of tomorrow in the process of right now.? Luciano Floridi illustrates this well in his book The 4th Revolution , how the infosphere is reshaping human reality by listing 4 major revolutions from a human development perspective and our non-centric role in the universe in each: 1) the Copernican (humans are not immobile, at the center of the universe); 2) the Darwinian (humans are not detached from the animal world); 3) the Freudian (humans are not rational creatures entirely transparent to themselves); and, 4) the Turing which is what his book is based upon that (humans are not disconnected agents, but instead informational organisms sharing with biological and engineered agents an environment that is basically informational , an info sphere).? “We are slowly accepting the post-Turing idea Floridi writes about that we are not Newtonian, stand-alone, and unique agents, like some Robinson Crusoe on an island.? Rather, we are what he calls “informational organisms (inforgs), mutually connected and embedded in an informational environment (the infosphere), which we share with other informational agents, both natural and artificial, who also process information logically and autonomously” watch a video about it HERE. ?Back to our earlier discussions of the field of play, the players, and their activities while on the field (in their environments), Floridi’s suggests four major impacts to humanity in this new revolution: 1). our self-concept (who we are); 2). our mutual interactions (how we socialize); 3). our concept of reality (our metaphysics); and 4). our interactions with reality (our agency).?

Interestingly, for me navigating these historical revolution changes feels a lot like they have been caused by cognitive worldviews which Per and I have written about previously held by the left, and right hemispheres of the brain respectively and having to wrestle back the strong ideas held by the more egocentric steadfast and utilitarian left hemisphere of the brain that we are not the center of the universe, we are not separate or different from animals, we are not in complete control or aware of our faculties, and we are not disconnected, informationally or otherwise, from the whole of life. Call it dissociative disorder or the way in which we are wired for survival, I’m not sure. The day humankind sees its connectedness with all things and behaves accordingly is the day the world will change. Until then we will continue to suffer alone in the dark.

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?Objects and subjects

In a recent conversation with Robert Chia on the subject of environmentalism he also suggested something similar when he stated that the language we use for the planet was “objectifying” the Earth. “We need to stop thinking and talking about the earth as a resource to be controlled and exploited, it creates boundaries, apportions rights, and raises ownership issues.”? Robert calls the earth a “fecund” (regenerative) and a pro-generative source, not a “re-source,” two very different things he suggests. Is Robert suggesting that the earth is a living thing? Not unlike other living things or our fellow human beings? With that said would you (intentionally) objectify another person? Use them for utility as a resource to harvest or exploit? Or expend to depletion? The honest answer to that question is that some of us would or have.? But to do so would be immoral, unethical, and unsustainable, and upon doing so we would likely feel an intuitive twinge of guilt.? What does Chia prescribe to remedy this kind of thinking about the Earth? He says what’s needed is ongoing “searchlight scanning” using our senses rather than our intellect to predispositionally (not intellectually), align ourselves with the ways (the rhythms) of the world. An appropriateness of engagement, not maximization of exploitation, will be the driving force behind optimality of engagement with the world. It will take a strong form of relational thinking, approach, and philosophy focusing more on what can be between us, rather than just on ourselves Chia says. Interestingly, great minds do think alike. In a 1984 interview at The Center for Process Studies in Oregon USA physicist David Bohm suggested humanity needed to realize its connection to the inanimate (as well as the animate) world and treat matter with more respect. Catch it HERE at right around the 17:40 mark. ?

?Creativity, and purpose

What’s our purpose? Does humanity, life, the universe, even have one? I think they do. Per is not so sure however, other than to say, “we are our own purpose, there are no omniscient creatures with a meta-plan, gods do not exist.” ?And if we did have a purpose, what would it be? Perhaps our purpose is to be creative? Neuroscientist Rudy Tanzi said it best when he said the brain is a creation machine.? Tanzi says “the only purpose of the brain is to create.? “A word, a deed, a thought, a facial expression, a piece of art, poetry, or music.? We manifest material things into reality and that which we create comes back to regulate, monitor, and govern us.”? So, if you’re going to be governed by and likely influence others you’re around with the things you make why not make things which are helpful, inclusive, beautiful, regenerative, sustaining, positive, and creative? Artists know of the power (and responsibility) creation brings; designers know it too.?

There are a lot of different opinions about getting into a creative space and summoning the gods of creativity, but I suspect it’s not as easy as some would attest, creativity is not a structured thing or at the least its structure is mysterious (not known to us) until it appears. nor is it a “willed” thing, in other words you can’t go to a training class or creativity retreat weekend to learn it or assure that it will happen, it’s not cognitively rational or formulaic though we treat it as if it were. And while we may be designed as creation machines, we would (usually) rather focus on controlling and manipulating our world for our utility instead. Interestingly, control Tanzi says comes from self-organization and that is ultimately the job of a (self-organizing) universe. Try doing this Tanzi says, and the universe may just say: “control? That’s my job” and then we go extinct. Stop controlling life.?

