Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Good Ideas, Bad Results

While online last Friday I stumbled upon a review for a book called, Meaning: The Secret of it All by Cliff Havener, and proceeded to read the first 3 chapters which are available online at www.forseekers.com. The book begins with the following epigraph:

“There was only one catch and that was Catch 22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind…Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t he was sane and had to.” – Joseph Heller

He uses the idea of Catch 22 to unify his ideas around developing good ideas only to become frustrated by the futility of getting people to help make them a reality. The tales he tells would be funny if it were fiction like Catch 22, but it is frightening when you realize they’re real and that they happen in the world of corporate decision makers. He demonstrates how managers in corporations become so bound to the rules and procedures that they lose sight of the original intent. He advises that once a system loses its meaning it breaks down.

Could this be what we are witnessing with the current Facebook privacy debacle? With this not being my point I will leave this question for you to ponder, and rather move on.

What is my point then? My point is about staying current, and in the flow of things, not becoming an archaic machine, a cog in a big system that has lost its identity and purpose. I’m not going to end up there, and I don’t want the people I come into contact to end up there either. We got to pull together, and make sensible choices based on meaning, and ride the fluid ever-changing circumstances with sense, and purpose, if we lose this I am afraid we lose ourselves.

Another striking thing about Havener’s approach is how reluctant he is to use certain words because of their cultural baggage. For example, when he wants to talk about the immaterial aspect of phenomena he settles for “spirit” albeit reluctantly. He details this by investigating some of the connotations in the religious, and metaphysical sphere.

I relate to Havener’s language dilemma, because I often struggle with this. I had a teacher Father Max who would sometimes lug around huge dictionaries to our lesson, and tirelessly define even the simplest terms until he was satisfied we were talking about the same thing. I also see it played out in the writing of Trungpa who brought so many new forms of thought to a vastly different culture than where it started from. He didn’t want to get trapped in closed-view definitions that could lead to grave misinterpretations. This is why he often used terms borrowed from psychology over the religious realms. I found Fabrice Midal does a good job exploring this in the Trungpa biography. Trungpa had a unique ability to apply the poets heart to an in-depth analysis of how the mind works, and how we experience reality.

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