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You are the balcony – you are the ultimate context in which all things are arising.
You are always the Context in which all things are arising. The Three circles of Context, Process and Content.
The notion of Umweld or Ecosystem that we carry with us. Disclosive Space would be different for two architects in conversation.
Network design 101 – you can outsource whatever you are not good at.
The Balcony
20 plus years of research at the Harvard negotiation Project tells us that the key to identifying Non-Zero Sum* gains is to stay on the Balcony, defined as “the place where we one is no longer exclusively identified with one’s own position or emotions”. The challenge Fisher of Getting to Yes fame says is “not in getting to the balcony but rather staying there”
To see through the self is to see that one is in fact the Balcony. This makes one free. To do so is to cross over from scarcity to abundance**. To see that one is already free from the process of becoming.
* Ironically, when we “own the whole” which is what we are doing as the balcony is taking on a Zero Sumness that maximizes our chances of creating Non-Zerp Sumness. This is why Consilient Dialogs are so powerful – they help us maximize the interplay between Zero and Non-zero sum interaction in part by making the price of entry the agreement to a Triple Win or Omni-win Value proposition approach.
**As we saw in the Great Acceleration and will cover further in the chapter on Paradigm Shifts, we have shifted our axis of travel from horizontal to vertical. This is a shift from scarcity to abundance. Recall that the Great Acceleration chart shows we have gone from time moving faster than abundance or GDP was growing to GDP or abundance growing faster than time. One of the reasons it is critical for leaders to upgrade their operating systems, is that bringing a mindset of scarcity to a world of abundance can be highly problematic. For example, if we maintain attitudes of scarcity about food in the face of plenty obesity can be the result. Likewise, rampant greed is the result of enough not being enough. Vince would go further and say it is often the result of attempting to meet Being Needs with Doing or Having. Doesn’t work. And in true Easter Island fashion when it doesn’t work, our tendency is to “double down” on the having or doing.
Jim Carrey Painting of a person stepping out of a cage with the caption – “at that moment he was free from the process of becoming”
Surrender (Transcend habit of Control)
In summary, the avatar or little Homuculus that represents us in our minds is a major evolutionary advance allowing as it does for us to plan and predict and control better than we could before we developed a self-concept to project into future scenarios.
The avatar allows us to become more self-shaping by taking evolution out of the context of the environment and allowing us to shape it in a Virtual World (this is the main point of Intended Evolution Theory) This phenomena is well known in sports performance research where Visualization has been shown to improve performance beyond mere physical practice alone. And psychologist now tell us there is no fixed personality and it is easier to change by identifying with our Future self than to operate from the limitations of our past.
The avatar or sense of self is also a source of suffering as we saw in the hand and table tapping experiments. When we identify with the table, we suffer when the table is struck.
Seeing that this homunculus is just a construct and doesn’t really exist and certainly is not “us” is the essence of liberation. It is strangely synonymous with surrender. And not efforting. Because there is no one to effort.
The State of Effortless Effort
Scientists now understand the state of peak performance or ultimate control is paradoxically one of timelessness and selflessness. One in which one merges with one’s surroundings, where one can in fact be the ball. This is what happens when the default mode network switches off – people report as sense of timelessness and selflessness*.
Wu-Wei is the Chinese phrase for Effortless Effort. This it turns out is the state of freedom. This is free in the same way the center of a circle is part of thing part of and free from everything around it. When we are centered in ourselves we are here. And we are centered in the universe. And this is a very powerful place to be.
* Paradoxically, creative people it turns out are able maintain an internal focus at the same time they are engaged in an outside activity. In neuroscience he Outward eye(the Executive Attention network) and the inward eye (the default mode) can coordinate. It seems that creative, intuitive people don’t tune out as much information as logical people (see Tedtalk of cognitive scientist on creativity and flow). It has been found among Fighter pilots downed behind enemy lines that the B and C students do a better job of surviving because they more readily rely on more ways of knowing. Whereas the A students imaging everything has to be planned or thought out. They Full Stack Cognition is one of the aims of Integral or Consilient training.
**The Axial age is a transformative period roughly 2500 years ago in which all over the world humans in which people turned away from the pursuit of perfection through Ritual towards realizing perfection through Archetype. This was a cognitive leap of epic proportions from chasing things physically to chasing them in a world of ideals or in the mind. a new operating system emerged. (And our challenge at one level is we still have the same deep platonic drives but we no longer appear to live in a world unified as Aristotle’s time saw it.
Designing pathways from the inside out
When we operate from the Balcony we design pathways from the inside out. We come from the future state of being not as a place to get to but rather a place to operate from. From here Transformation looks like a process of Enrollment. This begins with the principle that the only person who can changes anyone’s mind is that person. They will do that through inquiry.