Electrical storms and waterfalls

He called it thought tumbling, and for me it immediately conjured up images of logs going over a waterfall only to collide together chaotically in the swirling foam of the river below.? Philip Wolf is a man who has dedicated his life to the responsible uses of cannabis, for increased mental and physiological health and the betterment of society. He said one of the challenges, and benefits of thinking while under the influence of cannabis was what he called “thought tumbling.” He described it as a flood of disparate and far-reaching thoughts and ideas which don’t seem to initially connect but in reality, make larger and more creative connections than one would have otherwise. During these mental electrical storms, thoughts take on a freewheeling quality and concepts are often connected in unusual, playful ways.? Other types of cognitive distortion, hyper-priming, semantic priming, perceptual priming are also like electrical storms in the mind of fast and loose patterns which create new and novel structures, thoughts and ideas. While I’m not advocating the use of substances to induce creativity or experience reality, I am suggesting creativity is not a product of (conscious) effort, it’s not a quality of ego or will.? It’s more like something often noticed in the periphery of view when one (mentally) looks away. And while the hemispheres of the brain may house or accommodate an environment for creativity, it comes from elsewhere, and humanity can’t definitively pinpoint where, how, or when it visits us.? The universe loves creativity and what comes from it.? Innovation, exploration, invention, transformation, it may be the sole reason we’re here, our special gift, purpose, and contribution.? What if we are (just one) of the universe’s ultimate expressions of creativity? Like a flower unfolding, a butterfly pollinating in a meadow, or a whale breeching the water as it crosses one of the world’s oceans.? Given these new definitions of what it means to be human how many of us would fall short of our ultimate purpose??

Time, the passing of a life

Albert Einstein suggested that systems moving at different speeds would have different kinds of time. Last month we asked if consciousness could be the structure that underlies everything, and not time or even space? An ontological primitive existing before everything else.? Professor Robert Chia agreed, saying “yes,” but there’s a twist. Chia points out “it is the conscious awareness of temporality (the temporariness of things) of the gestations of birth, growth, maturation, and decay that motivates the conception of time.”? “Time therefore may indeed not be an ontological primitive” (and consciousness is) Chia says, “but our conscious awareness of the relentless passing of nature is.” Time therefore could be looked at as one way to see consciousness, proof of it, like the way we see the wind when it moves through the trees, regardless of the direction in which the wind blows. And what do I think of Chia’s assessment between the relationship of consciousness and the path of time? I think it’s right on the button. ?

Plan it or wing it (depends on who you ask)

There's more than one way to live life. There is a part of our brain that wants to compulsively simplify life by abstracting it into facsimiles, diagrams, and lists of what we expect to encounter and want to encounter, to order it, and experience life through those plans. But without awareness of intents and their outcomes this ends up being good behavior done badly. This part of us would prefer to orchestrate and execute moments from laid out plans than to sail through life by the seat of their pants, relying on faith. But what does the other part of us want?

The meaning of life

So, what is the meaning of life anyway? What if the answer is right in front us but we don’t see it, we pass it by?? Maybe there’s a part of us that’s not really interested in knowing. This is an unfortunate possibility we must consider and reconcile if we’re to find peace. In a 1984 video physicist David Bohm casually commented on what the meaning of life was. So casual was the remark in fact that I initially overlooked it, it wasn’t until I listened again that I caught it. ?What could you do with such information? Once you’ve discovered the meaning of life, and purpose, you could then rather quickly figure out what to do, what actions to take, to execute that meaning and do it every day. Doesn’t that sound amazing, and wouldn’t you want to know? and do that?? And what did Bohm say? “The meaning of life is life lived together.” Life may be no more complicated than this.?

Emptiness and black holes

I suggested earlier that we don’t know what the formula for creativity is. ?And while I stand by that I will also say it is possible to pinpoint at least some of its ingredients. One of them may be “emptiness,” and the creation of an empty open space of unknowing in the mind. When talking about the subject of organizational ambidexterity with Ed Brenegar on his podcast The Eddy Network I said it was important to keep a mental empty room prepared (or preserved) in your head for whatever might come along, Ed agreed. There is an emergent character to emptiness that many fear or find undesirable today. Subsequently they fill every minute (and every space) with thought, activity, and things. But does creativity come from empty spaces?? The word leisure originally meant a space of allowing, an unoccupied, open space of freedom. Today (at least in America) every minute of most people’s leisure time is filled with structure.

New scientific theories postulate that everything has a black hole. From microscopic particles to macroscopic formations, they all have a mysterious singularity at their center, does that include us? A black hole has a gravitational pull so strong that no light or matter can escape it, crushed into an infinitesimally small but infinite density of a billion stars called a singularity.? We can’t see inside a black hole, but we know about it by the way things move around it, influenced by its gravity. In the same manner we cannot see all of our nature, or our true nature. but we can observe the actions from it because of its gravity.?

Similar to the analogy of the black hole, Zen tradition teachings also talk about the gateless gate within us which is the path to enlightenment. One must pass the gateless gate to realize an awakening and a state of equanimity where the intellect goes beyond its normal functions of discrimination by the ego. Achieving this loosens one from their physical body and creates a space between what is you, and what is your body, and in this state, there is no time or space. ?How do you pass through the gateless gate? It’s difficult. Other than perhaps physical death I think it would take a doing away with or suppression of the ego, its preferences, and desires.? Zen tradition lends a clue how to accomplish this, saying “no one can pass the gateless gate; no one has found out how. No one can pass the gateless gate, so be no one.” ?Assuming any of this is true, what can we practically do to protect our mysterious singularity and tap into our hidden nature? How about keeping an open mental empty space at the ready and check your ego at the door whenever possible. The late Zen master Suzuki said, “strictly speaking there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened action.” Does enlightened action come from feeling the gravity of our singularity? I’ll meet you in an empty room! ?

Dr Zabiegalski and Per Brogaard Berggren are available to talk to your organization or venue about ambidexterity research or speak informatively and eloquently about organizational culture, leadership, strategy, learning, complexity, IT, business neuroscience, creativity, mindfulness, talent management, personal success, emotional intelligence, Action Learning, and storytelling. Contact Eric, or Per on LinkedIn about a talk, keynote presentation, or workshop today!