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Content recorded and/or produced by The Radical Change GroupTM, International
Haiti Earthquake
A rare powerful earthquake has destroyed the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, left the country in chaos, practically without police and government, and the survivors are relying on the foreign aid for the basic survival needs – food, water, safety, medical help.
We are shaken by the news, and are passing the word to all our listeners and readers to help the people of Haiti with what you can. The RCG founders have donated from their personal funds to “Doctors Without Borders”. Many more organizations are listed in a CNN article – a very much needed and concrete way to make a difference.
Osho’s Code
I have finished reading “Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic” by Osho. What a beautiful and intelligent man. An agent of radical change. As usual, I modeled him as I read, so here is his code (see below for a short intro to modeling):
- I am not going to tolerate anything that is wrong to my conscience.
- God is not a thing but a process.
- Everything belongs to me.
- Whatsoever the consequences, I am not going to be deviated from myself.
- Don’t give me advice, – I want to learn on my own, – life has to be learned through trial & error.
- If I accept death, there is no fear. Only life creates worry.
- I am not here, I am a nobody, nothingness.
- Never to allow an unintelligent thing to be imposed upon me, to fight against all kinds of stupidities, whatsoever the consequences. Be rational, logical to the very end.
- Be more and more alert, so I don’t end up being just intellectual.
- When I do something, I do it to the very end.
- What is gone is gone, – I never look back.
- I am not a man who can be stopped.
- I am satisfied with something very simple – the very best of things.
Modeling forms the heart of NLP. It is a process of extracting the recipe, the blueprint behind repeatable success. Such recipe typically consists of patterns of beliefs, psychosomatic states and specific behaviors. When modeling from a book, only beliefs are visible (the other two require being with the person), so that is what I have listed above.
the Belief in scarcity leads to Coercion
“Scarcity has always been imposed upon the community to serve the interests of those in control. Scarcity has been maintained by the system of organization so as to perpetuate inequity in service of the privileged. Privilege requires coercion; coercion is justified on the basis of scarcity. In the absence of coercion and in the presence of scarcity is the actuality ‘war if each against all’. So scarcity has always been jealously guarded as a justification for the use of force. The use of force requires social acquiescence if it is to have persistence as a means of control. But availability of resources is limited only by the poverty of ideas.
…
If you doubt this, consider the fact that the mutual convertibility of the elements means that all things are available everywhere; what is lacking are the ideas about how to get at those things. And this general principle applies not only to this extreme case. Ideas have always been controlled for the benefit of the few: the chief, the shaman, the God-king, the priesthood, the lord, … the power elite. It is in the control of ideas that we find the source of scarcity, and hence the justification of coercion.”
- an excerpt from “The Moon of Hoa Binh” by Cong Huen Ton Nu Nha Trang and William Pensinger.
Other-awareness
“Just imagine what it is like to carry the other-awareness like on carries a mantra. But how difficult it is to be aware of the other! It is not that our awareness slips; it just never gets established. How rare is the occurrence of other-awareness. We have no taste of what it is to truly hold-the-other-in-awareness. We cannot stand such joy! We are afraid. To hold the other-awareness-in-fullness is to voluntarily embrace the dissociation. The ego I-ness framework has to split. How could it be otherwise? One just happens. One is not a happen-er. The other-awareness is not just knowing that he or she is there. It is knowing that the other has a being-for-him/her-self as a self-limitation-of-the-whole. The other is a symbol of the self; the self, a symbol of the other. Ha! But to hold such an awareness: that is truly an act of sanctification. A benison for the beloved is to hold the other-awareness before-the-self. One must never forget that there is only one real I-ness. Before-the-self is not self-denial; it is other-self renewal. The other-self is a multi-unity. But, of course, one must embrace the split to real-ize that.
Why is it that no one is interested in experiencing the multi-unity of the other-self? Why is woman no leader? She should know! She should feel it in her abdomen. She should demand a fullness of the other-awareness. But she, too, never remembers the miracle of being-ness, or reaches for the fullness-of-the-context in moment to moment awareness. She, too, lives in a fog. What is it with woman that she does not know? Why does her inner taste not tell her? Why does she believe what she is told? Why she not already learned? If anyone should have deep sensitivity to the omni-multi-relation at the root of existence, it should be woman. Man-woman relating should highlight this omni-multi-ness. Why does she not know and insist? Why is she, too, afraid to embrace the being-branching at the heart of existence? Is not to birth a child, to experience the multi-unity? Where is her integrity? How can she let the intellectual aporia of enculturation short circuit her acting-from-the-being?”
- an excerpt from “The Moon of Hoa Binh” by Cong Huen Ton Nu Nha Trang and William Pensinger.
A Story of Punished God
This story landed in my inbox today – if you know the origin of this story, please let me know…
This god-like being had committed a great transgression and was punished by his fellow gods, condemned to live imprisoned in a mortal human body.
At his birth, he was trapped inside an infant body with only an infant’s ability to move and speak. As he grew, every outward aspect of his life seemed ordinary, except that he knew inside he was a god. He knew that in
spite of his appearance, his family and his upbringing, there was nothing ordinary about him.
It’s The Mutants That Make It
Having been a long-time scientist myself, I’ve observed time and time again one very persistent approach by most of my fellow scientists to innovation: take what’s been done, and improve it. Not a single project that I’ve participated in could skip this important step – look what’s already been done, study the literature, talk to those who walked there before, learn what their approaches do well and where they have weaknesses, and see if you can keep the "good stuff" and somehow avoid the pitfalls, generally by tweaking things here and there. Granted, most of the technology comes from such an approach of learning more and more about the specific methods, and polishing them to perfection, until hardly anything can be improved, at which point the science proudly declares it to be "the state of the art" and "the best it can ever be", mathematicians formulate theorems proving that nothing better can be done with this technology – no matter how hard you try, and the method enters the classical textbooks as "the way to go". Until someone invents a new technology that totally outperforms the "old and tried" ways, making everyone wonder what has just happened…
You make it obsolete by introducing a superior methodology."
(Buckminster Fuller)
Remember the vacuum tubes? Neither do I. Perhaps, the only surviving vacuum tubes these days are the CRT TVs and computer monitors – but even those are becoming increasingly obsolete. With the invent of a transistor, electronics suddenly became cheaper, more energy-efficient, and much more compact. I remember playing with transistors as a kid – soldering simple radios and amplifiers for my home fun projects.
RCG Reinvents Itself – Again
In the spirit of continuous change and transformation, the Radical Change Group is reinventing itself once again. In an attempt to capture our founding principles and communicate our values and contributions, we have created a short video. Feel free to re-post this video elsewhere – help us spread the word! And also, let us know what you think.
Have a great day, and a Happy New Year!
Iodized Salt: The Cheapest Way to Make a Big Difference
“Raising the World’s I.Q” (New York Times, Dec 4 2008)
…Almost one-third of the world’s people don’t get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness…
…One of the attractions is that a campaign to iodize salt costs only 2 cents to 3 cents per person reached per year…
Technocrati Tags: Iodized salt, IQ, developing countries, charity, humanitarian aid
Martin Seligman: What positive psychology can help you become
Science, and psychology in particular, are catching up to the ideas of happiness, meaning, state of flow, and pleasure in life, in very specific and measurable ways:
Technocrati Tags: Martin Seligman, TED, Happiness, Meaning, Positive Psychology, Flow, Pleasure
This quote says it so well…..
