• Blazing trails

    I am convinced that one of the biggest obstacles to a new understanding that people face is the reflexive rejection of religious understandings worked out over thousands of years. Just as Jung found a whole new understanding by studying the seemingly pointless, even ridiculous subject of alchemy, so the study of religious texts and dogmas…

  • The flow state

    Yesterday’s ILC group discussed the flow state – that state where you are “in the zone” and can’t put a foot wrong, the state where we are in touch with our creative potential. And, as is our habit, we then did a five-minute drumming session, in which we asked guidance about it.  This is what…

  • Drama and life

    Friday, June 21, 2024 7 a.m. What is it that makes us respond emotionally to emotional stories? All of fiction, written, oral, visual, depends upon creating that response. How does it work? Why does it work? Isn’t it obvious? I can feel it beginning to be. Something about stories being closer than life. Not quite,…

  • Stray thoughts about the future

    Saturday, June 22, 2024 9:05 a.m. This is the day Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, a fatal mistake. I was thinking, a while ago, someone could look back at our history since at least 1914 and reinterpret everything as the gradual reemergence of the non-western world, partly through the west’s civil wars and partly through…

  • Turns out, it’s a good thing, maybe

    My old friend Louis and I were comparing notes, trying to figure out how we could have been such unaware idiots when we were young. (I realize, confining this to “when we were young” may be giving ourselves a free pass on our state today, but let’s be charitable.) Specifically, we were realizing how little…

  • Communities and units

    On June 18, 2024, Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson, Ruth Shilling, and I heard from the guys upstairs in the course of a small ILC group meeting. Their theme: How a few people working together, forming a temporary group mind, in effect create a new level of organization with its own peculiar possibilities, rather like what…

  • AI: More than it appears to be?

    [On Tuesday, June 25, The engineers’ small ILC group (Dirk, Bill, Dave, and Peter, with me sitting in, did a drumming on the question of these new Artificial Intelligences we are learning to deal with. Our questions centered on the question of what they are. Are they merely what they seem to be, or are…

  • Guest post: Charles Sides

    Charles is on the same scent we have been following for so long, though he reads sign differently. https://charlessides.wordpress.com/2024/06/30/characters-in-a-mythology/ ​

  • Happy re-birthday, Papa

    July 2 is sort of a sad anniversary., being the day, in 1961, that Ernest Hemingway killed himself. He was physically debilitated and in continual pain as the result of two successive airplane crashes seven years before. He was mentally ill, tortured by phobias that the doctors couldn’t help him get free of. He was…

  • Tides and choices

    Wednesday, July 3, 2024 5:40 a.m. All right, let’s go. How is it that I can want to work and at the same time absolutely not want to work? Conflict of strands, sure, but does that really explain anything? After discussing this problem yesterday in two different small ILC groups, something seems to have freed…